NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again(gothamist.com) |
NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again(gothamist.com) |
Ironically most homework is done by the kids on their phones so when I tell her to get off her phone she always has the excuse that she's checking/doing her homework, or looking at her timetable online.
[edit] note this is a UK perspective, not sure why this got downvoted
Also they don't ever have to worry about becoming young again so they literally never feel the consequences of their ideals and actions against kids. They feel safe in completely dismissing concerns and actual reality because they are so far removed from it and can cling to whatever imaginary view of the youthful world they made up.
Sometimes you have to trade personal liberties (makes liberals sad) and/or privileges (makes conservatives sad) to obtain better societal outcomes, i.e. mandatory vaccination or minimum wage. Those are socialist policies.
And since the major media and thus our shared social space is heavily anti-socialist (qui bono?), everyone is closeted and tries extremely hard to justify socialist policies as liberalism, which is not shunned. Hence people in the US now perceive them as closer or even "allied".
Reversion to the past is not preparation for the future.
This school is also a magnet school with only high-performing kids who did not suffer from distraction problems and who actively made use of phones during class for classwork.
We should celebrate screen addiction and not fight it.
Even today I learn and produce the most when the network is down.
I think I learned half my basic social skills from lunch rooms in school. That time period is probably more important than any of the classes themselves.
I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could.
This can't be it. I was in high school when smartphones were coming out and there was zero tolerance for them or any other electronic devices (dumbphones, ipods, palm pilots, etc) in the classroom.
I don't know when or why it happened but allowing smartphones in school was a conscious choice and a policy change.
Next let's ban kids from social media.
Or better yet, let's tax social media as a negative externality. Anything with an algorithmic feed, engagement algorithm, commenting/voting/banning, all hooked up to advertising needs to pay to fix the harm it's causing.
They're about as bad as nicotine and lung cancer. They've taken people hostage and turned society against itself.
> I think chatbots and AR glasses are going to supercharge these social problems at a rate much faster than phones and facebook ever could.
Chatbots aren't smart and AR glasses are dorky. They're going to remain niche for quite some time.
iPhone immediately caught on like wild fire. You can tell those other two don't have the same spark. I'm not saying there won't be users, but it's a much smaller population.
I try to use my phone less and less but as someone who loves photography the ability to take a raw photo and edit on my phone is amazing.
Quite frankly, we (in a collective, general sense) suck at predicting the future. Half will think A, half will think B, and the half that ends up being correct by chance will think they are actually smart rather than lucky.
1) "Since when do we consider it OK for the government to intervene between the parents and their children and telling them whats good and whats not? They know best."
2) "Whoever does not want to use electronics at school grounds are free to do so who are we to constrain them? Also, forbidding things never works let them learn."
3) "I think you are underestimating children; if they see that what they are doing with electronics affects them in any way, they will stop using them. Lets give them some credit and let them make their mistakes."
All of which are anti phone-ban/anti-regulation/pro-liberal/freemarketeering masquerading as a product of independent thought.
I don't see what you're saying. Are you saying people must think the same things as you do for it to be independent thought?
I will not say that some kind of electronic use ban at schools is necessarily bad, but someone proposing such a ban should absolutely have answers at hand to these reasonable counter-arguments.
I was trying to relate, and thinking until around 7th grade school lunch was a pretty awful lonely experience. But then remembered 2nd/3rd year of middle school finding the other outcast that somehow came together as our own little group of enterprising odd-balls.
We would buy large packs of gum (we sold for $.10-$.25 a piece), champion-caliber pencils (we tested a bunch playing a lot of pencil-break[0], sold for $.50-$1+), ping-pong balls/paddles (we had raggedy ping-pong tables near the food-court for before/after school and lunch that the cool kids didn't use so eventually other kids would rent/trade-for balls/paddles from us once we started playing) etc.
I think the biggest thing we did was start and run table/paper-football[1] games/tournaments; sometimes offering our perfectly-folded-winning paper-footballs or champion-level pencils or packs of gum, to make it exciting.
First we used the table we sat at for lunch, then noticing how shunned the un-cool ping-pong tables were, we turned them into paper-football fields (the green colour and white border lines made it that much more awesome as a paper-football field). We started playing before/after school and during lunch. We started doing ping-pong games too in one of the 3 time slots -- I think before school but maybe lunch I forget. But, I mean, this was Texas -- football is football -- we started drawing crowds and people were mixing outside their cliques wanting to get in on playing games (note: these were latchkey kid days in the south, the main groups looked like something out of prison movies; but we were a mixed sort of popular-group rejects, male & female)
Anyway, I would have to agree it was an important time for the foundation of my basic social skill set (never thought of it that way before). As much as I value that time and experience -- to be fair -- these kids are figuring it out in a different way for the world they live in. I've chalked up my dislike of watching my siblings kids being perfectly content to not get up from the couch/phone for hours at a time, as me being old.
Look, I think that phones and computers don't belong in classrooms, but instead of assuming that the world has gone that mad, you should probably assume that whomever wrote those words has a tenuous relationship with honesty.
At least some of this is poor support for teacher's enforcement by the administration (I have been told that teachers are not allowed to kick students out of class for having their phones).
Ok, turn off the internet. And ban the cell phones.
I suppose a district could block the known AI providers, so kids could only use AI at home. I’m very skeptical this would eliminate the negatives.
On the contrary, every administrator I know of is gung-ho about the coming improvements in education driven by AI. (There certainly are SOME, but it comes with minuses.)
The actual levers of control available to those in charge in schools are limited, in the end.
The rules that exist are routinely broken and can only be enforced selectively. Many of the rules are unpolicable frankly and are only kept to or only marginally broken as a matter of social norms, and understanding so there is not total choas. An equilbrium is found.
With phones there's such social pressure to allow their use, including from forces external to the school, that there was never possibly a hope of the equilibrium immediately settling at phones being banned.
It was always going to creep to the current status quo. Again this would have been true even if a rule were ostensibly set.
Society is learning, slowly, that this isn't ideal, and the pendulum seems to be swinging back. It may settle at phones being completely banned in schools, but in practice this will also obviously be moderately chipped away at all the time in various surprising and unsurprising ways. Especially as the hardware itself evolves.
Phones, and electronic devices in general, were always banned. What changed was schools started allowing them.
I was in high school right when some kids first started getting (dumb) cell phones. MP3 players were still new, CD players were not uncommon, and ALL of them were banned from being outside of your locker or backpack. If a teacher saw one, it was gone until the end of the day. Period.
Teachers didn't need to bear the brunt of angry parents, it wasn't their call to make. That belonged to the school administrator, who merely needed to say "tough shit". Somehow, the adult children still won anyway.
Then, it seems only a couple years after my schooling was complete, smart phones came out and they just let them exist, everywhere. It has never made sense to me how that shift happened so suddenly but best theories I’ve heard are 1) parents insisting kids be reachable and 2) educators just gave up the fight against it.
But yeah, it’s sad to me to think a whole generation had lost core social experience and socialization of such a pivotal age in life. When I hear stats about how kids/teens don’t; drive, party, date, sex, etc yet are lonely, anxious, depressed, etc I’m always like “no shit”
What a lot of people learn from lunch rooms is not a happy social lesson. It’s who is allowed to sit where, and who is outcast from a table. It’s the shit teenagers lower on the social hierarchy have to take daily from teenagers who are higher, even if they are allowed to sit at the same table. High school is widely remembered as a brutal rite of passage, and lunch rooms are as much a part of that as any other space. If everyone was so absorbed in their phones, that may have been a benefit for social harmony and escaping real-life bullying and shaming.
The problem isn't phones, it's the addictivisation of social media and gaming. Being able to stay in touch with friends and family is potentially a good thing.
But it's currently implemented as a hook for psychological and chemical addiction, so that user attention can be sold to advertisers.
That is a problem, and I think we're starting to see a movement which will eventually end with these platforms being banned, or strictly regulated at the very least.
It's basically casino psychology applied to all social interactions. That is clearly not a good or healthy thing.
All my friends were nerds, but at the same time I didn't feel like there was some brutal social order hanging over me like I did in jr high.
valuable lessons don't necessarily overlap with happy.
a kid leaves the gate open until his dog is ran over, it doesn't happen again after that with the new dog.
The unfortunate truth is that cliquey behavior and bullying are some of things that children have to be exposed to - you won't come out of school as a fully-capable human being unless you've spent the last several years being exposed to a ton of different adult emotions.
I do think though that it's worth discerning here: We don't need to accept a world in which we have to decide between apathetic children stuck to tiny screens and daily traumas. Both things are evil, and in both cases it's a testament to lack of care our education systems have for us/children.
Sitting in noisy lunchroom isn't fun if you have autism. Walkman/disc man was my fav (you know, that thing I used while on the bus, so no I didn't talk much there to others either). Too bad we didn't have noise-cancelling headset back then. Back to lunchroom. Went for a drink while leaving your school bag? Your scientific calculator got reset by one of the bullies. Good luck getting it ready again for math/physics/chemistry/biology class test. But I usually just lunched elsewhere anyway, since I wasn't allowed in the cool kids group, and I ended up finding solace in that. So where did I end up? In the multimedia library! 20 or so PCs which you could use for, eh... 'homework.' At one point I found out you could just edit your student number in HTML, so once I figured the student number of a bully I signed him up to study in one the silence rooms for a week. When he found out I did that, he did the same to me, but -unlike him- I was cool with that. As for that library: other, more smarter kids than me, went to sit separate to study during break. And during lunch break there were people bored, shooting with elastics, yelling, running, bullying. Book reading at school? Didn't happen much during lunch breaks. Some studying, sure. That it was so awesome before the smartphone time, is a nostalgia myth.
FTA:
> The faculty donated board games to help ease kids into the phone-free era. Student volunteers oversaw a table stacked with games: checkers, chess, Yahtzee, Scrabble, Clue, Life and Trivial Pursuit. For many of the kids, it was their first time playing the games, and they said they were enjoying it.
Oh, yeah. I played MtG back in those days but was called a 'nerd' for that, and surprisingly nobody in my class (gymnasium; highest education level on high school) would also play it. At times, I kind of enjoyed something like Black Lady and Rikken, but Poker just bored me, and I didn't like the play for money (it was officially forbidden, but you know how that goes).
> Ko said other analog activities have also made a comeback, including cards, hangman, tic-tac-toe and Polaroid cameras. “There are just a lot of memories that we make throughout high school that we want to capture,” she said. “I actually have a lot of Polaroids on my wall.”
Funny how there's still a need to make photo's. That is one thing I hate about smartphones. That excessive need to photograph everything these days.
Now, about the subject. I don't think it has to be 'all' or 'nothing'. It wasn't 'nothing' back in the days (as I already wrote above, we just consolidated a lot of devices), it wasn't perfect back in the days either.
How could they have ever known? /s
Senior Raya Osagie, 16, said she has to “think more in class” because she used to Google answers or use artificial intelligence. “Now when we get computers, I actually have to [do] deep research instead of going straight to AI,” she said.
Damn, that hits pretty hard.
But it's hard to separate out that effect from just earlier and earlier exposure to modern phones. The class of 2018 was ~10 when the iphone 4 came out. And even that wasn't nearly as addicting as modern phones - it was tiny, and didn't have vertical scrolling video (except for Vine, briefly).
If you're wanting to meet new people and chat with new people but a large chunk of them are sitting on their phones it makes it more difficult.
The lunch room was quite loud. To keep people from being in their own world on their phones too much, my lunch table had a rule that if you laugh out loud at something on your phone, you had to share it with the table. It was quite effective, though somewhat embarrassing from time to time.
Sitting around the table with some beers and friends, everyone put their phones in the center of the table. First one to touch their phone had to buy the next round of drinks. It was effective. I've tried similar recently, but people are less enthusiastic about the idea.
For my parents, it was the radio.
For their parents, reading out loud for everyone to enjoy ("Mr. Dickens has published another episode of The Pickwick Papers!"), or playing instruments.
Collapsing in front of the TV with the family was still quality time enjoying something together.
As a society we do get to answer these questions.
There are kids who lost their phones because it accidentally fell out of a pocket lol
This is not intended to be a news piece. It's a story. But whoever is in charge of CMS messed up categories. It should not be labeled news
Some weird phenomenon.
I also remember downloading Froggy jump on my iPhone and playing it with friends, but you certainly put your phone away more than you do now. You also had it taken off of you if you were on it when you shouldn't have been. If my parents found out they took my phone off of me, they'd probably crack it at me because I wasn't paying attention. I get the feeling many parents might just get angry at the teacher rather than their child.
Does not sound good.
We haven’t extensively studied how social media and smartphones affect a kid’s brain. It’s becoming abundantly clear the former is inappropriate for kids and adolescents. It’s emerging that the latter is at least destructive for non-adolescent children.
That's my take.
Sometimes each grade level will have a class president.
Varies from school to school for the details.
My early dinner, empty restaurant habit is the adult persistence of my teenage preferences, and I don't expect my personal tolerance to be their norm.
My experience (consulting with multiple k-12 institutions) is that it's the parents. If the parents can't be in CONSTANT contact with their kids, it's a problem. People are scared of everything all the time. It's not great.
Or we can go the opposite way: for kids who want to be loud during lunch there should be a place for them to do that. Wanting to be loud it too common to ignore, and it isn't like perfume/peanuts/... where we have to force a policy for a minority.
"NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again"
1. Required teachers to have kids turn-in their phones for the duration of each class period
2. Banned teachers from kicking kids out of the class who did not turn in their phones.
Teachers don't enforce the rules here because they don't believe the administration will have their back if they try. They can assign detention for students not listening, but many students don't show up for detention, and meanwhile that student still has the phone.
This happened at the same time a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms would have went into effect but was temporarily blocked while it works it's way through the courts [0]
[Texas educators praise new school cellphone ban] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/10/texas-cell-phone-ban...
[0] https://apnews.com/article/ten-commandments-bill-texas-schoo...
I don't think it's actually possible for a parent and community to safely and sanely raise a human child without some amount of coercion the kid doesn't want in the moment, so I don't advocate for this. Still, it is important to acknowledge that being coerced by people more powerful than you who think they know better than you do about what is good for you is unpleasant in and of itself, and society should try to minimize doing this to children to the extent possible.
I see you don't have kids yourself. You need to sync up with them when after-school plans change.
/S
If society were ignorant, then it’s forgivable. But society is not ignorant.
We know tech companies deliver things bad for us (lies and manipulation).
And we knowingly choose it, over the good (truth).
While we can definitely point the blame at tech companies that manipulate algorithms, engage in dark patterns, etc, it's ultimately up to the consumer to consume judiciously and moderate their own well being. Nobody ever asked Apple or Google to "deliver what's best" for society. What's best for society is a collection of rational, intelligent, and accountable adults.
I definitely know who was president in March of 2020. Before they lost their election 8 months later.
Somehow it seems a lot of people don't.
An x-ray device to see if the shoes fit correctly?
Leaded paint for my asbestos shingling?
Can I sell my vote for the next presidential election? (It used to be common!)
Hotel owners are forbidden from discriminating based on race. You want to allow it? Even if not perfect, it still works.
As someone without security clearance, I'm forbidden from a lot of places with secret information.
Even if there is still an underground market for elephant ivory in the US, forbidding its trade greatly reduced the demand.
Seems like on average forbidding things has been pretty effective.
Forbidding things works very well most of the time. There are exceptions, but as a rule, it works.
No?
Because it effects others and brings down the overall ability for the learning environment to succeed. Same deal with phones. If it makes the environment toxic to success, there should probably be some prohibition within those grounds. This isn't banning phones across the board, or banning them for kids. It's banning them within a location, like how firearms are banned inside courthouses.
Having separate spaces works a lot better. Which is why we have alcohol venue licensing. Forbidding kids from phones entirely, at the same time as adults are on them constantly, isn't going to work. But having a phone-free space like a smoke-free space is more viable.
Grandpa laughed heartily, as I may have hit a bullseye
But it doesn't need to be a smartphone for that, and it doesn't need to be out during school hours.
Sure if “at least one match” means activity.
Back in the day, you couldn’t find parking for several blocks radius around every public sports field.
There's a 500B industry selling the phones, 2.5 trillion selling telecom services, trillions more selling social media, and most of the economy involves selling their products over the internet. Those are some HUGE incentives to maintain the status quo, or get people even more addicted yet.
I don't think our society is capable of answering that question and starting a Dune-style "Butlerian Jihad" and destroying all machines-that-think.
I praise you for not defaulting to US-defaultism, which is quite common on HN, but this really seems to be universal. There are also regulations like this in Scandinavia, France, Germany is talking about it.
Calling day trading “zero sum” seems like a huge stretch. To get the sum to be zero you need to include everyone involved in the market: institutional investors, hedge funds, etc. Somewhere between 87 and 95 percent of day traders lose money.
Had you bought actual regulated shares you could sue the company for deliberately crashing the value. But since video game skins are not a real investment. You have no protections at all.
You're saying it's not zero sum because to make it zero sum you should include the big profitable corporations that are pumping in money?
True it's not zero sum but that's like saying a casino isn't zero sum because you're playing against the house!
Meanwhile, my brother would often go dig in and read a fiction book in isolation. Which is fine and great and all. I'm definitely not taking a dig at reading a book in any way. But, its not like only screens lead to isolation. There's plenty of tasks one can do at home that then become isolating.
Observe young people using their phones, and you can see the social use is often just occasionally switching from TikTok to a chat app, dashing off a one-line message, and then going right back to TikTok. Big difference from having actual long phone conversations with friends after school.
I accidentally "rolled coal" in my 90s Landrover because I was in totally the wrong gear going up a steep hill. It was amusing in the way of "oh shit! I kinda just blew a load of black smoke in the driver face behind me".
Obviously, I don't do this deliberately.
The act of riding a bicycle in and of itself is not "preachy". That happens. "six bicyclists training for a road race were run over by a 16-year-old who was rolling coal", at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal .
Rolling coal nearly always implies deliberate intent, not coincidental timing. Some examples from state laws listed at that same Wikipedia page: "knowing release of soot, smoke, or other particulate emissions", "with the intent", "may not knowingly or intentionally cause", "intentionally release significant quantities of soot, smoke, or other particulate emissions"
> Yes, people do all sorts of nasty and cruel things because they think it's kinda amusing. That doesn't justify the behavior.
Blowing a bit of soot up in the air isn't in itself cruel. It is just a bit naughty. Now doing it in someone's face like I've seen in videos deliberately is not very nice and can be dangerous. I think it should go without saying that I don't condone anti-social and dangerous behaviour.
> The act of riding a bicycle in and of itself is not "preachy". That happens. "six bicyclists training for a road race were run over by a 16-year-old who was rolling coal", at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal .
Who said anything about riding a bicycle is preachy? BTW, I am a cyclist that spent 3 months out of work because of a hit and run accident that left me with a permanent weakness in my right shoulder as a result. The reason I don't spend a lot of time with other cyclists, is because everything started to become a political issue against drivers, a lot of my fellow cyclists are preachy. I heard people saying that owning a pet was akin to slavery and other such nonsense. As someone that enjoys both driving and cycling, it left a bad taste in my mouth.
BTW, In the story he caused a collision while rolling coal. The issue was dangerous driving. Not blowing some soot up into the air itself.
> Rolling coal nearly always implies deliberate intent, not coincidental timing.
In my case it was, it was because I was stuck in the wrong gear. My vehicle is currently in a garage being repaired for that very issue now (clutch is worn). It was funny in the sense of "OMG that is embarassing".
Incredibly childish. "I hate you for saying we should have a cleaner environment, so I will intentionally pollute the environment!"
> I accidentally "rolled coal"
There is no accidentally rolling coal. You just had shitty emissions. Coal rolling is intentional, and requires a special tune at the very least.
At least were I am coming from, you can also not just film random adults on the street.
If you live in the United States, the first amendment absolutely allows you to film anyone in public. It's a constitutional right.
This also applies to publicly funded facilities, like courthouses, libraries, post offices, the DMV, and also public schools - any publicly accessible area, in any facility that is publicly funded.
I'm not making this up, it's actually part of the constitution.
>What's best for society is a collection of rational, intelligent, and accountable adults.
That same party insists that you should be able to choose to enroll your child in a school that does nothing but teach weird christian doctrines, and outright lies like "Evolution is controversial" or "Continental drift is not proven" or "The USA is a Christian country". They demonstrably want to be able to direct my tax dollars to these institutions, based on their choice.
Everyone should spend time checking out what the tens of millions of self reported fundamentalist "Christian" americans pay money for. There is an entire alternative media economy and it is horrifying. It exists to reinforce tons of outright false and delusional narratives, like an imagined persecution complex against christians.
If you think those tens of millions of Americans don't have power or sway in this country, they are literally the reason why visa and mastercard keep shutting down porn businesses (the higher fraud claim is just false and probably a lie, ask me how I know!) and the current House majority leader is their guy, as well as Trump's previous VP, as well as maybe technically JD Vance, as well as like Joe Rogan, who insists that AI is the second coming of christ because it doesn't have a mother, just like christ. Not joking, that is a real thing that Joe Rogan has made millions of dollars saying to over 20 million people. Oh, and at least one Supreme Court Justice.
No lasers or dragons -> I skipped the book at that age.
Today-me would agree with you about all those books, teenage me would not.
And Besides a bit of Orson Scott Card and LoTR I didn't get into fantasy until later in life.
It's...rough out there.
People WANT to know how to feel about things, so they watch how other people react to them and form their opinions on that.
In the zoomer colleague case they most likely had a vague opinion, but needed a second opinion from someone (or something) to form their own properly
Which is really sad.
Thanks for clarifying. But to be serious, I think it's the drive for culture in action. I think culture comes from people glancing at each other and doing what they do, reacting how they do. I think it can be healthy actually.
Ah a fellow HN user ♡
Found the optimist. (no, it unfortunately not required. Imagine, if you will, the world's worst version of the Telephone game...)
How do you know? :)
Credit Card companies do not care about chargebacks, as long as you don't substantially hurt consumer goodwill. They get their money back from the merchant, and every successful chargeback is a reminder to consumers of how credit cards will protect you. A false chargeback would also be unlikely to harm consumer confidence in that protection, since the consumer knows they weren't defrauded.
We know Ashley Madison had millions of paying subscribers. The idea that porn websites have "Higher fraud rates" entirely comes from the unstated assumption that porn consumers will chargeback their payment, and this claim is not justified. Consumers do not make a habit of making false chargeback claims, it just isn't substantiated in the data. We also have substantial evidence that lots of people want to genuinely pay for porn, and will pay significant amounts.
If 1 out of every 5 people who paid for pornhub tried to do a chargeback, that would not be a payment stream the credit card processor would be bothered by.
Meanwhile, the facts on the ground are that there is a fundamentalist religious organization formerly known as Media Matters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_on_Sexual_Expl... who have been working since at least the Nixon administration to ban things like sex toys from sale, to ban sex education, to stop same sex marriage legalization, to prevent the decriminalization of sex work. They were part of LBJ's commission on obscenity and pornography. They asked Reagan to ban pornography in 1983. They are significantly responsible for the large media blitz in 2020 that demonstrated that pornhub had a genuine problem with things like revenge porn and underage porn that lead to pornhub deleting 90% of their content, which frankly is a good thing, but they are demonstrably and openly not out to help sex workers or keep porn safe, but rather to kill it. Their official stance is that porn is a public health crisis. They were one of the principle supporters behind FOSTA, a bill that most sex workers insisted would make their jobs less safe.
Why is there a popular, trite, completely unsubstantiated narrative that is super popular on places like reddit for how porn companies lost the ability to take payments despite open and direct and admitted actions by an organization that has openly worked for decades to ban porn who helped sue porn companies? Gee, I wonder why.
Meanwhile, two months ago, the stepson of the chairman of that very organization was charged for child porn, so you know, the standard religious right style of "We have to protect the children" while literally abusing children.
Notably, the recent spat with getting some really, uh, """Niche""" adult oriented games off steam was not (at least, publicly, but this is not an accusation) done by them, but an unaffiliated Australian organization that has a better track record of doing what they claim. Steam also is still selling lots of porn games.
Secondly, I am allowed (whether you like it or not) to complain about something if I don't like it. I find this style annoying and I often believe it is written in a way to manipulate people, which I have a distaste for.
Thirdly, whether I am in a vocal minority or not doesn't mean that vocal minority is incorrect in its criticism. A lot of sites have adopted this style even more more "news" style articles.
Maybe you feel that navigating social hierarchy is more important than anything in math is because that's the kind of culture you happened to grow up in, not because it's truly more important?
Fwiw, my older two are 14 & 16 and we still use device control software on their phones and laptops. The younger of the two complains a bit periodically but the older one just accepts that it's the way it is and gets on with his life [most of the time].
I personally advise you not to let your young kid get into e-gaming. Things like Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft are gateways to increased device usage, and the benefits are (again, imho) not remotely worth it nor irreplaceable by much healthier alternatives.
Fun tidbit: my 8yo has a Kindle Fire and we've let her have Netflix & Disney+ installed on it. She also uses the Kindle & Libby apps to read voraciously, and Khan Academy for math. When she watches streaming media, though, she frequently watches it on mute with subtitles. That shocked me to see, and I asked her about it. She's 100% cool with that and appreciate the "privacy" of being able to watch things without other people meddling in her business. Shrug.
It's hard to believe that parents were only able to achieve this during the past 15-20 years.
(When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, I spent plenty of time outdoors with my friends in the neighborhood, and also inside, in front of my Nintendo, either with friends or without. Not sure how much peace my parents got, but I assume it was non-zero.)
I do this myself from time to time (and I do it more often if I didn't have bluetooth earbuds), that seems like a perfectly sensible thing to be concerned about.
It was all bullshit of course, but people did believe it, myself included. Just 15 years ago the outlook of social media was much more optimistic.
Imagine an alternate universe where, since you were paying them, they kept you safe and secure online, and kept the bad actors away.
sure, people would have been able to cancel their monthly facebook subscriptions if they didn't like that stuff. but we can effectively do that now just by not using it.
Those who forget Usenet are doomed to repeat it, I suppose.
> It was all bullshit of course
Or, more likely, what was dreamed of ended up being incorrect. Like we learn every time we try social media, people don't actually want to be social online. That takes work and the vast majority of people don't want to spend their free time doing work. They want to sit back, relax, and be entertained by the professionals.
As before, businesses can only survive if they give others exactly what they want, which doesn't necessarily overlap with what is good for them. A fast food burger isn't good for you, but it is a good business to be in because it is something many people want. Arguably small communities like HN with exceptionally motivated people can make it work to some extent, but that is not something that captures the masses.
It's not coincidence that those who tried to make a go of social media ~15 years ago have all turned into what are little more than TV channels with a small mix of newspaper instead. That is where the want is actually found at the moment. Social media didn't work in the 1980s, the 2010s, and it won't work in the 2080s either. It's is not something that appeals to humans (generally speaking).
That's not it at all. Facebook shifted because they wanted you to spend more time on their website and serve you more ads. And once you've seen all your posts from your friends you'd be done and close facebook.
Which is why the posts from the friends are now completely gone, replaced by… stuff.
So I think by the time I got to high school we were too mature for the kind of bullying you see in USA films, but that did happen earlier.
Looking at the wikipedia article you linked to, it doesn't have "Media Matters" mentioned anywhere on the page.
Why do you feel they're the same crowd?
Indeed you don't; let me help you out then:
Arguments must be made in good faith; and when you hear anyone saying anything I mentioned above it is immediately obvious that they are not arguing in good faith.
If they think they are, then their decision making centre is compromised by cnbc and fox news and their opinion must be dismissed.
If anyone considers the above arguments valid and worthy of discussion, they need to exempt themselves from this discourse.
> If they think they are, then their decision making centre is compromised by cnbc and fox news and their opinion must be dismissed.
I hope you're trolling, because if not...
> 1) "Since when do we consider it OK for the government to intervene between the parents and their children and telling them whats good and whats not? They know best."
A public school intervenes between the parent and their children to tell the student what is good work and what is not. Parents do not always know best. (Yes, there are policies which let the parent appeal, but the parent does not have final authority.)
Child protective services can take children away from parents who are egregiously poor parents.
I don't see this as a good faith argument.
> 2) "Whoever does not want to use electronics at school grounds are free to do so who are we to constrain them? Also, forbidding things never works let them learn."
If we believe in educating citizens then we set rules to help educate citizens. There is a long history of prohibiting certain electronics at school. At https://archive.org/details/makingvaluejudgm0000elde/page/38... we can read that over 50 years ago some schools prohibited transistor radios.
If the claim is in good faith then it's also saying that laws and rules forbidding smoking in school must be repealed. I certainly want to keep them in place, so I don't see this as a good faith argument.
> 3) "I think you are underestimating children; if they see that what they are doing with electronics affects them in any way, they will stop using them. Lets give them some credit and let them make their mistakes."
Which is an argument that if the child wants to play video games all day and is getting Ds or worse in every class, than teachers should like the child continue to make that mistakes. I don't see this as a good faith argument.
It seems that they do indeed see what you’re saying…
They gave the social media thing an honest try for a short period of time. And it even came with a lot of fanfare initially as people used it as the "internet's telephone book" to catch up with those they lost touch with.
But once initial pleasantries were exchanged, people soon realized why they lost touch in the first place, and most everyone started to see that continually posting pictures of their cat is a stupid use of time. And so, Facebook and the like recognized that nobody truly wanted social media, gave up on the idea, and quickly pivoted into something else entirely.
Social media is a great idea in some kind of theoretical way — I can see why you bought into the idea — but you can't run a business on great theoretical ideas. You can't even run a distributed public service without profit motive on great theoretical ideas, as demonstrated by Usenet. You have to actually serve what people actually want, which isn't necessarily (perhaps not even often) what is good for them.
My son has been taking violin for years, is really good, and loves it - but most of his practice time is still really hard pieces that need a lot of practice of the hard parts (stitching between 5th and 2nd position...) and he would prefer to sit down at the piano (he stopped lessons years ago) and play an easy piece.
After they got it, it was instantly allowed everywhere. It was another result of the "activism" of the same suburban let me speak to your manager class that has been ruining everything for the past 20 years.
edit: A lot of parents are constantly texting back and forth with their kids all day. It's basically their social media, especially if they don't have any friends, and I bet in plenty of cases a huge burden to the children.
Schools are not employers that can implement take it or leave it policies. You need coordination and agreement between school leadership, district leadership, staff, and most critically parents to put your foot down on anything while also working to ensure basic safety and decent academic outcomes.
Now that the ills of social media and screen time are mainstream knowledge, it’s easier to make a common sense argument without much pushback.
People think "just ban phones". But there are so many factors at play, it has to be a coordinated effort across an entire school. And everyone has to play along. Any policy is only as good as its enforcement, and enforcement is hard.
Even I find myself holding onto my phone during most of the day when not on my computer, I don't even know why. It's an incredibly addictive piece of technology.
[1] - to a first order of approximation, yes I know you're the exception
When I was in high school in the 90's, the famed Texas Instruments calculators were often banned in some maths classes because, as was said at the time, we were "not going to be walking around with a computer in our pockets all the time," so we needed to learn to do the work. By the time my younger brother passed through the same classes, they were required to have a graphing calculator because it actually helped kids complete the work. And play Dope Wars.
While we do tend to overreact to new tech, ways of thinking, games, music, etc, there's something inherently oily and snakelike about a thing that brings convenience to our lives the way smartphones or cell phones did. They slip in, comfortably at times, settling into our habits and routines while simultaneously altering them. We end up manipulated by it and before we know it, we can't set it down. In the case of smartphones, our data became the commodity, a mere decade or two after we were worried about tracking devices in cars or phone lines being tapped. But the smartphones kept delivering on their promises, which kept us hooked.
As someone who recovering from alcoholism, I struggle to call our love of smartphones an addiction, but if it helps people be aware of the dangers, by all means, use the term. To me, the problem of smartphones is manipulation at the deepest cognitive levels. We started offloading some thinking to them and who could blame us? We had the store of human knowledge in our pockets! We could play a game instead of sitting idle on the train, gamble with online casinos to try and win some extra cash that week, keep up with the Joneses on Facebook or get into a heated debate on Twitter during our lunch break, check banking, stocks and eBay sales, etc. We no longer had to carry a separate device to photograph or record the moment. The list goes on and on. But in the end, it altered our behavior just enough that we allow ourselves to be controlled by it, monitored by it, and bought and sold by it.
Funny that we as a society were winning for a while until somebody invented vapes.
My son goes to a private school, and I was on the board of trustees when we basically did the same thing the NYS requires three years ago. The drama and insanity was beyond anything I expected. One parent left me a three minute voicemail excoriating me as being no better than a school shooter - in the event of an emergency her son would die alone, because of me. (I introduced the motion and was called out in the minutes)
It’s great that the state passed a pretty sane law on the matter. Crazy people already think the governor is <insert terrible thing>, and the school boards can just nod, point to Albany and get on with their business.
There is leeway as well, our school (and some others that I know of), allow 7th graders and up to email parents via GMail. So little Tommy can keep folks in the loop about scheduling changes or whatever.
I'd say there was definitely a grace period (roughly iPhone -> iPhone 4 maybe?) where device addiction wasn't yet normalised, and the real world hadn't ceded control yet. Not sure what happened at the school level after that, but somewhere along the way phones (devices as they were called then) everywhere all the time became very normal.
There existed a period of time where handheld communication devices existed and were banned.
Sometime later, someone somewhere made a conscious choice to change policy. It didn’t just happen.
Must have been a powerful person.
Banning smartphones completely (including during breaks / lunch)? A different matter entirely.
> Who said anything about riding a bicycle is preachy?
People burn coal while passing cyclists. Why? You yourself say that not all cyclists are preachy.
> In my case it was
Your accidental and short release of dark exhaust caused by driving an old vehicle does not fit the definition of burning coal. City busses where I lived in the 1980s emitted a lot of exhaust. That was simply bad emissions control, not rolling coal.
What are you on about? I prefaced my post quite clearly. This is nonsense.
> People burn coal while passing cyclists. Why? You yourself say that not all cyclists are preachy.
Because there is a perception that cyclists are like this. Whether it is true or not doesn't matter. If a group of people don't police the most extreme members you are defined by those members.
BTW mountain bikers/bmx don't generally have the same poor perception IME as many other cyclists because generally the attitude is generally different.
> Your accidental and short release of dark exhaust caused by driving an old vehicle does not fit the definition of burning coal. City busses where I lived in the 1980s emitted a lot of exhaust. That was simply bad emissions control, not rolling coal.
Other than it not being deliberate it was "rolling coal". To get the black soot you need to just have poor combustion of a diesel.
This was what was happening because I had to push the throttle to the limit so the engine didn't stall. For all intents and purposes it is exactly the same thing as there was incomplete combustion of diesel and therefore lots of black smoke coming from my exhaust.
I reiterate my earlier comment about it being childish. "You look like someone I should hate, so I am going to fuck with you in particular."
Oh the irony in these same people being quite fond of claiming it's everyone else that's the emotional snowflake.
> Other than it not being deliberate it was "rolling coal". To get the black soot you need to just have poor combustion of a diesel.
No. Rolling coal requires injecting vastly more fuel and making the mixture far richer than even the worst possible factory tune.
I do not.
> also public schools - any publicly accessible area
A public school in your country is something were any random dude, can just walk in, without anyone being able to object? How does this work with the duty of supervision, the duty to provide and the protected status of children as ward to the educators?
A prison, a nuclear power plant, the hospital and the military are all facilities, that are publicly funded, yet you certainly can't walk in and take random photos or do other things.
I expect public schools to be publicly funded, not to be the same as any public space. Maybe that indeed doesn't apply in your country, but that sounds bullocks to me.
Hence, all drivers are defined by those who roll coal on cyclists and pedestrians for the lulz. Got it.
These days, generally no, "random dude" cannot just walk into any school as some have the front doors locked during school hours (mostly due to gun violence, not taking photos), but it's not impossible. But "random dude" is not the subject of the article, the subject is student's phones being banned, which does not include cameras specifically being banned, which students could still bring into a school, and it's still perfectly legal to use them. Don't hallucinate something I didn't say to try to make a pointless argument. "Random dude" was not part of this comment thread until you made it up.
>A prison, a nuclear power plant, the hospital and the military are all facilities, that are publicly funded, yet you certainly can't walk in and take random photos or do other things.
You can take photos in the public lobby of all those places, that is accessible to the public, or from outside the facility on public sidewalks or roads, etc. Hospitals over here aren't generally publicly funded, a small number are, but most are for-profit. The US has a lot of problems with healthcare that your country may not have. It's perfectly legal to film military bases from outside the base, anything you can see from a public space is legal to film. It's up to the public entity being filmed to create privacy (walls, etc). Publicly accessible areas are a thing in most public facilities, and restricted areas are a different thing, where filming is not allowed, nor access is given.
1st amendment rights are the same rights that allow security cameras to record people in public, and the public has the right to request police body cam recordings, as well as all camera footage from cameras in public facilities to be requested by the public. If I wanted to, I could get all the security footage from any public facility, just by requesting it. That's why it's also perfectly legal for me to bring my own camera and film inside any publicly accessible area of a public building. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public in the US.
>I expect public schools to be publicly funded, not to be the same as any public space. Maybe that indeed doesn't apply in your country, but that sounds bullocks to me.
Constitutional rights don't stop because someone's feelings might get hurt if their photo is taken, and a made-up policy that some institutions like to post on the front door banning photos doesn't supersede the rights given in the constitution. We can ignore those policies, because they are not more important than constitutional rights.
Most people in the US don't even understand 1st amendment rights, but there are a lot of "1st amendment auditors" that go around testing our rights, filming in publicly accessible areas of all the places you've mentioned, and educating people (including law enforcement) that don't have a clue what the 1st amendment guarantees.
You might find some of these videos kind of wild:
Postal Office: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumedKeDqg0
Military Base: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipAN8pft7Fo7
Correctional Facility: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egIz6-Ikma4
Filming banks through the window from public: https://youtu.be/9KpUnID-OVc?si=P1OWYxqqPhWnMVVO&t=650
Sorry, that wasn't what I was trying. "Accessible by random dude" was something I took as a measure for being "public accessible space". In my mind that's a prerequisite to being allowed to take photos.
> If I wanted to, I could get all the security footage from any public facility, just by requesting it.
Wow. That's a thing? That explains some films, I always thought, they have just weirdly good connections to a security guy or bribe someone.
> Constitutional rights don't stop because someone's feelings might get hurt if their photo is taken, and a made-up policy that some institutions like to post
In my mind personal privacy should be a higher right than some random person today feeling like they need to record my faux pas. But your law is your law.
Don't you have a (legal) duty to protect children from having arbitrary behaviour publicly broadcasted?
The videos sound I bit like public place means any where you can just walk in. Does that mean you really need a fence, to say that something is not public? I mean we are here also not the Nordics, where you do not need a fence what's-o-ever, but we don't need a fence that physically prevents you from going in. A partial fence or markings on the ground are enough, and you are expected to just not walk onto private property, you don't need to be forced to do so here.
There's nothing wrong in being in minority but I guess because it is on frontpage it says something about preferences of majority.
Why then make it sound like I can't by deliberately misstating my position in a completely ridiculous manner to be as argumentative as possible?
> Just like people are allowed to write these stories and me and people who upvoted this allowed to do the opposite of complaining. whether you like it or not
I never said once they weren't allowed to. I said I found the writing style annoying.
> There's nothing wrong in being in minority but I guess because it is on frontpage it says something about preferences of majority.
It doesn't say anything about the preferences on the majority. A minority of people would have up-voted this as well. Many other people may have found it annoying that said nothing or simply ignored it. You don't know their numbers. So this is speculation.
there was tons of news rehashing facts of what happened (phones banned yadda yadda), why not just read that instead if you want it
Right. A service that isn't used is pointless. Usenet didn't serve ads or even try to make money, but also didn't get used, and was also deemed unworthy of attention. I mean technically it is still running out there in some corner of the internet, but when was the last time you used it? I bet 90% of HN users have never used it even once, and that's a technical crowd who are the most likely to use it. Your school crossing guard will have never heard of it.
> Which is why the posts from the friends are now completely gone
That's not exactly true. There is a secondary newsfeed that is limited to just your friends' posts, under the "Friends" tab. But let's be honest: Nobody (other than a few, let say odd, characters) post anything, so it's always empty. This is no doubt why you claim that it doesn't even exist. You're not wrong in practice, even though it is technically there.
This is the problem with social media. They learned pretty quickly that it doesn't work — the same hard lesson Usenet learned decades prior — which is why they had to pivot away from it. If you don't give people exactly what they want, you're not going to go anywhere. Plain and simple.
It’s telling that none of the tech CEOs allow their children to use their wares.
This is way too general a claim to be plausibly true, or verifiable even if somehow it was true. There's a lot of tech CEOs, running companies doing lots of different things in the world of computer technology, with lots of different family situations. They do not all have the same philosophy of how to raise their children, that they have publicly and truthfully talked about. Even if you're just talking about, say, Mark Zuckerberg specifically, who I know has mentioned some things publicly about his approach to raising his relatively-young kids, I don't think he claims that he blanket-disallows his kids from using every Meta product. And if he did, why would he say that publicly? Or maybe he did do that at one point when his kids were younger but then they complained a lot about this parental restriction and eventually he relented without happening to inform the world on a podcast that he's now making a slightly different decision in his private life.
I also don't think that any parent's decision about what kinds of computer technology use to allow or forbid for their children should be primarily based on what tech CEOs do with their own kids (and of course, really, what they heard tech CEOs somewhere without actually being able to verify this unless they happen to be close personal friends of a tech CEO).
> iPhone immediately caught on like wild fire.
> I'm not saying there won't be users, but it's a much smaller population.
The facts say you're wrong about this.
The adoption rate for the iPhone was slow. There were only 1.4 million iPhones sold in its first year,[1] whereas there were 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users in its first year.[2]
ChatGPT is not niche, and is not a 'much smaller population'. Right now it has 800 million weekly active users. That's how many iPhones were active in 2017. Are we to say that iPhones were a niche in 2017? It's how many smartphones in general were active at the start of 2012. Are we to say that smartphones were a niche in 2012?
[1] https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology--media-a...
[2] https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/
[3] We can go deeper on this data, but these are generally accepted figures, and I have seen no figures that agree with your statements
The ChatGPT number includes people who paid no money. iPhone adoption was incredibly fast for a paid product
ChatGPT and Claude have incredible utility, whereas Character.ai-type chatbots are much less certain. I can't fathom trying to spend more than a few minutes talking to them since they have so many shortcomings.
I don't consider ChatGPT a chatbot because my inquiries tend to match my usage of Google Search. It's a search tool.
We are here in Australia from the 10th December this year.
I've also been thinking that perhaps social media platforms should start displaying some kind of indicator when a poster is from out of your country. So when foreign troll farms start political posting you can see more clearly they aren't legitimate. I suspect that social media is largely to blame for the insane politics of the world right now.
When the iPhone came out, nearly everyone I knew dumped hundreds of dollars to get one (or a droid) within 2 years.
Have you recently spoken with the younger generation still in school?
I doubt you find many there who just "have barely engaged with it". It is just too useful for all the generic school stuff, homework, assignments, etc.
Between your comments, and the report above, I suspect you, and most people you know, aren't students.
Point being, when smart phones came out it there was anticipation of what it might be, sort of like a game console. ChatGPT et al was sort of sudden, and the use case is pretty one dimensional, and for average people, less exciting. It is basically a work-slop emitter, and _most people I know_ seem to agree with that.
most people I know spend $500+/month and use ai 8-10/hrs per day
Raw deal.
Device-delivery instead of teacher-delivery puts the student first, even when the student knows nothing, and has zero impulse control.
So instead of modelling a productive and enriching data accessing environment, we're actually just tearing down the walls of the school and asking teachers to babysit the mayhem.
Of course by the time I was there smoking on school grounds was prohibited, so smokers had to go just beyond the gate. Which students were not allowed to, but few teachers were willing to enforce that
They didn't and they haven't.
It's more nudge nudge wink wink age restriction theatre than 1984 total surveillance.
The onus is on platforms (Facebook, Youtube, et al) to adhere to the request to restrict minors.
https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/soci...
https://theconversation.com/details-on-how-australias-social...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-30/teen-social-media-ban...
Schools are generally protected against that, and your only hope is to replace the school board, who is commonly bullies themselves.
However at the same time I understand the attitude. The fact that I understand an attitude doesn't mean I condone it.
You don't condone it but you think calling it nasty behavior is preachy. Sounds like you are so afraid of being vocal and preachy that the most you can do is say “tisk, tisk” - hardly effective policing.
I agree. However if the most vocal members of the group come off preachy, self entitled etc. at best people are going to be ambivalent towards you and at worst straight off hostile.
> Oh the irony in these same people being quite fond of claiming it's everyone else that's the emotional snowflake.
It is often pot and kettle. I am not in the US and don't care about stupid culture war bs. I see both as equally ridiculous.
> No. Rolling coal requires injecting vastly more fuel and making the mixture far richer than even the worst possible factory tune.
This is exactly what happened. Someone has messed with the fuel pump (before I owned it) and/or the throttle cable isn't adjusted properly.
So all intents and purposes the effect was the same. That is why the vehicle is in the garage. I don't like having a vehicle that isn't running properly.
Now it's "Someone has messed with the fuel pump (before I owned it) and/or the throttle cable isn't adjusted properly."
Here's NJ's law:
> No person shall retrofit any diesel-powered vehicle with any device, smoke stack (i.e., hood stack or bed stack), or other equipment which enhances the vehicle's capacity to emit soot, smoke, or other particulate emissions, or shall purposely release significant quantities of soot, smoke, or other particulate emissions into the air and onto roadways and other vehicles while operating the vehicle, colloquially referred to as "coal rolling."
Did you purposely release significant quantities of soot? According to your own words, that was not your intent.
Therefore under NJ law you were not rolling coal, even though the visible effect is the same. The law is based on your intent and purpose.
Straw-man and now gas-lighting. Obviously I wouldn't have the same opinion about a classic novel (however flowery prose is a problem in a many novels) as I do about throwaway news "stories" written by a copy writer that wants to make use of their English degree. Pretending someone would (without any evidence to the contrary) is a disingenuous tactic to make people shut-up. I've had this done to me in person.
> there was tons of news rehashing facts of what happened (phones banned yadda yadda), why not just read that instead if you want it
If they hadn't have used the story like prose I may have read the rest of it! That is my and the OP's entire complaint.
I think we will leave it there.
Indeed.
> If they hadn't have used the story like prose I may have read the rest of it!
So you didn't read it? How far did you make it? I swear there is an underlined link to another article about the ban somewhere in first paragraph. If you follow that link, there's a handy sidebar appears with details about the ban. Yay technology)
> throwaway news "stories" written by a copy writer that wants to make use of their English degree
Personal attacks on people who can write? let's goo!
You are being recorded by the government, constantly in public. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. If you're going to be disturbed that someone recorded you tripping over a rock, then that's your problem, not the problem of some random camera in the area.
The only time where permission is required is if the photo or video is used for commercial purposes - like a tv show or movie or an ad campaign, etc. Then the person filming must get a signed release to use the images.
>The videos sound I bit like public place means any where you can just walk in.
Generally, yes.
>Does that mean you really need a fence, to say that something is not public?
Not a fence, just a "no trespassing" sign is enough if it's a private property. But you are allowed to walk up to any home's door and knock on the door, even while recording. If they tell you to leave, you must leave.
If it's public land, then a fence is likely necessary, with a sign posted that it is a restricted area. For example, if it's an unfenced parking lot at a public facility, and there is no "restricted" sign posted, you can walk around and take photos of all the cars, even inside the cars since it's essentially within public view from a non-restricted area.
Are we talking about your country or about mine now? When the legal basis for the surveillance expires the government must also delete the data like everybody else. Sure they might not always do it, but that is simply illegal and I can sue my government for that.
This applies to all cameras. Any place where a camera is installed needs to have a sign, stating the storage duration and a contact where you can object and get your data deleted earlier. For example, footage from bodycams of policemen need to be regularly deleted, and emergency dashcams for cars, are only allowed to be have storage for a few hours maximum, so the data is regularly overwritten. If you use a camera that doesn't do that and you bring the data to a court as evidence, it is taken against you.
> If you're going to be disturbed that someone recorded you tripping over a rock, then that's your problem, not the problem of some random camera in the area.
It's less that I would be personally disturbed by the recording itself, but by the public humiliation that follows, which absolutely has real world consequences. Would you hire that fool you have seen last week on Youtube doing a dumb challenge? Suddenly the recorder has a way to ransom you. That applies even more to children in a school. That will be a easy way to bully people if you make that legal.
Your explanation sounds like it would be absolutely illegal, to record the habits of your neighbors, when they get up, when they go to work, what they like to eat etc. ...