My counterintuitive mildly-offensive party conversation starter is that I think that the ideal number for childhood deaths by misadventure or accident is a balance between protecting children from stupid accidents and making children stupid and timid by restricting them from doing anything that could result in an accident. If kids are getting into too few fatal accidents, protections for children should be reduced until we get the numbers back up.
Frankly, these precautions exist for a reason, and it is because many many people died in the early days of rail. Many people who work in rail, particularly in ops/sigs/assurance are proud of how safe rail transport now is.
(I work in Engineering Assurance on rail infrastructure projects).
I was thinking about your comment and one way to save considerable infrastructure costs is more level crossing and less overpasses/bridges, but train vs pedestrian or train vs car are common and messy. Plus level crossings wreck traffic flow on the surrounding road network.
But if you try to make that argument on HN, a bunch of people will yell at you about how Boeing and the FAA are evil for putting cost savings over safety.
"you don't need fuel for the descent though"
You can, but it's not a fair comparison. 99.9% of deaths of railroad transport is people killed while crossing rails - e.g. pedestrians.
If you consider rail passengers only, it is far lower than airlines and cars, something on the scale of 2-3 people/year.
Airplanes are cheating in the sense that there are no pedestrians in the air to collide with.
0: https://www.aopa.org/training-and-safety/air-safety-institut...
Interesting stat.
If airliners were only as safe as walking, nobody would use them, because you'd expect to have at least a minor accident (like a sprained ankle) when walking 2000 miles. A similar argument can be made for cars and trains (just a magnitude less distance per trip and consequently a smaller chance of injury).
It's a novel idea in terms of emissions avoidance, though: couple the externalities to personal risk.
. Wow, I'm the opposite. I don't mind discussing a spicy topic, but only if the person actually gives a shit about it. I have no desire to be trolled IRL by someone wanting to be edgy. If someone is serious and polite about it, I'll discuss any topic.
I wanted to say I don’t like discussing spicy topics with people who give too much shit and are inflexible because at that point discussion can turn personal or can feel like them venting.
Although I allow friends to vent inflexibly. But that's a different type of conversation done for their benefit.
edit: shouldn't party conversation be a little spicy? At least I'm not talking about party politics, sports events, or television shows. Or the weather, or how we all individually got to the party.
(And I assume you’re not advocating dropping either of those.)
That is accepted that pedestrians need to behave so that cars can drive around at relatively high speeds in very public and shared spaces is an unbelievable accomplishment by the automobile industry.
I guess it's similar with car noise. People would go nuts if everybody was, I don't know, humming all the time outside. But car noises are normal.
That sounds like a good case against supervising children at all, but I don't believe it's true.
"During its initial committee hearing, sponsoring state Rep. Mary Young, D-Greeley, said allegations of neglect or lack of supervision have been on the rise in Colorado, even as the number of substantiated cases are dropping. In 2019, there were 3,854 allegations of lack of supervision; 82%, or 3,169, were unfounded, she said."
[0] https://www.denverpost.com/2022/03/31/colorado-reasonable-in...
edit: more context to quote
Some social norms have clearly disintegrated, but now there is a law to patch it up.
The reasons why the social norm disintegrated in the first place remain unresolved.
*compulsively scratches neck*
"can we get some of that sanity"
https://reason.com/2021/04/29/reasonable-childhood-independe...
Not only are there no consequences, but the system is set up to ensure that one can make any accusation they like, that CPS will be administratively required to investigate it, and that the pain will always be asymmetric. Also CPS investigations typically aren't 'criminal' investigations so it's doubtful you could argue that any false accusations as 'falsely reporting a crime.' You may be told that it's not a criminal but child welfare case.
It's practically the perfect system for a vindictive neighbor / ex-spouse / whatever.
It's a safe neighborhood and my first instinct was, "Why don't those parents monitor their children" but then I thought for a minute and remembered my own childhood where me and my brothers would walk to the park, look for worms, ride our bikes, go on adventures.
Those kids are welcome to look for bugs and lizards now, everyone keeps an eye out for them, one fell and scrapped his knee and was crying outside our house so I went to check on him and carried him back to his house to get cleaned up. My wife is worried we will get sued at some point if they get injured on our property, but I guess that's the risk I'll have to take so that 2 kids can just play outside and have fun.
1) If a little black boy or girl came along I felt fine fixing their bicycle or whatever.
2) If a poor looking white kid I felt fine that their parents wouldn't accuse me of some bullshit if they were on my property or whatever.
3) Middle class or better seeming white kids. No fucking chance in hell. Won't talk to them. Won't willingly let them on my property. Won't engage or look at them. Scared to hell parents will accuse me of something or sue.
Lets assume poors/minorities are equally as likely as anyone else to accuse you of something improperly (although that's probably a poor assumption, as those of higher social class tend to have better access or confidence to access formal government systems, especially when you consider things like illegal immigrants probably won't approach police under any conditions).
Now imagine thye go to police, or to the court. Which parents do you think garners the best odds and rapport with the legal and enforcement systems in the US:
1) The black factory workers
2) White single mom in the trailer park.
3) White business owner of the local dentist office.
The legal system discriminates. Then I pick to minimize my chances of being the victim of a discriminating legal system. Sadly there's not much chance the cops are going to believe the black factory worker or trailer park mom in the place I lived, false accusation or no. Hell in that same city they shoot black guys just for having a CCW and telling the cops they're legally carrying. I simply had nothing to worry about.
The axiom that the rich tend to get away with more in the US is sadly a true one. The other end of that is that the rich also tend to be able to garner much more social capital to pursue claims against you, whether they are true or not. My fear is not so much the false claims alone (which can come from anyone of any race/class), but people who may make a false claim and also be on the upper end of the spectrum of holder of social capital to actually execute that claim.
My risk tolerance being what it is, I could choose to ignore ALL children and thus not discriminate. Instead I choose to discriminate and will engage children if I think that someone who makes some bogus claim won't be taken seriously by the justice system. If the justice system / police treated poor blacks as well as affluent whites, I would choose to not engage children at all ever. If this makes me a bad person, so be it, but it's a measured response to the sad realities we live in.
From a cold calculating standpoint, engaging an affluent adult can come with significant upsides: jobs, access to political power, commerce, international interface, mobility. An affluent adult can fuck you in a lot of ways, but you can also trade with them in ways that can really help you.
On the other hand, the relationship with children is asymmetric. A poor / minority child isn't going to offer you anything (from a selfish viewpoint), but neither is an affluent one. However an affluent family can absolutely crush you if they misinterpret some engagement with their children. The poor / minority family may be less likely to have the power to make a misunderstanding turn into a significant legal hassle for you. Therefore the calculus for engaging an affluent child look pretty bad, while that of engaging a poor child look more like neutral.
For adults I find it more of a wash, with the upsides typically higher than the downsides for engaging most any sane adult.
I'm well aware of the benefits of having people with resources on good terms with me.
We said we were just inspecting the house, and would be gone in ten minutes, but he just kept repeating that we were breaking the rules, and needed to move our car over.
The realtor looked at us and said "ok, you're not interested in this place, right?" "Nope".
Retired carpetbaggers with nothing to do and no check-and-balance to their behavior. Ever since that fateful day I’ve pondered just how to setup an HOA to counter such behavior.
I guess the problem with HOAs is they empower these sorts of people with authority.
But it just goes back to the same question: has the world gotten more dangerous or are we just more aware of dangers that were always there?
Don't know if it's actually true, but it's worth examining.
"Stranger" kidnappings are exceedingly rare. The majority of Amber Alerts occur due to custodial disputes between divorced parents when one parent takes the kid when they are not supposed to[1].
> Children (and parents) are often conditioned to be wary of strangers. However, in reality, only a small fraction of child abduction cases – around 0.1 percent – involve kidnappings by strangers or slight acquaintances.
Car drivers kill thousands of people walking on the street every year. Kidnappers don’t.
This is the safest period in human history, more so if you live in a high income country.
But according to my anthropology professors, these societies tend to have very high death rates. For men, the lifetime risk of being murdered or killed in intergroup fighting runs about 10 to 20%.
So there's a real possibility that the modern era is very safe by historical standards.
That makes being born in western Russia in 1905 look like a peaceful life
Crimes of passion should also be exempted from the general murder rates.
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2021/11/3/hld-surge-in-us...
The homicide rate in 2021 was almost half of the homicide rate in the early 1990s.
Like sending your kid to the shop. There's also the fact that we don't need to do that anymore. Very often there's a late (or all) night shop open not too far away. So the urgency is just not there.
The next year we moved and my walk home was a bit longer, my grandfather was home which was nice since I didn't come home to an empty house. I'm not sure if it was that year, or a year or two later, but I was allowed to basically bike wherever I wanted in town as long as I didn't go past some pre-defined boundaries. Just doing some math on that now it's roughly 1.5 miles in any direction and I mostly followed that restriction. The only rule was that I had to be home before the streetlights came on.
I didn't have a cell phone. I didn't have any way to call the police if someone tried to abduct me.
By all statistical crime measures children are safer today than they were when I was a kid.
Today you're able to give your child a device which you can use to constantly GPS track them, they can call/text you or the police at any time.
And, yet, somehow we've infantilized children and removed their agency and I don't know why but I really fear for the consequences of it.
Once a red Volvo 240 stopped and tried getting my brother to approach for some candy. I pulled him away and we went inside, because I'd heard rumours about some dude in the area trying to nab kids. I was about eight and he was six.
Because we had learned to not talk to strangers that weren't our parents or relatives or public officials like police, medics and fire crew in uniform or in uniformed vehicles. If someone stops while we're waiting for the school bus and offers to drive us home it's not OK to get in the car unless our parents had asked our teacher to tell us that one specific family member would pick us up.
Basic good upbringing, really...
There was one time where a guy in a truck slowed down and was lagging behind us a bit. We turned down a side street and he kept following us. We were on sidewalks, so we just turned around quicker than he did and raced away. In retrospect that was legitimately scary.
In middle school, I could ride wherever I wanted. I'd ride to garage sales, buy used puzzles, then spend hours completing them at home. To think that those opportunities wouldn't be available is sad.
>And, yet, somehow we've infantilized children and removed their agency and I don't know why but I really fear for the consequences of it.
In grad school I worked with a fellow from China. At the age of 3, he would go to the nearby market to buy some groceries for the family, cook food, and hang out at home alone all day. He was shocked at the attitudes in the US.
> But also maybe kids just enjoy different things nowadays
I think this may be true, but also I think parents might find it easier to let their kid play video games in their room where they think they are safe compared to letting them roam around unsupervised. I had friends whose parents thought we were bad kids because we wouldn't know where would go that day, so when they asked "where are you going" and we said "idk, to the creek or pizza or wherever we find interesting" they would think we were up to no good since we didn't have a plan.
The funny thing is back then there were no sidewalks or shoulders at all, and kids biked everywhere until old and lucky enough to drive. Now, there are extensive sidewalks on all the main roads, but the only people using them are middle aged dog walkers.
Sadly never crossed my mind to figure out what time the lights turned on, and expand my radius further.
Osama may be dead, but the erosion of rights that US has seen because of 9/11 did strike a big blow to US democracy and he partly achieved his goals.
I could totally see the trend being accelerated by a lot of things. Sure, 9/11, is one possible trigger, but it could also be news sources getting better at optimizing for sensational takes and - more recently - the common person using the internet/social media to amplify troublesome anecdotes to the point where they seem like pervasive trends.
Which, of course, describes this entire thread of discussion kicked off on one person’s anecdote…
America lives in constant fear of everything and it only seems to be getting worse.
One counter point is cities have started adding 'danger' back into playgrounds (not actually that dangerous, more like risk in the mind of the child). So hopefully we'll see some progress.
Kids are pretty capable and most people are pretty supportive/helpful.
Things really were better before them. (Said as part of the last generation to experience that world)
When constantly having your kid reachable was impossible, no one judged parents for not doing it.
Now? All the judging.
Our kid bikes to and from school each way, a little over a mile away. She is always hanging out with other neighborhood kids, going to the pool or park, and nobody has called the cops yet thankfully.
I live in NYC and when my son was a 9-year old I would let him play out at the park and on the sidewalk. I had some anxiety about it at times but never thought there would be any legal trouble from letting him be a 9-year old.
This is New York's, for example:
> 1. He or she knowingly acts in a manner likely to be injurious to the physical, mental or moral welfare of a child less than seventeen years old or directs or authorizes such child to engage in an occupation involving a substantial risk of danger to his or her life or health; or
Whether something is "likely to be injurious to the physical, mental or moral welfare of a child" is fairly subjective, since it's a balance of odds.
I slept there overnight and walked back the next day...
All is well that ends well...
+highly recommended, beautiful area and very nice campings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98
At this point I'm decided that if I have children, I will not raise them in the U.S. Maybe a few cities are amenable to how I would like to raise children, like Cambridge, MA. But I would like for them to grow up in a healthy, independent environment.
second worse thing I was doing my paper route and almost mauled by a dog but a nearby neighbor convinced it to go away
ah, another time when I was 17 I was almost abducted but that's what I get for walking down an industrial road at 2am on new years alone, I was saved by the fact I had a cell phone (seeing it caused the predator to retreat)
I am extremely glad I don't have kids and super disappointed that the world has come to this.
if we're really lucky humans will stop reproducing
it won't hurt me at all
My papers were dropped off really early, and I had to be there for them - alone - around 4am. And my route was about half a mile away from my house.
I got chased by a dog a couple times. One time it bit and punctured my tire.
I flipped my bike with all the papers in it a couple of times.
Some older kids dropped by once - I was afraid they were gonna fuck with me, but instead they just asked me to scream some stuff.
And of course collecting. I got chased off by a couple dogs then too. Come to think of it, maybe I should be more afraid of dogs than people.
Eventually I got a route for the apartments that were across the street from my house. That was a much nicer experience. More money, less distance, less area to cover, and no dogs.
Re 'candy shop' - it was about 400 feet from the restaurant.
I take it's not a "daycare is a cash only business and cops know what real crime looks like" type place.
Does the store owner have a license for child care? Did she discuss child care with them? Was she expecting her kid to sit at a candy store and do homework for an hour absent an agreement with the owner for child care?
Seems like pawning her kids off on unwilling people who have no responsibility for them.
No, it seems like someone (read: you) making a lot of assumptions and jumping to conclusions.
Edit: Oh man, the absolute irony of you telling someone to "think" further down in this thread...
Read.
Maybe think along with reading
They live about 1.5 miles from the eatery. She would let her 9 year old walk home sometimes in good weather - low crime with actual tree-lined suburban streets. Police apparently threatened her over that as well - that's somehow endangering the child too much, and she might be charged with some misdemeanor.
I don't get it. Really. As someone who grew up in the 70s/80s... I can't say 'nothing bad ever happened'. Obviously it did. But the pendulum has swung far too much the other way now.