Some of the generic policies can be very strange, too.
I once got detention for getting punched in the arm. I was much taller than any of the school bullies, so they mostly didn't start anything with me. But every now and then, they would try. The punch barely hurt and I didn't really care, but another student saw it and reported it. The staff knew what happened, understood that I was the only one that got hit, and then gave us both detention. I couldn't believe it. That angered me 100x more than the bully. Looking back, I assume this policy was intended to deal with cases where it's unclear who hit who or who started it. But I became fixated on how unfair it was. If they wanted to create another troublemaker, they almost succeeded.
Zero tolerance can lead to a new type of bullying: state sponsored. I remember a younger colleague who talked about her school experience, this was just at the start of zero tolerance because there was a belief that bullying caused school gun violence. Bullies quickly found out it was easy to just report "weird" kids as potential shooters and let the school torment them with investigations.
> Zero tolerance can lead to a new type of bullying: state sponsored.
Absolutely. The more of a victim you're perceived the more attention and the more punishment the bully gets. If the system overreacts, bullies would be stupid not to use the over-reaction in their favor. One of the kids at my daughter's school figured it out and was getting others in trouble by falling down then telling the teacher so and so pushed her and that was like 2nd grade. They can also team up together to accumulate these reports against student they don't like and just let the state come down on them and ruin their life.
The institutions we force on our children often closely mirror the institutions we implement for ourselves. Conversely, the institutions we go through as children mold our perceptions of how they should appear in adulthood.
> the scapegoat cannot appear as scapegoat, as it does in the Gospels, without losing all credibility. To account for it, let us look more closely at an expression I have used throughout these lectures as if it signified something quite obvious — scapegoat. It is not an ordinary concept. Instead it is something paradoxical, a principle of illusion whose efficacy requires complete ignorance of it. To have a scapegoat is not to know that one has one. As soon as the scapegoat is revealed and named as such, it loses its power. To reveal its purely mimetic nature, as the Gospels do, is to understand that there is nothing in the scapegoat phenomenon intellectually or spiritually deserving of faith; it is to see that the persecutors of any scapegoat, and not only of Jesus, hate him without reason, by virtue of an illusion that propagates itself irresistibly but no less unreasonably among them. It is pure, collective illusion, spectacular but deceiving.
This doesn't sound like a result of "zero tolerance" policies, unless the one faking being attacked was also punished, but you didn't mention it.
And if that's the case "zero tolerance" would on the face of it seem to discourage this kind of fakery by punishing the faker too.
Even the comment before doesn't sound that relevant to the normal complaint because again, the two parties aren't both being punished, just the one reported to the system as a potential threat.
So we are complaining:
1. The victim and the perpetrator are equally punished (because it's hard to figure out who started it when a physical fight starts)
2. People shouldn't always believe reports of kids being potential school shooters, because they might be liars doing a mini-(or indeed literal) SWATing by weaponizing the institutional response.
3. People shouldn't always believe people who complain about bullies generally, because they might be liars being "cry-bullies"
These individually sounds like hard problems to solve. Combined they have further complexities and solutions for one seen to make others worse.
The tone of these complaints often make it seem like there is an obvious better way, but that may in fact just reflect the strong feeling that they were the victim, and that the other person should have been punished, not them (or their child).
Which is understandable but not really a great basis to make policy on.
> This doesn't sound like a result of "zero tolerance" policies, unless the one faking being attacked was also punished, but you didn't mention it.
The implication is that the system overreacts one way only, taking the word of the victim at face value and then applying "zero tolerance" towards the perceived bully.
Like I mentioned "if the system overreacts, bullies would be stupid not to use the over-reaction in their favor". Think of it like a tree that's unbalanced and leaning heavily one way, well you can make it fall on someone by pushing it in the way it leans, it won't take much effort to do that, it's already leaning as opposed taking tree standing tall and trying to topple that down on someone.
My (private) school had the luxury of sorting this through a multi tier system.
a) detention was 3 hours minimum on a saturday. It involved manual labor like mulching flower beds, picking up litter while rolling around 50 gallon drums, etc.
b) if you liked manual labor you were made to do homework with someone paying direct attention or lecturing subjects you were bad at.
c) if you attempted to opt out of that they would have you dig holes 3 feet deep with a post hole digger and fill them back in.
d) if you attempted to opt out of that you got 2 options
1) the teachers thought you were redeemable. you pushed the dumpster around campus picking up the 50 gallon drums. 3 times during the circuit you'd come back and raise a 50 lb plate overhead and drop it to smash the garbage. Aroudn 30 times each round. One of the philosophy teachers would expound on your life decisions for the full 3 hours.
2) you were enrolled at your public school immediately, and truant the next day. your parents were called and told to pick you up and returned the balance of the tuition.
It works too well. Especially with the "first to call" or "first to complain" gets automatically a 500 point boost in credibility. "Clearly if they called the police first, the to other party must be at fault".
I can't tell whether you are being sarcastic about it discouraging retaliating. When they had us both in the room, I said to the staff, "If you're just going to give me detention anyway, then the next time he punches me, I'm punching him back." Needless to say, they didn't like that. But I think it kept the peace. At the time, it seemed like the only logical move. Otherwise, the bully would just have another reason to do it, to get me in trouble without any additional consequences. As I saw it, half the reason to punch back would be to show the school how stupid their policy was.
That's 100% how it worked in practice. Hell, I've even heard of some parents encouraging their kids to do that if they get hit precisely because the notion of "no tolerance" is absurd
> can't tell whether you are being sarcastic about it discouraging retaliating
I'm 100% for the retaliation. If I'm going to get kicked out for fighting, I'm not going to do it without hitting the other guy.
One time I was almost kicked out for a "serious fight" I never threw a punch in. Was a friend who was having a rough time and I knew I just needed to give him a minute. Arm up to keep some space, stepping back. Caught and detained for it. Couldn't figure out what else I was supposed to do. Didn't matter because I was involved.
> bully would just have another reason to do it, to get me in trouble without any additional consequences
To who!? It doesn't sound fair at all. It sounds like an "authority" being embarrassed their precious system wasn't able to catch the perceived issue. "I can't see everything so, until I can (ominous foreshadowing camera angle), every suspect is guilty."
It isn't sold like this though, hence it working differently on paper and in practice.
There is no tolerance for violence. The kid is involved in a violent situation, and the kid is punished for it. That is a fairly logical set of steps until you realize how vague "involved" is.
I hope from this episode you learned your lesson that if any form of enforcement authority is given to any person or institution, this entity will sooner or later abuse it.
If you "got" this lesson, you learned something insanely important for your life: to deeply distrust every authority with (enforcement) power - something much more valuable than basically everything else that school teaches you.
The real lesson is that people in authority prioritize preserving that authority rather than solving problems with it. Even if they're not deliberately malicious, they will risk others before risking their status. The sooner kids understand this, the better they will understand adults.
I had a similar issue. A teacher found me with a smaller boy (poor kid had some genuine emotional issues, in retrospect was probably being abused outside of school) who was nevertheless doing his best to rip my ears off. The fact that I had my hands on his wrists was seen as reason to split the resulting punishment between both of us.
These days I pin a lot of this kind of thing down to the psychology of teachers, which seems to skew hard towards an unmet desire for respect/authority coupled with a relatively dull intellect. Most just aren't equipped to take charge of children.
You can see data for this by looking at GRE or SAT scores across intended majors. It made me sad to see education majors generally do very poorly compared to the rest.
That's exactly the kind of situation that made hateful as a teen. I'm so glad to be free of that now. Therapy works (over the long term, not a quick fix).
Ten minutes ago my son came home from school and told me there was a fight and that the kid who started it has no punishment but the kid who finished it got a weeklong suspension.
I stopped a kid from hitting me and the school tried to punish me for another kid attacking me, and I non violently grabbed his fist and stopped the attack.
When I learned I'd be punished the same as the attacker, or if I had hit back, I told the school, "Next time, I will knock him out."
I don't recall if the policy was changed, but I was not punished, and no one bullied me when they realized I would defend myself and was prepared to fight back. Don't pick on the quiet fat kid.
And where were your parents in this? My school in USA tried this... Once. My dad went to have a talk with them. I do not know what was said, but the principal walked out of the room white-faced and they never tried that bullshit on me again.
School administrators have much less power than you might think. In public type school systems they're left answering to a lengthy hierarchy which doesn't even end at the superintendent, because they in turn are often beholden to various bureaucrats. And in private schools of significant size, there are usually investors or other monetary types at the top, but well out of sight.
In either case, the people at the top tend to know very little about education and they're often the source of really stupid policies that sound decent only if you know nothing about schools and/or are incapable of seeing second order effects, such as with zero tolerance.
In any case, the admins there probably wished the OP would have punched the bully back. That's what stops bullying, and oddly enough often even results in friends being made. At least among boys - girls that get physical with each other will hold a death grudge til the end of time, but also get physical far less often as a balance to that.
> In either case, the people at the top tend to know very little about education
There don't actually exist so many things that you need to know so that you can at least make decent decisions:
For this particular case, it suffices to know the trivial fact that if children are in half-time jail ("compulsory school attendance"). From this, one can easily conclude that thus structures that one knows from prisons will develop on the schoolyard.
I had something similar to this happen to me, where some kid was causing trouble during nap time in kindergarten.
I was an obsessively good kid, my parents took me everywhere with them and treated me like a peer, within reason. I was well behaved for my age. At the end of the day in kindergarten class, if you didn't cause problems, you received a stamp on your hand. The stamp was everything. A brand that I had ACCOMPLISHED that day.
Nap time was a post lunch, thirty minute time when we turned the lights out and laid down. Some kid near to me was making faces and making weird noises behind the teacher's back during nap time. Of course, he's five, maybe six, so this is not going undetected by our teacher. She storms over and asks "who is making all this noise?". I, being a total narc at 5 simply point. Assuming of course, this means I will receive a daily stamp, maybe even more, for my quick and wonderful detective work.
Then the unthinkable happens. His name goes on the board. MY name goes on the board. A wave of confusion sweeps over me. This is a massive blow to my tiny ego, only bad kids get their name on the board, surely there is a mistake!
It's nap time. I cannot make any noise, else I will risk A CHECKMARK NEXT TO MY NAME, which will only escalate the punishment in 198x to TIME OUT. Bad kids are always in time out. I am NOT a bad kid.
I am crushed. My small brain cannot process the enormity of what has happened. My name is on the board. I am smart enough to know what's not coming.
2pm comes, we're sitting on the square rug, and we're all putting our hands on our heads to receive our daily benediction: the stamp. I desperately keep my hand on my head, hoping I might trick our assistant teacher into giving me what I know is very far away.
She passes right by. I look left and right and realize, there is no mistake.
I held immediately held back a flood of tears, feeling deep failure. I stood up, and slowly gathered my things. I slogged my way to the bus and remember staring out the window thinking, what if the same thing happens tomorrow? I will never receive another stamp under this system, how could they do this to me?! The stamp continued the next day, but a different mark was made.
I had a short villain era after this, realizing a true injustice of the world: no matter how good you are sometimes things will not go your way.
That all sounds reasonable until you realize that the same logic is how we ended up with customer support systems that try to walk you through a phone tree and if you are lucky, you will be able to press 0 to speak to a human without answering a bunch of questions first and being referred to the online help articles.
Do you enjoy using any of those systems? Do you want the world to be that way?
Maybe we are interpreting the GP differently. In this scenario, the phone tree is doing the same questions that the human agent is going to do but does it immediately when I call rather than "waiting for an operator" to ask me those questions. And as long as I can "press 0 to eject" (just like I can in the accounting scenario, then its completely kosher to me.
No, we end up with crappy systems because people are optimizing to save money over providing a good service. OP has simply replaced the traditional room full of clerks applying policy rigorously with a baysian algorithm and now AI. The management and oversight is still in place, and that is what makes a system that doesn't suck. To make it suck and save money, you remove access to that oversight or just remove it all together. And falling down that slippery slope is not inevitable, even if it sometimes seems like it is.
Regarding customer support on phone:
I usually have lock with just waiting and not responding to the tel bot, very often you are routed to a human at the end :-D
You explained it well. Representative democracy complicates systems of fairness since it adds another layer that itself also needs to be fair. And each is an opportunity to be corrupted into unfairness.
Our education curriculum is also a big problem here. If I stopped random people on the street in the U.S. and asked them what first-past-the-post is, I suspect only a small number would be able to answer.
Yet people are baffled as to why we have the two party system, gerrymandering, and all of the other problems. You can’t fix what you don’t understand. We have to start there.
Ranked choice is starting to gain some traction in the U.S. But there are many different ranking methods and the one we are using is instant-runoff, which has many of the same problems as first-past-the-post, including polarizing candidates and winners. I think if these systems were more broadly understood, many people would prefer Schulze for its fairness properties and to reduce polarization.
Imagine if MS just did a git revert all the way back to ~2020. That was peak GitHub for me. We got some niceties the first couple of years after the acquisition - free private repos, Sponsors, secret scanning, a new mobile app and CLI - but things were still pretty stable, before their architecture and the little UX touches got destroyed.
My vote is to revert all of the js-only UI features that the surveillance capitalist enshittifiers pushed, even if that means server rendering a whole lot more.[1]
C'mon, Microslop. Be daring. Buck the trend. You used to do that once in a while.
[1] It'll probably improve UX a hundred fold, even if it doesn't lower compute cost...though it might do that too, if the system is as slop-coded as some suspect.
Not only that, but with iOS 17.1 or later, AirDrop transfers will continue to work if you go out of Wi-Fi range during the transfer. It seamlessly switches to an Internet-based relay.
Which, in my view, significantly decreases the value proposition, as there is no way to deactivate this feature to my knowledge (at least not without also opting out of other useful features under the "Handoff" umbrella).
A typical Apple feature, dreamed up by engineers that are presumably not aware of the existence of metered data plans...
Settings > General > AirDrop > turn off Use Cellular Data
That said, I don’t really see why you would disable that. It’s only a backup method for when the peer-to-peer connection fails. Unless you are sending huge files on a regular basis, I wouldn’t expect it to be worth disabling. Also, most metered plans I’ve encountered just cause your connection to be very slow after you hit the data cap.
If you are on a plan that automatically charges you excessive overage fees without warning and there is no other choice, then my condolences.
I'm not American, grew up on a Caribbean island. When I was little milkweed was everywhere, including our yard. Consequently monarch butterflies were everywhere.
But we fought the milkweeds cause nobody wanted them in their yard cause before long it's all you had.
We won the war but we don't have as many monarch butterflies anymore.
Here it had nothing to do with pesticides, we just destroyed their lifecycle.
I think majority of places are beyond that point. I’ve found that planting whatever works, even if incrementally, should work. I plant natives, but for natives alone won’t work unless my entire neighborhood does so. So you supplement with non natives that provide something. Milkweed will help with the butterfly larvae but what do you feed the butterflies? Something that’s long blooming and nectar rich. So I let the red valerian that grows like an invasive weed in all conditions, remain blooming in my yard for months at a stretch.
So you supplement with non natives that provide something
I get the sentiment but tend to I disagree. Maybe some very specific species might benefit somewhat, but in general the principle makes little sense. Whatever native fauna there is in your area spent thousands of years in relationships with other native flora and fauna. So not just plants, also the soil life, the combination of plants, the terrain variation and so on. Hence replicating that as close as possible should be what works best. Which a far as nectar/pollen goes means not a single species but a combination providing it throughout the seasons. Whereas 'long blooming and nectar rich' completely ignores specialist insects which only get nectar and pollen from one particular species or group of species, insects laying eggs on specific species only, and so on. Butterfly bush is considered a McDonalds for insects, and that's actually a pretty good metaphor. Red valerian is in the same ballpark.
The “butterfly bush” is native to China. Milkweed is native to North America.
Milkweed is the only one that can feed the Monarch at all stages of its life, from larva to caterpillar to butterfly. When people plant butterfly bushes, it “tricks” the butterfly (or at least crowds out better options) into laying eggs where the larvae will ultimately die of starvation.
The most popular cultivars are from China, but there are also native American butterfly bush (Buddleja).
I've heard the native ones support monarch's throughout their lives, but now I'm seeing that's not so - which would be odd... Why would Monarchs evolve to lay eggs where they'd starve?
Do you use a case? My guess would be that when you swipe up, you're not quite starting low enough, perhaps unconsciously, because of the case being in the way. See if a case with a thinner front or smaller bezels helps. Using your index finger also works better than the thumb.
If that doesn't help, there are some settings you can try:
1. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > AssistiveTouch and turn on AssistiveTouch. Under Custom Actions, set Single-Tap to Home. Now you have a home button. You can move this button anywhere on your screen and adjust its "Idle Opacity" so it's less distracting when not in use.
2. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap and choose Double Tap or Triple Tap. Select Home from the list of actions. Now you can tap on the back side of your phone to go home.
There's also Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Touch Accommodations, but that's more about preventing accidental touches and swipes, so that would probably make the situation worse for you.
It’s not you or your setup. I experience the same behavior. Tried with and without Private Relay, residential and commercial ISPs at different locations, and more to debug it. Same results.
I think GitHub has just gotten so aggressive with their rate limit policies that it’s straight up incompatible with their own product. The charitable interpretation is that they aren’t keeping good track of how many requests each page actually performs in order to calibrate rate limiting.
On the other side of the coin, they also punish people who have slow connections. The acceptable speed for downloading from github on my connection is 90k/sec. No more, no less. Something prevents the rate from being higher (probably Github), and if the rate drops any lower for any length of time, the connection will suddenly abort right in the middle of the download. Since the dumpster fire that is git doesn't support resume, welcome to hell. If I didn't have a fast server elsewhere to git to then zip up and re-download, I'd be screwed.
In episode 69 of Access On, the story of accessibility for early Apple devices is told. Including how many of the modern tools that are taken for granted, such as speech synthesizers and VoiceOver, came to be.
I think the Matter standard is going to cause IPv6 adoption to increase significantly in the coming years. People will demand it, without even knowing what Matter or IPv6 are. They just want to be able to turn their lights off from their phone without any extra hardware or software.
Matter is only local networking. Essentially everyone has IPv6 on their local network.
That said, I disagree with the parent statement that v6 isn't going to happen. It's already happening at a steady rate. From the Google stats it's steadily rolling out. Some countries are reaching 100% v6 deployment. I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually see some countries with high v6 deployments see services which are v6 only.
They've had years to demand it, I don't see why it would suddenly change. Most users who buy "smart" appliances are not power users, don't set everything up themselves and just rely on manufacturer's servers anyway and don't need a direct connection - and are okay with it.
I once got detention for getting punched in the arm. I was much taller than any of the school bullies, so they mostly didn't start anything with me. But every now and then, they would try. The punch barely hurt and I didn't really care, but another student saw it and reported it. The staff knew what happened, understood that I was the only one that got hit, and then gave us both detention. I couldn't believe it. That angered me 100x more than the bully. Looking back, I assume this policy was intended to deal with cases where it's unclear who hit who or who started it. But I became fixated on how unfair it was. If they wanted to create another troublemaker, they almost succeeded.
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