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On Car Seats as Contraception
41–50 of 121 posts
Re: On Car Seats as Contraception
#42While I feel we need to be gradually reducing the number of people on the planet (can anyone point me to the number of humans earth can sustainably support?), I agree with what the article is saying. It seems to me one of the biggest things is the pace of change and potential for criminal charges. Especially considering that many people are likely breaking the laws (not just car seats, but supervision, etc), with no…
> Especially considering that many people are likely breaking the laws (not just car seats, but supervision, etc), with no ill effects Car accidents are the #1 cause of death of kids in Mexico. People have 0 literacy about car seats there. > I was riding without a booster seat well before age 8 and we'd occasionally ride with a friend's family in a station wagon or SUV with the add-on cargo seats. This story could ha…
"Car accidents are the #1 cause of death of kids in Mexico. People have 0 literacy about car seats there."
There are other traffic differences as well. We can't tie all of it just to the car seat. Even with car seats (and other measures not in MX), it's still a leading cause in the US.
"This story could have been very different if your car was hit and you were disabled because of, I don't know, something totally preventable."
Totally preventable? You do understand that even kids in car seats are susceptible, right?. I was in an accident as a child and had no ill effects. We can play the "could" game all day, like outlawing cars would make all traffic deaths preventable.
Do you have any data on the net benefit of the laws? What percentage of people would not use the devices without the laws? Which instances would the devices be beneficial - the article thinks 90% of the issues would be covered at age 4, and note that rear facing is still a safer form of travel, so should we have cars with all rear facing seats except for the driver? Sure there are preventable deaths that could be avoid this way. Where is the line drawn and why? How many people's lives have been ruined by enforcement of the laws.
Re: On Car Seats as Contraception
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's car seats that are affecting fertility, and definitely couldn't be the cost of raising a child. /s
Money and time are fungible on a societal level. If you throw up barriers to entry in the form of time and/or money you will get less of whatever it is you're throwing barriers in front of. Car seats are just one example of a barrier.
I'm going to guess you don't have kids.
Re: On Car Seats as Contraception
#44I have no kids nor have I ever had to transport kids so have no experience in this area, but I would guess it would be possible to design a multi-child car seat that can fit N kids in less space than N 1-child car seats.
A bit of Googling turns up a company doing that [1], but those are not legal in the US. They are legal in Europe, though. Does Europe have looser standards for child car seats? Do US standards preclude doing something like this in the US?
The Multimac 1000 fits 3 kids in the back seat of a Fiat 500.
Re: On Car Seats as Contraception
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminds me of the George Carlin bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdSi9NW5u3E Humor aside, it's a depressing worldview to me that each marginal human is a net negative. I take the opposite view, that each human is a net positive - and we need all the brainpower we can get to solve all of our problems.
We could solve a lot of our problems right now if people were prepared to change how they live and accept a decent amount more responsibility (e.g. sort waste by hand, etc.). Scaling up problems typically hasn't helped, and you get novel issues at large scale (e.g. parasites and diseases thrive due to monoculture in huge farms). As Bill Burr noted, we could all drive tanks to work if there weren't as many of us. It's…
Love bill burr
Re: On Car Seats as Contraception
#46Quoted post unavailable.
There aren't too many people in America. How about we focus on fixing the services we have for those already here You're going to have a hard time fixing anything at all when your population pyramid is inverted. For long term stability you need to have one child per adult. The US currently produces 0.85 children per adult. Innovation dies when all the young peoples' work is going to support a massive geriatric popula…
All Ponzi schemes eventually fail. If you're paying current dividends out of new capital, you're running a Ponzi scheme.
Find another way to fix things before it's too late.
Re: On Car Seats as Contraception
#47While I feel we need to be gradually reducing the number of people on the planet (can anyone point me to the number of humans earth can sustainably support?), I agree with what the article is saying. It seems to me one of the biggest things is the pace of change and potential for criminal charges. Especially considering that many people are likely breaking the laws (not just car seats, but supervision, etc), with no…
> When I was a kid (not too long ago) I was riding without a booster seat well before age 8 and we'd occasionally ride with a friend's family in a station wagon or SUV with the add-on cargo seats. It wasn't unusual to occasionally ride in a pickup bed on private roads, or pile 8-9 people in the old Caprice for short (This is a great example of literal survivorship bias
Re: On Car Seats as Contraception
#48While I feel we need to be gradually reducing the number of people on the planet (can anyone point me to the number of humans earth can sustainably support?), I agree with what the article is saying. It seems to me one of the biggest things is the pace of change and potential for criminal charges. Especially considering that many people are likely breaking the laws (not just car seats, but supervision, etc), with no…
> While I feel we need to be gradually reducing the number of people on the planet We are on that trajectory now. No need to do anything special. It's baked into demographics and unavoidable at this point. https://quillette.com/2022/08/20/the-unexpected-future/
Trajectory to what exactly? I can't find anything about the sustainable carrying capacity, only the max which seems to be unsustainable based on current scenarios.
Re: On Car Seats as Contraception
#49> Enthusiasm for these laws has not been curbed by studies showing that child car seats are no more effective than seat belts in preventing death or serious injury for children above age two (e.g. Levitt 2008, Doyle and Levitt 2010). Like many of the other Freakonomics conclusions, this one is at best oversimplified, and at worst actively dangerous. To simply quote it as uncontested fact is ridiculously incompetent.…
Without even jumping into the detail of the study, for most toddlers under 3 year old with an average height, a three point seatbelt would have the chest strap crossing at neck height.
Irrespective of statistics, common sense would dictate that using your neck region to restrain any human at multiple G's impact, is most definitely not a good idea.
Re: On Car Seats as Contraception
#50While I feel we need to be gradually reducing the number of people on the planet (can anyone point me to the number of humans earth can sustainably support?), I agree with what the article is saying. It seems to me one of the biggest things is the pace of change and potential for criminal charges. Especially considering that many people are likely breaking the laws (not just car seats, but supervision, etc), with no…
> When I was a kid (not too long ago) I was riding without a booster seat well before age 8 and we'd occasionally ride with a friend's family in a station wagon or SUV with the add-on cargo seats. It wasn't unusual to occasionally ride in a pickup bed on private roads, or pile 8-9 people in the old Caprice for short ( This is a great example of literal survivorship bias
Yes, and so is the fact that we don't all ride rear facing, or that we have cars at all.
The point is to draw a line somewhere that makes sense. The Overton window has been shifting an a rapidly increasing pace for child "safety" laws in the past two decades or so. If we make it an absolute about "Even one child", then we ignore promoting net benefit and can end up with detrimental effects, which is essentially the point of the article.