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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

#581

Post by dsnuh »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #572
dsnuh wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use whatever app or medium you choose, my advice was simply that sending directly to specific people is a better than flooding your IG or FB with photos of junior every day.

How is emailing photos to specific people materially different than posting photos to a Facebook account followed by the same people? (Particularly if the account is otherwise private.)

How many people really care? Seriously? I love my kids as much as the next guy, but unless you are talking about a small group of people, yeah, in my opinion that amounts to narcissistic oversharing. I mean if you catch something hilarious, sure, share it. But it seems to me that those kind of posts should be few and far between. We've entered an age where voyuerism == friendship. No one really cares. Do you care about some high school pal's post of their kids activities?

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#582

Post by dsnuh »

ImSkeptical wrote: post #578
dsnuh wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use whatever app or medium you choose, my advice was simply that sending directly to specific people is a better than flooding your IG or FB with photos of junior every day.

I'm not sure why. My sister has an Instagram where she takes a couple of pictures of her kids a day, and has for the past five or six years, and I quite enjoy it. I know many of my family members do too. I visit a URL that just shows me her posts once a week or so, and just scroll to see what my niece and nephew have been up to.

How often do you call or visit your sister? Or your nephews? Just saying that I think we lost something when we could just become low-effort voyeurs.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#583

Post by sliverstorm »

hermitdev wrote: post #573
sliverstorm wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing speeds is a form of collision prevention, is it not? A typical car can just about stop on a dime at 15mph, and a pedestrian has more time to react. There's a whole slew of other pedestrian-friendly street design that we could & should adopt as well, but that doesn't make speed any less of a valid approach.

Speed, in of itself, is not dangerous. What is more dangerous on highways is differential speed. i.e. if you're driving 60 mph when the traffic around you is doing 80 mph, you're the problem. Probably exponentially so if you're driving slowly in the "fast" lane. While rarely enforced, most states in the US have laws that require you to pull to the right if you're impeding traffic (usually defined as holding up +2 veh…

Speed, in of itself, is not dangerous

Certainly! Falling from great height isn't dangerous either, you know.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#584

Post by Splines »

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…

Sounds like something out of a futuristic movie with large class divides. Rich person sits in autonomous car that hits poor child, car stops and legalese starts being printed all over the car, rich person calmly gets out and into second car without even breaking their video conference. "What was that?" "oh, nothing"

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#585

Post by avh02 »

caseysoftware wrote: post #303
jfoucher wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't read the story yet, don't know if I will. I just wanted to reply to your comment with a personal anecdote. My eldest son died in an accident when he was about 2 ½ years old. The dread wasn't there before. I didn't think anything like that would happen to me. You do learn to live with the pain, even I sometimes cry for what would have been futile reasons. But I still couldn't bring myself to enter the church a…

I have two toddlers and that's visceral. I'm sorry. That's awful. That's beyond awful. There are no words. I travel a ton for work and take the earliest flight out in the morning so I can tuck them in the night before. Then I get back late so I'm there when they wake up the next morning. Physically painful but worth it.

I'm not anywhere near "old", but you may want to consider the tradeoffs you're making on your health (I.e: longevity) by being brutal to your body in the short term. I don't have kids, but I like your values... Just make sure you're not screwing up being around later on as well.

Just a concerned stranger. I wish you well.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#586

Post by thomastjeffery »

sliverstorm wrote: post #564
thomastjeffery wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speed is the most quantifiable factor in a collision. It is also very controllable. That is why it gets the focus that it does. The trouble is, it's easy to get distracted by speed as a coefficient in collision intensity, and not pay attention to what causes that collision in the first place. People often think that because speed is such an important factor that they shouldn't drive faster to help traffic flow, or ev…

Reducing speeds is a form of collision prevention, is it not? A typical car can just about stop on a dime at 15mph, and a pedestrian has more time to react. There's a whole slew of other pedestrian-friendly street design that we could & should adopt as well, but that doesn't make speed any less of a valid approach.

Reducing speeds in some places makes sense, but in county roads out in the country, it just creates a reason for bottleneck, which clumps traffic together, making collisions more likely.

For example, a 4-lane road that I drive on to get to the city will usually have two cars in the front driving practically the same speed, and slower than the traffic behind them. To fix this situation, the car on the left should speed up and get over, so that traffic can flow around it and spread out. Unfortunately, there is so much educational focus and enforcement on speed limits that the driver on the left believes [s]he is driving correctly.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#587

Post by sliverstorm »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #586
sliverstorm wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing speeds is a form of collision prevention, is it not? A typical car can just about stop on a dime at 15mph, and a pedestrian has more time to react. There's a whole slew of other pedestrian-friendly street design that we could & should adopt as well, but that doesn't make speed any less of a valid approach.

Reducing speeds in some places makes sense, but in county roads out in the country, it just creates a reason for bottleneck, which clumps traffic together, making collisions more likely. For example, a 4-lane road that I drive on to get to the city will usually have two cars in the front driving practically the same speed, and slower than the traffic behind them. To fix this situation, the car on the left should spee…

Naturally, a lone country road designed for speed is fine. It's when you've got a high speed road with lots of on-street parking and pedestrians right next to traffic, even house fronts, where you've got a major clash of functionalities and a safety problem.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#588

Post by PostOnce »

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…

I think it's mammalian, not just human. We've felt a loss that's hard to describe all throughout history. Just because it was common doesn't mean it hurt any less.

Here's the description of a man losing his son, from Beowulf, a thousand years ago:

(lines 2444-2464 of Heaney's translation)

-----------------------

It was like the misery felt by an old man

Who has lived to see his son’s body

Swing on the gallows.

He begins to keen

And weep for his boy, watching the raven

Gloat where he hangs: he can be of no help.

The wisdom of age is worthless to him.

Morning after morning, he wakes to remember

That his child is gone; he has no interest

In living on until another heir

Is born in the hall, now that his firstborn

Has entered death’s dominion forever.

He gazes sorrowfully at his son’s dwelling,

The banquet hall bereft of all delight,

The windswept hearthstone; the horsemen are sleeping,

The warriors underground; what was is no more.

No tunes from the harp, no cheer raised in the yard.

Alone with his longing, he lies down on his bed

And sings a lament; everything seems too large,

The steadings and the fields.

Such was the feeling

Of loss endured by the lord of the Geats

After Herebeald’s death.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#589

Post by LocalH »

sliverstorm wrote: post #583
hermitdev wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speed, in of itself, is not dangerous. What is more dangerous on highways is differential speed. i.e. if you're driving 60 mph when the traffic around you is doing 80 mph, you're the problem. Probably exponentially so if you're driving slowly in the "fast" lane. While rarely enforced, most states in the US have laws that require you to pull to the right if you're impeding traffic (usually defined as holding up +2 veh…

Speed, in of itself, is not dangerous Certainly! Falling from great height isn't dangerous either, you know.

As long as you safely slow down before you approach the ground, it's not.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#590

Post by GuB-42 »

I expected some metaphor about becoming an adult. Turned out I was wrong, it is exactly as the title says, no second meaning.

Maybe I see so many "interesting" titles that I tend to forget that sometimes, they really mean what they are saying.

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