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The day I accidentally killed a little boy

bbc.co.uk

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Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#151

Post by seanmcdirmid »

joosters wrote: post #142
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #3

You have to feel terribly sad for everyone involved here. The only place the blame can rest is humanity's desire to mix very fast, solid vehicles with very slow, squishy pedestrians in the same spaces. We're way too far down that rabbit-hole to address it, but hopefully self-driving cars (and less polluting cars, too) will start to reverse the damage done by the automobile, in the not-too distant future.

Autonomous cars could actually lead to increases in road deaths (or at least, less pressure to improve road safety, and hence less potential reduction in deaths), because people would be far less invested in the accident. There would always be someone else to potentially blame: the manufacturer of the vehicle, the programmer of the software, the creators of the sensors, or even the owner of the vehicle not cleaning t…

Has that ever happened before in the American or other western legal system? It seems highly unlikely that no one would be assigned blame. Heck, we already have cars driven for us (taxis) and the blame for an accident is attributed to the driver, that wouldn’t change if the driver was a computer, the legal syste, wouldn’t simply shutdown.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#152

Post by adventured »

mattlondon wrote: post #117
bryanlarsen wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We're way too far down that rabbit-hole to address it" That's BS. Sweden has essentially zero pedestrian fatalities annually, and its overall traffic fatality rate is well under a quarter that of the US. There are two main components: reducing speed limits and spending money on infrastructure. Both of these are anathema in the US, but the refusal to do so is borderline criminal, IMO. http://www.visionzeroinitiative.…

+1 This seems to be a common excuse from people in the US "Oh yeah - well - of course you could do in such a small place - the US is just too big for to happen!" I looked up some stats for the inevitable "But the US is bigger than that! We simply cannot solve this problem!" replies. The EU is pretty big too, but the fatality rate is half of that in the US despite being of comparable land-area. US road fatalities per…

The distance driven per year per person in the US is twice that of the figure in the EU.

As an example for the prime driving age bracket, the average driver in the US, 20 to 55 years of age, drives nearly 30,000 KM per year.

In the EU it's half that.

You would expect fatalities to increase meaningfully when you double the distance driven per person.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#153

Post by AlgorithmicTime »

dmitripopov wrote: post #52
thriftwy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, having more of them decreases your odds that you will face losing all of them. Imagine how parents live who had just one child, who died.

It does not work in mathematical way. You lose one and your life is broken forever.

How did parents do it before modern medicine? Historically, it was exceedingly common to lose at least one child.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#154

Post by luckroy »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #143
luckroy wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you've never been on rural roads that also have houses? There are many places where a 50+ mph speed limit is appropriate even though there are little clusters of houses dotted along the route. It's not practical to lower the speed limit for every house that has children.

Those houses are generally located far away from the road (farm houses) or are in some other way separated from the road way. If it’s a rural highway and houses are near the road, it typically results in a speed zone, even in desolate Nevada.

That's not true everywhere. My wife's parents live in rural Iowa on a highway that has a 45 mph speed limit. Their home is part of a small cluster of homes and their mailbox is across the road, similar to the circumstances in the OP story.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#155

Post by BearGoesChirp »

All the people talking about being unable to handle/comprehend the death of their child, and especially the one line of conversations about the impact of losing one child when you have many more, made me think about something. For most of human history, losing some children was expected. Child mortality rates for most of our history have been abysmal.

As species, what impact did that have on us? Child abuse has a long history of being accepted, with child sacrifices in some cultures to forced marriages of children (not to say any of these events were super common, but there were cultures in which they were accepted even if not common). Look at 16th to 18th century and what happened to orphans of single mothers and it is horrible by modern standards. In some cases orphans were treated as child slave labor or worse (granted, they would grow out of it if they survived, while with actual slavery it was for life). Even into the 19th and 20th century we had children working in factories where dismemberment was all too common.

But around the start of the 20th century, that started changing, and today harming a child is one of the worse things that a person can do. Many would quicker forgive an ex convict that killed a rival gang member than someone who intentionally seriously injured a child.

I wonder if this is at all tied to drops in child mortality rates.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#156

Post by Steltek »

mattlondon wrote: post #117
bryanlarsen wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We're way too far down that rabbit-hole to address it" That's BS. Sweden has essentially zero pedestrian fatalities annually, and its overall traffic fatality rate is well under a quarter that of the US. There are two main components: reducing speed limits and spending money on infrastructure. Both of these are anathema in the US, but the refusal to do so is borderline criminal, IMO. http://www.visionzeroinitiative.…

+1 This seems to be a common excuse from people in the US "Oh yeah - well - of course you could do in such a small place - the US is just too big for to happen!" I looked up some stats for the inevitable "But the US is bigger than that! We simply cannot solve this problem!" replies. The EU is pretty big too, but the fatality rate is half of that in the US despite being of comparable land-area. US road fatalities per…

Not to detract from your point but the US Federal government, shockingly, is incapable of passing necessary regulations and the Constitution forbids a State from passing their own versions. For instance, vehicle inspections, licensing standards, safety equipment, etc are all set at the Federal level. Cities can't forbid oversized trucking, require truck side guards, etc.

Likewise, stupendous amounts of Federal and State taxes are forcefully siphoned off into wasteful, money-losing highway programs. Money that could go towards safer transit, pedestrian, or biking initiatives.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#157

Post by 0xfeba »

chris_7 wrote: post #68
epitrochoidal wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The procedure later, away from the accident scene, probably was more involved, but at the scene, unless there was evidence of negligence or bed intent I wouldn't expect an arrest. She didn't flee. Apparently didn't appear impaired. What would they possibly arrest her for?

If you're driving fast enough on a local street that you can hit and kill someone, you're incredibly negligent (see: all NYC taxi drivers).

So 90% of drivers are incredibly negligent now.

If you slow down to non-lethal speeds for every parallel parked vehicle or obstacle in anticipation of some kid sprinting out from behind it, you might as well walk (not ride a bike, because that problem still exists).

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#158

Post by peatmoss »

dudul wrote: post #135
peatmoss wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, still not getting it. Wouldn’t normally a person be detained for questioning if they had just killed a person in some other context? Maybe arrest isn’t warranted—maybe a, “hey you look pretty shook up, would you mind coming down to the station with me to answer a few questions? Cool, I have to let you know before I get started that anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” But I also…

That's exactly what I meant. maybe I'm not familiar enough with what "arrest" entails, but at least keeping them at the station to make sure she's ok or something. To clarify my comment, I wasn't talking about finding a way to point fingers at her or something. but really, just sending her on her way, driving the car she just used to kill a child with, is irresponsible.

This is what I took your comment to mean as well. To me, watching the responses to your comment illustrate why it is that it’s so hard for anything to change with respect to traffic safety.

I mean, we have here a story with a dead child and story of a woman who caused the death. On the strength of the emotional narrative presented in this story, people here have largely decided that it’s not even worth asking questions, maybe dotting an i or crossing a t or two.

I wouldn’t expect the officer to knock her head shoving her into the back of a squad car, or to keep her waiting in an interview room until she’s good and ready to crack. But then again, I generally expect humane, dignified treatment of people that police interact with.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#159

Post by ajuc »

Xeoncross wrote: post #104
phkahler wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Is this what people consider "biblical"? An angry person? I've spent years reading the Pentateuch, writings, and new testament... No, it's the old testament god. The one who punished Adam and Eve, the one who decided humanity was such a disgrace he flooded the world to purge them - that angry god.

Is God not able to try and judge people just as we do? If someone murders another, humanity has long believed it ok to imprison or execute them for their crimes. I fail to see how an all-knowing God is not qualified to make the same judgement. > "Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. The LORD was sorry that He…

God is omnipotent, he could save these murdered by others. Instead he chose to let them be murdered and then punish these that did the murder. And then also to punish their kids and grandkids.

The funny thing is - most modern people are more ethical, than Old Testament's God.

You wouldn't kill your children if they decided to become hippies, or to burn your house. And you certainly wouldn't kill their children, etc.

And yeah, most Christians believe the God is the same. But the behaviour described in the books changed drastically.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#160

Post by peatmoss »

lr4444lr wrote: post #144
peatmoss wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, still not getting it. Wouldn’t normally a person be detained for questioning if they had just killed a person in some other context? Maybe arrest isn’t warranted—maybe a, “hey you look pretty shook up, would you mind coming down to the station with me to answer a few questions? Cool, I have to let you know before I get started that anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” But I also…

I'm not sure what you want to happen here. An arrest is a (temporary) suspension of a person's civil liberties. There has to be a legitimate reason under the laws of the jurisdiction to do it. I don't know the law in England, but in the USA, if the investigating officer does not have evidence for a crime (the act, and "mens rea") or you aren't deemed a potential flight risk because you have some relation as a person…

I used the term detained intentionally, and then specified that arrest wouldn’t be unreasonable if required by circumstances of the investigation.
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