Robots on Lake Michigan beaches to prevent drownings • Hacker News Board

Re: Robots on Lake Michigan beaches to prevent drownings

#101

Post by brewdad » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 2:32 AM UTC

MengerSponge wrote: post #20

akira2501 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is, which is why I said "not a useful _mindset_." I'm not arguing the semantics, just suggesting that allowing yourself to use them may alter your behavior in negative ways.

If the pandemic taught us anything (which it really, shockingly, didn't) it's that moral hazard is less of a risk than Chicago School economists would have you think. Introducing mechanisms to keep people safer rarely yields the feared perverse behavior, so just introduce the bit of safety and keep a wary eye out for the perverse behavior.

Driver behaviors once the risk of being stopped by a police officer went away during the pandemic beg to differ. Many of those misbehaviors continue today as new habits even after enforcement has resumed to varying degrees.

Re: Robots on Lake Michigan beaches to prevent drownings

#102

Post by seanmcdirmid » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 2:33 AM UTC

pomian wrote: post #62

ben7799 wrote: post #24

If it's $12k and requires an operator this seems more of a band-aid than anything. Where are the operators going to come from? And for a lot of places the operator + device probably pays for 3 lifeguards or swim instructors. Nothing is going to get better until we start trying to get out of the hole and improve the average person's ability to swim and make decisions in open water. I used to be a lifeguard and swim in…

Dartmouth college (USA), had a requirement that you must pass a swimming test to receive your degree. ( Obviously - if you didn't know how, there were free lessons.) They have recently dropped that requirement! ( After more than 200 years.) Why? At least with the old rules, you always knew that if a person was a Dartmouth grad, you could push them in the water. Or, at least, not worry about boating with them.

Most Chinese universities still have this requirement, but my wife was able to pass the test without knowing how to swim (the instructor didn't really pay attention during the test). We fixed that before we went snorkeling on our honeymoon to Bali.

Re: Robots on Lake Michigan beaches to prevent drownings

#103

Post by aaron695 » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 2:40 AM UTC

ben7799 wrote: post #24

If it's $12k and requires an operator this seems more of a band-aid than anything. Where are the operators going to come from? And for a lot of places the operator + device probably pays for 3 lifeguards or swim instructors. Nothing is going to get better until we start trying to get out of the hole and improve the average person's ability to swim and make decisions in open water. I used to be a lifeguard and swim in…

[dead]

Re: Robots on Lake Michigan beaches to prevent drownings

#104

Post by Apocryphon » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 4:16 AM UTC

aeternum wrote: post #64

Apocryphon wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swimming is not the only form of cardiovascular exercise and open water is not the only place to swim.

Of course, there are still non-banned activities but it's not only swimming. Cheerleading, football, skateboarding, even lifting are risky activities and do have some chance of injury. It's easy to cite the injury stats for these and use that as a reason to avoid, but my point is we rarely look at the other side. Kids' interest differs and the more activities we ban, the more we curtail the set of potential interests…

My point is that no one is trying to "ban swimming" - it sounds like the university is banning "unsupervised swimming," a proposal that seems more nuanced and might merit discussion of its precise implementation than preventing people from going to the pool.

Also, it sounds like the problem is the school's administration is behaving tyrannically for its own institutional self-perpetuation and a lot of the bans are not actually motivated by saving lives.

I get that while modern society is often overprotective, but this sort of hysteria about hysteria seems to be un-nuanced and one-sided. I mean, you want to talk skateboarding, apparently they're letting kids compete these days and 9-year old Ema Kawakami became the very first person to land three 900s in a row, something that Tony Hawk spent years trying to accomplish.

https://twitter.com/XGames/status/1802378553985499425?

Re: Robots on Lake Michigan beaches to prevent drownings

#105

Post by Apocryphon » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 4:21 AM UTC

jpollock wrote: post #76

Anon84 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People drown in bathtubs all the time... There are only two obvious ways to minimize risk: teach people to swim or prevent people from swimming. Guess which one is more cost-effective?

Since you can't stop them from swimming, it's teaching them to swim. The GP post was "stop them from going into dangerous areas", which is why I pointed out _swimming_pools_ would meet the definition of "dangerous".

My point is that limiting swimming in certain areas is hardly the same thing as banning all swimming, it just feels like there is an alarmism about alarmism and perhaps there can be nuance and self-reflection from all sides of the debate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40784425

Re: Robots on Lake Michigan beaches to prevent drownings

#106

Post by WalterBright » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 4:32 AM UTC

makeitdouble wrote: post #96

WalterBright wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never own a swimming pool due to the ginormous sums in liability judgments. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/steilacoom-to-pay-... https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/jury-awards-13-mil...

I can't read the first article, but judging from the second: > The sidewalk is “perennially covered in water and algae,” according to the complaint. Other Queen Anne residents testified in court that they had also fallen at this location. It reads to me like the sidewalk was a public danger, the building owners were under the hook to maintain it but never cared, until literally getting sued. What am I missing ?

Maybe watching one's step?

Re: Robots on Lake Michigan beaches to prevent drownings

#107

Post by WalterBright » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 4:34 AM UTC

brewdad wrote: post #95

WalterBright wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the idea of the curb bump-outs. Intersections where you cannot see the cross traffic are definitely higher risk. > Mike McGinn, the mayor at the time, said he wanted to recalibrate the public’s expectation of road safety to make it more akin to their thoughts on airplane safety, where no fatality is considered acceptable. That isn't true. There is an FAA standard.

No. The standard is zero. That's why the FAA investigates every crash or safety incident no matter how small. Realistically, the number will never be zero but if we don't put in the effort to improve constantly, safety will stagnate.

> The standard is zero.

This is simply incorrect. The FAA has a standard of getting the death rate below a certain figure per million flights, not zero.

Re: Robots on Lake Michigan beaches to prevent drownings

#108

Post by aftbit » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 4:36 AM UTC

brewdad wrote: post #99

akadruid1 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These exist and have been saving lives for at least 6 years: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/lifegua...

Costs 20x as much as this robot. It does have the advantage of being used successfully once .

The drone used in that situation is the "Little Ripper Lifesaver" which supposedly sells for around $50k[1].

From TFA, the cost for the boat was around $12k. That means this is about 4x more expensive, not 20x. That doesn't include the droppable inflatable boat but that is probably not going to break the bank either.

1: https://www.insidehook.com/culture/little-ripper-rescue-dron...

Re: Robots on Lake Michigan beaches to prevent drownings

#109

Post by thaumasiotes » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 4:47 AM UTC

makeitdouble wrote: post #96

WalterBright wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never own a swimming pool due to the ginormous sums in liability judgments. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/steilacoom-to-pay-... https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/jury-awards-13-mil...

I can't read the first article, but judging from the second: > The sidewalk is “perennially covered in water and algae,” according to the complaint. Other Queen Anne residents testified in court that they had also fallen at this location. It reads to me like the sidewalk was a public danger, the building owners were under the hook to maintain it but never cared, until literally getting sued. What am I missing ?

You can read the first article. https://archive.is/txCN0

A summer camp run by the city government left a group of 9 teenagers "unsupervised" next to a lake. I feel safe in saying that a lake cannot constitute a public nuisance.

DJ McCutcheon, one of those teenagers, "was underwater for about six minutes before bystanders rescued him" [after which he subsequently died], strongly suggesting that he was unsupervised in only the most technical sense.

I would have to agree with WalterBright that Steilacoom didn't do anything unreasonable here. The idea that 13-year-olds can't be trusted not to kill themselves if left - not even alone, but away from an adult who is officially responsible for keeping them alive - for six minutes,† is completely absurd.

The legal trouble appears to have arisen mostly from the fact that leaving the group of teens "unsupervised" violated a formal written policy of the camp, not from the non-fact that it involved some kind of wrongdoing or recklessness.

† They were left for much longer than six minutes, but since 100% of the problem occurred within a six-minute window, a standard that aimed to solve the problem would require smaller periods of "unsupervision" than that.

Re: Robots on Lake Michigan beaches to prevent drownings

#110

Post by makeitdouble » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 4:58 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #109

makeitdouble wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't read the first article, but judging from the second: > The sidewalk is “perennially covered in water and algae,” according to the complaint. Other Queen Anne residents testified in court that they had also fallen at this location. It reads to me like the sidewalk was a public danger, the building owners were under the hook to maintain it but never cared, until literally getting sued. What am I missing ?

You can read the first article. https://archive.is/txCN0 A summer camp run by the city government left a group of 9 teenagers "unsupervised" next to a lake. I feel safe in saying that a lake cannot constitute a public nuisance. DJ McCutcheon, one of those teenagers, "was underwater for about six minutes before bystanders rescued him" [after which he subsequently died], strongly suggesting that he was unsupervised in…

Thanks, so the town was sued for managing a summer camp where the supervisor couldn't supervise the kids, and it was a structural problem (if was alone peddling 12 kids)