I'm surprised there hasn't been a proactive step to improving electrical safety in North America. As an onlooker, whose done zero research apart from watching YT videos, the regulations seem to be vague/relaxed.
He notes it in the video but the Chicago metropolitan area has pretty strict electrical codes. Everything must run through EMT conduit with fully enclosed electrical boxes. Chicago has some weird thing about preventing fires...hmm can't think of where that came from...
For commercial, this extends to low voltage as well. Freerunning cat6 or speaker wire down walls and through ceilings is often completely forbidden. Personally I think that's a bit much...but with the prevalence of PoE and new standards that increase power throughout, maybe it's not such a bad idea.
Probably because it's not all that much of a problem. It's not very common to hurt yourself via normal use of American electrical devices. Not when we have cars and guns to wantonly kill each other with.
https://www.nfpa.org/-/media/Files/Code-or-topic-fact-sheets/InjuriesElectricalOutletsFactSheet.pdf
Injuries involving electrical receptacles (also referred to as outlets) sent an estimated 5,500 people to hospital emergency departments in 2015.
Sure it's less than others killing machines like cars but it's not insignificant.
Safety in North America is vague/relaxed in general compared to the rest of the developed world unfortunately.
Red you dead... bluie go kaplooie...
Go ahead and look up how many people are killed by electricity every year, it's fewer then people killed by lightning and almost always involves something much more dangerous then using home electricity in the standard way.
This is a standard wall outlet in my country; this is how it looks like with the face plate. This is the surfaced mounted version.
It carries the ground pins as standard and it is sunken in order to prevent touching the charged prongs and it has a built in shutter which is very annoying to tamper with.
Even the ungrounded version is sunk and has the same pesky shutters but it is even starting to become hard to find.
You guys are being played with. Your outlets are death traps.
Our outlets are not "death traps." Standard outlets nowadays are grounded and TR (Tamper Resistant) The outlets are designed so that a grounded plug hits ground first before the rest of plug is energized. They look like this. https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-D-hdRZMa2Zo/Vqe-AfvYA5I/AAAAAAAAAM4/I0Ln6JRNRRw/s1600/photojoiner.jpg
Also while I'm sure people are electrocuted every year, it's not because they didn't plug in something correctly and I doubt a more bulky outlet would have save them.
It probably wouldn't hurt to start overmolding the hot and neutral prongs with plastic for the first quarter inch, but otherwise I'm much more concerned with how fucky extension cords are with their AWG; if you've got something heavy, like my 12 amp thickness planer, "can this extension cord handle this load continuously" is a reasonable question that not a lot of them are willing to answer in an accessible way.
I'll tell you what is the first concern coming to mind when I look at those outlets: the appliances plugs have no safety socket to rest in.
Exposed plugs are prone to being easily damaged by accidental pull-outs.
