The US is a low trust society, because of all the poverty. You really notice the difference if you travel to Europe. It turns out that having half of the population be economically unsafe makes everyone and everything unsafe.

I made the same observation when I moved to the US, it was so weird to me that SF the city is pretty much devoid of children. They're all effectively locked up and prohibited from roaming. No-one trusts children, no-one trusts adults around children, no-one trusts strangers.

But I went skiing in Lake Tahoe one weekend, and suddenly all of that disappeared. Suddenly, you have children freely interacting with strangers, there's much less adult supervision, and a whole lot of trust in others again.

It's such a contrast, and you can experience it by simply driving for a couple of hours.

The kinds of strangers you are likely to meet in SF are not to be trusted. It's not irrational on an individual level, it's just a societal madness in the USA.

I lived in LA, and would not let my wife walk around after dark let alone my daughters. There were a few individuals who lived under bridges that would regularly assault women. And we lived in a "good" area. We moved to an even better area and within a couple months there was a shooting, high speed chase, and a drunk driver rolled his car into our neighbor's yard.

Needless to say, we moved away.

Once upon a time, Trolls lived under bridges. Now they call you a troll if you complain about those living under bridges.

SF is actually a city that is devoid of children. They're not hidden, they just don't exist because housing is too expensive. People with kids mostly leave.

It's low but not zero. SF is 13% under 18, compared to 29% nationally.

24% for New York City and 16% for Manhattan if people want an urban comparison, or a "insanely expensive" urban comparison.

It's been a common pattern for a very long time in the US for new graduates to often live in a city especially if that's where their job is and then move out when they start a family. That was the pattern with essentially everyone I knew who went into finance in Manhattan.

SF is full of mentally ill homeless people and drug addicts. Some literally camping in the doorways of homes. It's also covered in vomit and human feces. No way I would let my kids run around unsupervised there

Historically, people teach their kids how to navigate their local environment safely.

In rural environments, that can include wildlife dangers and natural hazards and in urban environments, it can include human dangers and industrial/sanitary hazards.

Environmental danger is not new. The culture of isolating kids rather than educating them is. Whether the new strategy is better for the kids is an open question, but seems crazy to some of us.

I let my 11 year old ride his bike to the park, 7-11 etc on his own or with friends. I don't live in SF though. I think it's a little different when the danger is another human and they are mentally ill or addicted to drugs. You can tell the kids to stay away from them but the kids are kids they can't necessarily outsmart an adult looking to cause them harm.

Adults are killed by homeless people in SF. They are an irrational danger that is difficult to prepare for. There are also a lot of them. It's one thing to say if you see a homeless person stay away but it's another when there are dozens of them camped on the sidewalk. Telling my kids to instead walk in the road is not a great option either.

You are not wrong and 99% of the time doing as you suggest is valid. Hordes of crazy people are a danger of a different breed.

>Historically, people teach their kids how to navigate their local environment safely.

And historically, society would drive insane and homeless people out of nice areas. Middle and upper middle class people weren't letting their kids hang out with drifters in the past.

Historically a city would be run with order in mind but SF no longer is. It’s a lawless place without defined borders of what’s safe and what’s not. If SF could clean up its act then maybe it would be different. But it’s the same reason as the 1970s when parents in cities began having to shelter their kids more. We’ve just allowed to streets to be taken over by the mentally ill, drug addicted, and creeps and everything that comes with that.

As someone who plans to teach their kid to bike to school, walk to friends' houses, watch for cars, play safely in the yard, climb trees etc... Who has also lived in SF... There's no way I'd expose a kid to the dangers of walking around that city!

We left because my wife was terrified to be alone outside of our apartment. She would be followed, harassed, threatened. Because we saw crimes occur in broad daylight and experienced the indifference of police when we called.

Comparing the environmental danger of avoiding snakes and not diving into water where you can't see the bottom to navigating the streets of San Francisco as a small, alone human is ludicrous.

It can even vary from one suburban neighborhood to another, without much difference in actual safety between the neighborhoods. Our last neighborhood had roving bands of kids wandering about and picking up and losing members here and there all day long in the Summer, just like it was 1975, everyone was totally chill about it. It was great. Our new one like two miles away is a "kid plays in the yard" neighborhood and we've had people come by more than once to make sure we're aware our kids are on their bikes on the other side of the neighborhood (yeah, we know).

I lived in the Bay Area for two years. It’s a shit hole. It’s dirty, dangerous, and expensive.

I’ve lived in NYC (the Bronx), Seattle, and Saint Louis. Never felt anywhere close to the terror I felt living in San Jose and commuting to Los Gatos and San Francisco.

We fled from San Jose to Phoenix a year after having our daughter. Kids walk to school in our neighborhood. A bunch meet up at the corner near our house and all scooter together to the local school.

SF is not the U.S.

> Never felt anywhere close to the terror I felt living in San Jose and commuting to Los Gatos

Terror in Los Gatos?

Los Gatos is pretty damn close to Mayberry (of The Andy Griffith Show fame), imho.

Certainly parts of San Jose are horrible, but you don’t have to live there.

Is there a reason you didn’t chose to live in Los Gatos? It’s expensive, but much higher QoL if cities are scary.

We have a whole media industry unrestrained by responsible regulation peddling fear.

Look at the court disclosures about Fox News personalities retaliating against Fox reporters actually reporting the truth. They knew the election fraud story was bullshit, but these folks have no higher purpose and want grandma to be scared.

SFO is a whole other universe.

Really strange to hear what life for US urban kids and pedestrians has become like. Can't have been always like that. As a proof, there's an episode of The streets of San Francisco where three boys break into a supposedly abandoned mansion in their neighborhood (looking like those SF hills but what do I know).

San Francisco is actually last in US cities for proportion of population under 18 years: https://www.aaastateofplay.com/the-u-s-cities-with-the-most-...

I remember watching 'The Phantom Tollbooth', which is set in San Francisco and has the main boy walking home from school through the city, and feeling how odd that seems now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Tollbooth_(film)

SF is devoid of kids because it is a super expensive place to raise kids in SF, and the schools are so messed up you need to go private or move. Also, a lot of same sex couples don't adopt.

https://www.aaastateofplay.com/the-u-s-cities-with-the-most-...

Nitpick: approx. half of same sex couples don't need to adopt. Sorry for digression

I doubt it’s anywhere near half, at least in my experience. It is definitely non-zero, but gay men are more common in the city than lesbians.

US is a low trust society because of a culture that reveres individualism and independence to the detriment of everything else, especially community and freedom from being abused in favor of freedom to abuse. Every man for themselves means kids need to constantly be supervised.

That culture is created by a media environment manufactured by companies whose employee base are well represented on this site. This line is pushed on us, ad nauseam. Unsurprisingly, most of us are sick from it.

An alternative view is that our individualistic culture is simply an evolution of the American idea of "rugged individualism" -- an idea which somewhat predates the tech industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugged_individualism#Influence...

> That culture is created by a media environment manufactured by companies whose employee base are well represented on this site.

Are you saying then that "that culture" is a decade old?

Yellow journalism dates to the 1800's. I'm sure much longer, but that is something everyone should remember from history class.

That's right, which makes it unlikely that the FAANG companies are responsible for it.

We were a more philosophically individualistic society in previous generations, during which children played freely in cities and suburbs.

The US is a low trust society because we're told not to trust people through highly negative news stories. The result is the US being primed to think there are child murderers and rapists under every bush, etc, etc. Ancedent to this unintentional effect was the incentivised "if it bleeds it reads" motiviation for promotion of the highly negative.

Both of these things can be true at the same time. The news can overemphasize the worst, AND we can have an epidemic of drug problems, mental illness, and the crimes that those bring.

Yet oddly, when I was a kid, and the crime rate was roughly double what it is now, we didn't have this problem.

There were drugs, oh you betchya, cocaine and crack and all these other cool things the D.A.R.E. officers were telling us about. There was crime, about twice as much of it as today. But us kids were out there riding our bikes around and playing till the streetlights came on.

This is something different entirely.

Hungary is extremely low trust and extremely poor, yet no one fears public transit nor letting their kids wander about.

that's not a contradiction. if society in hungary is low trust (which i doubt btw, unless something changed since i was there last more than a decade ago) then this low trust does not extend to the safety of their children.

letting kids wander about shows high trust in their kids not getting into danger. in the US people don't even trust that.

So let me get this straight, trust is measured on multiple axis except for the axis of children which sets the maximum? Please.

trust is measured on multiple axis, period. no exception.

the US have low trust when it comes to children. Hungary does not. Hungary may still be low trust on other axis.

Why do you say Hungary is low trust?

The people living in poverty very very rarely hurt a stranger's children. It's the cops who show up and take them, absolutely destroying their sense of security and growing independence.

This is very false.

National studies show more violent crime happens in poor areas: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf

What you've linked doesn't really contradict what the commenter said; he's arguing that folks don't generally hurt kids, poverty notwithstanding, and that tends to be my experience.

There's a section about poor people more likely to be victims of _stranger_ violence, which backs up your point. I didn't see much about children specifically, but I guess all other things being equal... Just such a sad thing to think about that I don't _want_ to think it unless there's hard evidence.

You need to cite more specifically, I'm not reading the whole study looking for the bit you think was relevant to the other poster's point.

Okay don't do it. Instead you're just going to believe the guy who cited nothing? Live your life however you want I guess...

I'm not going to believe either of you. What you offered was not responsive to his claim because it didn't address risks to children, which are the topic.

You can’t not believe either of us. He said a thing and I said it’s false. If you don’t believe him then you agree with me.

This btw is the correct course of logic since the burden of proof is on the asserter.

"False" is your assertion. You have the burden of proof in that claim. If you just wanted proof you should have asked for that rather than make a new, different assertion. The person you replied to took the 3rd option of the tri-state, which requires no burden, which is to merely remain skeptical.

Well yes. So you asserted a thing and didn't prove it.

Therefore the correct course of logic is to dismiss your assertion.

* * *

That study says poor people are more likely victims. Doesn't even say who is performing the crimes (doubtful, but based on this study could be rich people robbing the poor or whatever), nor does it show the rate at which those in poverty victimize a stranger's child (which despite your sidestepped report here was what you replied to).

For example, despite all the worries about kidnappings, there are only a few hundred kidnappings of children by complete strangers every year.

As an aside (and separate point): The data in there was all 12+. I'm gonna be the one to come out and say it: if the hypothetical reality is the teenager is growing up in a hell-scape world of death-match-violence then unfortunately it's one of those cases of "nows the fucking time to get out there and learn how to (gradually) adapt to the hellscape while we try to make it better." (which honestly is a little what driving feels like when you turn 15)

I grew up in India, a much poorer nation than the US, and I played outside all the time, walking to relatives' houses and going to hang out with friends. I highly doubt it's the poverty causing this kind of thing in the US. Seems more to me the high amount of media "stranger danger" affecting people's viewpoints.

I think this is a key perspective. In the US you will have rich neighborhoods where kids play freely outside and poor neighborhoods where kids play freely outside. It is in the mixed neighborhoods there is an overwhelming fear of children playing

the highest murder rate in US is 15.8 Louisiana while the highest in India is 6.5 (Patna). Most places in India have half or lesser murder rates compared to the average in US. India in general is just a much safer country, not in the same league as China, Japan but far safer than US. Growing up in Bangalore, I walked the streets regularly at 2AM when I was a teen, something that I’m scared to do as a full grown adult in SF

If you include traffic deaths (more likely to cause kids to get killed than murders), India and China look much worse.

Parts of the US are like this, but huge swaths of Americans don't even bother locking their front doors.

That's largely changed. I grew up in rural areas where this was true. In fact, we didn't bother locking our doors when I was a kid.

Now, however, people lock their doors because of meth heads even in the extremely rural areas of the southeast.

Just… no. It has not changed, crime is down across the board.

I've been through a lof of the balkan areas in the 1990s, also yugoslavia/serbia during the sanctions before the 1999 nato bombing and fast after, and during all those times in all those areas there was A LOT of poverty.

Kids were playing outside all the time... from urban belgrade, parks and playgrounds surrounded by huge socialist buildings, to rural villages. Going to school? Sure, kids 7, 8, 9yo walking alone to school was (and still is) a normal thing. Usually elementary schools (6/7->14/15yo) were walking distance, but some still had to use a public/city transport. High schools meant a bus/tram for a majority of kids. During weekends seeing a bunch of kids outside even late at night was normal and still is.

I can back that claim. Unfortunately, it's no longer the case - not exclusively for the low trust reason, though - but that kids of school age, in my experience, now largely rush home after school to text to their same group of friends they just physically separated from, and play games.

I believe the altered persona they can assume when texting, and freedom of expression they can have using that medium, over doing it in person, is of very high appeal, and something I find concerning for the future of society...

I'm sure that poverty can play a factor in worsening social trust, but can the reason for anything as complex in society only have 1 cause? Also, arguing your point, there's far poorer countries that are far more trusting. And arguably at the US's "poorest" (maybe during the Great Depression to WWII period) there was a much different social attitude to strangers than exists now.

I'd say that commenters have brought up some good factors like mentioning the media's business model in hyping up negative clickbait, but personally I'd say that the increasingly heterogenous population is closer to the biggest factor. Identity politics drives a wedge between most groups that can tend to make you distrust the motives of almost anybody, even if the stranger is a member of your own group. As long as identify politics persists, countries with an increasingly heterogenous population will have even lower trust.

That's obviously not the case when poverty levels are decreasing over time along with social trust.

My impression is the opposite - it is easy to encounter unsupervised children in a poor neighborhoods but practically impossible in upper-middle class ones.

Helicopter parenting is common in families where one of parent stays at home with one or two kids and directs all energy into supervising and 'developing' them. Having high income such families have disproportionate political power and able to enforce this model of rising kids on society at large.

I would say that this is an extreme and somewhat rare example. Kids here do walk themselves to school. But this does seem to be a growing concern, hence the legislation.

Some context is likely needed, as the fact that the child is a foster child most certainly played a part in how seriously they took this allegation.

In the US (and actually all over the world), children in foster care situations are at higher risk of abuse. Moreover, foster children are wards of the state and placement decisions are up to the state. The law about non-foster children (children with parents) is much more strict in what parents can and cannot do with their children. That means that it is extremely easy for the state to decide to move a foster child, whereas they cannot just take someone's adopted or biological child away. At the end of the day, the state is the foster child's guardian. For example, the state makes medical decisions for foster children. When we did our foster parent training, we even learned that sometimes the foster parents cannot make decisions on haircuts!

However, I'm going to guess that the state is hyper-vigilant about foster children because (1) they are often victims, (2) the state is directly in charge of foster children.

The usage of "foster dad" and "his child" to me implies that the child was not a foster child. However, foster homes are typically (completely depends on local laws) held to a fairly high bar for safety, so an allegation of neglect against a child (adopted or biological) will be fully investigated.

On the other hand, if it's anything like where I am, then foster parents are at least used to allegations. My wife and I had at least one abuse allegation per year filed against us when we were foster parents. It was somewhat disconcerting the first time. The fifth time, when the social worker showed up it was more "Hi Zoë, how's it going? What's the allegation this time?"

> The US seems to be the only country that has this problem.

Here's my take on the issue from 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32680201

Summary: We don't have safe roads and in most American suburbs traveling by car is often the only reasonable option available.

That seems like a very unrelated issue to someone being an investigated for letting their children do homework on the front lawn

It's a related cultural factor. The more we build our outdoor spaces to accommodate cars over people, the more notable it becomes when there are people in them.

That doesn't really explain the differences though. Car culture and design was as prevalent in the 40s-90's too, which basically defined the ideal of suburban sprawl. However, those spaces were also filled with children, often literally playing sports in the streets.

Parents and elderly at the time had grown up with playing in the street, so they could hardly be bothered by it. Now we have the next generation that has only known cars (oddly enough probably the ones that played in the street).

Yep! I blame the rise of 24 hour news and the need to spread fear mongering in the name of ratings. I think it coincides nicely with the problem.

car dependent development takes away children's independence ->

people are not used to seeing kids outside ->

they freak out when they see an unaccompanied child

Maybe if she’d been doing her homework in the car on the front lawn, it wouldn’t stoke such fears?

Related – this video does a nice job of articulating that argument: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw

I didn't open it and I knew it was a NotJustBikes video.

I actually hate that channel because it made me aware of how broken the car-centric infrastructure where I live is. I was living I such blissful ignorance, now I can't unsee it!

Depending on your circumstances you may be able to emigrate to the Netherlands.

Western Europe in general. It's not just an NL thing.

Central Europe is also reasonably well in this aspect, also Eastern Europe is much better than USA.

True, but if they're from the US there's the Dutch American Friendship Treaty.

Much of Latin America too, you don't have to be rich and powerful to have public transportation and stores and services evenly distributed throughout the city. It was a very deliberate planning decision made in the US, to have residential-only zones connected by highways to cities with huge parking spaces.

NotJustBikes is very good at articulating the problem with suburban car culture. I knew it was that guy before I even clicked it and many of us have already watched it so unfortunately it's choir preaching on HN. I hope town planners and suburban SUV drivers can also be influenced by his videos.

The problem with a lot of countries is that the car culture has spread to every city due to planning laws and such. You just need one place done right that can grow into something more European.

There are some communities trying to improve this but for the most part the US is a stroad-infested hellscape.

https://nstreetcohousing.org/ (Davis, CA) and https://culdesac.com/ (Tempe, AZ)

are worth a look.

so did something happen in the last 20 years to make roads unsafe? because the issues addressed by this type of legislation are recent.

IMO, yes, but I obviously can't cite sources for this claim.

I think it was a problem that started to feed back on itself once people started spending more time indoors and isolated themselves from their neighbors more.

Stupid, careless, wreckless people obviously existed during the heyday of the American suburbs, but I reckon that far fewer of them came roaring down suburban streets at 60mph since they knew that Nicky, Tony, and Tommy might be outside playing stickball and that Tony's dad, also named Tony, would throw you a neighborhood-sanctioned beating if you were to pull such a stunt... and nobody saw nothin'.

No, instead, you drove carefully until you got to the highway and THEN it was drag racing time.

I walk my kids to school in the US, but I definitely see kids as young as 6 walking without a parent. I choose to walk with my kids because I enjoy it, and it's easy exercise.

That said, a lot of parents still drive their kids - the vast majority I would say. Even people who live within walking distance. It definitely is faster if you look at it in a vacuum: you save 10 minutes round trip!

And when casually discussing things with them, that's usually the excuse - they just don't have the time! They're always running late! etc. But I get a 20 minute walk out of it, and spend time with the kids talking about stuff. So to that I say: I'm multi-tasking.

Part of me thinks this problem isn't much different from the fear of child abduction: overblown. But there is something especially frustrating about the times this happens because people think they are doing something good when they really aren't.

I live about a half mile from my kid's school and we walk most days, or I bike.

However, it has been... eye opening. We live in a fairly urban area of Nashville, but my street doesn't have sidewalks. We've been yelled at multiple times (me, my wife, and our kindergartner) by drivers to "Get out of the road!" (This is on a 25 mph street.) There are ditches and uneven ground on both sides of the road.

Even the sidewalks we _do_ have on our route are paltry... about 3 feet wide and immediately adjacent to a busy 30 mph road. We sometimes walk in the grass next to the sidewalk, and I actually had one neighbor yell at us to "Get out of the yard, get on the sidewalk." That one took the cake for me.

So, yeah. There's a lot of reasons people don't walk to work, but one of them might be that everyone and everything assumes you're supposed to drive in a car and idle in the parking lot for 20 minutes rather than walking. Walking can be _stressful_, especially if you're doing it with multiple kids (which I often do).

Car-centric infrastructure and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

I am really surprised every time I see this vehement hatred of cars. I lived in NYC my whole life and didn't have a car, but now we got kids so we happily moved for the house-and-car-in-the-burbs life and it's absolutely better. People make this choice for a reason.

Just curious, do you have a family and do you shlep them by bus everywhere?

I think the issue is that you don’t get to choose. Just because your city is walkable doen’t mean you need to walk everywhere.

I go basically everywhere walking, but if I visit my friend the next city over we take the car.

We have two cars, but anything within walking or cycling distance I prefer to do walking or cycling. E.g., 10 minutes walk to school with the kids, 20 minutes cycling into the city to do shopping,

Cars existing != car centric culture.

Have you been to, say, the Netherlands? There are plenty of cars in Amsterdam, but it is the opposite of a car centric culture. Bikes and pedestrians abound (including bikes with places to "shlep" your kids or cargo around), and they all have right of way, anywhere, and the drivers generally seem to respect it.

Contrast that with a big American city like NYC, and though probably the vast majority of New Yorkers don't own a car, it is still very car-firstin the priority of who gets to use the streets.

The Netherlands wasn't always like this, pics of it in the 70s show a typical car centric (in European standards) place with cars everywhere.

Not being America there will have actually been sidewalks everywhere though.

Better how? You don’t actually say why you prefer your new lifestyle. Clearly lots of people prefer to live without a car. Have you ever bothered having a conversation with them? Maybe if you did, you’d be less surprised!

Its easy to go places like the beach, camping, skiing, fishing, golfing, etc. Basically all the things I like to do except biking and hiking which I can do from my house.

These are all occasional things. Day to day life is better car free. And then when you want to go out you can rent a car. Or even own one. You don’t have to use a car for every single activity just because you sometimes go skiing.

Until you want to do things like bring groceries home (more than you can carry in your two hands), or something novel like, say, building materials. People do do those sorts of things, you know.

Or are you telling me that day to day life is better if I'm not a woodworker?

More food for thought: how cold does it have to get, with how much snow on the ground, before walking can be reasonably said to be unattractive to the average individual?

When I’m doing a big shop I just get it delivered to my door. Costs from $2-$10AUD.

I’m not claiming there are no things where a car is useful. But having to drive regularly is depressing. My life improved so much when I moved out of the suburbs and in to a walkable area. Sitting in traffic twice a day was sending me insane. While walking makes me feel better.

Yes - definitely. But you're a single guy, right?

Not single but I do not have children. I’ll admit that complicates things. From what I’ve seen from comments and US media, the US has a culture of woman rejecting men who don’t own cars, leading to this assumption in your comment?

This is not the case in Australia, especially with younger people mid 20s where not owning a car is usually associated with living in one of the expensive inner city trendy areas.

> When I’m doing a big shop I just get it delivered to my door. Costs from $2-$10AUD.

That... adds up quickly. And delivery services have other problems, such as actually getting the items you want. This may not be a problem for you; it's been a problem for me. Also, I can't help but point out that instead of driving out in your car for your groceries, you're having someone else drive the groceries to you. In a car. (I'm not sure if this has developed into something else, but it started with the topic of cars and their associated infrastructure).

> I’m not claiming there are no things where a car is useful. But having to drive regularly is depressing. My life improved so much when I moved out of the suburbs and in to a walkable area. Sitting in traffic twice a day was sending me insane. While walking makes me feel better.

Well, for me, I love to drive. I spent five years without a vehicle and it was depressing as all hell. This is in the context of country roads though, not city traffic. I hate cities...

I also tend to walk an hour or two most days, so there's that. Maybe we can agree that the issue is more about being forced (or feeling forced) into one path or another?

It’s far cheaper to get them delivered than to drive myself when you factor all the costs of a car. They also don’t deliver them in a car, they deliver them in a refrigerated small truck which makes multiple deliveries to the same street/area in one trip. Often a few to the same building as me.

I’ve regularly evaluated the cost effectiveness of getting deliveries/Ubers vs owning a car. And owning always comes out massively more expensive. Most of the stuff I want is within walking distance anyway.

Okay, yeah, since your alternative is not owning a car, paying for grocery delivery is going to be cheaper than owning a car if that's literally the only reason you might own one. I concede.

> They also don’t deliver them in a car, they deliver them in a refrigerated small truck which makes multiple deliveries to the same street/area in one trip. Often a few to the same building as me.

Ah, interesting. Very different from my area. Where do you live, roughly speaking? If you don't mind.

Having building mats delivered frequently would be a good reason to have a work vehicle.

In walkable places, you can just walk down and get that day's groceries as needed, or maybe you do it on your way home from your walkable job, etc. It's more flexible, fresher, requires less mass consumption, less packaging, as well--lots of ancillary benefits.

More food for thought: I've heard a saying (attributed to Norwegian/Scandinavian folk wisdom) that goes like, "There is no such thing as bad weather, only inadequate clothing."

> In walkable places, you can just walk down and get that day's groceries as needed, or maybe you do it on your way home from your walkable job, etc. It's more flexible, fresher, requires less mass consumption, less packaging, as well--lots of ancillary benefits.

It's also more expensive, and I don't buy "less packaging". Bulk purchasing generally involves less packaging than purchasing in smaller quantities. It's also far more time consuming to go to the store every day vs. once a month for bulk items and once a week to supplement perishables / small stock. I realize some cultures do this, and that's fine and all, but it has tradeoffs.

> More food for thought: I've heard a saying (attributed to Norwegian/Scandinavian folk wisdom) that goes like, "There is no such thing as bad weather, only inadequate clothing."

I have plenty of clothing. Nothing stops me from going out in most weather if I feel like it. When I don't feel like it, my truck is sure nice to have...

This is every weekend. Also, kid soccer practices are about four times a week and too far to walk or bike. Soccer games on the weekend can be 60 miles away. The grocery store is eight miles away.

I sense that the no car advocates are single people living in cities. I lived car-free back on those days. But once you have a house and a family, a car is a basic necessity. Its financially impossible to raise a family in a city on the US west coast, with the same standard of living as suburbia.

Sorry, but this is false. It entirely depends on your circumstances. Four soccer meets per week and soccer games sixty miles away is not a necessary thing in a child’s life. If they’re into it and you can make it work, that’s great, but this is hardly the only option.

It seems like you have a notion of what a high standard of living is that isn’t actually shared by everyone. I’m looking forward to raising my kid in the city with the absolute minimum amount of car dependency that I can manage.

A whole lot of people who can afford to live anywhere in the world and choose to raise their kids in NYC disagree with you.

We live in Manhattan and the whole point is that playgrounds, parks, ball fields, school, gyms, pools, ice cream shops, play spaces, restaurants and all sorts of activities are within a five to ten minute walk. Literally all 250 kids at the nearest school live within a five minute walk of it. The only times we go in buses it's for sightseeing.

I feel the same, lived in a large city when single just to be part of all the hustle and bustle. I liked it but I mean eventually all the bars/restaurants/music venues start becoming the same. Got married and started a family, eventually moved out to the suburbs. It’s MUCH better for families. Good public schools nearby, lots more parks and stuff geared for kids. Very safe, like leave your doors unlocked overnight safe. Yeah I have to drive more but I don’t mind, the benefits definitely outweigh the drawbacks.

But of those benefits you mention, most are not in contradiction with a walkable neighbourhood. In my home town, most things are in walking and biking distance and we still have good public schools, lots of parks and safety. These things have nothing to do with cars, if you just make the choice to create them somewhere walkable.

Car-centricity is a result of neighborhood design, which necessitates owning a car. There's almost nothing within walking distance of most houses. As you add cars, you need to add car infrastructure (especially wider streets for car parking, lanes of vehicles, sidewalks, etc). This further increases walking distances and also creates coverage areas that public transit cannot feasibly satisfy. Cars create a problem that only they themselves can "solve".

No offence, but that sounds like a terrible place to live.

Yes, but sadly still better than 99% of the US.

No, it's really not. I'm living in Nashville right now and it is exceptionally bad compared to many areas I've been.

It's a tourist town in a red state. Their priorities and funding do not align with making a pleasant built environment for residents.

I live in the Nashville area as well. I’m sorry this is the state of things where you are. The walkable areas have all become super expensive because everyone wants to live there.

Yet people keep building more suburban sprawl with no public transit or bike connections around town. It is all isolated and divided by huge stroads. Local celebrities even call the bike lanes that do exist here a communist conspiracy.

I live in Nashville right now too and it's just a mystery to me why people actually want to be here. I guess the people here just do not share my values, and they just want to drive their big cars on big roads.

When I was faced with the big commitment of buying a house, that was a major factor. Grocery store, credit union, pharmacy are all within easy walking distance, hospital's just a little further, and going downtown is still reasonable if the weather's nice.

There's a bit of our road without sidewalk, and someday I'd like to fix that. But mostly, it's just really nice to live somewhere walkable.

I've done a lot of walking in non-walkable areas before. It is awful. And I think that's most of the country. Been hit a couple of times by the side mirrors of drivers who were driving right on the edge. Had to make my way on roads with steep dropoffs or ditches on one side and cliffs on the other. Crossing big highways. It's dangerous.

I can totally see why some people just won't do that and won't let their kids do it. But what amazes me is that most people don't even see that as a problem. It's something that can be fixed.

Large parts of the US seem like a nightmare society. I can’t imagine how limiting life must be when your basic freedoms like walking are so restricted.

I don't know, I used to make similar sorts of treks daily, but on county highways (speed limit 55). No sidewalks. Uneven sides with drops.

I just gave cars berth, and wandered into the ditch when necessary. So the ground is uneven; never bothered me any. I didn't feel particularly restricted; I just went where I wanted to go, however I needed to do it. Probably not the best place to walk with your kid, I'll grant.

What did get to me was freeways; the idea that you have this huge swathe of road that's just straight out illegal to cross on foot.

What's really limiting, though? Not having access to a vehicle when you need one...

Any forum with a large group of problem-solvers who are discussing a problem are going to have a larger-than-average number of people announcing all kinds of terrible things.

Put another way, some Americans just love complaining about America.

We're a country of 330 million people, spread out the length of an entire continent. Name a problem, and somewhere, someone has it. No place you go to has every problem, and I imagine most places you go the average person will have more good than bad to say about where they live.

And so many stories about people shouting at strangers.

I'm currently living in Nashville and it has an especially terrible built environment. It is one of the most car brained cities in the entire country. The fact that you have any sidewalks at all is exceptional in this place.

My daughter's school is under two miles away, but I can't let her ride her bike alone because it is terrifying. I will sometimes ride with her though.

To get there one has to cross a huge stroad and motorists frequently ignore all traffic regulations. They look at cyclists and pedestrians as obstacles and their hatred is visible in how (and what) they drive. My daughter's bus driver told us that people don't stop at the red stop lights on buses here and I have seen first hand motorists pass and honk at buses that are actively picking up children.

Cities don't need to be built this way, Nashville is just an especially bad place to raise a family. A sibling called it a nightmare society and that is close to correct.

The schools here got a lot more car/bus heavy when five k-6 elementary buildings consolidated down to one k-2 and one 3-5 (with 6 rolled into the 6-12 building).

There's a closed and sold elementary building about 4 blocks from here.The consolidated buildings are still reasonably close, but still some multiple of that.

I walk my kid to the boys and girls club, and back, it is 5 minutes away, school is 7 minutes. It is nice to live in a semi urban area.

Its been a genuine problem. I have heard people actually say that if a kid is playing outside by themselves, then the parent should be charged with child neglect because the kid could get hurt. Any time a kid gets hurt on YouTube the comments are filled with people blaming the parent for not being outside with them. Thing is, playing outside by yourself gives you a strong sense of independence. The kid might get hurt, sure, but when the alternative is them never learning to be on their own and do things for themselves, the risk seems well worth it.

Sure, a reasonable risk is tolerable. But, for instance, car-centric infrastructure has *intensely* exacerbated those risks: space is completely surrendered to cars, sidewalks are non-existent, crosswalks go across 8 lanes of 60+mph traffic. All of this, plus terrible public transport, makes it impossible to travel anyway except by car. This leads to lack of independence for children, and sedentarism.

This is hyperbole at best. There are entire swathes of the country, both rural and suburban, with plenty of safe places for kids to exist.

It also depends on where you live. If you are a suburban or rural kid, playing outside all you want is fine. Let them explore the neighborhood. If you live near a highway though, or a high crime area, then you might want to reconsider what you want to allow. You still need common sense.

My main worry is people who live in relatively safe areas, like a suburban neighborhood, but with neighbors that will STILL call CPS on you for allowing them a little freedom. When I was a kid living in a trailer park we had neighbors like that. Never called CPS, but definitely complained about us being unsupervised despite the fact that the speed limit was a mere 15 MPH, and that we made a point not to bother the neighbors because our parents told us not to. They just saw kids playing and having fun, and decided it was a crime against humanity.

> a high crime area

What exactly do you expect to happen to your 6 year old? They’re not a very useful target for anything I can think of.

Mostly kidnapped by the parent that doesn't have custody. Once in a while other aunts or uncles who don't approve of the way their brother/sister is raising kids.

In China they might get kidnapped for adoption, at least that is what my (Chinese) wife thinks.

Adoption, or far worse.

That happens in places, but probably not in the places where people living here are.

But if you are adopting from a foreign country beware that it is easy to kidnap some baby from a remote village. Some of the less ethical adoption agencies have done this in the past.

When China was adopting kids to abroad, I'm sure that happened. These days, I'm not sure if child trafficking is still a problem, I only hear anecdotes, and its all domestic (because China doesn't allow kids to be adopted abroad anymore except in very rare circumstances).

China is not the only country adopting. There are places in Africa to watch out for. Though many have stopped adopting as abuse was too common for the benefits.

The big issue for China is that they needed kids staying in the country not going out of it. Even in the 00s, they were adopting primarily disabled kids, and I think that has almost stopped now.

Eh, the big issue with China (and Russia that did the same thing recently), is that it was embarrassing when someone did an international documentary and it became clear that many domestic orphans no one Chinese wanted.

Give me your lunch money!

No, that doesn't sound right.

Other than gangs recruiting young and something accidental (kid caught in crossfire), I agree, I can’t see the very young being targeted.

Most schools have lunch accounts these days, stealing lunch money is no longer possible.

We have a lot of unhoused neighbors in our neighborhood. When they are on bad fent trips, they can get pretty irrationally violent, though I've never heard of a kid being attacked before.

Is “unhoused neighbors” your term for homeless people?

"unhoused" means not having housing.

"neighbors" are people who live nearby, in the neighborhood.

It’s a term for street homeless because the homelessness industrial complex decided to inflate the stats by conflating couchsurfing people with the visibly homeless.

Perverts?

Such extreme privilege right here. Kids that young will be pressured into using drugs and committing crimes, mostly vandalism and theft, but sometimes worse.

That’s around the age when kids started dealing drugs where I grew up. I knew kids who threw bricks through windows and huffed paint when left alone.

Bad areas are bad.

>Kids that young will be pressured into using drugs and committing crimes

This is DARE level propoganda. What person is spending real money to give a 6 year old drugs?

Altruists?

Come on, it’s not extreme privilege. No gang is recruiting at 6.

I don’t know if it was gang affiliated but other 6 year olds were dealing where I grew up.

Where was this, and what convinces you this is widespread enough for concern?

This entire article is about rebuffing the "it happened once somewhere so it might happen anywhere" scare tactic that people use to prosecute well-meaning parents for letting their children experience independence.

Why should it be a crime for a parent to allow there child in the same public where criminals operate? Why should the police punish the victims of crimes for the police's failure to do their one job?

<< Such extreme privilege right here.

I hate to say this, but this is an amazing lack of imagination over what could happen ( based merely on what did happen before and not coming up with wild scenarios ). I am saying this as a likely free range parent ( still internally debating, but a lot will depend on how my kid handles things ).

The underlying problem is the same as the lottery: the human brain adjusts probability on the basis of severity.

Terrible things happen. They aren't likely to happen.

You are definitely onto something. Humans are horrible at estimating risk, but are forced to do it all the time. In some cases, it is a very clear miscalculation resulting in overdoing it one way or another. Sometimes it is just dumb luck.

<< Terrible things happen. They aren't likely to happen.

I think this is the wrong way of looking at this. Most people believe that lightning does not strike people that often. This does not give one has carte blanche to prance around the backyard with a metal rod.

Or, to use less crazy example, my street is relatively quiet and slow. And yet, I still look both ways crossing the street, because you never really know. Individual disposition and approach affects statistics.

Going back to the context of the thread: Not every risk has to be codified into the law, or enforced by the government. Should we make it illegal to prance around with a metal rod in their own backyard, just in case? Making a risk illegal does not magically improve safety, and there is a non-zero probability of the "enforcement" making things worse.

I am with you and, in a sense, you are preaching to the choir. If system setup was up to me, maybe with few notable exceptions, all new laws would require a sunset provision to force bad laws out of existence. I am certainly not arguing that just making things illegal improves safety ( and even when it does, I am not stoked about it ).

As a kid, I swam in our backyard pool during thunderstorms. I sunbathe. I drink alcohol.

I do these things knowing the risk but knowing the happiness they give me outweighs that risk.

Personally, I feel like the benefits to kids of greater independence (developing social skills, learning to deal with being uncomfortable, learning to see things through on their own) outweigh the risks of that independence (sex trafficking or sexual assault, bullying).

Mostly pedophilia and ransom would be my main concern.

That basically never happens with strangers on the street. If you're worried about that, pay more attention to teachers ("nearly 9.6% of students are targets of educator sexual misconduct") and your partner ("of the girls living with a stepfather, 3.7% reported sexual experiences with him")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sexual_abuse#United_Stat...

I'd throw in sports trainers, coaches, uncles and doctors. And not to forget priests and the like, in case of frequent vhurch visits.

The use of the phrase "high crime area" in this context, when just referencing child safety, is itself problematic. Everyone who is reading that phrase right now is forming a mental picture of what it means, and I guarantee it's not a picture of illegally burning garbage in the yard while drinking raw milk, sitting on an unpermitted deck, listening to an illegally downloaded MP3 while making a trade on their phone based on an insider tip they heard from their brother.

There is nothing problematic about having a phrase for areas with high risk of crime that negatively impacts the quality of life of local residents and visitors. (And that includes neighbors illegally burning garbage in their yard)

I'm objecting to the parent comment where this originated, where the author juxtaposed the safety of a child growing up in a "suburban or rural" setting with living "near a highway though, or a high crime area."

Crime is not an urban phenomenon, and when we describe it as one, we're flaming stereotypes. I don't think it was intentional and my point was not to denigrate the parent comment, but to encourage us to avoid accidental constructs like this.

Accidental construct of what exactly? Crime might not be an urban phenomenon in other countries but it certainly is more visible and prevalent in US cities.

At least in west coast cities, visible crime is just a fact of life. It borders on gaslighting to suggest that its not.

The data clearly supports the parent comment:

https://www.city-journal.org/violent-crime-in-cities-on-the-...

Cherrypicking violent crime in a discussion about child safety is misleading and fearmongering.

More children die from non-violent crime. The person who drives 10 over the speed limit down a suburban street is a child-endangering criminal, but so many people think the crimes they commit aren't "real" crimes.

If you want to look at data, overall rural child mortality exceeds urban child mortality in the United States; some of these causes are criminal, others are not. Motor vehicle death are the leading cause of child mortality, and for children under 18 exceed deaths from murder 2:1. Within vehicle deaths, for example, seatbelt usage is one of the predominant differentiators between rural and urban outcomes, and guess which areas have the lowest seat belt usage, and a disproportionately high number of deaths as a result? Yep, those "low crime" rural areas. Those parents who don't buckle up their kids are all criminals, too. I'm tired of seeing the label "crime" only applied to people committing certain crimes, in certain areas. It's applied in the most racist possible way in this country.

I was in a college class that had a mix of inner city and suburban kids.

Ask the suburban kids to describe the inner city? Dangerous. Crime-ridden.

Ask the inner city kids to describe inner city? Community. Know their neighbors.

Maybe try asking the kids who didn't go to college in both places what their opinions are next time.

Why would their opinions differ?

Because people have different opinions? And because college sometimes changes them?

Mind you, I'm not necessarily with the GP. It seems like a question of only marginal relevance. But the parent reads like a low-effort dismissal that doesn't actually address the point.

I just can't see college-or-not influencing perceptions enough to be relevant.

As someone who grew up in the suburbs, and has since lived in a rough part of the city, it also resonated with my personal experience.

In the suburbs, nobody generally knows each other. In the city, due to density, you just have more neighborhood interactions.

Sometimes inner city interactions are uncomfortable or with crazy people, but they're generally non-violent.

If I had to peg percentages, I'd say:

Inner city: 30% awesome/interesting/helpful strangers, 55% ambivalent strangers, 10% unpleasant strangers, 4.5% crazy strangers, 0.5% potentially violent strangers

Suburbs: 15% awesome/interesting strangers, 70% ambivalent strangers, 15% unpleasant strangers, 0% crazy/potentially violent strangers

Ask the inner city kids to describe the suburbs? Dangerous, get pulled over by cops.

Not to support the “what about the children” arguments, but 1) try thinking a little harder, and 2) probably a good thing that nothing comes to mind for you.

What do you think the children of people committing said crimes do? They mimic their parental figures. Child on child violence is a real thing and ignoring it just let's them turn into adult versions of the bullies they are.

Recently, it seems that every year in Washington, DC, there are a few bystanders shot by groups quarreling with other groups. Some of those bystanders have been very young.

There is irony here in that a "high crime" urban area is much more likely to have kids walking around with relative freedom than a "low crime" suburban area.

“High crime” urban areas are still generally safer for kids than car-centric suburban areas because cars aren’t going as fast. Kids are far more likely to die getting hit by a car than from violent crime.

> My main worry is people who live in relatively safe areas, like a suburban neighborhood, but with neighbors that will STILL call CPS on you for allowing them a little freedom.

I think this is the real problem, a lack of a low stakes mechanism for resolving small issues surrounding children. No matter if these laws pass, society will have standards and sometimes (oftentimes) good people will fall short of them.

Someone who can deal with a kid who gets a little overzealous at hide and seek or who decides to poke around an abandoned building instead of walking straight home from the store. Police and CPS type organizations seem to be too heavy handed for assisting with normal families that have had a dysfunctional moment, at the same time it feels like there is a need some something (neighbors just talking to each other would be nice, but it's apparently too big an ask).

It's similar to the situation with mental health and substance use disorders. A lot of people need help, and it ends up falling to first responders of various kinds and while they want to help they aren't necessarily well equipped to do so.

It feels like this infrastructural risk is media driven to the extent of "pedophile kidnappers" or "razor blades in apples". For example I grew up in an Eastern MA "suburb" in the mid 90s - early 2000s, characterized by narrow winding roads, fast drivers, and no streetlights. Everyone too young or unconnected to have car access bicycled or walked everywhere; parents were a bit fearful but ultimately acquiescent ("better dead than dumb, and if you're not dumb you won't die"), and cops only cared about trespassing with intent to vandalize.

Over the intervening years, the town added nice wide sidewalks (previously none), fancy crosswalk infrastructure, lighting, and started enforcing speed limits extremely aggressively. Yet the number of people on foot and bike dwindled to almost nothing and now the only ones are older middle aged folk walking their dogs.

I feel you, but this is clearly a “correlation is not causation” type situation. Infrastructure should be people-centric, and there’s nothing wrong with doing things to reduce car speed and make the built environment safe. It is unlikely that improved infrastructure resulted in people walking and biking less, which is what the wording of your post suggests.

(Also, love your username… I thought I was the only one. ;-) )

The wording of their comment did not suggest that.

It did to me as well.

Presumably the infrastructure development itself was not causative, but, the trend occurred nonetheless over roughly the same time course as the development.

I'd actually read it more as asserting the populace has been been so influenced by this media hysteria that even though all this stuff got built, nobody uses it because they've become fundamentally unwilling to let their children walk--and perhaps not very willing to do so themselves.

GP mentioned the safety-related improvements to demonstrate exactly how irrational being scared in their particular community was, and perhaps to lament the wasted effort and money a bit. The before/after was to illustrate the populace was so affected by whatever's happening they actually regressed from previously being very willing to walk in worse conditions.

At least I did until the response you got that didn't say exactly the same. But I still suspect that was the gist, in the original context, and it just got a bit lost in rebuttal.

Dunno about that city in particular but in general car deaths have been increasing over the past decades, presumably because cars keep getting bigger and heavier. It’s a lot safer for kids to cross the street when everyone’s driving a Taurus than when everyone’s driving a modern Toyota Tundra

Is it that the percentage of accidents resulting in fatality has increased, or that the raw number of accidents has gone up overall? Is it just a simple function of more cars on the road, and the compounding effects of such?

The example of the Tundra is legit. Trucks keep getting bigger. It's not really because people all want a bigger truck though, it's because the government outlawed the compact trucks with CAFE and any remaining compact truck import options that might have satisfied CAFE had the shit taxed out of them with the chicken tax. It's a major reason for increased death in pedestrian by truck.

> [...] but in general car deaths have been increasing over the past decades, [...]

Are you sure about that? What's your source?

Some quick searching gave me https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit... which even looks like a decrease per capita over the past decades.

No clue whether that source of data is any good, and what the rates outside of the Us are. Just FYI, I don't like car centric places either, and that's part of the reason I probably couldn't live in the US.

The source may be correct, but it’s not useful. To judge the risk you’d need a breakdown of where accidents happen - it may be the case that motorways have become much safer due to safer cars, but pedestrians and cyclists suffered.

Especially modern pickups and SUVs have an increased risk of severe injuries for pedestrians due to the high front area which hits vulnerable body parts where a station wagon would hit legs. You’ll likely find two or more overlapping trends.

Seems plausible. Do you have a source?

Btw, I heard that European cars pose less risks to pedestrians and cyclists?

Deaths for people inside cars have been decreasing, deaths for all other people, such as pedestrians or cyclists, have been rising.

Seems plausible. Do you have a source?

Yep, I grew up in the woodsy part of Framingham up by Route 20. A whole bunch of those roads are outright dangerous. My parents groused about how dangerous it was, but mostly trusted me not to be stupid.

Carlisle, which makes it even more ridiculous :)

Good on your n=1 data, but pedestrian fatalities have been steadily increasing for the last decades.

Also, nothing to do with "being stupid", if there are cars going 60mph right next to where you're walking, it's the luck of the draw whether you get decapitated by a truck or not.

> crosswalks go across 8 lanes of 60+mph traffic

Do such crosswalks really exist? Seriously. AFAIK, 60+mph speed is allowed usually (if not exclusively) on Controlled-access highways where pedestrians are not allowed at all. I highly doubt such crosswalks exist at all.

People easily go 60+ on 55mph roads

In what world do you live where people actually follow speed limits?

I grew up with a 6 lane highway with cross walks. I'm sure people hit 60+ even though the limit is 55.theres lights to cross at though

These risks have not increased substantially in the last 20 years, and in many ways they have decreased e.g. the mandatory backup cameras in new cars.

Cars are much bigger (easier to accidentally hit stuff with them), taller (harder to see things at street level) and heavier (take longer to stop and hit much harder) and smartphones greatly reduce driver attention.

I went googling to find evidence to disprove your statement about cars, and I found that you are correct. Though the trend slope is pretty shallow in the graphs I found, I can believe small increases have outsized effects.

...and the smartphone part I obviously wouldn't dispute.

> Any time a kid gets hurt on YouTube

Who's filming the kid getting hurt and putting it on youtube? Maybe that's what the comments are talking about...

No, its mostly news stories and channels like Code Blue Cam where I see people getting overprotective and blaming parents for letting their kids roam. Also sometimes kids will film each other doing stupid stuff and then those videos get added to compilations

ok, well I guess this raises the question of why are you apparently seeking out and watching so many videos of kids getting hurt

I don't. They just sort of show up every once in a while in things like AFV uploads, try not to laugh challenges, or cringe compilations.

In my experience if you don't watch a category of videos and select 'not interested' they will stop being recommended. I had to do this with 'animal rescue' videos, which are sometimes created by individuals who purposefully put animals in danger for clicks.

>I have heard people actually say that if a kid is playing outside by themselves, then the parent should be charged with child neglect because the kid could get hurt.

Giving concern trolls the ability to use the State's guns on whatever personally offends them always ends badly.

Why concern trolling in particular rather than good old traditional fake concern?

I’m guessing that OP can’t even comprehend what reasonable person of rational mind would report a child in no immediate danger for being neglected. OP is calling it trolling because it’s hard to believe people are that stupid and therefore must be doing it simply to harass others.

Concern trolling isn't the same as just trolling about being concerned it's a specific type of interaction around delegitimizing the other viewpoint via faking support of the view but raising concerns you don't actually have that may raise doubt about the view to others.

It's even in the YouTube algorithm. I've had a couple of videos taken down due to "potential child endangerment". They were videos of me and my kid doing things that are, realistically, safer than riding a bicycle. It's pathetic how fragile kids are being made these days.

Out of curiosity, what were the videos? The algorithm (advertisers?) is certainly picky...

The most recent was when my kid did a review of two different multitools. Within five minutes of uploading it YouTube had taken it down due to "potential child endangerment."

Yeah, it's child endangerment to put your kid on YouTube.

As long as it's something sterile like playing video games it's fine. But as soon as a kid does something with a bit of substance it becomes child endangerment.

The YouTube rules are completely insane. Whoever makes them has totally lost their mind.

For instance, YouTube recently implemented a policy such that they now demonitize videos that contain profanity in the first 15 seconds - AND THIS APPLIES RETROACTIVELY TO VIDEOS RELEASED BEFORE THE POLICY WAS CHANGED.

Between that, the downvote count being removed, random demonetizations, mysterious channel shadowbans, the DMCA travesty, YouTube Rewind, and the "misinformation" rules, YouTube is a complete trash fire.

Nobody sane believes that the YouTube rules are reasonable.

Hey hey! Don't correlate the immemorial art of travesting oneself with the disgrace that is the DMCA.

> AND THIS APPLIES RETROACTIVELY TO VIDEOS RELEASED BEFORE THE POLICY WAS CHANGED.

Which you can't edit without deleting and reuploading, breaking links, view counts, etc, right?

Does youtube happen to still show ads on those videos but now just pocket all the income?

I think you could edit it in YT studio and leave it in place.

And AFAIK demonetize means no ads. The whole thing is a brand safety kick so it doesn’t really make much sense to “demonetize” and still show ads.

> The YouTube rules are completely insane.

> Whoever makes them has totally lost their mind.

I don't think then problem is entirely YouTube per-se for some of the rules, it is the "people" who demand they do certain things a certain way. And by the "people", I mean (to lesser extent) us, the viewers; but mostly the advertisers, the mega-corps with deep pockets who want to be as far away as possible from everything that's not seen as sanitized humanity.

YouTube, then, like most capitalist entities, is merely incentivized to gravitate towards something, anything really, that will maximize their bottom line.

Ugh. The sanitized humanity of googlers will ruin the world.

As a general rule, parents seem to be blamed for anything happening to a kid under any specific setting.

Kids playing outside is one of them, kids talking to strangers, kids browsing the internet will also be seen the same...and then kids using voice chat in online games, kids talking to strangers in VR, kids just playing in VR, kids watching youtube etc.

It seem well accepted that pervert/criminal will go after kids at any occasion, the community can't be expected to police itself nor stop other people from hurting kids, and kids need to be locked away or under adult supervision 24/24 until adulthood or the parents are failing their job, and they shouldn't have kids if they're not up to the challenge.

I think there is a real issue on what people perceive as society's role and what parent's role is.

>I think there is a real issue on what people perceive as society's role and what parent's role is.

Not only that, but you a society has become obsessed with risk mitigation over the last several decades. The problem is that people are poorly equipped to estimate risk with very low occurrences against low or unclear cost. You see it in all facets of society with a platitude of better safe than sorry.

It shows up in increased medical licensing to reduce error, which means less accessible and more expensive care. It shows up in new parents who don't introduce their children to family for risk of covid. It shows up San Francisco city policy to reduce traffic death to zero even if it means reducing traffic to a standstill.

At the end of the day, a life with zero risk is not a life worth living but people are scared into the safest option.

Meanwhile actual trauma, by way of active shooter drills that are not announced in advance, run rampant and unchecked.

https://twitter.com/donnaprovencher/status/16281278397477724...

Obsession with risk mitigation is too diplomatic for what's going on here.

> active shooter drills

What the fuck

>> active shooter drills

>What the fuck

Took the words right out of my mouth...

It gets better.... they do the drill but then don't even practice the most important and highest priority of the 3 option which is to RUN.

It turns out, running is too inconvenient for the teachers to deal with, because it's a lot of work to round up kids that have run away (and probably not the safest thing to begin with anyway for just a drill). So instead they drill for them to hide, which should be done only if you can't run away. The thing is, watching both the Uvalde and Christchurch massacre videos, it will become crystal clear to you that hiding is the literal worst of the three options as you become a sitting duck.

So they have the drill, then drill into the kids to be sitting ducks because it is more convenient for the administrator than dealing with kids that are running. The advice I have for my kid is to not give a damn what the teacher says, to grab the nearest long durable object and smash out the windows and run away.

> The advice I have for my kid is to not give a damn what the teacher says, to grab the nearest long durable object and smash out the windows and run away.

Meanwhile, here in the UK, the advice I gave my son was to look both ways when crossing the road, not to mess around with plug sockets, and not to run when carrying a pair of scissors.

I honestly don't know how the US has got itself into such a messed up state that such drills are considered necessary and routine, or how it is that the people are ok with this. I'm guessing it's a boiling a frog type scenario as it doesn't make sense otherwise.

> don't know how the US has got itself into such a messed up state that such drills are considered necessary

As the comment above you says, they’re between counterproductive and unnecessary, and purely creatures of posturing and appeasing scared parents.

I think you've missed the point there, which is that something has become necessary to prepare for the horrifying reality of mass shootings.

Unfortunately, due to the political situation in the country, it's currently impossible to do the one thing that we know might actually stop those shootings (make it harder or impossible for people, especially children, to get their hands on heavy weaponry). So by the "logic" of "we must do something" "this is something" "then we must do this", we have active shooter drills instead.

Assuming the drills are necessary currently, doing "the one thing" isn't going to end them for at least decades. It's not going to be an either or situation.

The best solution I see is worldwide disarmament in some manner that still allows equalization of women, elderly, etc in physical force. That's a pretty tall order honestly not sure that happens anytime in my lifetime. It also has a sort of 'prisoner dilemma' element where the individual would be insane to give up their arms while the criminal still has theirs.

> It also has a sort of 'prisoner dilemma' element where the individual would be insane to give up their arms while the criminal still has theirs.

Advocates of "gun control" in the US don't realize this part, they seem to assume by making guns less available the criminals won't be able to find them.

My belief is that covid-19 responses were over blown too. Particularly the long lasting effects on young children. American society is already struggling with healthy socialization. Now we have children with earliest impressions being that "others" are dangerous.

Sure covid-19 was a serious disease but it appears to me to be a tossup whether the lockdowns, loss of schooling, etc will cause as much or more long term damages. It may turn out to not be the case, but I believe interventions should have at least a 100-to-1 effectiveness to harm ratio. Most vaccines fall into this rang, or much lower. I severely doubt the responses will be near that rate.

I think people are bad at reasoning about sub-percentile or even sub 1-in-10 risks. During covid, on one hand you had people over-exaggerating pandemic risks due to hearing specialists like epidemiologists considering only the fallout of their field. It's hard to compare other small risks without hard work. On the other hand you get people over-exaggerating the risks of a vaccine because they hear of a few cases of bad reactions. It's hard to compare small risks without hard work.

Unfortunately, I think experts are almost more prone to that overestimation issue. Any individual school is still probably unlikely to have had a shooter incident. But a school safety expert would've seen many of them, leading to drills.

Sigh whatever happened to those libertarian floating countries?

I'd be wary of putting all of these examples into the same box, though.

If kids can't play outside anymore because of overprotective parents or an overprotective society, that feels to me like a net negative. If newspapers are afraid to publish because they are fearful of libel suits, then we might miss fact-checked stories that are in the public interest, and it's not clear that that's a good trade-off.

On the other hand, zero traffic death policies usually result in fairly cheap and only mildly inconvenient interventions (if inconvenient at all) to improve the legibility of key intersections and dangerous roads. Drives to reduce medical error usually rely on increased training or the introduction of fixed procedures or checklists, quick wins. Safety regulations in construction require proper dust extraction and safety at heights, and really the cost in better ladders, scaffolding, safety harnesses, vacuums and so on is completely negligible compared against the occupational hazards and chronic illnesses often suffered by older construction workers.

(And sometimes it's debatable. I feel like NASA could take a bigger risk on some manned missions if the astronauts agree, but on the other hand there's so much money and effort involved in these missions that it's not so strange that they want to get everything right, and that feels like the right culture and attitude. I feel like you should probably be allowed to swim anywhere you want even in still water or when there's algae, at your own peril, but really it's not that much of an inconvenience to go to a safer spot with a lifeguard.)

My impression is that what really ails Western societies is not necessarily risk averseness but rather gridlock, where a small amount of people can block a lot of progress for the rest of us. Gridlock has made governments averse to big infrastructure projects (e.g. high speed trains) and big changes in regulations that could move the needle (e.g. land value taxation) but they're not really averse to the risk, they're averse to getting swamped by interest groups and influential people with a vested interest in the status quo.

> If newspapers are afraid to publish because they are fearful of libel suits, then we might miss fact-checked stories that are in the public interest, and it's not clear that that's a good trade-off.

I'd argue the opposite. If they're afraid of libel, they're probably engaging in it and should stop.

If they're sure of what they're saying and have proof of due diligence, they shouldn't be afraid. If they're not sure, they might still want to publish the information but be clear and explicit that they have no proof and state how they got hold of the information.

Saying "I heard but haven't been able to verify that Person X did Thing Y" is very different from saying "Person X did Thing Y". The latter should absolutely be liable to a suit if they don't have proof or very strong evidence that it actually happened. The former shouldn't as much.

Disclaimer, IANAL so I can't tell if libel laws in different countries work that way but I would expect them to do so at least in broad terms.

Even if you think you'll win a case, there's still the distraction and economic cost of being dragged into a lawsuit. Fear of libel suits probably does make the gutter press slightly less trashy, but it also has a chilling effect on dependable sources, and they are regularly employed by malicious actors for precisely that reason. But anyway, if you don't like that particular example, make up another where you feel society is currently too risk averse.

I think this is too broad a subject. Different societies have different risk profiles.

In the US, the OP is probably enough example. If you can't let your kids play outside or walk the streets for fear of being accused of child abuse, endangerment or whatever charges might be made against you, that's the symptom of worrying societal illness.

I grew up in America - in the southern part of the continent though, not in the USA. I now live Europe. Kids roam and play outside and that's a normal thing.

Kids need to be allowed to be kids, otherwise they will grow up to be very limited adults with odd world views. Perhaps everything else stems from this, at least partially? Kids who grow up overprotected might feel they need to overly protect everyone as an adult, and these adults will be the ones behind laws and regulations.

> If they're afraid of libel, they're probably engaging in it and should stop.

That may depend on the jurisdiction.

My understanding is that libel laws in the UK, for instance, are horribly broad, and, importantly, don't actually take the truth into account. (From what I've read, I would say it would be more apt to call them "defamation laws", but no one put me in charge.)

So if it were as simple as "just don't print verifiable lies", then I'd tend to agree with you, but given that there are places where you can print verifiable truth and still get slapped with a successful libel suit for it...

Perhaps. If that's the case though, it doesn't matter how much due diligence and honest reporting you're doing.

This thread is about where we (as societies) are being overly safe.

To be clear, my central point is that people cannot differentiate between the exceedingly low risks with cost and real risks that should be addressed. I'll dress your points on the medical area because it's the area that I'm most passionate about and think I'm the most informed. I'm not talking about medical checklist s. I'm talking about increased licensure. An example would be pushes to increase the academic training of nurses. Nurses with four-year degrees marginally better outcomes than nurses with two your degrees. That face all you that sounds like people will get better care. What's not discussed is that this means nurses are more expensive so hospitals have less nurses. Another example is mini drugs that are over-the-counter in most countries require a prescription in the US. At face value of this sounds safer is it allegedly reduces misuse. However, it adds hundreds of dollars in cost for a doctor's visit to get a $5 pill that means many people that need it won't get it.

I certainly agree that governmental gridlock and dysfunction exist. However, that alone doesn't explain why large infrastructure projects like rail cost $5 to 10x more in the US when they do make it through the process. Infrastructure projects have vastly higher headcount then even in the EU. You have paid professionals whose job it is to make sure that Builders don't step on endangered animals. This obsession with preventing the risk ignores the fact that it would be both cheaper and better for the animals assume some will die and spend part of the money you would be paying to prevent that on actually helping them.

> . It shows up in new parents who don't introduce their children to family for risk of covid.

This is asinine.

Just because politics tells you everything is normal, everything is decidedly not normal. COVID is still an endemic and very serious disease.

Dropping mask mandates were a seriously and deadly mistake.

Chicken

alive and not disabled by long covid either

Unvaxed, unmasked, also alive and not disabled by long covid ;)

You are a danger to society. Hope you are proud of yourself.

See you at the Herman Cain Awards.

My point was not to debate the seriousness of covid but talk about relative risk. If you think covid is very serious and it's perfectly logical to take some precautions with your child.

To my point, there is a huge difference between taking your child to a sports game and introducing it to one or two people over the course of a year. If you magically knew there is a 1 in 10 chance your child would die, of course don't do it. The question is when would you start to do it. One in a million chance, one in a billion? At some point the logic of better safe than sorry works against you.

No, completely isolating is the only sane choice right now thanks to the idiots dropping the mask mandate. The risk is too high.

If and that's a very big if, the other households does a PCR test and masks up then but only then would I take a small child there.

That is all well and good for rich people with big backyards or nanny's but how about the rest of the country?

Look man, I grew up in a trailer park. Very few people live alongside highways or in places where it is not safe to play outside. Currently, I live in a low income apartment complex, and I still see kids playing outside. three years ago I lived on the most violent street in our town because rent was so cheap there, and I still saw kids riding around on scooters and playing ball. A lot of it is mentality, and what you view as an acceptable risk. Has very little to do with income.

I frequently go to a trailer park to help someone there. Young kids are often running around and playing with other kids. In the summer I’ve seen a group of 8-10 kids grade and middle school age (some very young) sitting in street after dark playing games and talking. It’s a very mixed group age/gender/race. In my own wealthy neighbourhood I never see kids playing outside.

By that logic my childhood in Germany was 95% neglect. Also, I was hurt often and that was good.

Those people should take the subway in, e.g. Munich, when children go to school. A nice mix of people commuting to the office and 6 year olds commuting to school in the same crampted subway cars.

Looking from the outside in, the US are just a wierd country.

It wasn't always like this. I'm 35 and growing up in the US involved adventures that took me and my other 6-yr old pals several miles from home.

It's a paranoid US millennial parenting thing. I'm a younger Gen Xer and my parents would lock me out of the house from the time I got home from school until the sun went down. I was at the bus stop for 6:30 every morning.

Fellow younger Gen-Xer here, when I was growing up this trajectory was already clearly starting.

My parents were oldschool Italian immigrants and let me run wild, often accompanied by a relatively small subset of neighborhood kids whose parents also didn't worry.

But there were already plenty of boomers panicking about child molesters reported in the news, locking their kids up inside. Then as minorities started moving into the predominantly white racist midwestern neighborhood, the fears went into overdrive.

The U.S. federal government gives the States' child protection service agencies money grants that are conditional on those agencies actually taking children from their homes. You get what you subsidize, and if you subsidize petty tyranny, you'll get petty tyranny.

I had friends who should have been taken away from their neglecting parents, but never were. Turns out, if the child is not being literally beaten, all the parent has to do is not open the door when child services comes by.

So if the child's teeth literally rot out of their mouth, they wear filthy clothes to school, they live in a house full of cat shit everywhere, and a rotted away caved in roof, all the parent has to do is continue smoking, drinking and browsing the internet. No one could do anything about it. Those kids' lives were ruined.

There are sadly some places where the courts/CPS will avoid removing them even in such a situation because their temporary care situation available from the state is so fucked that they're better off in literally any situation where they aren't beat/molested. Some parts of the US have truly dire situation with not enough quality foster car parents and basically a lord-of-the-flies temporary home available chock-full of kids with various unique and difficult to live with issues.

That makes sense. But what's bad is they had extended family who would have taken them in, there was just nothing the state could do. The mother brainwashed the younger kids to think their grandmother and aunt were terrible people, so they couldn't even lobby for themselves.

My friend was the oldest of 3 sisters and she didn't even realize how bad her home life was until middle school. Eventually she started dating another of my friends and ended up just living with his family for years to avoid going home. After she turned 18 and was independent, she tried to get her siblings out, but the state said their hands were tied.

Yeah, the subculture of people who get incandescently angry about CPS aren't the kinds of people I'd want anywhere near children.

for those of us who ticked off at CPS, that's kind of the point. who you want "anywhere near children" should have nothing to do with my relationship with my kids.

> who you want "anywhere near children" should have nothing to do with my relationship with my kids.

The laws against child abuse argue against this kind of absolutism.

Do you have something against those, too?

I thought that was obvious.

Yes, they want to beat their kid in peace: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34918902

Why? It seems like those things are directly related. If I see somebody treating their child poorly then I wouldn't want them caring for my children.

Guess I’d better quit as a paramedic since I’m apparently not fit to be around kids, let alone treat them in medical emergencies.

All well and good until you're on the reverse end of the stick. It cuts both ways. Sometimes CPS is direly necessary. Sometimes it's just harassment.

I applaud your parents for staying level-headed. There is a 100% chance I would have gotten into a firefight with the government in the same scenario. And of course that would have been objectionally successful for the government as the children would have been removed from the home.

Turns out, if the child is not being literally beaten,

psa: you can beat your kids in the US. spanking is, fortunately not yet, the same as abuse.

Fortunately?

It is indeed fortunate that certain groups of people have not been successful in equating spanking with abuse, from a legal standpoint.

Reasonable and clearly defined punishments that include spanking as the "nuclear option" are part of a parent's toolkit.

Child rearing is hard. I've been doing it for 24 years straight now with four kids.

Kids are different and don't respond the same to punishments. What works for one may not work for another.

Barring cases of abuse, I believe it's wrong to armchair quarterback parents raising their kids in the best way they know how.

If I (non-consensually) spank another adult, that's abuse. If I spank an animal, that's animal abuse. Somehow spanking a child makes it not abuse?

Your analogy makes no sense. If I ground my child, preventing them from leaving the house, that's a reasonable punishment. If I prevent an adult from leaving my house, that's kidnapping. There are some things you can do to your child that you cannot do to another adult. And that's normal and good.

That's fair, and I don't disagree that parents and guardians should have rights over their children to punish them for discipline. That said, you certainly still can't spank your pets...

Look, I agree that the state should have a lot of leeway in letting parents decide what is best for their children. But in and of itself, spanking is the direct use of physical harm (the fact people even split straws on whether or not it causes "lasting damage" is really the wrong question to be asking) to a child to get your way, whether you feel it's justified or not. And there is this reflexive defense of it because it's just this completely weirdly ritualized punishment where people have completely distanced themselves from the idea that while yes, they are inflicting physical pain upon their children, they've made themselves comfortable with the idea because it's a traditional parenting method.

Inflicting pain (physical, mental, emotional) is an acceptable option when there are no alternatives.

I know a lot of people who were physically abused as children and became screwed up adults as a result of it.

I know a lot of people who were never physically disciplined as children and became screwed up adults as a result of it.

I know many people who were occasionally (1-10 times) disciplined as children and became great adults.

As a result? Who knows? But the line doesn't seem to be 0 vs >0.

When one of my sons, at age 4 or 5 picked up a brick and hit my other son in the head with it "just to see what would happen" he got a spanking.

He got to see what would happen.

And you know what? He never did anything like that again.

I don't think that spanking should be a go-to punishment, but in some cases, especially those involving high danger, a small child needs to have a fundamental fear of breaking certain rules.

I'd rather have to give a child a spanking for trying to run out into the road than to have a dead child and some sort of moral superiority.

Works that way with lots of things. My kid gets a pretty generous existence off ~10% of our post-tax salaries. Not because we are rich, we just don't waste money.

In a divorce, the state says I would need to pay 20% pre-tax (like 30% post-tax) or go to fucking jail. There's no rational reason why the kid is always going to need 3x the money in a divorce, and that reason be so dire it's worth throwing someone in jail for not paying it. The reason turns out the state gets benefits based on both the small administrative cut and based on the amount of child support outlays.

Benefits how? If your kid doesn't waste money, why does it matter whether the money is your account or theirs?

You are forced to give it. If you lose your job or somehow cannot manage your cashflow for a moment, you go to jail.

Or if you just get hijacked by terrorists while ironically working the job to come up with money for the child support [0]. Should have kept mailing the support while a gun was pointed to his head.

[0] https://greensboro.com/ex-hostage-jailed-in-child-support-ca...

Link?

Anyone who wants to spank their children is rather perverted, of course: We all know what it means when an adult spanks an adult.

Car-centric culture and gun-centric culture is making our society to be like this.

Also, most states defund mental health institutions. Finally, the 24/7 news cycle covers a lot of crazy behaviors, encouraging copycats to one-up the crime even more.

Is it a surprise if Americans are more paranoid than ever?

The 24/7 news cycle is problematic, not because of copycats, but because of paranoia about traumatic, but very low-frequency events.

If we had the kind of gruesome, 24/7 news coverage that is usually reserved for crimes, but for car crashes (lethal and otherwise), instead, maybe that would shift the needle some.

Sort of? I've been at an Israeli wedding once and we literally had to shelter for fifteen minutes because some Gaza rocket was flying over the venue, people just shrugged it off.

There's people in the thread here saying American roads in suburbs are too unsafe, I don't think these folks have seen traffic in Jakarta, and yet kids still walk to school there. Most people on earth would kill for American suburb levels of safety.

America's paranoia is grounded in something else. The country has had bouts of hysteria over anything for many decades now.

> I don't think these folks have seen traffic in Jakarta, and yet kids still walk to school there.

You can't compare the two. Traffic in Jakarta is often barely moving while the suburbs have the opposite problem.

Maybe. But we all agree that American suburbs are peaceful, heaven-like places compared to many places in the world. In Australia it is poisoness animals, in many countries it is the availability of drugs, in some crime, kidnapping and rapist. And God forbid you live in a war zone.

Most parents would love their kids growing up in a safe place like in the US, the EU or Japan. But they are not and are faster independent and aware of their environment. And that is okay. Was like that for thousands of years.

Minor quibble: Australians generally aren’t afraid of our poisonous animals, and it generally doesn’t factor into whether we let our kids play outside.

Absolutely. I fully expect Australian kids tell their parents at diner how they made a Instagram story of them and the poisonous snake ;)

US is in immense mental illness epidemic crisis. That's it. Everything else is a side effect stemming from this.

> Car-centric culture and gun-centric culture is making our society to be like this

This can't possibly be the cause. The US has been filled to the brim with cars for decades - yet this is a modern phenomenon.

Similarly, bad guy have had loads of guns in the US since even before the US was a thing... yet again, this is a modern phenomenon.

> Finally, the 24/7 news cycle covers a lot of crazy behaviors, encouraging copycats to one-up the crime even more.

I'm in complete agreement here. The media goes wall-to-wall with every mass shooter every time, turning them into some sort of sick idol for all the other mentally unstable wannabe's. Sometimes the media even reads these people's manifestos on air... it's just insane behavior.

> Is it a surprise if Americans are more paranoid than ever?

Paranoid, but also mentally diseased. We've constructed a society where it's totally acceptable to be mentally ill and entirely on your own. Today, even small cities have homeless camps filled to the brim with mentally ill that desperately need help - yet our policies give them free needles to enable them to continue doing drugs and ruin their lives.

It's horror disguised as compassion - compassion that ends up killing people.

I don't think any of this is new, it's a continuation of a trend.

I'm intending to have children soon (admittedly later than normal), and it was only in my parent's day that the interstate highway system came into being.

The world has changed quite a bit in not the last few generations. We're in the process of developing new social norms to deal with these changes, so we've got overreactions and underreactions.

> The US has been filled to the brim with cars for decades

In the 1970s, I lived in one of the western suburbs of Denver, about a mile from I-70. At night when things were quiet, I could hear individual cars. In the 1990s when I was back for visits, I-70 had the steady hum of continual traffic.

There are definitely more cars per household than there were fifty and sixty years ago.

> The US has been filled to the brim with cars for decades - yet this is a modern phenomenon.

I think you may underestimate the degree to which US infrastructure has failed to keep up with increasing use of cars.

The interstate highway system was built in the post-WWII years. It was designed to cope with the amount of traffic that existed then, plus a reasonable buffer for growth. It actually did a pretty good job of keeping up for at least a few decades. Anecdotally, growing up in NYS in the '80s and '90s, I-90 (aka the NYS Thruway) was a perfectly reasonable road to drive along.

As the 2000s came, it was already starting to get crowded. These days, I always have to weigh the extra speed and directness of the Thruway against the stress of driving among so many cars—and, especially, so many tractor trailers, including many double-length trailers.

Other roads may not get quite the same concentration of additional traffic as interstates, but as car ownership in general has trended up, more and more places have filled up with them.

As for guns...yes, lots of people have had lots of guns for centuries. But in 1999, the Columbine shooting showed that disaffected young people could get massive media attention if they shot up a school and then killed themselves. It has been fairly well proven by now that the media attention given to these events is a significant driver of more such. You even comment on this, but don't appear connect it to the rise of mass shootings in the modern era.

——

There's also a second phenomenon at work here. There's been a very strong streak of sensationalism in the media about children in danger that, from what I've seen, mostly started in the early '90s. There was a prominent disappearance in the Upstate NY area around that time (the Sarah Ann Wood case) that stayed in headlines for years; the JonBenét Ramsey case was also in the mid-'90s, and much more nationally sensationalized.

In general, there was an increase in pushing the "stranger danger" idea during that time, and...guess who are the parents now? The people who were young and impressionable growing up during that era.

> Car-centric culture and gun-centric culture is making our society to be like this.

The US has been car centric and gun centric for more than 70 years. Unsupervised kids bring frowned upon is a much more recent development.

> Finally, the 24/7 news cycle covers a lot of crazy behaviors, encouraging copycats to one-up the crime even more.

Yet that is entirely refuted by crime stats.

What the 24/7 news cycle does is runs out of real news 30 minutes into the 24 hour cycle and then fills the public head with deceptive and disproportional hysteria. The kind of stuff that makes them say that Car-centric culture and gun-centric culture are something remotely new. :)

Swiss here. We also have a lot of guns and cars. Yet we have swarms of children going alone to school and playing alone in nature.

> "The US seems to be the only country that has this problem. Children here (Norway) walk to school on their own at the age of five or six, some of them take buses."

I grew up in New Zealand, and when I was a kid it was pretty normal to walk to school also. I spent my whole childhood walking 20-30 mins every morning and afternoon! Eventually I got a bike which saved a bit of time.

But now days, I think it's not as common. My nieces seem to get shuttled everywhere in their Mum's car. One issue is that there's a lot more cars on the roads now days so it doesn't feel as safe or as friendly for pedestrians as it used to.

It’s the catch22 of it I suppose.

Also grew up in rural Nz where walking / cycling alone from a fairly young age was normal. Now my kids are at that age they cycle a bit on their own, but even in our village there is a street they need to cross on the way to school where they need supervision. Really we should start a community lollipop person schedule and sort it out.

> lollipop person

TIL, "crossing guard" in Kiwi, how much cuter is that?

>> Really we should start a community lollipop person schedule and sort it out.

That's how it's done in Japan in the mornings. Kids first collect into small local groups, they walk together to the nearest designated adult helper. From that point, there are adults manning every crossing to the school. They help the groups cross.

It's not a huge commitment for the adults. Maybe 20 minutes on average. Not every week.

> ”Really we should start a community lollipop person schedule and sort it out.”

Ahh yes! My primary school in NZ had two nearby crossings over a “busy” road (but probably not that busy by today’s standards)

I remember doing lollipop duty on it a few times. As a kid. A very prestigious assignment and we got some special high-vis to wear and everything. I assume there must have been some volunteer parents involved as well, but I really don’t remember now. Would have been too caught up in the excitement, haha.

Over here in Australia I remember the same, kids walking to school at 5 years old. In fact one time my mum forgot to pick me up, so I walked to my friend's house. Turns out it was the wrong day, oops.

But now I see cars lined up at the school near me, around the block. They'd rather sit in a line in their car blocking traffic for half an hour, instead of just parking one block away and walking with their kids (there is plenty of untimed parking, it's residential). Or, god forbid, asking their kid to meet them at a convenient corner each day. So I don't think it's just a safety thing, some parents are a little lazy too and would rather just sit in their car instead of walking or meeting other parents.

This might be a country vs city thing too, since I'm in Sydney now.

Some of the schools near me in London close the street during pick-up and drop off times to prevent exactly that:

https://www.royalgreenwich.gov.uk/info/200259/transport_and_...

Seems popular and does seem to create a good social vibe on the street: parents actually chatting to each other rather than sitting in their idling cars!

That’s a nice touch. Where we are it’s a little impractical as there’s only a single road through the village but it also means that that we’d only have to man the single point of crossing.

The block I'm talking about has "no stopping" signs specifically during school pickup hours to block cars idling. But, either it's a grey area or they just don't enforce - I'd guess the parents would say they are "stuck in traffic" and not just stopped and waiting. Except maybe the one in the front. Either way, if you want to turn left at the traffic lights while that's happening you have to do it illegally from the centre lane to get around them (2-lane roads, but the left is full and the only legal turning lane there).

Closing the streets could work but I think we already have the tools we need (it worked differently in the past, right?) but choose not to use them.

It's very unfair to compare Norway to the US, you just have to look at the racial composition of both societies to see why

There's no reason why a multi-racial society can't let their kids go out to play. Being multi-racial doesn't mean a country has to turn itself into a shit hole. Moreover, if it's because the races hate each other, then stop encouraging the hate.

>Being multi-racial doesn't mean a country has to turn itself into a shit hole.

It doesn't? Do you have any examples where this hasn't happened?

I live in a French neighborhood with multiple races (mostly white+arabic+black) and it's very safe, children play outside be themselves and no parent or neighbor ever care.

What does race have anything to do with this? Unless you believe diversity somehow leads to insane laws....

How is playing or beeing outside is a racial thing?

Granted that the average is as you say. But averages conceal the truth that the racial composition of those US districts that I have seen personally is generally not average, they tend to be overwhelmingly white or overwhelmingly black (mostly the Raleigh-Durham Triangle). In Norway we don't have many areas where that happens.

It's not really a problem in the US either. Kids are walking or biking unsupervised everywhere. Only a few isolated cases like the one you mentioned make the headlines.

It's not the number of cases, it's the possible litigation that's at stake.

> A passerby reported

this is a big part of the problem

In Japan, one of our buildings was right next to a girls' primary school.

When I took the train from Shinagawa to Nishi-Ohi, I would see these tiny little girls, basically knee-high, on the train, by themselves, on the way to school.

I've talked about growing up in Africa[0], and what kinds of things we had, slithering around.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34628812

I walked to school in the late 90s to middle school because we were so close a bus isn’t offered. I also did a similar thing and biked or walked to high school until a friend who took me.

When I used to ride a public transport train to work I would see young kids going to a private school dressed in school uniforms. They would go together and it wasn’t a problem, their school wasn’t in the best area either.

No one blinked an eye now or then. I live in fairly large city in the US South and half my neighborhood walks around. Never head of someone calling the cops for walking.

I'm told I was stopped from walking to school around the age of 10 (which did involve crossing a very busy road without any safe crossing apparatus) because someone reported it to the headmaster who then asked my parents to put a stop to it.

I don't remember it well enough to comment

The whole thing goes back to 80s and 90s daytime TV and people like John Walsh who pushed “stranger danger” unbelievably hard. Two generations of parents have been taught that the streets are crawling with child predators when in reality attacks by people not known to the child are very rare.

For whatever reason this took off in America more than most other places. US culture seems very prone to moral panics and crime scares.

The fact is that the vast majority of child abuse and abduction is committed by a family member or someone known to the child like a teacher, pastor, neighbor, coach, etc.

Stranger abductions are horrific and terrifying but they are nowhere near the top of a list of bad things likely to happen to your kids.

Imo there's two factors at play only one of which seems to get much attention. There's the legality (and burden of compliance even when abiding the law) of leaving your children unsupervised but there's also the complete lack of penalty for being wrong. A person reporting abuse incorrectly is for all intents and purposes, an attacker. Why is attacking someone else with only a brief observation of the situation cost free? Sure there's a balance to be maintained so that people still report actual abuse but why is there no burden upon the attacker to be correct or defensibly confused when the stakes are so high for the defender? If this was a game the imbalance would be an obvious point of dialogue.

Charge $5 bucks for some type of reports, it's a small annoyance which should be nothing for someone truly concerned.

I'm convinced the internet would have been better if we had charged $0.05 per email.

Making something free definitely has its costs.

I get your point, and it was a pretty serious discussion in the early days I think.

Now, introducing micro-transactions into people‘s communication looks like a straight ticket to hell to me. Reminds me of the early days of SMS when only porn sites, scams and businesses that made you pay for their SMS bills would send you messages.

Well, it would have combated spam effectively, which would have directly decreased the power of Gmail.

But it would also have, more importantly, created a revenue stream and normalized microtransactions, which would have created an alternate business model to attention/advertising.

Nobody likes paying for things... but I think the "free" future we're living in is pretty shitty compared to the way things were before.

This doesn’t compute to me…

On spam: we’ve been receiving physical direct spam mail from the dawn of the modern postal service, and the delivery is paid by the sender. Same way on linkedin for instance, recruiters pay to reach inboxes. Same for many other platforms where spamming and shoving content in users’ feed is monetized by the platform itself.

And that’s the bulk of the alternate business models and revenue streams we’re talking about.

Not everything needs to be free, but raising paywalls at the wrong place can have devastating effects on platforms.

Did you use email ~2000? It was a nightmare in sheer spam volume. Zero cost of copying + zero cost of sending = send worldwide all by default, or as close to it as they could get.

I'm sure the amount of email that isn't even seen in modern webmail services would still boggle our minds.

And as far as I see it, platforms are part of the problem.

Marketplaces are better for the customer in the long run.

That is to say, shared infrastructure/basic utilities with many different independent vendors on top each offering goods and services.

Sure, the not so early days were rough, everybody and their dog could run a self hosted email server, a lot of us actually did, and the spammer jumped on the bandwagon x1000.

But trying to solve these kind of situation with marketplaces only solve them monkey paw style. Marketplaces are for discoverability and supply and demand issues. Fundamentally I don’t want my personal communication to be supply and demand regulated. Instead I want strong enough penalties on entities that flood my inbox.

As you point out spam filters help a lot, but to me regulation was the biggest move: having a one click link to unsubscribe from ads and companies actually respect it reduced my inbox manyfold. Businesses I actually have transactions with were the hardest to filter out, and finally some progress was made in that front.

In general I feel believing marketplace are more than financial systems only leads disappointment. AppStores are the poster child marketplaces, and they’re sure full of scam and predatory content. Online ads are also marketplaces, facebook made user feeds a marketplace etc.

In my thinking, I probably should have said cooperative instead of marketplace -- a place where all parties have equal access and there's no tax to a third party.

App stores, ad markets (as they exist today, namely Google/Facebook/Amazon), and Facebook user feeds are all beholden-to and -enrich a single operating party. And specifically, an operating party that also competes with many of the offerings in their own "marketplaces". That makes them owned platforms in my book.

That sets up some screwy incentives (e.g. caring about volume over quality, self-preferencing) that substantially degrade the entire experience for buyers/users.

To the email case though, the problem with penalties is that they require a centralized manager. Which is how you get back to Gmail being a de facto standards body. Ugh.

We could always have done net-zero charging on email fees, that I think would have solved the accessibility issues. $0.05 paid to send an email -- $0.05 earned on receipt of an email.

I was reading Hammurabi's code the other day and was struck by the fact that the very first thing the code does is establish the consequences for bearing false witness. There's not even an allowance for "well, I thought it was true", if you are accusing another in court then you are running the risk of the same penalty that you are hoping to impose on the other person, whatever penalty that may be.

There are lots of problems with Hammurabi's code and I wouldn't suggest emulating this particular implementation, but it's interesting to note just how far back this concern of false accusations goes and how our legal system seems to have backslid a bit in this regard.

http://www.wright.edu/~christopher.oldstone-moore/Hamm.htm

Of course, the solution is criminal and/or civil penalties for people making false police reports. If you call to complain about your neighbor and it turns out there was nothing wrong going on, the neighbor should be able to 1. discover who made the complaint and 2. sue for damages. People need to mind their own business unless they are 100% sure there's abuse/crime happening.

We also have this problem in Canada, but being as we import a great deal of our culture from the US, we're frequently "America-lite" for things like this.

The US has a lot of problems a lot of other countries don’t have.

I don't understand what's either astonishing or even wrong about that sequence of events by the government. Person calls 911 and reports child abuse. The government takes the situation seriously and investigates. The government determines there was no issue. Person being investigated is upset.

Other than the person calling 911, who do you want to do something different?

You want the first responder to dismiss the case because they don't think it matters? A lot of abuse went on for years because of that.

You want the government to take the kid while investigating?

You want the government to just not investigate and take the kids?

You want the parents not to be worried going through the process?

I just don't know how else I would want the government to react. It was far too lax in the past in investigating credible accusations. And if we have to error on one side or the other it should be helping abused kids.

The sequence of events that is wrong here, is that if a person calls 911 claiming that there is child abuse going on, and the "child abuse" is a child playing outside or walking to the park alone, the person should be fined. There is a difference between "I saw little Johnny outside for hours in the cold, I think there is child abuse." or "I saw bruises all over little johnny, I think there is child abuse." and "A child was walking outside alone, there is child abuse".

Of course what happened in this case wasn't child abuse. But the reporter didn't say "I saw them playing outside". They said "the child is being neglected". Yes, it turns out the reasons for the person calling saying so were wrong. But if the child wasn't being given food or medical care it would have been reported the same way. So the government had to investigate.

If someone makes a false claim that results in personal expenses for me that sounds like libel or defamation. Allow me to find out who they were so I can sue them. I value my time at least for say $1000 per CPS visit and $300 per hour I have to spend dealing with the investigation they knowingly initiated with their libel.

The laws hiding the identity of people abusing children by making these trumped up reports should be re-evaluated.

> If someone makes a false claim that results in personal expenses for me that sounds like libel or defamation.

Then you don't know what libel or defamation is. But, yes, if someone makes a false report against you and that results in injuries to your reputation you can totally sue them for slander, libel or defamation (depending on how the report was filed).

As far as I know, no laws hide the identity of people reporting crimes. However, for very good reasons, we allow people to report crimes anonymously.

I guess it's only natural that people outside the country aren't exposed to our local news, but this kind of crazy shit happens all over the US. You probably hear about our insane politics and people who don't believe in science, but there's so much more. People in the USA are really nuts.

Police too busy chasing other problems than hunting down pedos.

In Belgium, we had Dutroux a serial rapist and child kidnapper that traumatised the country ~30 years ago. As a kid I remember living like you describe in Norway. Not anymore. Parents are still to this day worried letting their kids go outside.

Fast forward to spring 2020. The country is locked down. The weather is surprisingly excellent. It took me a lot of effort to leave my 8y old girl go play with her friend to the small wood nearby. Initially I even asked her to go with the dog. I could see the disapprovals of other parents I was talking to about this. But little by little other kids joined.

They had a blast. No school for months. Living in the sunny woods all day, just coming back to eat and sleep.

She's 10 now and as you can imagine a very independent girl.

I blame this transition to overprotection on Mean World Syndrome[0]. Our media picks up alarming stories and amplifies them in a way that wasn't happening before.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_world_syndrome

I concur. It's not just children, women are afraid to walk alone at night, when men are way more likely than women to incur violent attack from strangers.

Women and children are almost always preyed upon by people who know them, not strangers.

I think it depends on the area

I see little kids mobbing around everywhere here

Unfortunately there are some unreasonable people out there who must be reading too much negative news

>"The US seems to be the only country that has this problem"

Same here in Canada. Retarded policy I think

Italy is not as ridiculous, but until 14 years kids cannot exit school without a register adult picking them up.

But that is ridiculous!

According to thelocal.it it's no longer true: https://www.thelocal.it/20171114/italy-amends-law-kids-go-ho...

Havs thelocal got it right?

"Italy amends law to allow kids to go home from school alone

Italian schools can let children walk home alone without fear of legal repercussions, after the senate approved an amendment to a law that said they had to be picked up by an adult.

..

Under-14s will require written permission from their parents or guardians to leave school unaccompanied, according to the amendment, which passed the senate’s budget committee on Monday."

> has thelocal got it right?

How can you get something right about any Italian law?

Sure they correctly cited what has been defined by the law but that doesn't mean jackshit in practice.

Once a law is written, it can change substantially once it gets put into practice, by the many and many little details.

In theory the parents "authorize" their kids to exit the school alone.

In practice, individual schools can decide whethers that's reasonable or not. The criteria for what's reasonable or not begin with reasonable stuff like "it must be safe", "the child must be mature enough", "the child must walk on your sidewalk", "the child must know the rules of the road" ....

But then after a while most schools just ended up with blanket rules like "possible starting from the 5th grade" (since only those kids are generally old enough to meet all the other criteria; so even if your kid meets them before, tough luck).

And some schools don't even allow that. Basically you have to fight for your right, which usually requires you to band with other parents otherwise you have no chances winning.

But once you band with enough parents, there is a simpler solution which requires no fighting: you just add a bunch of other parents to the list of trusted people, and so a group of kids exits with one adult supervision and they usually just walk together to their respective homes, possibly letting the kids to leave the group once closer to home (sometimes called "piedibus")

So yeah, in practice people get more or less what they want, but oh boy how different this is in practice than what you'd read in the newspapers.

From what I see in media more supervision for children (compare to what was norm 25-50 years ago) is a trend across most economically developed countries. But the US is definitely the most extreme case.

I would not be surprised if there is an inverse correlation between birth rate and "child protect" laws - the less children a country have the better it tries to protect (to the point it harms everybody). But child hostile laws (and they abuse by police and social services) like in the US definitely not encourage young people to rise kids.

East Asian countries have among the lowest birth rates, but their children largely are allowed to travel by themselves to school from like 7 years old.

The US may be the most extreme case of this problem, but not every country has it as good as Norway either.

I'm from Spain and sadly no kid here goes to school on their own at 5 or 6. Most start at 8 or 9, and typically "experts" recommend 7 as the absolute lower bound. While not as car-centric as the US, we still have too many cars in every city (and too fast) to feel safe leaving kids alone at 5 or 6.

Norway is also far from perfect, we have an increase in parents driving their kids to school because of the dangers from the traffic made by parents driving their kids to school

That is not astonishing, that is the stupiest shit one can imagine. And because of the monkey nature of humans and the dominance of the US american 'culture' in the world, that will spread to other countries, too.