Not a lot of information in that article. Is the Guardian a reputable news service, or is it one of those British Tabloids that specialize in shock “news”? Regardless, there’s no way I’m going to say having a government agency take responsibility for stranded children with no family, friends, or resources is a bad thing… no matter how poorly it is occasionally occurs in practice.
the guardian is pretty reputable. Its a serious newspaper, although considered left of center.
I’m amazed this isn’t more of a news story tbh, I find it pretty shocking. But it is weird that the kids didn’t suggest someone phone a friend or relative. I guess sometimes you really wish you had bought travel insurance.
How about they put the kids on a plane back to the UK and their dad, grandma, cousin, aunt, or neighbor picks them up at the airport and sits with them at their house until the mom can safely come home?
I have a better idea. How about they round up all of the kids in the NYC orphanage and send them to Disneyworld! That’ll show those Brits what it’s like to be an American orphan!
I dunno, isn’t the problem here that our state lacks some “Nanny-like” quality that would allow us to be nice to people who forgot to buy travel insurance?
There’s something very “small government” in the government’s response: by treating the children poorly it sends the message that “freeloading” will not be tolerated. Maybe next time people will remember to buy insurance instead of expecting a government handout!
I think it’s more bureaucratic than small government. It’s watching families starve to death with boxes of food at hand because you don’t have permission to distribute them because distribution isn’t your job, assessment is, and the distribution agency is routed through the state’s ways & means department, which calls social services in order to start a case file and begin processing the application for a tuna sandwich…and you haven’t received any paperwork yet. So sorry, wait in line please!
I think, if anything, in a nutshell, that’s the problem with American government &/or society today, in that there is no common sense or local authority to do anything simple. The hospital couldn’t just, you know, make some calls, find out if she had family, see if they could send some money or work with a British agency, ect. They passed the buck onto the city. The city passes the buck on the social services. Social services passes the buck to the orphanage. The orphanage passes the buck and treats them like indigent homeless, children of gangsters and processes them like everyone else. No one wants to be the one caught holding the stick. Why? Because of the liability, the cost, and the lack of having any sort of authority to apply some common sense responsibilities to a simple situation.
You are assuming that calls weren’t made, and that they would readily have resolved this situation.
Hospitals are accustomed to contacting family members of their patients for various medical-legal reasons, and although it is not as easy as you suggest, I suspect it was attempted in this case. And I also suspect that getting someone to agree to wire over a few thousand dollars immediately is much more difficult than you think. I wouldn’t be surprised if the girls were turned over to the state only after all the easy options were exhausted.
That’s a mindbogglingly inane post, even for Spoofy.
NYC’s inability to properly care for unsupervised minors is evidence of rampant nanny-statism? Or is he just outraged that we didn’t turn them loose to trade sexual favors for food and shelter?
I don’t understand why the British Consulate couldn’t/wouldn’t help out here - even if they couldn’t pay for the woman in question’s medical bills, they should certainly have been able to provide safe accommodation for the kids.
Why no love for Janet Devers, arrested in the UK for selling by pound instead of by the metric system, despite the fact that the UK mostly uses the pound.
The Metric Martyr?
Damn! I had the over on how long it takes Spoof to find a real outrage. Way to ruin it, wahoo.
Spoofy has an axe to grind. He looks for stories to support the conclusion he’s already come to, and then he posts them here, and bitches about them. At no point in this process do facts or logical reasoning take place. Expect several hundred more of these, in the weeks and months to come.
Standards? Bah! Who needs them? Especially in a trade union spanning an entire continent and dozens of different languages, cultures, and customs.
Despite her attempts to rally people behind her with patriotic jingoism, her crime wasn’t that of using the Imperial system, which is perfectly legal in Britain, but refusing to offer her customers metric weights as an alternative if they asked for them.
The standards are there to reduce confusion and prevent people from being ripped off with measurements they don’t understand.
How many stones to a furlong?
Isn’t the best answer to say that if you’re confused the switch or didn’t think you’re getting a good price for the amt of peppers, then don’t buy anything.
That’s the beauty of a market. You can find someone else selling peppers in kilos or whatever you want. This is just bureaucratic silliness.
Consumer protection laws are important because unregulated free markets are notorious for not respecting consumers. I know I know, it was a shock to me too when I discovered this.
As with any laws, the tradeoff for a simple uniform consumer protection law that isn’t riddled with exceptions is that sometimes an odd edge case comes up. So in this specific case the price of a simple straightforward consumer protection law is that something unimportant like red pepper units gets regulated. Does that make it a bad law when the big picture is considered? Not really in my opinion.
No, the best answer is for her to standardize her measurements as the regulations demand. I don’t want to have to go to multiple stores just to find measurements I understand. And if enough store keepers do this, it’s possible that I won’t find any stores that use understandable measurements.
That’s the beauty of a market. You can find someone else selling peppers in kilos or whatever you want.
Really? Good sir, could you tell me where I can find a store that sells peppers in kilos here in Seattle? Or if I go to Virginia, could you tell me where to find a store that sells peppers in kilos?
Sometimes people have to be forced to do the right thing.
Qt3 posters defend throwing someone in jail for using pounds instead of kilos. No one is surprised.
But, would it have been different if a taser was involved?
Um, no. How about “Some posters support throwing someone in jail for willful defiance of a reasonable law” instead?
True, except for the part about it being reasonable.