Just thought I'd add something to this. Unfortunately its a bit wooly, so please forgive me.
I read something somewhere a while ago (see, I told you. Wooly) saying that a lot of the problem with things like the ones you mentioned (in terms of safety, rules standardization and so on) is that our laws (I think the comment was about American laws no NZ, but I think it still applies here) have a 'Biggest dumb idiot' measure, rather than the 'normal-ish person' measure that most people think it should.
In other words if you fail to protect someone against doing something that only the biggest dumb idiot would do, and someone goes and does it, then its YOUR fault that they did this dumb thing. So people go nuts trying to protect everyone against everything that could possibly go wrong, because otherwise they will get sued if some moron does something stupid.
That is a possible root cause of all sorts of weird 'safety' and 'political correctness' rules. For example, I went on an adventure camp in 7th form. We went on massive treks, abseils high enough to kill you if anything went wrong, did a high wire course and would have gone snow caving if we weren't so tired, but we couldn't go on the wussy little confidence course next to the high wire course because we didn't have a qualified instructor and some moron might of had a boo-boo and sued the local council or whatever.
I read something somewhere a while ago (see, I told you. Wooly) saying that a lot of the problem with things like the ones you mentioned (in terms of safety, rules standardization and so on) is that our laws (I think the comment was about American laws no NZ, but I think it still applies here) have a 'Biggest dumb idiot' measure, rather than the 'normal-ish person' measure that most people think it should.
In other words if you fail to protect someone against doing something that only the biggest dumb idiot would do, and someone goes and does it, then its YOUR fault that they did this dumb thing. So people go nuts trying to protect everyone against everything that could possibly go wrong, because otherwise they will get sued if some moron does something stupid.
That is a possible root cause of all sorts of weird 'safety' and 'political correctness' rules. For example, I went on an adventure camp in 7th form. We went on massive treks, abseils high enough to kill you if anything went wrong, did a high wire course and would have gone snow caving if we weren't so tired, but we couldn't go on the wussy little confidence course next to the high wire course because we didn't have a qualified instructor and some moron might of had a boo-boo and sued the local council or whatever.
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