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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

#341

Post by LordKano »

treyfitty wrote: post #322

Ever since I became a father (2 months ago), I've been seeing the world as a dangerous and an ugly place. This is confounded with the fact that, a month ago, I came to find out that my brother was bullied in HS and was never the same. My brother has been out of high school for about 9 years now, but It took me 6 whole years to consider the possibility that something was wrong. I was in undergrad and focused on my stu…

For me, that happened when I became the father of two little girls.

My radar is up whenever I am in public with my daughters. I notice if strangers look for too long in their direction or if I see someone hanging out where children are, without a child of their own.

Occasionally, I'll spot another father like me. We'll lock eyes for a moment and it's clear that we recognize each other (for what we are, not necessarily who we are) and then go back to scanning the area.

I'm sorry to hear about what happened to your brother. Kids can be horrible to each other. I don't say that to minimize his experience but to say that I understand.

This heightened awareness that you feel, it comforts me to know that there are others out there. Obviously, there are no guarantees in life but your vigilance will give your son a better shot at safely reaching adulthood than many other boys who don't have someone looking out for them like that.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#342

Post by dsfyu404ed »

mcguire wrote: post #184
Steltek wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 St…

Vehicle inspections, at least, differ between states; AL doesn't currently require one annually. California has long had much stronger environmental regulations.

>California has long had much stronger environmental regulations.

But not safety which is the issue here.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#343

Post by JKCalhoun »

gcheong wrote: post #138
JKCalhoun wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let’s hope technology will finally prevent that. Funny, because it's technology that caused the death in the first place. Maybe consider how to get rid of the car?

Lots of everyday technology has the potential to cause death. People sometimes get hit by trains and those run on tracks. Whether the advantage of using the technology outweigh the downsides is always the tradeoff we need to decide on with an eye on trying to eliminate the downsides as much as possible while retaining the benefits.

True, just pointing out the irony of waiting for technology to fix technology.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#344

Post by naasking »

smitherfield wrote: post #327
BearGoesChirp wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When has this ever not been true? In the past before child abuse became seen as a big deal. Granted, if you hurt the child of some wealthy/powerful individual it was considered bad, but children of the poor, and especially children of single mothers were offered no where near the status they are given today. Just look at societies where infanticide was common place to see that harming a defenseless child wasn't cons…

But those are examples of acts which we consider immoral and criminal today, but were acceptable and legal (or even moral and mandatory) in the past. People didn't think it was okay to commit crimes targeting child victims, they just didn't think of those things as crimes at all (which, at the time, they weren't). That's a separate issue from what you were (or seemed to be) saying in the post I responded to, that in…

> People didn't think it was okay to commit crimes targeting child victims, they just didn't think of those things as crimes at all (which, at the time, they weren't).

See, this is the problem he's pointing out: if it wasn't considered ok, it would have been a crime. The point being that children as a whole weren't seen as a protected class the way they are now. At best, you might treat the child of a wealthy person well but only because of the consequences the father might inflict upon you, not because the child itself was worthy of that treatment.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#345

Post by Mithaldu »

LocalH wrote: post #274
Mithaldu wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty that could've been done to prevent this. Most basic and simple would be to institute a traffic law culture in which the driver does get blame by default for hurting a pedestrian so they have pedestrians on their mind every single minute they control their car.

Have you not seen what happens in some parts of the world where people throw themselves in front of vehicles as a form of insurance fraud? And you want to extend that to make the driver guilty of a crime when that happens?

I live in germany, traffic law works like that here, and the insurance fraud you mention is not known here. Not sure why. Maybe because of other aspects of the law culture here.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#346

Post by saturdaysaint »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #301
saturdaysaint wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fundamentally transforming default thinking patterns that have been etched deeply through years of habit and experience. ...and hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. We are hard wired to spend an inordinate amount of time and attention on averting losses of all kinds, often to a degree that confounds any sort of cost/benefit analysis.

Not really. Young people are naturally adventurous, and old people are naturally cautious. It's a balance of life stages that works really well for society in aggregate.

Both are averting losses of different kinds. Young people are driven by social pressures (FOMO), old people are avoiding bigger risks (mortality, financial calamity).

This is bog standard behavioral economics. I highly recommend Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow".

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#347

Post by CalRobert »

rdiddly wrote: post #207
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.

And all of you saying "same here" because your children are so precious, you all swore off driving cars, right? Because other people's children are precious?

Umm, pretty much.

Sold my car, moved to Europe, commute by bike. I do rent a car now and then when it can't be avoided and in those scenarios I drive with extreme caution.

The US has a 9/11 every month on the roads and almost nobody there gives a shit. I never understood it.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#348

Post by rev_bird »

lolsal wrote: post #222
erik_landerholm wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not stupid it’s a morally wrong thing to say and very mean. She was what, 19? He obviously knew it was an accident (why did he let her go? He obviously thought it was an accident, probably unavoidable), more the little boys fault (if you have to blame someone) than her’s..what a jerk-off.

How is it morally wrong?

The cop said it wasn't her fault, she didn't do anything wrong, but ALSO that "you need to make sure that you never do this again." How is she supposed to do that? The cop is pretending to absolve her of guilt while explicitly saying she is somehow in control of an uncontrollable situation.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#349

Post by dsfyu404ed »

tombrossman wrote: post #204
adventured wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The link/pdf below says 13,000km per driver in the EU. Other sources indicate 11,000km or 12,000km. Any of those work reasonably for this comparison. https://www.adac.de/_mmm/pdf/fi_nutzen_pkw-verkehrs_europa_f... The US figure is around 22,000km per person for 2017. In Sweden for example it's closer to 12,000km per person. There's a dramatic gulf between the distance driven in the US and most everywhere else. The pa…

I agree that fatalities can be expected to rise as miles driven rise, however these two data points are not so closely linked. For example, driving ten miles in western Kansas on I-70 at midday is not the same as driving ten miles in a metropolitan area filled with shopping centers, with the sun low on the horizon ahead of you and a dirty windshield. There are many, many variables which complicate the study of traffi…

>but it's far more complicated than tracking per capita miles driven (not that you were making this specific argument, just pointing out the obvious).

x2. A drunk driver going off a cliff is uninteresting since it's a known problem with known solutions (regardless of your personal opinion on how adequate the implementation of those solutions is).

Stuff where no party did much that was unreasonable is what's interesting because those tell you what edge cases cause the system to fail.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#350

Post by macintux »

cableshaft wrote: post #331
mikemac wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, wish there was a Netflix section for "movies where no children are harmed"

They also need one for "movies where no dogs are killed". There's a lot more movies that do that than you might expect. I know several people that get really angry when they are subjected to a movie with this in it.

10 years ago I had to have my German Shepherd put down; she was suffering from cancer, and I couldn't take it any longer.

A few weeks later I was watching I Am Legend in the theater, and when (spoiler alert) I could see what looked like the inevitable demise of Will Smith's dog, I hoofed it out as quickly as I could. I was completely unprepared to deal with that, and to this day I've never finished the movie.

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