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What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

stevemagness.substack.com

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Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#571

Post by [deleted] »

oersted wrote: post #225
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it's amazing how much modern-ish suburbia just has no place for you to even exist without a car. It's trendy to blame cars for this but the problem is fundamentally zoning. It's not that there is nowhere for you to exist without a car, it's that there is nowhere for you to exist there at all , and you thereby need a car to leave the vicinity in order to get anywhere you can. If you want to build a cafe or an ar…

As a European, I don’t understand why there’s such resistance to this. I get it NIMBY, but why? Surely good amenities would improve property values and life quality. If it’s right next to your home all the better. Peaceful quietness is so overrated by US and northern Europe. It feels creepy and dead to me, a liminal space. Besides, modern insulation does wonders for blocking noise if that bothers you, not to mention…

[deleted]

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#572

Post by embedding-shape »

Amezarak wrote: post #566
embedding-shape wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There were ample bathrooms but every single one of them was filled with human feces, covering practically every surface, and littered with needles. What the hell? No offense, but was this in a slum somewhere or something? Not saying it doesn't happen in other places, but I think I've came across that once in my ~35 years, visiting countless of public bathrooms, cities and towns, admittedly mostly around in Europe,…

I’ve definitely heard that other countries don’t tolerate this sort of thing, but the thread is about US cities. Of course YMMV, my understanding is many European cities have very few or only paid public bathrooms.

Ah, yeah, going back I see the "big US cities", my context was just "big cities" when I was reading the thread, my bad!

> my understanding is many European cities have very few or only paid public bathrooms.

Not my experience living here, but I'm sure it differs a lot based on the country and the city, some will have free public bathrooms, some paid public bathrooms, some no bathrooms at all.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#573

Post by treis »

contubernio wrote: post #378
treis wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really true. Almost every neighborhood in Atlanta has a cluster of shops or food hall kind of thing to walk to. It's true that it's a massive lifestyle leap to go to no car. But walk to the park. Walk to get ice cream. Ride bike to school are all easily doable in atlanta.

It's certainly true in Atlanta. That "cluster of shops" can be a long way walking (10-15 minutes) from where one resides. It's small, incomplete, inadequate, etc. I grew up in Atlanta proper, so know the city well, and later, by choice, lived there for a few years as an adult without a car and it was genuinely complicated. I chose a place to live near my place of work (near = it was 30 minutes solid walking). I had a…

That doesn't sound like very few stores in walking distance.

And yes things have drastically changed in the 10+ years or whenever growing up was.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#574

Post by ineedasername »

tonymet wrote: post #483
ineedasername wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely this! Too many confounding variables to look at such a surface level, a few high-level population wide stats. Nothing is that simple, nothing is clean in this sort of thing. Messy, interrelated factors, and you can chip away at the question bit by bit to reveal things but that is what it takes, not this do-it-with-vibes approach that's been around long before agents started taking prompts to code. My hope i…

Let’s see how it goes. I don’t think safety is properly being measured. Much like you can’t measure a beautiful property or a delicious dish. It has to be experienced. Moreover, AI guardrails will interfere with you identifying any meaningful anthropological conclusions.

>AI guardrails will interfere with you identifying any meaningful anthropological conclusions.

In this respect it depends on how AI is used. In this case, I didn't envision it doing this in the "deep research" sense or otherwise making its own conclusions from data, I meant more in the vein of a well scaffolded agent loop iterating through, for example, census tract-level data, cross referencing that with other data sources to find the relevant, granular-but-requires-intelligent-judgment details to piece together countless small datasets to assemble a large pictured. Grunt work that is repetitive but just variable enough you can't do something like download/scrape and assemble at scale because each block or tract or zip code needs one small bit of human judgement.

None of that is my work though, just where I think things might usefully go. For my part I'm trying to jump industries into AI more directly, it aligns well with my background, but that fact combined with zero industry connections (save Claude Code's recommendation & endorsement, that I had to tell it not to email on my behalf to Anthropic) hasn't broken down that wall yet, and in the meantime I try to build useful things that might help in that direction. So I'm aware of AI's blind spots on some things, and its significant capabilities still need significant shepherding.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#575

Post by yesfitz »

mattmiller wrote: post #427
elevation wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> existing somewhere without spending money Existing without spending money works a lot better when you perceive and comply with social norms. At a mall, you're unlikely to meet loitering enforcement for reading a book in the food court all afternoon while sipping a drink you brought from home. You can meeting your local walking club there too and walk for miles chatting without purchasing anything -- if you're not b…

"Antisocial behavior" You are describing teens being social. You dont get to define what antisocial means.

"Anti-social" has multiple definitions.

The other poster was using it to mean the opposite of pro-social, i.e. behavior that is bad for society (like roughhousing in a shared space meant for shopping). This definition is frequently used in the UK and Ireland thanks to Anti-social Behavior Orders.

You are using it to mean being averse to socializing.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#576

Post by theultdev »

californical wrote: post #556
theultdev wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know what people use their trucks for. They have utility and getting rid of trucks in the name of safety is really stupid. How are you going to stock food, how are you going to transport goods? There's safety, then there's regression. Might as well put everyone in a bubble suit.

They’re talking about pickup trucks, not delivery semis. And if you look at pickup trucks, they’ve gotten way taller since the 00’s, for no reason except style.

So take everyone's pickup away and your child still gets hit by an illegal driving a u-haul, okay.

Just teach safety and enforce speeding/dwi/immigration laws.

Much better than taking a certain vehicle away from law abiding citizens.

I need my large truck just as much as I need my EV. I haul stuff constantly while also driving safely and following all laws.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#577

Post by anon291 »

andai wrote: post #4
delichon wrote: post #2

A large part of the protectiveness of children is about the fertility trend. Parents with four children think about safety very differently than parents with probably ever only one. I saw this on my home street growing up. The girl next door was an only child who her parents hovered over relentlessly. When I was ten, with three brothers, and told mom I was going exploring, she made sure I had a quarter to phone home…

Yeah, as an only child it's a weird burden to be the guy who makes or breaks the whole bloodline. No pressure right ;) But that pressure is on the parents too. There's this weird two-way feedback loop. Single child household has made parenting culture neurotic. Because if you screw it up it ends your entire bloodline. But the neurotic attitude makes child rearing feel like such a burden, people can hardly imagine doi…

I have four kids, my neighbor has one, and I see this dynamic play out in real time. My neighbors are neurotic with their kid. Poor kid is hovered over. My kids play by themselves, walk to their grandmother's house (a block away), go to the park, and just kind of show up in our house from time to time. Of course the little ones are taken care of explicitly, but they too will age out of that. It's much better for everyone. My wife and I go on dates and stuff that our neighbors could never imagine doing. Having one kid is way harder honestly.

(We get a babysitter for our dates, but they're too scared to leave their kid -- no judgement... that's just how it is).

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#578

Post by steveklabnik »

californical wrote: post #556
theultdev wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know what people use their trucks for. They have utility and getting rid of trucks in the name of safety is really stupid. How are you going to stock food, how are you going to transport goods? There's safety, then there's regression. Might as well put everyone in a bubble suit.

They’re talking about pickup trucks, not delivery semis. And if you look at pickup trucks, they’ve gotten way taller since the 00’s, for no reason except style.

> for no reason except style.

There are other reasons (not that they're good ones):

https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/how-us-emiss...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#579

Post by PearlRiver »

buellerbueller wrote: post #493
ivell wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not many movies are made on people getting hit by lightning. Perception beats stats and facts.

yes, feels and vibes beat rationality and science. Is it any surprise the US is backsliding?

It is funny because we now know that in the 1970s there were far more randos kidnapping people than today. The FBI actually got pretty good at these crimes.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#580

Post by tomhow »

avazhi wrote: post #284

When are we gonna get a rule about AI slop submissions? "Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans." Why limit this to comments only? In this case the conversation was literally started by an AI. At least require people to label submissions as AI-generated and then give users a way to filter that shit out. I don't come to HN to read AI slop.

These comments from you seem belligerent and entitled. This has no place on HN. If you want to contribute constructively to the way HN runs, great. Start by being respectful to the community and the guidelines. We're hardly going to prioritize the suggestions of people who routinely throw grenades around.

We can't have a blanket rule to ban all AI-generated articles, because we can't review every article that's submitted and make an evaluation about how much it was AI-generated or assisted. If an article is badly written, whether or not it was AI-assisted, it should be flagged.

In this case, yes I can see the LLM-style of the writing, and I'd prefer writers avoided publishing work that with such obvious fingerprints.

But it got few flags on HN, no complaints other than yours and a good discussion, and the quality of the discussion is what matters most on HN.

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