When smartphones first started coming out a high school teacher took mine away - there was no blanket ban but I had undiagnosed ADHD and I wasn't paying attention during class. As she was taking it I told her if it got broken while it was out of my hands that was her responsibility, it cost a thousand dollars. I wasn't a rich kid and I got it on a contract with the phone company. I remember she got really stressed out and cried about it during class.
If you multiply that by 30 kids in a class, conservatively, a teacher could be stuck sitting on 30 confiscated iPhones. That's like half their annual salary in kids claiming they broke their phone. Not to mention any claims that a teacher used a kid's phone for some nefarious purpose.
> As she was taking it I told her if it got broken while it was out of my hands that was her responsibility, it cost a thousand dollars.
If that's the claim, I think an appropriate response would be to send the kid out of class (with their precious phone), or home. Can't have them not paying attention in class, and if they are literally a walking liability to discipline in any other way: fine, so be it.
Educators in general seem especially scared of the liability fairy.
The correct thing to do here is your teachers position is to laugh at the idiot kid telling them about their legal liability.
The school may be taking some on, but if it’s a school policy short of actual gross negligence by the teacher she had none personally.
Even if the school had liability the correct response to such nonsense is to tell the parents to sue them. Most will not, and you defend to the death the few that do so others understand the cost of bringing frivolous lawsuits for silly reasons.
This whole nonsense of entire school systems grinding to a halt and lacking any implementation of common sense due to made up liability fantasies is ridiculous. Let those highly paid admins do their jobs and take on risk.
That 'fantasy' is not ridiculous. Teachers are quite often (nearly always) in a financially precarious situation with management that doesn't support them and parents that abdicate all responsibility. All it takes is one spoiled kid with rich parents to manufacture a complaint (teacher stole my phone and broke it). That complaint could seriously derail their life. My wife taught for years even though I made enough that she didn't need to because she loved helping kids learn. She left the profession entirely because the death by a thousand cuts that is the American education system was giving her actual medical issues from the anxiety, at great detriment to the kids she would have helped.
We treat teachers like second class citizens at our own peril.
It's exceedingly overblown. I agree administration (not teachers) are the issue here, they are the ones who are terrified of the liability fairy and refuse to actually support anyone who is actually attempting education. They don't want to have to take a single risk and maybe have to either do some work or lose their cushy job. Much easier to do nothing and pretend they are terrified of having to deal with manufactured complaints. These school districts are large - they could trivially come up with a in-house legal defense team and strategy for a rounding error on their budget and kill these stupid things as a chilling effect.
I've watched it happen in real time. Administration terrified of totally nonsense complaints and pretending that they just can't take on the "liability" - most of which would be laughed out of court. Bury these people in legal bills if they want to bring such crazy to court. But there is no risk ever taken unless an administrator's career is the one on the line.
Phone breaks in the custody of a teacher and there is not actual evidence of that happening? Too bad. Sue us. No one is suing over a $800 phone unless it turns into a crusade. If the latter happens, put up the strongest legal defense possible and make sure anyone watching understands they are not an easy target for such things. Don't want your phone to "break" while in custody of the school? Easy. Don't bring it to school and violate school policy.
If there were a competent administrator they'd be having parents sign release forms at the start of the school year for the topic. First offense confiscation for the day. Second you get it back on Friday. Third at the end of the school year.
I don't disagree that we treat teachers like shit. They are the equivalent of a retail employee being put in the front line and forced to deal with customer's vitriol due to horrible corporate policies set by do-nothing executives making 20x what they are. I put nearly all the blame on incompetent and downright corrupt administration enabled by equally deeply unserious politicians.
My mother is a teacher, and her school has gone through many different lawsuits from parents. In theory the staff are protected from liability, but if you think that going through a legal case is not stressful for the school from the principal to the teachers and counselors I don't know what to tell you. It only takes one parent out the hundreds to thousands of students at a school to make a mark. They can and often will go after the school for any little thing, from dress code to phones, to teachers being too easy to teachers being too hard. Anything that they perceive as giving a disadvantage to their children or that they don't like they will go after if they think they have a chance.
One thing not mentioned here is that most of these teachers have over 100 other students they are responsible for educating. So saying, "The teacher should just..." ignores the bigger impact of mobile phones and the management thereof.
The daily BS of "put your phone away", "are you on your phone?", "give me your phone", etc is not only an ongoing stressor for teachers, but an interruption / distraction and a "micro time suck" that very much takes away from the education of all the other students.
I think this reflects on a lifetime of highlighting "think of the children" versus abusing women, stalking, etc. being swept under the rug. "Creepy" behaviour towards someone can actually deprive them of a sense of safety and cause permanent harm. As a culture we downplay that as weird or silly instead of scary and invasive.
Personally, as a former meetup organizer, my health has not been good post-COVID. I have a lot less energy to do extra-curricular work or go out and socialize after work.
3. It's very hard to know what kind of compensation employees are actually getting in an acqui-hire. I've been involved in a few of these - money flows through the cap table, so investors and founders get most of it depending on liquidation preference. Retained employees get a typical, levelled offer + some cash/stock (probably more stock) incentive with the usual 1 year cliff and 3-4 year earn-out. Incentives are also usually contingent on specific business goals.
In other words, the scenarios I've seen if the acquired company is not doing well the acquirer pays off the investors and gives the employees a small bonus contingent on staying for 1+ years and hitting goals. It's not necessarily a crazy windfall.
There's a lot of nature to protect in Antarctica, and there are very strict rules. This guy is selfishly flaunting those rules and just paying to get rid of the consequences. Considering he's got a personal plane and pilot's license at 19 he obviously has rich parents who can buy his way out of trouble.
Donating to charity is not impressive if you're still rich after you donate. Me giving $20 to a homeless person is a bigger blow to my personal wellbeing than this guy's "donation".
> There's a lot of nature to protect in Antarctica
I'm sure the entire Chilean military base with all the fuel they burn there and garbage they produce is built there specifically to protect Antarctic nature from occasional idiots in small planes.
He obviously can afford it, like the Chilean government could afford to put unnecessary military base there. Somehow when some government is stupidly splurging it's good and fine because they do it in accordance with rules, that they written themselves.
> I'm sure the entire Chilean military base with all the fuel they burn there and garbage they produce is built there specifically to protect Antarctic nature from occasional idiots in small planes.
Its mostly there because it includes Chile’s main scientific/meteorological research station in Antarctica and the airfield providing for personnel and supply transport for both that station and the nearby stations of other countries.
Because its largely a scientific/meteorological research station and an airport serving that station and the many others of different countries on King George Island, and because nothing in the Protocol prohibits it?
My city has inductive bike sensors at specific intersections but many intersections (even ones with bike lanes) lack them. Cycling infrastructure is so half-assed in the US.
Cost per benefit? My friend is a commercial property guy and sometimes has to bring properties up to date for handicapped access.
He jokes that with how few handicapped people use the features, he could probably give people $1k each as an apology for not being able to go into the building and be far ahead.
I started thinking that for the most part most handicapped people would even take that deal. I think I would.
I don't think it costs that much more to use a D or Q pattern for the inductive loop instead of a circle for new loops. But, if the loops are already there, it is a lot of expense to put in new ones.
Adding a loop to bike lanes might be reasonable, or maybe it forces a controller upgrade and that's not reasonable... but if you make the lowest speed through lane and at least one of each protected turn lanes bike accessible (while otherwise doing loop work), that's good. I think the loops are pretty shallow, so if the road has significant rebuild/repair, it's time to address the loop design.
The key word for ADA is reasonable accomodation. It does add expense, and not every feature is used often, but it's 35 years since the ADA passed and the US is a lot more accessible now than it was in 1990. The window of reasonable changes over time too, of course.
You would be amazed how bad drivers are at actually hitting the correct stopping position for the inductive loops in the ground that sense cars. When I'm on my bike stopped on a small side street I often try and gesture for drivers to pull up so their car is over the vehicle sensor in the pavement and the light changes faster. Drivers have gotten angry and yelled at me for giving them a little "inch up" hand gesture.
I worked selling refurb computers and this wasn't the case from Windows 95 - XP. The rise of TPMs and EFI is after that time so it's possible some newer system provides a way of tying licenses to computers, but it's not BIOS.
55% net profit doesn't include NRE right? The thing about selling fewer, bigger-ticket items is that the non-recurring engineering costs are amortized over fewer sales. Not to say they aren't printing money, but the unit cost to produce the second GPU pales in comparison to the effort to produce the first one.
Who are "capable" people? Do you think if the cafe owner was born in the US they would be working at Google?
Lots of people in North America work in jobs with positive externalities (teachers, nurses, etc) and they're generally treated like shit compared to 9-5 office workers. I don't think the issue is that the former is group is less capable, they're just not sociopathic resource-collecting robots.
If you multiply that by 30 kids in a class, conservatively, a teacher could be stuck sitting on 30 confiscated iPhones. That's like half their annual salary in kids claiming they broke their phone. Not to mention any claims that a teacher used a kid's phone for some nefarious purpose.