We've now got two different claims in this discussion [(1) U.S. safety laws in general are substandard to the rest of the world but the U.S. is arrogant about it, and (2) Deployed air bags can cause respiratory problems due to the checicals that get released]. Is there any relationship between those two issues? IOW, does Europe use an entirely different air bag propellent that does zero harm? Or on that particular issue is wonderful Europe just as bad as the U.S. (I'm not talking about that the deployment energy used in Europe being less and therefore safer - that's a separate side issue - I'd like an answer on the propellent respiratory harm question).
Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my adddress with the letter 'x')
It's all about an awful chemical called Dihydrogen Monoxide. Here's how bad it is: If you inhale it, it will kill you - and it doesn't have to be a large amount. Thousands of people die in the U.S. alone each year from this chemical that it turns out is just about everywhere you look in our society. Our lakes and streams are full of it. And guess what: It is used in the manufacture of styrofaom cups that we drink out of, and the styrofoam retains this chemical!! A city on California recently was considering a ban of styrofaom cups at city-sponsored events. You might check with your local officials to see if they could consider doing something like that too. From that web site, here are just a few facts associated with the problem chemical - this ought to whet your appetite: Death due to accidental inhalation of DHMO, even in small quantities. Prolonged exposure to solid DHMO causes severe tissue damage. Excessive ingestion produces a number of unpleasant though not typically life-threatening side-effects. DHMO is a major component of acid rain. Gaseous DHMO can cause severe burns. Contributes to soil erosion. Leads to corrosion and oxidation of many metals. Contamination of electrical systems often causes short-circuits. Exposure decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes. Found in biopsies of pre-cancerous tumors and lesions. Often associated with killer cyclones in the U.S. Midwest and elsewhere. Thermal variations in DHMO are a suspected contributor to the El Nino weather effect
Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my adddress with the letter 'x')
bill, i have just taken my first look at the website for DHMO. it is terrible.. and i did not know about it.. thank you for alerting me to this.. i signed up for the ALERT mailing list on the site. we are killing our environment and i don't like it... and i want to help stop it.. but i am only one person. not a greenpeace person, not a hippie (not now anyway). i am a fully employed, single mother of a 24 year old seriously ill (not from legal chemicals) son. and all i know is that i am interested in learning and this is my beginning... everyone has to have a start... thnks you again for the ALERT. i will dedicate some more of my limited time to looking into this, i have some connections, not many, but am getting to know quite a few people in my heartfelt quests....
Matt, just an excerpt from a conversation i had with my son when he was
5 years old (that was 19 year ago). i told him that i wanted him to always wear his seatbelt, even when he was not in the car with me. because no one NO ONE loved him as much as i did and i wanted him to be safe and always insist on wearing his seatbelt for me because if something happened to him i would absolutely die.. he looked at me with his sweet little five year old face and said, well, mom, i love you too and you don't wear your seat belt. From that moment on, I NEVER GO ANYWHERE WITHOUT PUTTING ON MY SEATBELT and neither does my son.
just a cute little excerpt from my life.. hope no one is offended...
Not as such, no. European airbags are less likely to deploy, since their vehicle-speed and vehicle-deceleration thresholds are higher. They are also smaller in volume, which means a lower concentration of Sodium Azide byproducts and talc in the air in the car after deployment -- so the likelihood of exposure is lower, and the extent of exposure if it occurs is lesser.
No, but the first US airbags (GM full-size cars, '74-'77, as a factory option that included the deletion of seatbelts) used a completely harmless propellant: Pressurized Nitrogen.
You're using Thunderbird. On the menu bar, there's an entry called "Help." Click on it, and go from there. There's a lot of information there about how to use the newsreager you're using. BTW, "NG" is a contraction of "newsgroup."
OBL is probably in Iran. He needs dialisys 3 or 4 times a week; Afghanistan doesn't have facilities he can use that often without being found out. he needs a support network that would be much easier in Iran than Afghanistan.
I think you need to really review this anti-airbag crusade your on. I think your really misguided. Let's review the objections you have brought up.
1) airbags have dangerous chemicals. Well, this isn't a problem as long as those dangerous chemicals aren't generally making their way into the environment. Since most cars with airbags never are involved in collisions where the airbags deploy, the only time that these dangerous chemicals really have of getting into the environment is when the car goes to the wrecking yard and is broken up for scrap. If the wrecker is routinely throwing these unused airbags into the garbage, that is a problem. So maybe if you are concerned about these chemicals you should be more conerned with how these airbags are being disposed when the car is broken up for scrap. And guess what - it so happens that there are some states that are making it a lot harder for wreckers to remove these undeployed bags and sell them on the used market, instead of removing them and landfilling them. This is despite many industry recommendations that undeployed airbags are perfectly usable, and at least one major insurance company that requires them to be used when a vehicle is repaired, if they are available. So maybe instead of trying to ban them you should be trying to get those states to stop obstructing the creation of a used market which would encourage wreckers to remove and not landfill these bags.
2) airbags hurt people when they deploy. Well here is the long and short of it. If you are wearing your seatbelt in a car that is involved in a collision then in the overwhelming number of cases you aren't going to be seriously injured by the deployment of it's airbag. Which means that just about the only people who get seriously maimed by a deploying airbag are idiots that don't wear their seat belts. So, your crusading to ban airbags based on airbags hurting people is pretty much a crusade to help idiots. So maybe instead of crusading to basically help idiots you should crusade to get people to wear their seatbelts.
If this is the case and you really want to make the most difference then you need to worry about the most dangerous chemicals that are emitted from a car every day - the tailpipe exhaust. And we all know just how to reduce these, everyone does. The answer - drive less And how do you do that, well here are some ways:
a) if you live in the city experiment with different routes to learn which ones are less congested and save you time. b) get in the habit of running errands on your way to and from work, instead of saving them all up for the weekend or evening. Or have your spouse or SO run your errands that are convenient for him while you run his errands that are convenient for you. c) for errands that you have to do on the weekend, plan them so you do them at once, on a route that uses minimum time to complete. d) move closer to your work. e) carpool with others at work. f) choose social venues that are closer to you rather than further away g) spend more time at home, eat in instead of eating out, watch movies from netflix instead of driving across the city to the metroplex.
All of those things will do FAR MORE to help the environment than banning airbags.
You know linda, people are always complaining that they never have enough time in their lives to do things they want to do. Well a big time consumer is just driving around needlessly, don't you think?
You seem to think it's your responsibility to crusade for the environment, well fine. But it is easy to crusade among strangers that you don't know. If you really feel called to do this then your a faker unless your willing to crusade among your friends and family - where you are going to be more worried about offending someone, than here.
If your principles aren't strong enough for you to take this list I just posted and run around to all your friends and family, and press them to agree to try to do some of the things on this list, then you have no business coming into this forum here and trying to pull this concern for the environment crap here.
Linda, You might like this e-mail I received a few years ago:
I am a very sick little boy. My mother is typing this for me, because I can't. She is crying. Don't cry, Mommy! Mommy is always sad, but she says it's not my fault. I asked her if it was God's fault, but she didn't answer and only started crying harder, so I don't ask her that any more.
The reason she is so sad is because I'm so sick.
I was born without a body. It doesn't hurt, except when I try to breathe. The doctors gave me an artificial body. It is a burlap bag filled with leaves. The doctors said that was the best they could do on account of us having no money or insurance.
I would like to have a body transplant, but we need more money. Mommy doesn't work because she said nobody hires crying people.
I said, "Don't cry, Mommy," and she hugged my burlap bag. Mommy always gives me hugs, even though she's allergic to burlap and it makes her sneeze and chafes her real bad.
I hope you will help me. You can help me if you mindlessly forward this email to everyone you know. Mindlessly forward it to people you don't know, too. Dr. Johansen said that for every person you mindlessly forward this email to, Bill Gates will team up with AOL and send a nickel to NASA.
With that funding, NASA will collect prayers from school children all over America and have the astronauts take them up into space so that the angels can hear them better. Then they will come back to earth and go to the Pope, and he will take up a collection in church and send all the money to the doctors. The doctors could help me get better, then. Maybe one day I will be able to play baseball. Right now I can only be third base.
Every time you mindlessly forward this letter, the astronauts can take another prayer to the angels and my dream will be closer to coming true.
Please help me. Mommy is so sad, and I want a body.
If you don't mindlessly forward this email, that's okay. Mommy says you're a mean and heartless bastard who doesn't care about a poor little boy with only a head. She says that if you don't stew in the raw pit of your own guilt-ridden stomach, she hopes you die a long slow, horrible death and then burn forever in Hell. What kind of cruel person are you that you can't take 5 freakin' minutes to mindlessly forward this to all your friends so that they can feel guilt and shame about ignoring a poor, bodiless 9-year-old boy?
Please help me. I try to be happy, but it's hard. I wish I had a kitty. I wish I could hold a kitty. I wish I could hold a kitty that wouldn't chew on me and try to bury its shit in the leaves of my burlap body. I wish that very much.
Thank you and God bless, Billy "Smiles" Evans (the boy with just a head, and a burlap sack for a body)
Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my adddress with the letter 'x')
Come to think of it, Mozilla, and I believe Thunderbird, have a message threading bug where if you click on get new messages while the thread is open, all new messages appear at the bottom without being graphically attached to their parent post. Maybe that's what is confusing Linda. I don't know why they haven't got around to fixing that bug (which has been around since version 1.2 or 1.3, IIRC), but what I do is just close and reopen the thread.
Also, Linda, if you haven't already, try to use the threaded message view so you'll get a hierarchal view of messages. That should make it easier for you to keep track of who's responding to whom.
I personally prefer "top posting" as you have done (and I have done here as well). This is the way my newsreader works by default and also allows me to read threads in order so I don't need to waste time skipping down to the body of each message.
I have received criticism from time to time that I should not "top post", but this has generally not been a large issue since everyone has a different opinion on what is best and there is no universal agreement. That said, I believe that most will agree that the content of the message is much more important than its formatting (top posting, spelling, and even capitalization too!) There are times when I will include my message at the end or even in the body of the previous response since this allows me to use the quote as a reference. This works very well when replying with a point by point response.
As to the rough treatment you were given, I speculate that some of this may come from the fact that this has historically been a male-dominated NG and some of the old timers have had heated exchanges with a woman who used to frequently post here by the name of Charlene Blake (dare I use her name here?) She used to post a lot of non-factual, emotional rants regarding her Minivan's problems and Chrysler's lack of responsibility/accountability to their customers.
Good luck with your cause. As to my perspective, I've never been involved in a major accident when the air bags have deployed, but was in a couple of accidents in which they would have if the vehicles had been so equipped during the late 70's and early 80's. As such, I have no immediate first hand experience and more importantly, no experience with air bag deployment in my extended family (parents, in-laws, brothers, sisters, brother-in laws, sister-in-laws, nieces, nephews, etc. (35-40 drivers and vehicles) I do know co-workers who have been in major accidents and who have had their air bags deploy. In a few cases, they told me that they had slight burns on their hands from the gas venting, and they all said the bag deployed with incredible force. They all were thankful to have it and felt their injuries would have been far worse without the bag. As such, I've got my perspective so was not as open to your post as I possibly should have been. I did appreciate Dan Stern's reply, but to be totally honest have trouble relating to the issue since I don't see it as black and white that they are a problem.
The MSDS for Sodium Azide is in the "holy shit" range:
Health Rating: 3 - Severe (Poison) Flammability Rating: 2 - (Moderate) Reactivity Rating: 4 - Extreme (Explosive) Contact Rating: 3 - Severe (Life)
Inhalation: May cause irritation to the respiratory tract and mucous membranes, sore throat, coughing, dizziness, shortness of breath, and fainting. May be absorbed through inhalation. Symptoms may parallel ingestion.
Ingestion: Highly Toxic! May cause breathlessness, pulmonary edema and rapid heart beat within 5 minutes. Nausea, vomiting, headache, restlessness, and diarrhea may occur within 15 minutes. Other symptoms may include low blood pressure, abnormal breathing, reduced body temperature, reduced body pH, convulsions, collapse and death.
Need I go on?
Anyway, fortunately most if not all of the azide deflagerates in the airbag explosion. Unfortunately, it decomposes to nitrogen (N2), which is perfectly harmless, and sodium (Na) which ain't. If the sodium reacts with water (e.g. humidity, or your mucous membranes) you get NaOH (lye)
Except for not being explosive, NaOH is about as nasty as azide. The other stuff they put in airbags to try to prevent the free sodium from floating around isn't much fun to breathe either; if it works perfectly you get "only" silicate glass (which you don't want to breathe either), otherwise you get sodium and potassium oxides (quite nasty)
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