7 ms·
You Can Run
- dyauspitr 5mo agoAh to live in the 70s and 80s where nothing was verifiable. I probably would still have been a model employee but the possibilities were endless.
- thomassmith65 5mo agoThe 90s weren't so different, nor earlier decades, centuries. In fact, the positioning here irritates me: The McCanns vanished, as did Sally and Steve. It wasn’t that hard; they were living in the golden age of fugitives. It makes it sound as though the anomaly were not the past two decades, but all of recorded history which preceded them.
- decimalenough 5mo agoNo, it really was a golden age. Before the 747 kicked off the age of cheap air travel in the 1970s, it was impractical to hop around the world like the family here did. Even domestic travel in the US was slow, difficult and expensive until the train and automobiles came along. And if you wind the clock even further back, you could hardly go further than a few villages away on foot or horseback before people would get very suspicious about an outsider venturing to their domain.
- tobyhinloopen 5mo agoI expected a “running for beginners” app hah, like for training / endurance
- delichon 5mo agoThe son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself. -- Ezekiel 18:20 That was aspirational around 590 BC when written, and still is. To isolate children from the iniquity of the parent would require the dissolution of the family.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- boothby 5mo agoMy favorite (dys|u)topian setting; universal child removal to robo-nurseries, gets closer to implementable every day.
- Etheryte 5mo agoThey more or less did that during the bombing of London, children were evacuated to foster families in the countryside en masse. Luckily they came to terms with the fact that this was an insanely traumatic experience pretty quickly and reverted. It's literally less traumatic for a child to be in an active war zone than to be separated from their parents.
- kortilla 5mo agoDoes this apply to babies separated at birth though?
- moralestapia 5mo agoThe trauma shifts forward in time, like debt.
- CamouflagedKiwi 5mo agoUnless the child is killed in said active war zone, which was the maximally traumatic outcome they were trying to avoid. Some evacuation was reverted, but there were also later waves; I don't think it was clear that it was overall the wrong thing given the very possible outcomes of heavier bombing or even invasion.
- nandomrumber 5mo agoWell obviously dead child suffer no trauma.
- bee_rider 5mo agoWow, that was quite a lot of cryptic build-up. It’s basically a story about conman/drug guy interwoven with biographical information and anecdotes about how this impacted his family. “You can run,” I guess maybe in the context of “You can run but you can’t hide” is not really touched upon too much. I mean it doesn’t have a particular connection to this story, any more than any other story about a fugitive.
- kayo_20211030 5mo agoYup. A big yawn. It seems like it ought to deep and insightful, but is, as you say, "basically a story about conman/drug guy interwoven with biographical information and anecdotes about how this impacted his family". There's no connection between the two parts that goes deeper that "they knew each other once, but did they really know each other?". It'd be Hallmark, but the parents aren't sympathetic enough.
- muglug 5mo agoYeah — but includes a fun cameo from a famous 90s TV dad.
- linohh 5mo agoWhen I read your comment, I instantly knew which one.
- jmye 5mo agoHave you ever like, read books? Why on earth would you think the title of a piece needs to call to anything but a general emotion from the story? > Wow, that was quite a lot of cryptic build-up. Yes, they were building suspense and telling an interesting story. It's a long form article, not a 30-word tweet. Jesus.
- JRandomHacker42 5mo agoI've seen this attitude on HN all the time - the concept of "a narrative hook" is apparently a foreign concept here
- davidw 5mo agoOn the subject of crime and that web site, I thought this story was quite fascinating: https://magazine.atavist.com/2019/outlaw-country-klamath-county-oregon-guns-murder https://magazine.atavist.com/2019/outlaw-country-klamath-cou... There are a lot of those bits of land throughout the west that have been, for whatever reason, subdivided enough to make them very cheap plots of land in remote areas. They tend to attract a lot of very random people. There's an area like that near where I live in Bend, Oregon where some guy called in to the Sheriff's department worried about his brother. The deputies decided to visit the next day because it was winter and already dark. Reading that, I had a record scratch moment where I was going "wait, the sheriff's deputy wouldn't visit the area after dark - holy crap".
- RickJWagner 5mo agoCar racing and drug running must have been closely linked in the 80s. For another great read about them, check out Randy Lanier’s story. ( He had racing boats, too. ) Maybe Miami Vice was closer to truth than we knew.
- wwarner 5mo agoHonestly i come to hn to escape true crime.
- twobitshifter 5mo agoI read it all. There are no shockers in the boxes. It's all explained ahead of time and by the time the contents of the boxes are revealed, you'll wish you didn't read all of that.
- fisian 5mo agoI interpreted it another way: the boxes are what connects the past to this written story. Without the boxes most details would be forgotten and this article wouldn't exist. The documents in the boxes were only thoroughly read by one daughter starting in 2024.
- ahwvd37js 5mo agoIn the long tradition of commenting on HN without reading the source, I was about to write up everything I've learned about running over the years...shoes, routes, stretches, rest days, IT band therapy, ...
- declan_roberts 5mo agoTheir dad smuggled cocaine. That was the secret that took about 4,000 words to reach. Entertaining article, but boy what a trudge.
- kraussvonespy 5mo agoSometimes the journey is the reward.
- MarsIronPI 5mo agoMeh, I felt that the article was over-dramatic and verbose at times.
- dyauspitr 5mo ago> John was strict and controlling. He wanted his daughters to dress in identical clothing embroidered with their initials, and told them to wear their hair long, that it looked more ladylike than a popular bob cut. He wrote down chores for everyone in the family on sheets of yellow legal paper. Erin and Meredith got lists of books to read and words to memorize. The house had about a dozen phones, and John instructed Erin to answer formally: “McCann residence, Erin speaking. How may I help you?” John told his daughters that there was only one right way to install a new roll of toilet paper—feeding forward from the top, not hanging down in back—and insisted that they get straight A’s while lying about his academic achievements. So completely normal things painted as some insidious nonsense.
- djeastm 5mo agoI wouldn't call that completely normal. It's certainly strict and controlling.
- bflesch 5mo agoIs this a story from the Epstein universe? Because the town of York during that time had some interesting characters like Donald and Kashoggi. Also "Lago Mar" in Florida sounds familiar. Edit: At the end the main protagonist even mentions having Iran Contra evidence and speaks to the commission, but two senators present evidence that devalues his testimony. Interesting.
- photochemsyn 5mo agoThe moral of the story is that they should have followed in the footsteps of the Sackler Family and Purdue Pharma, who found a legal way to push opiates on people using shopping mall pain clinics and shady doctors as the sales and marketing team. Just as sociopathic, but they got to keep their billions, serve no prison time, all while doing far more social harm than a pair of low-life cocaine importers could have dreamed of.
- user_of_the_wek 5mo agoReminds me of Brecht > Was ist ein Einbruch in eine Bank gegen die Gründung einer Bank?
- woogiegie 5mo agoI actually enjoyed this one the build up worked for me, even if the two threads don't fully tie together.