We must guard against table saw violence

ChuckM

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Sorry, according to some young people , accidents are violence, and hence the way I word the heading.

A friend of mine shared with me this: "'Last night I was watching the local news. There was a story on bike traffic and the ongoing issues that come from sharing the road with multiple transport modes... a [Gen zer] was interviewed and she kept referring to accidents as "car violence" and steps to prevent accidents as "preventing car violence'".

 
usernumber1 said:
I kinda like they are using their brains.
This terminology with vehicles isn't new. The stats show they are 90% predictable and preventable as per thishttps://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/adv/article-no-such-thing-as-accidents/

they have been rebranded as collisions as far as I can remember.

I think the same could be said about the table saw accidents. Could use a name to match

Negligent Use of a Table Saw?

Bonus, it's also an acronym: NUTS.

(borrowed the idea from the language used for firearm incidents, which are generally seen as negligent rather than accidental)
 
With 49 years of clean driving record (zero incidents) and still counting, I know I can prevent car crashes that are due to my fault, but I can't prevent or avoid someone else crashing into me. I know someone who died at a young age because he was T-boned.
 
Well ... see my signature.

Yet to see a car consciously attacking some other participant of the road traffic.

Nough said.

ChuckS said:
With 49 years of clean driving record (zero incidents) and still counting, I know I can prevent car crashes that are due to my fault, but I can't prevent or avoid someone else crashing into me. I know someone who died at a young age because he was T-boned.
You can still choose the vehicle to drive.
 
ChuckS said:
With 49 years of clean driving record (zero incidents) and still counting, I know I can prevent car crashes that are due to my fault, but I can't prevent or avoid someone else crashing into me. I know someone who died at a young age because he was T-boned.

Defensive driving and risk mitigation puts the onus on both drivers in a crash, it's just a matter of to what degree.

Some states have "no fault" insurance, which is predicated on a combination of the above as well as a mitigation measure against fraudulent claims ("swoop and stop" rear-enders, etc).

Some insurance companies, even in "no fault" states, act as if they are "no fault" insurers, putting at least some of the blame on the driver who wasn't at fault, merely for the fact that they were even at the scene in the first place.

I've been rear-ended once, t-boned once, and front passenger in two other driver-at-fault (the driver of the car I was riding in) accidents.  The rear-ender could have only been prevented by my running a red light.  The t-bone was mitigated but not avoided by accelerating and swerving when I realized a driver was running their red light from my left, thus moving the point of collision to the rear axle rather than my door.
 
With the way some drivers react to cyclists who are enjoying a bike ride and legally sharing the road, I can see why some who spend more time biking would consider it violence. Where I live, we have a pair of one-way, north-south roads separated by a green belt, with a 15 mph speed limit. In the summer months, it's where the majority of beach traffic parks. It's also a shared lane. The aggression of some drivers trying to get through casual bike riders so they can score a parking spot before someone else is unacceptable.

This just happened yesterday:
Driver intentionally hit cyclists, killing one, in brief rampage, Huntington Beach police say

north-south-one-way.png


 
[member=75283]4nthony[/member] that is terrible. Deliberately hitting cyclists and killing one of them. I hope they catch the psycho who did this and put him/her in jail for a very long time.

On the other end of the spectrum, I frequently see cyclists who must think they are immortal - driving with zero regard for rules of the road, running red lights and stop signs, making illegal turns, going across lanes without care, etc. On average 9 out of 10 cyclists on roads that I see here in Chicago do this. I don't mind sharing the road at all, I bike a lot myself; but if you are on the road, follow the rules.
 
serge0n said:
On the other end of the spectrum, I frequently see cyclists who must think they are immortal - driving with zero regard for rules of the road, running red lights and stop signs, making illegal turns, going across lanes without care, etc. On average 9 out of 10 cyclists on roads that I see here in Chicago do this. I don't mind sharing the road at all, I bike a lot myself; but if you are on the road, follow the rules.

I 100% agree with you. Just like people who drive motorcycles and cars, there are bikers who follow the rules and those that flaunt them. I've been known to yell, "your behavior is why people hate cyclists" at a few arrogant riders from time to time.

I'm not a road biker and the street I posted is where I ride cruiser bikes with my family to get to our beach bike path.

 
4nthony said:
I've been known to yell, "your behavior is why people hate cyclists" at a few arrogant riders from time to time.

I need to remember this the next time I'm walking on the sidewalk and a bicyclist comes rolling up on me, even though there's a marked bike lane 3 feet to my left.

Or when I see the local bicyclists riding 2, 3, and 4 wide down the street at whatever casual pace they deem proper on their way to the next bar.

I also still regret disassembling my old 1990's Schwinn Sidewinder for maintenance and leaving it apart long enough to forget how to put it back together again, leading to its demise at the scrap yard.  Now that we live at the bottom of a hill, my Collegiate 3 tank of a bike just isn't up to the task of getting my butt up out of here without significant annoyance.
 
This has evolved into two topics at once, maybe three.
The first and main one is about the fairly recent concept of changing the meanings of words. It's a disturbing trend that requires pushback. It can only get worse when left alone.
Violence is intentional, plain and simple. Negligence, while still wrong and shouldn't be excused, it not intentional in the same way.
As a guy who worked in a body shop for nearly a decade, I can say that I never use the term accident, when referring to car crashes. Most of them are not. Negligence, ignorance, carelessness, whatever you want to call it, most are very preventable.

The bicycle thing is quite another matter. As a guy who commuted to work every day, until the company moved too far for it, I have lots of experience with road cycling. There are a lot of bad cyclists out there and they do so much to hurt the good. I see these every day; riding without lights pre-dawn, riding on the wrong side of the road, riding on the sidewalk, total disregard for the law and their own safety. Yet they would be the first ones to cry, if something did go wrong.
Cars play their own role in this too. They refuse to recognize that bicycles are legally allowed to be on the road, they are part of traffic too, which is why they have to obey the laws surrounding road use.
Cars don't see bicycles as something to "pass", like another car. They are something to "go around" as if it was debris in the road. These are very different actions.
Because I am in a large metro area, we have a fairly decent bike trail system which is completely off-limits to cars. However, it does not go everywhere and sometimes utilizes city streets to connect sections of it.
Here it is totally illegal for adults to ride on the sidewalk ever.
 
Another week, another round of "car violence" aimed at bicyclists.


Also, from the previous video, the person was found and arrested.


In the original post, it was a Gen Z'er who was referring to accidents as "car violence". Per ChatGPT, "as of 2023, 'members of Gen Z would typically be in their late teens to early twenties'".

And here we have two incidents of teens/minors killing people riding bikes. Maybe Gen Z knows something about the younger generation (millenials?) that us Gen X/Boomers do not?
 
Funny you should mention this …

When I was in high school, which pre-dates my woodworking experience by about 30 years, a classmate of mine who I will only identify as Frank B., was what we call a “rough character”.

He carried a flask of whisky in his back pocket and drank liberally from it whenever no teacher was watching.  He hung out with other “rough characters” and he carried a deck of cards with him at all times, and he bragged about his poker playing abilities.

I ran into Frank B., about 10 years after graduations and he had two prosthetic hands (grasping metal hooks).  I asked him what had happened and he said he was working at a cabinet shop and he had an accident at the table saw.

deliveryService


It wasn’t until 20 years later that I questioned the accuracy of that explanation.  How could you cut off both hands on a table saw in one accident?  I cannot picture that.

I can, however, envision that his poker playing debts might have required some gentle prodding to prompt him to make payments. Hence, the table saw violence.
 
4nthony said:
Snip.

And here we have two incidents of teens/minors killing people riding bikes. Maybe Gen Z knows something about the younger generation (millenials?) that us Gen X/Boomers do not?

Horrible crimes!

There's no question that each generation knows their own members best. A friend of mine, a high school teacher, for example, has given up trying to catch up with the "secret codes" his students invent and use (aka slang). Not just language or word usage, but also how the younger generations think. The topics of environment, sexual orientation and gender identity are very important to the Gen Y and (esp.) Gen Z, so important that we babyboomers would not understand, my teacher friend suggested. Those young people make their decisions based on many other factors that may never cross our much older minds, to say the least.
 
Packard said:
I can, however, envision that his poker playing debts might have required some gentle prodding to prompt him to may payments. Hence, the table saw violence.

I could see colleagues getting fed up with his sloppy workmanship due to being trashed all the time and "encouraging him" to seek alternative sources of employment...  [scared]
 
The use of 'violence' reminds me of Newspeak from 1984.  If one can get rid of 'accident' and the concept of it, then every infraction can be met with the most draconian response.  Adherents to the language are literally not equipped to distinguish nuance since all things are the same.  Now, to wield power, I need not make an argument anymore, but merely have to possess the loudest megaphone to shout the word 'violence' at would be oppressors.
 
“Violence” and “violent” are not the same.

I might describe an accident on my table saw as, “A violent kickback of the short strip of oak quite took me by surprise (and took me to the emergency room of the nearest hospital.”

I would not accuse my table saw as having committed violence against my person however.

 
While calling every collision between cars or cars and cyclists violence is a little weird, I think an increasing number of gen Z'ers are frustrated because they don't want to own a car or live in the suburbs, and the US isn't generally setup for them to be able to afford to live in urban areas, or ride their bike/take transit. Top it off with dysfunctional safety/regulatory standards that are leading to less and less safe cars/trucks (for anyone outside of them), and you have a growing frustration.

This frustration is probably where things like calling it car violence are coming from. Just my guess as a millennial stuck between gen x and z.
 
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