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According to this link https://www.kidsandcars.org/document_center/download/hot-cars/Child-Hot-Car-Deaths-Data-Analysis.pdf https://www.kidsandcars.org/documen

According to this link https://www.kidsandcars.org/document_center/download/hot-cars/Child-Hot-Car-Deaths-Data-Analysis.pdf https://www.kidsandcars.org/document_center/download/hot-car... (and I’m guessing any bias would be to overcount given the goals of the organization), 1125 kids have died in this way since 1990. That sounds like a lot, but compared to the hundreds of millions of people in the US, it’s vanishingly small. Regulating this way leads to a straitjacket society where we are not allowed to take any risks whatsoever, no matter how minuscule. We’re not banning kids from being around kitchens, stairs or bicycles, which all present greater danger. Meanwhile, we are creating an environment where kids can only venture outside the home in highly regulated and supervised situations and wondering why things like social anxiety are rising off the charts. If we wanted cars to be capable of letting kids out, car manufacturers would have to do it, much like they have to avoid creating all the other dangerous situations a car can create. The question is “should parents be given discretion to parent their kids”, saying no because car windows don’t roll down isn’t really engaging with that.

mschuster91 1y ago
It's always the same in the end - the thing with a low-trust society vs a high-trust society. When an ever increasing part of the population is cognitively impaired, (massively) under-educated themselves and/or doesn't have the time and money to properly take care of their children, a lot of implicit and explicit assumptions just go straight out of the window. The fact that car dependency and car centrism makes a whole lot of other assumptions (like, that you can let your child outside unattended because nothing will happen to them) go away as well doesn't help either. And lawmakers and executive agencies like CPS? They only see that "numbers go up" or get blasted for high-profile cases where the shit really hit the fan, but as addressing the root causes goes far out of their scope (both legal and financial), each uses the tools at their disposal to try and keep up.
- clickety_clack 1y ago
  I don’t know if it’s quite a trust issue. Maybe it’s more a low- v high- responsibility society. It seems more like people want responsibility removed from people and given to the government. In my experience people become more competent when they have responsibility, so the removal of responsibility seems (to me at least) like it will train people into incompetence.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    Well, European countries have (more or less) strong governments and strict regulations, but as a result of these, our children mostly can walk to their schools, and they certainly don't have to fear school shootings.

mschuster91 1y ago

It's always the same in the end - the thing with a low-trust society vs a high-trust society. When an ever increasing part of the population is cognitively impaired, (massively) under-educated themselves and/or doesn't have the time and money to properly take care of their children, a lot of implicit and explicit assumptions just go straight out of the window. The fact that car dependency and car centrism makes a whole lot of other assumptions (like, that you can let your child outside unattended because nothing will happen to them) go away as well doesn't help either. And lawmakers and executive agencies like CPS? They only see that "numbers go up" or get blasted for high-profile cases where the shit really hit the fan, but as addressing the root causes goes far out of their scope (both legal and financial), each uses the tools at their disposal to try and keep up.

clickety_clack 1y ago
I don’t know if it’s quite a trust issue. Maybe it’s more a low- v high- responsibility society. It seems more like people want responsibility removed from people and given to the government. In my experience people become more competent when they have responsibility, so the removal of responsibility seems (to me at least) like it will train people into incompetence.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  Well, European countries have (more or less) strong governments and strict regulations, but as a result of these, our children mostly can walk to their schools, and they certainly don't have to fear school shootings.