And just like the panic over cell phones, this too shall pass.
Maybe half of HN is too young to remember (or old enough to have forgotten?) but when cell phones with cameras were becoming mainstream, there was media panic over them too - people could be discretely filming in bathrooms, locker rooms, etc. There were even a few high-profile salacious stories where people did use their phones to film inappropriately.
And then we collectively decided that having cameras with us was generally beneficial and rarely harmful, and people realized that creeps who wanted to hide hidden cameras could already do so, and we all kinda moved on with our lives.
I can't leave my house without being on a dozen Ring cameras, Flock cameras and probably a handful of satellites, along with devices tracking Bluetooth and WiFi IDs every time I enter a store or a cop car drives by or having my license plate scanned by passing tow trucks. Drawing the line at glasses seems pretty arbitrary.
This has been tried before, and Google Glass did not pass.
As others have said across multiple threads here, there is a difference between passive recordings from fixed vantage points made by a property owner (or which are required, as with autonomous vehicles, to make the thing work at all), and having people you're talking to do it. The difference is the social aspect; people who wear them still seem antisocial to the rest of the population. People with normal vision who feel the need to constantly record the world around them from their own vantage point certainly seem creepy to me.
It's particularly sad that we just proved this with the massive Covid-era stimulus and yet didn't collectively learn the lesson.
We gave millions of people unemployment checks that were larger than their actual income had been, gave low and mid income workers stimulus checks, gave business owners forgivable debt for payroll and a year later we didn't have increased quality of life, we just had fast-food that cost twice as much, apartments that cost 50% more and billions of dollars spent on gambling, crypto and meme stock option trading.
Or they're a student who has to work a part-time job after school. Or they have a long commute. Or they have hours of practice for a competitive sport or extracurricular. Or they have to take care of their siblings, grandparent or sick parent. Or they were told by their parents and teachers that because they're smart and do well in school that they don't need to worry about studying. Or they know their parents can't afford an elite school anyway, so they know they just have to score well enough to get into a school with in-state tuition and noncompetitive admissions.
Two kids who both went to the same school, were told the same things about the importance of the SAT and dedicated equal time to study and preparation can probably say that the difference in their scores is indicative of differences in intelligence.
But any two random students? There are so many factors that could cause students to underperform their hypothetical max score if they had perfect conditions in the months leading up to the test and day of.
We're talking about the SAT, not the gaokao [1]. It's a relatively short test that you can take it whenever you want, you can even retake it if you want, however many times you want. There's minimal memorization required and it's mostly testing basic aptitude. But the overwhelming majority of people are of average aptitude, so the overwhelming majority of people will do "poorly" on the SAT when comparing themselves to outliers.
I don't understand the effort to try to eliminate the reality that innate ability exists. I think we should accept this and work to cultivate it. Just because somebody of average aptitude doesn't mean he might not excel in other ways. The world needs all sorts of people, and I think the ideal system would work to figure out and cultivate these talents in everybody.
There's plenty of time during school hours to study up on the math. My high school was deficient in math, everyone knew that, and I took math classes at the local community college to make up for it.
I never studied for tests in school, not for the SATs, either. I tried that in college, that did not work. The stress of the tests was pretty bad. I realized I had to study hard, and I did, and it was effective at reducing test anxiety.
This was posted on a Saturday night (in the US). A story posted at lunch time on a Tuesday is going to get 100x or maybe 10,000x more views than a story posted on a Saturday night.
It's not that HN readers lack intellectual curiosity or have some character flaw or narrow worldview, it's just that few people are reading and commenting between the late hours of Saturday and early morning of Sunday. It's 6 am Sunday in California as I post this.
Relevant for big companies where people intend to have decade spanning careers with multiple promotions.
But for the tech worker who is going to have a series of 1-3 year stints at different companies, their promotions are more likely to come from switching companies than from showing loyalty or commitment to their current employer.
Internet commenters try to get me to hate lots of people for lots of reasons, but "Parents trying to send their kid to a school that fits their kid's needs" seems like such a hard sell.
Like, I get the desire in a hypothetical, that you hope that people in power would use their power to make public schools better if their kids were forced to go there.
But in reality, the actually powerful can just pay for private schools out of pocket and the vouchers help a lot of middle-income families send their kid to a school that can provide a better environment for whatever definition of better is relevant to that individual.
It just seems like such misplaced anger and energy. You could just advocate for improving public schools, without attacking regular families trying to do their best while trapped inside a system they have very little influence on.
The voucher system is seen as an attack on IEP / special ed children, since public schools rely on distributing money away from the general population of students and into special ed and IEP students who, by various measures, can consume 3x the amount of money per student. They need lots of non-special-ed students to subsidize the special ed ones at the current levels.
If enough people use the voucher system it basically forces the per student spending to get closer to a purely egalitarian spending per student, with the result that public schools have to spend about the same amount on special ed kids as the voucher kids get (in the extreme, that's all the students they're left with). While this is objectively fairer in my opinion, it's viewed as an entitlement that the special ed kids can take more money at the expense of everyone else.
Obviously though this has to be carefully framed to sell it properly. Very few are going to knowingly sign up to lose funding for their own student to help some other student who is already getting 3x the money as them, so instead it's framed as some sort of evil capitalist agenda against public schools.
A relatively tiny percent of mortgages not getting paid in 2007 & 2008 caused a global financial crisis. If even just 10% of current office workers lose their jobs and quit paying their mortgages, their car loans, their car insurance, etc things will go bad fast. And realistically, it's going to be more like 80% of office jobs gone in the next 10 years.
> a home is the largest purchase they will ever make and the bulk of their net worth
That's bad and a central part of the problem.
I accept that my car is depreciating in value every year I own it, and but I need a car so I buy one. I don't need it to be a good long term investment, despite it being a major purchase.
The entire mindset of treating a family's home as being an investment class rival to bonds and equities is a relatively new phenomenon, and one that's clearly been detrimental to many.
> > a home is the largest purchase they will ever make and the bulk of their net worth
> That's bad and a central part of the problem.
Why? Or to ask in a different way, how could it not be?
For nearly all regular working people, there is nothing they will ever buy that costs more in labor and materials than a home. So of course it will be the most expensive purchase most people ever make. How could it not be?
Maybe half of HN is too young to remember (or old enough to have forgotten?) but when cell phones with cameras were becoming mainstream, there was media panic over them too - people could be discretely filming in bathrooms, locker rooms, etc. There were even a few high-profile salacious stories where people did use their phones to film inappropriately.
And then we collectively decided that having cameras with us was generally beneficial and rarely harmful, and people realized that creeps who wanted to hide hidden cameras could already do so, and we all kinda moved on with our lives.
I can't leave my house without being on a dozen Ring cameras, Flock cameras and probably a handful of satellites, along with devices tracking Bluetooth and WiFi IDs every time I enter a store or a cop car drives by or having my license plate scanned by passing tow trucks. Drawing the line at glasses seems pretty arbitrary.