alt Hacker News@idiotsecant is correct. Length of arc correlates to voltage, while most of the potential pain or damage from an arc will correlate more to amperage and/or to duration.
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HPsquared • 01/22/2025
So it's not the Amps that get you, but the Coulombs? Or is it the Joules?
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You're correct, but just for fun's sake:
The amperage of static elecricity discharges like this can be quite high, tens of amps is common.
So walking across a carpet and getting a shock can easily be tens of amps at thousands of volts, and we're just totally fine (because it's for a tiny fraction of a second).