Things that make you go "WTF?"

[unixronin]

Something I've thought about before, and which Pirate asked about on the way to the school bus stop this morning.  Most states these days have mandatory seat-belt laws for everyone.  Here in New Hampshire, seat belt use is recommended for everyone, but still mandatory for children (up to age 18, actually).  You can be cited and fined for not having a seat belt on your child.

So how come school buses don't have seat belts?

On a slightly different subject, NPR reported on the way back from the bus stop that medical insurers in New Hampshire are considering not paying hospitals to treat conditions caused by medical errors.

Sure makes sense to me... if I'm a mechanic, and I'm working on your car, and I fuck something up that was fine when you brought the car in, you should expect it to get fixed on my dime, not yours.  Why should a hospital be any different?

Comments

[fatcook.livejournal.com]

DFIK!
I've asked that question myself, and have been stonewalled by the both the school board and administration.

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

The rationales I've heard are:

1. The marginal safety gain will be small. School buses are one of the safest modes of transport on the road, with the injury and death rate per passenger-mile much smaller than that of private automobiles transporting children to school.

2. Cost. Equipping buses with belts is gonna cost money that some school districts can't afford. Coupled with (1.) above, the marginal lives saved per dollar spent will not be worth it.

3. Expected poor compliance. Herding school children is like herding cats. Can you picture getting an entire bus full of them to fasten their seat belts?

4. The time involved in making sure everyone is belted in before the bus moves will result in unacceptable delays in already tight schedules. Not only that, other road users are prohibited from passing the stopped school bus, thus creating delays for other road users.

5. The belts and buckles will make nice weapons for the kids to hit each other in the head with.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The first two, I can see. The third, not so much. I'd think it's going to just reinforce what they should be learning from their parents anyway.

"You wear your seatbelt in your parents' car, right?"
"Uh, yeah ..."
"Then you can wear it on my bus."

I don't see much to #4. Typically only a few kids get on and off at each stop, and it's not like they all have to line up to fasten and undo their seat belts. That operation parallelizes insanely well.

#5 ... well, there's a point, but isn't the driver supposed to keep the kids from fighting on the bus anyway? Far as I've heard, if your kid starts fights on the bus more than about once or twice, the bus company will tell you, "Your kid's not riding the bus any more, take him to school yourself."

[7leaguebootdisk.livejournal.com]

Here in CA it just would not be much of a win, at least not for full sized buses, but we don't have many mountains for them to drive off. They are twice as safe as any other states (well, 20 years ago when I drove them they were), but that is because they make the driver get out and escort the students when they cross the street, unlike every other state. The majority of fatal school bus accidents occur out side the bus (7 or 8 year old boy on a Tuesday going under the bus after something they dropped after getting off).

Given how few car drivers payed attention to my cross over lights (some ignored me with my stop sign, driving around me.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

[CA school buses] are twice as safe as any other states (well, 20 years ago when I drove them they were), but that is because they make the driver get out and escort the students when they cross the street, unlike every other state.

Here in NH, the drivers aren't allowed to have kids under 10 years old cross the street. If there's kids that need to get off on the other side of the street, the driver has to go up, turn around, and let them off on the other side on the way back. The parents up here in Gilford Acres get to drop kids off at the end of Mountain Drive in the morning, but in the afternoon we can pick the elementary-school kids up five minutes earlier by picking them up at the mouth of Area Drive, a hundred feet down 11A on the other side. The one local parent who walks still picks up at Mountain Drive, not to have to cross 11A.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Because people don't die as often when the mechanic refuses to fix their car for free.

Unless hospitals are ORDERED (or bullied, by lawsuits) to fix problems stemming from medical errors, I suspect plenty of people will die. Fixing medical errors is really, really expensive, after all, and hospitals are businesses.

That said I have no sympathy for the medical insurers here. They're defining a new, very amorphous category of things they won't cover -- just like they always do, because it helps *their* bottom line.

Why do we let companies determine our health, again?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Unless hospitals are ORDERED (or bullied, by lawsuits) to fix problems stemming from medical errors, I suspect plenty of people will die. Fixing medical errors is really, really expensive, after all, and hospitals are businesses.

That's a simple problem to solve. You just tell hospitals, "If you make a medical error and you DON'T make all reasonable efforts to make it good, on your tab, you can kiss your certification goodbye. Your patients are not responsible for eating the cost of your mistakes."


(Which, of course, does come under bully them to do it, I suppose.)


That aside, though, come on, surely the public goodwill of being known as a hospital that accepts responsibility for fixing its own medical errors counts for a lot more, in the long run, than the cost of fixing them. If the cost of correcting its mistakes is more than the value of that goodwill, it's probably not a hospital you want to risk going to anyway.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Hospitals are funny. They're essentially a public utility with an implicit monopoly. Very few people have a good choice of hospitals, so they are stuck with the 1-2 local ones, especially in an emergency. (Boston is, of course, an exception, but even here the 'good' hospitals are overcrowded so people still end up going to the crap ones.) If the two local ones agree they're going to be crappy and cheap -- implicitly, of course, or you might get them on racketeering -- what are the locals going to do? Nothing...they can't drive the hospital out of business, because they need to have one close by.

Goodwill only matters when consumers have a real choice. And few people are going to drive 60+ miles to the next hospital for routine care -- but it's that fairly routine care that causes a lot of deaths (catheter -> infection -> hospitalization -> more infection -> dead).

I wish I had a solution.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Goodwill only matters when consumers have a real choice. And few people are going to drive 60+ miles to the next hospital for routine care -- but it's that fairly routine care that causes a lot of deaths (catheter -> infection -> hospitalization -> more infection -> dead).

Very true.

[house-pundit.livejournal.com]

Better solution: For medical errors, they send the check to the patient to cover his/her costs, and then themselves send a bill to the hospital/doctor.

This is just them saying they won't pay---which means leaving the patient doubly injured, because it means the patient has to pay and then not be able to afford to sue and eat the costs. (Dr. Bob injures me. I go to Dr. Jane, who has no connections at all to Dr. Bob, to get it fixed. Insurance says Dr. Jane's bill is my problem and that if I don't like it, I have to go sue Dr. Bob.)

Your insurer breached contract and didn't pay for an injury of yours for which he was clearly liable. Why was he confident he could get away with that? He bet, correctly, you couldn't afford to sue.

So where it's not an emergency, you (insurer) send the patient to somebody other than the docs/facilities who did it to fix it, and then you bill the docs who caused it for the costs.

This is just using the "Oh, yeah, that sounds right" response of people hearing about it to do the unconscionable---dump the costs of patients injured by doctors squarely onto the patient.

My auto insurer, when I get in a wreck and it's the other guy's fault, pays to get my car fixed and then goes after the other guy's insurer, or the other guy himself, for the money. My insurer has the muscle to demand the other guy's insurer (or the other guy himself, if he has money and is uninsured on purpose) pay up. I don't.

In said wreck, if I had to go straight to the other guy's insurer, myself, to get my car fixed or my injuries paid for, I'd die of old age before I'd see a penny.

Same as your own loss: "You can't afford to sue me. Fuck off, peasant."

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

On a school bus, a seat belt is not regarded as a safety device. It is regarded as a means of restraint and control, limiting the motion of the student.

So I hypothesize due to the fact that some school buses do have seat belts. The short buses, the ones that you put handicapped or special-ed kids on. Every year that my son has ridden a short bus, I've been required to sign a waiver permitting the bus driver and attendant to "apply restraints to" my son. That may not be a direct quote but it's pretty close.

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

it's been nearly 2 decadees since i've ridden a greyhound type bus - do they have seatbelts?

would putting seatbelts on a school bus require modifications to the seats? are they structural to resist the pull of bodies? are they bolted down properly/etc? sounds expensive.

is the school bus driver belted in?

and why can't i have 5-7 point restraints i my car? it's safer! oh, i know, i know, not certified, but why not? oh, i know. politicians. hah.

shit, people should have to wear helmets too while driving. and be sober and not in any way impaired, and be required to wear corrective lenses. and pass tests. and other things too.

#

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

and why can't i have 5-7 point restraints i my car? it's safer!

Yeah, that's a question I've asked before. My children are legally required to have a 4-point or 5-point harness in their booster seats. Because it's safer, and we have to look after the children. How come in many states, I'm not allowed to have one?

[dafydd.livejournal.com]

On smaller busses, I'm willing to be convinced.

On 40' busses? No. Never.

Why?

Go find a friendly bus driver. Take a big child and a small child with you.

You sit the the driver's seat, and look in that little mirror above your head.

The big child (The "bully.") and little child (The "victim.") sit in the back row.

The bully pantomimes wrapping the seat belt around the neck of the victim, below the back of the seat ahead of them, whilst maintaining an innocent expression.

How easy is that to see when your prepared for, and looking for, it?

How easy do you think that would be to see if you were busy driving on a snowy day?

Seatbelts on 40' busses is a timebomb to the first day a strangled child isn't found until the bus gets back to its base.

I drove those busses for 18 months. I will never advocate that they get mandatory seat belts.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Seatbelts on 40' busses is a timebomb to the first day a strangled child isn't found until the bus gets back to its base.

An unpleasant thought that once again makes me think "You know, there's something really fucking badly wrong with our society" that the hypothetical bully might get away with doing it.

Of course, the other side of the coin is that if a bully on the bus can get away with strangling another kid with a seatbelt, he can do it with a belt, or a shoelace, or a backpack strap, or a piece of string.

[dafydd.livejournal.com]

Of course, the other side of the coin is that if a bully on the bus can get away with strangling another kid with a seatbelt, he can do it with a belt, or a shoelace, or a backpack strap, or a piece of string.

Perhaps. However, those are items that must leave the bus with the bully, lest someone start asking awkward questions. And, neither of those examples would be as convenient for a bully to use as a seat belt would be.

[house-pundit.livejournal.com]

With a seat belt present, the bully would think of wrapping the other kid up in it around the neck, where he might not think of taking off his belt and strangling the kid.

Murdering psychopaths don't spring, full grown, from a clam shell coming up out of the waves. They're not rare named guys like Dahmer or Bundy. 5% of the population are sociopaths, and the psychopath subtype is not rare.

You know why kids can't be psychopaths? Because the psychologists defined psychopathy with a bottom age limit. That's it. A kid can show all the features of psychopathy except for the long history (cause he hasn't been alive that long), and he's not a "sociopath" because he's below the purely arbitrary age the profession has stuck on the diagnosis as a lower limit.

That's all. Have the same symptoms, the same mental state, one day before your 18th birthday and you're not a sociopath. The next day, you are. Merely by definition.

"How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?" "Four. Calling it a leg doesn't make it one."

"How many legs does a dog have if you say every limb below the rib cage is defined as a tail?" "Four."

The psychological profession does not want to admit that anyone below the age of 18 is unfixable---and they definitely don't want to consider that anyone below the age of 14 is unfixable.

When I was a kid, the psychological profession was adamantly convinced that kids could not get bipolar disorder. To the point that they essentially defined the diagnosis that way.

Not as emphatically as they've defined sociopathy by age. To my knowledge there is no evidence that you can take a child who lacks a conscience at age 10 and develop one in him by age 18, no matter what you do.

And all that abuse you find in the childhood of adult sociopaths? It's childhood abuse that's significant, not teenage-hood abuse. That demonstrates that the critical brain changes that take the kids pre-disposed to sociopathy but on the margins of "could go either way" happen young. I'm not a researcher, but I haven't seen any evidence that they've been able to take kids with the abuse plus the genetic predisposition for sociopathy and "save" them. Truth: nobody knows if any of the "at-risk youth" various programs think they've "saved" had the genetic predisposition in the first place. And, even if some have been, nobody has the foggiest clue how many. One in a hundred thousand pre-disposed plus triggered saved? One in a hundred? One in ten?--thousand? One in a million?

It's just a bit difficult to sort out who's who, since even normal ten year olds are more known for displaying their impulses than their consciences.

It's not "our society" that has a problem with sociopaths in their childhood years. It's all societies.

Our society just tries desperately to cling to the notion that all cute little chubby faces and bright eyes are sweet little tabula rasas and that none of them are just plain rotten to the core, unfixably, from a very young age.

Every murderer in prison, or even on death row, was once an eight year old.

[house-pundit.livejournal.com]

Anyway, the point to that is that the only reason a number of childhood bullies don't kill their victims is because impulse and opportunity aren't there right together.

You have to go to some effort to take off your shoelaces or belt and garrote someone. You have to think about it first--more so in the case of the shoelaces.

A shoulder-belt already goes close to the neck and is so convenient a momentary impulse is enough to set one of the little psychos off.

Most childhood bullies grow out of bullying. But nobody knows what was different about the ones that don't, and nobody knows, out of the ones that do, how many had not conscience as children and have no conscience as adults, but are simply hiding behind the facade of one of the non-criminal or less-criminal variants of sociopathy.

The lion's share of sociopaths are never caught, and never have anything happen to them for it. Did the bullies "grow out of" being conscienceless bastards--or did they "grow out of" being so obvious about it as to get caught?

The non-psychopath sociopaths still have no conscience at all. They may be politicians, they may be the corporate guy who steals credit for his subordinates' work, they may be the back-stabbing socialite, they may be the bum on your sister's couch---but they all, if they knew they were immune from prosecution or wouldn't get caught, would kill you casually and with no remorse if you were in their way and/or they were bored. The only problems the non-psychopath sociopaths have with killing is that there are other things that they want more, getting caught would be a pain in the ass, and killing people is less interesting than their preferred "games."

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

and i'm deleting this. i just don't feel like sharing it with google on public entry. not that i mind comments from from anyone here, i just know that if/when my mother finds out i have a livejournal she'll probably google everything i ever wrote :P
i'm not sure she even knows what a livejournal is. yet.