While he stood at the urinal he managed, with a little more fingering, to get it unfolded. Obviously there must be a message of some kind written on it. For a moment he was tempted to take it into one of the water-closets [toilets] and read it at once. But that would be shocking folly, as he well knew. There was no place where you could be more certain that the telescreens were watched continuously.
- George Orwell, 1984
That's to say, every society has its discontents who take their anger and frustration and discharge it on innocent civilians. Some societies manage their mentally ill people better than others. We do a pretty pitiful job at it.
EDIT: I used ChatGPT 'thinking mode' to get that number for USA. Where mass shooting >= 4 people injured.
> EDIT: I used ChatGPT
Digital is most of the market now but analog video cameras, analog video recorders, and analog tape recorders are still made.
If you're the kind of guy to bring a tape recorder in there and argue about splitting hairs, I don't think they will look kindly upon you.
… multiple threats a day?! At 1 high school?! Citation needed on that. I know that US high schools have a reputation of being unsafe, but I highly doubt there’s near-HOURLY thwarting of “threats”. Are we talking about rule breaking (vaping in the bathroom, skipping class) or bullying? I would assume so.
The fact it’s then immediately followed up with stats about gun violence does sort of imply we’re talking about serious threats…
Sure, maybe you go full-prison mode if there’s an hourly murder, but that’s so outside the realm of reality that I’m not willing to even entertain that as being a possibility. You would’ve run out of students by now.
This makes the assumption that all policies have a reasonable justification, so that the existence of a real problem can be inferred by the implementation of a policy which would only make sense if (1) there was a real problem, and (2) the policy was an effective mitigation.
I would suggest that this assumption is both false and dangerous, in that it makes one trivially manipulable by anyone in a position to set policy.
I’m in the US and this story feels extremely foreign to me. Even hearing a rumor about a gun threat at my kids’ school or any of my friends’ kids’ schools would be a topic of discussion for the next year with parent-teacher meetings, the school communicating with parents to shed light on what happened, action plans, and so on. Fortunately nothing like that has happened, but this is the level of communication that happens for even rumored threats.
The US is a huge place, though. Some times I don’t think outsiders understand how big and diverse this country is.
This was in a wealthy suburb where people like that have to make up imaginary threats in order to feel something, and what better population to fret about than the kids.
Do we trust surveillance peddlers enough that we should believe what they don't even say directly, but only "sort of imply" it? In this case, we have an easy test: has the number of attempted homicides at this school decreased by multiple per day since the surveillance was implemented?
If it has, I'm sure the surveillance vendors would be eagerly pointing to the dramatic drop in homicides on a graph, coinciding with their invasion of the school, and not just sort of implying it.
How dare some teenager thumb their nose at the almighty rules of the state by <checks notes> vaping in the bathroom.
Or they're trying to appeal to the emotion of "the usual demographic suspects" who they need to simp for this.
Yes, the juxtaposition does strongly suggest that that is the narrative that the piece is trying to push, even before it explicitly states that by following the stats with “Given those appalling metrics, allocating a portion of your budget to state of the art AI-powered safety and surveillance tools is a relatively easy decision.” (And that emotionally-loaded language isn't paraphrasing any figures named in the story, its the "news” stories own voice!)
But with on the order of 50 fatalities nationally per year, and a single high schools system detecting "multiple threats a day", if we are talking about the same kind of threats, then the false positive rate is virtually indistinguishable from 100%. And, if we aren’t, then the juxtaposition is irrelevant as well as emotionally manipulative.
I'm glad B) at least wasn't made /explicit/ in the article, but damn... they do point at it by implication. You're totally right about the juxtaposition being manipulative.
> The company isn’t aware of any school shootings where its tech was deployed.
A thing that happens 50 times a year, across the entire US has not occurred at any of the small number of pilot schools... where apparently "threats" occur multiple times a day?
EDIT: confirming I agree, emphasis on /explicit/.
I think for (B) to be a justifiable reading, the national stats would have had to have been much higher before the roll out, with a significant share of those national stats being from the particular schools that happened to be the leading implementors.
But, yeah, I agree that that is a possible implication of the presentation on the surface.
Only 32% felt they were always being watched, but in reality 100% of them were always being watched.
Same principle applies with cameras. The tool is not the issue.
What you need to do is undermine the culture of machismo and trollishness around guns:
Start with "anyone who poses with guns in their family Christmas photo is to be treated as if they will use them on your family or their own kids without a moment's hesitation for their own gain".
(Like, if you get a Christmas card from a family with guns in their photo, why would you consider that anything other than a threatening communication? It clearly is.)
Move on to "anyone who has more usable guns than they can hold in their hands is probably a broken person and maybe you should consider keeping your distance".
Move on to "anyone who owns a bump stock is insane or compensating for a tiny penis", and "anyone who doesn't keep their guns in a gun safe is not safe to be around at all".
Move on to "open carry does not mean ostentatious carry". Start thinking about whether open carry is, in fact, a necessary conclusion of the right to bear arms.
Move on to fucking investigating NRA corruption properly. Don't just point it out.
Move on to humiliating politicians who take gun lobby money. Don't just point it out as if it's some form of conflict of interest or a sign they won't be serious about gun crime. Laugh at them. Call them spineless cowards. Humiliate them for their craven foolishness.
Aim for a process that preserves the right to bear arms but makes gun nuts seem as untrustworthy and dangerous as it turns out they so often are.
And if you are a gun owner and you believe guns should be treated with caution and respect, and you know someone who doesn't, tell them in no uncertain terms, and if you ever see them get violent, tell the police of your concerns.
Make gun obsession weird again.
That seems hyperbolic to me. I don't understand liking "tactical" Christmas decor, but I know some people who do.
In my experience, this kind of hyperbole tends to increase polarization around an idea instead of leading to any consensus.
Consider that we have a documented justice system in many places that is repeatedly releasing violent criminals onto the streets, such that they are going on to set people on fire on the train, knife innocents on the subway, swinging and hitting elderly women with nail-embedded boards on the sidewalk. Note these crimes happened despite their lack of firearms. Should we not have guns to defend ourselves from these barbarians?
If the justice system were perfect, and crime rates far lower, then firearms would be less necessary, but never unnecessary, because civilization in a local phenomenon, and it only takes one barbarian to disrupt civilized order for the peaceful people of the world. It takes one civilized person with a gun to restore order.
In many places in the west, immigration policy has given rise to rape gangs in England, gangs that bomb in Sweden, etc. Should these peaceful people not have guns to defend themselves from these barbarians?
> There is no clear correlation whatsoever between gun ownership rate and gun homicide rate. Not within the USA. Not regionally. Not internationally. Not among peaceful societies. Not among violent ones. Gun ownership doesn’t make us safer. It doesn’t make us less safe. A bivariate correlation simply isn’t there. It is blatantly not-there. It is so tremendously not-there that the “not-there-ness” of it alone should be a huge news story.
> While the FBI did break these down by weapon type, they didn’t differentiate between AR-15s or similarly patterned rifles, and grandpa’s bolt action deer rifle. All told, in 2019 there were 364 rifle murders, out of a total of 10,258 firearm murders, accounting for approximately 3.5% of total firearm murders. Nobody uses rifles to murder people because they’re big, bulky, difficult to conceal, and a handgun can do the job just as well.
My school had ONE boys bathroom and the rest were closed and used as storage. It was located outside of the lunch room main doors where a security guard sat. No stall doors. The normal protocol was you never shit in school. If you really had to go you prayed no one was in the last stall and covered your lap with your book bag OR try to use the one in the nurses office by claiming you were nauseous. I have on more than one occasion feigned sickness to get my mother to pick me up so I could go home and take a dump with dignity.
We need to stop this nonsense. Fear, surveillance, and distrust are out of control.
Is this what I think it is?
And did the surveillance equipment catch the perpetrator?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Doctorow_novel...
whalesalad•2h ago
gnabgib•2h ago
m4ck_•1h ago
this shit makes me want to move into a hollowed out tree trunk and forage.
whalesalad•1h ago
reilly3000•1h ago
acuozzo•1h ago
This would constitute illegal wiretapping. You have a legally-defensible reasonable expectation of privacy in your domicile in the absence of a warrant.
ls612•1h ago