11 hit a pedestrian

It might help if you actually read other posts. I said it demonstrates the statistics that show guns are the means in over 50%of suicides.

You don’t understand what empathy is. Not the same as sympathy.

Yeah, I do. My statement stands.

Copycatting is real. Back in New Jersey in the 80’s several high school students decided to commit group suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. Parked the car in a garage, closed the door, turned on the ignition and waited for the inevitable.

Next thing you know over several ensuing weeks there were more in other towns. Why? God alone knows why.

Starting several years ago it seems copycat suicide by train on NJ Transit lines began when one was reported as an SBT. Then the others began and haven’t stopped, averaging at least one per month. Now they’re reported as “tresspasser strikes,” probably so as not to give any others ideas. Maybe most are tresspassers who don’t know any better or who just don’t think. Who knows?

I realize we’re off-topic, but …

Some research is showing that much of the increase in depression and suicidal thoughts among young people may partially be linked to smart phones and social media (not the bullying in the news).

Many families and social groups have replaced physical interactions with online socializing.

I have to wonder how much is due to the 24-hour news cycle with a constant drumbeat of crisis after crisis, doom report after doom report, and the typical “If it bleeds, it leads.” Bad news from parts of the country and around the world we wouldn’t have heard about years back we certainly hear about now. They’ve got to fill up that air time and can’t be repetitious. I could see how it might affect some overly sensitive souls to believe everything’s hopeless and the next world’s GOT to be better than this one.

Not like the olden times when there were only three major networks with local and national news broadcast only from 6:00 to 8:00 PM and then “Film at 11:00.”

Smart phones bring the outside world - worldwide, national, local and personal acquaintance right into a person’s bedroom and personal space.

Bullying takes many forms and when some of those forms get inserted into someone’s personal space it creates even more pressure on those that are least able to handle it.

Don’t they realize the damn phones have an “off” switch?

I agree. You also read about people telling the whole world their innermost thoughts and everything that they do. They don’t have to know and it just gives them more fodder for their attacks on you.

You know, in the Marines (And I’d imagine just about every other service) they taught us:

NEVER put ANYTHING out over the electromagnetic spectrum or unsecured line you don’t want anyone else to hear! You might think you’re talking to good ol’ Joe from the second platoon, but chances are it’s good ol’ Ivan!

Good words to live by concerning communications that I live by to this day.

The 21st Century tells everyone entering it that you ‘must be connected’ or you will lose out. What you will ‘lose out’ on is immaterial - you will lose out.

Parents want to keep ‘close tab’ on their children and would probably punish them in many cases if they found them with the phone turned off. Phones, smart or otherwise are not the only devices that kids are entwined within - Ipads, Chromebooks, laptops - in today’s world most schools provide or require students to have one of those devices in the normal course of their education.

The world as it exists today is no where near the world that most of us grew up in or for that matter raised our own children in.

Getting today’s juveniles weaned off electronic devices and keeping those devices from impinging upon their ‘personal space’ is next to impossible.

I know. It’s pathetic. It truly is.

I don’t know if the inventors of “SmartPhone” technology planned it that way or if like Doctor Frankenstein they’re asking themselves “What have we done?”

You know, there is a battle I fought, and lost, in the 1970s and then again, in a different context, in the 1990s. It remains a somewhat attractive option today… if the obvious issues can be addressed.

Back in the days of CONELRAD, there was discussion that as part of developing FM portable and car radios, there be circuitry installed that would turn them on, adjust volume and in some cases auto tune, and broadcast the appropriate tones for the EBS system. Some people regarded this in a sort of tinfoil-hat sense as the camel’s nose for PRC-style pervasive propaganda broadcasting… and the idea didn’t go far.

But it would be highly logical to use a similar system in cars to produce an alarm near an active railroad crossing, or if sensors detected imminent ‘fouling’ of a crossing to activate the general warning. This would turn your car radio on and transmit an appropriate warning… at one and the same time removing one of the likely distractions and noise sources masking bells or horns and providing immediate warning messages.

The 1990s extension would be to implement similar bridging to ‘Walkman’ devices (using a small FM tuner chip as appropriate) so that wearers of headphones within range of track, or more specifically locomotives on the track, would be alerted through the phones when a horn or other ‘protection’ was activated.

It would of course be trivial to put this in ‘smartphones’ whether they connect to handsfree equipment or not. And that would be more ‘bang for the buck’ than one-way FM radio broadcast…

… except that railroads do NOT like to have their traffic and train lengths recorded and analyzed, and the results used for purposes not rewarding the stockholders. Or for terrorism, robbery, and other things, some of which we’ve discussed comparatively recently. Speed or location, length, and frequency could be trivially extracted from ‘connected’ smartphones

Risk/reward evaluation. The device whether through car electronics or people’s smartphones** should simply warn of train coming. No need for other data.

** Smartphones are just fine, the Luddite reactions by some elders notwithstanding.

I don’t think it’s so much a Luddite reaction from us geezers as much as the realization of one of life’s great lessons, which most of us learn sooner or later:

“Too much of a good thing is bad!”

That’s all it does.

The problem is that the devices can track actuation. And this can tell people with ‘access to the data’ (like Apple, or companies allowed to use the information) where the front of the train is, where the back of the train is, and how fast the front end is moving at particular crossings… which will tell you enough about the type of train. Remember that the smartphones are already doing this by default for ‘differential’ GPS enhancement – a necessary thing given the drift of many of the GPS chipsets as their phones heat up and cool down.

I really liked the idea of an app that could track grade-crossing occupancy in real-time, with dynamic GPS-navigation instructions avoiding trains, suggesting alternate routes, counting down time for crossings to clear, warning about trains on other tracks, etc. Nifty as hell… but it tells people where the trains are. Railroads don’t generally like that.

Flintlock76 In particular I read a story about a police officer assigned to a “Special Victims” type task force. He started out sympathizing with women who had intimate pictures blasted across the Internet by ex-boyfriends (or girlfriends, let’s not be bigoted) as “revenge porn” but grew to resent them as they were soaking up an inordinate amount of time better spent investgating physical abuse and assault. His attitude was, “What sort of idiot agrees to pose nude in front of a camera with no concern for whether the photos/videos will get out? You agreed to do it. Unless violence or threats of violence were involved, live with your mistakes, the way the rest of humanity has to.”

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There it is. “Don’t put anything out over the electromagnetic spectrum…”

I do shake my head over today’s tech-savvy kids (of all people) making mistakes like this.

The only mitigating circumstance I can think of concerning this is it’s becoming such a common practice that’s getting to be unremarkable. Soon the attitude may very well change from “Oh WOW!” to “So what?”

Naomi Judd (C&W Singer) died today with the family listing her as having succumbed to Mental Illness at age 76.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/naomi-judd-dies-singer-mother-of-wynonna-ashley-judd-dead-age-76/

She didn’t pick train as her preferred method. RIP the Peace you didn’t find in life.

“Mental illness” can cover a lot of ground, but we don’t need to know the particulars. Some things should stay private if the family wants it that way.

Rest in peace Naomi. Go sing with the angels now.