601–610 of 683 posts
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.
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…
> the largest changes in our lives are beyond our control.
My brother and I started a very small humanist school in Hungary to give my nephew a better education and yes, to shelter my nephew from being bullied. Yes, quite a lot of things in our lives is beyond our control but with a lot of perseverance you can wrestle back control. Although the necessity to do this is exactly beyond our control...
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I don't think this is the argument the author of the article was trying to send at all. This accident could have just as easily happened in a dense urban core, as it could have in suburbia. The message was something else - sometimes, bad things just happen to people, and there is little you can do about it other than move on, and learn from the experiences.
The likelihood of death is proportional to speed [1], and the speed is lower in the urban cores. The math is super simple, and let's stop trying to justify bad urbanistic (essentially, political) decisions blaming it on the bad fate instead. [1] http://www.copenhagenize.com/2012/11/the-85th-percentile-fol...
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Well, people had to be careful before the automobile too, you know. People could by killed by horses or wagons. The introduction of the automobile didn't make it suddenly unsafe to be in the street.
A collision with a horse and wagon might break your leg, but it's highly unlikely to kill you. That's one of the main points of "Vision Zero" that I linked. Any collision at speeds less than 20mph has a very low fatality risk.
You can argue the specifics, but it seems modern recreational horseback riding is fairly dangerous. http://freakonomics.com/2006/08/28/whoa-nellie/
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Is time better spent earning money to help pay for a kids financial future, or better spent playing with the kid? It's a fine line and I'm not sure there's a one-size-fits-all answer.
Unless I already have that future locked down.
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Same here. I cringe when I see the common HN rhetoric that parents now a days are over-protective. Go say that to parents who lost a child and now live in regret. Kids are unpredictable. I remember being 7 years old and waiting with my mom to cross a busy street. For some reason that today is unknown to me, I decided to just run across the street as soon as the lights turned yellow. I almost got hit and my mom almost…
Being careful is fine and understandable but over-protective "helicoptor" parenting is bad for the kids: it destroys their self confidence. I know a helicoptor family where their youngest daughter couldn't properly walk down stairs until she was 12. She's already broke more bones than all my kids combined.
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Sure, that is the message they want to give over. However, the message I take away from this is that somehow we have accepted into society this incredibly dangerous thing which while convenient it not necessary at all. While we make everything else in society safe, we seem to ignore the most dangerous thing around us, that kills around 1.3 million people every single year.
It's amazing how much death and disease we're willing to suffer for the sake of convenience, isn't it. We treat automobiles as a necessity of modern life in all places, but it wasn't always this way. In the 1910s and 20s, many writers excoriated all of the roads bringing dangerous cars into places where people live and play. It turns out they were right, but we just became blind to the danger.
Read Super Freakonomics for the interesting data that they observe between the two.
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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.
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True. My position as a sheepdog isn't limited to strangers. My children aren't unsupervised with many relatives or family friends either. They're also not left unsupervised with clergy.
Research is tricky, but at the moment we think the person most likely to abuse a child is their sibling.