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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Sure, maybe, but I’d also say you shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

    Yes, we should absolutely have better mental healthcare safety nets. Yes, false positives are probably a pretty common prank.

    But this isn’t a zero sum game. This can work on tandem with a therapist/counsellor to try and identify someone before they shoot up a school and get them help. This might let the staff know a kid is struggling with suicidal ideation before they find the kid OD’d on moms sleeping pills.

    In an ideal world would this be unnecessary? Absolutely. But we don’t live in that ideal world.



  • You say “the last time this happened” as if this wasn’t a generalized trend across all schooling for the past decade or so.

    Out of the tens of thousands of schools implementing systems like this, I’m not surprised that one had some letch who was spying on kids via webcam.

    And I’m all for having increased forms of oversight and protection to prevent that kind of abuse.

    But this argument is just as much of a “won’t someone think of the children” as the opposite. Just cause one school out of thousands did a bad thing, doesn’t mean the tech is worthless or bad.


  • This article feels pretty disingenuous to me.

    It glosses over the fact that this is surveillance on computers that the school owns. This isn’t them spying on kids personal laptops or phones. This is them exercising reasonable and appropriate oversight of school equipment.

    This is the same as complaining that my job puts a filter on my work computer that lets them know if I’m googling porn at work. You can cry big brother all you want, but I think most people are fine with the idea that the corporation I work for has a reasonable case for putting monitoring software on the computer they gave me.

    The article also makes the point that, while the companies claim they’ve stopped many school shootings before they’ve happened, you can’t prove they would have happened without intervention.

    And sure. That’s technically true. But the article then goes on to treat that assertion as if it’s proof that the product is worthless and has never prevented a school shooting, and that’s just bad logic.

    It’s like saying that your alarm clock has woken you up 100 days in a row, and then being like, “well, there’s no proof that you wouldn’t have woken up on time anyway, even if the alarm wasn’t there.” Yeah, sure. You can’t prove a negative. Maybe I would usually wake up without it. I’ve got a pretty good sleep schedule after all. But the idea that all 100 are false positives seems a little asinine, no? We don’t think it was effective even once?


  • How do you differentiate what you’re calling psychological torture here from just bog standard negative anticipation?

    Is it psychological torture if I tell a child that we’re going to the doctor because they need to get their flu shot? They have to sit and live with that dread for the whole ride over.

    If this is in some way a difference of kind, what differentiates them? What is the key characteristic that separates the two?

    Is the only difference one of degree? That hurting someone in this way just a little bit is fine, but there’s some amount of damage that makes it unacceptable?

    Or is it that the ends justify the means? That it is psychological torture to tell a child about the flu shot, but that the need to get the shot outweighs the negative of the torture? If so, and if someone truly believes that capital punishment is correct in a given case, why would the same argument not be valid?




  • I think the issue is that, while a country is certainly allowed to write it’s own laws, the idea that it is deeply fundamentally immoral for the government to prevent someone from saying something (or compel them to say something) is very deeply baked into the American zeitgeist (of which I am a part.)

    So in the same way that a country is perfectly within its sovereign rights to pass a law that women are property or minorities don’t have the right to vote, I can still say that it feels wrong of them to do so.

    And I would also decry a country that kicks out a company that chooses to employ women or minorities in violation of such a law, even if that is technically their sovereign right to do so.




  • I’m betting 5-4 in favor of throwing this out.

    Gorsuch came down hard on Bostock, which makes me think he’d be skeptical of overturning Obergefell (which he wasn’t on the court to rule on originally).

    Roberts is married to process well enough that I don’t think he can find it in himself to violate stare decisis on a case he was actually chief justice for, even if he did vote against the first time. Plus a lot has changed since 2015, and the court took a hard swing right. The dude has always kinda been that middle man referee, so I think that’s another drop in the “would shoot this down” bucket.

    That only leaves Alito, Thomas, Kavenaugh, and Barrett. Alito and Thomas will always vote for the craziest possible position, so they’re right out. Kavenaugh and Barrett are more of a coin toss, but I lean towards them having their own, separate dissent if Bostock is any indication (which Kavenaugh dissented on, but not with Alito and Thomas. Barrett had yet to join.)

    So my gut is that this isn’t going anywhere. I’d honestly be surprised if the supreme court even took it up.