Apparently, hair straighteners get hot and can cause burns. Whodathunkit, eh? Having occasionally used them, I can attest that, yes, they do get hot. That’s how they work.
Still we get the statement of the blindingly obvious along with the usual subtext:
The council adviced[sic] parents “to keep the hot surfaces away from exploring fingers”, even though tongs are being increasingly sold in heat-proof bags or clips. In the absence of effective legislation the best preventative measure remains “education of the users”.
In other words, they would like “effective legislation” but will have to make do with hectoring us instead. So, fine, educate – although, frankly, most of us can manage to work out that hot things burn without the research, studies or awareness campaigns.
How about leaving us to get on with it and letting Darwin cope with those who can’t?
There’s a lot of this attitude that has been brought about by (who else?) our old friends, the legal profession.
Since we imported from the US (where else?) the idiotic ideas (idiotic as currently practised) of a) product liability and b) contingency lawsuits, so many now bend over backwards to cover their own arses.
Hence we have bags of salted peanuts emblazoned with “Warning: May contain nuts”, and companies being successfully sued on the grounds that they didn’t specifically warn in their manual that sticking your hand in a blender wasn’t the best way to trim your nails, and about a zillion other examples showing that the judiciary – theirs AND ours – has an uncommonly high proportion of congenital idiots in its makeup.
I know there is more to this than the part I have copied below, but this seems to be the more relevant part:
The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again.
Mark Twain
About twenty years ago, my wife (then my fiancée) and I attended a family bash on my TR1. One of her young cousins came over and promptly reached out to the hot exhaust. He’s in his late twenties now. He has never repeated the experiment to my knowledge.
When I was about five I touched the electric ring on my aunt’s electric cooker because it was glowing a pretty red colour. Like the cat, I did not repeat the experiment. 😉 😡