Oolite Bulletins

Diziet Sma wrote:

Alex wrote:

Ye what's with the landcruisers?

That's very simple.. 4WDs, SUVs, whatever you want to call them, the chunkier body and higher ride give drivers an exaggerated, albeit illusionary, sense of safety. They feel safer to drive. And since the primary female motivator is security.. well, it attracts them like flies to sh.. err, honey.

That sounds suspiciously like the "sociobiology" that was a fad in the late 1970s-80s. [Looks around for notebook labelled "Suspected Dawkinsists (to be rounded up when the time comes)".]

I think it's a socio-economic "conspicuous consumption" symptom. Or just plain wankerism. The ones around here have all the off-road accessories - roof-racks, snorkels, roo bars, spotlights - but show no other signs of ever having left the city. My little Freelander has been all over the country without the need for a snorkel, roo bar or spotlights. Okay, I recognise that's just envy talking. Which is the point of conspicuous consumption - to make one's neighbours envious. So I think that explains it without need for sociobiological hocus-pocus.

Wildeblood wrote:

That sounds suspiciously like the "sociobiology" that was a fad in the late 1970s-80s. [Looks around for notebook labelled "Suspected Dawkinsists (to be rounded up when the time comes)".]

<snorts with laughter> "Dawkinsist"? Moi? I think the man's a prat. But whatever.. your theory doesn't explain the special attraction 4WDs have for mothers of school-age children. Mine does. Feel free to come up with something better. (Oh yeah, my theory has more to do with Evolutionary Psychology than 'sociobiology'.)

Wildeblood wrote:

The ones around here have all the off-road accessories - roof-racks, snorkels, roo bars, spotlights - but show no other signs of ever having left the city.

What we Melbournians derisively refer to as a "Toorak tractor", in other words.

Selezen wrote:

Alex wrote:

Ye what's with the landcruisers? What happened to give the little ba.. darlings a bicycle?
To much like common sense?
Kid would get exercise and learn a bit about road rules for future driving.

Quite a lot of schools actually don't allow kids to come to school on bikes. There's a road safety issue for a start, especially for the younger kids.

By the time the kids are old enough to be safe on a bike on the roads, they're usually old enough to walk to school.

Yes, one of my buttons has just been pushed [Rant="SteveKing"]
1 Unfortunately common sense isn't that common
2 With mothers being the primary carer (and more often these days the only carer) and in general, these days, the primary teacher as well, there is no male 'devil may care' attitude instilled in children
3 It's safer to participate in a virtual assault/war/explosion/assassination/dragon slaying event than really fall out of a real tree
4 What Diz said... several times
5 What WB means by 'wankerism'... (deep down on a level I think he and Diz agree with each other )
6 "By the time the kids are old enough... they're smart enough..." to avoid anything that resembles work and they don't get taken to task over it
7 Sadly the gene pool is shallowing (due to a global warm and fuzzying event?) - to the detrement of society - and those 'Idiots that are allowed to vote' (to coin a phrase) don't have the opportunity to remove themselves from it as often

For goodness sakes, push them outside, let them eat dirt and fall out of trees once in a while![/Rant]

Sorry I blacked out for a moment there, what were we talking about, flying cars?

SteveKing wrote:

Sorry I blacked out for a moment there, what were we talking about, flying cars?

Well the topic title says flying cars, but it was actually about electric helicopters so far. OTOH, copy/paste from some other website:

Some links to ostensible flying car ventures. Some are financial scams, some are hoax videos, some are legitimate ventures... What do you think?

Aeromobil

http://www.aeromobil.com
http://www.gizmag.com/aeromobil-flying- ... hes/37473/
http://www.autoblog.com/2015/05/13/aero ... r-crashes/

Terrafugia

http://www.terrafugia.com/

Moller Skycar

http://www.moller.com
https://youtu.be/VHuoPJjuRwk

Wildeblood wrote:

Moller Skycar

http://www.moller.com
https://youtu.be/VHuoPJjuRwk

[/quote]
Ah, the vapourware skycar. It's an awesome development but I think it's sadly doomed.

Tiny helicopters are the way to go.

I like how this has become the "overgeneralisation of bad parenting" topic. In my own experience (i.e. those around me) there is actually a higher percentage of parents who are following the "make them do things for themselves" path. I'm one of them. I refuse to blindly agree to ferry my kids places for no reason - if they can get a bus or walk then that's what they do. I only agree to providing "Dad's Taxi" services for long journeys or if it's dark and probably not all that safe to be wandering the streets. Oh, and if the grandkids are tired and probably won't be able to walk home. But only if I have proof (such as a photo of a sleeping child).

In reality I'm aware that the nanny state has spoiled most people's kids. No longer are they allowed to climb trees. The slightest bit of dirt results in the baby wipe or hand gel coming out. I've seem parents in playgrounds with the full-size bottles of hand gel that you find in hospitals, squirting it on hankies and smothering their kids in it before they go in to the school. It's madness!

My grandkids are being brought up in the traditional way, I'm glad to see - my daughter has no issue with letting them roll around on the dirty ground and there isn't a bottle of antibacterial gel anywhere in her house.

The old values are still around. It's up to us old, dirty buggers to keep them going

Selezen wrote:

In reality I'm aware that the nanny state has spoiled most people's kids.

In my experience it's not the nanny state so much as the vulnerability of schools, local authorities etc. to lawsuits. My primary school backed on to a large stretch of forestry commission woodland (not a plantation, though - just a stretch of woodland) which contained, among other excellent scrambling-about opportunities, a fully fledged disused quarry. Not the flooded kind, just your regular, run-of-the-mill 40-foot cliff and piles of rock kind. That's where we played at break times. Even after one kid fell off when attempting to scale the cliff and broke his arm. "Don't do that," we were told. So we didn't (not without the precaution of a washing line tied firmly-ish to a tree up top, anyway).

Now, though - because of a change in attitude of some parents - the whole area is closed off to the current generation of kids, who have to remain under constant supervision outside the staffroom window. Because if some child fell off the quarry and broke his arm (or neck, which to be honest was just as likely), the school would be sued into a smoking hole in the ground, and the teacher(s), who are in loco parentis, would be sacked, if not arrested.

But it's the fear of being sued by parents demanding compensation for little Timmy's boo-boo (or broken arm, or neck, or severed head) that's at the heart of it. In my 13 years of schooling, I only ever got two days off for bad weather, when the diesel in the school buses froze during one particularly chilly spell. Now, schools in my home area are routinely shut if the ground gets a bit slippy, because kids might fall over and skin their knees and their parents might require £1.5m to cover their emotional trauma and a new pair of trousers.

Lawsuits? Yes, they are a problem! Some of the injuries I took playing rugby at school would be worth a mint these days!

Disembodied wrote:

Now, though - because of a change in attitude of some parents - the whole area is closed off to the current generation of kids, who have to remain under constant supervision outside the staffroom window. Because if some child fell off the quarry and broke his arm (or neck, which to be honest was just as likely), the school would be sued into a smoking hole in the ground, and the teacher(s), who are in loco parentis, would be sacked, if not arrested.

Yes, sadly this. The attitudes of the parent have changed, but I wonder if it's because there is an imbalance in parenting so that it has become more maternalistic, the idea of the 'Power Mum'. Or because of modern pressures on the family forcing the educators to be, as Dismb puts it 'in loco parentis' because parents are less able to be.

I hope the circle turns quickly in this area.

SteveKing wrote:

Or because of modern pressures on the family forcing the educators to be, as Dismb puts it 'in loco parentis' because parents are less able to be.

Usage note: in loco parentis (always italicized because it's foreign devil speak) is a legal term. Schoolteachers & babysitters have always been in loco parentis (acting in place of the parent), because children are given into their custody for specific periods and purposes.

The duties of a person in loco parentis are greater than the general duty of care owed by all adults to all children, because other people's children are not in our custody. E.g. a mother delivering her children to school has a general duty of care not to reverse the Landcruiser over someone's else's children as she leaves (a foreseeable risk). A schoolteacher, who is in loco parentis from the moment the parent leaves, has a parent's duty to ensure the children in his custody do not recklessly run onto roads. But a driver passing a school does not have a duty of care to slow to a crawl just in case a child runs onto the road (unlike the case when passing horses); they are entitled to assume that children in the vicinity are being supervised by either parents or teachers.

And then we have the stupidity of school zone speed limits; because clouting a small child with a landcruiser at 50km/h will kill them, but at 40km/h probably won't do too much harm. School zones represent the triumph of tokenism over good policy, IMHO. Either lower the speed limit to the horse-passing 8km/h or abolish school zones.

Wildeblood wrote:

because clouting a small child with a landcruiser at 50km/h will kill them, but at 40km/h probably won't do too much harm

I thought the school speed zones were less about the damage a car can do at 40kms, and more about the additional reaction time the driver has when going at a slower speed.

phkb wrote:

Wildeblood wrote:

because clouting a small child with a landcruiser at 50km/h will kill them, but at 40km/h probably won't do too much harm

I thought the school speed zones were less about the damage a car can do at 40kms, and more about the additional reaction time the driver has when going at a slower speed.

We're discussin' how feeble and wussified modern society has become. #WhyBotherMeWithReasonableExplanations

For a totally randomized view of road safety regulations Australians can review Senator Leyonhjelm's appearance on Lateline last night, and see the intellectual carnage left as libertarianism collides with reality. Learn how seat belts are a violation of your "freedom of choice", and remember those idiots are allowed to vote.

Edit: apparently Leyonhjelm has a silent J.

Wildeblood wrote:

We're discussin' how feeble and wussified modern society has become.

There's also the issue of advertising. Most of the marketing industry revolves around making people feel nervous and/or inadequate, and then selling them the solution to the problem they didn't know they had until they watched the advert. The modern origin of this was probably deodorant:

deleted scene from Mad Men wrote:

"Psst! You smell!"
"This is the 1950s: we all smell."
"Yeah, but you smell really bad. Other people are talking about it behind your back."
"Really? Oh no, how embarrassing! What can I do?"
"Buy this stuff and spray it all over yourself every day - then people will stop reeling backwards and gagging when you approach."

I'm not saying all this was necessarily a bad thing, you understand. But once the real (or at least aesthetic) issues have been marketed and monetised, things start getting silly. I keep seeing adverts encouraging parents (mothers, specifically - in a male-dominated society it's easier to make women worry) to chemically sterilise their entire home on at least a daily basis. The pinnacle of this kind of stupidity has to be the hands-free soap pump for the home - because no-one should risk getting a germ on their hands immediately before they wash them.

The media also gets in on this game. Fear sells - and so does hope, especially once you've generated the fear. Hence things like the Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project, dividing the natural world into things which either cause or cure cancer (sometimes both).

We're drenched in this stuff, all the time, in ways in which previous generations weren't. We are constantly being fed information about all the things we should do (for which read: spend money doing) that we're doing wrong, or not enough, or not doing at all. A hundred years ago there were a handful of snakeoil merchants in wagons, and enough tar and feathers to go around if they lingered too long in one place. Now we are surrounded at all times by animated screens pumping anxieties at us 24/7: in many respects, the bulk of the Western economy is based on consumers trying to fulfil needs they didn't know they had until five minutes ago. In these circumstances, it's hardly surprising that people are behaving in irrationally hyperdefensive ways - especially those with children, who are a) designed by evolution to be protective of their children anyway, and b) sleep-deprived.

Disembodied wrote:

In these circumstances, it's hardly surprising that people are behaving in irrationally hyperdefensive ways - especially those with children, who are a) designed by evolution to be protective of their children anyway, and b) sleep-deprived.

The general and substantial decline in infant mortality (first year of life) has probably had a major effect, since that's dropped from "about 10%" to "about 0.5%" in the last century, and child mortality (1-14 years) has dropped to "virtually none" (UK statistics, but similar in other high-tech nations) from "about a third" [1] over the last couple of centuries.

[1] And that's aggregated - in the poorest areas it could be well over half.

There is now a sufficiently strong expectation that a child will survive childhood that eliminating much lower likelihood risks makes sense (whereas if they're probably going to get cholera or TB or something anyway why bother spending money fencing off the abandoned quarry as it probably won't be that which kills them) - and also means that such a death is a major event (there's an ONS note that says it's basically impossible to usefully track this at a district level any more because one death more or fewer has such a major effect on the statistics) rather than "something which happens" and therefore there'll be someone (probably the mother) to try to blame for it.

When the overall advances in medicine, nutrition and public health have had such a substantial effect, it's certainly not reasonable to expect non-specialists to evaluate each new claim. That goes both ways of course - for every person disinfecting their house twice daily there's someone saying "we stabbed ourselves with rusty nails regularly when I were a lad and it never did us any harm", being egged on by a bunch of journalists complaining about "health and safety gone mad" who work in an office where the worst risk they personally face is spilling their coffee on themselves.

Ur all dum. Fluoridated water is the problem. Hardens the tooth enamel; softens the brain.

cim wrote:

When the overall advances in medicine, nutrition and public health have had such a substantial effect, it's certainly not reasonable to expect non-specialists to evaluate each new claim. That goes both ways of course - for every person disinfecting their house twice daily there's someone saying "we stabbed ourselves with rusty nails regularly when I were a lad and it never did us any harm", being egged on by a bunch of journalists complaining about "health and safety gone mad" who work in an office where the worst risk they personally face is spilling their coffee on themselves.

Indeed - and reaching the stage where people refuse to vaccinate their children because of the risks they think exists, because they can't perceive the risks (to their children and society in general) of not vaccinating them. I've never seen a child blinded by measles, but I have seen huge shrieking headlines written by journalists whose grasp of science is roughly equivalent to their capacity for shame.

We can manage - just about - to make the food industry print nutritional information on their products. Would it not be possible to have a media outlet's content assessed for accuracy, over the course of a year, say, and award it an average bullshit rating?