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Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

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Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

#461

Post by cassianoleal »

danaris wrote: post #452
cassianoleal wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

> If they're afraid of libel, they're probably engaging in it and should stop. 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…

Perhaps. If that's the case though, it doesn't matter how much due diligence and honest reporting you're doing.

This thread is about where we (as societies) are being overly safe.

Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

#462

Post by stuaxo »

p0pcult wrote: post #165
xyzelement wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am really surprised every time I see this vehement hatred of cars. I lived in NYC my whole life and didn't have a car, but now we got kids so we happily moved for the house-and-car-in-the-burbs life and it's absolutely better. People make this choice for a reason. Just curious, do you have a family and do you shlep them by bus everywhere?

Cars existing != car centric culture. Have you been to, say, the Netherlands? There are plenty of cars in Amsterdam, but it is the opposite of a car centric culture. Bikes and pedestrians abound (including bikes with places to "shlep" your kids or cargo around), and they all have right of way, anywhere, and the drivers generally seem to respect it. Contrast that with a big American city like NYC, and though probably…

The Netherlands wasn't always like this, pics of it in the 70s show a typical car centric (in European standards) place with cars everywhere.

Not being America there will have actually been sidewalks everywhere though.

Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

#463

Post by Tostino »

PeterisP wrote: post #229
RajT88 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, not only is the law vague, but also CPS is underfunded. Which of course, you need funding for program oversight.

Well, no surprise it's underfunded if it has to investigate literally every third kid ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34916782 ) - if they tightened up the criteria so that CPS would ignore at least half of this unreasonable number of cases, then they might have enough funding; they seem to be doing so much work that shouldn't be done at all.

I think we should vocalize the concept of "negative work" more often. That being work with which society as a whole would be better off if left undone.

Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

#464

Post by makeitdouble »

ethbr0 wrote: post #457
makeitdouble wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, it would have combated spam effectively, which would have directly decreased the power of Gmail. 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.

This doesn’t compute to me…

On spam: we’ve been receiving physical direct spam mail from the dawn of the modern postal service, and the delivery is paid by the sender. Same way on linkedin for instance, recruiters pay to reach inboxes. Same for many other platforms where spamming and shoving content in users’ feed is monetized by the platform itself.

And that’s the bulk of the alternate business models and revenue streams we’re talking about.

Not everything needs to be free, but raising paywalls at the wrong place can have devastating effects on platforms.

Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

#465

Post by jehb »

strix_varius wrote: post #350
jehb wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm objecting to the parent comment where this originated, where the author juxtaposed the safety of a child growing up in a "suburban or rural" setting with living "near a highway though, or a high crime area." Crime is not an urban phenomenon, and when we describe it as one, we're flaming stereotypes. I don't think it was intentional and my point was not to denigrate the parent comment, but to encourage us to avoid…

The data clearly supports the parent comment: https://www.city-journal.org/violent-crime-in-cities-on-the-...

Cherrypicking violent crime in a discussion about child safety is misleading and fearmongering.

More children die from non-violent crime. The person who drives 10 over the speed limit down a suburban street is a child-endangering criminal, but so many people think the crimes they commit aren't "real" crimes.

If you want to look at data, overall rural child mortality exceeds urban child mortality in the United States; some of these causes are criminal, others are not. Motor vehicle death are the leading cause of child mortality, and for children under 18 exceed deaths from murder 2:1. Within vehicle deaths, for example, seatbelt usage is one of the predominant differentiators between rural and urban outcomes, and guess which areas have the lowest seat belt usage, and a disproportionately high number of deaths as a result? Yep, those "low crime" rural areas. Those parents who don't buckle up their kids are all criminals, too. I'm tired of seeing the label "crime" only applied to people committing certain crimes, in certain areas. It's applied in the most racist possible way in this country.

Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

#466

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

dragonwriter wrote: post #48
kwhitefoot wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Over 50 percent of Black children in the U.S. will experience a child welfare investigation before their eighteenth birthday (nearly double the rate of white children). So more than 25% of all children experience a child welfare investigation? That's mind boggling.

>> Over 50 percent of Black children in the U.S. will experience a child welfare investigation before their eighteenth birthday (nearly double the rate of white children). > So more than 25% of all children experience a child welfare investigation? Yes, 37.4%. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5227926/#:~:tex... .

This is precisely like the situations which are present in every large company, where people fight to protect stupid, manual processes and digital paperwork in the name of justifying their existence at the company.

After cities fund these departments, people work very hard at justifying their employment, and trying to increase their metrics, to make it look like they're having an impact.

"We" recently ran afoul of the police because my son was caught having been handed an illegal substance in the high school bathroom. The investigator threatened us with prosecution for possession, then admitted it probably didn't rise to this action, and then ran down a litany of programs and counselors she could get our son involved with. I could tell she was salivating at the thought of getting our son put into these programs, just to be able to say something like, "We 'helped' 17% more kids this year; we need more funding!"

The investigator seemed to be on the hunt for names; we declined to have our son give a statement at all.

My wife is a counselor herself; we're dealing with that side of it.

Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

#467

Post by p0pcult »

mtrower wrote: post #381
Gigachad wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all occasional things. Day to day life is better car free. And then when you want to go out you can rent a car. Or even own one. You don’t have to use a car for every single activity just because you sometimes go skiing.

Until you want to do things like bring groceries home (more than you can carry in your two hands), or something novel like, say, building materials. People do do those sorts of things, you know. Or are you telling me that day to day life is better if I'm not a woodworker? More food for thought: how cold does it have to get, with how much snow on the ground, before walking can be reasonably said to be unattractive to…

Having building mats delivered frequently would be a good reason to have a work vehicle.

In walkable places, you can just walk down and get that day's groceries as needed, or maybe you do it on your way home from your walkable job, etc. It's more flexible, fresher, requires less mass consumption, less packaging, as well--lots of ancillary benefits.

More food for thought: I've heard a saying (attributed to Norwegian/Scandinavian folk wisdom) that goes like, "There is no such thing as bad weather, only inadequate clothing."

Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

#468

Post by danjoredd »

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #322
danjoredd wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its been a genuine problem. I have heard people actually say that if a kid is playing outside by themselves, then the parent should be charged with child neglect because the kid could get hurt. Any time a kid gets hurt on YouTube the comments are filled with people blaming the parent for not being outside with them. Thing is, playing outside by yourself gives you a strong sense of independence. The kid might get hurt…

That is all well and good for rich people with big backyards or nanny's but how about the rest of the country?

Look man, I grew up in a trailer park. Very few people live alongside highways or in places where it is not safe to play outside. Currently, I live in a low income apartment complex, and I still see kids playing outside. three years ago I lived on the most violent street in our town because rent was so cheap there, and I still saw kids riding around on scooters and playing ball. A lot of it is mentality, and what you view as an acceptable risk. Has very little to do with income.

Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

#469

Post by andrepd »

eru wrote: post #440
medler wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunno about that city in particular but in general car deaths have been increasing over the past decades, presumably because cars keep getting bigger and heavier. It’s a lot safer for kids to cross the street when everyone’s driving a Taurus than when everyone’s driving a modern Toyota Tundra

> [...] but in general car deaths have been increasing over the past decades, [...] Are you sure about that? What's your source? Some quick searching gave me https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit... which even looks like a decrease per capita over the past decades. No clue whether that source of data is any good, and what the rates outside of the Us are. Just FYI, I don't like car centric place…

Deaths for people inside cars have been decreasing, deaths for all other people, such as pedestrians or cyclists, have been rising.

Re: Making It Legal to Play Outside: “Reasonable Childhood Independence” Bills

#470

Post by andrepd »

omegaham wrote: post #284
xkcd-sucks wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like this infrastructural risk is media driven to the extent of "pedophile kidnappers" or "razor blades in apples". For example I grew up in an Eastern MA "suburb" in the mid 90s - early 2000s, characterized by narrow winding roads, fast drivers, and no streetlights. Everyone too young or unconnected to have car access bicycled or walked everywhere; parents were a bit fearful but ultimately acquiescent ("bet…

Yep, I grew up in the woodsy part of Framingham up by Route 20. A whole bunch of those roads are outright dangerous. My parents groused about how dangerous it was, but mostly trusted me not to be stupid.

Good on your n=1 data, but pedestrian fatalities have been steadily increasing for the last decades.

Also, nothing to do with "being stupid", if there are cars going 60mph right next to where you're walking, it's the luck of the draw whether you get decapitated by a truck or not.

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