Replacing a broken set of blinds in my house and apparently no one sells the old standard kind where you pull the cord to raise them, I guess because kids and/or pets could tangle in the cord? Bit of an education in miniblinds today.
Well that’s depressing.
Actually I don’t think it is, because they’re fixing it. “Hey here’s a problem, let’s use engineering to eliminate the problem.” Best thing we do as a species.
Don’t make the two strings into a loop. Problem solved. Or secure the loop to the wall. Problem solved. But really what I meant is that it’s depressing that people have managed to strangle themselves in a contraption that’s pretty benign by design.
I agree. It’s really sad when children and pets die accidentally or for any reason really.
What’s truly depressing is all the jaded assholes who think that their adult intelligence is the standard for every baby and animal in the world so it’s somehow the kids fault for strangling themselves because they should have known better
Has anybody ever said that?
When my cat was a baby she got tangled by the neck in a blinds cord, thankfully I was right there, but it scared the shit out of me. I rent, and still (and everywhere else I’ve lived) have corded blinds, but the cords are now rolled up and tied to the top so they’re out of the way. This kind of regulation is a good thing.
I used to think it was “only” toddlers. Tragic stories of 12 year olds dying from the pull cords. Fucking horrible.
Am I misunderstanding what pull cords are, or why not have it so the two strings can separate easily? The two strings in my blinds “snap” together so that it’s easy to raise/lower the blinds, but the strings separate very easily from each other if applying force in any other kind of way (would be impossible for a child to accidently hang themselves with it for example)
The strings come off the “screwed in” part?
I don’t think politicians came up with the new design, but embraced the new design. This has been an issue for decades and the ban is newin USA.
So make it two chords instead of a loop. Problem solved.
Take two pieces of string with wooden knobs at the ends and hang them up together.
Put your arm between them and pull down quickly.
Repeat, and notice how a fraction of the time those wooden knobs may wrap around each other and become tied by a knot held by the downward force of your arm until you pull up which you can’t do if you’re hanging.
I know a family whose baby hung themselves on the cord. Must be common enough that they just banned them.
Anything is lethal when you give it to a million people. This is the main reason I take issue with pointing out individual examples of for example autonomous vehicle crashes and treating that as an evidence for why they’re inherently dangerous. Almost nothing is 100% safe. I bet there are dozens of people suffocating to their pillows each year.
Username checks out. If they weren’t so awful, maybe people would care about defending them, but there’s just all-around awful. They’re uglier, harder to use, and seem to frequently get damaged (probably mostly from people trying to fight with them or just bending them out of the way because damaging them is worth it to avoid dealing with them…
There’s always roller blinds for the ones among us to whom mini blinds are too difficult to use.
So by your logic if a collision from bicycle or even from people running isn’t 100% safe, then it’s as dangerous as car?
More like if you contextualize the incidents of bicycles and pedestrians with cars, you might realize they’re safer than you think. This is absolutely false for cars and pedestrians though in America at least.
contextualize how?
Well, nothing is 100% safe, and we allow plenty of things that are demonstrably unsafe to continue. So if you compare bike-car collisions against say, firearm suicides in the US, you’ll see that bike-car collisions aren’t that bad.
The fundamental argument is that nothing is totally safe, but some things are safer than others.
so by your logic since nothing is as bad as [choose any cause of death], we should just… give up on improving safety?
Does no threshold for the rate of any cause of death justify improving safety?
I legitimately don’t understand your question. If you’re asking if the cost to improve safety may be too great in some cases, yes that is true in some cases. But you haven’t made that case in this specific instance yet.
Nope.
Are you saying we should not have safety regulations just because we can’t make everything 100% safe?
Also, if you have mini blinds made in the 70s, they’re full of lead
Fuckin-a roit buddy! Built back when people knew how to party!
About 9 children die every year , strangled by mini blinds. 3500 children are killed by guns every year.
Why did we only fix the most unlikely one?
There’s no amendment protecting mini blinds.
Probably because there isn’t a giant mini blind lobby, and people plastering stickers all over their pickup trucks yelling about their mini blind rights.
Shhhh. Don’t give the conservatives more stuff to scream about.
gun violence isn’t an engineering problem. miniblind cords are.
Unrelated to blinds but my friend told me about having hanging Christmas cords. Her car made a wrong jump and she came home to a dead cat. She was 5. I am trauma’d.
I know what you were trying to write, but I am still picturing your friend as 5 yr old, speeding her car over a ramp so bad, it caused her cat miles away at home to die in shock.
Unrelated to blinds but my friend told me about having hanging Christmas cords. Her car made a wrong jump and she came home to a dead cat. She was 5. I am trauma’d.
Typo strikes again!
They just installed some in our new office. Guess it’s time to somehow choke myself on them and get a phat check.
Okay but if you get stuck, at least try to get in one good asphyx-e-wank on your way out.
Is there an app for that?
Witness the horror replacing it
Natural selection is dead.
Natural selection is dead.
What a concept
I’ve never understood why they had more than 1 string for a set of blinds, it’s not like anybody wants to raise only one corner of it?
My experience has been that stringless blinds are the Landlord Special of window covering, they suck ass and barely raise up if you don’t get the individual “blades” perfectly horizontal.
One string pulling up the left side, one string pulling up the right side. They are separated in the “down” position, so they have to be separated in the “up” as well.
If you use only one string in the middle, they will never stay level.
Little trick I figured out as a kid in case you ever have the string blinds again (also, never seen stringless):
Cut a string to the same length as the two coming out of the blinds, snip the little plastic cap off the two attached to the blinds, and braid the three strings together, tie at the end. Never pull unevenly again.
You can’t braid them together, they won’t go through the take-up mechanism when you drop them closed. I tried wrapping one with the same idea in mind and had to sit and unwrap them because I couldn’t open them anymore.
You could just braid the bottom and set the braid with a knot, but that’s basically what the knot at the end and the cap do.
Even if you braid it while the blinds are already closed it won’t work?
I haven’t tried this yet but want to try when I get home. I worry about my cats getting tangled and one cord would be better than whatever the hell is going on with it now lol.
I’ve personally done it, but now I wonder if those blinds were somehow loose or different. Don’t wanna suggest you do it just to have to undo it if it doesn’t work :/
more than 1 string for a set of blinds
Small differences in rolling behaviour for each string as they’re collected on the roll can cause tuning problems and so need tiny adjustment periodically.
Just tie a knot. Avoid the overhand - do a climber’s figure-8 instead - if you want to untie it later for tuning ever.
