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Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

theguardian.com

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Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#421

Post by hindsightbias »

ddingus wrote: post #297
hindsightbias wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The horse has left that barn. They're under surveillance from the moment they enter the maternity ward. The population of HN'ers who let a babysitter take care of their kids w/o a webcam is probably way below the general population. Your kids will raise theirs under the watch of Alexa AI-Webcam and Apple Watch Child Protection kit. And one day they'll sit on courts and find the Fourth Amendment quaint.

Maybe. Quite a few of us are raising kids free range. Ideally, we can also pass along what life can be like.

What free range options exist for urban techs? I do find it reassuring to see more Jr High aged kids on Muni recently.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#422

Post by Thriptic »

bobbles wrote: post #389
Thriptic wrote: post #155

Poor, emotion driven risk management as usual. School shootings kill very few people per year and are rare events (especially in places that can afford this tech) despite what the New York Times would have you believe. Why not focus efforts on things that actually do kill young people, namely: * Car crashes (teach people to drive more defensively) * Suicides (provide better mental health services) * Violence that occ…

Comments like this look absolutely insane to anyone outside the US. Look at the numbers: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/05/21/us/school-shooting-us-ver...

I agree, let's look at the numbers. ~ 300 school shootings in ten years averages out to 30 a year. There are about 100,000 schools in the US. That's a risk rate of 0.03% per school per year risk. Considering that very few people within a given school die per attack, this means that your risk of being killed in a school shooting is basically negligible. Further, your article talks about ANY shooting on school grounds including gang shootings, domestic violence (adults), and accidental firearms discharges so A. almost certainly incidents will be clustered and a middle class school in some random place like what's in the article will have far less overall risk, and B. the actual number of real shootings of the kind that would make the news is far less than 300 over ten years.

The risk of being involved in every other incident class I listed is higher, so that is where we should be focusing our efforts because ultimately a death is a death regardless of what people are scared of. This is basically the terrorism problem: terrorism in the US is this big scary boogieman until you actually look at the data and realize that there's very little terrorism. The school shootings make the news precisely because they are very rare and surprising (and because some media outlets have readership that is in favor of strict gun control so it will play well).

If you want controls to stop school shootings anyway then why not just put in place general healthy population controls: stop bullying, keep a cop visibly on school grounds to deter criminality, engage with parents, and create a healthy environment for learning. All of that costs basically zero dollars and would likely do far more overall good than these silly, expensive, and invasive surveillance systems.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#423

Post by Zigurd »

im_with_stupid wrote: post #260
oliveshell wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Citation Needed]

You need a citation to believe that "the rejection of all religious and moral principles" would incentivize people to make their own "screw the system" morals? Really?

If you insist on linking morality with religion, yeah, I do need a citation

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#425

Post by jessaustin »

sdinsn wrote: post #387
lom888 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be flippant, but so is alcohol usage, should we encourage students to drink at school? Smartphone applications are designed to be addictive and have demonstrably negative effects upon the mental health of adolescents. Their usage should be vigorously discouraged by anyone who cares about the mental health of school students.

> but so is alcohol usage, should we encourage students to drink at school? Not a great analogy, since the effects on alcohol are quite different than the effects of using a smartphone.

In many contexts, e.g. while driving or attempting to think about abstract topics, the effects of one are difficult to distinguish from the effects of the other.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#426

Post by slothtrop »

jdkdnfndnfjd wrote: post #410
slothtrop wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're also grossly overestimating the occurrence The bodycount might not be "spectacular" but the rate of school shootings in the U.S. dwarfs other developed countries. Fatalities 200+ so far. At any rate, you don't know what they were 'estimating' exactly. > The vast majority of shootings are between criminal gangs - making the guns illegal will not magically make criminals into upstanding citizens. Criminals ret…

So the vast majority of gun death happens because of illegal guns and yet the problem is that guns are legal. The wretched cesspools that we call public schools are creating a bullying environment that makes kids suicidal and in this way kills lots of kids (some of which translate their despair into murder-suicide) and yet it’s our 2A right that we should dismantle, not the public schools? Our kids are an internation…

> it’s our 2A right that we should dismantle, not the public schools?

Didn't say that, nor do I believe that. Just correcting the above.

> So the vast majority of gun death happens because of illegal guns

Well the majority are suicide, with legal guns. As for homicide, yes. But people don't care about that, really. They care about mass shootings, or school shootings.

> The wretched cesspools that we call public schools are creating a bullying environment that makes kids suicidal and in this way kills lots of kids

We don't know to what extent it's about bullying in the school system (kids haven't gotten meaner), or exacerbation of issues as a function of modern living (e.g. more isolation), or neither. What's clear is that guns are easily accessible to angsty homicidal loners.

I don't think schools in and of themselves are so different than those in every other developed country as to be responsible for shootings.

> And the most famous school shooting of all time, the one that started it all, columbine, sources it’s guns from an illegal gun dealer,

Yeah, they did, from unlicensed sellers. Not most.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#427

Post by Wh1skey »

motohagiography wrote: post #38

Sort of consistent with the idea that U.S. public high schools prepare students for prison. Why respect authorities or society at all when it's arbitrary like that. It teaches learned helplessness and corruption and creates crappy people. Public schools don't have money, and when they get it, they spend it on this? Private schools and homeschooling programs seem to have a bright future.

[dead]

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#428

Post by [deleted] »

superkuh wrote: post #314
detritus wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My local corner shop has about 16 CCTV cameras in it, covering as many angles in the shop as they can. This is common. Very common. I'm totally OK with that kind of apparently 'pervasive' CCTV coverage - we're not talking government-owned networked cameras linked up to face/gait/whatever recognition systems or deep cold storage banks, we're talking small store-owners keeping an eye on junkies and thieves. The oft-reg…

Imagine each one of those cameras were being held by a person. How would you react then? This is the true nature of the situation. Surveillance Camera Man made it explicit, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP5ZVPwP7bg : people hate being watched. Doing it with machines is an exploit for the human psyche.

[deleted]

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#429

Post by EliRivers »

superkuh wrote: post #314
detritus wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My local corner shop has about 16 CCTV cameras in it, covering as many angles in the shop as they can. This is common. Very common. I'm totally OK with that kind of apparently 'pervasive' CCTV coverage - we're not talking government-owned networked cameras linked up to face/gait/whatever recognition systems or deep cold storage banks, we're talking small store-owners keeping an eye on junkies and thieves. The oft-reg…

Imagine each one of those cameras were being held by a person. How would you react then? This is the true nature of the situation. Surveillance Camera Man made it explicit, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP5ZVPwP7bg : people hate being watched. Doing it with machines is an exploit for the human psyche.

people hate being watched

So what's the deal with the selfie obsession and the instagram obsession and so on? Is it that people dislike being watched live? Or is it that people dislike other people having control of the footage?

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#430

Post by AnimalMuppet »

shadowgovt wrote: post #384
hcurtiss wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, depending on the government policy, that is precisely what I'm arguing.

It's a fantasy Americans seem to uniquely believe in that arming the populace is a good deterrent against bad government policy. If it actually worked, one would expect the US to be two separate nations now. After all, what was the Civil War if not a mass of Americans deciding extra-legally that the laws should not apply to them and taking up arms to break free of government oppression and form a government more incl…

It's not perfect. But what it means is that if you're going to impose a policy that unpopular on half the population, you may have to go as far as the Civil War did, including accepting that many of your own people dying. That's... somewhat daunting.

And a tyrant, while perfectly willing to bring their own guns to turn on citizens, would have a military that might not be willing, especially if they didn't agree with the tyrant. (The Civil War wasn't just the US army against the citizens of the south. It was the army members from the south against the army members from the north.)

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