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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?
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).
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.
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