I have a 4 year old, in my mid 40s, and think about this a lot for some reason.
In the 70s during the summer, when I was around 7, we would wake up, eat breakfast, go out and about wherever we wanted, come back for lunch, out again, come back for dinner, and then out again past dark to play flashlight tag.
I think I would be charged with child endangerment these days if my kid (3 years in the future) was doing stuff like that. And frankly, I think I've been conditioned to think that I would be a negligent parent if I did this.
The media is part of the problem. 24/7 news, social media, and channels like ID (real life murder 24/7) scare the bejeezus out of people. But besides that, we have an acceptance of nanny-state government - that the government should be a much closer "partner" in child rearing than 40 years ago.
I always say, there's a consequence for everything, including seemingly innocuous laws to protect people.
But as a parent of a 4-year old in 2017 (and a 7 year old in 2020), I know I would be gnashing my teeth if my kid was roaming the streets and woods all day long...even if I did it.
Media is part of it, but the other part is this, taken from the first comment on the linked article:
"I can’t help but notice how many freeways and roads are between Sheffield and Rother Valley. We can’t blame parents alone for the loss of childhood freedom. Since 1919 We have purposely designed our cities to maximize vehicle throughput and require car ownership and the result is an environment that is lethal for 8 year olds. You can’t blame parents for wanting to keep their children safe when it’s barely safe to cross the street."
I hardly feel safe roaming my own town as an adult, and it's mostly due to the rivers of high-speed traffic that cut up the city, that I have to cross to get to anywhere interesting.
This is very true in London, unfortunately. Cars destroy the city - both by polluting it, and making walking and biking dangerous. Boris Johnson's goal as mayor was to optimise traffic flow through London, which just encouraged more cars. Going to a city like Cambridge where the center is shut down to cars is quite eye opening - lots of kids and people walking and biking. In London it's just a sea of cars driving and parked on sidewalks so you can't actually walk anywhere safely.
Case in point: my daughter had a very near miss when she was about 2. She was walking down the side walk a bit in front of me, and this middle aged lady in a Range Rover went onto the sidewalk to get around a stopped car, barely missing my daughter. I yelled at her but she didn't even notice in her sound proof SUV.
I make a point of banging on any vehicle that's nearly hit someone and not noticed/acknowledged it - regardless of whether it was me they nearly hit or not.
People get mad (especially people driving vans/small trucks), but it's disgraceful that people are driving multi-tonne vehicles and are completely oblivious to their surroundings.
As a pedestrian in SF, I feel a lot more threatened by cyclists than by cars. The car-pedestrian right of way rules are clearly established, but the pedestrian-cyclist rules, if they exist, seem to be ignored by cyclists. I have numerous times had cyclists bike 2 feet in front of me instead of stopping at a pedestrian crossing. I am not sure cyclists in SF grok the idea of a stop sign either. Same thing with traffic lights, which a lot of cyclists treat as mere suggestions.
I mean, around me the made a law that you can't be within 3 feet of a cyclist. After that passed there was a group of cyclists going around with yardsticks trying to smack cars while riding.
Pretending that there aren't extremely toxic cyclists doesn't help the problem.
I LOVE this idea. Don't want your precious car scratched, then give 3 feet. My street has no sidewalks and cars constantly exceeding the 25mph limit. I'm pretty sure I could damage some vehicles doing nothing more than holding my house keys sideways in my hands as I walk/run. Drivers truly don't care about anything outside their windshield.
Cyclists will often ride between rows of cars that are stopped at a traffic light in an effort to get to the front, probably assuming that the 3 feet law doesn't apply in that case.
Cyclists don't have to be toxic for the whole setup to not work, they just have to not obey the same laws that are in place for cars. Where I live, I'm more likely to be hit by a cyclist on a pedestrian crossing than by a car.
What a strange double standard. Presuming your anecdote is true (and statistically, it isn't), your greatest risk is minor injury if hit by a cyclist, while that's the best possible outcome from an interaction with a car.
And no, cyclists don't often ride between lines of cars. Some cyclists do that. Just like some drivers are reckless jerks.
Every group has bad actors. I'd even wager both groups -- cyclists and drivers -- have the same percentage of morons.
You seem to be claiming that all cyclists have to be saints "for the setup to work", which is bizarre. The rules in most cities in the US clearly prioritize cars over people. As plenty of other cities around the world have demonstrated, changing those priorities changes behavior.
In SF, I see cyclists jumping traffic lights, ignoring STOP signs, not giving right of way to pedestrians in the cross walk etc. etc.. In my anecdotal experience I see more cyclists breaking traffic laws everyday than cars. I havent felt the same way in other American or European cities, so its possible this is an SF only thing.
From my experience, it's all too common in Boston, too. Zero regard for traffic signs, lights, or pedestrian activity. It's usually the couriers that ride unsafely.
Yes, this is mostly my experience as well. I had a delivery truck driver get out and start yelling abuse because I banged on the back of his vehicle to alert him that he nearly knocked a woman off her bike a couple days ago.
This isn't rare, either - there's at least 1 shouted interacted per week.
It's no wonder my friends are afraid to get on the roads/their bikes.
Ha, I remember knocking on the rear windscreen of a car as it passed me by, I was doing about 20mph, the car not much faster, I didn't even need to stretch my arm to do so.
The driver pull over further down the street and I had a conversion with him very calmly, he wasn't happy about me knocking on the window and told me that if he was younger he'd punch my lights out.
I used to do this all the time as well, and then I started noticing that it only increased the rage that I felt and also the rage in the other drivers. It finally came to a head when a car tried to run me down between multiple lights.
My new form of riding in the city is to be 100% defensive all the time, but not in a give up my rights as a cyclist way. I assume cars will do dumb things (because they always do) so I avoid their blind spots, never pass on the right, alsways take the entire lane so that a car can not pass you if it's not safe (only do this in the city), when traffic is slow assume cars will jump quickly around in lanes etc.
Many people get angry and defensive when you yell at or reprimand them. The goal is to try and inform them of their poor driving without increasing anger on both sides. Now I do this with a look, and no anger, and people tend to respond to that apologetically.
Any vehicle that is close enough for me to touch I hit. There's no reason to drive that close to a human being who doesn't have hundreds of pounds of armor around them.
I did that when I was nearly hit in a marked crosswalk (they didn't slow down and were less than arm's length from me) that was at an intersection with no light. They went around the block to come back and start threatening me for hitting their car...
I admire the Dutch. They use the bicycle everywhere and in all weather conditions. The result? Their cities even sound so different. It is calm, very little car noise. Amazing.
It's not as bad as the parent suggests, but our roads are much smaller than in the US, so on residential streets it is common to have only a single effective lane even if residents park on the pavement (as we call sidewalks). So to stop completely blocking traffic flow, this is what happens. There's typically plenty of room still on the pavement to walk in this scenario, so I've no idea why they're complaining. It's never been an issue in my entire life living here.
It's an every day occurrence in London unfortunately. People park on sidewalks, cars parked down both sides of narrow streets with no room for cars to pass in opposite directions, you have to pull into gaps between parked cars to allow head on traffic to pass. In some places there you only have inches on either wing mirror to even pass through. If you've never been to London, you can't begin to appreciate the width of your roads here in North America.
In places where you have 20 mph zones because you feel like you can't physically get 2 cars past each other in North America, not only do you have traffic flow in both directions, the speed limit is 10 mph faster and everyone is still speeding.
There are places where if you don't park on the sidewalk, there isn't enough space on the actual roadway for traffic to pass... so people park on the sidewalk because "where else am I gonna park?"
This is everyday life in London, and people rarely even give it a second thought or bat an eyelid until someone gets hit, and then there's outrage for a day or two and then everyone shrugs and say "that's just the way it is" and goes back to their everyday lives.
Is this crazy? I guess it is, but that's London... and every other old world town in the country. Streets were built long before there were cars, houses line both sides of streets and so the roads can't be widened without knocking down hundreds or in the occasional place thousands of years of history. We take our heritage more seriously than our need for wider roads.
We all greatly over estimate our ability to drive and we all think we're the next World Rally Championship champion - because we all drive stick. None of those shitty automatics you North Americans love. When we drive, we want to drive, not cruise luxuriously on our floating cloud, cut off from the feeling of the road by soft suspension.
So imagine cars dashing through tight streets, with no room for two way traffic - even though it's a 2 way street, other cars parked close on either side, almost grazing your wing mirrors as you whip through and your only thought is I hope nothing comes the other way, the last place I could've let them pass was 400m back and I'd have to back up this bastard all the way back to there to let them pass.
Ironically, you have one of 2 states when you're driving on the circular road around London, our M25 motorway (that's what we call highways in the UK, motorways). You're either whipping along at 90mph (the speed limit is 70mph) 15ft from the bumper of the guy in front of you and the guy behind you 15ft from your bumper... all the way around the M25, or someone's had an accident and you're crawling along at 20mph wondering if you're ever going to get home. The 3 lanes of the motorway much of the way around is narrower than your 2 lane highways here.
The first time you ever drive in this kind of environment you feel one of two feelings - either trepidation, anxiety and nausea, or a level of indescribable exhilaration.
That's what driving in England is like. It's like an extreme sport compared to driving in North America.
I visited Ireland last year as a Wisconsinite..... being driven around the Northern Irish countryside was terrifying. Also everyone parks on the sidewalk, and its completely impractical to own a truck because the roads are about half the size of American roads..
As an American in London, or in fact pretty much any town or city in England, I'd wager you'd feel much the same way.
A little secret though, we already know you guys feel this way, and we take that into consideration when we drive you... we add a little extra excitement to the drive, you know, because we know you guys are addicted to drama :D
We know you're already uncomfortable because you feel like you're on the wrong side of the car and on the wrong side of the road, exposed and white knuckling it, so we just like to send you home with a little something to remember us by... that time you took your life in your own hands by getting in the car with a crazy Brit and lived to tell the tale ;)
The Irish are just as crazy, they pass busses at highway (should I say motorway?) speeds on what I would call a one lane road. The busses suck together when they pass. It's terrifying.
We grew up in this environment though; and just like you guys are desensitized to the media hype of which country you're bombing next for their resources (heck your national anthem even celebrates that insanity - bombs bursting in air indeed!), we (for the most part) don't even think about how dangerous our roads are... we just accept that and find a way to enjoy it.
Every country has its own behaviour that shocks and horrifies the rest of the world. Britains roads, drivers and completely topless Page 3 girls in mainstream newspapers that even our kids can leaf through are ours. I guess we'd rather die at high speed in our own car in a land we own where our kids grow up with a healthy appreciation of breasts than be desensitized to the rape and pillage of foreign lands for their wealth ;)
You may have missed the tone of the rest of my post which should have implied a tongue in cheek mood... you'll have to forgive how dry our humour is, something else that is uniquely British ;)
You complain about London---and I just moved from Sydney to London and enjoy the relative pedestrian-friendliness here compared to that car-centric hellhole down-under.
After reading the parent I was about to say "I'm almost 30 and I barely feel safe wandering alone".
Not just crossing major roads (I live downtown in my little city, but I have to cross a major road to get to any shops, which puts a big damper on my walking) but just one person walking down the road, by themselves? It's almost a scandal. And if I'm biking around town, especially not dressed in spandex like a bicyclist... what, did you have your driver's license taken away?
I know those are purely my hang ups and no one has ever stopped me and questioned my motives, but the idea comes from somewhere. It comes from a childhood where you weren't supposed to wander alone, and you were supposed to avoid strange men on the street. Then when you grow up to become a strange man on the street, you can't help but feel uncomfortable about it. At least I can't.
This is one of the biggest reasons it was refreshing as hell to move to the big city, as paradoxical as that sounds.
Rural/suburban life is like living in a barren wasteland
marked by occasional oases you have to travel between in a metal spaceship.
Living in an area where commuting to work and activities by foot is completely normal feels like rediscovering a lost sense of communal society, and there's a relief and a comfort to it that's difficult to articulate.
I live in a small suburban city and I can walk to:
* The library (5 minutes)
* A supermarket (8 minutes)
* A dozen restaurants (7-15 minutes; mostly local restaurants + 2 fast food chains)
* Two liquor stores
* A drug store (12 minutes)
* A coworking space (15 minutes)
* Several antique stores (12-15 minutes)
* (Almost forgot) Walmart (10 minutes)
* Two barbers (8-12 minutes)
* At least three major bus lines
And if I get on a bike, I can go across the entire town in 20 minutes, which puts me in range of more supermarkets, a local game store, a Gamestop, a bowling alley, at least two dozen more restaurants, and tons more.
There are places to live in my town that I would be stuck driving (or at least biking) everywhere. But I chose a place near the downtown area, and I can walk to tons of places. And I do.
Not fond of big cities. My kids can wander around my neighborhood or walk to the park, and we don't worry at all. Granted it's not six miles to the park. Six miles in any direction and you've left the small city I live in. But we're trying to resist the helicopter parenting style.
That said, I think there's another thing that's missing from this discussion: People are having fewer kids. Sometimes they have a single kid. So it's natural when all your eggs are in one basket to be a bit more paranoid about that basket.
That's exceptional though. Most American suburbs aren't like that at all, and many of the ones that do have a walkable area, most of their housing is still in unwalkable areas.
To a certain extent you have to read between the lines, people aren't usually gonna come out and say, "Yes, these regulations are to prevent minorities and the poor from coming to my neighborhood." But that's kind of the obvious takeaway from, say, zoning regulations that mandate houses/lot sizes of a minimum large size: they make it so that a lower-middle class family can't enter an upper-middle class neighborhood by simply purchasing a smaller house on a smaller plot of land.
Probably 30% of the housing in my town is manufactured homes, though (i.e., dirt cheap), and the city council and planners are actively looking for ways to improve diversity of housing. The people living here in the rich-people subdivisions predictably are against any higher density housing being built, though, probably for exactly the reasons you site (some explicitly site "undesirables", despite the already existing low-income housing).
They also complain that it will affect their view, though. Not the view from their homes, but as they drive along the road. Considering the housing is proposed for right behind a WalMart and other big box development, and in the opposite direction from the mountains from their subdivision. Sigh. "But we'll have to drive past it on the way to WalMart or the grocery! OMG!"
Despite having plenty of "undesirables" (not my word), we're in the top-10 safest cities in the state (#3 or 4, if I recall). The neighboring town (Louisville, CO) has won "best place in the US to raise a family" several times.
And the state is Colorado, where even the "rough" cities are actually pretty safe to begin with. I used to live in Oakland, CA, so there's probably no area in Denver that I'd be uncomfortable walking around at night. There are places I've been quite wary of in Oakland, though.
Yes, it's the exception. But it's not non-existent. You just need to choose to live in an area like that.
I lived in Oakland, CA, and had the ability to walk to tons of restaurants, a post office, and a library. And Bart. But Oakland counts as "big city" by most measures.
I also lived in Lafayette, CA [0], walkable to Bart, restaurants, and grocery shopping. And Alameda, CA, walkable to grocery, the post office, an entire shopping center (Southshore [1]), and a beach. And in Boulder CO where I could walk to a supermarket, restaurants, and a library. And another location in Boulder where I could walk to restaurants.
And I've looked at walkable housing in a dozen other suburban cities. If "walkability" is your priority, you can find it all over the place.
[0] Ironically I'm now in Lafayette Colorado. I keep saying I just have a couple more Lafayttes to live in, and I can collect the whole set. :)
I think the important distinction there is between rural and suburban.
I grew up in a rural small town and now live in NYC... I love my neighborhood in the city for how extremely walkable it is, the breadth of diversity in people, food, opportunities etc. However I do often miss, for example, going for aimless drives with no traffic or stoplights, finding solitude on a dirt road 5 minutes from home with not a house or person in sight, hiking, camping, shooting and snowmobiling essentially right outside the door.
In the burbs I still get the same kind of 'trapped' feeling I'll sometimes get in the city, but without the benefits of living in a dense city: endless things to do, many friends within walking distance, and tons of places to share a drink or meal with them.
Not sure the point of this. The implication of the parent was that HOAs severely restrict freedoms in the suburbs. My point was that HOAs are not a requirement for living in the suburbs.
The suburbs truly are a barren wasteland of nothing. Without your car, they're a soul sucking prison with all the rules of the city and none of the pay-offs.
I now live in rural Canada. I've spent much of my adult life living in dense cities after having grown up in rural England - London, Vancouver, Houston, Toronto. You can't compare the advantages of either environment - rural or city, but the suburbs truly are the worst of each. You get a lot of space you can't do anything of any value with because of all the rules defined for the comfort of your neighbours who you either have never met or are a pain in your ass; and you can't walk anywhere because there's nowhere to walk.
When you live surrounded by farmland, you can camp for free, hunt, be outdoors, roam on your bike, let your kids climb trees and hike and explore on their own, build treehouses and let them play Lord of the Flies to their heart's content. They can grow, find themselves and become self confident self assured leaders who don't need Mommy every time they graze a knee and have thick skin that doesn't cry to be soothed every time someone insults them, because "they've got this".
In the city you've still got all the stifling rules of suburbia, but you have a pay off: Everything is to hand, you can ditch your car and walk everywhere or take public transit, get on your bike, become part of a tight community of city dwellers. There's extensive culture right outside your door, night life, excitement and high energy... that never. Ever. Shuts. Off.
Eventually the city grinds you down though. It's exciting and freeing for a while, and if you grew up in the city, you might never notice it; but if you grew up in the countryside or the mountains eventually you'll notice it and begin to feel trapped, you'll begin to miss your roots and the simple life, you'll grow sick of trying to keep up with the relentless onslaught of the media, the billboards, the shop windows telling you that you're not enough, you need this to feel better, you need this to look better, you need this to be better and you'll begin to long for an escape from the ceaseless assault of your mind.
Rural life is a different kind of freedom... where you can see the stars.
Work: This is a matter of priority... you can always find ways to pay the bills and put food on the table. It might not be doing exactly what you love, or it may be. There are ways to make almost anything work if you spend the graft making a name for yourself. You're right, it's frequently easier, dare I say simple to find a comfortable job doing what you love in the city. I'm at a point now where I have enough of a client base who trust the quality of my work to give me the freedom to work from home part time which makes this a lot easier. But even in the countryside, if you're capable and interested in learning new skills to a high degree of quality, which I am, there will always be people willing to help you put a roof over your head and food on your table.
Schools: I agree, you can't substitute a good education, but there are more ways to educate kids to a high level than sitting in a classroom. Scouts, Guides, 4H, Outward Bound, there are many stables that need stable hands, farms that need labour. There are endless numbers of lessons to be learned about working as a team, discipline to work on your own etc. etc. etc. There are many ways to effectively supplement their academics that they would never stand a chance of getting in the city. It just takes a different way of looking at things. That's not to say that the academic education kids get in the city is to be dismissed. But the more I hear about our inner city schools failing our kids, the more I wonder how effective they even are in this current climate.
Politics: This is very geo-specific. There are many liberal, conservative and more socialist leaning communities. It really depends on the demographic of that area and who the tax system is set up to benefit. The village I grew up in tended to be much more moderate... I'm not sure how to describe it actually, liberally conservative perhaps? We had a socialist mayor when I was growing up there and the closest town was quite metropolitan, but still enjoyed the benefits of the socialist leaning community that all looked out for one another. It was pretty much live and let live, help each other out, look after your neighbours, proud of their community and the town was very well kept and maintained. If an area is downright too conservative and that's not for you, I'd suggest not living there ;)
Even in rural areas, you can find much more in common with your neighbour than you think, regardless of their political sway, whether they're a hardcore biker or businessman, doctor, lawyer, farmer. We're all in this together, even if some of their ideals don't quite mesh with your own.
Most of Canada is pretty liberal leaning... especially since the Harper Government was ousted. Most of the country seem to like Trudeau pretty well.
Many of the more European leaning communities are much more inclusive of neighbours needs and looking after each other which is a more socialist type trait.
Let me clarify, when I say socialist, I don't mean the brand of socialism that's sold by American propaganda in the way Communism was in the 60's which caused everyone to be terrified of it. I mean the brand of socialism where everyone is not only happy to contribute and be taxed for the good of their community, to improve infrastructure, hospitals, education, waste services, emergency services etc. but they feel it's their duty to their community and do it proudly. Everyone feels it's their duty to ensure that nobody is left behind and mucks in to make it so.
Conservative everyone-out-for-themselves-and-fuck-everyone-else attitudes tends to be a much more American stance on Conservatism, even Conservatives here in Canada tend to be much more community minded and inclusive - it's enshrined in the culture here, "immigration and diversity is our strength." Especially in communities with a large youth contingent.
I'm guessing, so please take this with a grain of salt: I would say look at the age demographics of a community, the lower the median age, I would wager, the more likely the community is to lean more moderately or towards liberal or socialist ideals.
It has been my experience that French communities tend to lean more heavily towards the ideals of France, which are more socialist in that respect and the Polish people I know also seem to lean more heavily towards the ideals of Poland, which being European isn't a world different. Immigrants (in my experience) tend to favour what they grew up with and know. As an immigrant myself, I can understand that sentiment.
Often newer housing that is closer to the urban center where people work (something you typically do 5 times a week) but is also so much more affordable than living in the city. I think they have appeal, but only for the budget-minded.
but many suburbs don't have a HOA at all. I think some of the issue here is specifically upper-middle class problems. In my suburb its been just as it was when I grew up. Kids can play on the road easily, they live within walking distances of schools, etc,
What, people who live in cities don't have freedom? And the user you replied to wasn't talking about space available like in a truly rural setting, they were talking about how it's impossible to live in a suburban or rural setting without centering your life around the car you drive.
I assure you that you won't be arrested for wearing drag in rural Pennsylvania, you will however be arrested in Philadelphia if you start a bonfire or ride a dirtbike in your backyard.
I don't know if I've ever seen "choices" and "freedom" framed as in opposition. And I don't see how having to pour money into a fossil fuel powered cage and having to keep your kids inside like this post talks about is helping in the directive of freedom.
What do you have the freedom to do that you can't do in a city, other than constraints of space and physical geography? Rurally you're still constrained by all that seemingly open land belonging to other people, plus the time constraints of getting to places.
You have fresh air, views, and quiet (provided you're not in the middle of an agribusiness rural area).
(Talking about "freedom" in the pure abstract is vague; freedom to/from what?)
I know this discussion is from the US point of view, but land belonging to other people is not a problem everywhere. Many countries (at least in Northern Europe) have "freedom to roam" [1] which in addition to actual roaming may include camping, picking berries and mushrooms, et cetera.
I actually got stopped by the local police a year or two ago for going on a walk during a holiday, as they received reports of some strange guy walking alone.
My uncle, aunt and their two children moved to the US for a few years a long time ago, and had the same happen: First day in a new neighbourhood, what do you do but have a walk around to see what it's like? The police assumed their car must have broken down, and on hearing they'd intentionally set out to walk around the neighbourhood, they seemed to imply they didn't think it was safe and offered to drive them home.
It satisfied a few European stereotypes of America all in one go.
I'm pleased to have visited various parts of the US since, and confirmed it certainly doesn't happen everywhere, but I've also experienced first hand just how pedestrian hostile some areas are...
One of my favorite things is to walk down the middle of the street in my Grandma's town on Thanksgiving or Christmas. Small town, shops are closed, quiet except for a few bars and people's homes. Also a good break from family, and a walk on a day where I eat a lot.
Hahaha I get this every time I cross a street upon a suitably large gap in traffic rather than waiting for the lights... because that's what we learn growing up in England where almost nobody waits for the lights - especially if there's a gap in traffic. The numbers of people gobsmacked at this behaviour here is... funny, honestly.
As a pedestrian, are you really going to stand around and be dictated what you can and can't do by a stupid fcking light? Life is short, get your head out of your phone, pay attention to your surroundings and cross the fcking road before the little light comes to tell you that your time is up and it's your turn to go to the next life and you missed it.
Every time someone baulks at me for doing it, I can't help but grin and remember the quote from the original Point Break:
"It was about us against the system. That system that kills the human spirit. We stand for something. To those dead souls inching along the freeways in their metal coffins ... we show them that the human spirit is still alive."
I lived in a place that was about 5 miles outside of town if you took a main road, and 6-8 miles if you took the country route.
Of course, taking the main road by foot or bicycle would get you stopped by the police telling you to not do that on that road. It was for cars, not pedestrians.
Reminds of a time when a friend Of mine was rollerblading to my home from hers (~5 miles). She called me mid way because she found 2 kids (maybe 12 years old) carrying a ton of stuff down an empty 3 mile road. She asked me to drive my car to them to help them out carrying all the stuff. When I got there, one of them hopped on right away but the other held back, almost with a scared face. My friend insisted that they let us help but I told her to leave them alone. We left.
Imagine the story from the kids point of view. "We were walking down the road in an isolated place, and this car came along and tried to make us get in"...
> We have purposely designed our cities to maximize vehicle throughput and require car ownership
This is just one specific example of the broader phenomenon, which is corporations seek to remove all of our abilities to take care of ourselves and our communities, so that they may resell those things to us as products. Requiring cars to move around is just the surface.
We go to coffee shops and restaurants to see our friends.
We purchase MP3s or concert tickets to hear music.
We order food instead of cooking it let alone growing it.
And of course this is all a luxury to some: many of us would be happy to never have to walk significant distance, cook, or listen to a local musician ever again.
But it's in the corporations best interest that children aren't really given a choice. And that serves nation states' best interest, which is to grow the GDP. But the result is a world of people who, without a credit card, are babies unable to care for themselves. Short of someone putting food in our mouths and maintaining the grounds around us, we would be lost. Luckily we have the cash to afford these things.
And those who fall through the cracks of being able to hold a job are eaten up.
All hail GDP. All hail capital. Thank you Gates, Koch, Slim, Walton, for providing us with internet connectivity, petrol, and toilet paper this day.
There is no evil corporation stopping you from dropping out of the rat race and moving to a farm to live life off the grid. What's stopping you from doing this and living the life you appear to desire?
There is also no evil corporation ordering people to give up subsistence farming and move to cities. Why do people, all around the world, still do it?
I find its theory compelling that a lot of advertising works by cultural imprinting: corporations use their power to create a presence in the public sphere which changes the underlying culture of society, and we as individuals have no choice about that.
Obviously individuals can in principle just ignore and go against the prevailing culture (in sufficiently free countries, at least), but even in free countries, that's a lot harder than just going with the flow. That's just how humans are wired, and the likely fact that corporations - i.e, non-human intelligences - have such influence over us by changing the very fabric of society is a cause for concern. Like all influence it can turn out to be good or bad, but ignoring it is not an option.
> There is also no evil corporation ordering people to give up subsistence farming and move to cities
Good luck growing modern plants, they're mostly hybrid and massively drop in yield if you decide to plant part of your harvest next year. Not to mention that Monsanto will be all over your field if they get wind of you violating their copyright by doing so.
The cost of living a subsistence lifestyle is very low. Land in the middle of nowhere is cheap, and property taxes are almost non-existant, you don't need to pay 25% of the turnips you grow to the state as an income tax, and gasoline is very cheap in the US.
There's that whole big-corporation medical care business, but if you're willing to forego it, the dream can be yours - for much less then the cost of a small suburban home.
>Land in the middle of nowhere is cheap, and property taxes are almost non-existant
Housing is not cheap, no matter where you go in the US. Sure, the land it sits on may be cheaper in some places, but the cost of building materials is the same everywhere, and houses have to be built to code, and old houses that aren't maintained well enough get condemned so you're not allowed to live in them. Of course, you can always just get an old trailer home or something.
>and gasoline is very cheap in the US.
Yes, and distances are far when you're talking about living in "the middle of nowhere", and if you have an old vehicle, it's probably going to have terribly fuel economy, so you're still looking at a significant fuel bill just to get to the grocery store. No, you're not going to succeed in getting yourself a proper diet with your home garden. And you still need some kind of income to buy that land and whatever structure you live in, and that gas for your car/truck.
>There's that whole big-corporation medical care business, but if you're willing to forego it,
That's not allowed unless the ACA is repealed. Of course, with a low enough income, you might qualify for Medicaid, but that really depends. I believe a lot of states won't allow you to enroll if you're an adult, saying you should just get a job.
Most of the cost of housing is in labor, not building materials. And, as you said, there's always the trailer. It'll be cold in the winter, though.
My parents do part-time homesteading (My father works - he will retire in a few years) - and they only need to go into town once a month for staples - supplemental chicken feed, milk, fertilizer, etc. Fuel economy isn't that big a deal.
The ACA tax is based on your income. If you have no income, the tax is tiny.
No, of course you can't start all that having nothing. However, most of the posters on HN are more then able to save up to afford this life.
The other problem you're missing is what happens when you have health problems? No health insurance means you're screwed as soon as you have any kind of problem at all.
erikpukinskis - the great-grand-parent of my post was talking about dropping out of the rat race that is modern life, which presumably means that you are OK with not having access to a $400,000 treatment plan should you get lung cancer. You can't really have it both ways, though.
I love it. The top comment is about how this is caused by government, the third comment is about how this is caused by corporations. Obviously some force greater than ordinary humans must be at fault for this!
I'd like to mildly challenge your accounting. I believe when you say "the third comment" you're referring to the top comment responding to the top comment responding to the top comment. Recognizing the threaded nature of the comments here makes this fact not at all surprising.
> corporations seek to remove all of our abilities to take care of ourselves and our communities
Please.
It's in a corporation's best interest to give the customer exactly what he wants.
We still have "our abilities to take care of ourselves and our communities," but we also have the option of a corporation providing for our every whim.
It's in the corporation's best interest to ensure a steady income flow. That's about it. Corporations only care about 'what the customer wants' insofar as how much it affects a steady income flow.
I think you have misinterpreted what the parent comment was saying. He wasn't saying there are limited options, just that we choose to have corporations take care of things for us, and now that we have chosen this we are more dependent on them. He wasn't stating that you could not take care of yourself if you want to. Just that it's easier to let the corporation do it for you.
No, he sounds like evil coroporations force us to meet friends in coffeshops, etc.
When in reality we just don't want to tidy up our houses before inviting friends over, do the dishes, etc. And it also gives us an opportunity to leave the house :)
Then why do corporations spend billions of dollars each year on advertising? Surely it's to convince you to buy something that may not be exactly what you want.
A corporation's main goal is to drive up profits and if it's more convenient for them to manipulate a populace into acting a certain way than it is to give the populace exactly what they want then that's what they'll do.
There is probably not a conspiracy from corporations or government to undermine people's freedom and what not but it doesn't mean that it isn't the end result.
There are some adverts that sell a product against its competitors. But there are plenty that sell the idea that with a particular company's logo on a product you'll be fashionable. And, there are plenty that sell products that people don't need, at all, using the idea that the product will make your life more fulfilling.
We don't watch broadcast TV at home. 30 mins in front of a friend's TV and our kid suddenly 'need' a ton of new stuff. At the cinema "you should get that car Dad", etc..
It's psychological manipulation, it's rarely ever a helpful synopsis of a products comparative specifications.
Advertising is 99% about making you aware that theproduct exists and fulfills the needs you already have, and at most 1% about making you want theproduct.
How is that true? What about all the various gadgets that exist that nobody wanted until they were advertised to them?
If you don't know about something then how can it possibly be exactly what you want? You wouldn't want it if you didn't know it existed. Or how about brands like Coca-Cola, everyone knows they exist but they keep advertising, surely it's to make you want it!
If you don't know about something then how can it possibly be exactly what you want? You wouldn't want it if you didn't know it existed.
You may want something with accomplishes some goal without knowing exactly what. If a person thinks "I have to go out but I'm waiting for a call", they may not imagine the cellphone as an object, but they still want something that solves their problem.
That said, 73.6% of all statistics are made up. Many ads in fact are designed with both goals in mind.
Many corporations create "needs" that didn't exist before, and spend marketing effort convincing consumers that that need exists. This is telling the customer what they want, or at the very least deflecting existing wants into the corporation's exploitable direction.
Just a few days ago I was walking into Costco to buy a loaf of bread. Outside at the food court was an old Chinese man with what looked like a 4 year old grandson. The old man was playing a bamboo flute, very beautifully, while his grandson ate some food. The whole area was filled with some beautiful music which transported me back to time I have spent in China. I wish listening to live music was more common again.
I really don't think it's some sort of conspiracy: it's just that it's more efficient for someone to grow all your food, someone to make all your clothes, someone to purify all your water, someone to generate all your electricity &c. while you do what you do best than it is for you to learn how to do all of those things, acquire the raw materials and spend decades trying to make a computer from some copper, oil and sand.
I recall that Mao Zedong tried to get every farmer to smelt his own iron, which rather predictably led to a lot of poor-quality iron, and a food shortage.
I get the appeal of self-sufficiency, I really do (one of my dreams is to grow all of my own food), but I think it's a luxury for the rich and inescapable misery for the poor. Modern capitalism has made everyone richer.
I wish it were merely a way to avoid taking personal responsibility. There's much more to it than that.
Read "The Psychology of Influence" along with some of the stuff by, e.g, Kahneman and/or Tversky on behavioral economics and the various cognitive biases humans have that lead them to make poor decisions. I assure you that corporations have read all of this and are taking advantage of it to part you from your money, selling you products that they make you think will increase your happiness. Another resource on this would be Robert Shiller's book "Phishing for Phools, The Economics of Manipulation and Deception".
This isn't about taking personal responsibility. Even when you become fully aware of the insidious way in which our culture works, it's impossible to entirely avoid being taken advantage of by marketing and advertising. We humans are made to think in certain ways, our brains have evolved in a way that gave us cognitive biases we can't escape, even when we're aware of them. Being aware can motivate us to change the culture itself (and its laws), though, so in the future people are less affected by corporate deceit and greed. Yes, this would likely mean lower corporate profits. (Question how we're conditioned to think of lower corporate profits as a bad thing.)
I want the best returns out of the corporations I invest in.
> Question how we're conditioned to think of lower corporate profits as a bad thing.
Perhaps it is my neoliberal worldview, but I think most people are like "corporate profits can go down" for <my cause>. People think that corporations are owned only by billionares.
Lower corporate profits are a bad thing for shareholders.
Why don't we just take poor people's money since they're so greedy for wanting money? Most of the arguments against excess wealth can be used against many first-world people including HNers.
Take it further. Why are you a shareholder? Why are so many people shareholders? Investing for retirement is pushed heavily and incentivized by the government but is it for our own good or is it to provide liquidity in the financial game? If you are pushed to invest then you have skin in the game and are a shareholder who wants to increase corporate profits. This puts you almost directly at odds with all non-shareholders who are negatively affected by increasing profits.
> This puts you almost directly at odds with all non-shareholders who are negatively affected by increasing profits.
Economics is not zero-sum. Few people such as competitors will be negatively affected, but for the average person there will be little impact. For example, if Google makes more profits I am hardly impacted.
So what exactly are you saying these influences can do? If you tell me that they're going to make me slightly more likely to buy one brand of soap than another, I can accept that.
If you tell me that they're going to make me buy diamonds when I have no conceivable use for diamonds, I'm gonna have to call BS.
Well, people buy diamonds and they're basically useless, other than signalling that the purchaser has a certain amount of money. The price for them is much inflated over what it would be if priced purely for their practical value. Artificial diamonds are identical to the naked eye, yet the diamond industry somehow influences our culture to make people think they need to spend many thousands of dollars on useless "real" diamonds.
> corporations seek to remove all of our abilities to take care of ourselves and our communities, so that they may resell those things to us as products
That's an interesting thought. I was thinking that probably UBI won't come to pass (politicians corruptible, corporations greedy and short sighted) thus people will have to rediscover self-reliance in order to improve their situation.
>many of us would be happy to never have to walk significant distance, cook, or listen to a local musician ever again.
You say that like local musicians are somehow a good thing... I'm quite sure there's none in my little area that I'd have any interest in listening to. Whether local musicians are good depends on your taste in music and the local culture where you happen to live.
While car corporations were obviously behind car-oriented policies as well, the American electorate was also completely on board. It didn't have to be this way.
> it's mostly due to the rivers of high-speed traffic that cut up the city
and that is the priority.
you have to be able to drive as fast as the roadway allows to get where you're going without needing to think about the safety of others.
if some kid runs out in front of your car, its not going to be a question of if you were driving to fast but one of "where the hell were the parents?"
the assumption being that the vehicle occupant has the right to get where they're going absolutely as goddamn fast as is humanly possible and nothing had better get in their way.
Rivers of high-speed traffic in the city? Dude, I feel like I can't allow my kids to walk alone to school that's four blocks over in my own neighborhood without some nanny state enabler calling child services on me.
Hell, I don't let them play in the front yard and wonder how long it'll be before I get the knock on the door because I let them play unsupervised in the fenced backyard with a trained full-grown German shepherd on watch.
And then it spitballs. The police / CPS will listen, and we've all heard horror stories about "good people" getting slapped with lawsuits, fines, community service[1], or straight up losing their kids[2] because of a system gone mad.
And the sad part is that we've been conditioned to it. The parent that lets their kids roam with that kind of societal norm and social pressure? You start wondering...
Your comment made me consider this point, and I think it's a good one. That said, I actually live in a less crowded and busy city than I did as a child, yet the conditioning the parent poster mentions is there.
As a 6 year old, I would walk next to busy urban streets alone, cross streets, get on trams, and go to school. I don't think the risk of that has really gotten much higher, we just perceive it differently. A good example is how cars didn't have seatbelts (at the back at least), or headrests, and they had a tendency to crumple and have the steering column impale the driver during collisions.
We seem to be more keenly aware of these issues nowadays, and are somehow more averse to them - quite aside from any actual changes for the worse.
This isnt it. The town I grew up in had precisely the same number of interstates and major roads as it did 30 years ago (flat population) and children today have nowhere near the freedom that I did as a child.
Are you saying that the causes can't be different from town to town or region to region, or that such actions couldn't be justified and rational in one region, while not justified and irrational in another region?
Can you provide some details? I'm amazed by the idea that there's still a place like this. I'm guessing it's a relatively small town pretty far from any major urban centers?
I'm curious why you're amazed at this notion. Surely the vast majority of towns have not been significantly urbanized or had significant road changes in the last thirty years.
My home town in the UK hasn't substantially changed since I was growing up. There's a few junctions which have changed, but no major new roads.
I think this is a distinct difference in culture though. Over here its still the norm for kids to walk to school by themselves from the age of eight or nine, and once they reach secondary school to travel relatively long distances either by foot or public transport. I think there has been a drop in the number of primary school kids playing outside by themselves, but I have a feeling I had a less regimented childhood than many of my friends as a result of living on a quiet road.
I'm not sure you're right. We live in a fairly compact city community, quite suburban but close to town. The primary school doesn't allow children to leave unaccompanied until Y5/Y6 (9-11yo). It's c. 50% that then do walk.
In contrast older children are expected to walk 3 miles before they get transport cost assistance. Regardless of the social dangers of the route.
Not in my experience. I've lived in a variety of places in my life, one specific cross-section of America: from farm towns and small-to-medium cities in the midwest to major urban areas including New York, DC, and Chicago. Basically everywhere I've known for more than a few years has had some measure of road building. Perhaps other parts of the US haven't seen the same trend?
I'm not talking about "significant urbanization", but I definitely am talking about suburbanization, which is a pox that affects the whole country, as far as I know.
This is one of the aspects that are most exciting for me about self-driving cars: no road rage, no hurrying, complete respect for road rules. You wouldn't have to do the "game of chicken" on the crosswalk where you start crossing, but in such a way that you can always bail out if the oncoming traffic doesn't stop. You wouldn't have to fear for your life when simply riding your bike on a wide street. You wouldn't be one person having a bad day away from needing a wheelchair for the rest of your life. To me that day can't come soon enough.
Yes, more than that: if robot cars could be made incapable of hitting pedestrians, then children might start to roam again. It would be a marvellous unintended consequence...
that is impossible in real world. if you go 50 kmh in 50 kmh zone, and small kid jumps 2m in front of your car suddenly, there is nothing anybody or any software can do. if it's 5m, would you rather crash and kill the parents than the kid? what about 2 kids?
it's dangerous direction of thoughts, meaning kids won't have to be careful when outside. but you have bikes, you have tons of other dangers.
Take an evasive maneuver at the very limits of the car's handling, brought to you by the speed of computers, while all the other cars around you adjust at similarly lightning-fast speeds?
Well yes, we can't eliminate all dangers, but we can bring them down significantly and the rest is covered by teaching our children basic self-preservation practices. Like don't run out on to the street without looking even if cars can stop automatically.
I see your point, but don't you think it's possible to teach children to cross traffic safely?
When I was little, I regularly walked 3 or 4 miles to visit friends. I had to cross at least one "big" road on my way, where I just took extra care, because my parents had reminded me to.
It is possible. In fact, we have proof suggesting it's possible (me and millions like me who grew up that way and lived) while we have no proof suggesting otherwise. It's not like children died en masse due to being allowed outside, so people decided it was a bad idea. People just became obsessed with their children's safety and stopped letting them outside just in case. At no point was there some large-scale problem of children dying due to being allowed to roam.
The only large-scale problem was the anxiety suffered by parents who started obsessively worrying about their child, and maintaining tighter control over children is mainly medicine to alleviate their anxiety.
> It's not like children died en masse due to being allowed outside
Do you know what the rates of accidental death were in the 1970s vs today?
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just interested if you know the data.
EDIT: indeed, most children killed in car accidents were inside the vehicles, so driving kids everywhere may be increasing their risk of death. And a decreasing death rate might just be better car safety features - better car seats; better seatbelts and seatbelt laws.
EDIT2: Something like 12,000 US children die each year from unintentional injury, and 29million have non fatal injuries. Most of these are preventable.
I have no real stats, but I can tell you that from the hundreds of kids at my school zero died from getting hit by a car. There was exactly 1 accident-related death and it was while playing sports, and this was a much older kid (like 12-13).
Now that's not a very good sample size for a low-probability event, but it's not entirely insignificant either. If children had to dodge death at every turn like one commenter suggested, zero out of several hundred would have been unlikely.
As for non-fatal injuries, that's different, we were CONSTANTLY injured. Not from cars, but from just being clumsy stupid little fucks. It was normal for a kid to have bloody knees or scabs on their knees in my childhood. But I don't consider that a problem.
These are the statistics about traffic-accidents back then. Unfortunately there's no distinction whether the children were in the car or walking/cycling.
* Austria had 7.8 million inhabitants back then, 24% were 0-19 years old.
* There were 4.682 accidents involving children 0-14 years old
One more thing (can't edit the other comment), I am talking about the late 80s / early 90s, not the 70s. I am not from the US, so it is possible that the "protect the children" mentality was adopted later here. Kids were definitely still free to roam around in 1990.
yeah, preventable. strap kid to the bed or lock in the cellar and no car will ever harm it, right.
there will never be 100% safety, kids do stupid dangerous things, climb stuff that shouldn't be climbed, we all did. in past, people accepted that, accepted the risk of injury and death for their kids, it was part of growing up. we just grew weaker recently, became control freaks, with illusion that we can control everything, while losing so much more. freedom.
fck, i am so glad i grew up in exactly that period of experiencing many good old things, and be able to apreciate new cool stuff too.
If you're imagining a single kid, it sounds reasonable. Now think about the millions of kids across the country: what are the odds that in a year, none of them will make a fatal mistake while crossing a street?
Even adults screw up, we can't reasonably expect kids not to when the consequences can be fatal. We could easily make our streets safer and more tolerant of user error if we actually cared, look at Sweden or the Netherlands. We just have to make safety a higher priority than speed in road design.
Think about how insane it is that we're expecting kids to regularly navigate an environment where, if they make even a small mistake, they can die. In what universe is that reasonable? Why are expecting our children to regularly dodge death?
> Now think about the millions of kids across the country: what are the odds that in a year, none of them will make a fatal mistake while crossing a street?
What price a life? What else would you block to save a life? Pen lids? Swimming pools? Marshmallows?
> if they make even a small mistake, they can die. In what universe is that reasonable?
This universe. It is nature's way. Nature is unemotionally brutal, and cares not for a slip-up. We just try to insulate ourselves from its brutality.
Edit to reply to Tullius (I've hit my comment limit):
The whole origin of this discussion is the hit to quality of life that losing the 'right to roam' has given. Also, while pen lids and marshmallows are outliers, swimming pool deaths aren't - between 1 and 4yo, drowning is the leading cause of death in the US, and drowning is up there with traffic accidents up until the teen years.
> What price a life? What else would you block to save a life? Pen lids? Swimming pools? Marshmallows?
Obviously there's some limit to the degree we can protect ourselves, however as it stands, traffic fatalities are one of the highest-ranked causes of death for kids and youth, and we know of plenty of things that could increase traffic safety while still satisfying our transportation needs. There's no need to debate some silly extreme when we can make vast improvements without compromising quality of life.
> This universe. It is nature's way. Nature is unemotionally brutal, and cares not for a slip-up. We just try to insulate ourselves from its brutality.
Yes, and we could insulate ourselves a lot better if we took up better traffic engineering principles.
For those interested: I live in Austria, the year of my story was about 1992.
These are the statistics about traffic-accidents back then. Unfortunately there's no distinction whether the children were in the car or walking/cycling.
* Austria had 7.8 million inhabitants back then, 24% were 0-19 years old.
* There were 4.682 accidents involving children 0-14 years old
So what you're saying is that most adults never crossed any major roads as children and most children that have crossed major roads didn't grow up to be adults?
I know traffic statistics are depressing, but surely they can't be that bad.
You're making it sounds like there's a pile of dead kids just growing on the side of the road every day. Lethal traffic incidents among children are non-trivial, but no-where near enough to introduce any kind of "survivorship bias" effect.
Indeed. Among the many reasons life-expectancy was worse back then, children were less likely to survive to adulthood. Among "Great Grandpa's" 13 siblings growing up on the farm, the one who drowned unsupervised at the ol' swimmin' hole six miles from home is just another statistic next to the couple who died as infants from disease.
Everyone's grandparents who survived just fine are exactly that: just fine, because they survived.
Nowadays, with parents having fewer children on average and with tragic childhood accidents being more exceptional, I would only expect modern parenting to favor greater restrictions.
Yep I (20 year old) rode a bike quite often down to say the public library about two miles, but it was all sidewalks on slow roads. It's one of the things I really miss about where I live now. It would be almost criminal to try having a kid ride to the library from here.
Another reason is that things are generally very spread out in the US. Since it was taken for granted that everyone has a car, house lots are large and commercial areas are far from residential areas.
I can't help but notice that this is close to Rotherham. The second hit when you google for Rotherham is the Wikipedia article on the "Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal".
The report estimated that 1,400 children had been sexually abused in the town between 1997 and 2013, predominantly by gangs of British-Pakistani men.[7] Abuses described included abduction, rape, torture and sex trafficking of children.
Yeah the traffic is a killer, I was almost killed by a driver who straight up ran a red light going around 75mph and nearly collided with me, an old man and an (estimated) 8 year old girl, its very dangerous to be a pedestrian, even more dangerous than being a motorcycle rider.
This is definitely the issue from what I see. I have a neighborhood road that runs in front of my home. Speed limit is 25 mph. Doesn't matter, cars still do 55 or more at times. When I was growing up, you'd never see anyone going that fast down a residential street.
I think this is a large part of it. I don't care so much as 5 cents about what somebody at child protective services thinks...but where I live people drive so fast it is a bit ridiculous..but also my neighborhood has roaming packs of dogs. For whatever reason my area seems to be where people go to drop off unwanted dogs; they pack up and become dangerous. I have been attacked 3 times, my wife once and I am not too keen on my children's ability to defend themselves against them. I have disposed of many of them but it seems just when it is safe again to go for a run...there are more dogs.
I grew up deep inside a suburban development in Pennsylvania. We could ride our bikes for miles and still avoid major roads. Street hockey games very rarely had to move nets for cars. A number of friends lived easily within walking/biking distance. Even leaving my development usually meant dealing with one "major" road before getting into the quiet streets of the next one.
I would love to let my 8 year old daughter roam our current neighborhood like that, but we get more speeding cars in an afternoon cutting through our street than I would see in a weeks at my parents'.
But the driver for building roads is frequently that roads enable an upgrade in zoning for land that fronts on those roads.
More modern roadways are quite distant and independent of even the usual retail/restaurant establishments. You have to take an exit. These roads tend to be toll. I don't know how anyone who hasn't used them would be able to see what I mean, but around Houston, the new 99 and I45 stand as examples of the two approaches.
Traffic is definitely a big, unsolved problem in todays cities -- but in this context, it doesn't really fit into the causal chain: People report roaming about freely as kids in the 70s and 80s (that would include myself), several decades into the golden age of cars everywhere. Obviously individual areas can change, but the world at large today isn't significantly more dangerous for traffic reasons than it was 40 years ago.
I'm curious if that's a sufficient explanation. Do all the parents today (who remember roaming as kids but who wouldn't let their own kids roam now) live somewhere with more dangerous roads than where they grew up? I wonder if my own home town, which I know has not had significant road changes, has experienced the same alleged decline in roaming.
Great point to consider geography and the urban environment. In the suburb I grew up in there were no sidewalks, and a few woodsy areas around my parents house were quickly developed and turned into more suburban dwellings, so there really wasn't anywhere to roam.
As a Swiss with a small child, this is the main reason why I couldn't move to the US or UK. Your 70ies examples are still common enough in Switzerland. 6 year olds are sent to Kindergarden on their own (after a bit of training with their parents). Put the visibility triangle on and off you go. Parents are discouraged by the school authorities to bring by car. Today looking back at this I can see the value. Maybe it has to do with Switzerland being small enough for horrible child abduction stories to be very rare, and if they happen outside Switzerland we tend to think as something that happens to other people - as nationalistic as that sounds, but that's just how most people's minds work, for better or worse, in this instance probably for the better.
To be fair, in a recent brief visit to Switzerland I stayed with some friends in a small village near Zug and saw examples of this sort of attitude throughout more aspects of life than just child-raising. For example, many farmers were leaving produce out with price tags on and relying on an honour system for payment. Some did a 'pay what you want' system for their produce and just relied on people to do the right thing when valuing the items. It was really nice and refreshing and had a very positive community feel to it. It wouldn't surprise me if it's an attitude conditioned through exposure to it in all kinds of different aspects of life. I hope it stays around.
Forget farms, this is even how the supermarket produce section works in Switzerland. You pick your stuff, you weigh it yourself, you choose the right tag (without anyone looking over your shoulder) and then you go to a (nowadays potentially automated) cashier.
Heck, it's how the tax system works as well. Government has no way of knowing how much is actually on your bank account, well at least not officially (gov was probably quite happy about the US breaking our banking secrecy). So everyone is supposed to be responsible enough to fill out their taxes and hand in all the information needed. At the end it all works out fine - turns out you can mostly trust people to be honest and the system keeps working for everyone, at least it did so for the last 170 or so years.
You can still do this at hardware stores in the US. You put your nuts and bolts in the plastic bag and write down the price and quantity and then they add them up at the register. I was really shocked as a teenager when I realized they just "trusted" you to do it correctly.
Worked in a busy bike shop as a kid and sometimes you would have someone come through the door after a nut or bolt. I would go to the workshop and spend quite a bit of time finding the bolt, then I would only be able to charge 50p for it. By the time I had came back I could have used that time to serve a customer after some real purchases, e.g. a whole bicycle. There wouldn't even be any 'word of mouth' benefits, the bolt could be for a lawnmower or something and the customer could be far too wedded to their tin box vehicle for there to be the chance to upgrade them to a bicycle.
Anyway, it was not cost effective to do personal service bolt sales, at 50p a time, had I been smarter I would have had a big box of random bolts under the counter and made things 'self service'.
Isn't that a chicken-and-egg problem? IMO if a society treats people like responsible adults they'll rise up to the task. The question is of course how to transition there. I can't say to have any recipes, but I'm reasonably sure that taking away civic rights is counterproductive. Maybe try to get one electable political party that makes it their thing to protect and even expand citizen's rights and allow for more self responsibility? I don't like the Libertarians for some of their antisocial ideas, but at least that's where they seem to have gotten something right.
if there would be public vote about this in all european countries, most if not all would ban it. that's the current attitude unfortunately. swiss are just the most free nation to decide these things themselves
I'm sure it has genetic components, but the question for me is rather whether those components differ between peoples. I'd assume that evolutionary pressure selected quite heavily for people who can be trusted to cooperate.
But there are also obvious evolutionary pressures towards self-interest, even when it means breaking promises/trustworthiness. (Remember, selection happens at the level of individuals, not of whole groups and societies!) The balance between the two pressures could be different in different environments. In other words, it's quite possible that one environment could select more for trustworthiness, another more for untrustworthy self-interest.
Not being a dick and working together without everyone constantly on edge that everyone else is going to screw them the first chance they get is a totally valid strategy, even from a self-interest standpoint.
Actually, what I recall from reading studies of adoption and criminality (it was a few years ago, though, so I don't remember the authors or exact titles to find them) the "the children taken into care at a young age turn into bad people just like their parents anyway" has a truth in it - if you analyze the heritability of antisocial behavior and criminality (and the heritability clearly exists) to see how much of it is e.g. "nature vs nurture" or genetics vs environment and socioeconomic status, then about half of it still remains in case of adoption to a 'low risk' environment.
One plausible explanation for some of that, which wasn't analyzed there, but has some basis in other research is that things like risk-taking behavior or being prone to addiction are quite genetic.
But in any case, for many(most? all?) "moral" characteristics saying that they're only about "poverty, inequality and values" is wishful thinking. Yes, they are in part about that, but they are also in part about genetics; the answer to "nature or nurture" pretty much always is both.
"The best fitting model for 41 key studies (58 independent samples from 14 month old infants to adults; N=27,147) included equal proportions of variance due to genetic (0.50) and non-shared environmental (0.50) influences, with genetic effects being both additive (0.38) and non-additive (0.12). Shared environmental effects were unimportant in explaining individual differences in impulsivity."
So impulsivity (which is obviously closely related to your propensity to betray the trust of your fellow-man for a short-term gain) appears to be a combination of genetics and random luck (non-shared environment).
I don't know about trustworthiness in particular, but lots and lots of personality traits turn out to have a heritability of about 50% (or more), so much so that it's a decent rule of thumb to guess that a trait is about 50% heritable.
I haven't been to too many US supermarkets, but don't you get the vegetables in already weighed and tagged portions? IMO if you do that yourself, and there isn't even a cashier doing a bit of sanity checking, there's just more opportunity to cheat. With self checkout alone you can just not scan something, but it would seem a bit more obvious to catch (which I could see the chains doing with security cams). Almost certainly noone is going to notice if people print the tag for cheap Apples and put it on a bag of expensive ones.
No. The majority of vegetables I buy (in Canada but it's the same in the US as far as I've seen) are not pre-packaged. Self checkouts have a scale built into them that you weigh your own produce and punch in the code to say what kind of food it is. It's trivial to cheat if you want, but most people are honest. This is also true in hardware store self checkouts where you buy loose items and the store relies on you being honest about punching in the correct code when you check out.
Not exactly. Typically there will be a sign that lets you know how much the produce is per imperial pound. There are analog scales there that you can use to weigh your produce to give you an idea of how much it will be, but the real digital scales are at checkout. At self-checkout you put the produce onto a scale and then click on the picture of the produce your are purchasing so the computer can correlate the weight with the item. There isn't anything stopping you from clicking the picture of a cheaper produce item other than the honesty system.
generally no. They do sell stuff like that as well, but most is out in the open and you bag yourself. And then punch in the item codes or look them up at the self checkout. There's no real check, although sometimes they catch people cheating by reviewing video.
Here in the UK, like the US, the self-checkout machines have built-in scales that weigh your produce and calculate the price automatically.
There's no extra tags involved, you just have to select what the produce is if it doesn't have a barcode.
There is indeed an opportunity to "cheat" by weighing something expensive but telling the machine it's something cheap like onions or potatoes.
But the machines can be monitored remotely from a security station, so there is a small chance you'd get caught. That keeps most people pretty honest.
I'm sure a few cheats do slip though, but the losses from this sort of thing are presumably much less than the savings from employing less checkout staff!
Here in Toronto, we have both. In fact, one location of a grocery chain might allow you to tag and weigh your own items, whereas another location of the same grocery chain might require an attendant (usually right next to the automated machines) to verify it.
I've seen one location go from requiring an assistant to allowing full self-serve.
Not sure about the U.S. but I have the impression that there must be places which are similar in the U.S.
>You pick your stuff, you weigh it yourself, you choose the right tag (without anyone looking over your shoulder) and then you go to a (nowadays potentially automated) cashier.
The US has its faults to be sure, but it's not that different here for buying produce these days. A lot of things had little stickers on them which can be scanned directly, and for other things the automated cashier lets you type in or look up a code number and then set the item(s) on the scanner/scale to be weighed. If you really wanted to cheat, it would be trivial to buy a bag full of some expensive item and type in the code number for some cheap item.
well, for supermarket this is common all around europe for fruit&veggies, east, west, everywhere. probably cheaper than hiring extra person to mark everything correctly.
all super/hypermarkets in france are same, shopping there every weekend.
I recall my childhood in rural Australia and am greatful for our freedom then and hopefully still now. We would ride for hours all around town, once even riding to a neighboring town along the coast.
Doors and cars are also typically unlocked, sometimes the keys are left in the car too. I have always mused that if you wanted to steal a bunch of cars you would just take a trailer to a country town and load them right up.
It all worked out fine because it was a small community and people would know who did what. Steal a car? Where are you gonna drive it? Everyone will know it's not yours.
The other thing I imagine helps is that there are fewer mentally unstable people just thanks to there being fewer people. So someone "a bit off" would be known to the community. That can be good and bad.
>Doors and cars are also typically unlocked, sometimes the keys are left in the car too. I have always mused that if you wanted to steal a bunch of cars you would just take a trailer to a country town and load them right up.
>It all worked out fine because it was a small community and people would know who did what. Steal a car? Where are you gonna drive it? Everyone will know it's not yours.
>The other thing I imagine helps is that there are fewer mentally unstable people just thanks to there being fewer people. So someone "a bit off" would be known to the community. That can be good and bad.
Congratulations on describing a small town pretty much anywhere in the western world.
Right here in suburban San Jose too. Phil Cosentino (one of the Cosentino brothers of local grocery fame) and his family run J&P Farms on Carter Avenue near 85 and Camden. They sell organic fruit from their backyard orchard.
Sometimes you will run into one of them at the produce stand in front of their house, but usually when I've been there it's unattended. The baskets of fruit have prices on them and there's a slot in the counter to put your money in.
I think your perception of HN membership is way off. I'd frankly be surprised if 50% of HN members live in the SF/SV area. Not sure how either of us can be proven correct, however, at least not without mod assistance. Perhaps user IPs?
Well, a few months ago I bought several cartons of berries at a honor system you-pick farm. To be fair that was in Vermont, which probably isn't representative of the whole of the United States.
For that matter, I regularly see schoolchildren riding the New York City subway accompanied only by their friends...
To be fair, NYC is very, very different from the rest of the US. Reading over many of these comments, the people saying that kids can't roam in their areas are living in suburban places where you need a car to go anywhere, and it's simply not safe as a pedestrian. NYC is not like this: everyone takes the subway or walks all over the place there, and many people do not have cars, or use them within the city if they do. It's totally walkable. So I can see how kids walking around by themselves won't have people worried the way they would in suburban areas.
> Reading over many of these comments, the people saying that kids can't roam in their areas are living in suburban places where you need a car to go anywhere, and it's simply not safe as a pedestrian.
It's safer as a pedestrian in the suburbs than in urban environments, which is one of the reasons people move to suburbs to raise kids. In fact, one of the reasons public transit doesn't work in suburbs and you need a car to get anywhere out of your residential neighborhood is that suburbs are usually designed to limit both traffic volume and traffic speed in residential neighborhoods (which typically include small parks and other facilities specifically for for kids) to provide pedestrian safety (which has a side effect of requiring longer, both in road distance and time, trips to anywhere else than straight-libe distance would suggest, and making efficient public transit routes impractical where this is done through branching designs without connecting loops, and making distances impractical for walking out of the neighborhood to other areas -- though this is sometimes, in better suburbs, mitigated by walking/bike paths which make non-carbonated distances closer to straight-line than the motor vehicle routes.)
This is essentially how it works in Japan as well; once the kids are old enough, the parents will walk with them to school a couple of times - to ensure they learn the route and to introduce them to neighbors they might meet on the way - and then the kids are on their own.
Japan's cultural safety net (by which I mean the overarching concept that everyone is more or less working together for the common good) is one of my favorite things about the country, and one of the most startling to me after moving to Asia.
Most American parents, on the other hand, don't teach their kids anything about being safe on the streets (other than basic theory, like "don't cross on a red light") because they're always shuttling them around in a car. The reason it's unsafe for American children to roam free is because they don't know how to. In the past, they learned from older siblings and friends. Nowadays there's nobody to teach them. And as soon as you turn 16, you're suddenly free to drive anywhere. It doesn't feel safe to be a pedestrian in a town where most drivers have never been a pedestrian. And so the vicious cycle continues.
Maybe in the suburbs. Here in New York City kids are expected to make their own way home by the fifth grade. And take mass transit to school by themselves by sixth. I'm not sure if it's safe, but plenty of kids manage it themselves. My eight year old is eagerly awaiting the day he can walk home by himself.
It might have to do with the fact that fewer people drive in New York City. Suburban parents can drop their kids off at the school on their way to work. Trying to do the same in New York City would be a massive waste of time!
The last few decades were all about ever-expanding suburbs. It would be interesting to study the effect of urban revival and gentrification on parenting behavior and the larger culture over the next few decades.
Yes, I live in Japan now and I see that every day. One note though: In cities there's actually a watch organised, every street corner there's a different parent or grand parent waiting at a specific time for the children to arrive. Also, older kids are officially tasked with guiding the younger ones on the way to school.
I was just going to mention this exact same observation from my visit to Japan in October. I stayed in an Airbnb north of Shibuya and morning and night we saw little kids walking to and from school. It was awesome. That, coupled with everybody leaving their bikes unlocked, was such a stark contrast to what I'm used to here in the US.
The concept of "us vs everyone else" or "other people are dangerous and untrustworthy" is probably the most clear difference in US TV shows when I compare it to where I live.
It always seems to be the exception rather than the rule, that people might be willing to co-operate. The idea of "only we are sane" is another. Assuming everyone else is crazy or disagreeable seems to be common.
I wonder if that is something reflected by US media correctly or if it is something skewed.
I've wondered the same thing. It concerns me that there are more police dramas than any other genre on American television.... and even more that they are so popular. It says alot about a cultural mindset. One the one hand you can argue the shows are being pushed.. but they wouldn't continue to do so if people didn't eat them up.
It's a gut fear that is being appealed to, and simultaneously teaching people exactly "us vs everyone else" and "other people are dangerous and untrustworthy." Even your neighbor. Even your friends.
Makes me sad.
It didn't used to be that way in the US. It's certainly gotten worse.
Bike theft is actually a surprisingly big thing in Japan. However, they have another method to control it: all bikes are registered and police conduct random spot checks of ID and registration. (Foreigners tend to get "randomly" checked more often.)
I think you're right. Kids being randomly abducted is vanishingly rare, but the faster and further news spreads, the more 'real' it seems. A smaller country would be less likely to see it as a problem that "happens here".
I was born in 1981 and from the age of 7 or 8 I remember walking to school (1.5mi and parts of it along a busy street). My friends and I would play in the drainage culvert under the road, walking back and forth, the far side actually was basically a cliff, but we didn't want to fall, so we took care. I remember at age 10 wanting to ride my bicycle to a friend's house across town, but it was "too far" according to my parents. It actually was quite far though; at least 6 miles and mostly on very busy streets, no cycling infrastructure. By 11 or 12 I was riding my bike dozens of miles from home. My friends and I went all over the place unsupervised, all summer long, and this was just in the mid 90s. It was just your average middle class suburban American town.
I definitely hope people takes these stories to heart and it encourages folks to let their kids roam. But it's hardly a memory of generations past.
>> Kids being randomly abducted is vanishingly rare, but the faster and further news spreads, the more 'real' it seems
The problem is that a single abduction is touted by the media as though 1,000,000 children were taken. It's the exact same propaganda as terrorism - one attack by a foreigner that kills 10 people is treated as though the entire nation of 319 million people were wiped out. When the police and child services can now pick your child off the street and put them into a foster home because they were "not under the supervision of a parent at all times", you have no chance. The U.S. has given away their freedom, simple as that.
I was born in the early 80s as well. I was way out in the suburbs and took the bus to school, but there were plenty of kids that walked. (Occasionally a teacher would forget to unlock the back gate and you'd see them all standing there in the morning when the first bell rang ... usually followed by an announcement of how none of the walkers should be counted late).
I walked everywhere, which even then, wasn't all that common. It was ~2 miles (4km) to church, and there were several times when other parents would stop and offer me rides.
In the mid-2000s I was in Cincinnati, and noticed a lot of the neighbourhoods close to the city usually had squares with the usual restaurants, ice cream shops, bars, etc. It was refreshing to see teenagers out in the evening in the weekend. They had places that were easily walk-able to meet up with friends (even though the bus there is less than ideal).
I would have much rather grown up in that kind of environment that way out in the suburbs where you needed rides eveywhere and few of your friends were in walking distance.
Does Switzerland publish where sex offenders live?
One piece of information present now is that I can see all the child molesters within a mile of where I live. You see that half a mile away there is someone convicted of "Rape of child with force" and it messes with you.
I'm pretty sure it doesn't have such a public registry. Some of the legal system in the US are very foreign to Swiss (and probably most continental Europeans for that matter), for example the way court proceedings are published and the accused can be named in the media before conviction. In almost every case, Swiss law enforcement and their corrective measures are meant to be that - corrective, not revengeful. This can sometimes lead to bad results (with quite a few people getting angry when crimes go with no or only light punishments), but overall most people probably think it's better to go too soft rather than too harsh, because the latter makes the government into a bully that everyone needs to fear, which people really don't want (and which a very active direct democracy hopefully somewhat protects against).
My main concern would be traffic. I live in an affluent neighbourhood with a lot of stressed people driving SUVs. I've had a car run over my foot. On one occasion, my kids had to be yanked out of the way by their mother to avoid being hit by a left-turning car that didn't see them.
My impression is that the Swiss are more fastidious about following traffic regulations. Is this outdated?
US drivers seem particularly hostile to pedestrians. I spent only a couple of months there, but there were two times (one each in TX, CA) that I was crossing with the 'walk' sign and had to literally stop because a car was turning right in front of me and I would have walked into the side of it. And I'm a 6'6" guy with broad shoulders, not hard to see. There were other close shaves and pedestrian-hostile behaviour as well, but actually having to literally stop walking stuck with me.
Oddly, despite the reputation, I actually felt safer to cross the road in NYC than most other places.
It probably depends on the location in the US, but every time I go there I find Americans amazingly relaxed when driving. Swiss are probably some of the more careful drivers in continental Europe (which is to say they're slow), but I think it's still way more nervous than in the US. However, one of the issues is probably the sheer size of US roads, it's just much harder to cross I think. And from my own experience, kids who are tasked to look after themselves, after a certain age will actually learn to be careful very quickly. Plus, near school there's lots of warning signs and drivers are generally careful there. Generally it's not an issue, but I can see how US suburbia could be ill fitted for such a system.
Parents put "Drive like your kids live here" signs in some parts of Palo Alto. I think the clever phrasing makes it more likely to be taken seriously by a driver.
As a Dutch guy visiting Switzerland regularly for skiing and just regular recreational purposes, I was surprised how many young children are getting on the bus for the slopes without a parent. Seeing a young child sitting/skiing/snowboarding on their own wasn't anything unusual.
That's good to hear. Some of the things I hear from the UK sound at least as authoritarian as the US, so I thought that CPS has similarly harsh measures - apparently it's not that big of an issue?
Working class and upper class children seem to have this freedom in London, having lived in both to press of area.
When I lived in Richmond there were often children alone on the bus or train with expensive belongings like musical instruments or sports equipment. My middle class parents would never have allowed that - but they would expect me to get to school on public transport alone.
There were a couple of highly publicised cases which I suspect may not be accurately reported in the newspapers, but generally UK child protection is under-funded and errs on the side of non-intervention. Which has tragic consequences of its own: Victoria Climbie, "Baby P" and so on.
This is a gratuitously polarizing and flamewar-baiting comment.
The issue described in the article is not a directly partisan one and parents are not "traitors" for having a different idea than you do about how independently their children should be allowed to explore their surroundings.
This seems to run rampart in the US, but also a little bit over here in Germany.
My daughter (now 12) is allowed to use public transport across my city (Munich) since she was 9 (close to 10) - and my son who's 9 will change schools in summer and take public transport to there as well.
What's (still!) normal here might be child endangering in the US. The kids are free to roam from here to the city's river Isar (around a 20 minute walk, 1 subway station) because there's just a green, nice place.
And no, Munich is not a rural area, it's a 1.6 Million people city. And the first year when my daughter was taking public transport she was switching lines at Munich central station.
In 2015. During those days when there were several thousand refugees here.
You teach the kids about sensible behaviour, about how to travel safely. And then you have to let them take a risk, because locking them up in the apartment is a very dangerous thing, for their mind, for their health.
There IS a certain risk that something bad happens. But I refuse to encumber the kids souls with fear and panic. I definitely believe part of the "obesity epidemic" is parents driving their kids everywhere because "its safer". No it's not. The kids get sick and fat.
My problem is neighbors. They would call the cops instead of talking to me if they saw my daughter out there biking or playing. Can't they just chill and keep an eye out? I do for their kids and even let them play on my lot.
Nope - they all hide behind the drawn in curtains and think there's pedophiles lurking in my backyard bush.
"We have been conditioned to appeal to authority in disputes rather than handling them ourselves."
Well that is how a dignity society operates; ignore it, or draw on authority. The alternative is an honour society, and those produce far worse outcomes for almost everyone. The problem here isn't that people appeal to authority in disputes; it's that people's idea of what constitutes a dispute is broken.
Seconded. People see crap they don't like and escalate to some 3rd party without at least making a token effort solve it first get a special place in hell.
What part of the US do you live in? I have 3 kids ages 7 to 12 and they and all of the neighborhoods kids wander together over a distance of several miles.
We make sure they have a phone and a time they are expected to return. The kids always group up as there is more safety in numbers. Life isn't worth living if you don't actually live.
Yes, you can definitely find places where kids still play by themselves in the US! But it takes work and the regional and even neighborhood-level differences in kids' behavior are enormous.
We used to live in suburban Washington DC and I didn't let my kids out of sight of the house.
Now we live in suburban Denver. We cared about play a lot so we used it as the main criterion of where we bought a house. We drove through neighborhoods on Saturday mornings until we found one where kids were out riding bikes and playing without adult supervision. We found a neighborhood that was both well designed (pools, a network of walking trails away from roads, school in walking distance) and full of people who were culturally supportive of free-range kids.
If you want to find or help to foster such a neighborhood, I recommend the book we used, "Playborhoods": http://playborhood.com
>I think I've been conditioned to think that I would be a negligent parent if I did this.
>The media is part of the problem. 24/7 news, social media, and channels like ID (real life murder 24/7) scare the bejeezus out of people. But besides that, we have an acceptance of nanny-state government - that the government should be a much closer "partner" in child rearing than 40 years ago.
The whole intent is to condition you to normality. Not unlike civil forfeiture and intrusive security checks when travelling.
Growing up parents gradually loosened the restrictions on my roaming from age 7-12. As an adult, I think that taught me independence, love of nature, and exercise / outdoor activities.
Do you not feel the benefits outweigh the risks? I've watched aunt shelter her 2 children. Both of her boys are sickly and extremely sheltered. Sure I had some minor adventures like stepping on nails and falling off my bike. But I learned and grew from those experiences.
Comparing how my sister and I turned out compared to my sheltered cousins, it seems like my parents did the right thing. You recognize that the world is just as safe and it's the media that scares people. Don't you worry that you are being selfish by being overprotective?
Has anyone considered that, like many things, maybe childraising knowledge has improved over time, and maybe it is true that it's dangerous and a bad idea to let them roam around far away unsupervised? It always seemed reasonable to me, even when I was that age myself. An anecdote is that the only bone injury I had as a kid resulted from riding bikes with some other kids who had a "fun idea" of biking down this steeply sloped road, which wouldn't have been allowed had an adult been present, and I ended up with a crushed wrist and internal bruising, and I was lucky I even lived - could have easily hit my head for example. The aftermath of that incident is probably largely to blame for the weight problem I developed at the time.
My proposed alternative is good video games with open exploration (something like the original Spyro the Dragon games has a great sense of exploration and adventure) or that are otherwise engaging. I always found them a lot more intellectually stimulating/interesting than meandering around outside as a kid anyway. Local multiplayer is a good social activity. Continuing the tangent on other benefits, I remember being motivated to read faster as a kid to keep up with certain text boxes that would disappear quickly, and achieving it.
With all this balanced with other stuff like encouraging playing musical instruments or art and such, I don't see a need for unsupervised "roaming," especially a need outweighing the risks.
I really feel that proposing video games over being outside does a huge disservice to us as people. Maybe I'm centennial, but there's something visceral and amazing about being outside.
I think we have made some changes for the better. I remember as a teenager I noticed all the metal jungle jims at playgrounds were gone. It made me said, but I realized it was probably because falling from one could injure or kill a kid; and today we see that many of them have come back, but in the much safer rope based variety with that cool recycled rubber matting under them.
There is something about risk that is important in helping people develop:
Your own stories show you learned from your mistakes. Yes, you could have died, but you didn't. That action and memory create a different reality for you, and the way you view it deeply impacts the opinion you've presented here.
> I really feel that proposing video games over being outside does a huge disservice to us as people.
This. Growing up, I was only allowed 1 hr of video games or TV per day. And on nice days, I was ordered to play outside. I grew up with a love of outdoors, sports, and have always been in good shape. My cousins were encouraged to stay in and play video games and never allowed out alone. We are similar age and genetics, yet they are both overweight and unhealthy. Whereas my sister and I are healthy.
I know it's anecdotal, but my families experience sure matches your centennial common sense.
Exercise is overwhelmingly dwarfed by calorie consumption, in terms of weight. Not eating an apple is about equivalent to running an entire mile. Most likely your cousins just had a worse diet. Exercise as a weight loss solution is essentially a lie sold by con artists - you can't outrun a bad diet, as they say.
Sounds like someone thinking of an excuse not to exercise :)
A quick Google suggests running a mile burns about 100 calories and an apple is about 50.
In a more general sense, you can't really compare the two. You can't say exercise is "dwarfed" by consumption because they're not on the same scale; unless you're talking about, say, perceived willpower of eating less versus exercising more.
How was measure calories is terrible. Carbs should be measured different from calories. If you cut out bread, pasta, soda and other major sources of starches and sugars (you can keep fiber and sugar alcohols), weight loss and overall health greatly improve.
Exercising is good and healthy for you. You should do it. But you won't loose weight by it. Your diet is way more important.
You can if you just do truly massive amounts of exercise. At one point last year I was doing 12 hours of cycling per week and my maintenance caloric intake was approximately 3000 kcal, or that of one and a half normal people.
Weight is not the primary concern of being in good shape. Being thin, but in bad shape, is almost as detrimental to your health as being over weight and in bad-shape.
One of the two bones I broke as a kid had a similar cause. That might sound like an endorsement of your claim, except first that it gave me powerfully to understand the value of forethought on the subject of not being a damn fool, and second that the other broken bone resulted from jumping up and down on an ordinary floor - not even jumping off anything. Are floors a problem?
I have a scar at the base of each thumb. One came from carelessness with the Boy Scout folder whose purchase price I'd years earlier worked hard to earn. It wasn't the first time I'd hurt myself through carelessness with that knife, either. It was the last, though, with any. Are pocketknives a problem?
The other scar I earned through waving a stick around. It wasn't really an instance of culpable carelessness on my part, in that if the stick hadn't had a twig stump where it did, or had I held it differently, it wouldn't have gouged me. I found a lesson there about unintended consequences that's served me well in life. Are sticks a problem?
In rough terms, I spent half my pre-adolescent childhood running around barefoot climbing trees and derelict farm equipment, and the other half indoors reading and playing NES games and writing Applesoft BASIC. I found both enjoyable, and a worthwhile way to spend time. I would not have attempted to replace either with the other. To make the attempt would have struck me as arrant foolishness, even at such a callow age, and I cannot say the idea seems any more sensible from a perspective more heavily weighted with years.
I never really liked outside much as a kid and found those kinds of games a lot more fun and "adventurous" than outside. To recall my exact feelings at the time, in Spyro I was working towards goals and finding cool stuff like fairies and treasure, while trees and rocks outside were just "there." Nowadays I can appreciate nature just fine (lately I watched a particular great blue heron occasionally throughout a semester that hangs around campus waiting to see if I could watch it catch a fish from the pond and it eventually did, cool thing to see) but at the time it kind of felt like a chore having to go outside. In addition to satisfying the criteria of exploration, I think the right kinds of video games are very beneficial with regards to reading/coordination/other skills at a young age, like with my reading anecdote, but I haven't read any actual studies on it. For stuff like building treehouses and other more creative ventures there's Minecraft et al. All without losing real limbs, falling down real wells, or getting stung by real bees a real mile from home and learning you have a real bee allergy.
That sounds much less like a genuine lack on the part of reality, and much more like your reward system being tuned so strongly to favor shiny polygons popping out from under polygonal rocks that, when you turn over a real one, their absence disappoints you.
Your other examples are just as flawed. When you build a treehouse in your backyard, you end up with a treehouse - and the knowledge that you built a treehouse, and that you can build a treehouse. When you build a treehouse in Minecraft, you end up with nothing. It's an arrangement of bytes that's rendered by an imaginary machine into an arrangement of pixels that corresponds roughly with some abstract idea of what a treehouse might be. There is nothing in the slightest about it which is real, and that includes the feeling it might give of having accomplished anything.
I get that, in an industry which revolves around building imaginary machines, it's easy for us to get confused and forget that's what we are doing. That it's easy is no excuse to let it betray you into sloppy thinking, though, and that's what I see here. Imaginary machines appear to have satisfied you well enough as a kid, which is reasonable. Assuming from this that imaginary machines are good enough for every kid is not reasonable at all. What you found to enrich your life would've intolerably impoverished mine, and those of almost all the people with whom I grew up. As such, I find your prescriptivism uninformed, premature, and faintly arrogant in a way I don't think you've reflected upon or even recognized.
There's a big difference between letting a kid play in the way they want to play (with limits, of course), and forcing or strongly encouraging playing video games instead of playing outside.
I wore my seat belt every day before that anyway, not even because I had to but because I wanted to. The only thing that really changed after that point was I didn't want to ride bikes anymore.
I really can't be the only one who thinks brushes with death are not a good thing to have just because they can teach you a lesson when you're fortunate enough to walk away from them. Would you also say Russian Roulette is a good thing to try out because you might learn to value life more afterwards?
I can't help but think you're drastically overstating the danger of riding a bike, even in less than safe conditions. I was heavily into downhill mountain biking during my invincible teenage years and only even heard of someone doing major damage to themselves second hand (they managed to impact their spine flying head first off their bike into a tree trunk).
Scrapes, bruises, cuts, and even bones heal relatively easily in children. At least for me learning that things will probably be OK was a valuable thing which has made me more comfortable taking calculated risks later in life, and the times things weren't quite OK taught me a healthy level of caution in calculating those risks.
"I was heavily into downhill mountain biking during my invincible teenage years "
But those mountains probably didn't pose the risk of getting crushed by two tons of steel when somebody decides they'd rather look at their phone than the road.
They were more hills than mountains, and while they weren't full of traffic I crossed (and in some cases rode along) some pretty major roads to get to them.
One might argue that the correct lesson to draw, from a broken bone got by doing something stupid on a bike, is not that one shouldn't ride a bike, but rather that one shouldn't do something stupid. That's the lesson I drew from it, anyway.
I'd be curious to know how old you were when you did the damnfool thing, and how your folks reacted to it. I was eleven or twelve and mine were generally unsympathetic, which suited me fine - it's not like I couldn't see in retrospect what a jackass I'd been, or like I wasn't quite properly embarrassed by the result. One does, after all, prefer to be able to say one earned a visible injury in some more respectable fashion than that!
I doubt it. There's a difference between playing and exploring the real world, and sitting in a room.
My parents took the easy route of indoor parenting, with video games / books / school / instrument practice... be safe all the time. I was consistently at the top of my class and reasonably successful socially... but that upbringing did a lot of damage mentally. It's like being raised in a glass cage.
I plan to go the other way with my kids. Buy 10 acres out in the country or woods near some other families, far from the concrete jungle... Let the kids run free and explore, sit and learn, play video games, whatever. My parenting mentality is to provide freedom, and advice on using that freedom (living). If they ignore my advice and do stupid stuff, the pain will teach them the value of advice.
I never visited a psych so I don't know the right terms, but it was probably some form of derealization. Reality always felt shallow, every experience lacked detail and substance... that served as the foundation for other problems. Mechanically, I suspect the derealization resulted from under-trained neurons/networks that couldn't accurately feed forward perceptions of the world.
Once I got to college, I spent the vast majority of my time outside and offline... after a month I distinctly remember noticing how everything felt so real. After a year I'd realized and unwound most of the neurosis on my own.
> and maybe it is true that it's dangerous to let them roam around far away unsupervised?
...and maybe there are unseen benefits that outweigh those risk factors? It's true that in the past few years childhood mortality has lowered, and that the highest risk factor for anyone up to age 44 is "unintentional injuries;" however, other statistics may be more troubling.
For example, the teen suicide rate was steadily declining throughout 1985 to 2000, but since then, there has been a steady uptick in the suicide rate for children under 18. It's the second leading cause of death for people 10 to 34 in the united states, out-ranking even murder and cancer for these groups.
There have been vast societal changes too (in the UK). 30-40 years ago a lot of residential streets would have parents home during the day. That doesn't seem true now.
I was allowed to roam as a child. But was in a village area where all the families knew each other, primarily because mother's were home with their kids for 5 years of their lives at least.
When I was 12, I rode my bike three miles to the bus stop where I hitched it to the bus and rode from a small town in San Diego down to the El Cortez Hotel where Comic Con was being held. I paid my own way, stayed for about 7 hours, then rode back home. I can't imagine being allowed to do that today...
I also just remembered another anectdote. One morning (age 13) I set out to go birdwatching. I had to get up around 5am, in order to get to the estuary before sunrise. I had a small backpack with all my gear, and about a mile from my home, a sheriff's deputy stopped me in his squad car. He quizzed me on what I was doing, asked to look in my backpack, and after 15 minutes, I was on my way. He was obviously surprised to see me out that early, but once he was convinced of my sincerity, I didn't warrant any further scrutiny.
> He quizzed me on what I was doing, asked to look in my backpack, and after 15 minutes, I was on my way
I don't know what the laws are where you live but I would guess he had no right to search your backpack without your consent. To me, what you're describing is police aggression and you must always push back against any such aggression. You should not have submitted to the search. The legal system is adversarial and you must protect yourself from the very first moment you are in any way involved with it.
To quote James Duane from his book You Have the Right to Remain Innocent: "Nobody of sound mind can dispute that there is something fundamentally wrong, and intrinsically corrupt, about a legal system that encourages police officers and prosecutors to do everything in their power to persuade you and your children (no matter how young or old) to 'do the right thing' and talk - when they tell their own children the exact opposite."
I was 13, maybe 5'8, and 100lbs soaking wet. He was probably twice my size, armed with numerous weapons. Sure I could have exercised my 4th Amendment rights, but most judges would believe that he had probable cause. Expecting a 13 year old to be a constitutional lawyer (especially back in 1977) is a bit much.
> I was 13, maybe 5'8, and 100lbs soaking wet. He was probably twice my size, armed with numerous weapons.
This is the best possible reason to know your rights. Might does not make right.
> Expecting a 13 year old to be a constitutional lawyer (especially back in 1977) is a bit much.
No one's expecting you to be a lawyer but it's not too high an expectation to know your rights, which is the point of Duane's book. Learning your civil rights should be part of everyone's education and it's a shame that it isn't. Police exploit that ignorance, as they did to you.
So I resist, get arrested, taken to jail. My folks woken up at 6am on a weekend to come pick me up. When my parents try to hire a lawyer, they'll be informed of how reasonable suspicion and probable cause work, for an hourly fee. All because a cop did his job by investigating a minor who from his perspective could have been a runaway or someone stealing junk.
Now while I can foresee situations where a 13 year old could successfully resist a search of their body/property, but I can't see a lawyer counseling it in this situation. Then again, IANAL.
You don't resist, you assert your rights. You fail to assert your rights and that will be exploited. If you get arrested for asserting your rights then you take them to court and you win.
> All because a cop did his job by investigating a minor who from his perspective
His perspective is irrelevant. Your only concern must be to protect yourself, which you failed to do.
He didn't search his backpack without consent - he asked for, and was presumably given, consent.
There are certainly scenarios where you should consider the police to be your adversary and enforce every right you have to its fullest extent, but choosing your battles is just as important. The police have far more rights to detain a juvenile compared to an adult, and an unaccompanied 13 year old with a backpack at 5am is out of the ordinary. The officer was already starting from a place with a reasonable assumption that the child may be lost or a runaway, in which case he can probably already take him back home (or to the station for CPS to talk to if he's completely uncooperative).
Allowing a quick search to confirm that you're just pursuing a harmless hobby and are not putting yourself in any danger or likely to be reported missing a couple of hours later, seems like the easiest and fastest way to deal with that particular encounter.
I never said he did. I said greedo shouldn't have given that consent.
> Allowing a quick search to confirm that you're just pursuing a harmless hobby and are not putting yourself in any danger or likely to be reported missing a couple of hours later, seems like the easiest and fastest way to deal with that particular encounter.
It puts you in danger of arrest and false charges. It's irrelevant what police suspect. You do not submit to them to make things 'easier' or 'faster'. Your only concern must be to protect yourself, even and especially when you're 13.
Duane's book is full of examples of people who thought it would be a good idea to cooperate with police, only to find themselves charged with crimes they didn't commit and some of them ended up in jail.
If you're starting from a position where the police can't take any action against you without more evidence, and they need you to provide that evidence, sure. In that case, there may be no benefit to you to cooperating. But that's not where the parent post was.
He was a juvenile, carrying a rucksack, walking alone at 5am. He is already starting from a position of being detained as a potential runaway. His encounter can get better (proving that he's just a birdwatcher and being allowed on his way) or worse (if he's carrying anything he can be arrested for). If he's just carrying a camera and a pair of binoculars, it seems like its worth the risk. The officer has better things to do with his day than ferry around kids who clearly aren't runaways.
In this case, failing to cooperate would almost certainly have led to him being detained as a potential runaway, and returned to his parents, or if he refused to provide any information at all, taken to the police station and turned over to Child Protective Services. In this particular scenario, it seems that cooperating was the best approach.
By all means enforce your rights, but make sure you know your opponents rights too, and choose your battles carefully.
Late 20's(mid 1990's as a kid) here in Northeast US. I had the same experience growing up, days when it was nice outside, we were expected to not stay in and watch TV, so we would go outside and find things to do. I feel like it's that last part though that may have changed over the years as well. There's so many compelling forces today that A) make kids want to stay inside and B) make parents want to want their kids inside.
In these discussions, I hear people say "I'd be charged if I let my kids outside today", but it doesn't also address the cultural shifts that have happened to both the kids and adults that make "outside" a worse off place to be.
(Parent of a 6yo and a 1yo). I feel the same, I was orders of magnitude freer as a kid as my children are now. One day the nanny of my 1yo found my 6yo outside of our school (which is across the street) almost ready to cross the street on the pedestrian crossing. We wrote to the teacher, who told us she couldn't sleep that night. It's very likely that if we had reported the incident to the principal she would have been fired. At end of the day, the main function of the schools nowadays is to keep our children safe, not to educate them.
But here's the thing, I feel the same as you. Part of it could be the PG observation of asymmetry of benefit vs risk for kids and parents ([1], paragraph before "Discipline"). But part of it is that the whole "world is tough, so toughen up" is a big misconception. I'm struggling to articulate a good argument, but I think it's worth shielding our children from danger for as long as possible, so they can focus on learning. Life will come at them, that's for sure. And then they'll have the motivation to learn how to deal with all the bad stuff. But until them they'll learn more of the good stuff if we remove the distraction of having to look out for themselves.
> I think it's worth shielding our children from danger for as long as possible, so they can focus on learning. Life will come at them, that's for sure. And then they'll have the motivation to learn how to deal with all the bad stuff. But until them they'll learn more of the good stuff if we remove the distraction of having to look out for themselves.
But how will they ever learn that when all they've been brought up with was that they can't be trusted to do anything on their own?
What good is all the learning when you lack confidence to apply it to something new, unknown, where you don't know the outcome 100%?
You make it sound like you are living in a war zone when in fact, your children are probably much safer than they ever were in history.
I don't know the answer yet (my being a parent is still work in progress, you know...) but I think my son will earn my trust to let him go to and from school by himself in a few years. I don't think there will a sharp demarcation line at 18 or any other age: you are under constant supervision up to here, and completely on your own from here on.
It's just that I don't think it's so important for him at this age to learn to negociate the street traffic, even if I was roaming the streets when I was his age. Can he do it? Sure. Are there dangers? You bet. Are they negligible? Maybe, some people say they are, some are freaked out. But we have a huge bias in our perception: we are all alive. We enjoyed our freedom when we were kids, but some of us died, and we, the survivors, tend to not include their experience in our assessment of the dangers.
I did play with carbide cannons as a kid, and also with matches, firecrackers, I climbed trees, and of course, I got in numerous fights with other boys. And here I am, safe and sound, living proof that it's ok to do all of those. Only the proof is flawed. One of my coworkers had a classmate die while playing with a carbide cannon. It's really not that safe to play with carbide cannons, or with fire, or to dash across the street right before a car was passing (forgot to mention I did that too).
Man that reminds me so much of my growing up experience. Spent most free time outside on a bike, playing with a football, climbing trees and only coming back indoors for food.
I grew up on a 80 acre farm. We lived there until I was 7 and my sister was 10. My parents didn't even get home from work until 7PM.
We had a full on welding and machine shop and a pretty fantastic place for woodworking in the shop. We had two creeks that were lined with trees hanging over them.
My dad had pretty much taught us how weld and use the plasma cutter and drill press and all the wood working stuff. Looking back I even find it insane to teach your 6 year old how to weld. But somehow I am still alive.
But the last few years we lived there my sister asked if we could build a tree-house in one of the trees that branched out over a creek. My mom said to go for it. My dad did help build the base (he was a mechanical engineer) and we did the rest. It was massively unsafe now that I think about it 33 years later.
The funny thing is we only had one major emergency at that house. My sister was making a frozen pizza and didn't check when she started preheating the oven. There were a few dozen glazed doughnuts in a box in the oven. They burst into flames and she pulled the entire rack onto the floor. We got the fire to go out.
And a few days later my dad taught me a lot about replacing a kitchen floor.
Or. Just google child predators in your neighborhood. Some states require these databases updated regularly. Statistically you should have one within walking distance. Sleep tight!
> I know I would be gnashing my teeth if my kid was roaming the streets and woods all day long...even if I did it.
I think what has changed is our attitude towards risks. We just can't stand even the slightest risk on our children. It's a form of entitlement - we want to raise kids risk-free, but that is dangerous in itself. Lacking experience, children are much worse prepared for life.
Congress? Someone should. Society has decided that a greater good is promoted when someone decides on a minimum wage. Why can't someone decide on a maximum wage?
That's a somewhat naive view. It presupposes that the current system is just, because (1) all members of society had an equal hand in shaping the current system, (2) that it was designed to serve the interests of society as a whole (rather than those who benefit most from it), and (3) that it would be easy to change the system if a consensus emerged among a majority (or even a vast majority) of society that such change was desirable. I disagree with all three presuppositions.
I made none of your 3 presuppositions. Society is society whether or not it is democratic, fair or wise. But usually it changes its mind as it becomes more democratic, fair and wise.
This is... very wrong, at least if you're talking about CEO pay. Who decides CEO pay? The Board. Who is the Board? Well, it's usually guys who are CEOs at other companies. Boards have every incentive to make this pay as high as they can get away with, so they will get the same quid pro quo, and "society" has nothing to do with it.
You're interpreting my comment too narrowly. I agree that the concentration of power is a big problem, in fact, the biggest. But most everyone is complicit, both through their actions and inactions. Nearly everyone is putting self-interest first and foremost, including most liberals/progressives. We are complicit when we vote for people like the Clintons into power to represent progressive values. We are complicit when we take higher paying jobs at companies that put profit over people and society (and thus act behave just like those CEOs). We are complicit when we try to handsomely reward ourselves via SV get-rich-quick schemes building products that no one is willing to pay for except the advertisers who bombard us with self-serving messages in turn turning the web into click-bait, fake-news viral hell.
I've had a couple 27" 1440p monitors since those cheap Korean (QNX and the like) came on the market a few years ago.
The natural upgrade path for me would be to ditch those and get a big-ass 5k monitor eventually, but I don't see the market really moving in that direction in an affordable way.
One 4k isn't going to cut it and I'm worried two 4k monitors is going to be to much from a field of vision perspective....maybe I'm wrong there.
Has anybody upgraded from a couple 1440p monitors to a couple 4k monitors, and what's your experience been?
It's been one of the biggest productivity improvements since moving from 640x480 to 1024x768.
The 1440p is now only used for minor stuff like email and not really necessary anymore.
I soon moved to a 32" 4K at home as well, because I just couldn't stand just 1440 anymore.
One of the interesting parts is that I don't use 4K fully: it's too much surface are and your head tilts too much to see everything at once. But what's great is that I can put a background process as full screen in the background and have a 3500x1800 window in front in which I do my real work. So I can observe the proceedings of the background talks without having to toggle windows all the time.
Agreed, I think 32" 4K is the sweet spot for Linux & Windows. The PPI is 140, which is "marginally retina" -- you can see pixels if you get close. Higher PPI is sharper even once you get past "retina", but it's definitely a case of diminishing returns. But the nice thing about 140 PPI is that you can run without scaling if you absolutely need to. You have to squint and you wouldn't want to do it too often, but it does work for those rare apps that don't scale well.
And the 32" size is about perfect too, IMO. The height is about the maximum you can view without head movement.
One 40" 4K has been perfect for me. Roughly the same DPI as my old QNIX (~110).
I got the Samsung UN40KU6290 (does 4k@60 with 4:4:4 chroma) for under $300. The PC mode is crisp and responsive. Calibrates well enough. Only complaint is slow GTG time can look blurry when scrolling text.
Nope, but I run it at 100% scaling. I did notice that if the source on the TV is not labeled "PC" then the Mac uses YCbCr 4:2:0 and looks like garbage. Setting the input label to PC must send a different EDID because it seems to use RGB... On my Windows machine I can just override that in the nvidia control panel.
I bought this monitor the other week after hearing things like this but I couldn't get over two things:
1) It doesn't power off or on automatically. I need the remote
2) The viewing angle made seeing the corners difficult on my admittedly shallower then probably needed desk with no scaling, (40" seemed like the sweet spot for PPI without scaling).
How do you cope with (1)? I'm amazed that Intel, Nvidia and AMD haven't thrown a HDMI-CEC IP code into their GPUs and made it trivially to turn on and off displays over HDMI.
I just leave the remote on my desk and turn the eco auto-off to 8hrs so it doesn't turn off in the middle of my day. The TV controls the on/off of my receiver via CEC.
Seconded. I have the same monitor and it's a perfect upgrade from my old 3 27"-24" monitors. 40" seems perfect to not have turn your head too much, two would be too much for me.
If you have 2 27" with 1440p and go to 2 27" with 4k which do you think the field of vision changes? It should be exactly the same. The potential differences would be that you can have either more screen estate (but with tiny rendering) or a much better image quality if scaling is used. I would at the moment always go for 4k due to better image quality - and not for anything else.
I run two 2560p QNX monitors. They're wonderful, would highly recommend; I think two of them will set you back around $400, a bargain compared to 4k monitors.
The trick is to put some of your monitors in portrait orientation. It's a game changer for reading text and for writing code (aka 95% of my computer use).
Especially if you can get a new main monitor that is exactly as tall as the old screen was wide. I've seen a couple people pull that off and it works really really well, better still if you do a color calibration.
I'm the last person to talk about type theory, but on the max function example:
fn max(comptime T: type, a: T, b: T) -> T {
if (a > b) a else b
}
fn letsTryToPassARuntimeType(condition: bool) {
const result = max(
if (condition) f32 else u64,
1234,
5678);
}
Then we get this result from the compiler:
./test.zig:6:9: error: unable to evaluate constant expression
if (condition) f32 else u64,
^
Couldn't the compiler infer some kind of union type. You don't know the type at runtime, but f32 or u64 is a legit comparision type.
I like what I'm seeing, but a suggesting regarding shortened keywords. Just go ahead and change compTime to compileTime. I don't see 3 extra characters saving much and makes it less readable. Most modern editors will autocomplete anyway.
I think this is a misunderstanding/misrepresentation of the argument. Following your logic, everyone criticising the Iraq war would be a hypocrite if they did not also oppose Congress' power to authorise wars.
Others are arguing that this executive order violates constitutional rights because it's awfully close to a religious test. Within that line of reasoning, there's no contradiction between opposing this order and not opposing Obama's, assuming those do not violate constitutional rights.
Of course that's okay with most folks. Reality is messy, and large swaths of it are unamenable to formalization in laws; human discretion will always be required.
Now, we can argue about where the balance is best struck, whether it's better to have the president making decisions vs. individual government workers, etc. Those discussions are fine. But we nerds have to stop pretending that a nation's laws are or could be or even should be as black and white and bug free (hah!) as most computer code.
Yes, nanny-state, authoritarianism is part of the socialist ideological grouping.
Socialists have always advocated the state making little, "lifestyle" decisions like this. The state "knows better", and you have lots of people agreeing.
Look at the top comment and its children comments on this story. You have people applauding this law and saying that people are too stupid to know when to not get a refill.
These are the same people that wring their hands about Trump being an authoritarian, but applaud stupid, nanny state laws like this.
Fighting for better health is authoritarianism now? that's a new one. I did not hear that argument when countries are raising cigarette taxes. Australia with one of the highest cigarette tax is also a socialist country then?
The laissez faire regarding food in the US does not seem to work very well since the US is one of the worst developed country regarding obesity.
> Fighting for better health is authoritarianism now? that's a new one.
No definition of authoritarianism has ever defined there to be good or bad motivations for the laws, just that they are strict and limit personal freedom.
> did not hear that argument when countries are raising cigarette taxes.
You haven't?!? Then what arguments against raising cigarette taxes have you heard?
State imposing its rules (state authority) over peoples' own decisions (personal freedoms) is authoritarian-leaning, by the definition of how things are on the authoritarian-libertarian axis.
Of course it doesn't make state authoritarian, but adding points towards that direction on that axis.
The state "knows better", and you have lots of people agreeing.
Doesn't obesity prove, in this case, the state really does know better? You could argue people are free to be as obese as they want, but only knowingly imo. The actual problem is a lot of people don't realize they're basically being tricked into unhealthy obese living by MegaCorps wanting to get them hooked on their product.
It gives me a very warm feeling to know that those simpletons now have you to care for them and prevent other people from taking advantage of them. I do hope they show some appreciation for your efforts on their behalf.
