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Cemetry Gator posted:Oddly enough today, it's still mostly doctors that have pagers. My ambulance service gives us pagers to carry when we’re on duty in case the radios are hosed up and the dispatch text message doesn’t go through. I think it’s only come in handy like once, but the whole point is redundancy.
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# ? May 9, 2020 19:51 |
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# ? Mar 29, 2024 12:33 |
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Do kids know what a paper route is, anymore?
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# ? May 10, 2020 00:54 |
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Leperflesh posted:Do kids know what a paper route is, anymore? I think paper routes, as something done by kids, were starting to be transitioned out by the time I was in my teens (early 2000s). A combination of "kids Today don't have time", "kids need to rely on parents for any transportation if the route takes them beyond walking distance of their home neighborhood", and probably more than a bit of "collecting money from customers can be more difficult for kids". I did the neighborhood paper route for about a year or two, before I think mom got fed up with both me being the only one to actually do any work reliably (it was supposed to be split between me and my two siblings, but I came home from school a lot to find that neither of them had done it yet, so I'd have to do it before dinner so people wouldn't complain about not getting their evening paper) and with being the one who had to deal with the paper office for getting the money to them and us getting paid (...allegedly paid, anyway, I don't recall ever actually being given any money for the thing), so we passed it on to another kid on the block.
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# ? May 10, 2020 06:48 |
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I think most papers figured out that an adult in a car hurling things out the window for minimum wage is much faster and also less expensive than the same number of addresses served by five unreliable teenagers chucking papers from bicycles. Also there's a huge drop in daily newspaper subscribership, making non-car delivery routes even less efficient.
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# ? May 10, 2020 06:55 |
I'm super surprised that there were actually paperboys in the early 2000's. I always assumed that was a thing that died out in the 60s or 70s, and just continued on in media as a useful archetype of a kid's job.
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# ? May 10, 2020 07:25 |
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torgo posted:I'm super surprised that there were actually paperboys in the early 2000's. I always assumed that was a thing that died out in the 60s or 70s, and just continued on in media as a useful archetype of a kid's job. My town's newspaper had gone down to a "once in the evening, just get it there before 8 pm ffs" level by the time I was doing the route, and I was doing a very small route at that - just my street and the street behind ours. That's about all that made it sustainable for me to do it, really. If it had required getting up for a morning delivery, or doing a larger neighborhood that actually required using a bike to get around (instead of hauling a little folding cart with the papers in it), it would've been out of the question entirely. I think the tipping point for mom was when I needed to sub in for someone else on a different route, and she had to drive me halfway across town to do a morning delivery on the weekend. Also, I'm talking very early 2000s - I don't think I was still doing it past 2004.
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# ? May 10, 2020 08:26 |
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tinytort posted:...kids need to rely on parents for any transportation if the route takes them beyond walking distance of their home neighborhood... This is the second reference I've seen to this on SA recently. When exactly did it become the norm in the US for kids to generally be disallowed from roaming around?
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# ? May 10, 2020 13:31 |
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I feel like Columbine was a turning point. I don't have any evidence to back that up, but it's just an observation from my own life.
unimportantguy fucked around with this message at 13:45 on May 10, 2020 |
# ? May 10, 2020 13:42 |
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Jeza posted:This is the second reference I've seen to this on SA recently. When exactly did it become the norm in the US for kids to generally be disallowed from roaming around? I was born in the 80's and I'm from Canada, not the US. But I wasn't allowed to roam around town freely. I wasn't supposed to go much farther than the school yard, or the corner store. Which was two or three blocks in either direction from my house. This was a small town too.
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# ? May 10, 2020 13:49 |
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Jeza posted:This is the second reference I've seen to this on SA recently. When exactly did it become the norm in the US for kids to generally be disallowed from roaming around? This is also happening outside the US (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/27/children-spend-only-half-the-time-playing-outside-as-their-parents-did) and there are many reasons and many articles on the reasons for this shift, which I can't link to you easily atm because any search involving relevant terms is all covid safety tips right now.
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# ? May 10, 2020 14:01 |
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tinytort posted:My town's newspaper had gone down to a "once in the evening, just get it there before 8 pm ffs" level by the time I was doing the route, and I was doing a very small route at that - just my street and the street behind ours. Your town sounds like it was anachronistic even in the early 2000s. The idea of an evening paper is just something that didn't exist for me. And a paper that only came out in the evening too! But yeah, as someone born in the mid-80s, nobody had a paper route. It just wasn't something that was done in my area. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/12485231/ns/us_news-life/t/while-you-were-sleeping-paperboy-grew/#.XrgKQMhKiUk - this article actually goes into it. So 57% were distributed by kids in 1994. So, it was definitely a thing in the 90s, but it was definitely shifting away at that time. Here's another article from 1992 - https://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/16/us/a-first-job-fades-as-the-paper-route-grows-up.html It gives more real numbers, but yeah, it looks like it was around the 1980s where the idea of the paperboy really began to fade away. But even the newspaper is beginning to fade away - https://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/newspapers/ Looking at that, it looks like by 2015, we were down 50% from the peak for daily distribution. I can honestly say that I don't know anyone who actually gets a newspaper, except for people over the age of 50. But none of my friends have subscriptions, I never had a subscription. It's possible in another 20-30 years, you might have to explain what a newspaper was before you explain what a paperboy was.
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# ? May 10, 2020 15:16 |
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Zoomers are going to struggle with is the idea that everyone just had old newspapers laying around to line birdcages, wrap fish in, or clean windows with. Old newsprint was so cheap and plentiful that it had all sorts of secondary uses. There isn't really anything comparable.
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# ? May 10, 2020 15:34 |
Cemetry Gator posted:But yeah, as someone born in the mid-80s, nobody had a paper route. It just wasn't something that was done in my area. I delivered papers until I broke my leg in 2000; most of the other deliverers at that point were in their 30s and doing it from their cars, or retired and picking up a few extra bucks while getting a morning workout.
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# ? May 10, 2020 16:10 |
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unimportantguy posted:I feel like Columbine was a turning point. I don't have any evidence to back that up, but it's just an observation from my own life. I don't know about Columbine - I mean, those kids who got shot were in school, not wandering the streets. Having grown up in the 80s myself I think it was more the whole 'paedophiles might snatch your kid off the streets' thing tbh (never mind that most of that poo poo isn't stranger danger but relatives/friends of the family in actuality).
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# ? May 10, 2020 16:15 |
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Midjack posted:You could go right up to the gate up until lunchtime September 11, 2001. In America, which was one of the things that shocked me when I first visited the place. In countries that had, for example, the IRA to deal with, security was always a bit more strict than that.
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# ? May 10, 2020 16:17 |
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Krispy Wafer posted:Zoomers are going to struggle with is the idea that everyone just had old newspapers laying around to line birdcages, wrap fish in, or clean windows with. Old newsprint was so cheap and plentiful that it had all sorts of secondary uses. There isn't really anything comparable. That keeps catching me out now. Break a glass jar and need to wrap it safely? Get some newspape......oh.
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# ? May 10, 2020 16:43 |
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feedmegin posted:I don't know about Columbine - I mean, those kids who got shot were in school, not wandering the streets. Having grown up in the 80s myself I think it was more the whole 'paedophiles might snatch your kid off the streets' thing tbh (never mind that most of that poo poo isn't stranger danger but relatives/friends of the family in actuality). Kids will never know the joy of the real life version of the Atari game Paper Boy. Also, in my neighbourhood, it seemed every year (mid 80s-mid 90s) or so there was someone driving around in the rape van that we had to be warned about for a week or two before everything went back to normal.
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# ? May 10, 2020 17:05 |
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No one cared where Gen-X kids went for the most part. All this stranger danger poo poo mostly hit Millennials, ironically at a time when crime rates were decreasing. A lot of it can be blamed on 24/7 cable news. Suddenly you weren't hearing about all the crimes in your city, but all the crimes in every city and that really hosed with Boomer risk perception. My mom spent the last decade complaining about how bad crime was when we were actually the safest we'd been in 40+ years.
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# ? May 10, 2020 17:14 |
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Krispy Wafer posted:Zoomers are going to struggle with is the idea that everyone just had old newspapers laying around to line birdcages, wrap fish in, or clean windows with. Old newsprint was so cheap and plentiful that it had all sorts of secondary uses. There isn't really anything comparable. I still get the penny saver every week and use that. One thing that I didn't get until recently is people pushing the hook repeatedly when their phone call is disconnected. To me, the first push hangs up the call and now what you thought might be disconnected is now definitely disconnected. Before automation, an operator had to unplug the call to disconnect you, and jamming on the hook would blink you light to get the operator on to reconnect the call or make a new call. The light came on when you picked up the receiver, and turned off when you hung up. I knew sometimes the hook was called the flash hook, and there was a "flash" button on some phones (especially cordless) that effectively blipped the hook for you, and those names make more sense now.
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# ? May 10, 2020 17:58 |
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Jeza posted:This is the second reference I've seen to this on SA recently. When exactly did it become the norm in the US for kids to generally be disallowed from roaming around?
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# ? May 10, 2020 18:41 |
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The Simpsons Meme thread yesterday was talking about Bill Saluga, a comedian who was big in the 70s with a character named Ray Jay Johnson. I didn't get that reference on the Simpsons in the 90s (or until like, last week, when I googled it), so I KNOW anybody under 40 doesn't get that reference.
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# ? May 10, 2020 18:44 |
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I was delivering a paper, before school in the early morning, on my bike, in the mid to late 1980s. It sucked rear end, we had to be up at like 5am to fold and (if there was any hint of rain) bag all the papers, and then ride a route, and there was one house with a doberman who would charge out and lunge but you were required to get the paper on the doorstep, not just the driveway, and so I had to throw it from the curb and often miss. gently caress those people. Anyway. My parents still get a newspaper and it's this pathetic little thing. Even the sunday paper is just small. I remember when I was a kid, the sunday paper was this inch-thick bundle stuffed with ads and various sections and a complete color sunday comics section like six or eight pages. If you didn't actively dump your newspapers you'd wind up with stacks of them. We'd roll up rolls of newspaper and burn it in the fireplace instead of logs.
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# ? May 10, 2020 19:16 |
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Leperflesh posted:Even the sunday paper is just small. I remember when I was a kid, the sunday paper was this inch-thick bundle stuffed with ads and various sections and a complete color sunday comics section like six or eight pages. If you didn't actively dump your newspapers you'd wind up with stacks of them. We'd roll up rolls of newspaper and burn it in the fireplace instead of logs. You've reminded me of a passage of Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent: quote:I DROVE ON, without the radio of much in the way of thoughts, to Mount Pleasant, where I stopped for coffee. I had the Sunday New York Times with me—one of the greatest improvements in life since I had been away was that you could now buy the New York Times out of machines on the day of publication in a place like Iowa, an extraordinary feat of distribution—and I spread out with it in a booth. Boy, do I love the Sunday New York Times. Apart from its many virtues as a newspaper, there is just something wonderfully reassuring about its very bulk. The issue in front of me must have weighed ten or twelve pounds. It could’ve stopped a bullet at twenty yards. I read once that it takes 75,000 trees to produce one issue of the Sunday New York Times—and it’s well worth every trembling leaf. So what if our grandchildren have no oxygen to breathe? gently caress ‘em. I recommend the book to the thread, since it's a man contrasting "Here's this thing, and the way it is now, compared to this other thing, from back then," making a nice picture of American society, and it's from the late 1980s. It also hilarious, but I may be biased by having been introduced to the audiobook as a child while taking long car trips with my father, which is basically the perfect environment for it—a book about a man taking long car trips, reminiscing about his father. quote:I COME FROM Des Moines. Somebody had to. When you come from Des Moines you either accept the fact without question and settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job at the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever, or you spend your adolescence moaning at length about what a dump it is and how you can’t wait to get out, and then you settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job at the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever.
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# ? May 10, 2020 20:13 |
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Related to newspapers, the guide books to having a small child have the trick of putting a couple of phone books under the bed to raise the head of your snotty kid. The point is obviously the phone book, which no one has anymore. It turns out that being under a bed for a month is not good for books, which is why you use a mostly useless one like the phone book.
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# ? May 10, 2020 20:23 |
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I worked for a telco during the aughts and it's hard to quantify how much infrastructure went into making phone books. Telephone companies printed so many that they'd own massive publishing operations. They'd print millions of those big yellow volumes every year and make an absolute fortune in advertising. Now it's completely gone, but there are still tens of thousands of companies with names starting with AAA and 1Acme that make no sense now. Vavrek posted:You've reminded me of a passage of Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent: My Audible library says I downloaded this in 2013 and finished it but I have no recollection, even though it's a 10 hour listen. Perhaps because someone else narrated it instead of the author himself. The reviews say it's bitchy Bryson, unlike his other works. I enjoy his writing very much, but Bryson has never been not bitchy.
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# ? May 10, 2020 20:51 |
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Krispy Wafer posted:The reviews say it's bitchy Bryson, unlike his other works. I enjoy his writing very much, but Bryson has never been not bitchy. Yeah, uh, unlike? It's exactly in line with the rest of his travel books, and is the first one he wrote. In contrast to later books, which feature "old man confused and alarmed by modern society," The Lost Continent is about a thirtysomething confused and alarmed by modern society. For what it's worth, I prefer the audiobook read by William Roberts. Bryson makes a caricature of himself in his books, and Roberts then drives that caricature to an extreme. Bryson took a while to develop as a narrator, so some of his earlier books are read better by others.
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# ? May 10, 2020 21:12 |
Leperflesh posted:I was delivering a paper, before school in the early morning, on my bike, in the mid to late 1980s. It sucked rear end, we had to be up at like 5am to fold and (if there was any hint of rain) bag all the papers, and then ride a route, and there was one house with a doberman who would charge out and lunge but you were required to get the paper on the doorstep, not just the driveway, and so I had to throw it from the curb and often miss. gently caress those people. You didn't bring dog biscuits?
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# ? May 10, 2020 22:45 |
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tinytort posted:I think paper routes, as something done by kids, were starting to be transitioned out by the time I was in my teens (early 2000s). A combination of "kids Today don't have time", "kids need to rely on parents for any transportation if the route takes them beyond walking distance of their home neighborhood", and probably more than a bit of "collecting money from customers can be more difficult for kids". I threw papers for a month and it was pretty much a scam job lmao e: I threw them in a car. There was no way anybody was doing my route on a bike Milo and POTUS fucked around with this message at 00:44 on May 11, 2020 |
# ? May 11, 2020 00:12 |
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Jeza posted:This is the second reference I've seen to this on SA recently. When exactly did it become the norm in the US for kids to generally be disallowed from roaming around? I don't know about other areas, but I grew up in the DMV (DC, Maryland, Virginia) and we were pretty free-roaming until the DC sniper shootings. Click for info. During that, we were on super lockdown, pretty restricted for a long time after, and never really allowed the free roam that we had had prior to that.
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# ? May 11, 2020 05:44 |
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A friend lost childhood outdoor privileges because of Ted Bundy of all things. This would have been early to mid-1970’s in Florida. She spent years being told she couldn’t play outside. I was a kid in Atlanta during the child murders, but no one ever seemed worried about me. I like to believe that was because the serial killer only targeted Black kids, but odds are my parents were just super apathetic.
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# ? May 11, 2020 15:49 |
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Jeza posted:This is the second reference I've seen to this on SA recently. When exactly did it become the norm in the US for kids to generally be disallowed from roaming around? But Son of a Vondruke! posted:I was born in the 80's and I'm from Canada, not the US. But I wasn't allowed to roam around town freely. I wasn't supposed to go much farther than the school yard, or the corner store. Which was two or three blocks in either direction from my house. This was a small town too. same here, really. Any time that I was further than a couple blocks away from the house, I was generally under some sort of adult supervision. Cemetry Gator posted:Your town sounds like it was anachronistic even in the early 2000s. The idea of an evening paper is just something that didn't exist for me. And a paper that only came out in the evening too! Yeah, probably it was. I don't know if it was specifically an evening edition? I just vaguely remember that they offered subscribers an option of getting a morning delivery, an evening delivery, or both (which implies that there were supposed to be some differences between the two, since who would want to get the exact same newspaper twice in the same day?). It was a small town, and largely populated by boomers and their parents. So 'anachronistic' or at least 'slow to adapt' would not surprise me; it's largely dying now, because of the lack of any jobs or housing for anyone who's Millennial-aged. Krispy Wafer posted:Zoomers are going to struggle with is the idea that everyone just had old newspapers laying around to line birdcages, wrap fish in, or clean windows with. Old newsprint was so cheap and plentiful that it had all sorts of secondary uses. There isn't really anything comparable. This keeps catching me too. There's nothing better for wrapping dishes and fragile stuff, when you're packing to move, except...there isn't a ton of newspapers just lying around any more. You have to hope that your area has a free newspaper delivered (unlikely) or find some other form of wrapping material. If you're really unlucky, you might have to pay for packing paper. Leperflesh posted:Anyway. My parents still get a newspaper and it's this pathetic little thing. Even the sunday paper is just small. I remember when I was a kid, the sunday paper was this inch-thick bundle stuffed with ads and various sections and a complete color sunday comics section like six or eight pages. If you didn't actively dump your newspapers you'd wind up with stacks of them. We'd roll up rolls of newspaper and burn it in the fireplace instead of logs. I remember the same thing. My parents and grandparents would save up newspapers for fire-starting, come winter, and there'd be enough that you could have done a whole fire with just rolls of newspaper if you wanted to. (Granted, I think part of this is that my grandparents lived through the Great Depression, so they didn't really throw away anything if it was arguably still useful somehow.)
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# ? May 11, 2020 18:28 |
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That was also the era in which there just wasn't any recycling. Here in California, aluminum cans had a redemption value when I was a kid, but you'd have to save them seperately and take them somewhere to get the money. There was no curbside pickup other than trash, and you just threw everything in the trash. So dumping your newspaper meant filling a landfill, of course you'd hang on to it for any other purpose. The other advantage to getting a daily newspaper was getting a daily supply of rubber bands. It was trivial to save up enough for a house-wide rubber band fight.
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# ? May 11, 2020 18:41 |
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Jeza posted:This is the second reference I've seen to this on SA recently. When exactly did it become the norm in the US for kids to generally be disallowed from roaming around? it's been a gradual thing over a century or so as the built environment gets more crowded and busy with people and vehicles, accelerated by the fact that over the last few decades there's definitely a lot more to do inside than outside before car ownership was a norm, you'd have to be used to roaming relatively long distances to get anything done. so it wasn't too odd for kids to wander many miles from home, especially in rural areas. nowadays most places people live are urbanized and filled with cars, so it's less acceptable for kids to have a large roaming area. i think kids do still roam within safely defined neighborhood spaces though, especially in suburbs. but even from when i was a kid, the neighborhood i grew up in is a lot more developed these days with more car traffic and less random woods to dick around in Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 19:32 on May 11, 2020 |
# ? May 11, 2020 19:30 |
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Kids safety is a funny thing. In Denmark, it's perfectly normal to leave your sleeping baby outside a shop while you go in, possibly with a baby remote (or whatever they're called) to check if they wake up, but possibly not. Some foreigners consider it completely irresponsible for some reason. Babies do not get stolen, obviously.
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# ? May 11, 2020 19:55 |
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well of course not, people have standards! it's strictly a take-a-baby-leave-a-baby honor system
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# ? May 11, 2020 20:09 |
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When the movie “Splash” came out in 1984, it was a joke that a mermaid would take the first name “Madison.” “Madison” became one of the top 25 most popular girl’s names in 1996 and hasn’t left the top 25 since.
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# ? May 11, 2020 23:34 |
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BonHair posted:Kids safety is a funny thing. In Denmark, it's perfectly normal to leave your sleeping baby outside a shop while you go in, possibly with a baby remote (or whatever they're called) to check if they wake up, but possibly not. Some foreigners consider it completely irresponsible for some reason. Some Danes did this in the states and CPS took the kid. I remember it from a class I took
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# ? May 12, 2020 00:59 |
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Here in Iceland during the day babies sleep almost exclusively outdoors if the weather allows (anything short of a storm). This is thought to originate in the time (circa 871 to 1900) when Icelanders lived in filthy, unventilated, mudhuts full of smoke and miasma and people wanting to keep their children as much out of the bad indoor air as possible.
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# ? May 12, 2020 01:25 |
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# ? May 12, 2020 03:38 |
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# ? Mar 29, 2024 12:33 |
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For parents who couldn't afford nannies
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# ? May 12, 2020 04:03 |