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Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

afterbabel.com

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Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

#351

Post by dangus »

throwaway7ahgb wrote: post #303
Foreignborn wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're saying doesn't hold up. Japan: > Road fatalities per 100 000 population: 2.6 USA: > Road fatalities per 100 000 population: 13.8 [0] https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/japan-road-safe... [1] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit...

I would be more interested in the stat per miles driven. I suspect the US still is worse than Japan but a lower ratio. There is no point debating on US car stats, we are the best and worst at everything car related.

Why does miles driven matter? Fewer people are dying, that's what matters. The fact that I have to drive further/faster than someone in Japan to accomplish the same task is increasing my chance of death and that is bad. The fact that the USA has no regulations stopping its citizens from buying 6,000 pound trucks that have bad pedestrian visibility as a driver with a pulse-check standard vehicle license is bad.

If people are driving fewer miles in Japan that means that the built environment is better.

Is there higher usage of mass transit, cycling, and walking in Japan? You bet there is.

And don't give me that "America is oh so big and spread out, Japan is on an island" nonsense. 80%+ of Americans live in urban areas. It once had the largest passenger rail network in the world. This is a matter of intentional city planning and deliberate choices. Not every island nation is as transit-oriented as Japan (just look at the Carribbean or even the UK).

When divided highways were first being introduced globally, Japan's government made an intentional choice to invest in the Shinkansen instead of roadways. That was not an inevitability as there were voices there that preferred road investment.

Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

#352

Post by tayo42 »

wincy wrote: post #93
grugagag wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they still play outside like previous generations used to?

My daughter has been playing outside since she was 4 years old, unsupervised. She's 9 now. A lot of the other neighborhood kids have followed suit (I really suspect our "benign neglect" made the other parents thing "well if nothing bad happened to her our kids will be fine" and we have about 8-10 kids around the same age on the block that are constantly going to each other's houses and hanging out doing whatever it i…

You don't also know what is actually happening.

I live near kids like this where there parents aren't around they just roam. They get into trouble. How much parenting are you dumping on others.

One group decided it would be fun to smash glass bottles in the parking lot. So I have to do the job if the parent and either tell them to behave, stop and clean it up or clean up after them myself so I don't ruin my tires. Why aren't the real parents doing this?

Or the kids liter, get stuck in trees,lose their stuff, pee on stuff etc. All problems their real parents should be dealing with but instead others have to deal with it. Randoms like me get the negatives of the unsupervised kids.

Im sure their parents think they had a pleasant day playing tag all day though.

Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

#353

Post by anovikov »

hiatus wrote: post #320
erikw wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can legally sell a new small vehicle in the US, so the root cause is legislation that prevents this. I believe that if you could legally produce kei sized vehicles in the US, there would be a massive market for it, especially in urban environments. And I'm sure US manufacturers would be happy to sell them to all comers. Edit: Basically any car from Suzuki would be a hit in the US: https://www.suzuki…

> I don't think you can legally sell a new small vehicle in the US This is blatantly false. See: the Mitsubishi Mirage as just one example.

Mitsubishi Mirage isn't a small car by EU standards. It's a typical, average sized one.

Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

#354

Post by LargeWu »

sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #300
AmVess wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reasonable well optioned truck is $75,000. People who can afford to spend that are immune from high gas prices.

You'd be surprised how many people look only at the monthly payment amount and ignore other financial concerns when deciding on a vehicle purchase. And perhaps with some terribly long loan term like 72 or 96 months they can get that payment to "fit" in their budget.

You'd be surprised how many people don't even consider the monthly payment. Not uncommon where I grew up to see guys making $50,000 a year driving $70,000 trucks. Because they "need it for work".

Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

#355

Post by jajko »

nottorp wrote: post #257
ThalesX wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in Eastern Europe; I've only seen an "American-style" SUV once I think two decades ago. I still can't get that image out of my mind. It was like a tank in front of my car. I couldn't understand how it fits our streets, how it parks, I couldn't see around it. Just... wow, honestly. I have no idea what car it was, but it was like a huge pick-up.

I once saw a F-150. It needed 3 parking spots at my eastern european local mall :) And I don't mean the driver was an asshole, it simply wouldn't have fit in otherwise.

My favorite answer from soccer moms when I ask them why they drive their huge (by US standard tiny to normal) SUVs just around the city: 'I see better from up there and I feel safer in big car'.

So, bad driving skills and realizing it via lack of self-trust, being compensated with degradation of roads and parking for everybody else, or just throwing money at the problem (without fixing underlying issue, but feeling less shitty about it).

All could be easily solved by proportional taxation. Swiss folks figured it like many other things already, each canton has their own car tax rules but most are some formula with horse powers and car weight combined. No chance this decade for anything similar in the US I believe.

Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

#356

Post by david-gpu »

pezezin wrote: post #178
bedobi wrote: post #29

The design of the physical environment is in no small part responsible for this. Don't believe me go to Europe and Japan where kids are still allowed to walk and bike to school, to friends places and just in general play and exist outside unattended to a much higher degree than in the US. Because in the US they would be roadkill, and even if they somehow survived outside of a car, car centric design means there's now…

> Don't believe me go to Europe and Japan Depends where in Japan; I live in a small city, and it is the worst urban sprawl that you could ever imagine. You absolutely need a car for everything, but at the same time the streets are really narrow and dark, and without sidewalks. It is not fun, to put it mildly.

Cars slow down in narrow winding steets. Wide straight streets are very prone to speeding.

Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

#357

Post by mike_hearn »

sircastor wrote: post #19
WorkerBee28474 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All in all, this is not science It's not trying to be. The intended audience is not peers reading a research journal, it's normal folks and policy makers who don't know what a confounding variable is but still want to make modern life suck less.

I think it's trying to appear to be science. They want the appearance of legitimacy and objectivity to encourage a particular position. A quick read through of the site shows it's a conservative-leaning group, and I'd be willing to bet that sooner-or-later they'll be pushing "a return to traditional values" as the cure for all our ills.

After Babel is Jonathan Haidt's site. He is very much not a conservative, as one might guess from his insistence on governments controlling everyone's social media and smartphone use. Although his work has tried to address the exclusion of conservatives from academia, that doesn't make him one.

Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

#358

Post by schmidtleonard »

lukan wrote: post #312
complaintdept wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, you'd want to get rid of those in car displays that require you to take your eyes off the road to do almost anything now, and will also spoil your night vision. There was an episode of Radiolab that was talking about this, and they made a very compelling case for it, along with those super bright headlamps that ruin your night vision when they're equipped on an oncoming vehicle. Tellingly, almost all increa…

"along with those super bright headlamps that ruin your night vision when they're equipped on an oncoming vehicle." I hate them. I dream of the day, when proper night vision gear with the result displayed to the front window will be standard in cars, so all the cars can have no, or very soft lights to drive around savely at night. Also, why not heat vision to better spot humans (and animals)? For the AI as well as th…

One nice side effect of headlights becoming LED arrays is that selective dimming is free in terms of marginal cost. Right now it's a luxury car gimmick but it'll eventually trickle down, and then we can mandate it.

Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

#359

Post by mike_hearn »

chris_va wrote: post #6

Apologies for being critical, but this reads like the author had a conclusion they wanted to reach and worked backward to some flashy graphs to make it work (the right side of the "lies, damn lies, and statistics" spectrum). There is no discussion of confounders, no control groups or paired studies, and there are million things correlated with the last 50 of societal development years besides the topics mentioned her…

There's no need to apologize. This whole line of work by Haidt and his associates has been heavily attacked on the grounds of poor methodologies, and Haidt's responses were astoundingly bad. For example, someone spot checked some of the hundreds of studies he presented and found none of them really supported the social media/teen girl mental health link he was asserting; his response was "they can't all be wrong" and "you shouldn't demand a high standard of evidence in a crisis" (where the evidence there was a crisis was the same evidence he was presenting...)

Re: Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

#360

Post by tb_technical »

ponector wrote: post #250
beretguy wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just tax fuel (or emissions etc) No, because that harm small fun sports cars. The problem is big cars. Just ban big cars.

Fuel tax is the best solution. Pay as you go. More fuel you consume more emissions you produce, more distance you go, more road your wear occurs. Do you want to get 8l V8 engine? Fine, just pay your fuel taxes.

This is a silly tangential point, but with good design a V8 can be as efficient as an I4 (and with bad design a V6 can be more wasteful than a V8).

Pinning fuel use seems to be the way to go, rather than penalizing engine geometry, for this reason.

It's important to remember, though, that semi-trucks get 5-8 miles to the gallon due to their weight/purpose. Perhaps these new fuel taxes should only affect classes other than A, B, and C to avoid knock-on effects.

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