Scott, I think you may be confused on point #39. I (typical American Jew) was taught that the *Six Day War* was a spectacular Israeli victory / Arab defeat. The Yom Kippur War (six years later) was very nearly the end of the Jewish state.
If you want to see who won, consider how much of Egyptian territory was occupied by Israel in, say, September 1973, and how much is occupied today. The Egyptians knew that they could not recover the captured territory by a direct assault against Israel, backed by the US. What they settled on was an ingenious plan which was strategically aggressive but tactically defensive. The crossed the canal (a considerable military accomplishment) and dug in, waiting for the Israelis to exhaust themselves in the inevitable counter-attacks. This largely happened as planned, but, according to somewhat I met who was a junior officer at the time, the Egyptians became over-confident and advanced outside their SAM screen, after which the battle started to go the other way. When I visited the Egyptian Staff College some years ago, there was a frieze commemorating the crossing, as the operation which recovered the territory they had lost in 1967.
Only slightly inaccurate. The Egyptians did not become overconfident, the Syrians started losing, and the Egyptians attempted to advance in order to relieve pressure on them. Otherwise I believe you are correct.
Right - if someone presents the Yom Kippur as an unambiguous victory for Israel, (a) I would like to see it, (b) I don't know what propagamda they have been smoking. Egypt achieved its goals, partly militarily and partly diplomatically. Israel succeeded at hanging on and not collapsing. You could say Syria failed.
We know it's a bad thing to win a battle but lose the war, and I think in the Yom Kippur war the same thing happened but one level up: Israel won the war, but lost its reputation of invincibility. Afterwards, Israel and Egypt could sign the Camp David accords and a peace treaty, if not as equals, then at least as states playing in the same league.
In 1967, the Arab armies were full of bravado and proceeded to be summarily defeated. In 1973, Israel was full of bravado and the Egyptians and Syrians managed to surprise Israel and totally overwhelm its first line of defence. Israel won the war in the end, but the Egyptians and Syrians regained their dignity. Moreover, the Israeli victory relied, in part, on emergency weapon shipments from the U.S., allowing the Egyptians to believe that they would have emerged victorious if it were not for the U.S.
In Israel, the memory of the war is complicated. The shock of the initial defeat and the heavy casualties dominate. But there is also pride in snatching victory from the jaws of defeat through some very hard fought battles, involving inspiring displays of bravery and improvisation in extreme circumstances.
Sounds like a reasonable way to remember the war, as collective memories war. However, speaking of an unambiguous Israeli victory and an unambiguous Egyptian defeat can be justified only on some cherry-picked technical definition. Even in purely military terms, the Egyptian army achieved and held onto one of its main objectives (Suez canal); then, at the negotiating table, it got essentially what it wanted. Israel got an expensive draw, paid with the lives of not a few young men, especially in comparison with its population.
#32: My fiancee woke up the other night, we conversed briefly, then she left the room and came back 5-10 minutes later. The next morning she told me she had no memory of it, and asserted that she was therefore unconscious during the time. On the other hand, it seems possible that she was conscious but not forming memories. I have no idea how you would disentangle these two possibilities.
There've been times when I'd get in to a state where I was able to form memories but not conscious - I'd be collapsed in a really uncomfortable position and a couple times people came up and started hitting or kicking me, but I didn't have any internal monologue or opinion on it at the time and didn't move or do anything about it.
It was my first person perspective, but just the raw sensory experience without any commentary. Like, if you ended up in some kind of situation where you couldn't move, your memory of that experience would include thinking about how to get out of that situation, or how you felt about it. In those moments, I had none of that.
I think I read that when you black out drunk you are not unconscious, you stop forming memories. I seem to remember specifically that the conversion from short to long term memories is disrupted somehow. My own experience confirms this in the sense that when I’ve blacked out sometimes I start to uncover some memories of the night later during the day. The memories I recover confirm I was conscious at the time. More obviously: My mom is in her eighties and often forgets things but is not a zombie.
This always fascinated me. In my harder partying youth, there were times I'd think "I wonder if I'm to drunk to remember this tomorrow." And then I'd think, "If I'm thinking this then it must be I'm not that drunk." But what always blew my mind is thinking how many times I'd thought that and not remembered it the next day. Trippy.
Wikipedia says Etizolam is known to cause retrograde amnesia, so that's probably what happened to that guy as well. (Albeit losing a week is more extreme than merely failing to record short-term memories.)
Kind of a boring answer compared to "Blindsight was right", I guess, although there are some interesting philosophical questions in amnesia and continuity of identity.
I remember - or should I say, I don't remember - falling asleep on a bicycle and waking up a few kilometers later, at the other end of a bumpy forest dirt road. And I'm nearly certain I fell asleep and not simply failed to form memories, because I was suffering from what I clearly recognize as symptoms of sleep deprivation at the time, and this made them go away the way they usually do once I manage to take a short nap.
My take is that our brains can really do a lot on an autopilot. Going through an entire workweek? Perhaps not, but I only see it as extremely unlikely rather than inconceivable. Even when we're conscious, a vast majority of our actions are automatic, many of them extremely complex, layering subprocedures over subprocedures. There are entire schools and practices aiming to enhance humans' awareness of what they're perceiving and doing, but most of us only really start consciously noticing things when something goes wrong and our automatic procedures all throw an exception.
My other take is that GPTs of the world are best conceived as this kind of autopilot without consciousness. For this reason, I don't find "GPT may make mistakes, but so do humans" a particularly convincing takedown of the AGI-through-deep-learning-skeptic position that some think it is. Humans make mistakes when the System 1 parts of their brains make them and System 2 fails to intervene. But it's the System 2 parts that we're thinking of when we imagine AGI, and currently it just doesn't seem we're getting any closer to it.
Somewhere in the autobiography of C.S. Lewis, in the section about serving in the Army during World War I, he makes a comment about falling asleep while marching...and waking up while still marching.
At the time I first read it, I did not believe that this was a possible scenario. I thought he was engaging in exaggeration of some sort. It confused me, though. That sequence of stories didn't look like exaggeration: it was about how the military was bad in some ways, and life in school had been bad in other ways. People weren't expected to like life in the military; people were expected to like life in school. Neither the school stories nor the military stories felt like exaggerations.
This one event, falling asleep while marching, stuck out as something very odd.
But seeing stories like yours, I now suspect that Lewis experienced something similar. Sleep deprivation is not surprising among military men during wartime. Either napping-while-marching or losing-ability-to-form-memories-while-marching could have happened.
I saw a young man fall asleep while standing at attention with his eyes open while I was in the army. He was very confused when a sergeant, with some effort, managed to wake him up.
According to my wife I regularly talk in my sleep, and would have full conversations with her. If I speak with her after I go to bed, she ignores me until I prove I am actually awake. Often by quizzing me or just telling me to go back to sleep. I have apparently told her that I was awake and not sleeping during these exchanges, though I do not remember that.
I do this as well. Often it's as I'm falling asleep, and neither of us realizes I'm not conscious until I either say something ridiculous or stop responding altogether.
My partner does this too. He falls asleep next to me on the couch while we're watching YouTube, and if I ask if he's asleep, he says no, but it's clear that he is, because when he's not asleep he will actually say something more contentful, either about the video or that it's time to go to bed or something. When he's asleep, it's just a flat denial that he's asleep and no more behavior.
After I got my wisdom teeth out, I was taking opioids with no apparent effect. No symptoms, but pain didn't go away, either. The sutures in the back of my mouth bothered my tongue. So I pulled them out. It made total sense at the time!!! Then I completely forgot I'd done that. I only remembered that "the doctor will be mad." But I didn't know WHY I expected the doctor to be angry.
Six months later, I watched a medical show. ER doctor told her patient to come back to get the sutures taken out, or else they'd heal like a railroad. The memory of pulling out my sutures came rushing back, along with, "Ohhh, THAT'S why I thought the doctor would be mad!''
This is a thing that happens fairly regularly in the transition zones around sleep. I have had conversations with just woken people who assured me that yes, they were awake, and understood what I had said, and no, they weren't, and no, they didn't.
Seems to be a tradeoff between housework and childcare. That maps to my own childhood, where my mom would plop me in my playpen and go about cleaning the house. My DIL spends far less time cleaning the house and more time focusing on her daughter. And she tells me that you're only supposed to "containerize" your toddler for 10 minutes a day now.
This was my thought too. Modern parents feel compelled by society to fill their kids' time with quality interactions, and pediatricians recommend against bouncy chairs for >30 minutes and so on. Whenever I complain to my Boomer mother about my two toddlers keeping me busy, she tells me to plop them in a playpen and turn the TV on. I expect that a 1965 housewife doing that counted it as 'housework."
Boomer parents put their children into playpens when they're busy, but don't many of today's parents just put their children in front of a smartphone or tablet for the same reasons? Or is that just a stereotype?
There's something to that, but I see two significant differences. One is that a young child in a playpen is physically restrained in a small controlled environment, while a kid sitting on the sofa playing with a tablet is merely engaged in a stimulating activity. The latter requires at least a little more parental alertness, least the child put the tablet down and find something else to get into. In addition, young children playing on tablets will often ask for help or otherwise bid for parents' attention (source: my not-quite-5yo daughter) and current generations of parents tend to be disinclined to ignore them.
The other big difference is that there's a bunch of concern in current parenting culture about kids having "too much screen time", which I don't understand to have a clear counterpart with playpens.
Tangentially, we're mostly not talking about boomer parents with the "plop them in the playpen and ignore them" childcare technique. The earlier year in the chart is 1965, in which it's mostly the children, not the parents, who are boomers. Young parents of newborns in 1965 might be very early boomers (standard boomer birth years are 1946-1964), but most parents of minor children in 1965 would have been Silent or "Greatest" Generation.
This lines up with my anecdotal intergenerational comparison of parenting styles: my wife an I (born on the cusp between Gen X and Millennial) use tablets and stuff to buy time to multitask (or more often, just tag team who's on point for active child care. My parents (Boomers) used TV or Apple II games as distractions for me and my little sister: we had playpens, but they were used to allow parents to multitask (e.g. I remember my mother setting up my sister's playpen in the home office so she could split attention between work and taking care of my sister rather than needing to focus primarily on childcare) rather than as a total substitute for active childcare. My grandparents (Greatest Generation) are the ones who plopped younger kids in their playpens and ignored them, and who sent school-age kids out into the neighborhood to play until dinner.
In 1965, after we got home from school, we "went out to play," returned at dinner-time, and then did homework/watched TV/read until bedtime. Free range children were more the norm.
It's unclear to me (I suspect one of us needs to actually read this book to find out!) whether this is just aggregated across all ages of children or if they just looked at a certain age or what. Childcare for an infant or toddler is a lot different than it is for a 9-year-old, which is why we're here debating using a TV or tablet as a babysitter and time spent driving to soccer practice as all part of this. I'm assuming no parent answering this survey counted "making your 15-year-old help you fix the lawnmower" as childcare, even though it may be functionally similar to "entertaining your toddler while you fold laundry because he keeps poking his brother in the eye otherwise."
I had this same thought, though you could also argue people are more likely to describe these gray areas as "childcare" in surveys today, since a higher expectation is placed on spending lots of time with one's children.
There's something odd in the data, for sure, presumably as a result of question phrasing or averaging. Best case, parents together are spending 3 hours a daybon child care, assuming they're never overlapping? That's completely unreasonable for infants/toddlers, - even if they spend all day at daycare, you likely have an hour with them in the morning and two at night, and then they magically sleep all night, and what about weekends? I really suspect this data, while interesting, may have been collected to answer a very different sort of question and something weird is happening when it answers this one.
I think a lot of the difference in time could easily be explained just by the amount of time it now takes to drive children (and teens!) to the places that they would have gone to by themselves in 1965. This also includes daycare, and sometimes school.
I spent a good deal of time in the late 90s/early 00s being cared for by my grandparents, and they did not care where I was as long as I was back by 5:00.
Wandering around the swamp? Be back by five.
Riding bikes around the quarry? Be back by five.
Heading across the railroad tracks to the abandoned subdivision? Be back by five.
More interestingly, the actual *parents* on that street had similar views, so my cousin and I could reliably round up one or two other kids to go God knows where. Why were they so resistant to helicopter culture?
Whereas when I was a teen in the same time period, I wasn't even allowed to bike in the cul de sac in front of my own home, let alone go anywhere myself. This, even though I grew up literally in the middle of a county park full of hiking trails (at some point the county made the area a park and banned any further house building).
I hitchhiked every day, to and from school and everywhere else from about 11 years old till H.S. graduation. Some great experiences:
Two lesbians took me to a nude beach for the first time (12yrs and had no awareness such a thing existed). One guy and 5 girls took me out to a breakfast my parents never could have afforded (champagne and crab omelette at 14yrs). They proffered this invitation after I tried to bum a smoke and then offered to smoke them out when they were taken aback. (Marin County California)....
Israeli conception of the Yom Kippur War is almost a national trauma - treated as a big failure (mostly intelligence-wise) that nearly led to destruction and we survived only through sheer luck and tenacity. Many lives were needlessly lost. An investigative committee was formed, heads rolled, cultural and political landscapes changed dramatically (in 1977 the socialist Labor party was overturned after 20 years of rule since independence).
OTOH, Egypt, although the invasion eventually failed and was pushed back, treats it as a great military success that led to the eventual return of the Sinai peninsula in the peace treaty several years later (essentially, the war of 1973 was seen as restoring the honor lost in 1967).
I (Israeli) agree with this comment and other comments on the Yom Kippur war. While it is considered an Israeli victory, it is treated as something that almost wiped out the country, and a massive failure in preparation. It is *still* often referenced in various contexts in the army as a lesson we need to learn from.
Also, relatedly, the Yom Kippur attack is considered kind of a dick move, for lack of a better term, from the Arab side, since they chose to attack on Yom Kippur. For anyone that doesn't know, this is a day in which a big part of the population is fasting (a bigger percentage in the more-religious '70s, I imagine.) And on that day, no one is driving. It's like attacking the States on July 4th or December 25th or something, but even worse since the country is effectively shut down on that day.
(Side note, I think rationally the much bigger problem is the "starting a war" part, not the timing of it, but it feels so much worse that they started it on Yom Kippur.)
Famously George Washington made a surprise attack during the American revolutionary war on Christmas day. It was taught to me in school as a turning point in the war and a kind of clever strategic thing to do. I've always been a little surprised I've never seen a Christian (or any) American criticize it.
Setting aside the fact that the Americans weren't fighting for the defense/liberation of a Christian homeland in response to persecution around the world/as an attempt to reclaim an area they once dominated making religion more or less irrelevant in the context of the actual fighting during the Revolution as the primary reason no one squawks about this, had he done it on Easter Sunday, then maybe they might grumble a bit given Easter is the holiest/most important day in the Christian holiday calendar, not Christmas. I could go on about what Christianity/Protestantism/various sects demands versus asks in regards to worship, work, and holidays (a sticky wicket given there are so many ways to slice and dice it), but I think the point about GW's strategy holds, in war doing the unexpected and taking advantage of an enemy's assumptions is the smart move even if the other side thinks it's unfair.
Hence the old meme of the famous painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware, captioned "America: We will kill you in your sleep on Christmas".
I'm probably a bit more aware of the Battle of Trenton than most, though, both from being a history buff and from my personal connection to the battle: I'm probably distantly related to the Hessian commander at that battle, Colonel Johan Rall.
It probably helps that these were hated foreign mercenaries/invaders and the Americans were defending their homeland. If a man breaks into your house on Christmas morning, threatens your family, kicks your dog, then sits down and starts eating your ham, is it rude to come up behind him, club him over the head, and throw him out? Must you let him rise to his feet for a fair fight?
By contrast, if Pearl Harbor had happened on Christmas, it would probably be remembered as even more dastardly.
The Easter Rising in Ireland began on Easter Monday, and I've never heard about anyone in England complaining about the date. Britain itself launched perhaps the worlds first carrier based air raid on German airship bases on Christmas day 1914. No one on either side was bothered by that, either.
Now, if Washington had broken a truce, I'm sure the other side would have been very condemnatory. As it is, his act was just another act of war, no worse than any other act by the rebellious side. The rebels might be accused of treason for rebelling in the first place, not for the date on which this particular act of rebellion occurred.
Egypt didn't choose to start the attack during Yom Kippur. The attack was supposed to start weeks earlier and the delay seriously threatened the secrecy of the operation.
Interestingly, I read an argument that Yom Kippur turned out to be the best possible time for mobilizing reserves, once the initial shock was over - the streets were empty and there were no problems getting in touch with reservists because they were all at their local synagogue.
Yep, an Egyptian Prof. (ex-colleague of mine) was quite angry about my suggestion that Israel had won that war - as it did all the others. I read up on wikipedia, and yeah, it was a kinda mixed result. Still, he refused to compromise; said that war was a national triumph for Egypt. - I travelled the Sinai a bit - sandbox, not much there worth fighting for. Shakespeare eternal:
Truly to speak, and with no addition,
We go to gain a little patch of ground
That hath in it no profit but the name.
To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it;
Nor will it yield to Norway or the Pole
A ranker rate, should it be sold in fee.
Hamlet. Why, then the Polack never will defend it?! -
> I’m a bit confused here; weren’t many 1965 moms stay-at-home? Don’t many moms use daycare now? How is childcare so much more time-consuming?
Huh, I guess you must really be disconnected from modern parenting trends. My mom was a stay-at-home mom, but in the '70s and '80s parents didn't really spend time playing with their kids. We (kids) didn't come home after school until it was dinner time. We went to our friends' houses and wandered around the neighborhood.
That shit *does not happen anymore.* Parents spend massive amounts of time with their children now. Parenting is incredibly intensive. The whole thing is totally insane, but you can't really opt out of it, because there's nowhere for the kids to go.
I wonder if this is different for city vs. country. I remember my sister and her friends taking me to the swamp. Was it ok because it was a small town, or ok because it was the '80s?
The 80s. I live in a small town and never see kids anywhere outside. They all must be somewhere, but I don't know where.
Funny because everyday I walk past a sign that says "drive slow, children at play," but I have yet to see a single child playing anywhere near that sign.
They are inside playing with devices. I'm not saying this to sound like a cranky old man. It's just true.
We had video game systems when I was a kid, starting with the Atari 2600, continuing on through the Nintendo 64, etc. We played them a reasonable amount, but I don't remember playing with them much in high school. They were kids' toys, not "entertainment systems." And even when we were kids, they didn't really replace time spent outside. Of course, there was no internet, no mobile devices, no social networks.
To be clear, I don't think that technology is the root cause here. My daughter is too young for social networks and doesn't have a phone or tablet. She still doesn't leave the house by herself. There are a lot of things going on.
I just got back from several days dogsitting for a friend in a subdivision, which is specifically designed to encourage kids and families to get outside. There are public playgrounds dotted throughout, plus park benches, ponds and streams, and even little exercise stations. And of course you got bike trails connecting everything.
I would say it's a modest success. Often when I take the dog for a walk I see families outside together, but most of the unsupervised kids are teenagers, and I rarely see anyone at the playgrounds.
My own 80s-90s childhood was spent growing up on a property with a pear orchard and horse pasture in a sparse neighborhood. I had a next-door neighbor friend who would go with me down the hill to a small forest with a decent-sized pond and a hawk nest. I guess you could say we were free-range kids since we were allowed to go outside of shouting distance, but our parents knew where we were (which sounds like common sense anyway), and we were never more than about 15-20 minutes away.
It's not just small towns. I grew up in the inner-ring suburbs, so definitely not the city but also not picket fences and cul de sacs. When I was still a pre-teen, I would walk over a mile to the nearest train station and take the train to downtown proper (where the train became the subway). What we did in the city was surprisingly tame (mostly hanging around in food courts), but my parents had no idea where we were, and we could have been absolutely anywhere.
This trend predates the 80s. My mother grew up in Jersey City, long before it was a gentrified outpost of Manhattan. As a teenager she would take a bus into the West Village of Manhattan, long before it was an upscale hipster enclave. She spent her time there smoking cigarettes and mixing it up with degenerates, and then headed back out to JC.
Parents today drive their kids everywhere now and think (probably correctly) that having them walk or bike someplace on their own is unsafe. A huge amount of transportation time suck
>think (probably correctly) that having them walk or bike someplace on their own is unsafe
Is there any evidence that this is (probably correct)? Everything I can find says that crime and child mortality are on the decline across the country.
As far as I can tell this is about *perception* not reality. People think it's more dangerous, despite it not being, so they've stopped doing it. Also something about how you're perceived by neighbors "oh they're the people that don't care for their kids."
I'd say it depends on the reason. Cars are bigger than they used to be, and there are more of them. Probably this risk is overstated by many parents, but I don't think it's totally crazy to be concerned about it.
If the thing you are worried about is child abduction, yeah, that's just bonkers.
I think it's partially unfounded concerns based on anecdotal news reports or rumors, combined with a social perception problem.
"Good" parents care for their children and are highly involved all the time. If you don't do so then you're not a "good" parent and subject to whatever social pressures there are to conform
Cars have way way better brakes than they used to, though, which I expect to dominate. Risk today is far lower than 50 years ago, but risk tolerance seems to have dropped faster than actual risk.
It's unsafe from a walking perspective. Newer suburbs don't have sidewalks and the proliferation of "stroads," four+ lane roads with heavy traffic, makes crossing through neighborhoods dangerous. There are a lot of places where you can't get to the house behind your own without jumping a fence or driving a literal mile.
We're also moving away from cars to trucks with very high grills and poor sightlines, making it especially unsafe for children. Pedestrian deaths have increased dramatically in the US.
There's a denominator problem that's a bit hard to figure out though - overall population has gone up in this time, which suggests that things are even safer now compared to the 70s than these absolute numbers suggest. But walking for transportation has gone down, and if it has gone down enough, even with overall population growth, then it could be that lower absolute numbers translate to higher risk per hour walking.
I was about to bow out of this conversation because anything more I might have to contribute would require digging for sources, but you've arrived with sources and data, so now I'm obsolete :)
My intuition is that the steep decline in pedestrian deaths for children under 13 represents an equivalent retreat away from them walking anyplace. Possibly with the rise of reduction in drunk driving, which would make the rise in overall pedestrian deaths since 2009 make sense: drunk driving goes down, but mobile phone-related accidents go up as smart phones start to proliferate and cars get interactive computer screens.
I’m in Phoenix, and every suburb has sidewalks. Most of them have little parks and playgrounds too. Trend is at least 2 decades old, since that’s the age of my suburb, which is itself not one of the older ones with this feature.
I keep getting the feeling that very few readers of ACX have children...hmmmm.
The cars are not the problem. Blaming this on cars is utter misderected BS. Hyper-zealous safety regulations are the problem.
In Los Angeles, I know that every school of which I am aware (both public and private -- to be clear, I do not have children, just obs of people/friends who do) every school REQUIRES that every child be seen getting into a vehicle driven by a parent or trusted (there is a list) guardian, or an official school bus, and must also arrive that way. All private schools have gates and guards to screen pickup/dropoff vehicles. (One near my work even has a mandatory bomb-scanning stop, just like US Federal Courthouses.)
Children are not allowed to leave school property otherwise, at the penalty of criminal charges, and a child arriving on foot or otherwise without a parent/officer triggers a mandatory report to Family Services and often the Police.
There is no legal possibility of children riding bikes or walking or any independent means, the whole society is deluded into thinking DANGEROUS.
I have a longer more hopeful anecdote regarding this, but that must come later.
I thought further and realized that Yes, there is one private school that does not require this, right down my street. But I live in a very close/old Armenian neihborhood, these kids probably walk at most six blocks home ... I saw twenty of them hanging out at the local Hot Chicken stand this afternoon.
And Public schools are not that strict, I apologize for hyperbole. Still, I will estimate that ~50% of children at public schools are picked up and dropped off, and there is special traffic control and LAPD officers tasked to this every day.
Among the laptop class, both law and withering social pressure, and 99% also the rules of the $$$ private school, require absolute chain-of-custody for all children.
Even in the same country, in the same city, living on a different street can make a huge difference... which you probably only realize after you buy your home.
From my sister's home, you can get to the nearest playground without crossing a road. The playground is visible from a window. So my sister can just tell her child to go to the playground, and once in a while look out from the window to confirm that everything is okay.
From my home, the playground is near, but you need to cross a road, and the playground is behind other houses, so I cannot see it from my window. I do not trust my 4 years old to cross a road safely... she often pays attention to the traffic, but sometimes does not and just runs. So we accompany our kids to the playground. (There I typically just ignore them and read a book while they play.)
Similarly, from my sister's home, you can get to a school by crossing a low-traffic road. From my home, although the school is only 10 minutes of walk away, you need to cross two large high-traffic intersections and a few smaller ones, that is about eight pedestrian crossings, some of them with street lights, some of them without. This feels a bit too much even for a 7 years old.
My experience could be quite different if I bought my home just a few streets away. But at that moment, I did not consider these things.
I have often thought these complex and difficult to make dodecahedrons were used as a note of rank or of an internal order of ranking within the military. They are very commonly found on battlefields and I reckon it was some internal order which needed a way to identify each other, perhaps becoming somewhat ceremonial over time.
Perhaps an internal spy/intelligence order of men mixed in with the other soldiers. Or perhaps as a simple rank insignia. These objects were hard to make and therefore difficult to counterfeit. Perhaps the spies and the scouting teams were mixed along with many of them being promoted over time. The Romans had a long history of various secret orders within their ranks and special rites and such within their military ranks. A perfect place for a curio to appear.
The location of the finds of these objects on battlefields and military caches is rather telling and the knitting thing obviously holds no water as they couldn't/didn't' knit. Though a fishing explanation or survival tool might make sense as a possible, though perhaps not plausible explanation.
While we may think of such objects or practices as something readily exploited, there were very limited games of advanced statecraft in that era. It wasn't as if the more decentralised Celtic peoples, as Julius Caesar called them, were going to be able to manufacture such objects or fit in with the ethnically different Roman soldiers. And even if they could, who would they report to on some long term spying operation...their village head somewhere in rural France or Germany?
33. Do moms feel the need to show greater care for their children relative to dads? Does trying to close the parenting gap just set off an arms race of wasteful signaling?
Probably, in the same way the housework gap is (aside from being working more hours) a product of women being more concerned about cleanliness than men.
Re: 33 (more parenting hours), I'm not a parent and haven't studied this, but it seems likely that cars explain a lot of that. There's a video on Twitter comparing kids coming to school in rural Netherlands and suburban America. All the Dutch kids ride their bikes, all the American kids are driven by parents. As we built increasing pedestrian-hostile spaces, more parents feel they have to drive their kids everywhere. I'm old enough that I walked almost everywhere as a kid (and, living in Chicago, still do). Also, I've worked with people who are certain if their kids don't have activities from the moment they wake up to the second they go to bed, they'll become drug-addicted pedophile love slaves. And that's not entirely exaggeration.
All that mom-ubering and drug-addiction prevention adds up.
(Bias note: I think Americans would be significantly better off if we mandated Netherlands-/Swiss-style infrastructure across the country: the car made us lonely, destroyed our communities, and steals all of our time. )
would be interesting to see data on parenting hours in a place like New York (or DC etc). While I think your car-driving theory is interesting, I also wouldn't be surprised if NYC parents spent as much time parenting as suburban parents.
The comparison video I saw used a North Carolina suburban location for traffic, and the Netherlands has. It wasn't hilly and the autumn weather wasn't severe. It's also worth noting that in countries with extreme weather, if they have good cycling infrastructure (e.g., Finland), people cycle in almost all weather. They plow the bike paths before the roads in some cities! Car dependence is a choice our urban planners and citizens make, not something inherent to our geography.
You were talking about the whole US. Some of it's flat or fairly flat. Some of it's hilly or very hilly. Being able to handle cold weather isn't the same thing as being able to handle hot weather.
Central San Francisco is famously hilly, and would be eminently bikable were it not for the cars. It's just a matter of mindset. The body adapts very quickly.
Not everyone has the potential to adapt, but there are powered bikes these days. On the other hand, what cities are very hilly but actually good for cycling?
Seattle has been a cycling leader for a long time—lots of riders there. There are places in Colorado with very rich cycling cultures.
But it feels like you're trying to defend cars by looking where bikes aren't practical. Bikes are fantastic, but they're not the only alternative to cars that are kid-friendly. Switzerland is bike friendly, but its real transit genius is its trains, which are so good, everybody takes them. Even a city that's borderline too hot for human habitation (like Phoenix is likely to become) could have trains and buses to get around. It might require that we change land use rules (e.g., abandon single family home zoning and parking minimums), but we could do it if we wanted to.
How is that going to work in farmland Nebraska, where it's 1/4 mile to the end of the driveway, a mile to the first neighbor's house, and 10 miles to town (and the school)? It feels like this attitude is informed by living in a dense urban area, without much experience of the large swathes of the United States that aren't that way at all.
I want to say obviously, no solution is going to apply to everyplace. But maybe that isn't obvious. In this case, though, truly rural areas are likely to depend on cars even in the most ideal scenarios. However, both Switzerland and the Netherlands provide robust public transit to their rural areas (which means mountainous areas in Switzerland), so for most Americans, we could do much better.
BTW, I grew up in rural America and I walked to or rode my bike to school. I had to go some distance, but that developed fitness habits I'm very happy to have today. Granted, I wasn't in an area so rural that the closest school was ten miles away, but very few Americans live in areas that sparsely populated.
I don't think either the Netherlands nor Switzerland is an appropriate model for rural America. These are both countries the size of the smallest US states, like Maryland or New Jersey. California has counties that are bigger than either country, and of course a mere rural county has a tiny fraction of the tax base and resources of a wealthy small country like either the Netherlands or Switzerland. The idea of running trains all over the US countryside, the way Switzerland does -- which is certainly marvelous, I've ridden the system and marveled at it -- is just wholly impractical. It would require economies (and tax bases) 10-100 times as large.
I don't know what you mean by "very few" but the USDA says 14% of Americans live in rural counties. 1 out of 7 doesn't exactly strike me as "very few." They are also, of course, a rather essential group of people, since they provide all the food we eat.
Rural counties aren't defined by living 10 miles from the nearest school. That's very low density.
While I hinted at it in my last response, I suppose I should be clear that when I said I would like to see car-centric urban planning abolished, I didn't mean that literally for all of the US. I don't think anybody I know of in urban planning/pedestrian-and-bike advocacy circles wants to make people in low density rural areas give up their cars for bikes-n-buses. But we could have much better transit (and housing) than we do in most areas, and one of the results would be fewer parents engaged in this madness:
America had already gotten cars and suburbs by 1965. Car-hostile cities like NYC don't seem any better for children; if anything they're worse.
I think the specific move from free-range kids to parent control happened as a result of fear of crime; both the very real increase in general crime from 1960-1990, and an exaggerated panic around child kidnapping sometime in the 70s or 80s. I wouldn't have thought that in itself was enough to change the parenting hours the way the graph shows, but it was a pretty big transition.
(Caveat, I'm not an urban historian, so I may be slightly off on my facts, but I feel confident in them)
1) Suburbs were built differently in the 50s and 60s—they were closer in and more urban. That's certainly in evidence in the Chicago metro area where I live. They have sidewalks, corner stores, etc.
2) As state departments of transportation expanded their role into cities and suburbs, they've prioritized cars (to the point where they actively fight against resident wishes). The roads are appreciably less safe, especially as big box retail came to prominence, which creates all sorts of flow problems and congestion.
3) Kids used to take school busses to school. Apparently, not so much anymore. That's a huge timesuck for parents.
4) Demand for "safe" kid activities means driving your kids about. My suburban friends with kids are car moms from 3 pm to 7 pm most days.
5) Yeah, I wouldn't deny fears over crime contributes to this, but it's kind of weird how that really only became a thing well after crime was declining significantly, suggesting there's something else behind it. I won't claim its cars, although building a "community" where nobody interacts with each other isn't going to create a lot of trust.
6) Most of NYC isn't really anti-car, and while better than many suburban places, relative to places that have emphasized pedestrian and non-motorized or public transit, it is only so-so. People in other countries rightfully feel much safer sending their kids out into the world unaccompanied because you don't need a fully developed brain to deal with the treats. I mean, Japan has a show where they send little kids to do errands. And driving in Amsterdam is better than driving in most American cities because there's less traffic and better flow engineering.
In our city, if you live within 2 miles of your assigned school, there is no bus service. There are also no sidewalks. Thus, we drive our kids the 1.75 miles to and from school each day. Also, its not just DRIVING kids to activities - I can't just drop my kid at soccer practice. I have to sit there in the parking lot for 3 hours a week due to liability concerns if he gets injured while playing, plus another 2 hour game on the weekend. That kind of crap is a massive time suck that you can't get out of unless your kid just doesn't participate in any extracurricular activities.
There's probably a chicken-and-egg issue. More parents are driving their kids to school, which causes less demand for buses, which makes buses more expensive to provide per kid, which causes cuts to buses, which causes more parents to drive their kids.
there is another chicken-and-egg issue in parallel: people don't trust their kids to ride the bike to school because there is so much traffic, but half of the traffic around school at this time is parents driving their kids to school.
I lived a couple blocks from a school when I was in Los Angeles. I would commute to USC on bike, but I learned that even if my work on campus was done at 2:30, I shouldn't head home then, because I would likely be arriving in the most dangerous moment of the day, when parents in cars are looking for their kid, and not likely to see anything else in front of them.
Our kids ride the school bus. When i was a kid, we'd get on the bus right outside our house. The drive let us off by ourselves, and we'd walk in.
Now, the district says you need a parent at the stop when the kids get off.
> but it's kind of weird how that really only became a thing well after crime was declining significantly, suggesting there's something else behind it?
What if the 'something else' is that people have simply become more fearful and risk averse?
I think that's true—my male friends with kids report going to the park with their kids means being treated as potential sex offenders, and parents who send their kids to school on public transit or let them walk unaccompanied are sometimes investigated by child protection services. However, the why of it baffles me. What made North Americans become so afraid of letting their kids have freedom?
I don't think it's only North Americans. Maybe Americans are ahead of the curve, but I think the trend happens in many places. Definitely also the UK, and maybe delayed or more slowly in other places, but I'd guess it still happens.
I wonder also if part of it is all the extra-curricular activities children seem to be engaged in. Some of it is probably interest on the child's part, and some activities really do help with confidence building and socialisation, but there does seem to be this drive to "you need to do a sport and an instrument and something else to build up your resume when you are applying for college", and that means a lot of driving the kids around to drop them off for activities then pick them up again, as well as making sure they have their sports kit, instrument, whatever else they need for the activity, and then maybe showing up for the school concerts and matches and the rest of it.
That's a good point. My youth was far less structured, and we often had many hours a day of unrestricted free time. With no internet and no ability to drive ourselves, we spent a lot of time wandering the neighborhood and woodland areas near our house.
Well you kind of need to work to get their little fannies out of the house these days, because the computer and the smartphone sing their siren song[1]. When I was a kid, it was impossible to *keep* me in the house. What am I going to do? Stare at the walls? Read, yeah I guess, but not all freaking day. So I'd be out of the house when I got home from school as fast as I could change my clothes, looking for some trouble...er...adventure with my friends.
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[1] It's not even that antisocial: they meet up with their friends online and play games. Heck, I've had siblings sit in adjacent bedrooms and meet online to play games. "Tell your sister it's time for dinner." "OK, I'll just drop a note into the game chat." Say what? She's right next door...? What a strange world the future is going to be.
Also, car-friendly and pedestrian-friendly aren't *necessarily* mutually exclusive. I live in walking distance of (1) a highway, (2) a grocery store, and (3) the local public high school.
Fear of crime wouldn't surprise me as a cause (though it's unlikely to be the *only* cause); the population of Rochester dropped every decade between 1960 and 2010, and the crime rate is still ~4x the national average among cities over 100k. It stabilized in 2020 at 211k (or at least, didn't get worse; there are obvious confounders), but that's still a third of the population evaporating over those sixty years. Over half that exodus happened between 1970 and 1980, which at least sort of matches the causal arrow of the 1964 race riot.
> America had already gotten cars and suburbs by 1965.
In the relevant sense, this really isn't true. By 1980, a majority of households had 2 or more cars, but in 1960, a majority of households had 1 car, and over 20% had 0 cars. A 1 car household is unlikely to be transporting kids by car while a breadwinner is at work.
It's harder to measure the history of suburban population, since there haven't been good and consistent definitions of "suburban" as contrasted with "urban". But if you look at recent decades, you still see continued increase of suburbanization:
The first Levittown was only built in 1947, and while that first wave of suburbanization was pretty fast, it didn't make up a majority of the population until close to 2000.
> Car-hostile cities like NYC don't seem any better for children; if anything they're worse.
I don't think it's fair to describe NYC as a "car-hostile" city. The majority of streets are lined with free parking, and there are only a few pedestrian plazas. It's less car-friendly than much of the rest of the United States, but they haven't even yet started charging people for the use of streets for driving or parking, let alone charging market rates.
Also, I would want some statistical information to judge whether New York is actually worse for child freedom than the suburbs. What percentage of 10 year olds are *actually* allowed to wander more than 10 feet from home without adult supervision in suburbs and in New York? What percentage of 15 year olds?
Potentially relevant: it seems for Americans the rise in child-care time for both fathers and mothers, educated and uneducated, happened pretty suddenly in the 90s[1]. Maybe it was indeed fear of crime.
[1] Ramey, G., & Ramey, V. A. (2009). The rug rat race.
Given the tenor of the comments here, I'm fascinated by the possibility that reactionary American conservatism may actually break AGAINST car dependency.
It is exactly about the car/pedestrian issue for children and how general zoning and architectural decisions factor into this.
Kicker: When asked how pupils come to school, a japanese school director is visibly puzzled about the seemingly idiotic question: How else would they come to school other than walking?
Well, bear in mind education infrastructure has changed, too. It's much less common to have schoolbuses that it used to be. Neighborhood schools, meaning schools within walking distance, are rarer -- schools have become bigger and more complex, with lots of add-on services and professionalization, so they are situated at larger intervals. School start times have drifted earlier, so that in the winter it can sometimes be twilight at the time kids would set off. It's also the case that America in general experiences considerably more variable weather than the Netherlands - snow, sleet, big thunderstorms, very low temps -- and that helps shape American attitudes in general.
Social attitudes have become more critical, too: if you were to allow your kid to bike to school on a day with a 20% chance of rain, and it actually did rain on him on the way home, you might rightfully fear someone calling the police on you -- in the modern Zeitgeist allowing your 8-year-old to ride 6 blocks in the rain is pretty close to child abuse.
Finally, there's a synergistic effect. If most kids are taking the bike or walking to school, then that will encourage others to do it. You'll meet up with your friends, there will be crossing guards and a few parents around, the large numbers will give both the kids and the parents more confidence that they get to school and if there's any weirdness there will be help right there. On the other hand, as the numbers who arrive at school dwindle, at some point *that* becomes self-reinforcing also: the small numbers mean the school doesn't provide crossing guards, there aren't any random parents walking along every now and then, the kids are alone and they are more anxious, and parents are more anxious that if there is some mild weirdness the kid will be completely on his own. Plus people like to fit in, and if everyone or no one is having his kids walk to school, you will feel strange if you buck the trend.
Add me to the chorus of "nos" in this. I was there, and 1960s through early 1970s was Peak Car Culture in the United States. Outside of e.g. Manhattan, pretty much every adult drove everywhere, bicycles were strictly for kids and public transportation was strictly for the poor. Which means pretty much every residential neighborhood, urban, suburban, or rural, was laid out to support automobile traffic uber alles.
But kids were walking and riding their bicycles on the same streets, or adjacent sidewalks, and everybody took it for granted that this was normal. Possibly a 21st-century Dutchman would look at a 1960s American suburb and say "that's horribly pedestrian-unfriendly"; actual 1960s Americans were fine with it even for their unattended kids (beyond very young ages, of course).
Fear that the kids will become "drug-addicted pedophile love slaves", yes, we did have a bit of a moral panic about that in the 1980s. Also they might have been sacrificed in some horrible Satanic ritual. I don't think we've ever gotten over those two.
> Outside of e.g. Manhattan, pretty much every adult drove everywhere, bicycles were strictly for kids and public transportation was strictly for the poor.
This doesn't seem accurate. As of 1960, a majority of households had a single car, and 20% more had no cars. It doesn't seem plausible that a majority of adults would drive everywhere if nearly 70% of households had fewer cars than adults.
It's true that people were much more bullish on cars then than they are now, because cars were still new, and roads were more over-built and thus less congested, and so having a car to use all the time was much more aspirational and a status symbol than it is now. New neighborhoods were certainly being built around the car at that point.
But given that most neighborhoods at any given time were laid out in the several decades before that time, rather than in the current decade, it would take several decades for most neighborhoods to be built around the car.
#4: Concerning that all signs are starting to point towards the Ohio agenda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3fD5FPQBtI
Glad to see that someone else thought of the astronaut meme
The etizolam original post appears to be https://www.reddit.com/r/researchchemicals/comments/hftagw/etizolam_memory_loss_update/ FWIW.
> Doses of 4 mg or more may cause anterograde amnesia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etizolam
Scott, I think you may be confused on point #39. I (typical American Jew) was taught that the *Six Day War* was a spectacular Israeli victory / Arab defeat. The Yom Kippur War (six years later) was very nearly the end of the Jewish state.
If you want to see who won, consider how much of Egyptian territory was occupied by Israel in, say, September 1973, and how much is occupied today. The Egyptians knew that they could not recover the captured territory by a direct assault against Israel, backed by the US. What they settled on was an ingenious plan which was strategically aggressive but tactically defensive. The crossed the canal (a considerable military accomplishment) and dug in, waiting for the Israelis to exhaust themselves in the inevitable counter-attacks. This largely happened as planned, but, according to somewhat I met who was a junior officer at the time, the Egyptians became over-confident and advanced outside their SAM screen, after which the battle started to go the other way. When I visited the Egyptian Staff College some years ago, there was a frieze commemorating the crossing, as the operation which recovered the territory they had lost in 1967.
Only slightly inaccurate. The Egyptians did not become overconfident, the Syrians started losing, and the Egyptians attempted to advance in order to relieve pressure on them. Otherwise I believe you are correct.
That's another story I've heard, though not from a participant.
Right - if someone presents the Yom Kippur as an unambiguous victory for Israel, (a) I would like to see it, (b) I don't know what propagamda they have been smoking. Egypt achieved its goals, partly militarily and partly diplomatically. Israel succeeded at hanging on and not collapsing. You could say Syria failed.
We know it's a bad thing to win a battle but lose the war, and I think in the Yom Kippur war the same thing happened but one level up: Israel won the war, but lost its reputation of invincibility. Afterwards, Israel and Egypt could sign the Camp David accords and a peace treaty, if not as equals, then at least as states playing in the same league.
In 1967, the Arab armies were full of bravado and proceeded to be summarily defeated. In 1973, Israel was full of bravado and the Egyptians and Syrians managed to surprise Israel and totally overwhelm its first line of defence. Israel won the war in the end, but the Egyptians and Syrians regained their dignity. Moreover, the Israeli victory relied, in part, on emergency weapon shipments from the U.S., allowing the Egyptians to believe that they would have emerged victorious if it were not for the U.S.
In Israel, the memory of the war is complicated. The shock of the initial defeat and the heavy casualties dominate. But there is also pride in snatching victory from the jaws of defeat through some very hard fought battles, involving inspiring displays of bravery and improvisation in extreme circumstances.
Sounds like a reasonable way to remember the war, as collective memories war. However, speaking of an unambiguous Israeli victory and an unambiguous Egyptian defeat can be justified only on some cherry-picked technical definition. Even in purely military terms, the Egyptian army achieved and held onto one of its main objectives (Suez canal); then, at the negotiating table, it got essentially what it wanted. Israel got an expensive draw, paid with the lives of not a few young men, especially in comparison with its population.
#32: My fiancee woke up the other night, we conversed briefly, then she left the room and came back 5-10 minutes later. The next morning she told me she had no memory of it, and asserted that she was therefore unconscious during the time. On the other hand, it seems possible that she was conscious but not forming memories. I have no idea how you would disentangle these two possibilities.
There've been times when I'd get in to a state where I was able to form memories but not conscious - I'd be collapsed in a really uncomfortable position and a couple times people came up and started hitting or kicking me, but I didn't have any internal monologue or opinion on it at the time and didn't move or do anything about it.
That's very hard to wrap my head around. What can you have memories of if not your first person perspective?
It was my first person perspective, but just the raw sensory experience without any commentary. Like, if you ended up in some kind of situation where you couldn't move, your memory of that experience would include thinking about how to get out of that situation, or how you felt about it. In those moments, I had none of that.
Wow that's extremely interesting, thanks for sharing.
I think I read that when you black out drunk you are not unconscious, you stop forming memories. I seem to remember specifically that the conversion from short to long term memories is disrupted somehow. My own experience confirms this in the sense that when I’ve blacked out sometimes I start to uncover some memories of the night later during the day. The memories I recover confirm I was conscious at the time. More obviously: My mom is in her eighties and often forgets things but is not a zombie.
That’s indeed what “blacked out” means, as opposed to “passed out.” People aren’t very consistent about how they use the term, though.
This always fascinated me. In my harder partying youth, there were times I'd think "I wonder if I'm to drunk to remember this tomorrow." And then I'd think, "If I'm thinking this then it must be I'm not that drunk." But what always blew my mind is thinking how many times I'd thought that and not remembered it the next day. Trippy.
How do remember what you can't remember?
Wikipedia says Etizolam is known to cause retrograde amnesia, so that's probably what happened to that guy as well. (Albeit losing a week is more extreme than merely failing to record short-term memories.)
Kind of a boring answer compared to "Blindsight was right", I guess, although there are some interesting philosophical questions in amnesia and continuity of identity.
I remember - or should I say, I don't remember - falling asleep on a bicycle and waking up a few kilometers later, at the other end of a bumpy forest dirt road. And I'm nearly certain I fell asleep and not simply failed to form memories, because I was suffering from what I clearly recognize as symptoms of sleep deprivation at the time, and this made them go away the way they usually do once I manage to take a short nap.
My take is that our brains can really do a lot on an autopilot. Going through an entire workweek? Perhaps not, but I only see it as extremely unlikely rather than inconceivable. Even when we're conscious, a vast majority of our actions are automatic, many of them extremely complex, layering subprocedures over subprocedures. There are entire schools and practices aiming to enhance humans' awareness of what they're perceiving and doing, but most of us only really start consciously noticing things when something goes wrong and our automatic procedures all throw an exception.
My other take is that GPTs of the world are best conceived as this kind of autopilot without consciousness. For this reason, I don't find "GPT may make mistakes, but so do humans" a particularly convincing takedown of the AGI-through-deep-learning-skeptic position that some think it is. Humans make mistakes when the System 1 parts of their brains make them and System 2 fails to intervene. But it's the System 2 parts that we're thinking of when we imagine AGI, and currently it just doesn't seem we're getting any closer to it.
This reminds me of something I read.
Somewhere in the autobiography of C.S. Lewis, in the section about serving in the Army during World War I, he makes a comment about falling asleep while marching...and waking up while still marching.
At the time I first read it, I did not believe that this was a possible scenario. I thought he was engaging in exaggeration of some sort. It confused me, though. That sequence of stories didn't look like exaggeration: it was about how the military was bad in some ways, and life in school had been bad in other ways. People weren't expected to like life in the military; people were expected to like life in school. Neither the school stories nor the military stories felt like exaggerations.
This one event, falling asleep while marching, stuck out as something very odd.
But seeing stories like yours, I now suspect that Lewis experienced something similar. Sleep deprivation is not surprising among military men during wartime. Either napping-while-marching or losing-ability-to-form-memories-while-marching could have happened.
I saw a young man fall asleep while standing at attention with his eyes open while I was in the army. He was very confused when a sergeant, with some effort, managed to wake him up.
According to my wife I regularly talk in my sleep, and would have full conversations with her. If I speak with her after I go to bed, she ignores me until I prove I am actually awake. Often by quizzing me or just telling me to go back to sleep. I have apparently told her that I was awake and not sleeping during these exchanges, though I do not remember that.
I do this as well. Often it's as I'm falling asleep, and neither of us realizes I'm not conscious until I either say something ridiculous or stop responding altogether.
I usually start suddenly talking about food when I’m drifting off to sleep during a conversation with my wife.
I have been told that when I sleep-talk, I am aware that I am asleep and sometimes correct people who think I am awake.
I wish I could do that. My self-awareness isn't always that good even when I am awake.
My partner does this too. He falls asleep next to me on the couch while we're watching YouTube, and if I ask if he's asleep, he says no, but it's clear that he is, because when he's not asleep he will actually say something more contentful, either about the video or that it's time to go to bed or something. When he's asleep, it's just a flat denial that he's asleep and no more behavior.
What if you did form memories, but couldn't remember them? But later you did...
After I got my wisdom teeth out, I was taking opioids with no apparent effect. No symptoms, but pain didn't go away, either. The sutures in the back of my mouth bothered my tongue. So I pulled them out. It made total sense at the time!!! Then I completely forgot I'd done that. I only remembered that "the doctor will be mad." But I didn't know WHY I expected the doctor to be angry.
Six months later, I watched a medical show. ER doctor told her patient to come back to get the sutures taken out, or else they'd heal like a railroad. The memory of pulling out my sutures came rushing back, along with, "Ohhh, THAT'S why I thought the doctor would be mad!''
This is a thing that happens fairly regularly in the transition zones around sleep. I have had conversations with just woken people who assured me that yes, they were awake, and understood what I had said, and no, they weren't, and no, they didn't.
Seems to be a tradeoff between housework and childcare. That maps to my own childhood, where my mom would plop me in my playpen and go about cleaning the house. My DIL spends far less time cleaning the house and more time focusing on her daughter. And she tells me that you're only supposed to "containerize" your toddler for 10 minutes a day now.
This was my thought too. Modern parents feel compelled by society to fill their kids' time with quality interactions, and pediatricians recommend against bouncy chairs for >30 minutes and so on. Whenever I complain to my Boomer mother about my two toddlers keeping me busy, she tells me to plop them in a playpen and turn the TV on. I expect that a 1965 housewife doing that counted it as 'housework."
Boomer parents put their children into playpens when they're busy, but don't many of today's parents just put their children in front of a smartphone or tablet for the same reasons? Or is that just a stereotype?
There's something to that, but I see two significant differences. One is that a young child in a playpen is physically restrained in a small controlled environment, while a kid sitting on the sofa playing with a tablet is merely engaged in a stimulating activity. The latter requires at least a little more parental alertness, least the child put the tablet down and find something else to get into. In addition, young children playing on tablets will often ask for help or otherwise bid for parents' attention (source: my not-quite-5yo daughter) and current generations of parents tend to be disinclined to ignore them.
The other big difference is that there's a bunch of concern in current parenting culture about kids having "too much screen time", which I don't understand to have a clear counterpart with playpens.
Tangentially, we're mostly not talking about boomer parents with the "plop them in the playpen and ignore them" childcare technique. The earlier year in the chart is 1965, in which it's mostly the children, not the parents, who are boomers. Young parents of newborns in 1965 might be very early boomers (standard boomer birth years are 1946-1964), but most parents of minor children in 1965 would have been Silent or "Greatest" Generation.
This lines up with my anecdotal intergenerational comparison of parenting styles: my wife an I (born on the cusp between Gen X and Millennial) use tablets and stuff to buy time to multitask (or more often, just tag team who's on point for active child care. My parents (Boomers) used TV or Apple II games as distractions for me and my little sister: we had playpens, but they were used to allow parents to multitask (e.g. I remember my mother setting up my sister's playpen in the home office so she could split attention between work and taking care of my sister rather than needing to focus primarily on childcare) rather than as a total substitute for active childcare. My grandparents (Greatest Generation) are the ones who plopped younger kids in their playpens and ignored them, and who sent school-age kids out into the neighborhood to play until dinner.
In 1965, after we got home from school, we "went out to play," returned at dinner-time, and then did homework/watched TV/read until bedtime. Free range children were more the norm.
It's unclear to me (I suspect one of us needs to actually read this book to find out!) whether this is just aggregated across all ages of children or if they just looked at a certain age or what. Childcare for an infant or toddler is a lot different than it is for a 9-year-old, which is why we're here debating using a TV or tablet as a babysitter and time spent driving to soccer practice as all part of this. I'm assuming no parent answering this survey counted "making your 15-year-old help you fix the lawnmower" as childcare, even though it may be functionally similar to "entertaining your toddler while you fold laundry because he keeps poking his brother in the eye otherwise."
I had this same thought, though you could also argue people are more likely to describe these gray areas as "childcare" in surveys today, since a higher expectation is placed on spending lots of time with one's children.
There's something odd in the data, for sure, presumably as a result of question phrasing or averaging. Best case, parents together are spending 3 hours a daybon child care, assuming they're never overlapping? That's completely unreasonable for infants/toddlers, - even if they spend all day at daycare, you likely have an hour with them in the morning and two at night, and then they magically sleep all night, and what about weekends? I really suspect this data, while interesting, may have been collected to answer a very different sort of question and something weird is happening when it answers this one.
I think a lot of the difference in time could easily be explained just by the amount of time it now takes to drive children (and teens!) to the places that they would have gone to by themselves in 1965. This also includes daycare, and sometimes school.
I spent a good deal of time in the late 90s/early 00s being cared for by my grandparents, and they did not care where I was as long as I was back by 5:00.
Wandering around the swamp? Be back by five.
Riding bikes around the quarry? Be back by five.
Heading across the railroad tracks to the abandoned subdivision? Be back by five.
More interestingly, the actual *parents* on that street had similar views, so my cousin and I could reliably round up one or two other kids to go God knows where. Why were they so resistant to helicopter culture?
Whereas when I was a teen in the same time period, I wasn't even allowed to bike in the cul de sac in front of my own home, let alone go anywhere myself. This, even though I grew up literally in the middle of a county park full of hiking trails (at some point the county made the area a park and banned any further house building).
I hitchhiked every day, to and from school and everywhere else from about 11 years old till H.S. graduation. Some great experiences:
Two lesbians took me to a nude beach for the first time (12yrs and had no awareness such a thing existed). One guy and 5 girls took me out to a breakfast my parents never could have afforded (champagne and crab omelette at 14yrs). They proffered this invitation after I tried to bum a smoke and then offered to smoke them out when they were taken aback. (Marin County California)....
Israeli conception of the Yom Kippur War is almost a national trauma - treated as a big failure (mostly intelligence-wise) that nearly led to destruction and we survived only through sheer luck and tenacity. Many lives were needlessly lost. An investigative committee was formed, heads rolled, cultural and political landscapes changed dramatically (in 1977 the socialist Labor party was overturned after 20 years of rule since independence).
OTOH, Egypt, although the invasion eventually failed and was pushed back, treats it as a great military success that led to the eventual return of the Sinai peninsula in the peace treaty several years later (essentially, the war of 1973 was seen as restoring the honor lost in 1967).
I (Israeli) agree with this comment and other comments on the Yom Kippur war. While it is considered an Israeli victory, it is treated as something that almost wiped out the country, and a massive failure in preparation. It is *still* often referenced in various contexts in the army as a lesson we need to learn from.
Also, relatedly, the Yom Kippur attack is considered kind of a dick move, for lack of a better term, from the Arab side, since they chose to attack on Yom Kippur. For anyone that doesn't know, this is a day in which a big part of the population is fasting (a bigger percentage in the more-religious '70s, I imagine.) And on that day, no one is driving. It's like attacking the States on July 4th or December 25th or something, but even worse since the country is effectively shut down on that day.
(Side note, I think rationally the much bigger problem is the "starting a war" part, not the timing of it, but it feels so much worse that they started it on Yom Kippur.)
Famously George Washington made a surprise attack during the American revolutionary war on Christmas day. It was taught to me in school as a turning point in the war and a kind of clever strategic thing to do. I've always been a little surprised I've never seen a Christian (or any) American criticize it.
Setting aside the fact that the Americans weren't fighting for the defense/liberation of a Christian homeland in response to persecution around the world/as an attempt to reclaim an area they once dominated making religion more or less irrelevant in the context of the actual fighting during the Revolution as the primary reason no one squawks about this, had he done it on Easter Sunday, then maybe they might grumble a bit given Easter is the holiest/most important day in the Christian holiday calendar, not Christmas. I could go on about what Christianity/Protestantism/various sects demands versus asks in regards to worship, work, and holidays (a sticky wicket given there are so many ways to slice and dice it), but I think the point about GW's strategy holds, in war doing the unexpected and taking advantage of an enemy's assumptions is the smart move even if the other side thinks it's unfair.
Hence the old meme of the famous painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware, captioned "America: We will kill you in your sleep on Christmas".
I'm probably a bit more aware of the Battle of Trenton than most, though, both from being a history buff and from my personal connection to the battle: I'm probably distantly related to the Hessian commander at that battle, Colonel Johan Rall.
It probably helps that these were hated foreign mercenaries/invaders and the Americans were defending their homeland. If a man breaks into your house on Christmas morning, threatens your family, kicks your dog, then sits down and starts eating your ham, is it rude to come up behind him, club him over the head, and throw him out? Must you let him rise to his feet for a fair fight?
By contrast, if Pearl Harbor had happened on Christmas, it would probably be remembered as even more dastardly.
The Easter Rising in Ireland began on Easter Monday, and I've never heard about anyone in England complaining about the date. Britain itself launched perhaps the worlds first carrier based air raid on German airship bases on Christmas day 1914. No one on either side was bothered by that, either.
Now, if Washington had broken a truce, I'm sure the other side would have been very condemnatory. As it is, his act was just another act of war, no worse than any other act by the rebellious side. The rebels might be accused of treason for rebelling in the first place, not for the date on which this particular act of rebellion occurred.
Egypt didn't choose to start the attack during Yom Kippur. The attack was supposed to start weeks earlier and the delay seriously threatened the secrecy of the operation.
Interestingly, I read an argument that Yom Kippur turned out to be the best possible time for mobilizing reserves, once the initial shock was over - the streets were empty and there were no problems getting in touch with reservists because they were all at their local synagogue.
Yep, an Egyptian Prof. (ex-colleague of mine) was quite angry about my suggestion that Israel had won that war - as it did all the others. I read up on wikipedia, and yeah, it was a kinda mixed result. Still, he refused to compromise; said that war was a national triumph for Egypt. - I travelled the Sinai a bit - sandbox, not much there worth fighting for. Shakespeare eternal:
Truly to speak, and with no addition,
We go to gain a little patch of ground
That hath in it no profit but the name.
To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it;
Nor will it yield to Norway or the Pole
A ranker rate, should it be sold in fee.
Hamlet. Why, then the Polack never will defend it?! -
Norwegian Captain. Yes, it is already garrison'd!
> I’m a bit confused here; weren’t many 1965 moms stay-at-home? Don’t many moms use daycare now? How is childcare so much more time-consuming?
Huh, I guess you must really be disconnected from modern parenting trends. My mom was a stay-at-home mom, but in the '70s and '80s parents didn't really spend time playing with their kids. We (kids) didn't come home after school until it was dinner time. We went to our friends' houses and wandered around the neighborhood.
That shit *does not happen anymore.* Parents spend massive amounts of time with their children now. Parenting is incredibly intensive. The whole thing is totally insane, but you can't really opt out of it, because there's nowhere for the kids to go.
> because there's nowhere for the kids to go.
I wonder if this is different for city vs. country. I remember my sister and her friends taking me to the swamp. Was it ok because it was a small town, or ok because it was the '80s?
The 80s. I live in a small town and never see kids anywhere outside. They all must be somewhere, but I don't know where.
Funny because everyday I walk past a sign that says "drive slow, children at play," but I have yet to see a single child playing anywhere near that sign.
They are inside playing with devices. I'm not saying this to sound like a cranky old man. It's just true.
We had video game systems when I was a kid, starting with the Atari 2600, continuing on through the Nintendo 64, etc. We played them a reasonable amount, but I don't remember playing with them much in high school. They were kids' toys, not "entertainment systems." And even when we were kids, they didn't really replace time spent outside. Of course, there was no internet, no mobile devices, no social networks.
To be clear, I don't think that technology is the root cause here. My daughter is too young for social networks and doesn't have a phone or tablet. She still doesn't leave the house by herself. There are a lot of things going on.
I was in Montclair NJ this summer and daily saw groups of kids riding bicycles around town unsupervised. Fantastic, felt like I had gone back in time.
I just got back from several days dogsitting for a friend in a subdivision, which is specifically designed to encourage kids and families to get outside. There are public playgrounds dotted throughout, plus park benches, ponds and streams, and even little exercise stations. And of course you got bike trails connecting everything.
I would say it's a modest success. Often when I take the dog for a walk I see families outside together, but most of the unsupervised kids are teenagers, and I rarely see anyone at the playgrounds.
My own 80s-90s childhood was spent growing up on a property with a pear orchard and horse pasture in a sparse neighborhood. I had a next-door neighbor friend who would go with me down the hill to a small forest with a decent-sized pond and a hawk nest. I guess you could say we were free-range kids since we were allowed to go outside of shouting distance, but our parents knew where we were (which sounds like common sense anyway), and we were never more than about 15-20 minutes away.
It's not just small towns. I grew up in the inner-ring suburbs, so definitely not the city but also not picket fences and cul de sacs. When I was still a pre-teen, I would walk over a mile to the nearest train station and take the train to downtown proper (where the train became the subway). What we did in the city was surprisingly tame (mostly hanging around in food courts), but my parents had no idea where we were, and we could have been absolutely anywhere.
This trend predates the 80s. My mother grew up in Jersey City, long before it was a gentrified outpost of Manhattan. As a teenager she would take a bus into the West Village of Manhattan, long before it was an upscale hipster enclave. She spent her time there smoking cigarettes and mixing it up with degenerates, and then headed back out to JC.
Parents today drive their kids everywhere now and think (probably correctly) that having them walk or bike someplace on their own is unsafe. A huge amount of transportation time suck
>think (probably correctly) that having them walk or bike someplace on their own is unsafe
Is there any evidence that this is (probably correct)? Everything I can find says that crime and child mortality are on the decline across the country.
As far as I can tell this is about *perception* not reality. People think it's more dangerous, despite it not being, so they've stopped doing it. Also something about how you're perceived by neighbors "oh they're the people that don't care for their kids."
I'd say it depends on the reason. Cars are bigger than they used to be, and there are more of them. Probably this risk is overstated by many parents, but I don't think it's totally crazy to be concerned about it.
If the thing you are worried about is child abduction, yeah, that's just bonkers.
I think it's partially unfounded concerns based on anecdotal news reports or rumors, combined with a social perception problem.
"Good" parents care for their children and are highly involved all the time. If you don't do so then you're not a "good" parent and subject to whatever social pressures there are to conform
Cars have way way better brakes than they used to, though, which I expect to dominate. Risk today is far lower than 50 years ago, but risk tolerance seems to have dropped faster than actual risk.
Relevant video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw
It's unsafe from a walking perspective. Newer suburbs don't have sidewalks and the proliferation of "stroads," four+ lane roads with heavy traffic, makes crossing through neighborhoods dangerous. There are a lot of places where you can't get to the house behind your own without jumping a fence or driving a literal mile.
We're also moving away from cars to trucks with very high grills and poor sightlines, making it especially unsafe for children. Pedestrian deaths have increased dramatically in the US.
Pedestrian deaths have increased dramatically since their 2009 low point, but they're still lower than at any time from 1975-1990 (and this chart just doesn't have data before 1975): https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedestrians
There's a denominator problem that's a bit hard to figure out though - overall population has gone up in this time, which suggests that things are even safer now compared to the 70s than these absolute numbers suggest. But walking for transportation has gone down, and if it has gone down enough, even with overall population growth, then it could be that lower absolute numbers translate to higher risk per hour walking.
I was about to bow out of this conversation because anything more I might have to contribute would require digging for sources, but you've arrived with sources and data, so now I'm obsolete :)
My intuition is that the steep decline in pedestrian deaths for children under 13 represents an equivalent retreat away from them walking anyplace. Possibly with the rise of reduction in drunk driving, which would make the rise in overall pedestrian deaths since 2009 make sense: drunk driving goes down, but mobile phone-related accidents go up as smart phones start to proliferate and cars get interactive computer screens.
I think you are wrong about newer suburbs, that trend turned around a decade or two ago.
I’m in Phoenix, and every suburb has sidewalks. Most of them have little parks and playgrounds too. Trend is at least 2 decades old, since that’s the age of my suburb, which is itself not one of the older ones with this feature.
I keep getting the feeling that very few readers of ACX have children...hmmmm.
The cars are not the problem. Blaming this on cars is utter misderected BS. Hyper-zealous safety regulations are the problem.
In Los Angeles, I know that every school of which I am aware (both public and private -- to be clear, I do not have children, just obs of people/friends who do) every school REQUIRES that every child be seen getting into a vehicle driven by a parent or trusted (there is a list) guardian, or an official school bus, and must also arrive that way. All private schools have gates and guards to screen pickup/dropoff vehicles. (One near my work even has a mandatory bomb-scanning stop, just like US Federal Courthouses.)
Children are not allowed to leave school property otherwise, at the penalty of criminal charges, and a child arriving on foot or otherwise without a parent/officer triggers a mandatory report to Family Services and often the Police.
There is no legal possibility of children riding bikes or walking or any independent means, the whole society is deluded into thinking DANGEROUS.
I have a longer more hopeful anecdote regarding this, but that must come later.
EDIT/Update:
I thought further and realized that Yes, there is one private school that does not require this, right down my street. But I live in a very close/old Armenian neihborhood, these kids probably walk at most six blocks home ... I saw twenty of them hanging out at the local Hot Chicken stand this afternoon.
And Public schools are not that strict, I apologize for hyperbole. Still, I will estimate that ~50% of children at public schools are picked up and dropped off, and there is special traffic control and LAPD officers tasked to this every day.
Among the laptop class, both law and withering social pressure, and 99% also the rules of the $$$ private school, require absolute chain-of-custody for all children.
BR
Yikes, this is not my personal experience, but I live in MN and maybe the rules are more lax?
My 9 year old walks to school every day with a group of neighborhood kids. But I do think that's atypical for many parents these days.
Even in the same country, in the same city, living on a different street can make a huge difference... which you probably only realize after you buy your home.
From my sister's home, you can get to the nearest playground without crossing a road. The playground is visible from a window. So my sister can just tell her child to go to the playground, and once in a while look out from the window to confirm that everything is okay.
From my home, the playground is near, but you need to cross a road, and the playground is behind other houses, so I cannot see it from my window. I do not trust my 4 years old to cross a road safely... she often pays attention to the traffic, but sometimes does not and just runs. So we accompany our kids to the playground. (There I typically just ignore them and read a book while they play.)
Similarly, from my sister's home, you can get to a school by crossing a low-traffic road. From my home, although the school is only 10 minutes of walk away, you need to cross two large high-traffic intersections and a few smaller ones, that is about eight pedestrian crossings, some of them with street lights, some of them without. This feels a bit too much even for a 7 years old.
My experience could be quite different if I bought my home just a few streets away. But at that moment, I did not consider these things.
That makes complete sense, both from the experience for looking after your kids, and not thinking about it when buying a house.
#1:
I have often thought these complex and difficult to make dodecahedrons were used as a note of rank or of an internal order of ranking within the military. They are very commonly found on battlefields and I reckon it was some internal order which needed a way to identify each other, perhaps becoming somewhat ceremonial over time.
Perhaps an internal spy/intelligence order of men mixed in with the other soldiers. Or perhaps as a simple rank insignia. These objects were hard to make and therefore difficult to counterfeit. Perhaps the spies and the scouting teams were mixed along with many of them being promoted over time. The Romans had a long history of various secret orders within their ranks and special rites and such within their military ranks. A perfect place for a curio to appear.
The location of the finds of these objects on battlefields and military caches is rather telling and the knitting thing obviously holds no water as they couldn't/didn't' knit. Though a fishing explanation or survival tool might make sense as a possible, though perhaps not plausible explanation.
While we may think of such objects or practices as something readily exploited, there were very limited games of advanced statecraft in that era. It wasn't as if the more decentralised Celtic peoples, as Julius Caesar called them, were going to be able to manufacture such objects or fit in with the ethnically different Roman soldiers. And even if they could, who would they report to on some long term spying operation...their village head somewhere in rural France or Germany?
I'd expect a military insignia to be flat so you can wear it more easily. These things seem like they would be kind of awkward to wear.
Might be less of an insignia and more akin to challenge coins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenge_coin
33. Do moms feel the need to show greater care for their children relative to dads? Does trying to close the parenting gap just set off an arms race of wasteful signaling?
Parents do so much today as they feel kids need to be attended to all the time. Plus driving (I rant about that in the post below this one).
Probably, in the same way the housework gap is (aside from being working more hours) a product of women being more concerned about cleanliness than men.
Re: 33 (more parenting hours), I'm not a parent and haven't studied this, but it seems likely that cars explain a lot of that. There's a video on Twitter comparing kids coming to school in rural Netherlands and suburban America. All the Dutch kids ride their bikes, all the American kids are driven by parents. As we built increasing pedestrian-hostile spaces, more parents feel they have to drive their kids everywhere. I'm old enough that I walked almost everywhere as a kid (and, living in Chicago, still do). Also, I've worked with people who are certain if their kids don't have activities from the moment they wake up to the second they go to bed, they'll become drug-addicted pedophile love slaves. And that's not entirely exaggeration.
All that mom-ubering and drug-addiction prevention adds up.
(Bias note: I think Americans would be significantly better off if we mandated Netherlands-/Swiss-style infrastructure across the country: the car made us lonely, destroyed our communities, and steals all of our time. )
would be interesting to see data on parenting hours in a place like New York (or DC etc). While I think your car-driving theory is interesting, I also wouldn't be surprised if NYC parents spent as much time parenting as suburban parents.
The Netherlands is flatter than a lot of the US, and has a more moderate climate.
The comparison video I saw used a North Carolina suburban location for traffic, and the Netherlands has. It wasn't hilly and the autumn weather wasn't severe. It's also worth noting that in countries with extreme weather, if they have good cycling infrastructure (e.g., Finland), people cycle in almost all weather. They plow the bike paths before the roads in some cities! Car dependence is a choice our urban planners and citizens make, not something inherent to our geography.
You were talking about the whole US. Some of it's flat or fairly flat. Some of it's hilly or very hilly. Being able to handle cold weather isn't the same thing as being able to handle hot weather.
Central San Francisco is famously hilly, and would be eminently bikable were it not for the cars. It's just a matter of mindset. The body adapts very quickly.
Not everyone has the potential to adapt, but there are powered bikes these days. On the other hand, what cities are very hilly but actually good for cycling?
Seattle has been a cycling leader for a long time—lots of riders there. There are places in Colorado with very rich cycling cultures.
But it feels like you're trying to defend cars by looking where bikes aren't practical. Bikes are fantastic, but they're not the only alternative to cars that are kid-friendly. Switzerland is bike friendly, but its real transit genius is its trains, which are so good, everybody takes them. Even a city that's borderline too hot for human habitation (like Phoenix is likely to become) could have trains and buses to get around. It might require that we change land use rules (e.g., abandon single family home zoning and parking minimums), but we could do it if we wanted to.
How is that going to work in farmland Nebraska, where it's 1/4 mile to the end of the driveway, a mile to the first neighbor's house, and 10 miles to town (and the school)? It feels like this attitude is informed by living in a dense urban area, without much experience of the large swathes of the United States that aren't that way at all.
I want to say obviously, no solution is going to apply to everyplace. But maybe that isn't obvious. In this case, though, truly rural areas are likely to depend on cars even in the most ideal scenarios. However, both Switzerland and the Netherlands provide robust public transit to their rural areas (which means mountainous areas in Switzerland), so for most Americans, we could do much better.
BTW, I grew up in rural America and I walked to or rode my bike to school. I had to go some distance, but that developed fitness habits I'm very happy to have today. Granted, I wasn't in an area so rural that the closest school was ten miles away, but very few Americans live in areas that sparsely populated.
I don't think either the Netherlands nor Switzerland is an appropriate model for rural America. These are both countries the size of the smallest US states, like Maryland or New Jersey. California has counties that are bigger than either country, and of course a mere rural county has a tiny fraction of the tax base and resources of a wealthy small country like either the Netherlands or Switzerland. The idea of running trains all over the US countryside, the way Switzerland does -- which is certainly marvelous, I've ridden the system and marveled at it -- is just wholly impractical. It would require economies (and tax bases) 10-100 times as large.
I don't know what you mean by "very few" but the USDA says 14% of Americans live in rural counties. 1 out of 7 doesn't exactly strike me as "very few." They are also, of course, a rather essential group of people, since they provide all the food we eat.
Rural counties aren't defined by living 10 miles from the nearest school. That's very low density.
While I hinted at it in my last response, I suppose I should be clear that when I said I would like to see car-centric urban planning abolished, I didn't mean that literally for all of the US. I don't think anybody I know of in urban planning/pedestrian-and-bike advocacy circles wants to make people in low density rural areas give up their cars for bikes-n-buses. But we could have much better transit (and housing) than we do in most areas, and one of the results would be fewer parents engaged in this madness:
https://twitter.com/grescoe/status/1564249783325364224?s=20&t=pASyNwBAGqbKJV9BAt2K-g
This is true. But 2020s US is no less flat than 1960s US.
Strong disagree.
America had already gotten cars and suburbs by 1965. Car-hostile cities like NYC don't seem any better for children; if anything they're worse.
I think the specific move from free-range kids to parent control happened as a result of fear of crime; both the very real increase in general crime from 1960-1990, and an exaggerated panic around child kidnapping sometime in the 70s or 80s. I wouldn't have thought that in itself was enough to change the parenting hours the way the graph shows, but it was a pretty big transition.
(Caveat, I'm not an urban historian, so I may be slightly off on my facts, but I feel confident in them)
1) Suburbs were built differently in the 50s and 60s—they were closer in and more urban. That's certainly in evidence in the Chicago metro area where I live. They have sidewalks, corner stores, etc.
2) As state departments of transportation expanded their role into cities and suburbs, they've prioritized cars (to the point where they actively fight against resident wishes). The roads are appreciably less safe, especially as big box retail came to prominence, which creates all sorts of flow problems and congestion.
3) Kids used to take school busses to school. Apparently, not so much anymore. That's a huge timesuck for parents.
4) Demand for "safe" kid activities means driving your kids about. My suburban friends with kids are car moms from 3 pm to 7 pm most days.
5) Yeah, I wouldn't deny fears over crime contributes to this, but it's kind of weird how that really only became a thing well after crime was declining significantly, suggesting there's something else behind it. I won't claim its cars, although building a "community" where nobody interacts with each other isn't going to create a lot of trust.
6) Most of NYC isn't really anti-car, and while better than many suburban places, relative to places that have emphasized pedestrian and non-motorized or public transit, it is only so-so. People in other countries rightfully feel much safer sending their kids out into the world unaccompanied because you don't need a fully developed brain to deal with the treats. I mean, Japan has a show where they send little kids to do errands. And driving in Amsterdam is better than driving in most American cities because there's less traffic and better flow engineering.
School buses are declining? That's news to me; any idea why?
Cost. Labor, mostly.
Also because your kids are trapped on the bus with assholes.
In our city, if you live within 2 miles of your assigned school, there is no bus service. There are also no sidewalks. Thus, we drive our kids the 1.75 miles to and from school each day. Also, its not just DRIVING kids to activities - I can't just drop my kid at soccer practice. I have to sit there in the parking lot for 3 hours a week due to liability concerns if he gets injured while playing, plus another 2 hour game on the weekend. That kind of crap is a massive time suck that you can't get out of unless your kid just doesn't participate in any extracurricular activities.
That sounds very stupid and yet it does not surprise me.
There's probably a chicken-and-egg issue. More parents are driving their kids to school, which causes less demand for buses, which makes buses more expensive to provide per kid, which causes cuts to buses, which causes more parents to drive their kids.
there is another chicken-and-egg issue in parallel: people don't trust their kids to ride the bike to school because there is so much traffic, but half of the traffic around school at this time is parents driving their kids to school.
I lived a couple blocks from a school when I was in Los Angeles. I would commute to USC on bike, but I learned that even if my work on campus was done at 2:30, I shouldn't head home then, because I would likely be arriving in the most dangerous moment of the day, when parents in cars are looking for their kid, and not likely to see anything else in front of them.
Our kids ride the school bus. When i was a kid, we'd get on the bus right outside our house. The drive let us off by ourselves, and we'd walk in.
Now, the district says you need a parent at the stop when the kids get off.
> but it's kind of weird how that really only became a thing well after crime was declining significantly, suggesting there's something else behind it?
What if the 'something else' is that people have simply become more fearful and risk averse?
I think that's true—my male friends with kids report going to the park with their kids means being treated as potential sex offenders, and parents who send their kids to school on public transit or let them walk unaccompanied are sometimes investigated by child protection services. However, the why of it baffles me. What made North Americans become so afraid of letting their kids have freedom?
I don't think it's only North Americans. Maybe Americans are ahead of the curve, but I think the trend happens in many places. Definitely also the UK, and maybe delayed or more slowly in other places, but I'd guess it still happens.
I wonder also if part of it is all the extra-curricular activities children seem to be engaged in. Some of it is probably interest on the child's part, and some activities really do help with confidence building and socialisation, but there does seem to be this drive to "you need to do a sport and an instrument and something else to build up your resume when you are applying for college", and that means a lot of driving the kids around to drop them off for activities then pick them up again, as well as making sure they have their sports kit, instrument, whatever else they need for the activity, and then maybe showing up for the school concerts and matches and the rest of it.
That's a good point. My youth was far less structured, and we often had many hours a day of unrestricted free time. With no internet and no ability to drive ourselves, we spent a lot of time wandering the neighborhood and woodland areas near our house.
Well you kind of need to work to get their little fannies out of the house these days, because the computer and the smartphone sing their siren song[1]. When I was a kid, it was impossible to *keep* me in the house. What am I going to do? Stare at the walls? Read, yeah I guess, but not all freaking day. So I'd be out of the house when I got home from school as fast as I could change my clothes, looking for some trouble...er...adventure with my friends.
-----------------
[1] It's not even that antisocial: they meet up with their friends online and play games. Heck, I've had siblings sit in adjacent bedrooms and meet online to play games. "Tell your sister it's time for dinner." "OK, I'll just drop a note into the game chat." Say what? She's right next door...? What a strange world the future is going to be.
You seem like 20 years behind the times. State DoTs have been pretty anti-car for a good 10-20 years.
Also, car-friendly and pedestrian-friendly aren't *necessarily* mutually exclusive. I live in walking distance of (1) a highway, (2) a grocery store, and (3) the local public high school.
Fear of crime wouldn't surprise me as a cause (though it's unlikely to be the *only* cause); the population of Rochester dropped every decade between 1960 and 2010, and the crime rate is still ~4x the national average among cities over 100k. It stabilized in 2020 at 211k (or at least, didn't get worse; there are obvious confounders), but that's still a third of the population evaporating over those sixty years. Over half that exodus happened between 1970 and 1980, which at least sort of matches the causal arrow of the 1964 race riot.
It's all fear. And laws and regulations encoding and enforcing the fear.
> America had already gotten cars and suburbs by 1965.
In the relevant sense, this really isn't true. By 1980, a majority of households had 2 or more cars, but in 1960, a majority of households had 1 car, and over 20% had 0 cars. A 1 car household is unlikely to be transporting kids by car while a breadwinner is at work.
https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-transport-challenges/household-vehicles-united-states/
It's harder to measure the history of suburban population, since there haven't been good and consistent definitions of "suburban" as contrasted with "urban". But if you look at recent decades, you still see continued increase of suburbanization:
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/demographic-and-economic-trends-in-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/
And in 1960, the US was still 40% *rural*, which was down to 20% by 2010, so the suburban population must have been substantially smaller in 1960:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States
The first Levittown was only built in 1947, and while that first wave of suburbanization was pretty fast, it didn't make up a majority of the population until close to 2000.
> Car-hostile cities like NYC don't seem any better for children; if anything they're worse.
I don't think it's fair to describe NYC as a "car-hostile" city. The majority of streets are lined with free parking, and there are only a few pedestrian plazas. It's less car-friendly than much of the rest of the United States, but they haven't even yet started charging people for the use of streets for driving or parking, let alone charging market rates.
Also, I would want some statistical information to judge whether New York is actually worse for child freedom than the suburbs. What percentage of 10 year olds are *actually* allowed to wander more than 10 feet from home without adult supervision in suburbs and in New York? What percentage of 15 year olds?
Potentially relevant: it seems for Americans the rise in child-care time for both fathers and mothers, educated and uneducated, happened pretty suddenly in the 90s[1]. Maybe it was indeed fear of crime.
[1] Ramey, G., & Ramey, V. A. (2009). The rug rat race.
Given the tenor of the comments here, I'm fascinated by the possibility that reactionary American conservatism may actually break AGAINST car dependency.
RETVRN TO WALKABILITY
I broke reactionary and against car dependency a long time ago, so there's at least one datum!
Listen to this 99% Invisible Podcast episode: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/first-errand/
It is exactly about the car/pedestrian issue for children and how general zoning and architectural decisions factor into this.
Kicker: When asked how pupils come to school, a japanese school director is visibly puzzled about the seemingly idiotic question: How else would they come to school other than walking?
Well, bear in mind education infrastructure has changed, too. It's much less common to have schoolbuses that it used to be. Neighborhood schools, meaning schools within walking distance, are rarer -- schools have become bigger and more complex, with lots of add-on services and professionalization, so they are situated at larger intervals. School start times have drifted earlier, so that in the winter it can sometimes be twilight at the time kids would set off. It's also the case that America in general experiences considerably more variable weather than the Netherlands - snow, sleet, big thunderstorms, very low temps -- and that helps shape American attitudes in general.
Social attitudes have become more critical, too: if you were to allow your kid to bike to school on a day with a 20% chance of rain, and it actually did rain on him on the way home, you might rightfully fear someone calling the police on you -- in the modern Zeitgeist allowing your 8-year-old to ride 6 blocks in the rain is pretty close to child abuse.
Finally, there's a synergistic effect. If most kids are taking the bike or walking to school, then that will encourage others to do it. You'll meet up with your friends, there will be crossing guards and a few parents around, the large numbers will give both the kids and the parents more confidence that they get to school and if there's any weirdness there will be help right there. On the other hand, as the numbers who arrive at school dwindle, at some point *that* becomes self-reinforcing also: the small numbers mean the school doesn't provide crossing guards, there aren't any random parents walking along every now and then, the kids are alone and they are more anxious, and parents are more anxious that if there is some mild weirdness the kid will be completely on his own. Plus people like to fit in, and if everyone or no one is having his kids walk to school, you will feel strange if you buck the trend.
Add me to the chorus of "nos" in this. I was there, and 1960s through early 1970s was Peak Car Culture in the United States. Outside of e.g. Manhattan, pretty much every adult drove everywhere, bicycles were strictly for kids and public transportation was strictly for the poor. Which means pretty much every residential neighborhood, urban, suburban, or rural, was laid out to support automobile traffic uber alles.
But kids were walking and riding their bicycles on the same streets, or adjacent sidewalks, and everybody took it for granted that this was normal. Possibly a 21st-century Dutchman would look at a 1960s American suburb and say "that's horribly pedestrian-unfriendly"; actual 1960s Americans were fine with it even for their unattended kids (beyond very young ages, of course).
Fear that the kids will become "drug-addicted pedophile love slaves", yes, we did have a bit of a moral panic about that in the 1980s. Also they might have been sacrificed in some horrible Satanic ritual. I don't think we've ever gotten over those two.
But the cars weren't the problem.
> Outside of e.g. Manhattan, pretty much every adult drove everywhere, bicycles were strictly for kids and public transportation was strictly for the poor.
This doesn't seem accurate. As of 1960, a majority of households had a single car, and 20% more had no cars. It doesn't seem plausible that a majority of adults would drive everywhere if nearly 70% of households had fewer cars than adults.
It's true that people were much more bullish on cars then than they are now, because cars were still new, and roads were more over-built and thus less congested, and so having a car to use all the time was much more aspirational and a status symbol than it is now. New neighborhoods were certainly being built around the car at that point.
But given that most neighborhoods at any given time were laid out in the several decades before that time, rather than in the current decade, it would take several decades for most neighborhoods to be built around the car.