In the simple form you compute a solution. You then compute a different solution. Compare the two and keep the better one. Rinse and repeat until you eventually arrive at the "bestish" solution.
I think this falls under... "If you don't want the whole world including your mom and your pastor to see it, don't take pics and put it on the internet".
Sometimes you really do need to think things through before you act cause sometimes "oops" just doesn't cut it.
So who decides when it crosses the line to "something stupid" and "they should have known"? You?
You clearly should have been watching your kid! You should have locked the door! You should have gotten child proof door handle things so the entire family can burn in the event of a fire! What if he had been kidnapped or hit by a car?
We can blame the parents all day long. We can go and remove the child from the home and declare the parents unfit. Or... we can accept that we weren't there. We don't know what the parents knew. We don't know what the parents thought. Maybe thought it only exploded in strange circumstances. You don't know. Just because YOU know better doesn't mean anyone told them.
In all honesty, we recall things so often in the country for stupid reasons that people tend to ignore them. My kid's high chair was recalled because apparently people weren't putting it together right. I looked at the high chair and decided the risk wasn't worth sending it back. Should I loose my kids if it falls apart? OR do I have the right to do my own risk management and use my own judgement?
She apparently tried. In her documentary it talks about how she tried to get people to stop distributing the photo. From her point of view as a young woman that was a pretty terrible picture to have going around. But the media simply ignored her because it was 'important'. It wasn't until she was much older that she was able to recognize and accept the historic significance of the photo.
It's also part of my job to help my children recognize when relationships are healthy or unhealthy. Like I said, an employer that cares about something as trivial as your baby photos is not someone you want to work for. Why on earth would you judge an adult based on a photo of them as an infant or small child? Are you seriously going to not hire someone based on a photo from 20 years ago?
If my child told me her friends would only be her friends if she cut her hair short and wore brown shirts, I would tell her to get better friends and I hope you would too. Or would you run out and buy her an entirely new wardrobe so she could 'fit in'? Do you buy your daughter a real American Girl Doll because all her friends have one and they won't be her friend if she doesn't have one? That actually happened to my niece. Or do you tell her that real friends don't care about that?
If your employer doesn't hire you because of a naked spaghetti covered baby photo from 20 years ago, you probably need a better employer. Those kinds of photos are not things that reasonable people should be embarrassed about.
Weren't we all talking about that poor girl who got napalmed having her photo plastered all over the net the other day? And the world pretty much told her to suck it too. We didn't even need the internet to spread her picture around.
I tell my kids tough shit, suck it all the time. It's called being a parent and caving into random whims about stupid stuff. I mean... what kind of parent says no to a kid who wants ice cream for dinner! They want it so they must have it!
Seriously... everyone has baby photos. We take photos of babies and post them on the internet. Before the internet we put them in books and then drug the books out whenever our kids brought home a significant other. Get over it. You were once a baby naked and covered in mud/spaghetti sauce and your parents took a picture. It probably even got taken in to work and is hanging up in a cube/office. That time you crapped your pants? Mom and Dad remember and will bring it up. Again. And Again. You'll probably do the same thing to your kids. Suck it up. Life is tough and not everyone likes you. It's my job to make sure you have the tools to make it, not be your friend.
I suppose it is possible that these 'embarrassing' childhood photos are not the typical spaghetti covered baby photos. But if that is the case, the parents probably belong in jail for other reasons.
Actually... I think I understand you perfectly. You want to charge parents with negligence when anything bad happens to their children that YOU are quite certain you would have never let happen because it makes you feel superior to judge people. YOU would never turn around in the grocery store to find your kid was not following you like he was supposed to. YOUR kid would never wake up in the middle of the night, open the front door and walk outside. YOUR kid would never set the house on fire making toast.
You are probably also the type of person that would sue Walmart because their parking lot was dark at 2AM and you tripped because they should have had better lighting.
How about instead we accept that sometimes shit happens? Sometimes we trip. Sometimes the toy/phone/laptop we are using randomly bursts into flames. We don't need to send someone to jail or take away their children every time something bad happens. We don't need to assign blame for every little thing. Accept that shit happens and life is dangerous. Life is full of risks that we take everyday.
Instead there are children suffering from REAL abuse and neglect that we are ignoring because we are too busy trying to decide if letting your kid hold a phone constitutes neglect. This kid has loving parents that can give him things like a state of the art brand spanking new phone. There are kids whose parents leave them alone while they go off and get high or drunk. There are kids who do not have food. Worry about those kids, not this one.
If the toy you are snuggling with bursts into flames, how much do you really care if there was an official recall or not? You are now on fire.
There are actually lots of ways to set yourself on fire, many of them surprising. Flour is highly explosive and grainery fires are pretty nasty. Should we ban flour or charge bakers with negligence for baking while their children are in the house? What about people that deep fry turkeys? Or laptops that overheat and set beds on fire? You must be negligent if you let your kids use a laptop in their room!
Fisher-Price Glow Seahorses also catch fire. And were not recalled. My kid actually has one in her crib. According to the baby books and baby stuff manufacturers everything will kill your kid. When we bought our crib the vendor had just come out with a new model with special "green" stains and finishes that would reduce the risk of SIDS. We habitually recall things where 1 in a million uses under some strange circumstances resulted in some guy hurting himself. Instead of writing it off as 'some guy did something dumb' or 'shit happens' we have to 'do something'. Remember Ford disabling airbags because their was a minute chance that the air bag might explode? Which was more likely, the airbag saving your life or exploding?
Logic and reasoning never make into our risk management conversations. We say "OH MY GOD! A PHONE EXPLODED A CHILD WAS BURNED! HOW HORRIBLE! DO SOMETHING! SUE SAMSUNG! ARREST THE PARENTS!". Meanwhile how many children actually DIED in car crashes yesterday?
On another note, random things spontaneously combusting is actually extremely common. Four of my monitors at work have caught fire (IT informed me that they were not on actually on fire, just smoking).
A friend of mine worked on the last census. His job was to physically visit places that people were living like under bridges, in caves, shacks, farms, etc to get them to fill out the census. There are apparently a significant number of people living in strange places without computers.
Depending on the area, firefighters can effectively always be on call. We have an all volunteer department and they only ever have one or two guys actually at the station (typically the college students who live there). If the live ins are out, the station is empty. If something happens, they call in everyone, go to the station, then head out to the call. There is an app that they use to alert everyone to the call and track who is responding.
But except for the night that you sleep at the station, volunteer firefighters have pretty normal lives. They have jobs, families, go to concerts, etc. And when someone sets their house on fire or crashes their car, they drop everything.
You are assuming the only kind of emergency involves you needing to call 911. Perhaps the babysitter/hospital is trying to reach you to tell you that your kid fell down the stairs, is at the ER, and they need your consent to operate / put him on a helicopter to another hospital. Perhaps you are a volunteer firefighter and there is a fire.
If you want to teach your kids about the cycle of life get fish.
We have Platies and my 5 year old watches the babies get born, most get then eaten by their mom, and the fast ones live. Then they get old, die, and flushed. Lots of great life lessons going on in the fish tank.
Except the earth isn't a sphere. It's an oblate spheroid that is better modeled as an ellipsoid. This matters. A lot. The radius at the poles is significantly less then the radius at the equator.
And the rocky mountains are pretty damn big. So are the Appalachians (when you talk about tunneling under them). You can't just hand wave them away.
Amazon never won out cause of tax. Amazon charges tax now, and I still buy stuff from them instead of my local stores. Because Amazon has what I want when I want it. I once tried to buy a book from a local book store. They didn't have it, but would order it for me. It was going to take them two weeks to get it and cost around $15. Amazon had the book for $10 with two day shipping.
So why on earth not just be good because you are a good person, rather than be good because some book written by hunmans with a slew of contradictory statements tells you to be good?
And that's what happens. Evil people are evil. Good people are good. Religion has nothing to do with it. It is simply a tool that provides support and hope to millions of people around the world and gives them moral guideposts. However, a good person is not going to go out and murder babies because someone said their god commands it. They will reject that god. Most people do not accept 'just following orders' as an excuse for hurting people.
The evolution of our moral codes over time shows that as a whole, society examines itself critically and tries to be better. We reject the tenets that we find repulsive and keep the ones we like. Since most people are not actually evil, this tends to work out for the betterment of society as a whole.
Child beaters are sick fucks and should go to jail. We all agree on that.
People who use religion to justify child beating, murder, etc are sick fucks and should go to jail. We all agree on that.
People use religion to justify being sick fucks ergo religion is evil. That is where we disagree.
There was a time that I used to think organized religions were evil because there is a lot of evil that is done in God's name. But one day I realized that they are actually made up of a lot of good people who use the tenets of their religion for good and that making generalizations about 'religion is evil' does them a disservice. When people go out an feed the homeless, help them with jobs, give diapers, clothes, and support to pregnant women, or take in people running from abusive spouses in the name of their God, should we disparage them and their efforts to make the world a better place? Do we lump those people in with the murderers because some asshole has decided to use their God's name to justify horrific things? Or do we place the blame on the asshole?
And in the US, parents who kill their children go to jail.
People who beat their children in God's name are no different than people who beat their children because they are drunk and the kid isn't listening or wet their bed or talked back. The drunk isn't going to regret it. Not really. They might regret the consequences, but they still blame the victim, not themselves.
Wasn't there a football player who took a switch to his naked toddler and said he did nothing wrong? That's how his dad disciplined him and he didn't see anything wrong with it? Meanwhile we have a kid covered with welts and cuts. And that woman in Florida who drugged her daughter, stuffed her in the trunk of the car, and then didn't report her missing from months so she could go clubbing or something? Or the people who let their babies starve to death while they play video games? I guarantee if you watch your local news you will hear about people getting arrested for beating/killing their kids for all kids of depraved reasons. God told me to is actually pretty far down the list with 'the bitch wouldn't stop crying' being at the top.
People who think it's ok to hurt other people don't need religion. It's just convenient and easy. The world is full of sick fucks who will latch onto any excuse to be evil. It doesn't make the rest of bad people.
Religion also tells us to help the poor and love our neighbors.
Like a gun or a kitchen knife, it can be used for good or evil. Blaming the religion is a convenient and easy way to explain evil people. Nationalism and the 'greater good' is also a convenient scape goat for evil. So is poverty, money, love, drugs, and alcohol. When people beat their spouse to death, we do not blame domestic life.
Some people are just evil. Does it really matter how they justify themselves? Does it matter if you beat your kid to death because God told you to or because that's how you were raised or because you were pissed off or because you were drunk?
I don't think anyone denies that there are violent sects of Christianity or that horrific things have been done in the name of God.
The point is that the modern, mainstream Christian sects condemn violence. When was the last time Christians led a crusade to wipe out the infidels? One of the mainstream sects with actual world power and influence?
The whole "remember the Crusades!" bit whenever someone points out that Christianity teaches peace is a bit childish. If you have to go back 400 years to get your example of Christian rampage, isn't that a pretty good record?
What I am suggesting is that experience counts. Just like in any field. Before you can know that something doesn't look right, you need to know what it's supposed to look like. But you also need to know what all the variations are, etc. If we are just going to give doctors a flow chart and replace them with a computer program like WebMD, we are going to end up doing needless, invasive procedures on a lot of people because diagnosing a lot of conditions isn't as simple as "you have a stuffy nose and a headache. Its a sinus infection, have some anti-antibiotics".
If the troubleshooting tree doesn't work for "my computer won't turn on", what makes you think it will work for "I have chronic headaches"?
Slashdot Mirror
I recently re-financed and had to fax the paperwork to the bank. Because email is insecure but fax is somehow magically secure and private.
In the simple form you compute a solution. You then compute a different solution. Compare the two and keep the better one. Rinse and repeat until you eventually arrive at the "bestish" solution.
I think this falls under... "If you don't want the whole world including your mom and your pastor to see it, don't take pics and put it on the internet".
Sometimes you really do need to think things through before you act cause sometimes "oops" just doesn't cut it.
So who decides when it crosses the line to "something stupid" and "they should have known"? You?
You clearly should have been watching your kid! You should have locked the door! You should have gotten child proof door handle things so the entire family can burn in the event of a fire! What if he had been kidnapped or hit by a car?
We can blame the parents all day long. We can go and remove the child from the home and declare the parents unfit. Or... we can accept that we weren't there. We don't know what the parents knew. We don't know what the parents thought. Maybe thought it only exploded in strange circumstances. You don't know. Just because YOU know better doesn't mean anyone told them.
In all honesty, we recall things so often in the country for stupid reasons that people tend to ignore them. My kid's high chair was recalled because apparently people weren't putting it together right. I looked at the high chair and decided the risk wasn't worth sending it back. Should I loose my kids if it falls apart? OR do I have the right to do my own risk management and use my own judgement?
She apparently tried. In her documentary it talks about how she tried to get people to stop distributing the photo. From her point of view as a young woman that was a pretty terrible picture to have going around. But the media simply ignored her because it was 'important'. It wasn't until she was much older that she was able to recognize and accept the historic significance of the photo.
It's also part of my job to help my children recognize when relationships are healthy or unhealthy. Like I said, an employer that cares about something as trivial as your baby photos is not someone you want to work for. Why on earth would you judge an adult based on a photo of them as an infant or small child? Are you seriously going to not hire someone based on a photo from 20 years ago?
If my child told me her friends would only be her friends if she cut her hair short and wore brown shirts, I would tell her to get better friends and I hope you would too. Or would you run out and buy her an entirely new wardrobe so she could 'fit in'? Do you buy your daughter a real American Girl Doll because all her friends have one and they won't be her friend if she doesn't have one? That actually happened to my niece. Or do you tell her that real friends don't care about that?
If your employer doesn't hire you because of a naked spaghetti covered baby photo from 20 years ago, you probably need a better employer. Those kinds of photos are not things that reasonable people should be embarrassed about.
Weren't we all talking about that poor girl who got napalmed having her photo plastered all over the net the other day? And the world pretty much told her to suck it too. We didn't even need the internet to spread her picture around.
I tell my kids tough shit, suck it all the time. It's called being a parent and caving into random whims about stupid stuff. I mean... what kind of parent says no to a kid who wants ice cream for dinner! They want it so they must have it!
Seriously... everyone has baby photos. We take photos of babies and post them on the internet. Before the internet we put them in books and then drug the books out whenever our kids brought home a significant other. Get over it. You were once a baby naked and covered in mud/spaghetti sauce and your parents took a picture. It probably even got taken in to work and is hanging up in a cube/office. That time you crapped your pants? Mom and Dad remember and will bring it up. Again. And Again. You'll probably do the same thing to your kids. Suck it up. Life is tough and not everyone likes you. It's my job to make sure you have the tools to make it, not be your friend.
I suppose it is possible that these 'embarrassing' childhood photos are not the typical spaghetti covered baby photos. But if that is the case, the parents probably belong in jail for other reasons.
Actually... I think I understand you perfectly. You want to charge parents with negligence when anything bad happens to their children that YOU are quite certain you would have never let happen because it makes you feel superior to judge people. YOU would never turn around in the grocery store to find your kid was not following you like he was supposed to. YOUR kid would never wake up in the middle of the night, open the front door and walk outside. YOUR kid would never set the house on fire making toast.
You are probably also the type of person that would sue Walmart because their parking lot was dark at 2AM and you tripped because they should have had better lighting.
How about instead we accept that sometimes shit happens? Sometimes we trip. Sometimes the toy/phone/laptop we are using randomly bursts into flames. We don't need to send someone to jail or take away their children every time something bad happens. We don't need to assign blame for every little thing. Accept that shit happens and life is dangerous. Life is full of risks that we take everyday.
Instead there are children suffering from REAL abuse and neglect that we are ignoring because we are too busy trying to decide if letting your kid hold a phone constitutes neglect. This kid has loving parents that can give him things like a state of the art brand spanking new phone. There are kids whose parents leave them alone while they go off and get high or drunk. There are kids who do not have food. Worry about those kids, not this one.
18 U.S.C. 798. Note how that law has no mention of malicious intent.
But isn't that what they said about Hillary? She didn't intend to break the law so it doesn't count?
If the toy you are snuggling with bursts into flames, how much do you really care if there was an official recall or not? You are now on fire.
There are actually lots of ways to set yourself on fire, many of them surprising. Flour is highly explosive and grainery fires are pretty nasty. Should we ban flour or charge bakers with negligence for baking while their children are in the house? What about people that deep fry turkeys? Or laptops that overheat and set beds on fire? You must be negligent if you let your kids use a laptop in their room!
Fisher-Price Glow Seahorses also catch fire. And were not recalled. My kid actually has one in her crib. According to the baby books and baby stuff manufacturers everything will kill your kid. When we bought our crib the vendor had just come out with a new model with special "green" stains and finishes that would reduce the risk of SIDS. We habitually recall things where 1 in a million uses under some strange circumstances resulted in some guy hurting himself. Instead of writing it off as 'some guy did something dumb' or 'shit happens' we have to 'do something'. Remember Ford disabling airbags because their was a minute chance that the air bag might explode? Which was more likely, the airbag saving your life or exploding?
Logic and reasoning never make into our risk management conversations. We say "OH MY GOD! A PHONE EXPLODED A CHILD WAS BURNED! HOW HORRIBLE! DO SOMETHING! SUE SAMSUNG! ARREST THE PARENTS!". Meanwhile how many children actually DIED in car crashes yesterday?
On another note, random things spontaneously combusting is actually extremely common. Four of my monitors at work have caught fire (IT informed me that they were not on actually on fire, just smoking).
A friend of mine worked on the last census. His job was to physically visit places that people were living like under bridges, in caves, shacks, farms, etc to get them to fill out the census. There are apparently a significant number of people living in strange places without computers.
Depending on the area, firefighters can effectively always be on call. We have an all volunteer department and they only ever have one or two guys actually at the station (typically the college students who live there). If the live ins are out, the station is empty. If something happens, they call in everyone, go to the station, then head out to the call. There is an app that they use to alert everyone to the call and track who is responding.
But except for the night that you sleep at the station, volunteer firefighters have pretty normal lives. They have jobs, families, go to concerts, etc. And when someone sets their house on fire or crashes their car, they drop everything.
You are assuming the only kind of emergency involves you needing to call 911. Perhaps the babysitter/hospital is trying to reach you to tell you that your kid fell down the stairs, is at the ER, and they need your consent to operate / put him on a helicopter to another hospital. Perhaps you are a volunteer firefighter and there is a fire.
If you want to teach your kids about the cycle of life get fish.
We have Platies and my 5 year old watches the babies get born, most get then eaten by their mom, and the fast ones live. Then they get old, die, and flushed. Lots of great life lessons going on in the fish tank.
Except the earth isn't a sphere. It's an oblate spheroid that is better modeled as an ellipsoid. This matters. A lot. The radius at the poles is significantly less then the radius at the equator.
And the rocky mountains are pretty damn big. So are the Appalachians (when you talk about tunneling under them). You can't just hand wave them away.
This is the first use that leaps to mind? Not giving voices back to people that have lost them due to cancer, injuries, etc?
Amazon never won out cause of tax. Amazon charges tax now, and I still buy stuff from them instead of my local stores. Because Amazon has what I want when I want it. I once tried to buy a book from a local book store. They didn't have it, but would order it for me. It was going to take them two weeks to get it and cost around $15. Amazon had the book for $10 with two day shipping.
So why on earth not just be good because you are a good person, rather than be good because some book written by hunmans with a slew of contradictory statements tells you to be good?
And that's what happens. Evil people are evil. Good people are good. Religion has nothing to do with it. It is simply a tool that provides support and hope to millions of people around the world and gives them moral guideposts. However, a good person is not going to go out and murder babies because someone said their god commands it. They will reject that god. Most people do not accept 'just following orders' as an excuse for hurting people.
The evolution of our moral codes over time shows that as a whole, society examines itself critically and tries to be better. We reject the tenets that we find repulsive and keep the ones we like. Since most people are not actually evil, this tends to work out for the betterment of society as a whole.
Child beaters are sick fucks and should go to jail. We all agree on that.
People who use religion to justify child beating, murder, etc are sick fucks and should go to jail. We all agree on that.
People use religion to justify being sick fucks ergo religion is evil. That is where we disagree.
There was a time that I used to think organized religions were evil because there is a lot of evil that is done in God's name. But one day I realized that they are actually made up of a lot of good people who use the tenets of their religion for good and that making generalizations about 'religion is evil' does them a disservice. When people go out an feed the homeless, help them with jobs, give diapers, clothes, and support to pregnant women, or take in people running from abusive spouses in the name of their God, should we disparage them and their efforts to make the world a better place? Do we lump those people in with the murderers because some asshole has decided to use their God's name to justify horrific things? Or do we place the blame on the asshole?
And in the US, parents who kill their children go to jail.
People who beat their children in God's name are no different than people who beat their children because they are drunk and the kid isn't listening or wet their bed or talked back. The drunk isn't going to regret it. Not really. They might regret the consequences, but they still blame the victim, not themselves.
Wasn't there a football player who took a switch to his naked toddler and said he did nothing wrong? That's how his dad disciplined him and he didn't see anything wrong with it? Meanwhile we have a kid covered with welts and cuts. And that woman in Florida who drugged her daughter, stuffed her in the trunk of the car, and then didn't report her missing from months so she could go clubbing or something? Or the people who let their babies starve to death while they play video games? I guarantee if you watch your local news you will hear about people getting arrested for beating/killing their kids for all kids of depraved reasons. God told me to is actually pretty far down the list with 'the bitch wouldn't stop crying' being at the top.
People who think it's ok to hurt other people don't need religion. It's just convenient and easy. The world is full of sick fucks who will latch onto any excuse to be evil. It doesn't make the rest of bad people.
Religion also tells us to help the poor and love our neighbors.
Like a gun or a kitchen knife, it can be used for good or evil. Blaming the religion is a convenient and easy way to explain evil people. Nationalism and the 'greater good' is also a convenient scape goat for evil. So is poverty, money, love, drugs, and alcohol. When people beat their spouse to death, we do not blame domestic life.
Some people are just evil. Does it really matter how they justify themselves? Does it matter if you beat your kid to death because God told you to or because that's how you were raised or because you were pissed off or because you were drunk?
I don't think anyone denies that there are violent sects of Christianity or that horrific things have been done in the name of God.
The point is that the modern, mainstream Christian sects condemn violence. When was the last time Christians led a crusade to wipe out the infidels? One of the mainstream sects with actual world power and influence?
The whole "remember the Crusades!" bit whenever someone points out that Christianity teaches peace is a bit childish. If you have to go back 400 years to get your example of Christian rampage, isn't that a pretty good record?
What I am suggesting is that experience counts. Just like in any field. Before you can know that something doesn't look right, you need to know what it's supposed to look like. But you also need to know what all the variations are, etc. If we are just going to give doctors a flow chart and replace them with a computer program like WebMD, we are going to end up doing needless, invasive procedures on a lot of people because diagnosing a lot of conditions isn't as simple as "you have a stuffy nose and a headache. Its a sinus infection, have some anti-antibiotics".
If the troubleshooting tree doesn't work for "my computer won't turn on", what makes you think it will work for "I have chronic headaches"?