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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2699 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for December 7, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Or did too many toddlers get run over by Ford Mctrucks with absurd blindspots?

This.

Backover: Vehicle backover injuries and deaths occur when a person is positioned behind a vehicle without a driver's knowledge as the driver backs up. Most victims of backovers are children and the elderly. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that backover incidents cause at least 183 fatalities and between 6,700 and 7,419 injuries annually; however, the number of fatalities and injuries from those incidents is subject to debate because no comprehensive statistics are collected on vehicular accidents on private property. Some safety groups assert that the number of backover-related injuries and fatalities is higher. Because these accidents often occur on private property, rather than on public roads, they are not typically included in traffic-crash fatality data.

In preventing backover accidents, the size of vehicle blind spots, the area behind the vehicle where the driver cannot see using his or her side or rear-view mirrors, is a key factor. Generally, the larger the vehicle, the larger the blind spot. Children are especially vulnerable since their small stature makes them harder to see within a blind spot. As larger vehicles, including SUVs, pickup trucks, and minivans, have become more popular, more drivers are confronted with larger blind spots. Currently, without a standard, automakers can design similar-sized vehicles that have dramatically different blind spots. For example, among midsized SUVs, a 5 foot 1 inch driver of a 2006 Jeep Commander Limited has a 69 foot blind spot versus an 18 foot blind spot for a similar-sized driver of a 2005 Nissan Pathfinder LE.

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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