This burns my bacon! More nanny state bureaucratic nonesense.

I have not read all the posts, etc., but I can tell you what an old pediatrician told my mother when she complained to him about what I ate and how little, He look at her and said, "He doesn't look hungry or underfed to me, let him eat what he wants. At least he's eating."

If the kids, belly aching then tough, you cant be that hungry if your willing to turn away food. I hated 4 hour old pbj sandwiches, but I sure didn't go crying to the lunch lady.

Don't worry the do gooders are going to slowly work it to a point where they'll tell you how to conduct every part of your life, well let them crawl back into their little worm holes and mind their own business. There's a reason they get into these job's. The world can be a harsh cruel place and the younger kids better start getting prepared for it instead of being pampered.

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Originally Posted by Jeltz

People are a commodity to states, some are an asset and tax payers others are a liability i.e. claiming benefits, for a society to succeed the the assets must be greater than the liabilities. So in a society with a reducing base of tax payers as described above you have 2 ways to tackle the problem.

1) Import - i.e. economic migration, bring workers in from other countries. This is already happening and as there are plenty of people keen to move to the richer economies from the developing world where the global population growths are occurring.

2) Improve the quality of the indigenous population. I.e. reduce their requirement for care and benefits and try to keep them able to work and pay taxes for as long as we can. Current moves to do this are reducing smoking, drinking, and drug addiction and improving their health and fitness.

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3 - Reduce liabilities.

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Originally Posted by northpaw

Your first line about people is true, but little kids only barely qualify. :) With some allergies that severe, eating the food isn't necessarily required, so mischief that wouldn't be a big deal otherwise (e.g. a food fight in the cafeteria) could have tragic consequences. Accidents can still happen, but from a liability standpoint, the schools aren't as vulnerable if they take the cover-your-a$$ approach.

Story time: I have a similarly severe allergy to milk. In third grade, a girl who was somehow fascinated by that went into my sack lunch and snuck some Doritos in with my corn chips. Thankfully, I noticed the different taste before I ate enough to kill me, but it just goes to show that... well, little kids do dumb things, so if you're responsible for them (morally, legally, financially), you minimize the risk of harm where you can.

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I'm not saying allergies can't be dangerous.

But on the other hand, did you blame the school that Dorito's were allowed?

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Originally Posted by HNSB

3 - Reduce liabilities.

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True but sterilizing or euthanizing the sector of society that draws from the state leads to all sorts of legal issues, and discussing it online will inevitably invoke Godwin's Law at some point :D

The word "might" in my statement about not doing things that might kill someone refers to the probability that what you will do will have that effect. Obviously, it doesn't mean to not do something that has any chance at all of killing someone. The probability has to be sufficiently large enough to be a reasonable expectation. I mean, I might kill my wife by accident while shaving; she might come into the bathroom one time and startle me, causing me to cut myself, causing me to jump and trip, which causes me to fall into her and lay open her neck with my blade. But the odds of that happening are so low that it would be unreasonable to expect it. On the other hand, it is reasonable to expect that bits and pieces of the food children bring in their lunches will find their way onto hands, faces and clothes, which will come into contact with other children. If one of those children has a severe food allergy, then it is reasonable to believe that contact with food they are allergic to will result in anaphylactic shock, and it is reasonable to believe that death is a likely outcome of anaphylactic shock.

The reason we need a policy and list of such reasonable expectations is that human beings are very bad at making such judgments in the heat of the moment. We routinely underestimate enormous risks and overestimate minuscule ones, unless we make concerted efforts to accurately estimate those risks and enforce the reasonable behavior implicated by those estimates. We enforce speed limits because people suck at estimating how fast they can safely drive, especially while they're driving. There should not be a "market speed" on the roads that is a result of how fast everybody tries to drive on their own, only prosecuting for driving too fast when an accident results. If there were, there would be far more accidents than if there were an enforced speed limit slightly below the real fastest safe speed for the average driver.

As for my betraying my "pragmatic" moniker, that part of my username is modified by the word "Kantian" as in, referring to Immanuel Kant, a late 17th century philosopher known for the development of Transcendental Idealism. A transcendental ideal is an idea about the nature of things, including normative ideas about how people and things ought to behave in a moral sense. It is not justified by nor can it be proved or disproved by appeal to the empirical experience of the world, rather, it justifies modes of empirical experience and makes it possible for an experience of something to count as evidence for or against an empirical idea about the nature of experienced things. A pragmatic transcendental idealist is one who believes that transcendental ideals exist as ideas we must possess in order to reasonably believe that our plans and projects will be possible, let alone successful.

ohh that Immanuel Kant!

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Originally Posted by LX_Emergency

I'm not saying allergies can't be dangerous.

But on the other hand, did you blame the school that Dorito's were allowed?

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No, I blamed the bawling third grade girl! Can't say how adults would have felt about it at the time; I haven't asked. To be fair, though, it's a different scenario in the sense that it would be hugely impractical--if not impossible--to ban milk protein from school grounds. With peanuts, it's much easier to implement, so the cost/benefit ratio is vastly different.

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Originally Posted by Kantian Pragmatist

. On the other hand, it is reasonable to expect that bits and pieces of the food children bring in their lunches will find their way onto hands, faces and clothes, which will come into contact with other children. If one of those children has a severe food allergy, then it is reasonable to believe that contact with food they are allergic to will result in anaphylactic shock, and it is reasonable to believe that death is a likely outcome of anaphylactic shock.



As for my betraying my "pragmatic" moniker, that part of my username is modified by the word "Kantian" as in, referring to Immanuel Kant, a late 17th century philosopher known for the development of Transcendental Idealism. A transcendental ideal is an idea about the nature of things, including normative ideas about how people and things ought to behave in a moral sense. It is not justified by nor can it be proved or disproved by appeal to the empirical experience of the world, rather, it justifies modes of empirical experience and makes it possible for an experience of something to count as evidence for or against an empirical idea about the nature of experienced things. A pragmatic transcendental idealist is one who believes that transcendental ideals exist as ideas we must possess in order to reasonably believe that our plans and projects will be possible, let alone successful.

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If a child has a severe food allergy, then it's the parents' responsibility to ensure their child has an Epipen, one at home and one at school. As for the last part of your post, that just brings back nightmares of philosophy. Thanks alot. :)

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Originally Posted by ReardenSteel

If a child has a severe food allergy, then it's the parents' responsibility to ensure their child has an Epipen, one at home and one at school. As for the last part of your post, that just brings back nightmares of philosophy. Thanks alot. :)

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Sure, but since an epipen is not an instant cure-all for anaphylaxis, it's on the school to ensure that if they have a kid who suffers from such an allergy, that they do everything reasonable to keep the triggers for that allergy away from the kid. Having an epipen around if you know you've got such allergies is good. Not having to use the epipen is better, and if the restrictions on other's behavior that could trigger the allergic reaction are reasonable, then those restrictions should be made and enforced. Restricting peanuts and peanut butter for kids who have a classmate that suffers from peanut allergies is not unreasonable; it's not hard to avoid peanuts or products with peanuts in them, nor is it overly expensive to do so. If you had a kid that was allergic to other kid's boogers, then pretty much any restriction you try to come up with to prevent an allergic reaction would be unreasonable, largely because any rule you could come up with to prevent the allergic kid from coming into contact with other kid's boogers would be unenforceable. The reasonable solution to this dilemma is to not allow a kid with such allergies to come into contact with other kids, not give him a supply of epipens and say, "good luck, I hope you don't run out before recess."

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Originally Posted by Kantian Pragmatist

The reasonable solution to this dilemma is to not allow a kid with such allergies to come into contact with other kids, not give him a supply of epipens and say, "good luck, I hope you don't run out before recess."

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Whoa. Isolating children from contact with other children? Problem solved!

I also disagree with your assessment of the ease of avoiding peanuts. Ask any parent of children with peanut allergies and they'll tell you those things are everywhere. It takes a shockingly small amount to cause a reaction, so yes, it's actually quite a tall order to avoid products with peanut oil altogether... Unless of course you place the child in a plastic bubble...then I guess we're back to not allowing them contact with other children.

Then, not only will they have violent allergies, but we can send them into the world as maladjusted friendless weirdos!