Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

721–730 of 994 posts

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#721

Post by SovietDissident »

So he has a Muslim name, which is why this story went viral. Because racism. I hope everyone is equally outraged by the nonsense that happens all the time[0][1] to kids who aren't named Mohammad in public schools.

Sending your high IQ kids to school with adults who are batting 85 should be regarded as parental malpractice. And the notion that people defend public schools and tell us taxpayers they just "need more money!1!!1" flies in the face of reason and the facts (per pupil spending since the 60s has tripled with no change in test scores).[2]

Public schools suck by their very nature as state-controlled entities. If education is so important (especially today), why do we allow our kids to be taught and schools administered by the equivalents of DMV employees? Of course the poorest kids with broken families suffer the most.

And what happens when charter schools actually succeed? The Teachers Union is there to try and shut them down, with the help of sympathetic politicians (see NYC and de Blasio)[3]

[0] http://www.roanoke.com/news/columns_and_blogs/columns/dan_ca... [1] http://wjla.com/news/local/family-of-md-boy-suspended-for-po... [2] http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2015/mar/02/da... [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/16/nyregion/success-academy-c...

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#722

Post by jessedhillon »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #639
lisper wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's both: ignorance is the source of their power, and they are afraid of losing it. (I also grew up in the South.)

> ignorance is the source of their power Ignorance is a source of power only within a like-minded group, and only as long as that group is powerful. Now get out of there and see where ignorance gets you. Or wait until that group washes out into the irrelevance of history.

> Or wait until that group washes out into the irrelevance of history.

That's all fine and good on a geological scale, but we've been waiting 200+ years for the irrelevance of this particular group, and there's not a hope in sight of it happening any time soon.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#723

Post by NovaS1X »

d0ne wrote: post #577

President Obama has extended an invite to Ahmed to show his clock off at the White House: https://twitter.com/potus/status/644193755814342656

Major win. This is fantastic PR and a great response to this situation. I hope people learn from this.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#724

Post by eldude »

DanBC wrote: post #644
eldude wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only irony here is your complete failure to understand my original comment and your own failure to provide reasoning for your own false conclusion. Based on the facts in the OP and parent comment, I was disassembling the race-baiting rhetoric as anti-intellectual and fact-less (which, since you missed it, is itself a fact), to refocus on the original issue. Meanwhile, double-ironically, you again ignore context a…

The police made repeated mention of his surname. You might want to ignore race but thischild's religion was clearly a factor for the investigating police.

You're mistaken.

    You might want to ignore race [...]
I neither appreciate the defaming mischaracterization resulting from your mistake, nor do I appreciate the casual and irresponsible manner in which you do so:

    police made repeated mention of his surname.
Neither the original DallasNews article nor the TechCrunch article makes any such assertion about . The only person who draws that assertion is his dad, for which he provided no supporting evidence, and has a history of political provocation on this specific issue. (Not saying it's not true, but he's definitely not citing anything or anyone, so as presented, its only an opinion.)

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#725

Post by DanBC »

rhino369 wrote: post #709
dovereconomics wrote: post #125

Honestly, more and more, I challenge the idea of ever having a child: bright and smart kids have never been so intimidated. Many of the hacks I did as a child could have gotten me in jail today. Something 'silly' or 'funny' becomes dangerous/offensive/harassment; creativity, ingenuity and imagination are turned into dullness, self-hatred and nihilism.

Ironically, you are engaging in the same sort of fear mongering and paranoia that these schools and police are engaging in. You are taking a rare event (idiotic profiling or terrorism) and concluding they are very common. These sorts of overreactions are very uncommon. That isn't to say these sorts of zero tolerance, jail what you don't understand, actions shouldn't be strongly condemned. But there are probably hundr…

Hang on: the route from school misdemeanor to criminal justice is well known and much talked about.

The combination of zero tolerance with police stationed in schools means many children end up with criminal records for very minor events.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jan/09/texas-police-sc...

> In 2010, the police gave close to 300,000 "Class C misdemeanour" tickets to children as young as six in Texas for offences in and out of school, which result in fines, community service and even prison time

That feels pretty common. It doesn't feel rare.

It's known as the School to Prison Pipeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#726

Post by [deleted] »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #717
ja27 wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dumb stuff My wife was on the advisory committee for a local middle school that's struggling. One winner is that they bought SmartBoards for a bunch of classrooms but didn't get stands for them, so they just mothballed them for a year until they could buy stands with the next year's budget.

What would you have them do? If they're over budget, they're over budget and non-emergencies will have to wait.

[deleted]

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#727

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

jcromartie wrote: post #247
rasz_pl wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness it was probably staged by the father to end in civil lawsuit. "His father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, came from Sudan and is famous for arguing against anti-Islamic policies"

His father has been in the news several times. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/muslim-at-koran-trial-s...

That puts the whole thing in a different shade of light. Seriously. I wrote the kid on Anil's support page, but this makes me feel like there was more going on here than is being reported. I know, surprise, surprise, right?

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#728

Post by phaus »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #717
ja27 wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dumb stuff My wife was on the advisory committee for a local middle school that's struggling. One winner is that they bought SmartBoards for a bunch of classrooms but didn't get stands for them, so they just mothballed them for a year until they could buy stands with the next year's budget.

What would you have them do? If they're over budget, they're over budget and non-emergencies will have to wait.

The obvious solution would be to buy fewer smart boards this year, along with the stands, and then buy the rest of the smart boards and stands the next year.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#729

Post by eropple »

bargl wrote: post #701
eropple wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or don't do that, either, because it is not right to assume people are going to pull off bomb hoaxes. (Doubly so when the only real reason for the suspicion is skin color.)

Yeah but you also don't want to be the admin at a school with a bomb where there were "signs a student was creating bombs before he went ape shit". I agree with the color statement, but not addressing the issue at all can be just as bad as an overreaction.

Except there were no such signs, therefore let's not be jerks to a kid.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#730

Post by pain_perdu »

mikeash wrote: post #414
makecheck wrote: post #154

Of course the reaction to this is completely insane but what's even sillier is that they're continuing to assume that real threats would be things that they can see. If someone wanted to blow up a building they could hide a bomb in a backpack among hundreds of others and never show it to anyone. It's the same crap they pull at the airport where you must throw out your bottled water; and then their solution is to toss…

I think the liquids ban is dumb, but given that it exists, throwing confiscated liquids into a bin is completely reasonable. It's one of those weird game theory things. Your goal is to prevent dangerous liquids from being brought onto planes, but you can't reasonably tell them apart from other liquids, so you ban all liquids. Because it's banned, you can be reasonably sure that nobody is going to try to bring dangero…

This was a logically beautiful response, thank you.
Post reply on HN