Nope, I missed that story.
I've posted a fair number of pictures here over the years, and I try to choose each picture so as to focus on but one code issue.
Alas, it has proven nearly impossible to take a picture with but one flaw in it. Instead, when a hack is at work, there seems to be an urge to break as many rules as possible.
It's not that I rejoice when someone gets hurt, it's just that I nearly always find that there were so many things going wrong it's amazing it took so long for the accident to happen. Did I say accident? Some of these jobs look like a deliberate effort was made to cause injury.
There is also, dare I say it, some value to the doctrines behind cost/benefit analysis. To prevent cuts, we could outfit kitchens with rubber knives; just don't expect much cooking to get done! (Lest you think I'm being silly, have you seen the 'knives' some warehouses expect their folks to use? Ask the guy at Graybar to show you his!)
I think Alan (The OP) has a point: the ever-expanding quest to make things perfect has no place in code; it's a design issue.
We have other threads going right now that address other aspects of this quest to make things 'accident proof.' One thread references one man's campaign to do away with GFCI devices, and place the protection at the panel. Another thread details the difficulty of finding a problem that is 'somewhere' in the house wiring.
We can't just 'put in a GFCI' and expect stupidity to go away. Nor can we expect life to be completely without risk. It's too easy to say 'what if' ... but at some point it's wrong to inflict a burden on all in an attempt to shelter the one.
We also cannot ignore the other agenda of those claiming there's a 'safety crisis' to be addressed. We regularily see all manner of campaigns receive their 3 months of prominence, then disappear when somebody gets what they want - while the original issue remains forgotten.
