Thread: This burns my bacon! More nanny state bureaucratic nonesense.

Originally Posted by Catrentshaving

We're not allowed to send peanut butter or any peanut product to school due to peanut/nut allergies that other children may have.

Policy makers are such idiots. How about people just teach kids with peanut allergies to look out for peanuts....and ask "does this have peanuts in it?" before eating something they don't know?

What's next? A ban on certain colours because people with colourblindness can't see them properly?

Originally Posted by LX_Emergency

Policy makers are such idiots. How about people just teach kids with peanut allergies to look out for peanuts....and ask "does this have peanuts in it?" before eating something they don't know?

What's next? A ban on certain colours because people with colourblindness can't see them properly?

Not that simple, the reaction is often very fast and serious and it doesn't necessarily require eating transfer is also sufficient in many cases.

Imagine the scene you send your child to school with a peanut butter sandwich he/she's sat next to a child with a nut allergy. That child ask yours to pass the water which they do and a trace of peanut butter transfers to the handle of the jug. Within a couple of minutes the child goes into anaphylactic shock, if they are fortunate the school has adrenaline pens to inject the child, if not they have to hope that the ambulance reaches them in time.

My kids go to a school where nut products are banned, I don't think its law its just their policy. I have no issues with that because I don't see its important enough to risk the well being of a few of the pupils at the school. Likewise if any of the pupils had a latex allergy I would expect the school to buy non latex gloves for the cleaners etc. its just common sense.

Even though people who suffer from serious allergies are in the minority there isn't any need to see them as being insignificant enough to not warrant any consideration.

As for your comparison with colour blindness you will never see a single crossing light which has the ability to show both red and green they will always have position or shape differences so that colour blind people can distinguish whether it is safe to cross or not.

Originally Posted by Jeltz

My kids go to a school where nut products are banned, I don't think its law its just their policy. I have no issues with that because I don't see its important enough to risk the well being of a few of the pupils at the school. Likewise if any of the pupils had a latex allergy I would expect the school to buy non latex gloves for the cleaners etc. its just common sense.

What are you, some kind of Communist?

The trouble is that society is made up of people who are either contributing to it or drawing from it. Over a lifetime people will often shift sides several times but equally some people will be a constant drain on society, paid for by the majority. As such it is important that the state looks at how best it can prevent people being a drain on their (our) resources and one way is trying targeting those people who live an unhealthy lifestyle, which will impact on their ability to contribute in a positive way, and also trying to make sure they don't pass that lifestyle to their offspring.

There is a bigger picture, the aim is to maintain things for the future generations the attitude that we should be able to live whatever lifestyle we wan ignores the fact that our lifestyles affect others too.

Currently (in the UK at least) the birth rate in families is on average 1.8 i.e. for every 2 people (who are having kids) we are producing less than 2 future tax payers. Coupled with that the advances in medical science mean people are living longer and requiring more care. So today's children are going to have a hard job supporting the cost of looking after the current working generation, as it stands we are moving towards producing a society which could be to unhealthy to support itself.

Originally Posted by ChesterCopperpot

What are you, some kind of Communist?

Very far from it!

When you grasp the fundamentals of how states work you can see that they tend to behave like a business. Although they would not admit it.

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.

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.

3 - Reduce liabilities.

Originally Posted by HNSB

3 - Reduce liabilities.

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

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.

Originally Posted by Jeltz

.........................
As for your comparison with colour blindness you will never see a single crossing light which has the ability to show both red and green they will always have position or shape differences so that colour blind people can distinguish whether it is safe to cross or not.

I never knew that; today I learned something, Thank You Jeltz !

I feel happy & I feel like a dumb a** at the same time.

Originally Posted by Jeltz

As for your comparison with colour blindness you will never see a single crossing light which has the ability to show both red and green they will always have position or shape differences so that colour blind people can distinguish whether it is safe to cross or not.

Well we used to have something like that here when I was a kid. It went from a green Walk to a red Don't Walk...Yep that's right! No pictures. You actually had to know how to read. Shocking hey?!


Mick

Originally Posted by Jeltz

Not that simple, the reaction is often very fast and serious and it doesn't necessarily require eating transfer is also sufficient in many cases.

Imagine the scene you send your child to school with a peanut butter sandwich he/she's sat next to a child with a nut allergy. That child ask yours to pass the water which they do and a trace of peanut butter transfers to the handle of the jug. Within a couple of minutes the child goes into anaphylactic shock, if they are fortunate the school has adrenaline pens to inject the child, if not they have to hope that the ambulance reaches them in time.

My kids go to a school where nut products are banned, I don't think its law its just their policy. I have no issues with that because I don't see its important enough to risk the well being of a few of the pupils at the school. Likewise if any of the pupils had a latex allergy I would expect the school to buy non latex gloves for the cleaners etc. its just common sense.

Even though people who suffer from serious allergies are in the minority there isn't any need to see them as being insignificant enough to not warrant any consideration.

As for your comparison with colour blindness you will never see a single crossing light which has the ability to show both red and green they will always have position or shape differences so that colour blind people can distinguish whether it is safe to cross or not.

There's a difference between consideration, and making a policy that forces a large group of people to conform.