How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/magazine/arlene-blums-crusade-against-household-toxins.html?pagewanted=all

by danso • 14 years ago

233 154 14 years ago

zafirk• 14 years ago

between this and the article about brain parasites in california, HN is scaring the crap out of me

publicfig• 14 years ago

I don't know which article you're referencing, but we also had brain parasites found in a man who died about 50 miles from me in Indiana. We've basically been told to avoid freshwater lakes and rivers for now.

001sky11• 14 years ago

Those freshwater incidents sound like protozoa (amoeba) infections with an high mortality rate ("Brain-eating amoeba suspected in Indiana death"). GP is referring to another hazard, also seems to be from nasty water. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4492244. Don't say you weren't warned though !

noahc• 14 years ago

Minnesota also had a confirmed case about a month and half ago as well.

SoftwareMaven3• 14 years ago

This is a fundamental problem with our always-on, 24 hour news, headline-based world. Unfortunately, it tends to breed fear, hopelessness and apathy as people feel overwhelmed about too many problems they can't control.

Not sure what to do about it, though. Get outside and disconnected more, I suppose. :)

rcthompson• 14 years ago

Bonus: getting outside gets you away from your carcinogenic couch.

tsotha3• 14 years ago

Not me. For one thing, keep in mind these people are selling page views. If the headline was "Odds of being diagnosed with brain parasite at .00061%", would you even bother reading the story? Dividing things out is a big anxiety stopper.

And think about it when you see something like "...100% increase in your risk of brain cancer," since it represents the doubling of a very small number. Taking percentages of percentages is a sneaky way to make things look more important than they really are.

001sky11• 14 years ago

Of the 84,000 industrial chemicals registered for use in the United States, only about 200 have been evaluated for human safety by the Environmental Protection Agency

--Wait, what? What is the EPA doing, then for 42 years?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Environmental_Pro...

pmorici3• 14 years ago

Protecting the interests of the chemical manufacturing industry?

simonsarris• 14 years ago

I think this kind of cynicism without citation is a very unhealthy thing for any (online) community.

large edit: I should have said "cynicism without citation and qualification." Even if there's a citation I don't like how people reject people/places/institutions out of hand because they might do bad things or have bad qualities because it's often represented as a dichotomy.

For instance here, even if we grant that the EPA is susceptible to corporate influence, even if we as a society decide to go so far as to find them guilty of all the good they didn't do, it doesn't diminish the good that they did do and can still do, and too often these kinds of rejections/scoffs/cynicisms don't serve to add anything to the conversation of a community (such as HN) other than shut down more concrete or nuanced criticisms or discussions.

Sorry for being way off topic here.

srl• 14 years ago

The next sentence:

That’s because industrial chemicals are presumed safe unless proved otherwise, under the 1976 federal Toxic Substances Control Act.

In other words, the EPA isn't _allowed_ to investigate products unless evidence that they are unsafe is brought before it. Makers get the benefit of the doubt.

001sky11• 14 years ago

Because, you see, nobody cares. When things go wrong in your company, nobody cares. The press doesn’t care, your investors don’t care, your board doesn’t care, your employees don’t care, even your mama doesn’t care. Nobody cares.

And they are right not to care. A great reason for failing won’t preserve one dollar for your investors, won’t save one employee’s job, or get you one new customer. It especially won’t make you feel one bit better when you shut down your company and declare bankruptcy.

All the mental energy that you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one, seemingly impossible way out of your current mess. It’s best to spend zero time on what you could have done and all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares, just run your company.[1]

[1] http://bhorowitz.com/2011/10/08/nobody-cares/

newbie123• 14 years ago

The environmental movement in America is worthless. They spent all of their time on lifestyle issues like battery cars, recycling, and global warming (issues that also line the pockets of their large donors) when there are real, profound issues like this. Even if the EPA can't act, how come only one crazy lady is working on building the case?

_delirium5• 14 years ago

There's some more detail here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_Substances_Control_Act_of...

The situation is somewhat better with chemicals introduced after 1976. Any chemical that was in use prior to 1976 is grandfathered in, due to worries from industry that passage of the Act could suddenly call into question many chemicals then in use. Therefore anything that was already in use at the time is presumed safe and not investigated, unless significant evidence first piles up. The chemicals being described in this story (e.g. the PBDEs) are pre-1976, and hence not investigated.

tptacek10• 14 years ago

The EPA is not the primary investigator or regulator of industrial chemicals!

tptacek10• 14 years ago

OSHA requires MSDS with toxicology information for virtually all industrial chemicals.

wissler• 14 years ago

Security theatre.

afterburner• 14 years ago

Memory-foam mattresses have the same problem apparently. I have one, and am looking into a dust mite bed casing (~$100) to prevent the chemicals from getting into the air...

http://lesstoxicstuff.com/2011/09/how-to-reduce-your-familys...

lignuist7• 14 years ago

We spend a lot of time in our beds (at least we should), so we should take everything about it very serious!

We recently switched to a bed that strictly consists of natural materials like wood, latex, cotton and natural rubber. Absolutely no metal and no toxic additives. Costs as much as our car, but is worth every cent. Sleeping feels like holiday now. I also can smell the difference.

walkon• 14 years ago

Do you have a link to info on such beds?

doktrin• 14 years ago

I'm surprised this was only mentioned so tangentially. Memory foam mattresses are quite popular, and I would wager their users spend considerably more time there than on a couch.

hastur• 14 years ago

Vote for Mitt Romney, he'll scale back the EPA and you'll be able to wallow in carcinogenic substances all day long.

newbie123• 14 years ago

What is the EPA doing about it right now? You'd be surprised to learn that many U.S. environmental laws were passed by Republican presidents. There's a "Nixon-goes-to-China" aspect to it. Indeed, Nixon created the EPA...

hinathan• 14 years ago

Arlene Blum is kind of amazing. I met her maybe 20 years ago in the context of mountain climbing. Can't imagine climbing with a baby strapped to myself.

Tichy8• 14 years ago

So basically she is completely crazy? However I hope she wins the fight against toxic chemicals...

WildUtah2• 14 years ago

I climbed mountain passes that size with my infants carried in a pack. It was good clean fun and the babies loved it.

They play in the pine needles and the sand and get sap all over themselves and then snuggle up with you in the cold alpine nights. Everybody has a good time.

And I'm nowhere near as tough as Ms. Blum. (Annapurna I! Holy. Cow.)

NoPiece• 14 years ago

I feel like the article is missing a basic analysis of whether there would be more deaths by an increased number of fires caused by removing the fire retardant, or by cancer cancer caused by fire retardant. Just give me some numbers, and let me decide what kind of furniture I want.

Tichy8• 14 years ago

How does a couch catch fire, though? I suspect falling asleep on a couch with a cigarette is the main cause. Smokers want to die anyway, so I'd give priority to safety of children.

anonymouz• 14 years ago

But what about the people living next door to your hypothetical smoker? It's a good idea to have fire safety regulations, for the reason that a fire usually will not just burn the person who caused it in the first place. (Whether this fire retardent helps prevent fires or not is of course a more difficult question...)

natedub• 14 years ago

The article quotes a fire-safety scientist named Vytenis Babrauskas, whose study has been used in support TB 117:

"The problem, he argues, is that the standard is based on applying a small flame to a bare piece of foam — a situation unlikely to happen in real life. ... In real life, before the flame gets to the foam, it has to ignite the fabric. Once the fabric catches fire, it becomes a sheet of flame that can easily overwhelm the fire-suppression properties of treated foam. In tests, TB 117 compliant chairs catch fire just as easily as ones that aren’t compliant — and they burn just as hot. “This is not speculation,” he says. “There were two series of tests that prove what I’m saying is correct.”

agwa• 14 years ago

> let me decide what kind of furniture I want

The problem is that the government has decided that you shouldn't be able to make that decision for yourself - laws require that couches be sold with retardants. Arlene Blum managed to commission a custom-built couch without fire retardants, but that's neither scalable nor viable for most people.

huhtenberg2• 14 years ago

Reminds me of the situation around one of theories that tries to explain SIDS - Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. If you had a kid, you know what it is - a newborn dying in his sleep for no apparent reason. You put a healthy baby to sleep in his bed only to find him dead in the morning. Fun stuff.

There are no exact explanation for the syndrome, but there are preventive measures (such as always let newborn fall asleep on his back) that statistically lessen the risk of it occurring.

One of the theories was that a typical crib mattress creates a fertile ground for some fungal growth. Coupled with chemicals found in the mattress, this creates weak poisonous gas emission, which ultimately kills the child. It's an older theory that was verified and formally considered invalid. However in one country, New Zealand, there's a doctor who has been a vigorously arguing in favor of this theory and now has a statistic to show that proper mattress wrapping nullifies the risk of SIDS. From what I've read, he had very hard time getting the authorities to even listen to his findings, leave alone to act on them.

I wish this lady the best of luck, she's got NYT on her side, I hope she takes a full advantage of this exposure.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_infant_death_syndrome

philwelch• 14 years ago

SIDS is another word for "looks like asphyxiation but we can't figure out how". There's no single cause. Babies sleeping on their tummies was one, since they just breathe back in their CO2. Other proposed causes include fungus, as you mentioned, and even infanticide.

newbie123• 14 years ago

SIDs, while still too common, has dropped 70% in the U.S. since the "back-to-sleep" effort and the general awareness of the situation. Children under 6 months don't have a reflex to carbon dioxide poisoning, and their respiratory systems aren't fully developed, so it is easier for them to suffocate on their own breath pooling in too-soft mattresses or cribs with polyester blankets or bumpers. Risk factors for SIDs death include: winter, cigarette smoke exposure, respiratory illness, not breast-feeding, and not sleeping in the same room as an adult.

dfc3• 14 years ago

Winter? That is surprising. Do you know why a season is a risk factor?

DanBC7• 14 years ago

Unfortunately sometimes smart people believe dumb things, and Dr. Sprott is one of these people.

When you read the reasons why his "research" has been ignored you hear things like "vested interest", "cover up", and "politics".

Dr. T.J Sprott has a book, and several products for sale.

His "statistic" is bogus; the NZ authorities stopped recommending mattress wrapping in the 90s; he has no idea if babies slept or died on wrapped mattresses; yet he claims it as fact.

His paper was awful. That's why people didn't listen to him - he has weird ideas, he can't write them up, other research has tested his ideas and found them wanting.

He claims that decreases in SIDS are because of his mattress wrapping programme. He cannot explain why SIDS is dropping in countries that don't practice mattress wrapping. He cannot explain why SIDS was dropping in NZ before antimoney was addedd to mattresses.

Don't forget that he's not a medical doctor. He is a chemist.

People like Sprott are evil. They come up with some plausible sounding theory, and then they try to publish. No scientific journal wants it, so he self publishes, and publicizes. This creates fear and uncertainty in parents. And so children are at greater risk of death, because parents don't follow current best practice (which is still not perfect but at least is evidence based) and decide to try the advice of a wingnut.

huhtenberg2• 14 years ago

Well, from what I've read the book and the products came substantially after he started voicing his concerns, which sort of implies that he might've taken the matter in his own hands since no one would listen to him.

Even assuming he is a complete loon, the theory of an environmental cause is actually quite plausible. Perhaps not fungus, not phosphorus, but something in the bedding that just knocks those kids out.

With regards him being evil - I don't really see it that way. Why do you say that parents stop following established best practices once they wrap their kid's mattress? Parents aren't idiots, are they? What he's advocating for is orthogonal to existing prevention measures, both easily combined.

greenyoda3• 14 years ago

The irony of the whole thing is that the flame retardants don't even make furniture any less flammable:

"The problem, [the fire expert] argues, is that the standard is based on applying a small flame to a bare piece of foam - a situation unlikely to happen in real life. ... In real life, before the flame gets to the foam, it has to ignite the fabric. Once the fabric catches fire, it becomes a sheet of flame that can easily overwhelm the fire-suppression properties of treated foam. In tests, TB 117 compliant chairs catch fire just as easily as ones that aren't compliant - and they burn just as hot."

So the entire country is now exposed to the dangers of these chemicals because in 1975 some bureaucrats at an obscure government agency in California came up with an arbitrary standard that was not based in reality.

droithomme2• 14 years ago

Thanks for digging that up, I was wondering about that.

The article cites a retardant advocate as saying "Deaths caused by furniture fires dropped from 1,400 in 1980 to 600 in 2004; a 57 percent reduction."

We know that almost all of these couch fires are caused by people falling asleep while smoking cigarettes.

According to the CDC, in the same period, cigarette consumption in the US adult population has fallen from 33.2% in 1980 to 20.9% in 2004. (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762370.html)

So a certain portion of the decline is due to the reduction in cigarette use.

Also, 43 out of 50 states now mandate "fire safe" cigarettes which contain substances such as ethylene vinyl acetate which increase the chance an unsmoked but lit cigarette will stop burning. The presence of these cigarettes has also certainly led to fewer couch fires.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_safe_cigarette

It is unlikely that the entire 57 percent reduction in couch fires over 24 years is entirely due to the use of carcinogenic flame retardants.

Alex39173• 14 years ago

"According to the CDC, in the same period, cigarette consumption in the US adult population has fallen from 33.2% in 1980 to 20.9% in 2004."

Those who smoke cigarettes also smoke a lot less than they used to, so total cigarette consumption is maybe only half as much or less compared to what it once was.

greenyoda3• 14 years ago

The decline in deaths could also have been caused by laws that require the installation of smoke detectors.

noonespecial• 14 years ago

A perfect example of, in the absence of data, just doing what we wish would work in order to be doing something.

seiji• 14 years ago

an arbitrary standard that was not based in reality.

Also see the horrific "food pyramid" (or, if we named it properly, the "morbid obesity and recipe for metabolic syndrome pyramid").

lignuist7• 14 years ago

This reminds me of the ban on regular light bulbs in the EU. People are basically forced now to install so called energy saving lamps, which contain and emit highly toxic mercury and phenol. Most people even don't know about the risks and would let their children sleep in a room with a broken lamp.

DanBC7• 14 years ago

> emit highly toxic mercury

Do you have a source for energy efficient CFLs "emitting mercury"?

cghfdscv• 14 years ago

Yes.

Recently mercury-free LED light bulbs are getting more popular.

And you can still buy 100W incandescent light bulbs everywhere. The workaround is that they are marketed as for special use (shock-resistant).

nostromo• 14 years ago

Looking at mattresses without flame-retardent led me to this provider: http://www.whitelotus.net/green-cotton-rx/

Turns out you'll need a doctor's prescription to even order a plain cotton mattress. Yet another perfectly reasonable regulation from our friends in the California Legislature! :)

My least-favorite CA regulation has to do with eye-glasses. I lost my only pair and went in to get a replacement on a Saturday, but I couldn't because my (perfectly fine) prescription had expired. I had to make an appointment to get an exam in order to get new glasses, but they were closed for the weekend and booked for a few days.

So I spent about a week with headaches because some CA legislator decided it was in my best interest to pay some practitioner to get the same prescription for glasses every year.

tocomment• 14 years ago

You should have ordered online.

guelo• 14 years ago

"So I spent about a week with headaches because some ophthalmology trade group lobbied (bribed) the legislature to get profit-enhancing regulations in place."

FTFY

davidw• 14 years ago

The thing I hate about articles like this is that the path to snarky redditisms is very, very direct.

I'm not disagreeing with your message, I'm disagreeing with the delivery.

_delirium5• 14 years ago

Are there any states that don't have a requirement of a current prescription to purchase glasses? I've had the same issue in Texas [1], which usually considers itself small-government.

[1] cf. http://www.tob.state.tx.us/tobrx.htm

learc83• 14 years ago

I've ordered glasses from the internet here in Georgia maybe a dozen times without them requiring verification of prescription.

Contacts do require one though.

Don't know if the company is just skirting regulation or if it doesn't exist, however.

GFKjunior• 14 years ago

Texas is hardly small government.

I would call them more right-wing conservatives (neo-cons really).

lhnn• 14 years ago

I loathe the requirement of a current prescription for glasses. Corrupt bureaucracy at its usual tricks.

What I wonder: Is it illegal to make a bed out of flame-retardant free cotton balls?

sukuriant• 14 years ago

Are self-created fire hazards in your home illegal? Because that's PROBABLY what it would be considered.

IANAL

leviathant• 14 years ago

If you know what your prescription is, you could order online from a place like Zenni Optical (where my wife gets her glasses). I'm not sure about PA, but here in PA, it's illegal for an optometrist to withold information about your prescription. She got her eyes checked, had to push a little to get her prescription, and then bought her glasses online.

pavel_lishin2• 14 years ago

Exact same experience in Texas; had to ask optometrist to specifically mark down all required information (pupillary distance was missing) and then went to Zenni to get my glasses.

(Oh my god, we sound like a couple of shills.)

nvarsj• 14 years ago

> Turns out you'll need a doctor's prescription to even order a plain cotton mattress.

Alternatively, you can order one of the cotton/latex/wool mattresses that don't have any flame retardents. The most popular is Naturepedic. However, such a mattress will set you back $2200 for the most basic queen.

tokenadult• 14 years ago

Another top-level comment wrote:

between this and the article about brain parasites in california, HN is scaring the crap out of me

And I guess that's why my all-time favorite external link to share here on Hacker News is "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

by Peter Norvig, Google's director of research. To resolve the issue of the safety trade-offs of not treating furniture with flame-retardant chemicals (the status quo when I was a child) and treating it (the status quo for quite a while now in the United States) will take careful examination of the actual risk ratios of any disease said to be correlated with the chemicals, the risk ratios of injuries and deaths from fires, the cost of other preventive measures for each kind of harm, and so on. Public policy is not easy. The best public policies have to be carefully examined in light of verifiable facts.

I see from user danso's profile

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=danso

that he has a professional role in investigative journalism, and indeed I have enjoyed reading (and of course have upvoted) many of his comments here on HN over the past year. The piece submitted here mentions about its author that "Dashka Slater is the author of six books for children and adults. Her latest children’s book, 'Dangerously Ever After,' is out this month," which prompted me to look up other information about the author. Her personal website

http://www.dashkaslater.com/index.php/journalist

declares that she has written pieces for a variety of publications, many in the "alternative" market for periodical articles, and her LinkedIn profile

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dashkaslater

declares her educational background. There is some interesting reporting here, but as a regular reader of Mother Jones (one of the publications that most often publishes her work) and of other "alternative" publications, I would like to see more follow-up on this issue before writing to my elected representatives, as I sometimes do, asking for a change in current law. I do remember when newspaper and magazine articles in my childhood were all about the fearsome dangers of fires killing little children.

A recent submission to HN based on very reliable statistics pointed out that life expectancy in the United States at birth, at age 40, at age 60, at age 65, and even at age 80 has been steadily RISING

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...

since 1960, so new regulations introduced since then so far don't seem to have net harm for the population in balance with all other social and environmental changes since then. Perhaps the purported flame-retardant chemicals don't prevent as many fires as people suppose. But perhaps they also don't cause any serious human illness in actual use. Let's not rush to judgment on this issue, but let's do actual, verifiable science that with sound economic and policy analysis can help guide lawmakers to the best currently available trade-off in regulation.

lignuist7• 14 years ago

Statistics don't count in medicine if you are the one who gets the disease.

tsotha3• 14 years ago

They don't count if you die in a fire, either.

The reality is with this kind of thing we're really off into rounding errors. To the extent you can affect your odds of getting cancer, the extent to which you do the things your mother told you to do (don't smoke, don't drink, eat your vegetables, and don't get too fat) swamps your cancer risk from environmental sources.

Tichy8• 14 years ago

Could you provide a TL;DR of your expose? Thanks!

DanBC7• 14 years ago

Really?

Fire is dangerous, and we know it kills a bunch of people.

Fire retardants may be dangerous, they may harm a bunch of people, but we're not sure how many, nor how they are harmed. Research is sometimes conducted poorly, or good research is interpreted poorly by reporters.

We need to balance risk and cost. People dying in fires is bad. People getting a bunch of diseases is also bad. We need to find out which is more likely.

rdl6• 14 years ago

I assume flame retardants are mainly only needed for couches of smokers (I've never randomly put a flame onto my couch for fun to see if it would burn), so even if fire retardants save 100 people from fires they caused through voluntary negligence while subjecting 1 additional person to cancer or other illness due to chemicals, I'm not sure if it's a fair trade. Saving firefighters might be a reasonable argument, though.

tptacek10• 14 years ago

Do we know that anyone has contracted cancer as a result of flame retardants used in furniture? I re-read the article looking for clear evidence, and what I saw on close read was weasel-wording: when direct health effects are being talked about, the subject of the sentence becomes "flame retardants" rather than a specific chemical; when lax investigations become a topic, it's the EPA's laxity (the EPA isn't solely responsible for evaluating chemicals).

The closest the author comes to accusing a specific flame retarded is chlorinated trisphosphates. You can go to the EPA and look up the safety record of these chemicals; long story short, you can give rats reproductive and kidney cancer if you feed them chlorinated tris every day for 2 years.

AJ0072• 14 years ago

Its not just firefighters, but people who live in shared buildings -- apartment, condominium, co-op, etc. In which case, it would appear evident to me that the real policy issue is one of allowing smoking indoors.

Unfortunately the bureaucratic process tends to lean towards spending enormous amounts of time and resources on issues that could be "hacked" fairly easily.

When we add a lot of variables to a problem we end up with solutions that not only are challenging to rationalize, but also tend to have ugly side effects. This is something I've learned from running my own business, and it seems to be reflected on a government level as well.

TheAmazingIdiot• 14 years ago

This last winter, we had a nasty ice-storm that coated everything in about a 1/8 to 1/4 coat of ice. I was working in a nearby city, so going home was nigh impossible.

I ended up staying with a friend. She has a roommate, and they both smoke. I ended up sleeping on a bed there. What I saw disturbed me greatly:

The pillow, sheet, and 2 blankets all had various amounts of burns from ashes and cigarettes. The sizes on some of the burns were so big I could fit my index finger through.

I have to wonder: how do they keep from catching their surroundings on fire?

pmorici3• 14 years ago

I think the thing that is reflexively offensive about this whole thing is that the government has taken a risk that is reasonably easy for a responsible adult to avoid (setting their couch on fire) and implemented a measure that is harmful and difficult or almost impossible to avoid. It's as if we are all made to pay for the morons who can't resist playing with matches in their couch.

tptacek10• 14 years ago

It is not particularly easy to avoid setting your couch on fire. The problem with flaming couches is not just those cases where the couch is the primary contributor to the fire; it's also the cases where couches rapidly accelerate the intensity of a smaller fire, like from an electrical malfunction.

ScottBurson2• 14 years ago

I'm inclined to agree, but see this comment upthread about smokers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4494407

I'm hard put to believe I could be that careless even if I were a smoker, but apparently some people are.

Anyway, as a matter of policy, maybe as smoking continues to become less popular (here's hoping) it will seem less like a good trade to provide some very slight protection against smokers setting their furniture on fire at the cost of exposing all of us to carcinogens.

GFischer• 14 years ago

One of my coworkers had his 4 year old child set fire to his couch (he pushed and pushed until it was next to the gas stove - it's easier here in Uruguay due to smaller houses and different gas stoves).

Irresponsible, absolutely, for not supervising the kid, but it is possible.

abdelmaalik• 14 years ago

just in case your couch is dangerous: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJkhSUSnek

10 seconds that can mushroom into a lot of wasted time, you've been warned.

hollerith• 14 years ago

After the foam in cushions described in the OP, the biggest source of human exposure to flame retardants is probably consumer electronics. Particularly, most televisions and computer monitors are encased in a plastic housing which by law must be resistant to catching fire, and the universal way that is achieved is by mixing flame retardants with the plastic while the plastic is still "liquid". I read once that flame retardants make up up to 20% of the volume of the material of the housings.

When you remove this toxic plastic housing, there is another housing underneath made of steel, which holds the monitor or TV together just fine on its own. The exception is the buttons for adjusting brightness, etc.

Last year, I removed all the urethane foam from my home and the plastic housing from my monitor. There is a row of buttons for brightness, etc, that now hangs by wires, and there is a button near the top of the monitor for power which now hangs down the back of the monitor by wires. Now that the buttons are no longer held in place by the plastic housing, it is much harder to press them, but that is OK because I never adjust the brightness (preferring to use OS X to "switch black and white" at night). And I never use the power button. (The monitor draws one watt when it is on but not receiving video input).

Except for the small and not particularly noticeable row of buttons hanging by wires from the bottom of the monitor, the monitor has a tidy, trim appearance and does not prevent me from feeling proud of how my computer looks.

I recommend these home modifications to almost everybody.

The way the flame retardants get into the human body, by the way, is by attaching to dust, which gets ingested in small amounts. Consequently, after removal and disposal of the housing, I recommend cleaning the area under and around the device.

Or get a recent Apple monitor, which has an aluminum housing.

WalterBright• 14 years ago

The single best way to protect your home against fire, by far, is to have a fire sprinkler system installed. Unfortunately, this can only be done when the house is built. So if you are planning on building a house, specify a sprinkler system.

It'll be the best money you ever spent.

rdl6• 14 years ago

Why can't you retrofit fire suppressing foam in the kitchen, like one does in a commercial kitchen range hood? I've seen this done on kitchen remodels. There are residential range hoods (Viking, Wolf, ...) which have a wall-mounted button or a pull which 1) kills the fuel source and 2) smothers the range area with fire suppression (class BC or K) to put out the fire and prevent re-ignition. Totally ruins your food AND needs to be cleaned off promptly since it's corrosive.

Kitchens are by far the most likely source of domestic fires.

_delirium5• 14 years ago

> Kitchens are by far the most likely source of domestic fires.

Interesting; I would've guessed it'd be in closer running with other causes, but it looks like they constitute around 55% of total residential fires. According to some U.S. statistics from 2010 [1], the leading causes of residential fires are cooking, with 166k fires, followed by heating at 47k fires, electrical and "other unintentional" at ~25k each, and open flame and "intentional" at just under 20k each.

[1] http://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/res_bldg_f...

ericdykstra• 14 years ago

Another example of government creating arbitrary policies that just waste time and money, and probably kill us.

Since 1975, an obscure California agency called the Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation has mandated that the foam inside upholstered furniture be able to withstand exposure to a small flame, like a candle or cigarette lighter, for 12 seconds without igniting.

Who decided on 12 seconds? Why the inside of furniture rather than the outside? Who does this benefit? Why is there even a Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation? Why do government agencies like the EPA exist when they can't say anything about the safety of chemicals that are in couches in probably in upwards of 95% of homes in America?

It wouldn't surprise me if a flame retardant manufacturer was behind the law to begin with, which is even more disgusting.

brendn• 14 years ago

It was totally a lobbying effort to get the legislation passed. First by the tobacco industry because of fires started by smokers falling asleep with lit cigarettes, then by the chemical industry (by courting state fire marshals) to boost sales of their flame retardants. The Chicago Tribune has a multi-part series on it here: http://media.apps.chicagotribune.com/flames/index.html

tptacek10• 14 years ago

Chemtura Firemaster 550 is "just starting to be analyzed"? It was introduced in '05-'06, and here's its 2006 MSDS:

http://www.busbrp.org/cireeh/uploads/Main/FM550msds.pdf

thejefflarson• 14 years ago

The Chicago Tribune has a good series about how Big Tobacco and chemical companies have pushed for more flame retardants in everything despite health concerns:

http://media.apps.chicagotribune.com/flames/index.html

gojomo• 14 years ago

It's sad that premature regulation moved this into the sphere of politics and mandated-purchases (from companies with an incentive to lobby). That means any attempt to learn what's really going on, or make any incremental changes, is gummed up by the fog of adversarial, zero-sum politics.

Without the inflexible mandate, the rule could simply be: label whether your product has flame-retardants or not, and have evidence for your claims. Then the industry could diversify, some brands emphasizing flame-resistance and others lack of chemical additives. And, this diversity would mean we would gather more real-world experience about whether the flame-retardant units are really correlated with fewer/slower fires and fewer fatalities, or with more health/IQ/behavior problems in children and pets, or both, or neither.

But because of the uniform monoculture imposed by the premature politicization, we face a data white-out and policy is flying half-blind... with only indirect data on costs and benefits.

Maybe a way out would be to compel a bisection of the industry output: you must make half your units with, and half without, these additives, and clearly mark the units in each category. Five to ten years later, we'd likely have much better data about real effects.

reirob• 14 years ago

When reading the title I thought the article will be about how dangerous the couch is for our generation, because we are spending more and more time on it and so do not exercise enough our body, etc. You know, related to Tablet devices and Internet which allow more and more entertainment from the couch.

Was quite surprised it is about another type of danger. I guess I am too much on portable devices and on the couch ;)

dromidas• 14 years ago

>The baby’s mother had placed a candle in her crib, he said, and the candle fell over, igniting a pillow.

I'm pretty sure the baby's mother didn't deserve to be the mother of anyone. Either that or she spent too much time sniffing her own couch and it lowered her IQ enough to put a CANDLE IN A FREAKING CRIB WITH A BABY.

How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

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