GreenBeard

The reality is no one person is qualified to "run" a multinational megacorp. Not a single human being knows enough for this level of complexity, but the only reason any of them can justify the ungodly amount of marginal return they take is to pretend they're super-geniuses while relying on 'consultant' teams to do the actual thinking, and also keep it quiet that they're no more competent than the janitor they're making 1000x the salary of (all in stock options of course, but 1000x nonetheless).

All of this would work better if the "bosses" could accept they aren't demigods, that the domain expertise to make collective decisions is within their existing org charts and they just need to step down off their high horses and remember they are just a cog in a much bigger machine that makes its own decisions with or without their input. They're self-important sales reps, with just enough of a grasp of finance to be dangerous to themselves and others. I'm sure me and my 10 closest colleagues would also be inclined to say we do a billion $ of work every day if we were writing our own bonus agreements. We just wouldn't have the hubris to convince ourselves it's true.

Oh I know a lot of school districts, and you're not wrong, the career educators and administrators would absolutely be on board, it's the elected officials you have to worry about. They tend to hold the purse strings in most places.

I want to be clear, I like your vision, just from an execution perspective I've seen a lot of these ideas go completely off the rails before because there's a lot of landmines to doge. You might want to start in Europe. There's a lot more checks on corruption over there.

That's just publicly funding with extra layers of separation from politicians though. I'm fully behind such a plan, but I do have some concerns:

1. FOSS works great for the core layers, but lets be honest with ourselves for a minute, engineers suck at building interfaces that make sense to users, particularly children, and interface designers are expensive. Also I love FOSS hardware... as an enthusiast. Distribution at scale, durability, and so on are also going to be a challenge, and no having "Joe down the street with a 3D printer throw something together" is not the same as having professionally manufactured PCBs.

2. Vulnerability to embrace-extend-extinguish, situations like where a "Non-Profits" end up being converted to a for-profit through shady shit, means we're going to need legal defences and people with uncommon character coordinating the project.

3. The nature of the modern political sphere is not conducive to plans where there isn't a billionaire's toady in a suit wining and dining the school board members and offering political kickbacks to run with that platform. The platform is the easy part compared to the task of getting sufficient adoption to make it viable.

These are all solvable problems but the scale of the team needed to accomplish it would be... significant. It's achievable, but it's not going to be easy or quick.

Montessori style education works very well for certain learning types, but often under-supports others and can suffer from poor implementation just like any other educational model. One-on-one is far superior for some students, and that will never not be the case.

That does suggest the profit motive specifically works against the best interests of both students and teachers such that any "fit for purpose" platform is going to suffer from ill-conceived feature creep. Any suggestions on that front? I can already hear the howls of corporate overlords and political fiscal hawks at the suggestion of publicly funding such a platform.

Right?

"What's that Google? When you design things from the ground up with planned obsolescence in mind, it's suddenly hard to UNDO the mess you made of the hardware? Who would have thunk it."

If I read it right it's effectively two aluminum heat sinks sandwiching an insulating foam. Outer sink takes on the ambient heat signature, inner sink keeps heat trapped internally, and the insulating layer resists thermal transfer between the two zones. That said, I have to assume someone's tried that before and they're just doing it... better?

My condolences

Yeah. Has been for a long time friend. ICE stopping charter or even city busses to round up working people and make them prove they're citizens just because they happen to be within 100 miles of a border is practically a cliche at this point. Any international airport, shipping port, etc. works the same way. They operate on guilty until proven innocent, and if you are proven innocent, they'll invent a reason you're not anyway.

We thought we were signing up for libraries. We forgot the "Public" part of how libraries work.

I was always more angry about them editing digital publications after the fact. That's some Grade A "Ministry of Truth" BS right there. Dead Tree Media forever.

Samsung are the same, and even more aggressive with the adware. There's really not a lot of decent consumer hardware these days that aren't just obnoxious ad pipelines.