451–460 of 531 posts
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Depending on your circumstances you may be able to emigrate to the Netherlands.
Western Europe in general. It's not just an NL thing.
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I'd be wary of putting all of these examples into the same box, though. If kids can't play outside anymore because of overprotective parents or an overprotective society, that feels to me like a net negative. If newspapers are afraid to publish because they are fearful of libel suits, then we might miss fact-checked stories that are in the public interest, and it's not clear that that's a good trade-off. On the other…
> If newspapers are afraid to publish because they are fearful of libel suits, then we might miss fact-checked stories that are in the public interest, and it's not clear that that's a good trade-off. I'd argue the opposite. If they're afraid of libel, they're probably engaging in it and should stop. If they're sure of what they're saying and have proof of due diligence, they shouldn't be afraid. If they're not sure,…
That may depend on the jurisdiction.
My understanding is that libel laws in the UK, for instance, are horribly broad, and, importantly, don't actually take the truth into account. (From what I've read, I would say it would be more apt to call them "defamation laws", but no one put me in charge.)
So if it were as simple as "just don't print verifiable lies", then I'd tend to agree with you, but given that there are places where you can print verifiable truth and still get slapped with a successful libel suit for it...
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> The advice I have for my kid is to not give a damn what the teacher says, to grab the nearest long durable object and smash out the windows and run away. Meanwhile, here in the UK, the advice I gave my son was to look both ways when crossing the road, not to mess around with plug sockets, and not to run when carrying a pair of scissors. I honestly don't know how the US has got itself into such a messed up state tha…
> don't know how the US has got itself into such a messed up state that such drills are considered necessary As the comment above you says, they’re between counterproductive and unnecessary, and purely creatures of posturing and appeasing scared parents.
Unfortunately, due to the political situation in the country, it's currently impossible to do the one thing that we know might actually stop those shootings (make it harder or impossible for people, especially children, to get their hands on heavy weaponry). So by the "logic" of "we must do something" "this is something" "then we must do this", we have active shooter drills instead.
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Advocating for laws that promote reasonable childhood independence benefits families where all the adults have to work more hours to get by, leaving their kids in safe but unsupervised situations more often.
This parenting style doesn’t necessarily save parents time. For example, to implement this: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/06/09/6169288... It means involving toddlers into helping in small ways (and having to pay attention to the toddler’s capacity), even if that help initially involves many mistakes. People who are barely treading water may not have the resources to do something like that, being too…
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I'm convinced the internet would have been better if we had charged $0.05 per email. Making something free definitely has its costs.
I get your point, and it was a pretty serious discussion in the early days I think. Now, introducing micro-transactions into people‘s communication looks like a straight ticket to hell to me. Reminds me of the early days of SMS when only porn sites, scams and businesses that made you pay for their SMS bills would send you messages.
But it would also have, more importantly, created a revenue stream and normalized microtransactions, which would have created an alternate business model to attention/advertising.
Nobody likes paying for things... but I think the "free" future we're living in is pretty shitty compared to the way things were before.
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I was in a college class that had a mix of inner city and suburban kids. Ask the suburban kids to describe the inner city? Dangerous. Crime-ridden. Ask the inner city kids to describe inner city? Community. Know their neighbors.
Maybe try asking the kids who didn't go to college in both places what their opinions are next time.
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Maybe try asking the kids who didn't go to college in both places what their opinions are next time.
Why would their opinions differ?
Mind you, I'm not necessarily with the GP. It seems like a question of only marginal relevance. But the parent reads like a low-effort dismissal that doesn't actually address the point.
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Car-centric culture and gun-centric culture is making our society to be like this. Also, most states defund mental health institutions. Finally, the 24/7 news cycle covers a lot of crazy behaviors, encouraging copycats to one-up the crime even more. Is it a surprise if Americans are more paranoid than ever?
> Car-centric culture and gun-centric culture is making our society to be like this This can't possibly be the cause. The US has been filled to the brim with cars for decades - yet this is a modern phenomenon. Similarly, bad guy have had loads of guns in the US since even before the US was a thing... yet again, this is a modern phenomenon. > Finally, the 24/7 news cycle covers a lot of crazy behaviors, encouraging co…
I think you may underestimate the degree to which US infrastructure has failed to keep up with increasing use of cars.
The interstate highway system was built in the post-WWII years. It was designed to cope with the amount of traffic that existed then, plus a reasonable buffer for growth. It actually did a pretty good job of keeping up for at least a few decades. Anecdotally, growing up in NYS in the '80s and '90s, I-90 (aka the NYS Thruway) was a perfectly reasonable road to drive along.
As the 2000s came, it was already starting to get crowded. These days, I always have to weigh the extra speed and directness of the Thruway against the stress of driving among so many cars—and, especially, so many tractor trailers, including many double-length trailers.
Other roads may not get quite the same concentration of additional traffic as interstates, but as car ownership in general has trended up, more and more places have filled up with them.
As for guns...yes, lots of people have had lots of guns for centuries. But in 1999, the Columbine shooting showed that disaffected young people could get massive media attention if they shot up a school and then killed themselves. It has been fairly well proven by now that the media attention given to these events is a significant driver of more such. You even comment on this, but don't appear connect it to the rise of mass shootings in the modern era.
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There's also a second phenomenon at work here. There's been a very strong streak of sensationalism in the media about children in danger that, from what I've seen, mostly started in the early '90s. There was a prominent disappearance in the Upstate NY area around that time (the Sarah Ann Wood case) that stayed in headlines for years; the JonBenét Ramsey case was also in the mid-'90s, and much more nationally sensationalized.
In general, there was an increase in pushing the "stranger danger" idea during that time, and...guess who are the parents now? The people who were young and impressionable growing up during that era.