Security is simply no sales argument and can't compete with OHHH SHINY!!!!!
True though in fairness security and "shiny" are not mutually exclusive and security (in principle) should be a given. Even though they shouldn't, people are going to tend to assume that devices are secure. This isn't true of course but if they don't (knowingly) get hurt then they will assume that it isn't a problem. And there is no reason in principle to assume that a device cannot be both secure and a lot of interesting useful features too.
HP-Z apples mac pro needs to be kick ass and priced at the same level as Dell and HP pro workstations.
Why? People shopping for this machine probably aren't in the market for a Dell or HP. If they wanted a Windows machine they would buy one.
I have no idea if this new Apple Pro machine will sell well or not. Nor do I really care. But it's hardly inconceivable that it might sell very well. Time will tell if there is a market for it or not. Anyone pretending they know if it will succeed or fail right now is simply guessing.
I wonder what the collateral damage is going to be when bitcoin bubble bursts.
Probably fairly insignificant. A few people will lose their ass because they have no concept of risk. Bitcoin isn't a big enough deal to impact the wider economy to any meaningful degree.
That right there is a bullshit argument. Test it out with some other then/now comparison to see for yourself, e.g.
Hardly. Your attempts at bringing in other unrelated arguments that I did not make is a false equivalency.
That depends on what the concerns are, doesn't it? Obviously, a phone doesn't grant the holder invulnerability, but it can certainly ameliorate some common worries (like not knowing where the child is, not being able to reach them, etc....)
Not really no. If the parent is that concerned then they can accompany the child. If they need to reach them at school then they can do so through the administration of the school. If they are concerned about the transit to/from then accompany them. I reject the premise of your argument. If a parent thinks a phone is a security blanket then they are not actually considering the facts of the situation clearly.
And yet, most parents can't be with a school-age child 24/7. If only there was a way to ameliorate some common worries that parents often have.
A phone won't fix actual problems and I'm not going to pretend that it will.
Personally, I'm not a fan of giving kids a phone before middle school age or so, but if the child is walking to and from school before that, I can see the reasoning for it.
I disagree. The phone is just security theater. It does essentially nothing to actually keep a child safe in all but the rarest of circumstances.
The problem is, that would be hell to enforce. You would literally need teachers walking up and down the halls monitoring this. Teachers shouldn't be doing that.
No it would not. Teachers already are monitoring for contraband. If they see it being used then there are consequences. Have you ever actually been around kids? Teachers don't walk around covering their eyes and ears. And if a kid manages to sneak in a phone, so what? It just not that big a deal.
Here's why a whitelist system wouldn't work: 1) No way to ensure that it only functions on school grounds and doesn't affect those off campus 2) It creates all sorts of privacy problems and legal minefields that would have to be litigated. Not to mention that it probably violates all sorts of FCC regs. 3) Schools should not have the legal authority to control communications of people who aren't minors attending that school or employees of same. 4) It would be an expensive nightmare to administer. 5) It is much cheaper to have a simply no-phones policy and to enforce it. Similar to a ban on other contraband like tobacco. 6) This idiotic solution tries to make perfect the enemy of good. Keeping the phones out of the classrooms is good enough. If a few slip through so what? 7) It requires cooperation of the wireless providers who have zero profit motive create such a needlessly draconian system. 8) Such a system would almost certainly get abused.
People still have to check in when entering a school (they're generally not free and open to the public). An extra few seconds for tradesmen to put their phone number into the system isn't a huge burden.
Yes it is. Because their phone is not functional until they check it in. Furthermore there is no compelling reason to ban the phones of anyone who is not a student. It only serves to inconvenience people who don't need to be inconvenienced. Not to mention it is dangerous. There would be no way to not block people who are merely driving by the school. Radio towers don't respect property lines. How do you plan to ensure the cell tower does not affect those who are 1 foot off school grounds?
Boo hoo. Live without your electronic leash for a bit. If you're really that important, people will reach you through the school's office.
Grow up. Electronic leash? It's a tool you moron. Some of us actually have work to do that involves using a phone. I have to communicate with dozens of parents on a real time basis all the time. No I'm not willing to go to the hassle of registering my phone at every school I ever visit to solve a non problem that they can solve simply by actually monitoring the students.
SEND, not receive.
Sigh. We have teachers for that. And staff. And parents. You seriously think we need every child in the school to have a phone so on the vanishingly small chance there isn't any adult around at a school they can dial 911 in the unlikely event of an emergency? Thank goodness you aren't in charge of any actual schools because your critical thinking skills are lacking.
Funny how that's good enough for the kids, but you want special treatment for your convenience. Try leading by example.
I'm not the child being educated you imbecile. The purported purpose of banning kids from having cell phones is so they'll actually have to pay attention in school. A technologically enforced ban of all phones is a stupid, expensive, unnecessary, and dangerous idea.
Xeon CPUs and powerful GPUs inside a pointlessly thin computer with a built-in display? What for? Who the fuck asked for this?
Henry Ford said it best when he said "If I asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse". Perhaps you are right and nobody wants this but Apple does have a pretty good track record of making products people didn't know they wanted. We'll know soon enough.
Either the internal heat will kill components prematurely or the thing will make even more jet noise than an old PowerPC G4 tower.
I'm glad you could clear that up for us without ever having seen the product.
Legally run OS X. For some folks, that's justification.
You may be joking but that is actually 100% correct. Steve Jobs himself pointed out that Apple is a software company. Their hardware is nice but nobody would pay a premium for it if it ran Windows or if the iPhone ran Android. The hardware for a Mac or an iPhone is not meaningfully different from any number of their competitors. So that means that the reason people seek out Apple products is based in what they do differently and that is software.
People get confused about what sort of business Apple is because they won't sell you most of their software without bundling it with a piece of hardware. But a company is what they actually make and what they actually make is software.
That's why developers are working on higher layer protocols, such as Lightning Network, that need to handle nearly all transactions, and only use the underlying layer-1 for settling combined payments.
That's evidence that the system isn't working, not evidence that it is sound.
Compare it to the time when we had a gold standard. People transacted with pieces of paper, each representing a bit of gold, but the gold remained in the vaults.
You do realize that the gold standard system didn't work, right? We left the gold standard because it was fundamentally broken and there is no evidence to suggest that bitcoin will do any better. I think blockchains have some pretty interesting applications but bitcoin is unlikely to be among them.
Surely ones a futures market stabilizes some that should improve things there. Bitcoin payment processors will be able to use futures contracts to help create a payment that's less volatile.
Expecting derivative financial instruments to make the market more stable is a recipe for tears. That is NOT what they do in the real world, especially when there is a lot of speculation going on which is almost entirely what is happening with bitcoin. Prices don't change that fast when people are using derivative instruments for hedging purposes. All that is happening is a bunch of greedy people playing a game of "Who is the Greater Fool".
So far I think the situation is that schools can't handle cell phone storage during school hours.
What are you talking about? They have lockers. Use them. For schools that don't have lockers either forbid them to bring the phones or come up with a secure box to store them during the day.
Imagine the liability issues.
What liability issues? This is made up nonsense. There simply aren't any and it's trivial to work out exceptions to the policy where reasonable. People already sue schools for idiotic reasons so it's hardly worth worrying about a few irrational parents making up new reasons to be irrational. If there is an emergency contact the administrative office or the teacher directly. If the teachers have phones (and most do) then there is no reason to worry about emergencies.
Plus it's a hell of a lot of work.
Schools are very well equipped to monitor students using forbidden items during the school day. They've been doing it literally since there were schools. They already do this so it's really nothing new at all.
Then kids can't have a phone on them on their way to school or home, which is probably a bad idea.
Bullshit. I never had a cell phone as a child and yet somehow I survived the fiery apocalypse. I reject the entire premise of this argument. Children younger than driving age are in most locations by definition with an adult the entire time they are transiting to/from school. Why would they need a phone? Children old enough to drive can leave the phone in the car or in their locker during the day. If a parent is worried about their child's safety, a phone isn't going to solve that problem. The parent should be with the child if they are worried about them.
Schools should put up their own local cell tower that only routes to 911 or the head office if the call is detected to come from within the borders of the school property, unless it's a registered faculty phone number.
That wouldn't work for almost countless reasons. First, it's a very Big Brother sort of solution which would almost certainly draw lawsuits if they tried to implement it. Second, schools are not just for children. I'm on staff at my local school part time. We have community education activities going on all the time which involve people who aren't students. We have parents, guardians, grandparents and other relatives visiting for various reasons. Third, it is quite an unreasonable administrative burden to try to get everyone who might possibly visit a school to register their phone with a school. Not to mention all the privacy issues, problems with first responders, and similar issues. When I coach sports teams I visit other schools during the school day fairly often and it would be EXTREMELY annoying to have to register my phone with every school I visit.
No, it is MUCH simple to just forbid the students from taking a phone out of their locker during the school day. Schools are already well equipped to do that and it is FAR less costly. Schools have enough to do without trying to monitor the comings and goings of the phones for the whole community.
This is something that is possible to do, BTW, not just a pipe dream. It stops kids from wasting time on their phones in class, but still allows for emergency calls.
Possible? In theory but not in practice. And children do NOT "need" to receive "emergency calls" during the school day. That is a made up bogus excuse. If there is an emergency the parents can call the administrative offices and they will take care of it. It has worked fine for the better part of 100 years.
I predict that French schools will have a serious lack of empty toilets in the foreseeable future. And for a change, it's not because of the quality of the cafeteria lunch.
Kids at that age are not ready for the internet and communication like that.
That's quite plainly not true and I see hundreds of children almost daily that handle it just fine. What they are not ready for is UNSUPERVISED access to online communications. They are perfectly capable of handling it with a bit of guidance. Furthermore given how important the internet is and will continue to be, to withhold access to learning about such tools is actually likely harmful to them in the long run. I would argue that trying to nerf their world actually does more harm and I have seen that play out more than a few times.
If they learn to communicate via digital devices instead of directly, they miss essential things like non-verbal communication.
You talk about it as if it is just one or the other. Our job as parents is to make sure they can do both. I work with kids part time as a school staff member and they handle it just fine. These are kids that have grown up having smartphones basically their whole life. As long as the parent is involved it works out fine and if the parent isn't involved there are bigger problem than their use of a mobile device.
This will seriously affect them if you ask me.
Kids are more resilient than you give them credit for. That said I think that the French ban sounds like an excellent idea. Smartphones are nothing but a distraction during the school day. They can play with them as much as they want after school hours.
"I need to be able to reach my child in an emergency!"
That's why they have an administrative office. You call there and they go contact your child if necessary. Worked just fine for 100 years. There is no educational value in allowing access to cell phones of any sort during the day. If there is an odd circumstance where a child really does need to carry their phone during class hours due to some special circumstance then the parent can arrange that through the school administration on a short term basis.
The blame lies more with smartphone-addicted parents than the school.
There is Truth in this. The basic question to ask is "what educational purpose is being fulfilled by allowing access to smartphones during school hours?" If there isn't one then there is no reason to allow them.
I assumed he meant the drop as a percent of the labor force
Then that is what should have been said. Fact is that automation did NOT drastically reduce agricultural employment. It merely kept it from increasing along with population growth. And that is a Good Thing.
Similarly there has been much hand wringing about loss of jobs in manufacturing in the US but the fact is that the jobs that left the US were (relatively) low paying labor intensive jobs. Total manufacturing in the US has increased and accounts for about $3 Trillion of US GDP and rising annually. I work in manufacturing and the death of US manufacturing has been greatly exaggerated. I see no reason to believe that information workers and other white collar jobs won't experience similar benefits (and some pain) from automation but the dystopian concerns are mostly ill founded.
On their first day of trading, bitcoin futures surged past $18,000, adding to a streak for the digital currency that began the year at just $1,000 and has nearly tripled in value over the past month alone.
First off, saying bitcoin futures surged past a particular price is somewhat misleading because futures contracts on an exchange don't have a single price nor is that price the same as the price of the underlying asset. A futures contract has a price for the asset on the delivery date but the price of the futures contract is separate from the price they'll pay for the asset. The price of a futures contract might be $50 for an asset with a price of $18000. The price of the futures contract is dependent on the delivery date and the difference of the price from the current underlying asset price.
A futures contract on an asset is not the same thing as the underlying asset. A futures contract is a contract to buy an asset at a predetermined price at a date in the future. The actual market value of the asset at the delivery date may or may not match the price on the future contract. (in fact it almost certainly will not) Anyone buying a futures contract in bitcoin is doing one of two things. They are either speculating on future prices of bitcoin or they are hedging the value of bitcoins they hold to ensure that they can sell them at a known price. Either way the price for a futures contract on bitcoin isn't the price of bitcoin.
So saying bitcoin futures have increased in price simply means that there is a market consensus that the value of bitcoin is likely to rise but it says absolutely nothing about what the actual value of bitcoin is or what it will be. Whoever wrote this article doesn't understand the difference between an asset and a futures contract on that asset.
Yes, people are that stupid. If a store has to hire more employees bacause of an uptick in business, it does not follow that every store that automates will have the same uptick in business.
Of course not. But automation demonstrably can and does make industries grow faster overall. There will be winners and losers but the size of the overall economic pie can be grown larger through automation and that often means more jobs overall - albeit doing different things.
Hard to imagine anyone would think so, but here we are with the same sort of logic that created the housing bubble.
That was a different phenomena and isn't really a great analogy. First there is no evidence of a bubble but if you are going to compare with one a better analogy might be the dotcom bubble. New automation technology created a bubble until people sort of figured out how best to use it. There were some winners and losers and once the dust settled there was economic growth and more jobs than before.
The coffee in a can is equivalent to starbucks, except cheaper and in a lot more locations.
I won't pretend Starbucks coffee is amazing but to claim that coffee in a can is equivalent is only valid in the sense they are both coffee. Pretty much nothing else about them is equivalent. Both are fine but they are vastly different in too many ways to bother enumerating here.
For instance, automation of agriculture drastically reduced agricultural employment.
Not quite as simple as that actually. Total employment in agriculture in the US increased dramatically from 1850 to 1900. It has fallen since then but the total number of people employed in agriculture has only in the last 20 years or so fallen below the number employed in 1850. In 1850 about 3.5 million people in the US worked in agriculture. It wasn't until about 1970 that the number fell below 3.5 million again. In 2000 the number was around 3.1 million. Per captia numbers in agriculture have been falling since the 1400s but total employment actually seems to have peaked around 1900, well after automation started having serious impacts on the industry.
Automation in agriculture was a major factor in enabling the industrial revolution. If the majority of us still had to tend the family farm then technological progress would have happened much slower and chances are good you're not using the computer you are reading this post on.
This is why I'm not particularly worried about those proclaiming that automation is going to take away all our jobs. It won't. It will just change what we do and what we reap economic benefits from. Anyone who is programming computers for a living owes their livelihood to the jobs that were CREATED by automation. The problem is that it's hard to see what those jobs will be ahead of time because many of them haven't been created yet. There is an entire economy around the smartphone in your pocket that didn't exist at all 30 years ago and would have been hard to predict in any but the most general of ways.
On the other hand, it's easy to imagine that on-line ordering could drive greater sales, as it removes the need to visit the store to make a purchase.
Think of it this way. My wife HATES standing in lines and is introverted so she also hates talking to people needlessly. Buy Starbucks came out with an app that allows her to place her order and then just walk in and pick it up without having to talk to anyone or stand in any lines. They eliminated a frictional transaction cost so now she goes to Starbucks MORE often than previously as a result. Enough people like her and Starbucks will have to add workers because of the positive effects of automation. Taking the order is an unnecessary expense to both the customer and the restaurant.
Restaurant workers are already not the people who can afford to buy daily $3 coffees and the like.
I think you are under the delusion that restaurant workers are all living hand to mouth and barely making a living. While there are cases where this is true, there also are plenty of people in the industry doing just fine. Waitstaff at a decent restaurant can make a VERY decent salary.
Even McDonald's is quite expensive compared to a grocery store.
That depends on what you are buying. You can't even buy the meat for less money than a basic McDonalds hamburger costs (currently ~$1 including bun and condiments) unless you buy something really sketchy or mass produced. On the other hand you can buy the ingredients to make a much better burger than McDonalds will sell you.
It's mostly busy middle class business types who buy fast food, and the deciding factor for them is how quick and painless you can make the experience
It's not "mostly" middle class though they are the largest portion of the people buying fast food. Pretty much everybody buys fast food and the middle class buys marginally more than the poor (who have to stretch their money) and the rich (who can afford more options more often). But basically we all buy fast food, including many people who loudly proclaim they don't.
But usually in those cultures even the smallest street kitchens found on every corner can provide better quality and more variety than the run-of-the-mill american chain restaurant that microwaves the same slop from coast to coast.
Better quality I could believe but you're going to have a hard time finding any restaurant that has more variety than a place like TGI Fridays or The Cheesecake Factory. Those places have menus the size of phone books and have something from just about any category imaginable. None of it particularly good mind you but plenty of variety.
Personally I like restaurants that have small menus and do whatever they do extremely well. Any menu larger than a page with more than around 20 items on it is probably going to be sacrificing quality for variety. Places like a good ramen shop are an exception because they are really just selling the same product with lots of permutations. I never order something like ribs at a place that doesn't specialize in bbq because the odds of them doing it well are rather remote. I don't get seafood at a place that doesn't specialize in it because the quality will suffer and seafood is sketchy enough to begin with.
I guess my question is this...how much of the increase is driven by people trying to throw money at anything that will get them a huge return?
All of it. This is a bunch of people trying to Get Rich Quick. That much is obvious. WHO is driving it is a different question. My guess would be some combination of irrational exuberance and criminal enterprise. In financial terms bitcoin is a small and thinly traded asset and moving a market like that is child's play in the world of finance.
Or, when do financial advisors start recommending Bitcoin futures for Grandma's lump-sum pension payment?
Probably never unless they are trying to rob grandma.
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Security is simply no sales argument and can't compete with OHHH SHINY!!!!!
True though in fairness security and "shiny" are not mutually exclusive and security (in principle) should be a given. Even though they shouldn't, people are going to tend to assume that devices are secure. This isn't true of course but if they don't (knowingly) get hurt then they will assume that it isn't a problem. And there is no reason in principle to assume that a device cannot be both secure and a lot of interesting useful features too.
HP-Z apples mac pro needs to be kick ass and priced at the same level as Dell and HP pro workstations.
Why? People shopping for this machine probably aren't in the market for a Dell or HP. If they wanted a Windows machine they would buy one.
I have no idea if this new Apple Pro machine will sell well or not. Nor do I really care. But it's hardly inconceivable that it might sell very well. Time will tell if there is a market for it or not. Anyone pretending they know if it will succeed or fail right now is simply guessing.
I wonder what the collateral damage is going to be when bitcoin bubble bursts.
Probably fairly insignificant. A few people will lose their ass because they have no concept of risk. Bitcoin isn't a big enough deal to impact the wider economy to any meaningful degree.
You might be surprised, but there are many modern countries where kids walk to school alone for a mile or several.
And they routinely do so without the aid of a phone. What exactly is your point?
That right there is a bullshit argument. Test it out with some other then/now comparison to see for yourself, e.g.
Hardly. Your attempts at bringing in other unrelated arguments that I did not make is a false equivalency.
That depends on what the concerns are, doesn't it? Obviously, a phone doesn't grant the holder invulnerability, but it can certainly ameliorate some common worries (like not knowing where the child is, not being able to reach them, etc....)
Not really no. If the parent is that concerned then they can accompany the child. If they need to reach them at school then they can do so through the administration of the school. If they are concerned about the transit to/from then accompany them. I reject the premise of your argument. If a parent thinks a phone is a security blanket then they are not actually considering the facts of the situation clearly.
And yet, most parents can't be with a school-age child 24/7. If only there was a way to ameliorate some common worries that parents often have.
A phone won't fix actual problems and I'm not going to pretend that it will.
Personally, I'm not a fan of giving kids a phone before middle school age or so, but if the child is walking to and from school before that, I can see the reasoning for it.
I disagree. The phone is just security theater. It does essentially nothing to actually keep a child safe in all but the rarest of circumstances.
The problem is, that would be hell to enforce. You would literally need teachers walking up and down the halls monitoring this. Teachers shouldn't be doing that.
No it would not. Teachers already are monitoring for contraband. If they see it being used then there are consequences. Have you ever actually been around kids? Teachers don't walk around covering their eyes and ears. And if a kid manages to sneak in a phone, so what? It just not that big a deal.
Here's why a whitelist system wouldn't work:
1) No way to ensure that it only functions on school grounds and doesn't affect those off campus
2) It creates all sorts of privacy problems and legal minefields that would have to be litigated. Not to mention that it probably violates all sorts of FCC regs.
3) Schools should not have the legal authority to control communications of people who aren't minors attending that school or employees of same.
4) It would be an expensive nightmare to administer.
5) It is much cheaper to have a simply no-phones policy and to enforce it. Similar to a ban on other contraband like tobacco.
6) This idiotic solution tries to make perfect the enemy of good. Keeping the phones out of the classrooms is good enough. If a few slip through so what?
7) It requires cooperation of the wireless providers who have zero profit motive create such a needlessly draconian system.
8) Such a system would almost certainly get abused.
People still have to check in when entering a school (they're generally not free and open to the public). An extra few seconds for tradesmen to put their phone number into the system isn't a huge burden.
Yes it is. Because their phone is not functional until they check it in. Furthermore there is no compelling reason to ban the phones of anyone who is not a student. It only serves to inconvenience people who don't need to be inconvenienced. Not to mention it is dangerous. There would be no way to not block people who are merely driving by the school. Radio towers don't respect property lines. How do you plan to ensure the cell tower does not affect those who are 1 foot off school grounds?
Boo hoo. Live without your electronic leash for a bit. If you're really that important, people will reach you through the school's office.
Grow up. Electronic leash? It's a tool you moron. Some of us actually have work to do that involves using a phone. I have to communicate with dozens of parents on a real time basis all the time. No I'm not willing to go to the hassle of registering my phone at every school I ever visit to solve a non problem that they can solve simply by actually monitoring the students.
SEND, not receive.
Sigh. We have teachers for that. And staff. And parents. You seriously think we need every child in the school to have a phone so on the vanishingly small chance there isn't any adult around at a school they can dial 911 in the unlikely event of an emergency? Thank goodness you aren't in charge of any actual schools because your critical thinking skills are lacking.
Funny how that's good enough for the kids, but you want special treatment for your convenience. Try leading by example.
I'm not the child being educated you imbecile. The purported purpose of banning kids from having cell phones is so they'll actually have to pay attention in school. A technologically enforced ban of all phones is a stupid, expensive, unnecessary, and dangerous idea.
Xeon CPUs and powerful GPUs inside a pointlessly thin computer with a built-in display? What for? Who the fuck asked for this?
Henry Ford said it best when he said "If I asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse". Perhaps you are right and nobody wants this but Apple does have a pretty good track record of making products people didn't know they wanted. We'll know soon enough.
Either the internal heat will kill components prematurely or the thing will make even more jet noise than an old PowerPC G4 tower.
I'm glad you could clear that up for us without ever having seen the product.
Legally run OS X. For some folks, that's justification.
You may be joking but that is actually 100% correct. Steve Jobs himself pointed out that Apple is a software company. Their hardware is nice but nobody would pay a premium for it if it ran Windows or if the iPhone ran Android. The hardware for a Mac or an iPhone is not meaningfully different from any number of their competitors. So that means that the reason people seek out Apple products is based in what they do differently and that is software.
People get confused about what sort of business Apple is because they won't sell you most of their software without bundling it with a piece of hardware. But a company is what they actually make and what they actually make is software.
That's why developers are working on higher layer protocols, such as Lightning Network, that need to handle nearly all transactions, and only use the underlying layer-1 for settling combined payments.
That's evidence that the system isn't working, not evidence that it is sound.
Compare it to the time when we had a gold standard. People transacted with pieces of paper, each representing a bit of gold, but the gold remained in the vaults.
You do realize that the gold standard system didn't work, right? We left the gold standard because it was fundamentally broken and there is no evidence to suggest that bitcoin will do any better. I think blockchains have some pretty interesting applications but bitcoin is unlikely to be among them.
Surely ones a futures market stabilizes some that should improve things there. Bitcoin payment processors will be able to use futures contracts to help create a payment that's less volatile.
Expecting derivative financial instruments to make the market more stable is a recipe for tears. That is NOT what they do in the real world, especially when there is a lot of speculation going on which is almost entirely what is happening with bitcoin. Prices don't change that fast when people are using derivative instruments for hedging purposes. All that is happening is a bunch of greedy people playing a game of "Who is the Greater Fool".
So far I think the situation is that schools can't handle cell phone storage during school hours.
What are you talking about? They have lockers. Use them. For schools that don't have lockers either forbid them to bring the phones or come up with a secure box to store them during the day.
Imagine the liability issues.
What liability issues? This is made up nonsense. There simply aren't any and it's trivial to work out exceptions to the policy where reasonable. People already sue schools for idiotic reasons so it's hardly worth worrying about a few irrational parents making up new reasons to be irrational. If there is an emergency contact the administrative office or the teacher directly. If the teachers have phones (and most do) then there is no reason to worry about emergencies.
Plus it's a hell of a lot of work.
Schools are very well equipped to monitor students using forbidden items during the school day. They've been doing it literally since there were schools. They already do this so it's really nothing new at all.
Then kids can't have a phone on them on their way to school or home, which is probably a bad idea.
Bullshit. I never had a cell phone as a child and yet somehow I survived the fiery apocalypse. I reject the entire premise of this argument. Children younger than driving age are in most locations by definition with an adult the entire time they are transiting to/from school. Why would they need a phone? Children old enough to drive can leave the phone in the car or in their locker during the day. If a parent is worried about their child's safety, a phone isn't going to solve that problem. The parent should be with the child if they are worried about them.
Schools should put up their own local cell tower that only routes to 911 or the head office if the call is detected to come from within the borders of the school property, unless it's a registered faculty phone number.
That wouldn't work for almost countless reasons. First, it's a very Big Brother sort of solution which would almost certainly draw lawsuits if they tried to implement it. Second, schools are not just for children. I'm on staff at my local school part time. We have community education activities going on all the time which involve people who aren't students. We have parents, guardians, grandparents and other relatives visiting for various reasons. Third, it is quite an unreasonable administrative burden to try to get everyone who might possibly visit a school to register their phone with a school. Not to mention all the privacy issues, problems with first responders, and similar issues. When I coach sports teams I visit other schools during the school day fairly often and it would be EXTREMELY annoying to have to register my phone with every school I visit.
No, it is MUCH simple to just forbid the students from taking a phone out of their locker during the school day. Schools are already well equipped to do that and it is FAR less costly. Schools have enough to do without trying to monitor the comings and goings of the phones for the whole community.
This is something that is possible to do, BTW, not just a pipe dream. It stops kids from wasting time on their phones in class, but still allows for emergency calls.
Possible? In theory but not in practice. And children do NOT "need" to receive "emergency calls" during the school day. That is a made up bogus excuse. If there is an emergency the parents can call the administrative offices and they will take care of it. It has worked fine for the better part of 100 years.
I predict that French schools will have a serious lack of empty toilets in the foreseeable future. And for a change, it's not because of the quality of the cafeteria lunch.
I think you may not be aware of how amazingly good the food is in French schools. Unlike in the US where we literally give prisoners better food than students which is just mind blowing.
Kids at that age are not ready for the internet and communication like that.
That's quite plainly not true and I see hundreds of children almost daily that handle it just fine. What they are not ready for is UNSUPERVISED access to online communications. They are perfectly capable of handling it with a bit of guidance. Furthermore given how important the internet is and will continue to be, to withhold access to learning about such tools is actually likely harmful to them in the long run. I would argue that trying to nerf their world actually does more harm and I have seen that play out more than a few times.
If they learn to communicate via digital devices instead of directly, they miss essential things like non-verbal communication.
You talk about it as if it is just one or the other. Our job as parents is to make sure they can do both. I work with kids part time as a school staff member and they handle it just fine. These are kids that have grown up having smartphones basically their whole life. As long as the parent is involved it works out fine and if the parent isn't involved there are bigger problem than their use of a mobile device.
This will seriously affect them if you ask me.
Kids are more resilient than you give them credit for. That said I think that the French ban sounds like an excellent idea. Smartphones are nothing but a distraction during the school day. They can play with them as much as they want after school hours.
"I need to be able to reach my child in an emergency!"
That's why they have an administrative office. You call there and they go contact your child if necessary. Worked just fine for 100 years. There is no educational value in allowing access to cell phones of any sort during the day. If there is an odd circumstance where a child really does need to carry their phone during class hours due to some special circumstance then the parent can arrange that through the school administration on a short term basis.
The blame lies more with smartphone-addicted parents than the school.
There is Truth in this. The basic question to ask is "what educational purpose is being fulfilled by allowing access to smartphones during school hours?" If there isn't one then there is no reason to allow them.
I assumed he meant the drop as a percent of the labor force
Then that is what should have been said. Fact is that automation did NOT drastically reduce agricultural employment. It merely kept it from increasing along with population growth. And that is a Good Thing.
Similarly there has been much hand wringing about loss of jobs in manufacturing in the US but the fact is that the jobs that left the US were (relatively) low paying labor intensive jobs. Total manufacturing in the US has increased and accounts for about $3 Trillion of US GDP and rising annually. I work in manufacturing and the death of US manufacturing has been greatly exaggerated. I see no reason to believe that information workers and other white collar jobs won't experience similar benefits (and some pain) from automation but the dystopian concerns are mostly ill founded.
On their first day of trading, bitcoin futures surged past $18,000, adding to a streak for the digital currency that began the year at just $1,000 and has nearly tripled in value over the past month alone.
First off, saying bitcoin futures surged past a particular price is somewhat misleading because futures contracts on an exchange don't have a single price nor is that price the same as the price of the underlying asset. A futures contract has a price for the asset on the delivery date but the price of the futures contract is separate from the price they'll pay for the asset. The price of a futures contract might be $50 for an asset with a price of $18000. The price of the futures contract is dependent on the delivery date and the difference of the price from the current underlying asset price.
A futures contract on an asset is not the same thing as the underlying asset. A futures contract is a contract to buy an asset at a predetermined price at a date in the future. The actual market value of the asset at the delivery date may or may not match the price on the future contract. (in fact it almost certainly will not) Anyone buying a futures contract in bitcoin is doing one of two things. They are either speculating on future prices of bitcoin or they are hedging the value of bitcoins they hold to ensure that they can sell them at a known price. Either way the price for a futures contract on bitcoin isn't the price of bitcoin.
So saying bitcoin futures have increased in price simply means that there is a market consensus that the value of bitcoin is likely to rise but it says absolutely nothing about what the actual value of bitcoin is or what it will be. Whoever wrote this article doesn't understand the difference between an asset and a futures contract on that asset.
Yes, people are that stupid. If a store has to hire more employees bacause of an uptick in business, it does not follow that every store that automates will have the same uptick in business.
Of course not. But automation demonstrably can and does make industries grow faster overall. There will be winners and losers but the size of the overall economic pie can be grown larger through automation and that often means more jobs overall - albeit doing different things.
Hard to imagine anyone would think so, but here we are with the same sort of logic that created the housing bubble.
That was a different phenomena and isn't really a great analogy. First there is no evidence of a bubble but if you are going to compare with one a better analogy might be the dotcom bubble. New automation technology created a bubble until people sort of figured out how best to use it. There were some winners and losers and once the dust settled there was economic growth and more jobs than before.
The coffee in a can is equivalent to starbucks, except cheaper and in a lot more locations.
I won't pretend Starbucks coffee is amazing but to claim that coffee in a can is equivalent is only valid in the sense they are both coffee. Pretty much nothing else about them is equivalent. Both are fine but they are vastly different in too many ways to bother enumerating here.
For instance, automation of agriculture drastically reduced agricultural employment.
Not quite as simple as that actually. Total employment in agriculture in the US increased dramatically from 1850 to 1900. It has fallen since then but the total number of people employed in agriculture has only in the last 20 years or so fallen below the number employed in 1850. In 1850 about 3.5 million people in the US worked in agriculture. It wasn't until about 1970 that the number fell below 3.5 million again. In 2000 the number was around 3.1 million. Per captia numbers in agriculture have been falling since the 1400s but total employment actually seems to have peaked around 1900, well after automation started having serious impacts on the industry.
Automation in agriculture was a major factor in enabling the industrial revolution. If the majority of us still had to tend the family farm then technological progress would have happened much slower and chances are good you're not using the computer you are reading this post on.
This is why I'm not particularly worried about those proclaiming that automation is going to take away all our jobs. It won't. It will just change what we do and what we reap economic benefits from. Anyone who is programming computers for a living owes their livelihood to the jobs that were CREATED by automation. The problem is that it's hard to see what those jobs will be ahead of time because many of them haven't been created yet. There is an entire economy around the smartphone in your pocket that didn't exist at all 30 years ago and would have been hard to predict in any but the most general of ways.
On the other hand, it's easy to imagine that on-line ordering could drive greater sales, as it removes the need to visit the store to make a purchase.
Think of it this way. My wife HATES standing in lines and is introverted so she also hates talking to people needlessly. Buy Starbucks came out with an app that allows her to place her order and then just walk in and pick it up without having to talk to anyone or stand in any lines. They eliminated a frictional transaction cost so now she goes to Starbucks MORE often than previously as a result. Enough people like her and Starbucks will have to add workers because of the positive effects of automation. Taking the order is an unnecessary expense to both the customer and the restaurant.
Restaurant workers are already not the people who can afford to buy daily $3 coffees and the like.
I think you are under the delusion that restaurant workers are all living hand to mouth and barely making a living. While there are cases where this is true, there also are plenty of people in the industry doing just fine. Waitstaff at a decent restaurant can make a VERY decent salary.
Even McDonald's is quite expensive compared to a grocery store.
That depends on what you are buying. You can't even buy the meat for less money than a basic McDonalds hamburger costs (currently ~$1 including bun and condiments) unless you buy something really sketchy or mass produced. On the other hand you can buy the ingredients to make a much better burger than McDonalds will sell you.
It's mostly busy middle class business types who buy fast food, and the deciding factor for them is how quick and painless you can make the experience
It's not "mostly" middle class though they are the largest portion of the people buying fast food. Pretty much everybody buys fast food and the middle class buys marginally more than the poor (who have to stretch their money) and the rich (who can afford more options more often). But basically we all buy fast food, including many people who loudly proclaim they don't.
But usually in those cultures even the smallest street kitchens found on every corner can provide better quality and more variety than the run-of-the-mill american chain restaurant that microwaves the same slop from coast to coast.
Better quality I could believe but you're going to have a hard time finding any restaurant that has more variety than a place like TGI Fridays or The Cheesecake Factory. Those places have menus the size of phone books and have something from just about any category imaginable. None of it particularly good mind you but plenty of variety.
Personally I like restaurants that have small menus and do whatever they do extremely well. Any menu larger than a page with more than around 20 items on it is probably going to be sacrificing quality for variety. Places like a good ramen shop are an exception because they are really just selling the same product with lots of permutations. I never order something like ribs at a place that doesn't specialize in bbq because the odds of them doing it well are rather remote. I don't get seafood at a place that doesn't specialize in it because the quality will suffer and seafood is sketchy enough to begin with.
I guess my question is this...how much of the increase is driven by people trying to throw money at anything that will get them a huge return?
All of it. This is a bunch of people trying to Get Rich Quick. That much is obvious. WHO is driving it is a different question. My guess would be some combination of irrational exuberance and criminal enterprise. In financial terms bitcoin is a small and thinly traded asset and moving a market like that is child's play in the world of finance.
Or, when do financial advisors start recommending Bitcoin futures for Grandma's lump-sum pension payment?
Probably never unless they are trying to rob grandma.