It sounds utopian…

I’m curious how old you were when Covid hit? I noticed a similar change somewhere in my early to mid 20s.

Seconding both of those - getting older and having kids both have independently made me more responsive to emotional scenes.

And Bluey and all the Pixar films are good!

Probably due to how I grew up, I don’t often feel like it’s… right? Reasonable? for me to cry for personal things. But I can cry for others, for whatever reason. Showed my kids Pixar’s Up for the first time the other day, and we got to the scene near the end where Carl finds some of the messages his wife left him. My kids are still fairly young, and were trying to figure out what was going on in that scene. They also didn’t understand at first why my voice sounded so weird…

I feel like there’s a term for it, but I can’t recall it now - it seems like after you have kids, emotional impacts in media can also start to hit a lot harder. I’m not sure if there’s some empathetic response that tends to get strengthened or what, but my wife and I both have things we either can’t watch anymore or don’t process the same way. Like, I decided to start rewatching Star Trek: DS9 a few years ago (a year or two into fatherhood) and got wrecked by the scenes in the first episode where the captain relives losing his wife.

It’s not that we don’t want robots doing it - honestly that’d be pretty cool. It’s that we want to be sure the people that are being replaced are being taken care of.

There will always be some jobs. That’s no guarantee that there will be enough jobs for everyone to live modest lives on.

Why is that the comparison, though? Sears developed mail-order catalogues in the 1800s. That’s what Amazon replaced.

…okay, I really want to know the story behind that picture!

That can easily lead to “othering” those kids as well. Also, many parents who can still give their kids food from home might still struggle to do that at times.

Schools are already monitoring a whole mess of kids at once. Why not just take care of feeding them too? That ensures that, regardless of what happens at home, they have at least one good meal each day.

Im sure you’re right, but… Couldn’t we just take, like, one knob from one of our billion dollar fighter jets, and pay for mental and social services that way?

Not even from every fighter of that type, just pick the one plane that’s always down for maintenance anyway and, like, lock the AC to one temperature or something. Surely that tiny bit of a multi billion dollar airframe could cover some worthwhile social services?

Nah, highways tend have lots of visibility around them, you can see a person a long ways off. Though, if you do see a kid on the side (and don’t intend to stop), you should absolutely be slowing down and giving them a wide berth!

Nice, how’d you come by that? Posted article didn’t have anything but the town name.

The only way I can see the driver not being at fault is if he 1) could not see the kids near the road, and 2) had no reason to expect people might be in blind spots near the road.

Given that there were houses less than 2 blocks from the site of the incident, 2 seems unlikely - this sounds like either a suburban or urban neighborhood (multiple crosswalks within 2 blocks for a 4 lane road). No mention was made of any obstructions, which is not evidence in itself; but it’s the rare four lane road that hasn’t had obstructions cleared from the sides of the road (partly for this reason!), particularly in a non-rural area. At a glance, Gastonia seems to generally keep their roads clear.

I can certainly be convinced otherwise with more evidence, but the burden of vehicle safety absolutely lies on the driver. If you can’t respond fast enough to a seven year old running out in front of you from a place you can’t see; you are, by definition, driving too fast - regardless of the posted speed limit. And if you can see them, and aren’t driving in such a way as to be able to keep them safe should they run in front of you, you’re driving recklessly.

Why didn’t we ever reopen them?

I mean, I know why we don’t now, but we had a few decades since Reagan of occasionally reasonable administrations…

Reading through the article, it seems like one scenario is that a vehicle stopped at an intersection might be about to pull out, endangering another vehicle about to cross? It seems like the thinking is, if you notice a front/side brake light stops being lit as you approach the intersection, it might indicate they’re about to accelerate - be cautious!

I’m not fully convinced either, it seems like a lot of the benefit they’re projecting is based on analysis of historical collisions, rather than any kind of experimental results. It sounds like the study is to justify expanding research to that sort of simulated experimentation, though - I’m curious what that kind of testing would find.

The implied issue with that phrase is you risk your own glass house being pelted, correct? The glass house, in this case, being atrocities each government is implicated in?

I’m fine with all the atrocities being called out. Otherwise, how do we learn not to do them anymore?

Fair point, it was indeed between crosswalks. But from the sound of it, the kids had been waiting to cross, and the younger kid jumped out on his own.

The older kid saw the danger, meaning the car should have been able to see at least one kid too. I maintain that if you can’t react safely to kids you can see jumping unexpectedly off the curb as you drive by, you have no business driving.

He’s cooperating with the cops apparently, but it sounds like it was a bystander who was checking on the other kid until their parents could get there.

They left their mom at home, and were walking two blocks up the street to meet up with their dad, who was grocery shopping. The dad was on the phone with the older kid at the time, keeping tabs on them while letting them gain confidence going on their own.

As a parent who struggles not to helicopter my kids, none of this sounds out of line to me. The driver who apparently couldn’t react to a kid stepping out unexpectedly, in what sounds like a residential area? I want to know why he’s got a license.