isleepinahammock

I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. People can have morbid humor in the appropriate time and place. If I'm not at an airport, and a joke comes into my head about a bomb at an airport? I'll happily share that out loud if I'm in an appropriate social setting. Will I do that at an airport? Of course not. If I'm teaching and have a problem student, I'll feel free to vent, even making a light-hearted joke about "wanting to strangle the little bastard." In the right place and time, jokes involving threats of violence are perfectly acceptable. Puritans disgust me. It's always done in bad faith.

Here's the core problem. These apps literally condition you to view your communications as private. They literally will label things ''private chats." No one expects to be able to like, organize illegal drug deals over Snapchat. But when people hear "private," their mind immediately treats the space like they would a private conversation in a closed setting.

We still have a lot of cultural reckoning to do with online discussions. A big problem we have right now is that most of our conversations have moved online, even between individuals who know each other IRL. And people always code-switch their conversations. You'll talk one way in public and another in private with close confidants. A generation ago, someone would make a crude joke in a bar, people would laugh or find it distasteful, and no one would give it a second thought. But online, it exist in a durable form, and that allows bad-faith actors to treat speech much more seriously than it was ever intended.

We need to develop better cultural understanding of what online speech means. For example, I take what I say under this account here much less seriously than I would if I was posting on a social media account under my real name. You should view a pseudonym as someone saying, "My name doesn't stand behind this. I don't really take what I write here too seriously. You shouldn't either. We're just folks chatting at an airport bar." But publishing under your own name? That should be viewed like standing on a street corner holding a sign, or writing a letter to the editor under your real name. You're boldly standing up for your words, and you'll chose them more carefully accordingly.

People will find some political candidate's old reddit comments, comments they never put much thought into, and use those to crucify a candidate, citing their half-considered musings as proof of their irredeemable wickedness. We honestly have a lot of growing up to do for how we treat communication. People are very childish about the online communications of others, treating all forms as if they are the most serious forms of expressed beliefs. There's a time and place for rudeness and crude humor, and we shouldn't crucify people for being ordinary human beings. That's how you end up with psychopath politicians who design their entire social life around being as uncontroversial as possible. Honestly, if someone doesn't appreciate morbid humor? I feel there's something psychologically wrong with them.

The problem in this case is that Snapchat encourages people to treat their private chats like they would a private conversation between two people in their own home. Yes, their terms of service state they'll monitor the chat. But they still use dark patterns to encourage you to view the conversation as private and intimate. They do this to make you use the platform more.

Honestly, I see nothing wrong with what this person said. Morbid humor is fine. You would be hard pressed to find a teacher that hasn't joked about doing something completely inappropriate to a particularly frustrating student. Not always violence. But I've certainly vented about wanting to grab a phone out of a student's hand and smash it with a hammer. Would I actually do that? No. Would I threaten a student with doing that? No. But I'm also repulsed by Puritanical attitudes that pretend this isn't just a normal way healthy human beings communicate.

Those jokes just happen among close confidants, behind closed doors, and among people who know you're not being serious. This is just part of being human, and I'm tired of self-righteous haughty people claiming they wouldn't also be crucified if everything they had ever said was also part of the public record.

Why not just have the teachers make a phone call? You have wall phones in every classroom. There's zero need for the kids to have phones.

Yes, you can find niche scenarios where every kid having a phone may be useful, but we're already talking about very rare events. We're sacrificing our children's education for the sake of minute physical safety risks.

There are dozens of teachers, teacher's aids, and staff in a school. They can all have cell phones. You're just starting with the conclusion, "let's find reasons for kids to have phones," and working backward from there.

Schools have alarm systems for a reason. You can get the exact same effect without sacrificing educational quality. You can set up dedicated active shooter pull alarms if you wish. And every classroom has a phone in it. You can have a system where a teacher enters a code on the phone, and an active shooter alarm throughout the building.

I just see a lot of backwards logic here. You're starting with your conclusion of "let students keep their phones," and then trying to find a reason to justify that.

It's an empty platitude because it's a lazy solution. "Just throw money at the problem." I AM a licensed substitute teacher in my state. I'm familiar with the behavior of kids in educational settings.

The citizens of a school district can only support a tax burden so large. And those resources need to be shepherded carefully. And every dollar spent has an opportunity cost. For example, you could pay to station a paraprofessional in every classroom. They could help out on various tasks and also help police student device use. But they themselves will often have their attention drawn away. There's just no practical way to keep continuous eyes on every student. Instead of the kids pulling out their phones when the teacher isn't looking, they'll wait until the paraprofessional is helping one student out and the teacher is writing something on the board. And then you also have to consider opportunity cost. Instead of having classrooms with 30 students with 1 teacher and a paraprofessional, you could could have classrooms with just 20 students.

My solution to this is to build school buildings with Faraday cages built into the walls. It would be expensive to retrofit existing schools this way, but it would be very cheap to do during construction. Schools tend to be renovated every several decades or so, so do it when the opportunity arises. You can line the walls and ceiling with grounded metal grids behind the drywall. Once installed, there is zero ongoing operating cost. You simply make it so cell phones don't work in the building at all. You can still have electronic devices; but the only way to connect will be through a heavily locked down wifi network.

And with this, there is no way past it. This isn't a filter or a jammer (which would itself be illegal.) There's no bypassing the laws of physics. The kids can bring their phones all they want. They simply won't receive a signal inside the school building. If they need to call their parents for a ride at the end of the day, they can walk outside and make the call there.

So you're saying witches were real and there was actual scientific evidence to back up the existence of their powers?

The cops definitely need to act quickly. But no one is helped by a bunch of parents wandering around the scene of an active school shooter. Hell, half of them will bring their own guns, now you have multiple people without school credentials wandering around armed on campus. And the police have to chase after them instead of the actual shooter.

This is one of those cases where by trying to help your own kid, you're actually putting them and a lot of other kids at increased danger.

Every school in America is currently trying this approach, and it is failing miserably. It's not as easy to enforce as you imagine.

Freedom does not come first in all cases. There's all sorts of rights that get curtailed when you enter a classroom. For example, while Tinker v. Des Moines does protect certain nondisruptive exercises of free speech on school grounds, schools still need to have wide leeway to restrict many kinds of speech that would otherwise be perfectly legal outside school grounds. For example, many kinds of speech that would be perfectly legal outside schools will get you disciplined for bullying. Students may be allowed to wear nondisruptive things like armbands, but if a student insists on holding up a giant protest placard in the middle of their math class, the school can restrict that.

Solutions like "fund schools better" are empty platitudes.

Yeah, this is a problem that needs to be addressed when the school is being built. It flabbergasts me that it already isn't standard practice to construct classrooms and schools as big Faraday cages.

That's the real way to address that. You can still have a locked down wifi network for educational purposes. But you make it so the kid's phones simply do not work inside the building at all.

You do realize there are wall phones in every classroom, and each teacher can carry their own cell phone, do you not? You're talking about dozens of people who have the ability to call 911. Past a certain point all you're doing is saturating the 911 line and preventing ambulances and fire trucks from getting to other unrelated emergencies.

Exactly. In these situations, the exact last thing schools want is a bunch of parents showing up to try and get their kids out. It sucks for the parents, but it's one of those situations where by trying to help their kid, they're putting a lot of other children in danger. If a bunch of parents run into a building with a shooter and escort their kids out, now you have the nightmare scenario of trying to track down scores of kids that have gone who knows where. Plus now there are more people running around the building who the police may mistake for the shooter. Oh, and a good number of these parents would want to show up with guns of their own. Now you have multiple random armed people running around the school.

You do not want parents running into the scene of an active school shooting.

I propose we build all new school buildings as giant Faraday cages.