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When I was a teenager in the 90s, playing in bands before I got into tech, I knew a slightly older girl who worked as a model. She had a beeper for go-sees that always made plans difficult. In hindsight I may have been very naive, but sometimes I'm still grateful she allowed me my innocence.
The policy at my school was that any "electronic device," be it a cellphone or pager, would be confiscated and held until the end of the school year. I had this happen to a (not yet modified) Radio Shack tone dialer.
I just used a walkman
In the late 1990s, my dad attended night classes with other adult learners to earn his MBA. Everywhere he went during those years, my dad had a beeper clipped to his belt for an on-call hospital rotation. During his first week of class, my dad's beeper loudly went off during the middle of the lecture. As my dad scrambled out of the lecture hall to call the number on the little screen, the professor accurately guessed…
That is funny, in a way that I feel hard to explain. Something about it being a simpler, more innocent time?
This might or might not be an interesting digression (apologies if it's the latter!) but many medical professionals still carry beepers or pagers of some kind. Not like "an app on their phone that will ring your phone at you even through Do-Not-Disturb" (I have one of those), but something that is very recognizably an old school beeper. They often have a SIM card in them, and the newer ones sometimes have wifi as well for redundancy.
My wife is a nurse at a cancer treatment center, she coordinates care for extremely sick people who are getting very specialized treatments and she's kind of the front-line person for dealing with them and project managing emergency situations, so she and all the doctors she work with carry them. I thought it was actually pretty cool :)
I asked her about it once, and apparently the hospital system looked at the more modern app-based paging stuff and decided that while it was cheaper, the reliability hit wasn't worth it to them. The physical hardware for these things is outrageously sturdy, they have a lifespan of like a decade, they're extremely easy to replace. Sure, your wifi might be out or your telephony might be down, but that's a problem your app has to deal with too. Apps are easier to provision, but it's an extra layer of stuff that can go wrong (your phone is getting an update or out of battery, you left it in your car because you were playing music with it and forgot to take it out of the console, it got stolen because phones are recognizably valuable) so they just stuck with the old familiar form factor that does one thing, extremely reliably.
This isn't a criticism of the app-based paging systems or anything; they're quite reliable in my experience. I just thought it was a neat additional data point about the considerations that go in to the thought process about provisioning an alarm for your employees when the alarm almost always means either "I have a time-sensitive question about a patient's ongoing medical emergency" or "your patient is about to die".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> confiscated and held until the end of the school year. How things like that were even remotely legal?
Children don't really have property rights, and even if they did, courts have consistently ruled that the bill of rights is reduced in school settings.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> confiscated and held until the end of the school year. How things like that were even remotely legal?
Children don't really have property rights, and even if they did, courts have consistently ruled that the bill of rights is reduced in school settings.
Yes, they do.
> and even if they did, courts have consistently ruled that the bill of rights is reduced in school settings.
Courts have ruled that there are specific interests in school that meet the generally applicable (not special, weaker) standards applicable for permissible action where rights protected in the Bill of Rights are involved.
But establishing categories of and confiscating contraband is... not a disputed state power, in any case.
Forget the beeper. The idea of arresting a child at school for anything (short of maybe violent assault) seems to be madness.
I don't know what it is in US culture and society that makes it so hostile towards anyone and anything even vaguely suspected of a crime, but this sort of thing is shockingly common, even when dealing with children. Here's another case I encountered a few weeks ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Brown_case – there are so many things wrong with the entire thing, starting with charging an 11-year old as an adult…
The justice system has gone mad. Politicians probably encourage it behind closed doors as well. Fear is the road to authoritarianism.
The policy at my school was that any "electronic device," be it a cellphone or pager, would be confiscated and held until the end of the school year. I had this happen to a (not yet modified) Radio Shack tone dialer.
Beepers with text were peak technology.
Literal beepers were still in use as late as 2012 as backups for on call people, enough so that we supported them at PagerDuty for redundancy (the API was email->provider->beeper) https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/short-emails-for-your-pager/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know what it is in US culture and society that makes it so hostile towards anyone and anything even vaguely suspected of a crime, but this sort of thing is shockingly common, even when dealing with children. Here's another case I encountered a few weeks ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Brown_case – there are so many things wrong with the entire thing, starting with charging an 11-year old as an adult…
> in US culture and society that makes it so hostile towards As far as schools go, zero tolerance policies have been put in place. The concept of zero tolerance is something that just makes no sense to me. Not every thing that happens in a school needs police involvement, but because the rules/laws that have been put in place removes common sense and power from principals so that everything is now a police matter. Le…
If you allow people to have discretion, then it will be used(and abused).
Also some of the stories I hear about school in the 70's and 80's make me think that the current claim that "schools were always authoritarian and used to subjugate children to turn them into compliant workers" is probably BS.
Probably current administration needs to justify it's existence and high pay by making rules.