I bet over a million homes in the US still use mercury switches in their thermometers. (Shh! don't let them know.)
Another part of the equation is that as we as a culture have matured our risk threshold has dropped: we're much less likely to accept people getting injured. (I think at least part of that is because we're increasingly secular and people don't worry as much about someone getting injured or dying if there's a Heaven.) We increasingly use lawyers to punish companies that do bad things, rather than looking to the government for regulation, and a side-effect of that is that anyone who lets anything bad or dangerous happen, or thinks that through inaction, harm may come to someone, tries to avert that situation through any means possible. I think a total surveillance/nanny state is practically inescapable once litigation is considered a reasonable method of self-defense.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2008-08-15 04:37 am (UTC)Another part of the equation is that as we as a culture have matured our risk threshold has dropped: we're much less likely to accept people getting injured. (I think at least part of that is because we're increasingly secular and people don't worry as much about someone getting injured or dying if there's a Heaven.) We increasingly use lawyers to punish companies that do bad things, rather than looking to the government for regulation, and a side-effect of that is that anyone who lets anything bad or dangerous happen, or thinks that through inaction, harm may come to someone, tries to avert that situation through any means possible. I think a total surveillance/nanny state is practically inescapable once litigation is considered a reasonable method of self-defense.