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by mathogre 1467 days ago
It is a sad, soulless world in which we live today. I went to an otherwise anonymous state college on the east coast in the latter 1970s. One of the fun things I remember was picking up lunch from McDonalds using my former roommate's Ford Pinto. If you're not familiar with the Pinto, look it up. It was a "great" car. Yeah.

Driving to McDonalds was fun and exciting! This Pinto was a 4 speed manual, where the shifter could easily be lifted out of the drive shaft tunnel. But that was trivial in comparison to the fact the brakes were limited to the parking brake. The drive to MickyD's was five to ten miles, including travel on a highway. You plan your stops. A real emergency would be bad, but regular driving was merely interesting. When I got back to my former roommate's house, we enjoyed a great lunch! The drive was fun.

I'm saddened by what Stanford has become. I look at the list of companies founded by Stanford Alumni, and am duly impressed. I look at what the "edges" of the Stanford population is today, and see the end of Stanford dominance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_founded_by_S...

Here are your choices about life. It's wobbling on two wheels until you get it right or depending on training wheels and helmets to keep you safe. It's taking risks or saying, "Mommy, may I?" Mommy's gonna say, "No, honey, I don't want you to get hurt or for you to hurt anyone else."

Training wheels and Mommy's protection?

Fuck that.

1 comments

I'm sympathetic to the idea of not infantilizing college students, but not to the anecdote of driving 5-10 miles to McDonald's in a Pinto without brakes. Sounds like it'd endanger others.
Romanticizing pure stupidity is always one of nostalgia's greatest tricks.
You are exactly the problem OP is talking about
Driving a car without functional brakes on the highway is pure stupidity. It's not "fun boyish hijinks" if someone else dies because of you. It's not nanny-stating to think that your cool future story/character-building experience shouldn't involve putting innocent bystanders at risk.
Children don’t always make responsible, adult decisions.
Imagine how boring the world would be if everyone made responsible, adult decisions at all opportunities!
On the other extreme end of the scale, consider a young person with lots of potential entering university, who then decides to rebel by trying increasingly harder drugs, and ends up with drugs tainted with fentanyl and dies of an overdose. Similar situations have happened before, such as this report of a physics senior dying of fentanyl [1].

Consider young people who try black hat hacking as a prank or for illicit means, and getting a criminal record (source of this happening in Canada [2]. Students also cheat on their courses, get caught, and get expelled. Others make TikTok videos on train tracks, touch the electrified rail, and end up hospitalized or dead.

This is the extreme end of the scale, but these cases and personal experience have led me to believe that it's typically far better to follow the law while questioning conventions. I admit there are cases (e.g. Uber) where people and companies succeeded by breaking the law, but I figure the risks are pretty high, and there is still plenty of opportunity to innovate while respecting the law in one's personal and professional life.

[1] https://www.reed.edu/reed_magazine/june2010/features/drug_po...)

[2] https://globalnews.ca/news/3870338/mcmaster-university-hacke...

They didn't ask you :). EDIT: Sorry dad! If every decision was rational and safe we'd be a very uniform and good society. Surprised you did not see the irony, but I guess this is HN.