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I'm a fan of a minor celebrity from Vancouver, a Twitch streamer Northernlion (NL). He goes on "arcs" and in a recent one he can't get a slide fixed in his neighbourhood. Long story short, he is fond of his memories as a kid, how he played on a playground with his friends. They had a slide and how much fun was had with that slide. Now, he also wants his daughter to have memories like this, but alas, the slide has been broken since 2019 (more? less? I refuse to rewatch the video). He calls up a local low-level bureaucrat to offer a solution: he can pay for the repairs.
A low-level bureaucrat gives him a run-around for weeks and after he alludes to being somewhat popular, the bureaucrat goes, "🤑🤑🤑" (NL is at the very least upper-upper-middle class, but he is no Mr. Beast), the fateful call is scheduled. The call goes roughly like this: if we accepted donations like the one you suggest, there would be an imbalance between neighbourhoods. Richer neighbourhoods would have better amenities and poorer neighbourhoods would remain slideless. But you can pay to install a bench with your name somewhere in who-the-fuck-knows-where. We'll take your money, but you can't tell us what to do with it.
NL then laments: the kid is already four, her "going down the slide" days are almost over as it is (unless she's going to smoke and drink there with friends when she's twelve. Although a broken slide would be suitable for that as is), so this whole slide thing is kinda urgent.
One chatter suggests that maybe one could FIX THE SLIDE, and I am elated, but a parry comes swiftly (don't we all have this second nature in common?): "I would be taking on the liability if someone hurts themselves". Suggestions in YouTube comment section involved calling up an elected official (a higher level bureaucrat).
As of today, I strongly suspect that the slide isn't fixed.
Remember those commercials, where it's a bright morning, a single house in the middle of a green field, mountains in background, dewdrops serenely resting on blades of grass and a beautiful girl swings a window open to let a fresh breeze into the domicile and the curtains soar like sails, everything's sparkling clean, then she presents you some cleaning product? Well, I can't remember such a commercial, but I can imagine it so vividly it feels real to me.
I can't be that girl for two reasons: firstly, I'm not a girl, secondly, my window can't open more than... care to take a guess? It's 10 cm/4 in. I can't open a window in my rental apartment because there's a window opening control device (WOCD) installed on it that prevents me from opening it wide open.
All new buildings in British Columbia are mandated to have those devices installed when the window is 90 cm/3 ft from the ground. When I learned about this, I started to suspect that there's a fenestration industry conspiracy: there's no reason that I can fathom other than profit, why those devices would be mandated. Did a shadow fenestrator cabal collude with the governments of Canada, the UK, Australia, Boston, NYC to implement such rules? Did they push the newfangled window devices in every single new build? Which led me to my current predicament?
It's much simpler, much more prosaic. I haven't seen any evidence of conspiracy (not ruling out anything, anonymous fenestrator tips are welcome): some kids fell out of the windows and thus, a new safety rule was born, added to the BC Building code at paragraph 9.8.8.1 "Required Guards". Its brilliant Sentence 4, reproduced here in full:
Isn't this wonderful? Now our kids are more safe! You can sleep tight: your toddler will not fall out of the window. By the way, how many kids did fall out? Oh, in the UK it's 2 per year.... Tragic? Yes. But...
I'm from Russia and in line with our, as the saying goes (I consider it a lie) "broad Russian soul" they also install windows that swing open broadly, all the way inside. Khruschevkas have them, new builds have them. So in Russia, I could be that cleaning product girl in almost any damn building, or at least I'm half way there - just need a way to become a girl. I could swing a window open and let a warm summer morning wash all over me.
Back in the day, I've seen news about people, sometimes even children falling out of windows, but somehow Russians (and most of the world) decided that the issue was related to parental negligence or indifference, rather than the design of the windows.
"Well, if you are so confident you are safe, take the WOCD off". Yup. Here's my thought process: I can't take them off because I would be accepting responsibility for anyone who falls out. I'd be liable in case something happens. Even to my own child perhaps. I wouldn't want her to fall out of the window, or any of her friends. Or my adult friends. And, anyway, let's say I take them off. Strata would instantly notice my tiny North American windows (there's not much to swing open anyway) swung open all the way. Like - it would be noticeable from the street, akin to a chad-virgin meme:
I don't really want to antagonize my strata's busybodies who will send a stupid email to my landlord, who will in turn forward it to me:
Ugh... Feels like I'm rubbing salt into my imaginary wound in my pride.
I said to my wife "I'm taking off the safety restrictors" and she had the exact same reaction:
What the hell is going on?
Let's quickly acknowledge something: both mine and NL's problems can be solved without anyone's involvement at all:
Neither of us have an insurmountable problem on our hands, I'd argue that the problems are pretty trivial and nobody cares if we make our lives a bit more comfortable, even if we circumvent all of the bureaucracy but the first thing both of us thought about was: there's a process, there are rules, there's a big brother who watches the safety in our society and it is paramount everybody's safe and I don't want to be liable for anything that happens. Ever.
This thought process that both of us went through is a far more interesting phenomenon to me than a default libertarian argument of "government should get its hands away from my business". It should, but if it does, there's no guarantee anything changes in our heads.
We teach kids to think like this: here The Last Psychiatrist describes how we deal with bullies at schools nowadays. In essence, in the name of safety, we inadvertently brainwash away all of the righteous, moral, community-oriented instincts before they can flourish. He vividly paints how a girl is instructed to stay away from a bully instead of standing up for your peers: do not speak up, stay in your lane so you don't get hurt. Someone else will deal with the bully.
Now, in what I described with NL's slide, with my window WOCD devices, we don't need the Watchers present. They're already in the back of my mind, telling me that this is done in the name of safety, that they'll get their way anyway. When the Watchers don't want to or can't do something due to a lack of money or staff, well, in this situation all of the parties are completely impotent. Slides sit there completely unfixed. Windows stay safely restricted by safety restrictors.
"We'll handle it" is everywhere:
the Watchersthe Science.Fundamentally, we have less opportunities to exercise agency anymore and that shapes one's mind in a weird way. It embeds the Watchers in the back of your mind when they are not there physically. I think how we bring up kids is partially at fault, but the bureaucratization of the society is equally damaging. School is Not Enough by Simon Sarris addresses the first part. The whole body of work of TLP addresses the second part. Maybe I'm coming around to some of the Hlynka's arguments.
How do we make kids have more agency?
How do we make adults with more agency?
How do we go back to the society Alexis de Tocquevillle's observed?
Aren't building code requirements for windows partly based on the assumption that they can be used as a means of emergency egress?
https://www.thegreategressco.ca/pages/british-columbia-egress-requirements
Pretty sure you can still egress correctly after a disagreement with my ex-girlfriend and/or the Russian government.
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Picture of me egressing out of my apartment window: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/05/The_Falling_Man.jpg
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Self organized play. It is the sine qua non of childhood agency. Kids will, left to their own devices, self organize to achieve their goals, with those goals mostly being or rhyming with "fun." We know this from Herodotus, who tells us how to identify a high agency child who might become the Great King of Persia, and who is right about everything in the end:
What do we have here? Boys naturally play, they naturally choose the best and most noble of them as leader, they punish those who don't participate. They're learning to operate within the world according to their abilities, developing their leadership abilities, Cyrus is clearly a future leader. In a nobility based society, that must mean that he has noble blood and is meant for great things, because he has such strong agency.
We still recognize that young leaders will grow into great leaders, but we've Goodharted it into adult-organized school-sponsored clubs that don't really do much of anything but provide "Leadership Positions" for gunners to put in their college applications.
What we need to do instead is encourage entirely self-organized play for young kids, put them in a position where they both have the ability and the desire to self-organize to do things that interest them. To do this we need to do three things: Allow and accept reasonable limitations to abilities, allow and accept reasonable risks to safety, allow and accept reasonable suboptimal outcomes in tradeoff for more agency and creativity. As a toy example take Basketball, and you have three basic paradigms: Sandlot1 archetype of kids playing self-organized pick-up games every day on their own, the organized coached league archetype of youth basketball, and the Bowling Alone archetype of a kid practicing skills by himself in the driveway of his home.
Sandlot is a perfect mid-century American equivalent to the Cyrus story above: the boys self-organize to play out the stories and legends they see adults playing out, the best of them (Benny "The Jet" Rodriguez) is their natural leader and goes on to become a great man.
For the most part we can say for our toy example that a coached team in a league is going to produce the best outcomes in terms of developing basketball talent and minimal risk while giving almost no freedom and developing no agency for the players, pick up games develop agency but give a lower quality in basketball development, practicing skills alone in your driveway gives maximum freedom as to time and style to the kid while developing low quality skills and no organizational agency.
What we want is to develop kids who self-organize spontaneously to achieve their goals. We want kids to Sandlot themselves, to get together and decide to play, figure out the obstacles on their own, and play ball. That's agency. We don't want them to sit at home doing drills by themselves, that doesn't develop agency, and it also doesn't tend to help kids develop any skills. And we don't want to force them to only compete in organized leagues, where they are told what to do and when to do it, as that limits agency: instead of playing basketball as a fun activity they do on their own, they play basketball when mommy takes them to basketball practice and the coach tells them to play basketball.
Limitations are the core of creativity. If every kid has a basketball hoop in their driveway, there is no need to go to each other's houses to play, you can just stay home and play by yourself. Sure, if I have a basketball hoop then I can go out and practice free throws any time I want, but that keeps from doing the far better activity of playing with friends and prevents us all from learning to self-organize. Needing something from others creates the need to self-organize, to create a social grouping and do things together. If the basketball hoop is at Chris' house, then to shoot basketball I need to go to Chris' house and hang out with him. If we both have a basketball hoop in our driveways, then I don't need to cooperate with Chris. But the limitations have to be reasonable, we have to provide enough stuff to allow kids to play, but not so much stuff that they don't need to get creative or work together. I have to be allowed to do some things to get there, which requires accepting...
Risks have to be accepted in this process. I have to get to Chris' house, a couple miles away. That means I have to be allowed and trusted to walk there, ride a bike there, some accident might happen on the trip. I have to be there for some time by myself. I have to have the free time to do it. I have to be out of my parents' sight for that time. Chris and his older brother might beat me up. I might get hurt. My parents have to be willing to accept that, rather than requiring that I only play basketball in a league with coaches that keep me from getting bullied or beat up and have been SAFESPORT certified etc.
Suboptimal Outcomes The best youth athletes come out of coached programs optimized to teach kids skills properly, not out of spontaneous kids playing for fun. The more coaching the better. But that reduces agency. We have to be willing to accept that we're trading some degree of agency development for some degree of basketball skill development.
Now of course, the ideal is probably somewhere in the middle. Kids can be on a school team or in a once-a-week organized league while also playing pick-up after school every day, and a kid that really loves basketball might want to spend hours practicing free throws or dribbling drills on his own even when nobody else wants to. Leagues help to build skill and love for the game, encouraging kids to later move on to self-organizing.
We can apply this model to everything. When one kid had an xbox, everyone wanted to go to his house to play xbox. When every kid has an xbox, they all vegetate at home. When one kid has a car they all go on adventures, when every kid has a car or no one is allowed to drive anywhere, nothing happens. Kids need limitations to overcome, acceptance of risk in overcoming them, and acceptance that it might not be the absolute best use of their time in doing so.
This seems obviously correct to me. Using a kid you knew as inspiration is not defamation.
That Polydoros of all people would sue for "defamation" feels absurd. The character of Squints arguably gets one of the better outcomes of all the characters in the story. He ends up as a successful business owner who marries his childhood crush and sires 9 kids. Compared to Tommy who dies in Vietnam or Bertram who "got really into the 60s and nobody ever heard from him again" that is good outcome. Ok you never made it to the big leagues like Benny and Smalls did, but dude, take the win.
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Cyrus is elected as king, then performs the exact roles one would expect of a king. The son of Artembares regrets his decision and decides to try and change the game by casting doubt on the king.
I would think that the latter kid shows far more agency than the first, who simply follows the rules.
Now, what did the kids not named Cyrus learn from this game? Did the game make them more agentic or less? After electing the king, didn't they simply follow his commands?
I would suggest that in your example you are not teaching agency to the kids. You are teaching them to fall in line and follow a strict hierarchy that once set cannot be broken. You are creating one king and a legion of servants.
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This is why I'm so sad to see the slow motion death of the Boy Scouts. When I was in scouts, we elected our own leaders, planned our own camping trips, cooked our own food, and organized our own vigorous athletic pursuits (mostly football, capture the flag, and other more-or-less violent games). My scoutmaster was adamant that the adult leaders were there to provide guidance when asked and transport to the hospital in case of emergencies; everything else was on us.
Yes, the technical outdoors skills were also useful, but the Scouts' main value proposition is providing a place for boys to teach each other how to be men with as little supervision/interference as possible.
We desperately need a place for boys to get lost in the woods and throw rocks at each other, and the Boy Scouts was kind of the last one left.
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You and I remember school very differently. And this isn't just a gotcha, huge numbers of famous, successful people had terrible experiences with boys at school. It used to be taken for granted that allowing children to self-organise their societies produced character, but then many people found that instead it produced spoiled, self-satisfied bullies and their hangers-on.
What if it does both? What if you can't get one without the other? What if you can't have character building without risking some kids getting bullied?
Then I will reluctantly admit that contra BAP, I do not want to live in a society of barbarian warlords.
Personally, I am unconvinced that school bullies and the first XI football team are in fact the best and brightest of us. I see no evidence that this is so. If anything, the children who do well in later life seem to be the misfits who had to learn because nobody else was there to lean on. Even in earlier times, much British and American greatness (e.g. Teddy Roosevelt) came from aristocrats who were educated at home and did not go to school.
I accept that there is some modern propaganda also pointing that way, but it didn't come from nothing. That's not to say that the optimal level of bullying and hurtful comments is 0%, but leaving boys to self-organise society does not produce good society.
Cope. There is no positive correlation for misfits and genius or success, we just tell ourselves there is because it's a comfortable story to tell to losers. Some teenage misfits are smart, others are dumb. Some jocks are very successful. All studies on the topic show that varsity athletes do better than non-athletes across most life metrics.
Young Teddy was asthmatic and sickly as a child, but at 14 he got bullied by some older kids and he decided to do something about it. He took up exercise and boxing, and made himself better. He dedicated himself to The Strenuous Life to advance himself. His entire life is the proof of the character building thesis: the bullies who attacked him triggered the rise of the Rough Rider. If he had never met those bullies, he might never have become the man he was destined to be.
I'm not advocating for boys organizing the whole of society, I'm advocating for boys (and girls) being allowed to organize themselves in a limited setting.
I do want to object to the idea that athletes are necessarily jocks and not outcasts. As someone who did lots of sports growing up you get all sorts on the field and the asshole QB of 90s movies never really struck true in my experience.
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I'm not saying losers are destined to do well. I'm saying a disproportionate amount of people who make a real difference used to be losers.
Specifically according to your source*, high-school athletes are more likely to be employed, more likely to have a degree (American universities give athletic scholarships, so...), and more likely to take part in physical sports (again, they're athletes!). I was talking of rather higher ambitions.
Again, bro getting rich by betting on crypto is frankly the least impressive way of being 'very successful' that I can imagine. He doesn't seem to have done anything actually worth doing in his life, excepting sports if you're into that, just slid naturally into the kind of role that popular studly men do well in. I know lots of these people in the City - they're high confidence and high charisma but they don't actually create anything or achieve anything.
That's not the way I heard it. He did it because his father suggested it. (I will look this up when I can). He was also not very good with people compared to his more popular siblings, and definitely not a 'natural leader' at that age or really for some time.
I meant creating a good society for children, but also you seem to be advocating that the 'natural leaders' of boys and girls should be put in charge of society when they grow up.
*The actual source gives:
Educational
• any postsecondary education after high school for academic credit (i.e., college, university, or vocational, technical, or trade school) by 2000 (8 years after scheduled high school graduation);
• attainment of a bachelor’s degree or higher by 2000;
Labor Market • employment in 2000;
• full-time employment in 2000;
• income in 1999;
Health
• cigarette use in 2000;
• alcohol use in 2000;
• binge drinking in 2000;
• participation in physical fitness activities in 2000;
• participation in group or team sports and recreation in 2000.
And what, pray tell, might those be? Unless it's something utterly esoteric, or so rarefied as to constitute such a tiny number of people that statistical analysis becomes impossible, I posit that you'll find more athletes than you expect among their number.
From his autobiography:
Teddy directly states that this formative experience changed his entire life.
Well I didn't really say it, Herodotus did, though he is ultimately right about everything. Science says so as well: Studies show huge percentages of Fortune 500 CEOs were college athletes, though maybe that's too boring for you again, and the really smart kids are outcasts who do super important stuff like write groundbreaking Harry Potter fanfics or something.
But also, it's not really advocating for jocks per se as natural leaders. It would be those with the relevant talent to the task at hand who would assume leadership, whose peers will recognize them as leaders. Kids will recognize a great mathematician if his skill helps him win at cards, or a great prankster who makes everyone laugh, or a great singer if they're trying to form a band. All aspects of human endeavor naturally lend charisma to their practitioners. I'm advocating for letting kids pursue their goals on their own, how they organize is up to them.
Building things, inventing things, writing things. Some athletes, I'm sure, but I doubt many were at the top of the pecking order at school.
Fair enough.
Sarcasm aside, you're correct. I view Fortune 500 CEOs as being glorified babysitters, often barely competent. They're not idiots, often they're quite bright, but they're golden retrievers: they get those kinds of positions by being the right kind of chap who everyone likes, and they try to stay on the horse and not to fuck it up too badly before they leave. Say what you like about Yudowsky - and I do - at least he has ideas. Lots of my most charismatic schoolfriends went into Goldman Sachs and consultancy and the like, it's such a waste.
Sorry, I'm up too late and a bit bleary, but this just doesn't match on to my experience of life at all. Being good at this stuff (except football) makes you a loser. There is nothing that schoolboys (and often pre-1980 or so the men that they grew up to become) like to sneer at more than some swot earnestly making an effort to be good at things. Good for you if your life experience was different, but read say CS Lewis about his time at school for a counterpoint.
EDIT: I'm probably being a little belligerent. It's not even that I disagree with you completely, it's just the stunning levels of naivete and smugness in that story from Herodotus (on which my own schooling was at least partially based) irritate me. Oh, you didn't kiss the boot when the big kid told you to, and then he had his mates beat you up? Clearly you aren't high-agency and are doomed to a life of sad mediocrity while we reorder our society into bronze age Persia. Let the kids treat each other however they like, all things are for the best in this the best of all possible worlds...
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Wikipedia obviously not the greatest source, but this is what it has to say.
Incidentally, the strenuous life pays off. Look at this future President mean-mugging the camera at 19.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Teddy_Roosevelt_in_sculling_gear_while_an_undergraduate_at_Harvard%2C_circa_1877.jpg
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The other option is all of them maxed. My son is currently on two hockey teams plus football. Travel lacrosse just ended for the winter and his two basketball teams start up in a couple weeks.
He still does a few hours of pick-up basketball, two-hand touch or soccer after school, before football most days. On days off, he and 2-10 of the boys will meet up at one of the fields in our town or the next one (which they reach on their bikes) for free play or small pickup games that sometimes last 6+ hours. It's like The Sandlot, except he has a phone to call and ask me if he can DoorDash Wawa because he forgot to bring water. (The answer, of course, is no.) On top of that, they organize their own leagues (including the use of decently sophisticated stat-tracking software) for schoolyard soccer or baseball field wiffleball.
AND he has his own basketball hoop, hockey net, and lacrosse rebounder in the backyard when he wants to burn off some energy or has a friend over.
And then after all the boys finally go home, they hop on a group voice call for "Chel", which is NHL 2025, or ignore the Xbox to play Roblox sports leagues.
My point isn't just to brag (just mostly), but to say that @FiveHourMarathon is completely right about everything in this excellent post, and that killing it in these circumstances is still very viable, and also it really helps to have involved grandparents to help with carpooling.
I hope that your son's immense noble characteristics are soon recognized.
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I serve on a nonprofit board that does work in a state park, and while I can sympathize with this guy's plight, I understand why the parks people acted the way they did. The explanation they gave him about parks in poorer areas, etc. was bullshit. Not without some truth, but bullshit in the sense that there's more to the story and it was a simple explanation they could give him for why they were saying no. The grain of truth was that if people who live in low income areas (whose parks may be in worse condition) see that a higher-income area is getting new playground equipment, they're going to bitch to the board about it and that's a headache the board doesn't want to have to deal with. But that's not really the reason.
The real reason is that the guy knows that there's no way in hell that this is happening if they say yes and it's easier to just say no and stop it right there than to let this progress any further and waste time and money. The way this guy rambles my thought was that if he came across to the parks guy the way he comes across in the video there's no way he's getting anywhere. I don't know what you mean by him being given the run around for weeks. It's hard to get the timeline down because of the rambling, but it looks like he followed up after not hearing a response for 12 hours, and was then given the option of a phone call or in-person meeting. He then said he declined the meeting because he didn't want to drive to the guy's office, which shows his lack of seriousness right there, and schedules a phone call which he then postpones, possibly because he actually was busy, possibly because he wanted to waste the guy's time, it's hard to tell, and was then disappointed that the guy offered to reschedule it for the following business day.
I honestly don't know what the guy's strategy was, or what he was even looking to do. At one point he seems sure that the guy s going to tell him it's going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to install a $500 slide. No, not quite, but it's clear that this guy is clueless. You can't just buy a slide from Home Depot, sink a few holes in the ground, and call it a day. I mean, you can, but that slide isn't going to last a full season without falling apart. I have catalogs of various park products our private group orders with their own money for public use, and while I don't normally look at the playground equipment, a slide costs $5,000 on the low end for small one for toddlers up to about $15,000 for a fancy deluxe one. A typical basic 8 foot slide would run around $10k. Then there's installation, which is going to involve digging post holes for concrete footings on the supports, which is going to run at least another few thousand. And that's American. Northernlion, of course, has no idea where one even buys this kind of thing, or knows whether these supply houses even deal with the general public or if you have to have an account and a sales rep assigned to you, or what kind of contractor you call to even do this work.
He wants to blame all this extra expense on bureaucrats lining their pockets, but prices are what they are, and contractors charge what they charge. What does he expect the parks department to do, install a slide and send him a bill hoping he pays it? Waste time going through the equipment selection and ordering process only for him to back out when he finds out he can't afford it? The reason they asked him if he wanted to buy naming rights or ad space or a brick or whatever was because if this guy actually has enough money to pay for a slide installation then he has enough money to contribute to the capital projects the park has prioritized. If he'd expressed interest in that then they may have taken him more seriously about the slide since he'd obviously have the money, and they aren't going to ask how much he's willing to spend because they don't want the meeting to end with him being humiliated or assuming the high totals are due to corruption.
So they give him an excuse that is partially true. One of the things that any private group needs to take into consideration is that the agency they are dealing with is governed by a long-term plan. They have a vision of what they want the parks system to look like in five years, or ten years, or whatever, have an idea of how the vision is going to be funded, and how they're going to implement things. This is a process that the public is invited to collaborate in, but few do. The people who do collaborate are more influential than people like this guy will give them credit for; public comments are taken seriously. Just because you offer to pay for something doesn't mean they're going to let you do what you want. They may be willing to deviate from the plan, but it's not like any Tom, Dick and Harry can just submit proposals and get the green light.
I've spent the last decade trying to get trail built. The park has about 80 miles of existing trail, most of it built in the 1960s on old logging roads. These are in rough shape and vary between swampy and eroded due to poor design. They require a lot of maintenance just to stay passable, and many are beyond repair. The biggest hurdle we had with any proposals that we would build and pay for ourselves were along the lines of "We already have 80 mile of trail we can't maintain, so you have to show us that you have the manpower to take up some of that burden before you can add mileage." This is the kind of goodwill that takes years to establish. They don't want a group that comes in with enthusiasm and builds ten miles of trail, only to have that enthusiasm fade over time and end up with overgrown, unmaintained trail. It's happened in other places. If you want to be taken seriously you have to do it as part of an organized group that demonstrates that it deserves to be taken seriously. This isn't beyond the capability of anyone who is willing to put in the time. But too many people aren't, and bureaucrats are wary of people with ideas that they can't commit to. Saying "If you want to help here are some projects you can donate money to" is easy because he can donate to his ability or desire, and it doesn't require any follow up. Building a playground feature immediately puts him on the hook for more than he likely realizes, and commits him to possible future obligations (Is the park going to be expected to maintain this equipment, or does he have money for that too? Will they be able to send him a bill for repairs? Is he willing to donate to a capital fund? Will he get fixed if it breaks a few months after opening and the park doesn't have money allocated to fix it?)
As for the window thing, the code only requires those guards to be placed on windows that are below 2 feet above the floor and 6 feet above ground; i.e. it doesn't apply to most windows people have in their homes., i.e. it only applies to the kinds of windows a toddler would be liable to crawl out of without the assistance of a chair or something. If your windows do not fit this description than it's on the landlord, not the municipal government. I'm not sure where you're getting the 90 cm from.
All that said, I don't doubt that budgeting and building and maintenance and commitment are the meat and bones of the problem. I take issue with needing to prove commitment in a roundabout way, rather than a direct way. If it really is how you describe it and not an issue of distributing funds equally between neighbourhoods, you still need to infer the intent of a bureaucrat, translate the invitation to donate as an invitation to a game in which you prove your commitment. If I were in NL's situation, I would miss this entirely. Frankly, I don't want to play the courtship game with a bureaucrat, I want to do stuff that is pro-social.
They're not trying to test "can he afford 15K", they're trying to test "is he willing to pay 15K", which is a subset of that. He may have enough assets that 15K wouldn't make a dent in his budget, but that doesn't mean he's actually willing to pay.
There is such a thing as a contract, where people can legally bind themselves to a payment.
Giving him a contract is enough work that they're going to have a filter to get rid of likely spurious offers before reaching the contract stage.
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Some people have gone and fixed stuff on their own, only to be fined and ordered to stop by the very city that hasn't fixed those issues for one reason or another. When you have to fix problems on your own while also hiding your identity, it's sign of a failing society. The problem shouldn't have gotten this big to begin with, the system should've solved the issue when it arrived, and it shouldn't be punishing people for solving the problems it failed to fix to begin with.
This kind of ideology, the need to value equality above all else, is really upsetting and possibly one of the worst ideas ever to come into the public consciousness as a "virtuous" idea. The implication here is that every slide in all the neighborhoods are broken, and unless they can fix every single slide in every neighborhood and give them all access to slides, nobody should have access to slides. Insert meme about the equity solution to three people of different heights watching a baseball game is to cut off the feet of the 2 taller ones.
I'm left to wonder if they really think that or it's just the excuse given to hide some other reason, such as embarrassment from not being able to fix the issues plaguing the city or laziness or greed (donate money, we'll build a bench for 50% of the donated money and pocket the rest).
I keep thinking that in instances like this it would be very instructive to arbitrarily equalize something that affects the deciding party, give them a taste of equality.
In Birmingham, some judges decided it was unfair that some female-dominated council jobs got paid less, had fewer perks than binmen. The council, now short of cash decided to lower the binmen's salary and perks in part to pay compensation to the women. This caused the binmen to go on strike, no waste to be collected, a strike which continues to this day (though agency workers are collecting waste, and are likely more expensive to boot).
I think the judges in question should have had their salaries reduced to those of the binmen. If this were done, they'd quickly uncover new and interesting legal theories about why different jobs have different pay and perks and how this may indeed be equitable. Probably this is very illegal, judges would surely find that it's against the Rule of Law to reduce the privileges of judges. But I don't think they'd quickly do such things again if it were done and the judicial bitching and whining were ignored, they have the latitude to interpret retarded laws more or less reasonably.
Officials, judges and councillors would not be so high-handed if there were more direct consequences for their actions. I know this does go against separation of powers but they're not really separated, when a government really wants something they can just do it, to hell with the law or anything in the way. Government just needs to be more aligned.
Everyone in power needs to be more aligned; offering CEOs a golden parachute means that they don't need to do well by their company, judges let criminals loose who prey upon the middle class, and politicians spend tax money to put us into debt, knowing that they'll do well for themselves regardless of how poorly they govern.
Interestingly, I think both rightists and leftists tend to buy into this framing; the leftist version is the quote "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."
My most fedposting opinion is that those in power should fear those who serve under them.
I am under the impression that golden parachutes are given to new CEOs of already failing companies, since even a good CEO is likely to fail at saving the company, and you won't get a good CEO to accept the job with such a high risk of not getting paid. And that the CEO still has an incentive to succeed because they get paid even more if they're successful.
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Did anything change in the last 150 years in tort law that caused the risk of being sued to increase? Did the supply of lawyers increase and the cost to access a lawyer decrease? What are the incentives that have made us like this?
There's been a massive increase in the use of strict liability (no mens rea requirement), novus actus interveniens is pretty much dead (and is dead when it comes to kids), the eggshell skull doctrine has been expanded beyond all reason, and even being sued is a life-ruining experience for an individual, even if the case is frivolous.
Is this a decision someone made and can theoretically be unmade by a governing body? Like someone takes a case to the Supreme Court, or a law in Congress gets passed? Or is this just incentives finding a local minimum?
Juries will insert an arbitrary amount of zeros on the "damages" line of a verdict if the victim is sympathetic enough. The Supreme Court tried to tame the madness back in the 2000s, but in the absense of a bright-line standard lower courts (and especially state courts) continued to impose insane judgements. Philip Morris USA Inc. v. Williams is a good example of this.
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It is not one decision, it is many, made by legislators, judges, and bureaucrats. Most people prefer it this way and would be horrified at the suggestion that it be changed, so even if it could be undone, there's no constituency for it. There's a word for someone who opposes this kind of thing and acts on their opposition, and that word is "tortfeasor" (except where criminal law applies, in which case it is "criminal").
I have seen an increase in popularity of "Free Range Parenting," https://letgrow.org/, etc. I think sentiments on this are changing among some groups.
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Your examples have some superficial similarities, but some of them are actually quite different. Assuming none of your kids or their friends is a 4-sigma hyperactive retard, you can just remove or disable the damned WOCDs. This may increase your chances of liability but only by a very trivial amount; as you note, kids falling out of windows is pretty rare. On the other hand, a public slide is going to be involved in at least a minor injury at some point, because kids like to play and unlike their parents aren't super concerned about their own absolute safety. Which means there's a good chance of someone being sued. So if you're going to repair something like that, do it on the sly.
The short version is that we cannot. The longer version is that the steps we would have to take would have consequences all the Good People would clutch their pearls in horror about. Kids could rarely fall out of perfectly good windows and it would be nobody's fault except the kids! Kids could burn themselves, cut themselves, even break a bone or very rarely kill themselves on playground equipment and the parents would get nothing but sympathy.
One of the open tenets of modern safetyism is that you do not do cost-benefit analysis with safety. This is a tenet violated all the time (because it's completely impractical), but it serves to anchor discussions and short-circuit objections. And a more general principle that is widely understood though rarely openly stated is that neither liberty nor enjoyment have value in cost-benefit discussions. That is, "because I want to" and "because it's fun" are not considered valid reasons to do something that has other drawbacks. Both these rules would have to be repudiated to return to the society you refer to. And they will not be, the safetyists are firmly in charge.
I'm... kinda confused by the window example. I can go down to the hardware store and buy pet-resistant screen door mesh that can protect against a hundred pound dog lunging and clawing for thirty-plus minutes, or chicken-wire grid that block less air intake and is designed to protect a chicken coop against invasive predators for weeks at a time; both will cost less than thirty bucks. Even if we presumed Safety Above All, there are simple solutions that would be as or more effective and allow much better airflow (and be compatible with boost fans).
As I made clear in a comment below, the window example would only apply in a situation where you had a casement window where the sill was less than 3 feet above the floor and more than 6 feet above the outside ground, which is basically nowhere. I don't think I have ever been in a building that has such a window. I don't even think I've been in a building with a double hung window that would meet these requirements, but at least in that case you'd be able to adjust it so the top part slides down and the regulation wouldn't apply.
I have a bow window containing four casement windows each of which meets these requirements. This is a replacement window; there used to be a triple-window -- two double hung and one fixed window -- there, and both double hungs met those requirements. A large number of houses in my development have such windows (or a bay with two double hung and one fixed), they're not some exotic thing. Fortunately I'm in neither Canada nor New York so no guards or opening-prevention devices required.
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Such items would not meet the requirements of a window guard. It's not enough that things are safe, they have to be legibly and documentably safe according to the standards set by the building codes. You need a guard that's at least 1070mm (and no, that doesn't work out to something even in inches either; it's a little over 42 1/8 inch), doesn't pass a 100mm sphere (so the chicken wire grid is likely too coarse), and has load requirements that the mesh isn't documented to meet.
Or you spit on your hands, run up the black flag, and remove the WOCD without installing a guard.
Chicken wire comes in a couple of different sizes, but the mesh sizes available at my local hardware store are 1" and 2". Online it looks like 3" exists, but is still too fine for a 100mm sphere, which seems about the size of a small chicken you'd want to use the wire to fence.
Although even McMaster doesn't quote a load capacity, it can be fairly sturdy stuff. May still not be a good fir for this application.
I was thinking of some much wider stuff I've seen, but that must not be chicken wire.
The point is that it has to be LEGIBLY -- that is, documentably -- able to support the load in that particular application. It's not enough that it works, you have to be able to prove it works to the bureaucrats. Which with any sort of improvised solution, you can't.
That's... kind of not true in this case. Building inspectors do have four inch spheres (usually more of a cone) that they will try to push through deck/stair pickets if they have concerns; the amount of force that they are to use for this is underspecified (comes up with cable railings a lot), but I'd think that that well-fastened chicken wire (usually hexagonal; you are maybe thinking of page wire?) would utterly defeat such an inspector even if he tried to literally throw himself out the window.
Not sure that making your house look like a chicken coop is the Chad solution here though -- "fuck you, make me" is much better, as I describe above.
Ah, yes, that's the stuff I was thinking of. Or maybe welded wire fence, which seems to be similar only welded instead of knotted. Guess that's more for sheep than chickens.
A guard made of chicken wire wouldn't look any worse than some of the official monstrosities
I don't know if my area has such a rule (it appears there is one for landlords but I don't see one for homeowners), but my relevant windows are not only free, they have a convenient ledge for kids to climb up on to make their jump easier.
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As you accurately note, you can just do some easy work with tools. Probably in the case of the park everyone who notices will assume the city fixed it. Nobody at your apartment complex wants to go through the effort of filing a complaint for something that doesn’t bother them.
You can just do things. Anarchotyranny has as its natural enemy thé Bavarian fire drill.
You obviously aren't familiar with a certain type of (almost always female) busybody who goes out of her way to find where people are Not Following The Rules, and then making a big deal of it to whomever she can, mostly because she enjoys the petty powertrip involved in pushing people around, and making them comply just because you can. The one who will call CFS every single day if she sees you're not parenting your kids the way she thinks you should. The kind who get out rulers to measure lawns so she can rat people out to the HOA.
(I'm thinking of my late grandmother — the one who was a "special ed" teacher because the crippled and cognitively-impaired kids were easier for her to bully.)
... Based?
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When a kid injures himself anywhere near the now-operational slide, the parents will be demanding to find "who's responsible," at which point, the city will notify everyone that they did no such repairs, there would be paperwork if there were, and all would "know" who made the fix. NL would be sued; maybe the civil court is committed enough to rule of law that "everyone knows NL did it" wouldn't work, but you'd be suprised to know just how flimsy a successfull lawsuit can be.
No, they will not. They may make demands of the city that this obvious hazard be rectified, but the city didn't know anything about it. There’s a lot of putting two and two together over and over again that you’re assuming, each step of which is unlikely in isolation.
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IMO the ultimate source of these woes is that our elites have the wrong personality. There’s a particular personality type that can tell a mourning father that his child’s death was caused by his own negligence and that his guilt-appeasing window-amendment will not be going through. And there’s a particular personality that can grasp intuitively that normal people wish to benefit their own community with benches, and not the world at large with a randomly-generated bench. Our elites are not selected for this personality and nothing will change until they are. They are selected for abstract reasoning, which seems to correspond with poor instinct, and for temperamental submissiveness (agreeableness), a necessary aspect of success in elite institutions. We need to be selecting angry disagreeable men in positions of power and then ardently defending them from the inevitable backlash of their impulsivity (see: Trump).
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An obvious lesson here is that you just go fix things without asking or telling anyone. There is a bridge at a park near me that I re-decked one day because it was rotting and I use it all the time. But god don't ever send an email asking about it first if fixing it is something you are willing to consider!
I think this works in business too. No, do not go coordinate a monthslong marketing campaign with the idiots in marketing or let them have any input; just implement the feature that makes clients' lives better (assuming you are competent enough for this to indeed be the case). Seeking approval is just the opposite of a Cover Your Ass paper trail.
It’d be impractical to do that here where I am. The parks and recreation guys I’ve come across are jackasses with the lone exception of one of them. Maybe I can’t entirely blame them. Even the good side of the neighborhood has people vandalizing the grounds on the regular, so they’re always painting over the play structures and facilities. If you showed up one day with your hardware and just started making changes to things, you’d spark the ire of them in their trucks rolling up on you. No doubt.
I have stories of doing this at different jobs in the past. Looking back on it, some of the “fixes” I’ve implemented probably could’ve got me fired, not because they were dangerous or crossed some serious boundary, but it would definitely raise more than a few eyebrows and make people very suspicious. But you have to improvise when you’re not empowered to do your job. Shadow IT for instance has been a great worry of companies for a very long time. But when you’re on a shoestring budget and you get treated as an afterthought, what can you do?
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Russia is not some magical land of freedom.
WOCD are a common recommendation if you have children living in your flat. If your kid is dumb or hyper enough to fall out, you'll be held liable for his or her death. The only difference is that a WOCD won't help you in court if the kid is determined enough to dismantle it.
And guess what public officials did to a handcrafted fairytale playground someone built for everybody in the neighborhood? Yep, you guess it, demolished it to avoid liability.
Glad that we agree)
In this hypothetical, I think it's much easier to rouse your neighbours to defend a working slide than to rouse the bureaucrats to fix it.
Not hypothetical. Lots of similar news stories: https://gubdaily.ru/news/v-petrozavodske-xotyat-snesti-uyutnuyu-detskuyu-ploshhadku-postroennuyu-gorozhanami/ https://vk.com/wall-42189844_249407
Not surprised about this at all 😬
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I really like antibiotics and the Internet but fuck me reading shit like this makes me want to RETVRN so bad.
This photo broke my heart when I saw it in person, similar vibe, we've lost something
That link takes me to their entry page.
View of Hamilton by the Canadian artist Robert R. Whale.
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It works for me.
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You don't even need a group. You can just solve problems.
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With Russia in particular it's probably the de-fenestration industry conspiracy...
Anyways, you have noticed an important thing -- freedom's not free.
Humans do poorly in captivity -- live free or die. Fuck those cocksuckers and their safe shit -- pull off your helmet, let your hair blow in the wind.
Speed. Unbuckle.
People will give you dirty looks; you will get the odd ticket -- maybe even be sued.
Trust me it's worth it. (although less and less likely as state capacity declines -- in the Interior, the cops mostly can't even be bothered to do speed traps or DUI checkpoints anymore. I used to get way more speeding tickets -- it was still worth it)
You will never be a woman (in a Russian Bounce commercial) -- why not be a man instead.
The Interior of what? Russia?
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Over on DSL, someone stated that the first thing they did when they moved into their house was to remove all the smoke detectors so the damn things wouldn't annoy you in the middle of the night with battery beeps. Not my thing, but, yeah.
Worst I do is speeding and other traffic violations. Even with those little violations, you start noticing things. Like... those assholes in the traffic department really ARE out to fuck things up. Do the speed limit (on an arterial) and you hit every red light. Violate it by a significant amount, and you hit several yellows in a row. Like the people who drive side by side for miles if you're doing slightly over the limit will often move over expeditiously if you come roaring up behind them at 15+mph. Like cities love to place no-U-turn and no-left-turn signs so you have to drive across town to go next door... and you can save 10 minutes by ignoring them (and also a no-U-turn sign indicates a good place to make a U-turn).
There's a Robert Heinlein quote
A lot of "civilization" is about making it harder to be a live lion. But acting the jackal really sucks if you don't have the temperament.
Evidentally there's a philosopher named Sidney Hook, who Wikipedia calls a philosopher of pragmatism, who said about this:
But that is not the general thought of the Western world today. Safety uber alles, and the state to make sure it is "unsafe" in a large way to violate that in a big way; this is why people find it perfectly reasonable to threaten a superannuated computer programmer with a trip to Riker's Island for riding a bicycle on the sidewalk. State capacity may be diminishing in the Canadian Interior, it's Orwell's dreamworld in my area.
So they didn't say that they removed the smoke alarms because the pencil-pushing bureaucrats at city hall are trying to dictate how to provision their home, it was merely to defeat and negate the proper functioning of the alarm. I expect they'll be replacing their fuses with scrunched up tinfoil next.
If the proper functioning of a smoke detector is to wake you up in the middle of the night with a hard to locate intermittent chirp that indicates no imminent danger, and cannot be silenced without getting out a ladder, removing said detector from the ceiling, removing the battery, and then pushing the test button resulting in a VERY LOUD but fortunately short alarm. But only the pencil-pushing bureaucrats at city hall think that.
As for fuses, I would feel the same about removing AFCIs if the damn things tripped every time you used a perfectly good vacuum cleaner (as was a problem for earlier ones).
Alerting you that it's running out of power instead of leaving you unaware that it has silently failed is the alarm functioning properly.
Removing a smoke alarm is practically the same amount of work as replenishing or replacing, more if you have to patch and paint any holes. They're not expensive, the first place I checked sells a twin pack for £15.
I can say from experience it's better coming home to the news that you'll have to clean up smoke damage in the kitchen than whatever the outcome might have been if we hadn't had a smoke alarm.
That's what you and the bureaucrats say. I say waking me up in the middle of the night with such an alert is broken by design.
As for actual alerts, so far I'm a dozen or so to zero for false-to-real ratio. Most due to cooking, some due to shower steam, and a couple due to defective detectors that just went off for no reason.
Would you rather that the smoke alarm silently run down its battery?
Believe it or not, there are alternatives to those dumb ideas. It could turn on a flashing LED -- this would help location AND not wake me up in the middle of the night unless it was actually in the room. But that's not allowed because it's not annoying enough and people might not see it. Even before LEDs, it could be hinged and when the battery goes low it could trip a solenoid to make it swing down and perhaps display a brightly-colored underside like a deer tail. It could start beeping on the first peak in voltage after reaching the alert level, or 12 hours after reaching the alert level. (That they start beeping in the middle of the night is not coincidence nor just only noticing it then; it's because when batteries get cold their voltage drops)
But if there weren't alternatives... if it's 0-dark-30 and I'm looking for the smoke detector that's emitting a high-pitched chirp once a minute, yes, I absolutely prefer it run down its battery.
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Is it? When I look upon my own life, ethics, not prudence has been the main thing holding me back. When I see how liars have so much currency with the shear amount of endless lies that have been told about me, or backstabbing and throwing people under the bus which takes you up the ladder a step, and the finger’s always getting wagged at you if you even think of promoting your own self-interest for the moment, this place could use a lion or two to be set upon the mass of the population and remind people to stay in their lane and mind their own affairs.
“Freedumb” is nothing but a playground for thieves, bullies and narcissists.
“We’re best punished for our virtues.”
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I would dispute that state-mandated safetyism should be construed as a craven commitment to self-preservation. Not for nothing is it called the nanny-state - it is an essentially altruistic impulse, or to pick a more negative word, it's patronizing in the truest sense. The bureaucrats who make the rules and the lobbyists who campaign for them are not thinking of their own lives - they're getting high on the belief that they are saving other people's lives, the lives of the poor, stupid, reckless children called human beings, who cannot be trusted to seek what's good for them.
It is the worship of Safety.
Thus they center themselves on themselves and worship themselves as the source of that good.
As the source of preservation and sustainment ("they'd be dead if it weren't for me").
As a reflection of Holy Safety herself.
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I agree
I refuse the notion that unbuckling makes me more manly. Getting rid of the Watchers doesn't mean upping my chances to die. If anything, I think of my family and doing a responsible thing for them.
Don't worry about the specifics -- just find something that you can choose to do that safety-fuckers won't like.
It will probably end up being at least as dangerous as seatbelt miscreantism, but I guess those commercials were really effective given the nerve touched by the very idea of it; people who ride motorcycles are no longer (on the whole) any kind of rebel, but that is way more (statistically) dangerous than unbelted automobile operation.
Think of something for yourself; that's largely the point.
Tearing the bullshit out of your windows would be a good start.
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Of all the hills of masculinity, this is by far the stupidest to (literally) die on. Literally all downside, zero upside.
lol. lmao even. One day you may go flying through your windshield and paint yourself across the ground like a meat crayon. The people in the other car will hopefully think "damn, what an uncucked belt-Chad, unbounded by a feminized and broken society".
Godspeed warrior King
Witness me, The unbound spirit thundering down the highway with no safety belt. I am only slightly joking.
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...
I don't think you could have missed the point any harder -- the problem that teleo has noted boils down to lack of agency; to counteract this, you need to take some.
If you think that car accidents 'just happen', you are experiencing the downstream consequences of the widespread promotion of this (terrible) feeling -- you will probably struggle with countermanding it no matter what if 'speeding' or 'not wearing a seatbelt' carry too much risk for you. (start slow, try one at a time!)
Possibly you are too habituated to care, but if not I guess you could chip away at it --
Helmetless bike riding?
Midnight playground maintenance?
IDK, find something man.
Midnight playground maintenance is at least in theory positive-sum; however, there are ways to fuck this up that are non-obvious. For example: you use regular hardware-store bolts in a coastal playground, they rust out after ten years and catastrophically fail. There are probably other things, that would be fine for Joe and his son Joe Jr. but not good for a neighborhood playground...
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Speeding has substantial benefits alongside the risks - you waste significantly less of your life travelling and thus get more done.
What are the benefits of not wearing a seatbelt while you're sitting in a car anyway? I might disagree with punishing people for failing to wear a seatbelt since the risk is almost entirely to themselves, but seriously, this one is a good cost-benefit. Having agency for yourself does not mean doing the opposite of everything They tell you to do - that is still refusing to make decisions for yourself, insofar as your actions are still 100% predictable from Their edicts. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence; the goal is not to invert the system, but to ignore it.
Probably not. Very rarely will speeding significantly change travel times, you have to be doing a Cannonball Run to see a real difference in your life once you factor in things like getting into and out of the car and stop signs/lights (which I don't think anyone can recommend ignoring in most cases).
Rather, the benefit of speeding is that it is fun, and once you remove the idea of aesthetic enjoyment from your cost benefit you are lost as a human being. But I'm not interested in having the argument about my speeding habits here again.
Speeding is fun (or at least more fun than driving the limit), but it also significantly changes travel times. Not for trips to the mailbox, but many longer trips. Including with lights, since the lights are typically not synchronized to the speed limit (and as I mentioned elsewhere, sometimes they are synchronized to a speed significantly above the limit). For trips mostly on the highway it's basically linear.
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You feel a bit free, take some agency -- maybe notice that being slightly safer is not the be-all or end-all. Like I said, the exact thing that you do is not very important -- although if your risk tolerance doesn't extend to not wearing a seatbelt sometimes, you are probably going to struggle with alternatives.
When was the last time you crashed your car? On average you can go like half a million miles without your seatbelt becoming relevant -- quite a bit more if you aren't also drinking or whatnot. Consider how your opinion has been formed, and whether this is truly too risky for you -- it will give you the tools to evaluate other risks in your life.
All this plus you look cooler. I felt like a complete dork when I was riding in a car putting my seat belt on and everyone else was just freeballing it (in another country of course, with a lower standard of safety).
ABC man -- Always Be Cool
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I've always thought that the core idea of coolness is not caring what other people think in the moment.
Coolness is associated with freedom and relaxation and confidence yes. So caring less about what others think is usually cool, but the neurotic person dutifully buckling seatbelts for a 5 minute pickup jaunt is not cool. (not to say they aren't cool in general, just in this specific moment. they could very well be cool to give a moving eulogy when a drunk driver ends the merry ride early for anyone not wearing a seatbelt)
I've used some adjectives to stack the deck unfairly here of course, because this pup would be cooler than a try-hard wannabe that would like to buckle seatbelt but avoids doing so because they care so much about what other people think.
There's something about the fact that the doing (seatbelt) is uncool and the actively-non-doing (unbuckling to fit in) is double-uncool and the passive-non-doing (jaunt) is the cool thing.
Additionally: consider proportionality of safety-ism. Teen wearing a helmet for a razor scooter is uncool. Neil Armstrong triple-checking industrial buckles is very cool. (source: my opinion). Whether wearing a seatbelt is cool or not depends on which reference class a car-ride feels like.
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Strongly agreed. Cool people aren't doing what makes them look cool, they are doing what they feel like doing. The things they do become cool because the person is cool, not the other way around.
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For small values of significant. As a toy model, let us assume a daily commute of half an hour. Say 50% of the time, you are hampered by traffic and traffic lights from going faster. The other 50% is spent in situations where you could save time by speeding.
Let us say that you go twice the speed limit when speeding. This is breakneck speed, public menace level. Instead of going 50km/h in residential neighborhoods, you go 100km/h. Instead of going 100km/h on two way traffic roads, you go 200km/h. By risking your life and everyone else's, you save a whopping 25% of your commute time, or 7.5 minutes. Of course, for every second saved you will also spend a second in high concentration ready to slam the brakes at the slightest trouble ahead, knowing that every 50ms in reaction delay will make it even more likely that you will kill someone.
Now, there are certainly examples where going faster will save you substantial time. "It is 3am, I am at a highway junction in Munich and want to get to a highway junction in Berlin." Sure, going 280km/h will save you about half the time compared to a more leisurely pace of 140km/h (if there are no construction sites which will bottleneck your time, and you ignore speed limits meant to cut down nighttime noise). But for the average road trip, the time saved just is not all that big.
As another intuition pump, consider ambulances. Clearly, getting a patient into the hospital as soon as possible after an accident is beneficial, and this is why we allow them to turn on their siren and run red lights. So we want them to be reasonably fast. An ambulance capped at 70km/h would be comically slow. But once you get to 160km/h or something, you quickly hit the point of diminishing returns in most scenarios. I am sure it would be technically feasible to build an ambulance with a top speed of 300km/h, but nobody wants that, because the scenarios where the maximum expected utility would require an ambulance to go that fast are very rare indeed.
I said "travelling", not "commuting". I was thinking of going to visit family or going on a holiday, which (unlike commuting) often involves driving through long stretches of nothing (my general feeling is that the speed limits in built-up areas are generally about right, but those on highways are frequently far too low; many of the high-end divided roads and outback highways in Australia, for instance, could support far more than their speed limit of 110 km/h).
Also, here in Australia, there are certain highways where you're not just saving days, but potentially saving the need for a bloody caravan because the towns are over a day's drive (at the speed limit) apart.
I mean, the Royal Flying Doctor Service here in Oz has 500 km/h and even 800 km/h ambulances, which are in fact very handy. That particular solution doesn't work so well for random people travelling, though, because lol piloting is hard.
It still doesn't make much sense. Say you're on a 150 mile road trip. 50 miles are on normal roads where you can expect to average 50 mph accounting for traffic, hills, lights, stop signs, slowing down for curves, and all the other little things that keep you from maintaining constant speed. The other 100 miles are on open highway with a 70 mph speed limit. An hour is already accounted for either way. Strictly doing the limit will get you through the stretch in 86 minutes. Averaging 90 will get you through in 66 minutes. So 126 minutes vs 146 minutes, or about a 20 minute savings over more than 2 hours.
Except most people would bump that up to 75 and not consider it speeding, so now you're down to a 15 minute advantage. Which completely evaporates when you realize that if you do 20 over the limit for 100 miles straight your chances of getting pulled over are close to 100%. Plus you're now skittish and won't drive over the limit. If it happens halfway through the stretch you got dinged 33 minutes in, and it will take you an additional 43 minutes to complete the stretch. So you've completed it in 86 minutes, saving a grand total of 10 minutes in travel time, less the 10 or 15 minutes for the traffic stop, less the cost of the fine, less the additional fuel you used going 90 miles and hour. If there's a benefit here I'm not seeing it.
I'm definitely wanting LaTeX support, because even though it's just a derivative, it would look soooo much prettier.
I've found it interesting to think about it marginally. What's the time savings of each marginal additional mph? A derivative gives a very good approximation of this, and particularly for highway speeds, it's a good enough approximation to be reasonable over at least a handful of individual mph changes without recalculating.
Governing equation, which everyone should know from high school: d = rt, distance = rate*time.
We care about time. t = d/r.
dt/dr = -d/r^2
(Yes, this would be a nice place for LaTeX, because the d's for the derivative should be visually different from the d for distance.)
One has to be careful with units, because we're often talking about changes in time in terms of minutes, but we have rates in terms of hours. What we ultimately want is something mixed, like minutes/mph.
We're starting with [miles]/[mph]^2, so we need to correct by [60min]/[1hr], meaning if we just plug miles and mph into our formula, we need to multiply the result by 60 to get the units we want.
The obvious mental math version to just get your bearings on the magnitudes of things is to consider r=60mph, because then one of our denominator terms will cancel with our unit correction. It's also not too far off from the nominal speed of many state highways. This case gives us that a quick approximation, with inputs in terms of miles and mph and output in terms of minutes/mph is -d/r. That is, again, kind of assuming r=60, then if your trip is, say, 150 miles, you're saving (note that it's negative, because this is a reduction in time spent) about 2.5 minutes per mph you increase.
Some things to note. Time savings is linear in distance. I personally don't think it matters much until we're getting to pretty significant distance trips (I think trying to speed a bunch to save time on your 20mile commute is kinda dumb). It's also a 1/r^2 in rate. That is nasty in terms of diminishing returns. It's also why I'm kinda fine with the nominal 60mph mental math to make the unit change "free"; yes, I'm slightly overestimating the value of speeding if the nominal speed limit is 70, but it's probably not huge error. I haven't bothered actually quantifying the error; this is all just to quickly get into a ballpark.
I think the economist would probably want to slap a utility on this derivative and set it equal to something representing your estimation of the likelihood of getting pulled over. I think it's easy enough to handwave that a little bit and just think a little about the trip you're planning and this marginal rate of improvement and come to some approximation that you're comfortable with.
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They can consider it what they like, 75 in a 70 is speeding. You're not demonstrating that speeding isn't faster by showing that driving 5mph over the limit is indeed faster than driving at the limit.
LOL, no it's not. I've driven from Florida to the Northeast twice -- about 900 miles each time -- and gotten pulled over once per trip. A warning once and a ticket the other. And yeah, I was doing 20 or more over most of the time (note that the speed limit was mostly 55 and 65, not 70). On one of those trips I averaged nearly 70mph, including stops.
Nope.
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Piloting is easy, unless you mean helicopters. Dealing with all the nintendo-hard licensing and air traffic control stuff is the problem.
I mean, I guess, but I'm still not sure that replacing all/most Christmas car travel with personal aeroplanes would end very well (still wouldn't be as hilariously doomed as trying to do it for commuting, though; Manhattan's skyline would look a bit different after a month of that even if you handwave the parking problem).
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Midnight playground maintenance has an actual purpose. It's agency for something. Unbuckled driving or helmetless biking achieves nothing (unless you're in the autism-adjacent minority who find the sensation of having to wear seatbelts and helmets actively torturous, I guess). It's just contrarianism.
Helmetless biking at high speed is awesome. Especially when it's kinda hot.
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Yes, and?
That's the whole point!
Contrarianism is the whole point of unbuckled driving; I don't think it's the whole point of unsanctioned playground maintenance. Therefore I object to them being listed as examples of the same phenomenon. I'm not even knocking the joys of contrarianism! But it's more of a niche pleasure, and many people can and should see the appeal of the playground thing even though they have no interest in contrarianism-for-contrarianism's-sake.
Taking back agency in a practical, goal-oriented sense is, IMO, not the same conversation as letting yourself be contrary for the hell of it now and again - and while both are valid causes, the former is more societally important (while fortunately also being an easier sell).
Still missing the point -- the idea here is to build some risk tolerance, and notice that many of the things that a giant propaganda machine has been blaring are way too dangerous since the day you were born -- are not.
The responses here are a great example; you'd think I was suggesting BASE jumping every weekend or something.
The agency you are taking is not strictly contrarianism; it's also that you are taking responsibility for your own actions in the car. Making it clear (to yourself) that your life is in your own hands. Bird on a wire stuff.
It is anyways, we are all fragile and hanging by a thread -- making that apparent to oneself has intrinsic value. Like I said, there are other things you could do that would work -- but the options that are strictly safer than taking your seatbelt off and going for a drive are probably much fewer than you think.
I want to agree with the sentiment but the thought process that lets one realize that seatbelts don't actually do anything if you don't crash your car is also what allows people to realize that you can sell cocaine and get rich as long as you dont get busted.
Risk aversion has its place in the world, but just like snorting cocaine some things are best in moderation
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Helmetless biking (and skiing, omg, the 0-to-100 in the uptake rate of ski helmets in Europe in the past decade is making me fume) achieves a lot. It makes the difference between a bike being something you can just hop onto, go from A to B with and leave wherever, and it being an activity that requires locating a particular piece of gear and hauling it with you everywhere at the destination, leaving you with either -1 hand or -1 head's worth of volume in whatever bags you bring until you return home, unless you engage in extra planning to be able to leave it somewhere.
Seatbelts are ok because the delta-inconveniencs to driving is small. Bike helmet advocates, though, belong together with Rust programmers and playground securers on the scrap heap of history for being scolds that would sap all efficiency and convenience out of life by a thousand cuts for the sake of their padded-cell utopia.
The reason for the 0–100 uptake in ski helmets is that once you've worn one, you can't imagine going back to not wearing one. The safety advantages are controversial. The comfort advantages are not. On most days the helmet is all the insulation you need. On unusually cold days they hold underlayers in place better than a knit cap possibly can. On warm days they have vents that open up. On all days things are much more put together than they were in the days when you'd try to cinch all your headgear down with the goggle strap, and if you were unfortunate enough to crash, lose everything and get a nice crush of snow on your neck and head. And then have to pick up a hat that was covered in frost inside and out. And when you go inside, the snow doesn't melt and soak your helmet. And you can put bluetooth speakers in the ear pockets and have headphones that you can easily control with a gloved hand.
Helmetless biking is fine if you're riding on bike paths or flat roads with little traffic. If you're riding in traffic or on more topographically interesting terrain they're a good idea, and if you're mountain biking they're a necessity. Every once in a blue moon I'll see someone in the woods without a helmet and it's almost always a guy with a cheap bike not suited to the trail and nothing else to indicate he has a clue what he's doing. Either that or kids in West Virginia who can't really ride anything to begin with because the trail is too rugged.
I don't buy into the traffic part (though it might be more applicable in the US, where drivers are not trained or compelled to give cyclists proper room?), but mountain biking, sure. At that point you are doing a hazardous sport rather than utilitarian transportation; I'd accept the necessity for parachutes when high-altitude tightroping too, without being for making them mandatory while walking on firm ground.
I really don't want people who are wearing headphones on my piste (or, on that matter, on the road)...
I was actually convinced to try wearing a ski helmet once. It was not only uncomfortable, but also messed with my situational awareness (since it restricts wind flow around my face and heavily buffets my ears), though perhaps if you are the sort of person to want to wear bluetooth earbuds while skiing you don't particularly use that sense anyway.
Relevantly, perhaps, I don't see what gear there really is to hold down. I'd use a single heavy knit cap with lining, which holds itself in place just fine, and maybe add polarized sunshades if it's a sunny day. If I am going to engage in skiing where I expect head-down crashes of the type that would get snow on my neck, then sure, there is an argument for helmets, as there was for mountain biking - but again, we would be engaging in a strange conflation where we force the safety standards of an adjacent high-risk activity on a lower-risk one that doesn't need them, unnecessarily encumbering the lower-risk one in the process. Most biking does not involve uneven dirt paths that weave between trees, and most skiing does not involve doing 360-degree flips or unmaintained mountainsides.
(cf. Rust: Most programming does not involve people dying if a use-after-free happens!)
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Yeah, I normally wear a helmet when I bike for recreation, but when I commuted partly by bicycle I certainly didn't. Both because it's inconvenient and because I'm not exactly screaming down hills at 40mph when I'm commuting. Ironically my commute put me through the one local town which requires bike helmets for adults, but fuck them anyway.
(Dorkiness when biking for recreation is not really affected by the helmet, because the rest of the kit already maxed that out)
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I mean, why are we scared to say that the bike and ski helmets are inherently unaesthetic, dorky, and weird looking? Riding a bike is already fairly unaesthetic, but riding a bike with a helmet is basically doomed to dorkiness, and the more the helmet is optimized for any functional purpose the worse it tends to look. I do typically wear a helmet when I ride any considerable distance, but I'm under no illusion that I look at all cool doing so.
That said, seatbelts I remain a fan of. The numbers simply are what they are, and I don't think avoiding a seatbelt is really any improvement in comfort in a modern vehicle. I do occasionally drive classics that feature no or minimal seatbelts, and I suppose I'm taking a risk there but there's a corresponding benefit. My favorite tuner car modifications to see young guys drive around with are the addition of aesthetically obvious safety features. The fire extinguisher ostentatiously anchored to the floor in easy reach, the two strap hanging off the bumper, the four point racing harness in the driver's seat.
The idea that bike helmets look "dorky" is very alien to my lifelong sensibility on this point. They look sporty. Professional competitive bikers on television have them - they're part of the same aesthetic as football helmets or hockey masks, they have a kind of paramilitary-looking toughness about them. I will grant @4bpp the point that they are cumbersome, though.
I dunno, pros seldom raced in helmets until ~2002, maybe a little earlier in cobbled classics, and I definitely think the sport was more aesthetic pre-helmet. Not saying it's not worth it, on net, but.
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I think this attitude comes from having grown up as helmet adoption was first spreading. The cool kids did not wear helmets. It was the dorks who had helmets forced on them by their parents, and were too obedient to discard them once out of sight.
The helmet campaign was totalizing and successful. Kids born in the late 90s see them in all the media they consume and every kid wears them. Though as an elder millennial of a toddler I do notice the other dads my age sometimes give in to their kids hopping on a balance bike while leaving their helmets on the ground.
People who graduated high school before roughly 1992 wouldn’t have been exposed to the dynamics introduced by the helmet campaign and so can reasonably view them as the domain of Lance Armstrongs.
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Re: the Tocqueville quote. It seems to me that some of the reason North American society is more functional that European is because of remnants of the habits developed in frontier life. Having to band together with locals to fight nature is an amazing social lubricant.
Depends on what sense you mean “more functional.” Plenty of societies on Earth do things better or more effectively than Americans do.
The numbers don’t really back that up do they? [Nationality]-Americans have better outcomes than their [Nationality] brethren back home for every given group, the American economy outperforms all other economies, and America is pretty much always leading the trends in what turns out to be the revealed preference of nearly everyone once they hit a certain income level (large homes, cars, A/C, social spending, etc).
I mean I’m sure other societies do some things more in line with what you like but that’s not really a great definition of “better.” Most things America does ‘poorly’ America simply prefers this way, such as poor crime enforcement for instance. Most Americans wouldn’t really go for a Japan-style maximum enforcement if given the choice.
Once the dollar stops being a reserve currency, American standards of living and incomes are going to come tumbling down to a more reasonable level.
It's alleged purchasing power of the $ would decline by about 30% if that happens.
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I don’t have numbers on this but I also don’t think it’s necessary to make the point.
North Korea has a better border policy towards illegal entrants than we do. Finland has a better educational system. Germany has better employment law. Singapore has better real estate policies. China’s executed people for expropriating capital out of the country. Switzerland has a better healthcare system. How many examples would you regard as sufficient?
I'm not saying the solution is for America to immediately and identically adopt all said policies and replace the existing ones we have. There are unique circumstances that fit each country’s needs the way that they do. I don’t think raw economic or GDP numbers are the appropriate gauge to make this argument however. It’s been well known for quite a while that correlations between a person’s annual salary and personal happiness fall off remarkably about around $70,000. You don’t need to be an American to make $70k per year. And being the richest country in the world by GDP matters far less than where those numbers are captured and what the distribution is.
A list of cherrypicked examples beats the typical experience. For the US and almost all other countries for each carefully picked example. On one hand yes, that's how cherrypicked examples work, but it is not impactful or relevant. I'm not learning much about the inadequacies of America in our underperforming relative to North Korean insularity.
If no amount of examples will be good enough for you, there’s not much I can do beyond that if you think people don’t live said experiences.
I am pointing out the level of cherrypicking it takes to select a very narrow policy each from a separate country and compare each in isolation to the US. Especially when those countries would underperform each other by almost all these metrics; the North Korean border policy not making it better than the US or Germany at employment law.
And that's not even getting into if these policies are even desirable. North Korea out competing us at extreme insularity. China executing people for all sorts of reasons I don't agree with; including the popular act of getting currency out of China. They sure are "better at" executing people for things that are not crimes in the US or other developed countries. Something North Korea is also much better at than us. Singapore enacting racial housing quotas. They certainly are more extreme by those measures. Not that I'd say they are "better at" setting policy for some of these examples.
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Don't forget fighting hostile Natives, too. That was also a notable factor.
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the window thing might also be because when they get old if they open quickly then decelerate quickly then there is a risk the pane of glass will pop out and cut someone below on the street in two. this happened in our office building from the 7th floor onto a busy street but by some miracle no-one was injured.
Seems easily fixable by having the windows open inwards.
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