PowerSwitch

This is just plain crazy! If you're a parent with small children - what happened to these mums will make your blood boil.

Thankfully a review of the case has been ordered.

Review of babysitting ban ordered
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8277378.stm

Sorry not peak oil related, but a total control issue!

Ofsted has created mayhem and destruction wherever it has trampled over many years.

There's an interview with one of the policewomen on Radio 4 Today Programme this morning.

Couldn't agree more. I was shouting at the TV when this came on the news. Our world is going fecking mad!

I followed a link on PowerSwitch yesterday that took me eventually to the discovery of Tainter's "The Collapse of Complex Societies" and a review of it on DODGY TAX AVOIDERS that stated, basically, that complex societies are brought down by the weight of bureaucracy and ended with:

I would just add that the book makes very short work of what Tainter calls mystical explanations of why communities fail, terms such as `losing vigor', `loss of virtue' that some contemporaries of collapsing societies have observed are dismissed as value laden statements which need be given no credence and that I find is the only hole in the book, you cant dismiss the quality of the relationships between individuals and say this has not bearing on society because society is more than just `nuts and bolts' but social relations.

See also the "The kids are seething and it’s the fault of our generation" thread!

Our society has completely lost the plot about what is important and what is not.

BTW, be careful now as we approach autumn and THINGS might fall down from trees and HIT YOU ON THE HEAD and INJURE YOU. I know a good lawyer who can help you claim against the person or organisation responsible or with the deepest pockets. And a publicist who can get you a good deal with OK! magazine for your story.

Jeez, whatever happened to growing food to eat, making clothes to wear and building houses to live in!

You need re-educating.

snow hope wrote:.... I was shouting at the TV when this came on the news.....

Shouting! I nearly threw my 800" Plasma TV into my Hot Tub!

I don’t know the details of this particular story but it certainly fits a familiar pattern.

As a society we seem to do less and less on trust and more and more for legalistic or risk management reasons.

Apparently the requirement is for anyone babysitting for more than two hours, 14 times in one year.

I used to babysit for close friends, about 3 hours, about 25 times a year.

I was breaking the law!


Edit - I was only breaking the law if I gained from the exercise. Since our requirement for reciprocal babysitting was quite low, I didn't gain significant payment in kind.

I was OK, but if my friends had babysat for us more often, I would be the law breaker.

lancasterlad wrote:

snow hope wrote:.... I was shouting at the TV when this came on the news.....

Shouting! I nearly threw my 800" Plasma TV into my Hot Tub!

RalphW wrote:Apparently the requirement is for anyone babysitting for more than two hours, 14 times in one year.

It's this kind of bureaucratic complexity that destroys civilisations... thing of all the 'work' that has gone into developing these rules, publishing, promoting... will go into the enforcing.

It's a drag of society, and representative of a degree of complexity we won't be able to support in the future.

Laws are for the weak.

clv101 wrote:It's this kind of bureaucratic complexity that destroys civilisations... thing of all the 'work' that has gone into developing these rules, publishing, promoting... will go into the enforcing.

It's a drag of society, and representative of a degree of complexity we won't be able to support in the future.

Not only that. It also constrains and stifles initiative!

(Another area being 'don't tackle thieves breaking into your house; leave all of that sort of thing to your protectors, the police - who will be along sometime next week' and, of course 'beware of being sued by the thieves ransacking your house for infringement of their human rights'.)

Have you read Tainter's "The Collapse of Complex Societies"? I'm tempted to get it but it is expensive, even second-hand. I'd appreciate an opinion about it.

It befits our cultural heritage (Robin Hood, Just William) to be an outlaw.

One of my aims of trying to create Eco-Hamlets is that residents help each other with whatever needs doing. They should be safe places for kids to play, and be looked after by whoever happens to be around. So if their parents are out, they make whatever arrangements work and they're happy with. Stupid laws like this don't exactly help.

foodinistar wrote:(Another area being 'don't tackle thieves breaking into your house; leave all of that sort of thing to your protectors, the police - who will be along sometime next week' and, of course 'beware of being sued by the thieves ransacking your house for infringement of their human rights'.)

I was going to post a reply to this here but it warrants a separate thread.