huey_m

Trams are some of the most well-liked transit here in Hungary, this is a bit wild to me.

Most of this sounds like local design issue. Trams here are often on separated tracks and so zip through traffic, and are reliable.

Metros are good, but they’re for serving longer distance. Trams are easy to hop on and off. Trams cover short to medium trips, metro for trips that take you across the city or nearly, trains for anything longer than that, and buses when nothing else is available.

Isn’t it being overcrowded a sign it’s popular?

Few things are worse than Weird Al songs stuck in your head.

Just ask Don McLean. Getting an artist to forget their own lyrics on stage in favor of your parody has to be some kind of lifetime achievement for a parody artist.

Honey, I’m a veteran of the early internet, my first computer was a fucking Tandy. That’s why, after I matured a little, I decided seeing this kind of shit wasn’t some test of fortitude I was winning and likely it just wasn’t doing my mental health any favors.

Sounds like it didn’t do you any either.

If you don’t think raping an animal likely to death is horrifying, you should really consider what the internet has done to your brain, dude.

I know we’re making light of this in the comments, dark humor I get it, no judgment on that note… but this is actually fucking horrifying. That link is hella staying blue.

Let’s hope that the current generation will learn from our mistakes!

I read this less as “let those that follow learn from our mistakes” and more “let’s hope enough of us contemporaries stand against it and stave off evil”… which, it’s easy to get depressed about considering he was elected and certainly some segment of society fully supports him. But we’ve also seen some pretty intense grassroots efforts to counter these policies… Minnesota was downright inspiring in their response.

A lot of people who voted for Trump didn’t do so out of explicitly supporting racist, fascistic garbage, but rather a severely misguideded attempt at voting for literally anything that isn’t just the same socially liberal vs socially conservative neoliberal politics that has been the only choice since the 90’s and Clinton’s move to a “Third Way” following Reagan’s neoliberalising the GOP. Those people aren’t lost causes, they have a legitimate grievance and just made an awful conclusion based on it. And it is starting to look like a lot of them are realizing it.

We’re still balls deep in this shit, and it isn’t really clear how things will turn out yet. There is still very much a chance we will look back on this as a close call that we fought off with our own (belated, but there) good decisions that stopped a problem we started before it got unsalvageable. We don’t need to wait to see how the next generation will fix it, we’re still actively fighting this fight.

On the first point, it’s a bit different if someone is saying it about themselves/their people.

Sure. In the context I experienced it, it didn’t seem like use of the n-word among black folks or something similar, but it’s a) possible I missed that it was and b) obviously, not everyone feels the same in the first place, so just because they liked it doesn’t mean everyone is cool with it. Could also be that at the time I heard it used this hadn’t been picked up by the bigots yet and they since have ruined it, which wouldn’t surprise me, unfortunately…

Either way, noted for future reference, thanks.

On the second, hmm bit trickier. I could see arguments for/against.

My thinking was that while “transgenders” is similar to “blacks” in that it takes a noun and sort of subtly objectifies people, to transition is a verb and so is more akin to saying “swimmers” or “runners”. But I can see how some may see this as reductive. “Trans femme” sounds like it does what I was looking for, though, so may as well use that.

If that’s less openly offensive I’ll keep that as I think this has led to an interesting conversation about language others may be able to learn from as well.

Though again, fair enough on all points and genuinely noted!

Please rethink keeping it, transformers is sadly often used as a slur against us.

Huh. I’ve only ever heard it used by my trans friends positively. That said, I’ll remove it if you find it offensive, wasn’t my intention.

male to female transgenders

That is not what I intended to say, I intended to say “transitioners”. This would be how you refer to people who have transitioned in one word, right?

I used “man” and “woman” since this is also inclusive of people who are only socially gender transitioning. Is this not correct?

I’ve heard some analysis of anti trans types that indicated they’re much more upset about men to women transitioners than the reverse because it’s an open rejection of the more “powerful” role and how dare you reject your privilege like that.

Can’t speak to the veracity of that but it makes sense to me.

Hey Bezos, it’s a-me!

And you have to just acknowledge that separation of church and state doesn’t exist and never truly has.

… are we arguing should not, was never supposed to, or should/was supposed to but never actually has? Only one of these can I kind of agree with, sort of.

Big box grocery is a big part of the problem

That is very true and it’s wild how fast it changed. I remember still having small grocery stores in the 90’s, but they’ve all closed down now. A few still exist as discount stores, but they aren’t true full service grocery stores, mostly frozen stuff and junk food. It definitely exacerbated the “food desert” problem a lot of the US has… a lot of folks with limited mobility only have access to these shitty faux-grocery stores, it’s kind of no wonder so many people eat like shit.

I’m not in the US anymore but that big box transformation was well and truly completed by the time I left.

But yeah, traffic plays a role.

That is definitely a fair point. Big difference letting a kindergartner walk to school on a sleepy side street versus a fast arterial.

I guess just chalk it up to different experiences then. In fairness, I could see what you’re talking about being in play today… I just know in our area, the helicoptering far, far predated the ubiquitous tracking. I recall it being well in place before the iPhone even came out…

Might be a bit of a raw nerve for me at the moment as well since I’m literally in the midst of defending letting my 8 year old walk to school against overzealous teachers who apparently don’t let their 4th grader anywhere unsupervised, so mea culpa if I came on a bit strong.

Dude (ma’am?)

I’m from California originally, that’s an agendered term to me! lol (that said, I am dude in the way you’re thinking)

I had kids in the 90s and 2000s and was never a helicopter parent

Fair enough… I still think it was pretty widespread at this point, but I do get the sense California was “ahead” of the curve on that, so it may have entrenched earlier for us and so may be more exaggerated to me. I also think the helicopter parenting well predated everyone being tracked, which is really what my point was. Again though, fair enough.

I don’t think it hurts little kids as much as long as you have a plan to build their independence before high school, which these parents did not.

Agreed, the HS thing is kind of wild. Can’t really imagine that. I was surprised that our kiddo’s teacher was so agitated when we suggested the walk to school, I had kind of hoped in this part of Europe it would be more accepted… and even moreso surprised that she doesn’t let her 4th grader anywhere without supervision. We’re in a mid sized European capital, it’s eminently walkable and kids can even ride trams and buses for free. Go figure.

Helicopter parents existed before this, yes, but they were viewed as an overbearing subset of parents.

I don’t agree with this premise at all. That was true in the 80’s when the movement first started, but by the late 90’s it was pretty widespread, at least in my area on the west coast of the US. Maybe this isn’t true in very rural US or other countries, but I’m pretty confident it was already becoming the norm in most of America by the time of the new millennium. I didn’t know a single elementary age kid growing up who would have been allowed to walk or ride a bike to school already by that point.

but eventually enough people used them that nobody batted an eye, and not using them was viewed as unsafe.

Again, I think you have this backwards: letting your kids go out unsupervised was already well accepted as being “bad parenting” well before air tags rolled around. The air tags are the excuse parents have for why they aren’t “bad parents” by letting their kids go out. They’re actually empowering more independence among kids and parents versus a society dead-set against allowing them that independence, as we see from the article.

I really think your timeline on this is all wrong and so it’s leading you to a backwards conclusion.

I don’t know if you’re a parent, but it’s pretty hard to convey just how judgmental society is towards every aspect of your parenting and how that can actually lead to real, tangibly harmful situations, nevermind mental health consequences. At best, the peer pressure is real, the depression and anxiety around being accused of being a bad parent is real, and at worst you have to be concerned over literally being arrested or having your kid taken from you. These are what pushes parents to use these devices; the ones that don’t trust their kids already have a well-accepted social framework of just not letting them go out unsupervised at all, which is the expectation at this point.

I agree. I grew up in a place with very, very hot summers and open irrigation canals for farming; we had multiple kids die every year, many who knew how to swim but weren’t strong swimmers. Even pool deaths happened every year, and those are fenced in by law. We had PSAs every year for both, it was a big issue.

Most kids don’t have access to open bodies of water, so most kids don’t drown. That doesn’t translate to a valid risk assessment of drowning for kids that do have access and opportunity for it.

Some searching suggests the drowning death rate for children globally under 5 is 7 per 100,000 per year, lower in the US. Yes, it’s the second leading cause of death of kids, but it’s not a high risk. A child has just a 0.035% chance of dying by drowning before their 5th birthday.

Careful here, this is where statistics can very much lead you astray and you can end up like the statistician who drowned in a lake with an average depth of one meter.

I find it pretty likely the vast majority of kids don’t have access to open bodies of water that aren’t fenced in, especially in the US where laws tend to require fencing them in. You’d need to break this down to number of kids who actually have opportunity to drown in an open body of water. You can’t count kids living in a desert with no pool towards the risk factor of drowning.

Drowning is a real risk for any non swimmers, and kids are less likely to make accurate risk assessments, and this isn’t the kind of risk you learn from by fucking around and finding out, you’re typically dead. I lived in a place that got very hot in summer with open irrigation canals and we had multiple kids die every year from it. Even adults, but mostly kids.

This is actually a fair point, I think… if the kid has had swimming lessons, it should be fine, but if he hasn’t that’s indeed reckless to let him play alone next to an open body of water, I’d argue.

I don’t think this is an acceptable level of risk.

I think it pretty much purely depends on whether he knows how to swim and is a reasonably strong swimmer, but that is possible by 5. Mine was only a year older when he had completed swimming lessons and I was confident enough to leave him unsupervised in my in-laws backyard with a pond.

Prior to that, to your point, I did have to yank him out once and he absolutely could’ve drowned had I not been there.

If he hasn’t had swimming lessons and lots of practice, I agree.

I wish this was just the US. Having to fight the teachers here in Hungary so my 8 year old can walk down the pedestrian mall we live on and cross one slow road with a crosswalk to walk to school by himself. They’re dead set against it.

Why let them go out without knowing where they are if it’s so convenient to just put a tracker on them and know where they are at all times? As soon as we didn’t have to trust our kids anymore, we stopped

This causation is exactly backwards; this was a trend happening long, long before trackers were common. Helicopter parenting really started taking hold in the 90s and was pretty firmly entrenched by the 00s, well before every kid was walking around with a phone.

The trackers are actually a response by parents who are trying to buck this trend and want to be able to go back to giving their kids more independence but need to prove to other parents, teachers, police, the state, etc, that they aren’t being irresponsible by doing so.