Non-IT News Thread
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@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:
@JaredBusch said in Non-IT News Thread:
For those judging...
It's a terrible tragedy, but hopefully the takeaway isn't that parents don't need to be responsible for common sense and just because other parents were also less than cautious does not make it completely okay. That this person uses "I did it too" as a defence is circular reasoning. It's like "if all your friends jump off of a bridge."
We can't know who is to blame. But this post sounds like someone trying to justify their own decision to allow a child into alligator risk water rather than any kind of justification for the other ones who also did. I've been near that water myself and don't go into it because of alligators. I've seen many a gator in that water and there are many signs about them (or were.)
Hard to say what the signage is there or what kinds of warnings are provided ... and it isn't like kids don't get taken by sharks in the ocean and we don't say "well parents shouldn't let their kids swim in the ocean."
The best outcome will be awareness and hopefully more parents will be conscious of allowing small children to go alone into alligator risk areas.
But if places like Africa are any example, it doesn't change parental behaviour even in places where losing children to crocs is common.
What worries me most about articles like this is that they risk downplaying everyone's responsibility in the hopes of "making people feel better." I understand that there is value in helping those hurt through a time of loss. But there is a value in making people realize that we can't just leave the safety of children to someone else, too.
I'm glad a parent said this - I would have been filleted saying that as a non parent!
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@JaredBusch said in Non-IT News Thread:
For those judging...
https://www.facebook.com/jennifer.venditti.18/posts/10154371872047147
If she "can't conceive that an alligator would be in such a busy, small space", that shows her level of poor parenting and lack of knowledge of how nature works. If gators weren't on her mind while letting her kid swim in FL, she's a moron. #thinkmoreprayerwon'tkeepyourkidsafe
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I call bullshit arm chair quarterbacking on people saying things like @scottalanmiller and @RojoLoco
For anyone not raised around the danger, there is no sense of what is right or wrong or natural or not for alligators.
I would not even think about gators being active in a resort unless there were signs saying as much. In this instance, there were not.
If I was on an everglades tour or something, I would be aware of and thinking about them. I certainly never once thought about alligators in 2006 when I was with my sister's family at WDW. We were not at a resort with a beach lake like that, but there was a lake and we walked around it.
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@JaredBusch said in Non-IT News Thread:
I call bullshit arm chair quarterbacking on people saying things like @scottalanmiller and @RojoLoco
For anyone not raised around the danger, there is no sense of what is right or wrong or natural or not for alligators.
I was raised in the north, never in the south. Yet having been to Disney World, gators are very much warned about. I only know that they are such a risk there because Disney makes such a big deal about it.
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@JaredBusch said in Non-IT News Thread:
If I was on an everglades tour or something, I would be aware of and thinking about them. I certainly never once thought about alligators in 2006 when I was with my sister's family at WDW. We were not at a resort with a beach lake like that, but there was a lake and we walked around it.
Man made lakes are a bit different. Still a risk but a very low one. The Seven Seas Lagoon is a mostly natural "lake", it's a lagoon attached to the larger Bay Lake, that is full of gators. So many that they have special walkways in certain areas for safety because the gators are at the shore so often. That body of water is in a swamp area that is not that different from a developed part of the Everglades as far as habitat.
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It's not unlike the thread of bear in the north. If you are in NY you should be aware that sending kids into the woods could result in them running into a bear. The risks are about 2% that of gators in Orlando and are high enough that you need to be aware. That doesn't mean that no one, even locals, doesn't send their kids out to play in the woods.... but there is a certain responsibility for being aware of the risk and properly educating kids on what to do as much as possible (run like heck and keep away from cubs at all cost).
You can't protect kids from everything and there have to be risks. There is no getting around it. Everything, even sleeping, carries some level of risk and bad things can still happen. There is no way to take a poll now to see how many of us, for example, would have said that we were aware of gator risks in that spot and how we knew and would we allow a kid of what age to play in the water and what time of day now that the crowds and the guards are no longer there (it's a non-swimming area for other health related reasons.) But I know for sure that being from NY, I'm extremely aware of gators in that specific body of water and have been going back to the late 1980s when Disney first warned me about it when staying in one of the hotels there.
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I'm not a parent yet but I know that anything can happen. It's pretty clear to me that this family loved their child and the loss of him has devastated them as it would any parent. It's a tragedy. Unfortunately everyone seems to use terrible news to judge others and explain how they would have reacted to it. It's all well and good what you think you would have done, but the reality is none of us have been in this position. The father tried to do everything that he could. He attempted to pry the jaws of the alligator open himself. He did a heroic thing and failed. Since my last post about this I've read a ton of mixed reports and I can't honestly verify whether or not they were aware of alligator activity in the area. To this I say they are innocent until some legitimate piece of information comes across my desk that says they neglected their child, which I'm highly doubting they did. They need compassion right now not judgment. We didn't pay a price for what happened--they did.
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@scottalanmiller said
I was raised in the north, never in the south. Yet having been to Disney World, gators are very much warned about. I only know that they are such a risk there because Disney makes such a big deal about it.
I never heard a peep about gators when I was at WDW.
Of course we didn't stay by water.
I mean, you wouldn't expect to be in your hotel pool and a gator to pop out at you. This was part of a resort area.
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@BRRABill said in Non-IT News Thread:
@scottalanmiller said
I was raised in the north, never in the south. Yet having been to Disney World, gators are very much warned about. I only know that they are such a risk there because Disney makes such a big deal about it.
I never heard a peep about gators when I was at WDW.
Of course we didn't stay by water.
I mean, you wouldn't expect to be in your hotel pool and a gator to pop out at you. This was part of a resort area.
I was born in Louisiana and I don't blame the parents.
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@BRRABill said in Non-IT News Thread:
I mean, you wouldn't expect to be in your hotel pool and a gator to pop out at you. This was part of a resort area.
Sort of. It is a wild part of the resort area, not a pool. It's a lake formed from a central Florida swamp. It's a no swimming, no submersion area because of safety concerns (mostly around parasites in the water - this started about three years ago, I believe) and does not have the people or the protection that it would if it were a resort swimming area. I've been in WDW in the last five years and these areas are often totally empty and while they look like beaches, they have no people on them (typically) and are left to go decently wild.
In other parts of Florida you do indeed expect any open, natural swamp water area to potentially have gators. Disney used to even talk about all of the gators on the automated messages that played on the Monorail "radio" while to moved between areas as they bragged about the open, undisturbed miles of swamp land between the MK and EPCOT.
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@wirestyle22 said in Non-IT News Thread:
@BRRABill said in Non-IT News Thread:
@scottalanmiller said
I was raised in the north, never in the south. Yet having been to Disney World, gators are very much warned about. I only know that they are such a risk there because Disney makes such a big deal about it.
I never heard a peep about gators when I was at WDW.
Of course we didn't stay by water.
I mean, you wouldn't expect to be in your hotel pool and a gator to pop out at you. This was part of a resort area.
I was born in Louisiana and I don't blame the parents.
I'm not blaming them, I don't know enough of the situation. Just pointing out that there has been, at least traditionally, tons of warnings and standard knowledge that the area is rather stocked with gators and that it's not even slightly unreasonable to expect them to be in that area.
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@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:
@wirestyle22 said in Non-IT News Thread:
@BRRABill said in Non-IT News Thread:
@scottalanmiller said
I was raised in the north, never in the south. Yet having been to Disney World, gators are very much warned about. I only know that they are such a risk there because Disney makes such a big deal about it.
I never heard a peep about gators when I was at WDW.
Of course we didn't stay by water.
I mean, you wouldn't expect to be in your hotel pool and a gator to pop out at you. This was part of a resort area.
I was born in Louisiana and I don't blame the parents.
I'm not blaming them, I don't know enough of the situation. Just pointing out that there has been, at least traditionally, tons of warnings and standard knowledge that the area is rather stocked with gators and that it's not even slightly unreasonable to expect them to be in that area.
I don't mean you specifically. It's everyone on social media vilifying them
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Not only that but they do have some openly publicized relationship with the Florida Wildlife and Game Commission (I think that's what they are called) and the agency that manages the everglades. They have daily sweeps of this swamp area to find and remove gators that are found.
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I think both camps are too extreme. There is no way to know if the parents should be blamed. There is also no evidence that they should not be. It is very reasonable that they did nothing wrong. It is also totally reasonable to expect someone to know that Florida swamp water has gators and that gators attack small children.
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@wirestyle22 said in Non-IT News Thread:
@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:
@wirestyle22 said in Non-IT News Thread:
@BRRABill said in Non-IT News Thread:
@scottalanmiller said
I was raised in the north, never in the south. Yet having been to Disney World, gators are very much warned about. I only know that they are such a risk there because Disney makes such a big deal about it.
I never heard a peep about gators when I was at WDW.
Of course we didn't stay by water.
I mean, you wouldn't expect to be in your hotel pool and a gator to pop out at you. This was part of a resort area.
I was born in Louisiana and I don't blame the parents.
I'm not blaming them, I don't know enough of the situation. Just pointing out that there has been, at least traditionally, tons of warnings and standard knowledge that the area is rather stocked with gators and that it's not even slightly unreasonable to expect them to be in that area.
I don't mean you specifically. It's everyone on social media vilifying them
I understand. It's a horrible situation. The benefit of the discussion is just generally raising awareness as to the dangers of places like Florida. There is no such thing as safe water in Florida outside of a controlled pool and only there when you have full visibility.
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@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:
I think both camps are too extreme. There is no way to know if the parents should be blamed. There is also no evidence that they should not be. It is very reasonable that they did nothing wrong. It is also totally reasonable to expect someone to know that Florida swamp water has gators and that gators attack small children.
This was the number one rule when growing up in Florida (for two years thankfully no more then that) don't go near the water, even a backyard pool, unless an adult checks it out first. I don't expect people coming in to Florida to know that but we were told by our neighbor the first day we moved in.
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@coliver said in Non-IT News Thread:
@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:
I think both camps are too extreme. There is no way to know if the parents should be blamed. There is also no evidence that they should not be. It is very reasonable that they did nothing wrong. It is also totally reasonable to expect someone to know that Florida swamp water has gators and that gators attack small children.
This was the number one rule when growing up in Florida (for two years thankfully no more then that) don't go near the water, even a backyard pool, unless an adult checks it out first. I don't expect people coming in to Florida to know that but we were told by our neighbor the first day we moved in.
I think a lot of people feel that Florida water safety should be common knowledge across the country. It sure seems like common knowledge to me. No one needed to tell me to stay away from water there as a kid.
Maybe people feel that it is like sharks and an overblown fear and so ignore it like they have to with sharks in the ocean or aeroplanes. Sadly, this one is a real threat.
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@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:
@coliver said in Non-IT News Thread:
@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:
I think both camps are too extreme. There is no way to know if the parents should be blamed. There is also no evidence that they should not be. It is very reasonable that they did nothing wrong. It is also totally reasonable to expect someone to know that Florida swamp water has gators and that gators attack small children.
This was the number one rule when growing up in Florida (for two years thankfully no more then that) don't go near the water, even a backyard pool, unless an adult checks it out first. I don't expect people coming in to Florida to know that but we were told by our neighbor the first day we moved in.
I think a lot of people feel that Florida water safety should be common knowledge across the country. It sure seems like common knowledge to me. No one needed to tell me to stay away from water there as a kid.
Maybe people feel that it is like sharks and an overblown fear and so ignore it like they have to with sharks in the ocean or aeroplanes. Sadly, this one is a real threat.
I think the only reason I knew about it was because my stepfathers family had a vacation home in FL. If I had never been there I probably would not know now honestly. Still to this day I'm more worried about methheads on bath salts than I am alligators when it comes to Florida.
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@wirestyle22 said in Non-IT News Thread:
@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:
@coliver said in Non-IT News Thread:
@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:
I think both camps are too extreme. There is no way to know if the parents should be blamed. There is also no evidence that they should not be. It is very reasonable that they did nothing wrong. It is also totally reasonable to expect someone to know that Florida swamp water has gators and that gators attack small children.
This was the number one rule when growing up in Florida (for two years thankfully no more then that) don't go near the water, even a backyard pool, unless an adult checks it out first. I don't expect people coming in to Florida to know that but we were told by our neighbor the first day we moved in.
I think a lot of people feel that Florida water safety should be common knowledge across the country. It sure seems like common knowledge to me. No one needed to tell me to stay away from water there as a kid.
Maybe people feel that it is like sharks and an overblown fear and so ignore it like they have to with sharks in the ocean or aeroplanes. Sadly, this one is a real threat.
I think the only reason I knew about it was because my stepfathers family had a vacation home in FL. If I had never been there I probably would not know now honestly. Still to this day I'm more worried about methheads on bath salts than I am alligators when it comes to Florida.
The high risk of meth heads in no way diminishes the threat of gators
I think that it is similar to Amazon or Nile safety. I believe that anyone with a high school diploma should be able to tell you that the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers are dangerous because or piranha and parasites or that the Nile is dangerous from crocs (which are now in Florida as well!!!!)
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