Bistrofan

Karma: 37

Bistrofan May 31, 2025, 10:31 PM
1 point
1
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Letting Kids Be Kids

So, you do have a choice, and you’re choosing safety over freedom.

That may be the right choice, according to your values, or it may not. But you obviously do have the choice.

This sort of “we don’t have a choice” rhetoric is the source of a lot of the dynamics that the OP describes.

Yes I technically have a choice, I could tell my kids to suck it up and walk across multiple even busier roads, many of which don’t even have sidewalks for a good portion of them. But technically having a choice there doesn’t change anything about the complaint, after all I wouldn’t need to make this choice if I could live somewhere more walkable!

I’m making a far riskier choice than the parents in Tokyo do when they let their kids walk to school, in part because the parents in Tokyo don’t have their children walking down a sidewalkless street with cars going 40-50 right by them.

There’s roughly a ¹⁄₁₃₂ chance of a person being injured in a car accident each year in the US using some quick math off of injury rates and population, and walking is apparently 36x more dangerous than driving so it’s pretty heavily skewed towards them and I’m going to assume that’s skewed even more heavily towards “Kids who routinely walk alongside a road without a sidewalk near cars going 40-50 mph”. I wouldn’t know the exact amounts, but that seems pretty substantial to me.

Of course, I already make the choice of freedom vs safety by driving them to begin with (although similar, it’s skewed towards people who are drunk driving/using phone/speeding heavily/etc). So I know it’s a choice. But it doesn’t have to be one this awful!

Bistrofan May 30, 2025, 7:07 PM
13 points
3
on: Letting Kids Be Kids
I think there’s some important context to consider, the growing general crime paranoia of society. Personal-safety fear is apparently at a three-decade high https://news.gallup.com/poll/544415/personal-safety-fears-three-decade-high.aspx
People are as scared of the world now as they were during the 90s crime wave.
>WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Forty percent of Americans, the most in three decades, say they would be afraid to walk alone at night within a mile of their home. This indicator of crime fears last reached this level in 1993, when, during one of the worst crime waves in U.S. history, 43% said they would be afraid.
That doesn’t explain any difference by itself (after all fears were high in the 70s and 80s when children could free roam a lot more), but just from casual reasoning it seems like a more difficult task to lower fear over child safety without confronting general fear over personal safety because they stem from a similar source. Like my brother in law who would spend his time listening to crime podcasts and those videos of Ring camera package thieves and other spooky stuff https://youtu.be/r-ViIM4eZiI?si=YwpkoQyiGNKSS2eS (5.8 million views!) and things like that. The ones who see videos of the cities and basically think every street in Chicago or Los Angeles are packed to the brim with violent homeless.
>Because that’s what they are. People. Some people take this too far. Only treat kids as peers in situations where that makes sense for that situation and that kid, but large parts of our society have gone completely bonkers in the other direction. For example:
I absolutely agree, I get along well with the children in my life because I respect them as individualized people, including my own children, and my nieces/nephews/etc. They are kids at the end of the day, inexperienced and immature versions of their future self but time and time again I find high expectations of conduct/work ethic/etc to be more successful than coddling. That doesn’t mean no forgiveness (obviously I love my kids even if they don’t clean up their mess!), but it does mean I expect them to clean up after themselves.
Also Japanese two year olds!! https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/apr/07/old-enough-the-japanese-tv-show-that-abandons-toddlers-on-public-transport are going out on minor errands, and ok maybe Western society doesn’t need to be that permissive but certainly we can let young teens go out.
But ok, I think part of this isn’t just safetyism and overcoddling but also car infrastructure and lack of good public transit. One thing I’ve noticed is that you simply *don’t have a choice* here most of the time. I would sometimes have to walk 15-20 minutes home from high school and doing that required crossing a four lane road without a reliable crosswalk. Doable? Yeah, I obviously did it. But I’m not making any child of mine do something similar, it was terrifying and I always tried to get picked up/go with a friend/take the bus before I got my own car. And I have little choice now if they want to go to a friend’s house or a school event or whatever random things, I either drive them, they walk on the extremely loud (basically just auditory waterboarding if you have sensory issues like me) and dangerous roads that sometimes won’t even have sidewalks, or they take the public bus and spend like 2-3 hours getting to a place a 15 minute drive away (and filled with less savory people) that still requires walking the roads because bus stops are few and far between.
Even if I wanted to emulate Old Enough, I can’t. I have no choice in the matter, my main limiting feature here is not culture or law currently, it is city planning design. There are very few places where this isn’t true, and those are almost always very expensive because turns out there’s demand for the safe walkable neighborhoods even if we refuse to allow them.

Bistrofan May 29, 2025, 6:21 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: FiftyTwo’s comment on: Meditations on Doge
That’s part of the PR topic! Musk seems to have done a fine job marketing himself to the right wing aligned people, but “people who are predisposed to support you” are rarely the ones you actually need to convince. The main opinions you see will be of your friends and it feels good for them to cheer you on, but good PR strategy knows you often need to ignore your friends. It’s the fence-sitting moderates and more friendly “enemy side” people who are willing to say “Well that man is ok at least” who while relatively small in number are the kingmakers in a divided topic.
The targeting of more respected spending like foreign aid such as PEPFAR, his obsession with giving ridiculously incorrect savings estimates, constant framing of everything within the culture war, and barely disguised idealogical arguments as you point out is a breeding ground for generating the hostility and pushback from people who might have otherwise been more friendly.

Bistrofan May 26, 2025, 8:18 PM
2 points
1
on: Meditations on Doge
>Not so today. The civil service in western countries clearly struggles to keep up with the ever more complex and dynamic world. (If you want to understand the nitty-gritty details of that struggle read the excellent Pahlka’s book on the topic.) It clearly needs a reform, but nobody knows what kind of reform would work. Unlike in post-Soviet states in 1990’s, there’s no one to copy, no one to get guidance from. We are in experimentation mode.
>So, short of disbanding institutions wholesale without a clear plan, merely hoping they’ll improve when rebuilt, what else can be done?
It’s not just a question of “where would we need reform?” or “what kind of reform would work” but “what kind of goal are we seeking to get out of reform to begin with?” which is where a lot of the contention comes from. Political discussions in general get very heated and we tend to assume that the “other side” reform ideas aren’t working towards the Better Goal but to the Evil Goal. Having a target like the West which was just clearly better in their eyes makes for a somewhat more agreeable point than some generic reform idea.
As for DOGE in this process, a lot of left leaning people do the thing where they think it’s working towards the Evil Goal. Part of that is generic partisanship, but I do think part of that is on Musk constantly wading into culture war shenanigans and overselling his work. I can’t read minds and I can not know their intentions if it’s towards a mutually agreed upon Better Goal, a Better Goal that I don’t agree with but makes sense or an Evil Goal most would agree to be bad like corruption, but it does no favors when he’s on TV making unkeepable promises (like claiming Social Security benefits will increase) or he’s constantly taking sides in heated cultural debates that generates more opposition and thus distrust from the opposition.
You can’t have perfect PR, there will always be people who are angry just to be angry but people who truly believe in a positive reform should understand that your belief isn’t enough. You have to sell it to people, not just the idea of reform itself but trust in you and your implementation, and having a clear explicit and workable goal to move towards helps with that a lot.

Bistrofan Apr 23, 2025, 1:51 AM
25 points
5
on: Accountability Sinks
Fantastic post, an overreliance on process can end up with an inflexible and stiff system. I’d like to add an example I’ve personally encountered in my own life, the “Zero Tolerance Policy” of schools back in the mid 2000s. I was often bullied in middle school and at one point in my life a kid was pulling on my coat while I had something in my hand. It slipped out and hit them, which caused them to beat me to the floor and punch me in the face repeatedly until the teachers stopped them. The school of course responded to their violence with a suspension (as is proper) but also tried to suspend me as well until my dad made it clear that he would not back down on the matter and demanded to see the tapes. The school folded and I was not suspended. If my father had not been such a fierce advocate, I would have been punished for the crime of being a victim. Human systems are not created with a perfect vision of the future being followed by robots, it simply can not predict every exception in every way and even if it could it would be too confusing to follow.
And yet I think this goes too hard on process and procedure in some ways. You acknowledge this with how society would collapse without rules and process, but I think it’s better to look at the problem as one of tradeoffs. The limits on human flexibility are often a negative, but time and time again we flock to them. Why is that? Because without clear rules and procedure, humans can be really stupid, emotional and egotistical.
Rules are accountability sinks in part because they’re the ones that create accountability to begin with. A society that follows its own rules is a society that builds up credibility overtime. As an example there are issues with the American legal system but I would much prefer to have the worst American judge looking over my case than the best North Korean one. The worst American judge is still at least somewhat accountable to the rules, and I can appeal and appeal upwards quite a bit. If I upset a political leader like a mayor, senator or president, it’s difficult for them to corrupt not just the worst American judge but all the judges throughout the appeals process. The best North Korean judge however has no such process. If Kim Jong Un tells him to give me the death penalty, then I die.
This exists because of rules and process. While America has not been literally perfect and will likely never be literally perfect, I can still generally trust in the system. I can generally trust that a prosecutor must bring more evidence to a trial than “I don’t like him and want him to be guilty”, I can generally trust that a judge won’t sentence me just because he doesn’t like my face. And I can generally trust that the rest of government will do the same, that my mayor will not lean over to his police buddies and have me thrown in jail without a shred of proof. And even if that does happen, I can generally trust that when the court says “Let them go”, I will be let out. I can do all of this because America has rules and process and obeys them the large majority of the time.
Ultimately rules are just words on paper, but our collective trust and faith in them creates a stable society where they do generally get enforced. Not perfectly, but better than most other nations both nowadays and in history. Sometimes rules get distorted, sometimes they get abused, sometimes they mandate things that shouldn’t happen but I can at least trust that they will *generally* be followed and violators will *generally* be punished when possible and thus I can feel safe and assured that if tomorrow I insult my mayor, my governor, my senator, my local police chief, or my president that their hand can not easily reach out and slay me with their power. We can and should work on seeking a better balance when possible, but it is precisely this inflexibility that keeps me safe, and that means we trade off that sometimes rules take a little bit too much away. Thhanks to rules, I can also generally expect my bully to be punished for punching me.
And at the very least, I can predict the actions of a rules and process addict even if they are bad rules. Even in a county where you get the death penalty for speaking out against the Dear Leader, as long as they follow process you can at least know the outcome before you speak out. Unlike in many of those old school monarchies where the rules were shifting and vague based off the current feelings of the monarch.