Nov

9

I recently played with Aubrey at the new Stuyvesant park on West Street. It illustrates many things that made America great and are appropriate to think about relative to the well known abundance that giving each settler his own plot gave to the pilgrims enabling them to have a Thanksgiving. Everything is better now. Think back to the catalogs you used to order from 10 years ago, and see if there's anything you would buy. Not only in electronics, but in toys , gifts, cosmetics. The park has products from Kompani and Berliner– that are infinitely safer and more playful than the old parks. The ropes of the jungle gym protect the kids from falling and doubtless save hundreds of lives a year. The artificial soft turn prevents thousands of deaths a year from concrete and asphalt accidents. All the equipment turns and jumps with unbreakable springs. The plastic that Kompani uses is infinitely safer and more playful than the splintering and depreciating wood that our kids grew up on. How many things are infinitely better now than they were 20 years ago.

What causes this? Incentives, competition, specialization and trade. I must improve on this thought for my annual thanksgiving message based on the incentives that Governor Bradford provided.

Russ Sears writes: 

While one would hope that there is truth in this post, I believe the closer you look the more you see this is the incentive of government in charge of most parks and hover parents, not a free market. Parks often are most concerned with preventing lawsuits, rather than the entertainment or the education or even the holistic physical well being of the kids. Gone are the Basketball goals, the volleyball nets, and the score of competitive sports played on baseball field that encourage kids to casually compete, testing who is best. Even a kid Aubrey's age understands when helmets are good and when they are for show and support of over protective parents.

It is outside the parks system. To find the free market and true innovation you must go to the mountain climber, the bicyclist, the hikers, the campers, and even running specialty stores. There kids are thought to take educated risks and how to swing the odds greatly in your favor, to have a great time and live life fully in true freedom. These store are amazing places with gear that would stun a Rip Van Winkle awakened from a 20 year nap. 

Rocky Humbert writes:

Each year, emergency departments treat more than 200,000 children for playground-related injuries.

And from 1990 to 2000, 147 children aged 14 and under died from playground-related injuries. 56% died from strangulation and 20% died from falls. This may not seem like a troubling statistic, unless it's your kid that hit the ground at terminal velocity.

I submit that the Plaintiff's Bar is the "unsung hero" in playground safety evolution.

Russ Sears adds:

How many of increasingly obese, depressed, apathetic and unambitious youth and young adults are there through lost opportunity cost? Like the FDA, let us never forget "safety" has a hidden cost. In fact it could be argued that the bubble in safe AAA bonds was the fuel that allowed the housing bubble to start, grow and explode.

Jeff Watson writes:

You're right that most things have improved in science kits and electronics. However, chemistry sets have gotten worse, although they are much safer. My old Gilbert set from when I was a kid had a much wider range of experiments and greater variety of chemicals than any set today due to the legalities and regulations. Although I love the new electronics kits, the old Allied Electronic "Knight Kit 200" was the best electronic kit I ever played with because it was a breadboard and even had a solar cell. I tried my hand at designing simple circuits with this kit and always had a propensity to blow out .01uF ceramic discs due to my adventure.

Victor Niederhoffer replies: 

I disagree with you. The Kosmos Chem 3000 is infinitely better as are the snap tech kits much better than allied or radio shack. You must come and see the new science curricula that Kosmos provides.

Jeff Watson elaborates: 

The nice thing about the old Allied 200 in one kit was that it was a breadboard kit and used 110VAC with a multi tapped transformer. The breadboard came with plenty of extra connectors and I could add all the extra resistors, capacitors, transistors, coils, chokes, diodes, tubes, etc, that I could scrounge from old TV sets etc. The new kits just don't allow that flexibility, at least from what I've seen online etc. I still have that old kit and taught John the rudiments of basic circuitry when he was a kid. That kit is so old, I had to change out all the electrolytics and put in a new transformer as components change values with age. In my case, all the science and electronic kits I had ended up getting heavily customized by me, and they never resembled the original after a few days.

Victor Niederhoffer writes:

Yes. But that's infinitely more difficult and harder to learn and attach the springs than the snap-ons, which come with all those components and educational sets keyed to actual curricula.

Jeff Watson counters:

I know that the springs are harder, but they worked for me. When I was a kid, I never followed a curriculum, but by 5th grade, I was looking at schematics in Popular Electronics and building workable models on my Knight Kit breadboard. I made many improvements to their schematics and sent them to the magazine and I was published and rewarded with a free subscription. My tweaks weren't much, but for a 11 year old kid, they were pretty cool and left me with a sense of accomplishment. I never did much digital as it wasn't around then, but when I was a freshman in college, I remember studying "Digital Electronics for Scientists" by Malmstadt. Good book that is dated but still useful today.


Comments

Name

Email

Website

Speak your mind

Archives

Resources & Links

Search