A pair of scissors on formica table suddenly bursts into flames(old.reddit.com) |
A pair of scissors on formica table suddenly bursts into flames(old.reddit.com) |
In this type of scenario where we're investigating an interesting one time event, it's important to try and decide how something may have happened. But equally important to try and decide how something could be faked to appear to have happened.
In a world ever driven by attention and lies, it pays to have a professional attention grabbing liar double checking the facts.
As one comment pointed out, they could be using nitrocellulose in the handle.
They're just scissors, how are we still as a species finding ways to make them shitter and more breakable? They're a solved problem and yet some guy managed to hit on a way make them out of melting plastic?
I don't need them to be laser etched or artisanal or blessed by levitating monks or whatever. Just two bits of metal with a rivet that will still be scissor-shaped when I'm dead and buried. It's not even that much more metal than plastic handled scissors, and the hard bit is in the edges anyway, not the handles. It's probably never been cheaper or easier to make not-shit things and yet there's just so much shit everywhere.
Products when they are first introduced tend to be overengineered, since the way they will be used is not entirely known. As this knowledge accumulates the products can be optimized to be just good enough (just strong enough, just durable enough). You should expect in equilibrium that products will be optimized for minimum cost at the minimum tolerable level of quality.
On the other hand, we aren't being advised not to run with scissors any more.
- derive personal amusement
- embarrass the credulous
- drive traffic to the subreddit
- serve as an experiment on credibility/marketing (to which we are contributing data, even here)
- reddit karma and name recognition, which do correlate somewhat to monetary value if you're motivated enough, and if not, still give you concrete advantages
- create future content for reaction streamers
And the formula for tricking reddit like this is pretty well-known by many, so there's your means.
This is usually reason #1, and money doesn't have to be involved. Never underestimate the importance of imaginary internet points.
Everyone knew a Jason when they were a kid, someone who was seemingly a compulsive liar, and would just say anything and everything to have people listen to them, even if then to say 'that's horseshit'.
Reddit seems to be full of Jasons.
Leaky nearby microwave oven heated the metal part of the scissors?
So I now think my comment is misleading.
I have been to an injection molding shop a few times and it always seemed like a lot of labor was going in to cleaning the molds and the injection screws. Maybe a worker found a shortcut.
1 - the amounts would be so incredibly tiny, even microscopic, for it to get lodged in there.
2 - any flammable stuff would either evaporate or gradually oxidize.
To link to a post like this - a post that a sensible person would dismiss out of hand - and to host a discussion around it, is bad for HN.
It attracts the wrong crowd.
https://www.reddit.com/r/chemistry/comments/1ilmshx/a_pair_o...
Scissors also don't have to be "consumed", or at least not substantially over the course of a human life. I'd expect them to be durable goods. It's more than possible to make a pair of scissors, for not even that much more that a shit pair, that outlasts the first owner. We just generally choose not to.
> Labor has never been more expensive than now.
Each hour of wages is amortized across dozens, hundreds, possibly thousands of scissors. You could double the wages of everyone involved from manufacturing to fulfillment to logistics to sales and it'd translate to maybe multiple pennies' worth of a per-scissor cost increase.
> Raw resources have never been under more competition than now.
As the other commenter pointed out, steel's still plenty cheap and abundant.
> We as a species are more numerous and consume more scissors than ever before.
That's more than offset by our increased ability to make scissors at scale.
> Supply chains have never farther separated end user from producer, as now.
The whole point of that separation is to drive down costs.
----
All in all, the available information points rather squarely to manufacturers being greedy rather than costs somehow forcing their hand.