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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

#311

Post by cozzyd »

ssharp wrote: post #302
cozzyd wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed the civil engineer who allowed such an egregious speed limit is at fault here.

When you get into rural areas, you often times see houses that are built on roads that are 45-55 mph speed limits. They're main through ways but people build on them, often times either farms or former farms that were lotted off.

I have driven through such areas (mostly in Texas) and I found it very unsettling that the speed limit was so high. In other areas, it's not uncommon for the speed limit to be reduced to 25 (or maybe 35) in a residential area.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#312

Post by pnathan »

BearGoesChirp wrote: post #155

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 lon…

Yes, there has been a substantial shift. I found the book "Cherubs, Chattels, Changelings" to be a good treatment of the difference.

Suffice it to say, we have a very unusual society today, compared to the arc of human history.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#313

Post by tomji »

toyg wrote: post #105
chris_7 wrote: post #75

If someone fires a gun randomly down the street, not aiming at anyone, but happens to hit someone, they'd certainly be arrested. Drive a multi-thousand-pound projectile down the street, kill someone, and it's just an "accident". The default needs to move to charging every driver involved in a fatal crash with manslaughter. Currently the police won't even perform basic investigative work that would make any charge pos…

This young woman wasn’t speeding. Throwing her in jail would have done nothing but increase the amount of suffering in this world. She is being punished every day of her life as it is. In Italy they have introduced the crime of “automobilistic manslaughter”. It made no difference whatsoever. Nobody wakes up thinking “Today I’ll drive fast and maybe kill someone”, and nobody drives thinking “oh I must be careful or I’…

She wasn’t speeding but we only have her word for it.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#314

Post by yumaikas »

Permit wrote: post #215
yumaikas wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, there's a lot more to God in the Old Testament than anger, even in those instances. There's grief, especially in the flood, and in the case of Adam and Eve, God provided for their nakedness with better clothes then they had made. To say nothing of the promise and provision provided to nations throughout the Old Testament, the grace given to non-Israelites by keeping them from accidentally violating the m…

>Remembering only the anger of God in the Old Testament is a common, but incomplete reading. There is also grace there. If someone murders another person, we don't immediately start to list out their virtues (He donated to the poor, he was a good father etc.) It is not enough for God to have done "good things", he must also have not done "bad things". The bar for an omnipotent, all-powerful God should be higher than…

I don't believe God's anger and wrath in the Old or New testaments to have been unrighteous or wrong. There's a lot more discussion there than I have time for right now, however. Perhaps we can resume this discussion at a later date elsewhere.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#315

Post by cortesoft »

Pigo wrote: post #7

I can barely bring myself to read stories like this now. I never really thought about it before my son was born, but there's always this dread you live with in the back of your mind. This little helpless person has your life in it's hands. The world and fate is trying to take them out, and if they succeed you'd never recover. You can learn to live with pain, but I don't believe you ever get over something like that.

My cousin's daughter was killed in a car accident while my wife was pregnant with our daughter. I think about her almost every day, and just have this absolute immense sense of dread when I think about what it would be like to lose her in such a sudden and freak way.

I can't imagine.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#316

Post by btrettel »

peatmoss wrote: post #96
dudul wrote: post #25

"The lead officer came and told me that they were not arresting me - there was no indication that I was negligent or distracted or impaired in any way - but he gave me a little lecture saying, "This child died, that's a terrible thing, you need to make sure that you never do this again."" Was I the only one shocked by this? I mean, a little kid died and she's not arrested at least to conduct an investigation? How did…

Not sure why this is being downvoted. Whether you agree with the values expressed or not, it is a fact that people who kill people with their car rarely face any sort of legal repercussion. And yeah, I don’t think the fragility of the agent of death is a reason not to conduct even a cursory investigation into whether there might have been factors related to the crash. Was there anything in the car that might indictat…

What happened to all parties is horrible.

With that being said, I'm inclined not to believe people when they say they're following the speed limit without prior information about the driver. Speeding has become endemic to much of the western world. The driver in the BBC article claims to be following the speed limit, but can't remember it precisely ("45 or 50mph"). That's certainly not a point in her favor. And the various stats I've seen and also my real world experience suggest that relatively few people actually do follow the limit. I'm a cyclist who intentionally rides on roads with low speed limits. I can recall multiple instances where drivers decided to make dangerous "punishment passes" by me for apparently going too slow, despite the fact that I was actually going slightly faster than the speed limit (typically around 17 in a 15 mph zone). I can recall one particular instance where I spoke with a driver at the next light and they seemed incredulous that I was actually meeting the speed limit. I told another driver who almost ran me over that the limit was 25 mph and I was going around 28 downhill, so they can't claim I was going too slow. Their response was that I should be arrested, though they must have been going at least 40! That's entitlement. Too many drivers seem to have the attitude that someone deserves extra risk for inconveniencing others on the road. (The only reason I go a bit over the limit sometimes is because drivers tend to get angry if I don't, though I'm starting to question the utility of this. I go slower if there is no one else on the road.)

I often say that people are different when they're behind the wheel. They're less patient, and outright irrational. Speeding really does not save much time at all outside of perhaps empty highways. I see it all the time because my top speed is less than half of most drivers', yet I regularly catch up with them at stop signs and lights. Speeding is mostly extra risk for little gain.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#317

Post by pnathan »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #304
pixl97 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Broken_Hippo 1 hour ago [-] Save for the interstate highway infrastructure, most roads are done at the state or county level anyway. If you simply start doing this stuff a roads are upgraded (some can be done now and might bring in money), you aren't really spending lots more. You can change the driving culture and mindset, starting by designing roads that generally cause folks to drive slower, implemented at next…

Haha. Very possible, but also depends if people feel inconvenienced enough to be angry afterwards. If it also improves traffic flow, it might be a win most ways.

Read up on the dynamic tolling political fights. Whoo boy, when you start actually charging people for driving (or inconvieniencing them in any fashion), the flamewars get pretty hot pretty fast.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#318

Post by daeken »

alien_at_work wrote: post #246
chickenfries wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you feel sympathy for people on HN, but not for the college students who want to be warned when they're going to read something that might depict some other kind of traumatic experience?

If you're talking about trigger warnings, this is the crux of the so called "SJW" movement: it's a bunch of emotion from ignorant people. Actual studies show that trigger warnings are actually more damaging than not having them [1] [2] [3]. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-cod... [2] http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/cover_story/2016/09/w... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTU3hxg…

I'm unsure if you posted the wrong links, or if you mistook those for science. None of those links reference any "actual studies" whatsoever, let alone peer-reviewed scholarly studies regarding the impact of trigger warnings.

Additionally, the first article linked is one of the worst long-form stories I may have ever read. It's scattered, making a claim and then jumping to another without justifying it in any way, shape, or form. This is the furthest thing from being scientific, and having looked at the authors, I see why. One is "president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education" and the other is "Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University Stern School of Business and the director of Heterodox Academy". The Heterodox Academy is a right-wing group trying to de-left college campuses via bullshit propaganda. They don't care about diversity of views, they just want college kids to take up their antiquated mantle.

Regardless, there may be something harmful that comes from the (over)abundance of trigger warnings, and there may have even been some science along those lines, but it certainly isn't present in or referenced from these links.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#319

Post by 0xcafecafe »

adventured wrote: post #152
mattlondon wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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.

Part of it is also due to the lack of decent public transit opportunities. I would love drive less to work if a decent transit option is open.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#320

Post by albemuth »

Permit wrote: post #215
yumaikas wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, there's a lot more to God in the Old Testament than anger, even in those instances. There's grief, especially in the flood, and in the case of Adam and Eve, God provided for their nakedness with better clothes then they had made. To say nothing of the promise and provision provided to nations throughout the Old Testament, the grace given to non-Israelites by keeping them from accidentally violating the m…

>Remembering only the anger of God in the Old Testament is a common, but incomplete reading. There is also grace there. If someone murders another person, we don't immediately start to list out their virtues (He donated to the poor, he was a good father etc.) It is not enough for God to have done "good things", he must also have not done "bad things". The bar for an omnipotent, all-powerful God should be higher than…

> If someone murders another person, we don't immediately start to list out their virtues.

Tell that to the media.

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