> corporations seek to remove all of our abilities to take care of ourselves and our communities Please. It's in a corporation's best interest to give the customer exactly what he wants . We still have "our abilities to take care of ourselves and our communities," but we also have the option of a corporation providing for our every whim.
> It's in a corporation's best interest to give the customer exactly what he wants. Comcast comes to mind here. Or Better Business Bureau and the sole reason for its existence.
Exactly. It's in a corporation's best interest to fleece its customers for as much as it can get away with. Monopolies have a much easier time of it.
Media is part of it, but the other part is this, taken from the first comment on the linked article: "I can’t help but notice how many freeways and roads are between Sheffield and Rother Valley. We can’t blame parents alone for the loss of childhood freedom. Since 1919 We have purposely designed our cities to maximize vehicle throughput and require car ownership and the result is an environment that is lethal for 8 y…
I think this is a large part of it. I don't care so much as 5 cents about what somebody at child protective services thinks...but where I live people drive so fast it is a bit ridiculous..but also my neighborhood has roaming packs of dogs. For whatever reason my area seems to be where people go to drop off unwanted dogs; they pack up and become dangerous. I have been attacked 3 times, my wife once and I am not too ke…
>I have disposed of many of them but it seems just when it is safe again to go for a run...there are more dogs.
Sounds like you need to pack a pistol and some mace when you run.
Yes, more than that: if robot cars could be made incapable of hitting pedestrians, then children might start to roam again. It would be a marvellous unintended consequence...
that is impossible in real world. if you go 50 kmh in 50 kmh zone, and small kid jumps 2m in front of your car suddenly, there is nothing anybody or any software can do. if it's 5m, would you rather crash and kill the parents than the kid? what about 2 kids? it's dangerous direction of thoughts, meaning kids won't have to be careful when outside. but you have bikes, you have tons of other dangers.
Take an evasive maneuver at the very limits of the car's handling, brought to you by the speed of computers, while all the other cars around you adjust at similarly lightning-fast speeds?
To be fair, in a recent brief visit to Switzerland I stayed with some friends in a small village near Zug and saw examples of this sort of attitude throughout more aspects of life than just child-raising. For example, many farmers were leaving produce out with price tags on and relying on an honour system for payment. Some did a 'pay what you want' system for their produce and just relied on people to do the right th…
Forget farms, this is even how the supermarket produce section works in Switzerland. You pick your stuff, you weigh it yourself, you choose the right tag (without anyone looking over your shoulder) and then you go to a (nowadays potentially automated) cashier. Heck, it's how the tax system works as well. Government has no way of knowing how much is actually on your bank account, well at least not officially (gov was…
>You pick your stuff, you weigh it yourself, you choose the right tag (without anyone looking over your shoulder) and then you go to a (nowadays potentially automated) cashier.
The US has its faults to be sure, but it's not that different here for buying produce these days. A lot of things had little stickers on them which can be scanned directly, and for other things the automated cashier lets you type in or look up a code number and then set the item(s) on the scanner/scale to be weighed. If you really wanted to cheat, it would be trivial to buy a bag full of some expensive item and type in the code number for some cheap item.
>Rural >barren wasteland If you're a glass half empty person. Many people see it as freedom to do close to whatever you want without anyone caring.
I can assure you, your suburban HOA is extremely caring about what you do. Heaven forbid you change the colour of your curtains.
but many suburbs don't have a HOA at all. I think some of the issue here is specifically upper-middle class problems. In my suburb its been just as it was when I grew up. Kids can play on the road easily, they live within walking distances of schools, etc,
Exercise is overwhelmingly dwarfed by calorie consumption, in terms of weight. Not eating an apple is about equivalent to running an entire mile. Most likely your cousins just had a worse diet. Exercise as a weight loss solution is essentially a lie sold by con artists - you can't outrun a bad diet, as they say.
Sounds like someone thinking of an excuse not to exercise :) A quick Google suggests running a mile burns about 100 calories and an apple is about 50. In a more general sense, you can't really compare the two. You can't say exercise is "dwarfed" by consumption because they're not on the same scale; unless you're talking about, say, perceived willpower of eating less versus exercising more.
As someone who considered this, there are a few other factors where cities are preferable. Work. If you're not running your own online business and need a skilled/tech job, you don't have much choice. Schools. Cities often have better school options for your kids. Politics. Rural areas across the world generally lean conservative, and sometimes downright way too conservative.
Work: This is a matter of priority... you can always find ways to pay the bills and put food on the table. It might not be doing exactly what you love, or it may be. There are ways to make almost anything work if you spend the graft making a name for yourself. You're right, it's frequently easier, dare I say simple to find a comfortable job doing what you love in the city. I'm at a point now where I have enough of a…
Thanks for your response. One thing I got curious about -- are you aware of any liberal or socialist leaning communities in rural Canada?
I wore my seat belt every day before that anyway, not even because I had to but because I wanted to. The only thing that really changed after that point was I didn't want to ride bikes anymore. I really can't be the only one who thinks brushes with death are not a good thing to have just because they can teach you a lesson when you're fortunate enough to walk away from them. Would you also say Russian Roulette is a g…
One might argue that the correct lesson to draw, from a broken bone got by doing something stupid on a bike, is not that one shouldn't ride a bike, but rather that one shouldn't do something stupid. That's the lesson I drew from it, anyway. I'd be curious to know how old you were when you did the damnfool thing, and how your folks reacted to it. I was eleven or twelve and mine were generally unsympathetic, which suit…
About 5. They pretty much blamed the kids present/the parent. They apparently biked down that all the time but also had a lot more bicycle experience.
To be fair, in a recent brief visit to Switzerland I stayed with some friends in a small village near Zug and saw examples of this sort of attitude throughout more aspects of life than just child-raising. For example, many farmers were leaving produce out with price tags on and relying on an honour system for payment. Some did a 'pay what you want' system for their produce and just relied on people to do the right th…
Well, a few months ago I bought several cartons of berries at a honor system you-pick farm. To be fair that was in Vermont, which probably isn't representative of the whole of the United States. For that matter, I regularly see schoolchildren riding the New York City subway accompanied only by their friends...
To be fair, NYC is very, very different from the rest of the US. Reading over many of these comments, the people saying that kids can't roam in their areas are living in suburban places where you need a car to go anywhere, and it's simply not safe as a pedestrian. NYC is not like this: everyone takes the subway or walks all over the place there, and many people do not have cars, or use them within the city if they do. It's totally walkable. So I can see how kids walking around by themselves won't have people worried the way they would in suburban areas.
That just sounds like a way to dodge responsibility.
I wish it were merely a way to avoid taking personal responsibility. There's much more to it than that. Read "The Psychology of Influence" along with some of the stuff by, e.g, Kahneman and/or Tversky on behavioral economics and the various cognitive biases humans have that lead them to make poor decisions. I assure you that corporations have read all of this and are taking advantage of it to part you from your money…
So what exactly are you saying these influences can do? If you tell me that they're going to make me slightly more likely to buy one brand of soap than another, I can accept that.
If you tell me that they're going to make me buy diamonds when I have no conceivable use for diamonds, I'm gonna have to call BS.