Suspension of Disbelief 507
Well, you knew this post was coming when you read the news. A federal judge has ruled that Katie Evans, who had been suspended from high school for creating a Facebook group calling one of her teachers "the worst teacher I've ever met," can proceed with her suit seeking attorney's fees from her principal for violating her First Amendment rights. Evans, now a journalism student at the University of Florida, is represented in her suit by the ACLU of Florida.
If any of the recent student online free-speech cases should have been adjudicated in the student's favor, this would most clearly be the one. As Judge Barry Garber wrote in his ruling, Evans's page did not contain threats of violence (if it had, it would have been a matter for the police, not for a school punishment), and the principal didn't even find out about the page until two months after she took it down. It's hard to believe that the principal's lawyers, if he consulted with them, would have gone along with a recommendation to suspend the student. And once the Florida ACLU contacted the principal, wouldn't he have realized that the longer he fought the case, the more legal bills the ACLU would amass, along with the possibility that the principal could be ordered to pay them? Even if he had estimated that there would only be a 5% chance that he could end up being ordered to pay legal fees, was it worth the risk, if the fees could come to thousands or tens of thousands of dollars? Well, now he knows.
When a different judge ruled that a student had no right to challenge his suspension for making a vulgar Myspace page about his principal, I said that there was no more objective basis for saying that the ruling was legally "right" than it was "wrong," because if you put 10 judges in separate rooms and ask them how they would rule on the case, you could get 10 different, mutually contradictory answers. Well, fair is fair — even though I support Judge Garber's ruling 100%, I have to concede that it did not necessarily follow inevitably from the facts and the law, and there's no objective basis for calling it "the" right ruling. Judges are not like doctors who look at a mammogram, and draw on experience that the general public does not have, in order to see something that would be hidden from the rest of us. In cases like these, judges simply have multiple plausible interpretations in front of them, and they pick one. As such they're acting more like referees (who make a decision so that the game — or, in this case, society — can move on) than true "experts."
There is a temptation to think that there is some consistent reasoning behind the different courts' rulings — say, that the student who created a vulgar page mocking his principal (the student was identified in papers only as "J.S.") went too far and crossed a line, while Katie Evans's page complaining about her teacher was clean enough to stay on the safe side of the line, and make her eligible for damages in a First Amendment suit. This, I think, is nonsense, an attempt to put a consistent theory on top of a legal system that does not follow consistent rules from one court ruling to the next. If different judges had been randomly assigned to J.S.'s case and Evans's case, then it might have been J.S. who won and Evans who lost. After all, it was a federal judge who once ruled that a Utah high school had the right to suspend a student for wearing sweatshirts emblazoned with "Vegan" and "Vegans Have First Amendment Rights." (The judge and the principal had apparently confused veganism with eco-terrorism.) How do you reconcile that with any of the recent rulings? (No prizes for guessing how that judge would have ruled if the shirts had said "Christian.")
But even if it's still a roll of the dice how a court would rule in a particular student free-speech case, what matters from the point of view of a principal in a future case, are the potential payoffs. What if you're thinking about suspending a student for a non-threatening, non-libelous Facebook page? If the case ends up in court and you win, then you get the satisfaction of being "vindicated." But if you lose, you could be ordered to pay tens of thousands of dollars to the student's attorneys. So even a small number of victories for students in free-speech cases, even if mixed in with an equal or greater number of victories for the schools, still create an enormous incentive for a principal not to risk the case at all, when the potential gain is so small and the potential loss so huge. Even if you think there's only a 5% chance of being ordered to pay the student's $10,000 legal bill, that means you'd still have to decide if it's worth (on average) about $500 to get the satisfaction of suspending them.
(On the other hand, if a student created a page that was so threatening or libelous towards a staff member, that the school would run the risk of being sued if the principal didn't suspend the student, then the school and the principal are taking some legal risk either way, but the risk involved in suspending the student is much smaller. Fine — there's nothing wrong with suspending a student for threats of violence.)
So the ruling is a much more significant victory for student speech than many of the parties involved probably realize. Even though Judge Garber didn't actually award Evans her attorney's fees (yet?) — he only said that she could proceed to seek them against the principal — just the fact that it's coming dangerously close to that, means that principals in future cases now know what the risks are.
But why was all this necessary? How did the legal and societal climate of attitudes toward people under 18, lead to a principal thinking that he could punish a 17-year-old for comments that she made about a teacher, on her own time, to a third-party audience? If the students in the school had been comprised, not of minors, but of adults from some other minority group — African Americans, immigrant women, native Spanish speakers — there's no question that the principal never would have thought he could get away with suspending the student for criticizing a teacher.
Similarly, students at Harriton High School in Rosemont, Pennsylvania just discovered that school officials had given laptops to students to take home with remotely-activated webcams, that could be used to take photos in student's homes and transmit them back to school officials. Incredibly, this was discovered not by students or their parents examining the laptops, but because school officials used the feature to take a photo of a student in his bedroom, and then confronted him about "inappropriate" behavior, not considering that the students and their parents might consider it "inappropriate" that the school snuck spy cams into their bedrooms. (The school has issued a denial claiming, "At no time did any high school administrator have the ability or actually access the security-tracking software" — which doesn't seem to make sense, since the lawsuit was filed in the first place because the student was told by the assistant principal that the webcam had caught him engaging in "inappropriate behavior.") What was the school thinking? Probably, they were thinking, "These are minors, we can do what we want." If their student clientele had been comprised of adults, they never would have dreamed that they could confront a student about behavior in their room that they captured with a hidden camera. (Ironically, the school may end up in more trouble for spying on minors, as this editorial argues, since the school officials may now be guilty of recording and possessing child porn, depending on what the cameras "captured" in the students' rooms!)
So no matter how much ink is spilled analyzing the legal technicalities of suspending a 17-year-old student for off-campus speech, that's not what the case is really about. The case is really about attitudes. Change society's attitudes to think of 17-year-olds the way we currently think of 25-year-olds, and no judge is going to deny them their right to criticize their school on their own time, any more than a judge in today's society would deny that right to a 25-year-old.
And where does this attitude towards minors come from? I suspect that most people who believe that we have to draw the line somewhere around age 18, believe it for no better reason than because they were raised in a society where most other people believe it too. If you think that setting the cutoff age at 18 is just "common sense," then I would bet my house that if you had been raised in a society where the cutoff age was set at 13, that would seem like "just common sense" to you as well, and similarly if you had been raised in a society where the cutoff had been set at 22. This may seem like an unremarkable observation, but my belief in minors' rights has always been motivated by a more fundamental belief that you should not believe things merely because most people in your society believe them. If that sounds like a trite platitude, consider how few people in the US seem to question the rule that you can show a man's chest on television but not a woman's chest. In more liberal Denmark, supermarkets can stock tabloids at toddler-eye-level with photos of topless women on the cover, while in Saudi Arabia, adult women can't leave the house without covering their faces, and in all three societies, the majority thinks these regulations are just plain "common sense." Is the age of majority just another arbitrary illusion caused by the power of consensus?
When I said this on The David Lawrence Show, the host made the thoughtful observation that most countries all over the world set the age of majority for most purposes at 18. Close, I said, but it doesn't quite prove what it seems to prove, because those globally diverse societies did not reach that conclusion independently — they move in similar directions because of cross-cultural influences. (The voting age was set at 21 in many democracies before many of them lowered it to 18 in the 1970's within a few years of each other.) To get a better sense of whether there is any merit to the idea, we'd have to do something like the "putting the 10 judges in 10 separate rooms" test — put 10 different societies in mutual isolation from each other, let them develop and debate things on their own, and see if all or most of them reach the conclusion that 18 us a good cutoff age for adulthood.
The idea that actual children — under the age of, say, 11 — are qualitatively different from adults, has in fact been re-discovered by civilizations that developed independently at different points in history, all over the world. So there's probably something to it. The idea that teenagers are qualitatively different from adults, is something particular to recent history, and a wise person transported forward in time from the 1500's to the present day might scratch their heads and wonder why we think that 18-year-olds should be allowed to criticize their teachers but 17-year-olds cannot. I suspect the artificial extension of childhood grew out of the fact that because modern jobs are more complicated than they used to be, we need more years of schooling before we can go out and compete in the workforce. The fallacy there, though, is that just because we need more years of schooling, doesn't mean that the natural age of "human maturity" has gone up. So we end up with 17-year-olds having to go to court to establish their right to criticize their teachers on their own time.
Judge Garber wouldn't have been in a position to make this argument in his ruling even if he agreed with it. But even if his ruling was based on logic that has nothing to do with the underlying case for minors' rights, it was still a step in the right direction.
Re:Ageism (Score:5, Interesting)
Bars that won't let you enter unless you're over 25, although the drinking age is 21.
Apartment complexes that won't rent to you unless you're over 55.
In both these cases, the reverse would be unthinkable.
I don't want smelly old people in my bar or apartment complex - nobody over 40 allowed. Why does this bring a lawsuit, and the former does not?
Some Legal Background (Score:5, Interesting)
Probably the closest case to that is Morse v. Frederick [wikipedia.org] in which students stood just off school property with a banner reading "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS." Basically what it seems to come down to is that you have some first amendment rights as a minor in school unless your message contradicts stated school goals or hinders the learning process.
So the banner contradicted their anti-drug agenda and therefore it was ruled as okay to suspend them for the act. Similarly I guess a judge could interpret undermining a teacher's status as an authority figure to be an inhibition of the learning process in the facebook page. I don't agree with that ruling but this didn't seem to be addressed in the lengthy opinion piece presented above.
A classic case of a message not hindering the learning process was Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District [wikipedia.org] in which black armbands were worn to protest the Vietnam war.
In high school some kids circulated a 'zine that was laden with four letter words [slashdot.org] and was distributed via a student's access to his mom's work's photocopying machine during after hours. We were aware that some of them had been confiscated and you got detention for profanity but since we never really attacked teachers, it never resulted in suspension or worse. During the 'vest craze' of the late nineties, I fashioned a vest out of duct tape and made "Old Navy Sucks, GAP Blows" out of duct tape letters on it. And I was allowed to wear it throughout the whole school day claiming it was a political message if anyone gave me grief. I actually recall being pretty disappointed at the lack of attention I was given for it. The school had some rule about profanity so if you wore a shirt with profanity you had to turn it inside out. I guess 'sucks/blows' wasn't foul enough.
Long story short: as a minor you have some free speech rights in school but not all of them. Any that violate the reason you're in school are restricted. Any that undermine the stated goals of your institution are restricted. I think it's sad that this gets escalated so much
Whatever was going on in Utah needs to be looked at though [libertarianrock.com]. That story was downright disturbing. "Curbing the straight edge movement" was one of their school's stated goals?! Vegan statements were construed as 'straight edge'?! I must have missed something about the dangers of the straight edge movement and veganism because that smells like complete administrative bullshit from where I'm standing.
human nature (Score:1, Interesting)
What is the source of society's attitudes toward the free-speech rights of 17-year-olds?
When one human being is in a position of authority over another in one domain, they will tend to leverage that into coercion in any and all domains in which they are related.
Re:The right decision is easy. (Score:4, Interesting)
This brings to mind the recent case [techdirt.com] where a student was using a school-provided laptop at home and the administrators turned on the webcam remotely "for security reasons." The student was disciplined for "improper behavior in his home." The school never said what the conduct was. Some theorized it was sexual in nature while others said he was eating Mike & Ikes which the administrator mistook for drugs.
In any case, if my child is doing something improper at home, it is my job to punish him, not the school's. If it impacts his schoolwork then the school can either give him bad grades, work with me to correct the behavior and/or take action if the action "spills over" into school (e.g. he comes to school high/drunk even though he wasn't taking drugs/drinking at school). But punishing a child for actions that apparently were exclusively done outside of school is *NOT* the job of teachers, principals or any other school official.
This also misses the point (Score:2, Interesting)
But this has nothing to do with First Amendment rights. These belong to everyone. Even toddlers. Before you know how to speak, your speech is protected. Anything else is plain and simple bullshit.
I don't fancy anyone would deny a 17-year-old the right to speak at a rally, for example. How is this any different? Except, of course, for the fact that a school principal has no legal authority whatsoever over a student beyond what the contract with him or his parents (in the case of a minor) allows, and never in a situation where the student isn't under immediate care of the school. This whole thing is ridiculous.
Origins of ignorance (Score:1, Interesting)
Obviously the principle went to public school... there we learn that it is our right to rail against anything and everything (rhetorically) before we learn to study the nature of the system in which we operate. Venting is a national past time, and the opportunity to do so has been greatly expanded by the web. (Thank you Slashdot!)
Apparently this principle runs a model school because he has enough time to find and suspend a student for criticizing one of his teachers. No need to look into the merits of the argument, the politeness of the presentation or the ramifications of his own decision. I think any student who implicitly acknowledges the limits of their experience by qualifying the scope criticism (e.g. "the worst teacher I've ever met") deserves accolades for being both polite and self aware. This principle could take lessons from the student.
How would I fix this situation. Send the for training as a mediator, demote the principle and investigate the allegations of incompetence on the part of the teacher.
Re:Ageism (Score:4, Interesting)
Places that restrict rentals in such a way are worried about a group of immature people coming in and destroying the place without any means to pay for it.
This can be solved, in part, by paying for additional insurance to ensure that the cost of the damage is borne by an insurance company rather than the renter. Of course the insurance company will hike up the cost if the renter is under 25.
Interestingly its fine for insurance companies to discriminate based on age. They make no bones about using age to form part of their assessment as to what premium to charge. Are they exempt from anti-age discrimination law?
Re:Ageism (Score:4, Interesting)
You obviously have not been to many of the bars in Calgary.
There is blatant Ageism, Racism, even uglyism.
It's common knowledge that such and such a bar doesn't let in Asians. Such and such a bar hates hispanics. This bar is for 14 year olds pretending to be 18. This bar doesn't allow anyone over 40.
Not a single lawsuit to follow any of these. The bouncers can always say "Its your shoes" or come up with any excuse they want.
Re:The right decision is easy. (Score:4, Interesting)
"Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech." I don't see an age limit in there. Do you?
Another rambling mess from Mr. Haselton (Score:5, Interesting)
Once again Mr. Haselton demonstrates his tremendous ignorance of the law by attempting to analyze it from his own preconceived first principles using his own methods of reasoning rather than from within the appropriate legal framework using legal reasoning.
Judges are not like doctors who look at a mammogram, and draw on experience that the general public does not have, in order to see something that would be hidden from the rest of us.
The general public does not have substantial legal experience or knowledge, so judges do indeed see something that would be hidden from most people, Mr. Haselton included, evidently.
In cases like these, judges simply have multiple plausible interpretations in front of them, and they pick one. As such they're acting more like referees (who make a decision so that the game -- or, in this case, society -- can move on) than true "experts".
Although Mr. Haselton almost certainly does not know it, this is close to a critical legal studies [wikipedia.org] view of jurisprudence. It is a controversial view, to put it mildly, and the majority of judges and attorneys do not subscribe to it.
There is a temptation to think that there is some consistent reasoning behind the different courts' rulings...This, I think, is nonsense, an attempt to put a consistent theory on top of a legal system that does not follow consistent rules from one court ruling to the next.
Those rulings were written by judges in different circuits who were thus bound by different precedents. Furthermore, one was written by a district court judge who is generally constrained to follow the law in his circuit. The other was a decision on appeal written by a circuit judges who were considerably more free to deviate from prior precedent. Mr. Haselton is comparing apples and oranges.
And indeed in the 3rd Circuit case you see 3rd Circuit cases cited, and in the Southern District of Florida case you see different cases cited, including the earlier 3rd Circuit case! There is no inconsistency here: the Southern Florida judge is distinguishing his case from the 3rd Circuit case based on the facts present in the particular case. Judges do this all the time.
Mr. Haselton seems to think that rulings are always simplistic hard and fast rules. Here he seems think that the rule is something like "students can't be punished for something they do online outside the school." In fact, as the case discusses, there is a complex legal and factual inquiry that is dependent on balancing competing factors and making fine distinctions. The case itself makes this clear: "While the Frederick decision offers little aid in solving the specific issue of student speech published on the internet, it does, however, make clear that the operative test is not a simple one of geography. Where the speech is published is not the only question that needs to be asked." (emphasis added)
But even if it's still a roll of the dice how a court would rule in a particular student free-speech case, what matters from the point of view of a principal in a future case, are the potential payoffs.
Here Mr. Haselton is stumbling onto law & economics [wikipedia.org]. But his argument rests on several unstated assumptions: first, he's assuming that the principal is a rational actor, which is a pretty questionable assumption. Second, he's assuming that principal's have sufficient information on which to base a rational choice; in particular he's assuming that the principals (or their lawyers) know about this and related cases and know all of the ground facts of the case that a court might use to come to a decision. This is also a questionable assumption. He offers nothing to support either of these assumptions.
How did the legal and societal climate of attitudes toward people under 18, lead to a principal thinking that he could punish a 17-year-old for comment
Re:Ageism (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ageism (Score:3, Interesting)
There's also a plainly huge difference between what we understand as bias and what we understand as bias that forms an ism. So, it's not completely uncommon for a woman to bitch about men labeling women as either virgins or whores, yet they do the same with men and they do the same with themselves. The difference between natural forming opinions and overt oppression is probably on a scale somewhere.
Disclaimer, this is my own opinion I don't know what the experts say or even if they've looked at it much. It might be anecdotal, but I don't flippin' care. Im Right.
Re:Ageism (Score:3, Interesting)
nobody over 40 allowed. Why does this bring a lawsuit, and the former [won't rent to you unless you're over 55] does not?
Those under 55 can become over 55; they're only delayed entry.
Those over 40 can never become under 40 again; they're barred entry forevermore.
You might have a case if you suffer from progeria or other life-shortening disease and thus will never have the opportunity to reach these magic ages. Can a terminal disease or condition be considered a handicap illegal to discriminate against?
Re:Ageism (Score:5, Interesting)
>>>there's less harm resulting when a minority engages in it than when somebody in the majority does.
Tell that to some husband who has been abused by his wife, or a white guy who applies at a black-run or Arab-run company and gets turned down (in favor of the second black or Arab candidate), because he won't fit into the "culture". Reverse racism or prejudice is just as wrong as female or colored-prejudice.
Re:Ageism (Score:2, Interesting)
Personally, I believe the landlord should have the right to discriminate based on any criteria he wishes, since it is his property. Only for publicly owned/managed/funded areas should discrimination be illegal (and it often isn't, if you consider a wide enough perspective on discrimination).
That said, I completely agree that if the landlord has a "no under " policy, in principle he is doing it wrong. However laws are usually written such that renters get to walk all over landlords if push comes to shove, and it is a hell of a lot easier to simply not deal with the problems that occur more often with younger tenants than with older tenants.
For example, did you know that in my state it is illegal for a landlord to forcibly remove a tenant from an apartment, even if there is a court ordered eviction? The punishment for not leaving when evicted is slight, and often it is not worth a police officer's time to arrest a squatter, so it ends up being extremely low priority and can take weeks to deal with, and that's AFTER months of getting the court on your side.
That's a bit extreme, but I know someone who it has happened to. A much more common horror story is the tenant who stays for 6 months and causes $5,000 in damages. That $600-1000 deposit doesn't go very far in those cases, and it isn't like the landlord gets to save up those deposits to make up for a bad tenant, he gives it back when someone leaves (less any damages, of course). A lawsuit would probably cost the landlord even more in the long run, so when they see a pattern they end up cutting out a whole swath of people to avoid the problem.
It's the same reason car insurance is a lot higher for people under 25, statistically drivers under the age of 25 get in the most accidents, and it isn't by a small margin. That costs the insurance companies more money, and if they don't raise rates across the board they won't make any money on that particular group of people. 25 is certainly arbitrary, but an insurance company won't feel comfortable with you until you've crossed that magic age marker.
Re:Ageism (Score:3, Interesting)
Except of course for the significantly higher repair bills they seem to get so often after people under 25 have rented a room from them. Doubly so if the area is considered a major party destination.
People don't do things for no reason, especially when money is involved. Even racists will take the money of people they hate if they will make money on the deal.
The only reasonable, and in fact the most plausible, explanation for the "no under 25" rules is that people under the age of 25 tend to be far more destructive in almost every way than people over 25. It's arbitrary, sure, but there are a lot of statistics to back it up.
Of course MOST kids under 25 aren't destructive, that's not the point. The point is the few that are destructive cost more money then the majority that aren't bring in. Therefor, if you don't want to lose money you just nix the lot of them and deal with safer clientel.
That also happens to be the exact same problem that faces the black community. Most black kids are just as stand up as anybody else, but the few that aren't more than make up for those who are, and the culture is such that it can be hard to tell the difference just by looking at them and even sometimes talking to them. To prove my point, note that white kids (thugs or no) who dress and act the same as black thugs are discriminated against in very similar ways. On the flipside, a black kid who dresses sharp and has good manners is not often a target of discrimination. The skin color doesn't really matter usually, except as a distinguishing feature - it's the profile that usually triggers the discrimination. Most white folk aren't white supremicists, they just draw from their own experiences and the experiences of others to make the best decisions they can. Young people often hurt, rather than help, their situation.
Re:Ageism (Score:3, Interesting)
Just make a "no party" clause with huge monetary penalty for breaking. Make it bloody obvious from the beginning that this clause is there, and that it will be enforced if necessary.
And what happens when they have a party anyway, trash the place, and have no money to pay for it?
Take them to court? How much does that cost? And you can't get blood from a stone.
It's easier to avoid the whole problem to begin with.
It doesn't matter if you think it's discrimination or right or wrong, it's reality.... if someone's going to trash your rental property, it's much more likely to be younger people.
I agree with one of the above posters... I think landlords should be able to discriminate any way they want to. It's private property. Even the rights enumerated in the bill of rights are negative ones; you have the right to free speech, but no one is forced to provide you with a venue; you have the right to bear arms, but no one is forced to supply you with a gun. If, by the 10th amendment you extend that to include rental rights, you have the right to rent property, but no one should be forced to rent it to you.
Re:Ageism (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ageism (Score:3, Interesting)
People decry ageism in regards to minors, while leaving out the fact that it also protects them. There are very few cases where a minor is held accountable for their actions in serious crimes and typically crimes committed by a minor are sealed and not permanent
Yeah I felt real protected when at age 20 I was charged with underage drinking. I faced a mandatory suspension of my license (even though I wasn't within 2 miles of a car) a large fine, mandatory alcohol counselling courses (paid by me) and potential jail time. That charge is open to whomever wants to do a background check on me. I have to report it EVERY TIME UNTIL I DIE whenever my security clearance comes up for renewal (no limitations on alcohol charges/arrests there).
You tell me that it's for my own protection. It is so nice to know that the government is there to control me for my own good.
Re:Ageism (Score:2, Interesting)
No, the other poster was not talking about who holds the 'majority of power'. It was clear that he was talking about population numbers. Your racism has you trying to twist the language to rationalize your point of view.
Who has the majority of power is ALWAYS a case by case basis. Telling some guy that is being beaten because of the color of his skin, that it doesn't have as much impact, because he holds the majority of power is absurd at best. When an individual is being discriminated against, they clearly do not hold the majority of power. If they did, they would be discriminated FOR, or at the very least, treated equal.
But sure, each of those two examples is equally bad. My point, and the point of the original guy making the point, is that the case of the black guy getting beat up by a bunch of white guys will, by virtue of the fact that the white guys have the power, happen far more often. Thus the overall harm inflicted by cases resembling the first (white on black) will far exceed those inflicted by cases resembling the second (black on white).
How does one even respond to this? You directly contradict yourself. You claim it is just as bad, but not as bad. This is a paradox. You also claim in this paragraph that white guys beat black guys more often. Do you have any reliable numbers to support this, or are you just assuming that it happens more because you are a racist? You also miss the obvious and indisputable fact that whatever race the group that is doing the beating are, they have the power, and the one getting beaten doesn't. Thus, the statement is inherently flawed and racist within itself.
When you think that being white is the definition of racist, then you wouldn't understand what is racist about what you are saying.
Re:Ageism (Score:3, Interesting)
On the average, women do appear to make better parents then men. There are lots of exceptions, but that's the average. Believing it isn't something that is socially harmful.
OTOH, believing that ANYONE can be a decent parent and also hold down a full time job IS both a false and socially harmful. The only possible exceptions are jobs that allow one to work at home...and those had better allow for frequent interruptions. So the job will suffer, or the kid will suffer.
<digression>N.B.: This used to be less true. When people lived in less densely populated environments, and when transportation was considerably slower, and streets were less populated by it ... i.e., in villages without cars, then it was reasonably safe to allow kids to wander around unsupervised a large part of the time. Even during the 1950's when I was growing up things were a lot safer. I could ride a bicycle unsupervised, and the traffic on most streets that weren't through-fares (I don't mean just thoroughfares, also arterial streets. etc.) was light enough and slow enough that it was reasonably safe. By the time I had gotten to college in the early 1960's the traffic had become a lot denser. I still rode a bicycle, but I paid a LOT more attention to the traffic around me. By the 1970's I judged that the traffic had gotten so bad that I gave up my bicycle. (Falling off it in traffic had something to do with this decision. Fortunately I'd just turned onto a side street.) Today ... people who ride in today's traffic are taking their lives in their hands.</digression>
Re:Ageism (Score:3, Interesting)
The US (and Europe as well) uses age as a very poor approximation of maturity and adult capability. It's a very poor approximation at best, but it's well-entrenched, and since folks younger than 18 are legally second-class citizens they can't do very much about it.
I'm much more of a fan of tying privileges that are currently tied to age (e.g. driving, drinking, smoking, voting) and so on to passing appropriate tests on a regular basis.
For instance, if you want to hold a drivers license, I'd prefer a system where you can take the written tests whenever you're ready, take the driving test whenever you've recently taken a written test, and have to renew your license every few years. Yes, it's a PITA for everyone to retake their tests, but it means that there will be fewer incidents of half-blind elderly folks driving through a mall and the like.
Similarly, for drinking, I'd want to see a written test on things like the signs of alcohol poisoning, how to recognize when your buddy can't drive home, etc, and a practical test (taken after the written test) which would involve demonstrating the skills needed to drink responsibly. Again, perhaps a bit of an annoyance, but a worthwhile tradeoff if it reduces alcoholism, drunk driving, and so on.