Americans have been stripped of the right to walk

[Valmy]

I'm wondering if he read Plato'so Republic lately

He is upset he was not raised in a Soviet-controlled Creche designed to destroy Polish culture and make him a good worker and soldier in the glorious Soviet Union.

[mongers]

So a fairly interesting topic, gets derailed by monkey shit flinging. 

[Valmy]

So a fairly interesting topic, gets derailed by monkey shit flinging. 

What? Did you sign some kind of contract that forbids you from responding to a post two posts above the most recent one or something?

[grumbler]

So a fairly interesting topic, gets derailed by monkey shit flinging. 

What? Did you sign some kind of contract that forbids you from responding to a post two posts above the most recent one or something?

This is mongers, remember?  He can't see that post up from way atop that high horse.

[Razgovory]

So a fairly interesting topic, gets derailed by monkey shit flinging. 

Hey, I haven't even posted yet.

[jimmy olsen]

So who are these geniuses who should be raising the children? You? I don't see you adopting all these stupid people babies

He will follow the Toronto lawyer way.

As always, plenty of photos and embedded links here.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-a-dead-millionaire-convinced-dozens-of-women-to-have-as-many-babies-as-possible/

How A Dead Millionaire Convinced Dozens Of Women To Have As Many Babies As Possible

By David Goldenberg

On Oct. 31, 1926, Charles Vance Millar, a well-known and wealthy Canadian lawyer, died at age 73. Halloween was a fitting day for him to go; Millar loved practical jokes and spent far too much time doing silly things like dropping dollar bills on the sidewalk and then hiding to see who would pick them up. But that was just a warm-up. In death, Millar unleashed his biggest prank ever — a last will and testament that was basically a giant social experiment. By promising a vast sum of money to the Toronto family that could have the most babies in a 10-year period, Millar set off a race to give birth the moment he died.

Millar described his will as "necessarily uncommon and capricious" because he had "no dependents or near relations." What Millar lacked in heirs, though, he made up for in cash and property. In addition to his work as a lawyer, Millar amassed a net worth of more than $10 million (in today's Canadian dollars)1 through a series of investments, including the property that would eventually be used for the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, one of the busiest crossings between the United States and Canada. He wanted to give that wealth away.

But he wanted to do it in as roguish a way as possible. Millar started off by giving shares in a jockey club to gambling opponents and shares in a brewery to teetotalling religious leaders. Then he left his house in Jamaica to three men who hated one another, on the condition that they own it together. But those were just a prelude to the big finish. In clause 10, Millar revealed a biology and math challenge that would change the lives of dozens of Toronto families. The remainder of his fortune — about $9 million — would be bequeathed a decade later to "the mother who has since my death given birth in Toronto to the greatest number of children as shown by the registrations under the Vital Statistics Act." If there were a tie, he wanted his fortune to be divided equally among the winners.

Millar probably thought he was being clever; after all, childless people aren't often responsible for baby booms. He may have even been making a wry statement in support of birth control — he was known to think that using contraception shouldn't be the taboo it was. But he probably wasn't thinking about what would happen to the losers and all the new mouths they would have to feed, and he certainly wasn't thinking about the Great Depression, which would soon envelop Canada and the rest of the world. That historical coincidence drove an ever-larger and ever-more-desperate group of women to try to win Millar's fortune. Soon the local papers, led by the Toronto Daily Star and The Evening Telegram, anointed it the Stork Derby.

As the years passed, the Derby faded into history, leaving behind just enough scraps for Snopes-verified chain emails. In 1994, a graduate student at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, named Elizabeth Wilton wrote her master's thesis on the Derby and for the first time dug up and compiled the relevant court records. Wilton's thesis was eventually used as source material for an overwrought Canadian TV drama, but many of the details she unearthed are a previously untold gold mine for those of us trying to figure out how an extreme fertility contest could have played out.

In its most ruthless interpretation, the Stork Derby was a mathematical and biological challenge for the participating families. How could they maximize the number of babies they had?

For the past 170 years or so, much of the industrialized world has undergone what researchers call the historical fertility transition, as economic incentives and labor practices changed to favor smaller families. The fertility rate has dropped precipitously during that time. Families went from having five or six kids in the 1800s to only about two today. Canada's current total fertility rate is only 1.59, well below replacement level.2 (The rate in the U.S. is 1.87.) In 1926, Canadian families averaged 3.36 children each. But when the Depression set in, the fertility rate dropped, to 2.80 by 1934 — much faster than the historical fertility transition would have predicted. According to University of Minnesota economist Larry Jones, fertility rates dropped more during the Depression than during any other era in history, which is why he refers to those years as the "Baby Bust."

If a woman could have had a baby the day the contest was announced and every nine months for the next decade, she would have ended up with 14 babies. But, of course, human reproduction doesn't work that way. As Jane Frederick, medical director of HRC Fertility, a clinic in Orange County, California, explained, conception is difficult, especially for new mothers. The likelihood of getting pregnant again depends on "if she breastfeeds and how much time her uterus is given to recover," Frederick said. Many Derby contestants presumably weren't breastfeeding regularly, as lactation often prevents ovulation; one study found that it's as effective as condom usage in preventing pregnancy for the first six months postpartum. And Stork Derby contestants weren't resting their uteri for several months after each birth — many had two babies within a 12-month span. That meant the likelihood of miscarriage was higher.

Even if the uterus has time to recover, 10 percent to 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriages (and even more conceptions spontaneously abort before the woman knows she's pregnant). Frederick emphasized that most of these miscarriages, especially among younger women, occur randomly. "The most common reason is genetic problems with the embryo; there's not enough genetic information for it to go full term," she said.

When I asked Frederick how many babies a woman who was trying to maximize her fertility could expect to have in a decade without using modern fertility treatments, she said four to five if the woman was breastfeeding and up to seven if not.

Of course, there's a shortcut to having lots of babies — have more of them at once. Nadya Suleman, for example, had 14 kids (including one set of octuplets) in just nine years, from 2001 to 2009, using in vitro fertilization. Back in the 1930s, though, there was no IVF and no Clomid or other fertility-increasing drugs. That meant that not only were there no chemical ways to increase the odds of getting pregnant, but women also were less likely to have twins (or triplets) than women are today. Based on pictures and newspaper articles from the time, very few of the Derby contenders appeared to have had multiple births.

So what techniques could the Derby participants have used to increase their fertility? Besides mothers skipping breastfeeding, there were a few other ways to optimize the chances of getting pregnant, Frederick said. "Back in the 1920s, they didn't know what the hormones were, but they did know that women cycled," Frederick said. Shahin Ghadir, a fertility specialist at the Southern California Reproductive Center, said this information would have given the families a crude sense of when they were most fertile. As for the men in the Derby families, Frederick said they could have increased their fertility by abstaining from sex and masturbation for the five days before intercourse. But even if a family had done everything it could to conceive as fast as possible, it comes down to whether the people trying to have a baby are a particularly fertile combination, Frederick said.

It's unknown how many families decided to try to win Millar's fortune. While there were a few mentions in the press early on, news coverage of the Derby didn't really pick up until 1932, when the Ontario government tried to have the will nullified and the money given to the University of Toronto. After a huge public outcry — the Toronto Daily Star accused the government of resorting to "communism in the raw" — the government's claim was withdrawn. At that point, several other women seem to have realized that their family size put them in contention and started to compete as well. By the deadline in 1936, more than two dozen Toronto families had welcomed at least eight babies during the previous decade.

The Stork Derby eventually became a huge news story, perhaps since it provided an outlet from the miseries of the Depression. Those miseries were manifold. The Depression hit Canada almost as hard as it hit the United States. Unemployment hit 19 percent. Total earnings in Toronto's province dropped 38.5 percent from 1929 to 1933. By 1935, more than 25 percent of Toronto families relied on government relief.

Many of the major Canadian papers covered the intricacies of the Derby, from new births among the leading families to the courtroom machinations of the Millar relatives as they aimed to stop the circus and keep the cash for themselves. Very few articles, though, focused on the toll that the contest would have on the desperately poor families trying to win. Newsweek, for example, first referred to participant Lillian Kenny as a contender for the Derby before noting that one of her babies had recently died from rat bites while living in ghastly poverty.

Ten years after Millar's death, 32 lawyers showed up to an initial hearing to claim a share of the fortune for the families they represented. After some quick record scanning, though, the presiding judge, William Middleton, cleared out everyone who didn't have at least nine kids younger than 10. That left six families.

But some mothers who had more than nine kids still weren't allowed a shot at the prize. Pauline Clarke was one of them; she had 10 children within the timeline — the first five with her former husband and the second five with a different man, one she lived with after her separation from her husband. Middleton was not impressed. "'Children,' when used in any testamentary document, always means legitimate children," he wrote in his judgment. Instead of $9 million, Clarke was eventually given a settlement of just over $200,000, and that came only after a lengthy lawsuit.

As for the Kenny family, it eventually settled for the same amount that Clarke did. Although Lillian Kenny gave birth to 11 children, her claim was dismissed on the grounds that three of the babies were stillborn.3 "A child born dead is not in truth a child," Middleton wrote. "It was that which might have been a child." With that, three of Kenny's babies were scratched from the ledger. The youngest was named Charles Vance Millar Kenny, after his would-be benefactor.

Four other families with nine young children — the Timlecks, the Nagles, the Smiths and the MacLeans — were each awarded the equivalent of about $2 million. While she was in the midst of the Derby, Lucy Timleck took a moment to tell a reporter that raising a big family isn't easy. "I think birth control is a wonderful thing," she said in an article called "'Dark Horse' in 'Stork Derby' Now Believes in Birth Control." "I am sorry, in one way, that birth control information wasn't available years ago. I know mothers who would have welcomed such knowledge."

Kevin Timleck, 52, is the son of Edward Timleck, who was Lucy's youngest child. Kevin lives in Vancouver and told me that he has more than 100 first cousins spread out across the country. While many of his relatives have kept up the Timleck Irish Catholic tradition of having large families, Kevin has only two children. Why? "There's no money involved in it," he said.

[Eddie Teach]

The Toronto Lawyer way? I like that, it implies Malthus is partially responsible. 

[mongers]

So a fairly interesting topic, gets derailed by monkey shit flinging. 

Hey, I haven't even posted yet.

[Malthus]

So a fairly interesting topic, gets derailed by monkey shit flinging. 

Hey, I haven't even posted yet.

[Malthus]

The Toronto Lawyer way? I like that, it implies Malthus is partially responsible. 

[Maximus]

The Toronto Lawyer way? I like that, it implies Malthus is partially responsible. 

At least up until the headboard breaks.

[CountDeMoney]

Always comforting to see the Languish Empathy Brigade maintain its operational combat readiness.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I read this article a few months ago when it came out, it's a trash piece.

Lot of really poor arguments and falsehoods in it.

It's not illegal to walk, but we've created a system where pedestrians on major roads need to walk on sidewalks, and cross at crosswalks. On side roads pedestrians normally can cross as they please, as long as they use good judgment to watch for any oncoming traffic. Are there some residential neighborhoods that have high-speed roads going through them and inconveniently few cross walks? Sure, that happens. That's a local planning problem and obviously should be fixed, but that doesn't "criminalize" walking. In fact, it makes you walk more--because you're going to cover more ground than you otherwise would. Not saying that is ideal, but a "less efficient" pedestrian transportation system actually increases walking distance to get things done which increases activity time. It'll obviously also lead some people to not walk at all, but that's a personal choice.

Laws against jaywalking are a public safety matter, and not some grave inhumanity, or part of a broad campaign to ban walking. Pedestrians got ran over by horses and wagons all the time, and in many cities a private coach driver might be nice enough to scream at you and crack his whip at you to make a pedestrian jump the fuck out of his way--or they may just roll over you and both they and society would take the view of "fuck you, should've been watching."

As grumbler first pointed out--walking has always carried risks, all modes of transportation do.

Most of the areas with poor walkability in the United States are rural or suburban. And frankly, the closest store to a rural home may be 3+ miles away so no one who lives out there much plans on walking to it anyway. Suburban housing developments frequently do have sidewalks, largely for kids to ride bikes on or people to walk on, but the closest places to shop/do other errands are far enough away that a good system of crosswalks is irrelevant, because people aren't walking 2-3 hours round trip to grab dinner or go to the optometrist. The reason for this is some people have made a choice to live in places where they can buy more land for less money, with the trade off being less density of commercial development and decreased easy walking access to such businesses and services, the "urban poor" who genuinely live in places where it's hard to walk are pretty rare. Poor neighborhoods in urbanized areas often lack the nicer restaurants and service providers, and have poorly maintained sidewalks, but they do usually have a bus line. But the decay of those neighborhoods is largely a function of the ruling political class not caring about infrastructure for poor neighborhoods versus gentrifying ones, it's not part of some malicious plan to discourage walking.

[11B4V]

Always comforting to see the Languish Empathy Brigade maintain its operational combat readiness.

We can mark that as a "T" then on the battle training matrix.

[DGuller]

So wait, I misread the original article Tim posted. Was the woman crossing a busy road with her kids *not* on a zebra crossing? What a cunt. Even if noone was hurt, she should be charged with reckless endangerment and have social services take her kids away from her.

Your calls for blood and vengeance towards people who have done you no harm always puzzles me.

There are few things that piss me off more than stupid people having kids. It's the world's worst vicious cycle - and, as far as humanity's follies go, the belief that everybody has a right to be a parent and to raise their own biological kids is probably one of the dumbest and at the same type the hardest to change. We have made amazing strides in almost every other way when it comes to separating ourselves from the state of nature and developing a civilization, but this primitive and harmful belief still somehow eludes us as a race.

No system is perfect, but thankfully it at least worked in your case.