Self driving cars just feels like a bunch of engineers wanting to solve a really hard and really interesting problem. But is it really the right problem to solve? I don’t think so. Currently we have:
>other unpredictable human-driven vehicles on the road
>no sensors or passive/active guides in the physical infrastructure — guidance is completely determined onboard
>no signage designed for CV — everything written in plain English, so you have to waste compute on object detection and OCR. And, you have a constant and unending need to collect mapping data
>no vehicle-to-vehicle communication whatsoever
Design the roads and signage for self driving cars, enforce an industry-wide V2V standard with NHTSA, and start small in some test areas that only allow other vehicles that are part of the botnet (perhaps not necessarily self-driving, but at least part of the V2V network). That’s a reasonable problem space. The current one is unworkable — the models won’t converge and they’ll never make it out of “beta”.
Startups should almost never use k8s. They need to iterate fast and ignore the complexities of infra. k8s is far too complex for most small companies.
CapRover Droplet on Digital Ocean + deploy your Rails app with git. Scale your single VPS up as needed. Most don’t need much beyond that for quite a while.
I have never heard of CapRover and I dont know how to use it. I do know how to use Kubernetes across Digital Ocean, AWS, GCP and Azure. Just had to learn it once. I don't even use it for scaling. Not complex at all. I've used it for four years. Literally never had a problem with it. It just runs.
goto makes sense in C for cleanup of local resources. Passing a bunch of pointers to pointers to another function for cleanup makes code far less readable (jumping around in a source file instead of just reading code linearly and freeing local resources in the scope in which they were allocated). Basically, forcing structured programming over using goto is the anti-lambda — requiring a lot of jumping around in the SOURCE file (not necessarily the binary) instead of linearly scanning through the code.
Dijkstra was wrong with his “goto” paper. It’s fine to admit that. He was right about most other things.
Sure, there are uses. But they are not in this article. The article argues that without goto, an if statement can only conditionally execute one statement.
> The paper doesn't explain to us what would be the use of the "if" statement without a "goto" to redirect the flow of execution: Should all our postconditions consist of a single statement[…]?
People downvoted you, but I completely agree. It looks like this is NOT satire, but I hope you turn out to be right. Maybe someone has some sense of humor and enough time on their hands left to pull such stunt.
My bet is on someone forget to take it out of the template when the rest of the copy was added, and it will be gone in a few days with a realistic list item there.
I think it's mostly like a tongue in cheek acknowledgement of how everyone in big techs is fighting so hard for a promotion that they aggressively brand the heck out of every library, exploit, and "new tech" they scheme up, even if the thing they're mentioning is using weird language for a concept that isn't new.
School start is really bounded by the start of the average parent’s workday, unfortunately. Mom and Dad start work at 9 am. Kids need to be at school before then. None of this 10 am start talk makes sense for the kids that aren’t on the bus line and have parents that drive them to school.
This is the problem with American cities in general.
A very beaten dead-horse, but look at Japan:
Elementary Schools and Middle Schools placed within a MAXIMUM 10min walking pace distance at that age group’s walking pace.
High Schoolers able to commute to their school of choice due to robust public transportation network.
We have designed cities that create as byproducts incredible amount of self-inflicted wounds on our culture. We don’t have to live this way. This is a choice.
Parents go to work or send their kids off. A parent personally accompanying a student to school is an indicator of something having gone wrong.
Major US population centers who are not New York should have, at the start of their explosive population growth, experienced a massive construction boom. There should be so many people employed making a city right now that the other problem we have with people not making a living wage because they are working jobs that weren’t designed to be life-sustaining careers might not be a problem!
Tear down all the “historical homes” and build mid-sizes apartment buildings. Build more schools. Hire more teachers.
The “character” and “flavor” of a city will come naturally and organically as an emergent property of trying to build a massive city to house millions.
Cities if done right turn into quasi-perpetual motion machines that feed itself the economic activity to sustain itself. And because they are denser and more compact, resource consumption can be scaled to be more efficient. Oh and all the people who used to be sprawled out now concentrated? That frees up land to build industrial centers on the outskirts that feed more economic activity.
This is an oversimplification that ignores a LOT of externalities to economic activity and histories of urban decay, but essentially: yes cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles essentially need to be rebuilt from the ground up and hopefully it will be as a result of conscious decisions and not a Great Fire of London/Earthquake of 1906 type disaster.
The other problem is bureaucracy and that is actually a consequence of the way US regulations approach regulation. It will make everyone’s life easier if we had very perspective building regulations that can be just checklisted through instead of ambiguous, litigious wording.
Scratch the minimum parking requirements and allow people to fill up those spaces with new buildings. Maybe require basement parking or multistory parking at least.
Over time the city will grow denser and all other stuff like bike lanes and public transport will simply make sense.
> But how can we fix it? Tear down all the cities and start over?
No, that's not needed. There is one first start that is relatively easy to do, and many cities are experimenting with it all over the world: ban individual-transportation cars, only allow taxis, ambulances, delivery services, tradespeople's / construction vehicles and transportation for the disabled. Then, use the space on the suddenly free roads to introduce a solid 24/7 bus network and return the space that's not needed any more to the public by building green stripes, bicycle lanes and pedestrian stripes.
It's all fun and games until you have to transport 2 weeks worth of groceries with joint pain, or Ikea furniture in the street because the deliveryman couldn't access your street.
It's all fun and games until you find out that you can't have as many customers as you thought to because people can't find a parking spot near your shop, also because your delivery area shrinks because your deliverymen use bicycles and won't drive uphill or more than 5 km from your place.
Paris is implementing this and if you live in the suburbs, going out to Paris is a logistic nightmare. And no, taxis won't always accept to drive you to your hometown with no night time bus service.
Not advocating for car culture, but failing to account for citizens' actual needs makes your city unliveable.
- Your lifestyle can adjust so that you don’t pick up two weeks of groceries at once and buy in bulk at Costco. You could walk to a fresh market instead. You can get a few days groceries at a time. Getting groceries doesn’t have to be the massive effort it is here in North America. Or there are small electric mobility options.
- Customers and parking. This doesn’t necessarily follow. If a street is very walkable and people use it frequently, people can easily notice a shop and walk in. That doesn’t really happen if you’re driving, as you don’t really interact with or see the outside world. So in theory, a vibrant walkable street can support a lot more local economic activity. Beyond that, the amount of land used for parking in North American suburbs is so vast that there is actually less economic activity because so much land is effectively sitting there empty. If a parking lot is as big as the store… well, that’s one more store that could exist!
> It's all fun and games until you find out that you can't have as many customers as you thought to because people can't find a parking spot near your shop, also because your delivery area shrinks because your deliverymen use bicycles and won't drive uphill or more than 5 km from your place.
Existing dense and ultra-dense cities do not face these problems or have adequately addressed them. Or these aren’t actually problems.
Increased density in a neighborhood means increased foot traffic which means increased business.
Delivery of large items become an essential business activity. The Japanese versions of many multinationals offer free, same-day delivery of any items bought in-store if you live within a 30 miles of the store. You actually can have it scheduled to have the delivery truck coincide with when you come home.
Why do you assume the delivery service will use bikes and not mopeds, small cars, or other powered mobility systems?
Businesses respond to the limited range of their customers by increasing their presence. Look at New York — a bodega at every corner. Small businesses can thrive by filling a niche inside a walkable radius and have decreased marketing costs and higher customer discovery because tens of thousands will walk by every day. So large corporations create more jobs and independent mom-and-pops can reliably compete.
Denser cities don’t have your above problems because the nature of dense cities make all of those things moot. Ive seen many of these same counter arguments before, and my only thought is that Americans have lived in our current state for so long we fail to imagine a better life.
Culture is harder to shift, and I was mostly talking about France, but your points on increased density neighborhoods are valid nonetheless.
French cities are currently not getting denser because of perceived social problems such as poorer working population leading to low economic activity, poor academic performance and eventually and a rise of crime.
Paris in particular concentrates a really-non-negligible fraction of the metropolitan area's economic activity but cannot become denser that it is right now because current regulation restricts high-rise buildings in the city proper [1]. That leads to inflated price which drive people away.
Same-day delivery? Good luck with that. 24h is the best they can do, and that's 79 euros -- by the way -- for your sofa that's being delivered to your home, when you'll be there (or not, lol). That being said, Japanese versions likely factor in the delivery cost.
> Why do you assume the delivery service will use bikes and not mopeds, small cars, or other powered mobility systems?
These exist, and there are even moving companies that use that as a selling point. Don't see how practical it is though, especially when driving uphill, as Paris is not exactly as flat as Amsterdam, Chicago or Miami, for example. Mopeds or cars still won't deliver more than 5 km away from their base, but customers can easily drive for 45 min to a good restaurant 20 km away.
They want to turn a city into a car-free one but regulation ties their hands. As long as the city transitions, its citizens have two problems that lead to them being driven further and further away from the city proper.
You raise some good points, but I wanted to touch upon this one:
> Paris is implementing this and if you live in the suburbs, going out to Paris is a logistic nightmare.
The needs of a neighborhood's residents are distinct from and sometimes opposed to the needs of non-resident stakeholders such as suburban commuters, absentee landlords, and tourists. Ultimately I think every neighborhood needs to strike some balance between these stakeholders.
But the extent that most American cities prioritize the needs of commuters and visitors over their own residents has always seemed odd to me. For example, many cities spend huge sums of money destroying local neighborhoods to widen freeways so commuters can move further from the city. This results in a destroyed local tax base and increases in suburban property values.
All else being equal I would have expected most cities to operate like Paris and prioritize the needs of local residents above the needs of visitors.
> It's all fun and games until you have to transport 2 weeks worth of groceries with joint pain, or Ikea furniture in the street because the deliveryman couldn't access your street.
The former case can be solved by either going shopping more regularly - or by making that possible in the first place by making sure there are grocery stores at regular walkable distances. If you have to use a car to transport your groceries or other regular (!) shopping, your community is underserved.
The latter case can be solved by regulating delivery services to have enough staff and technology (i.e. pallet trucks) to be able to haul all the furniture from the nearest delivery drop-off point.
> It's all fun and games until you find out that you can't have as many customers as you thought to because people can't find a parking spot near your shop
Objective data from Berlin's experiment shows that this concern is relatively unfounded - they looked at anonymized cellphone tower data to determine a sizable increase in pedestrian traffic for the shops [1]. For stores selling stuff that is not easily transportable without a car (e.g. kitchens), there should be incentives to move these to a new location that is accessible with cars or by delivery services.
> Paris is implementing this and if you live in the suburbs, going out to Paris is a logistic nightmare.
Well, they are learning. The important thing was to get started in the first place. Now with real-world experiences they can adapt and improve.
> And no, taxis won't always accept to drive you to your hometown with no night time bus service.
Again, the answer of this is government regulation. In Germany, taxis are mandated by law to serve you.
Yeah, sorry. That doesn’t work in a huge percentage of areas in the US. Heat, cold, darkness, lack of infrastructure, and distance.
When the high is 110 F in a Phoenix suburb, you can’t ask the 14 year olds to skateboard 20 miles to school on a country road with no breakdown lane. Similarly, you can’t ask kids from Maine to skateboard to school in the dark on ice.
Whenever this topic gets brought up, a bunch of seemingly childless city dwellers think they’re making some massive revelation suggesting that kids just get their own butts to school at a comfortable 10:30 am.
It’s actually pretty simple: Both parents work. Somebody has to drive the kids to school (hard requirement — there’s no bus and a bike/skateboard is too perilous). Work starts at 9 am. School has to start earlier than that.
Cold weather and darkness are not obstacles. Here in Finland the winters are darker, colder, and longer than in the vast majority of the US, yet even elementary schoolers usually go to school by themselves, often by foot or on a bike, sometimes by taking a bus or a train.
The problem that the US faces with respect to this issue is primarily caused the design of american cities (including the surrounding suburbs), which are laid out in a manner that makes the use of a car a practical necessity for getting anywhere. You wouldn't have to worry about a 20-mile country road to school out of a suburb if you instead made the sensible choice of placing services (like schools) right where they are needed, as european cities tend to do, instead of 20 miles away.
Yes our car-dependent infrastructure is an issue, but it's infrastructure we've built up for the better part of a century. Changing it will be slow and gradual, and in the meantime cold weather and darkness are issues in much of the country. Also hot weather in other parts of the country (heat stroke can be a serious concern in the Southwest)
Helsinki is one of the Southern-most cities of Finland situated on the edge of a large body of water. Instead, take a look at this Not Just Bikes video covering biking in Finland during winter: https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU
The weather in Oulu during winter looks a lot like the weather in Sioux Falls, except there's a lot more precipitation (snow) in Oulu.
Pierre is the capital of South Dakota - though Sioux Falls is the largest city.
One statistic I've read for eastern South Dakota is that it's one of the worst states to live if you hate extreme cold and extreme heat as we have both - sometimes within a week of each other!
Some of what you say in your second part makes sense, although it has absolutely no bearing, nor is it a counter argument to the post you are replying to. It certainly doesn't refute the parent poster's statements about now, today, right now, instead, at best, maybe over 30 years, change could slowly be enacted.
However, as a Canadian, some of what you say is just plain gibberish. My rural county, not province or country, but county, is on its own larger than some European countries, with a population of 20,000.
If you tried to put schools within even 10 miles of every kid, you'd end up with hundreds of one room schools, with a teacher teaching 4 kids.
The problem here is, there is no one size fits all. Trying to make suggestions needs to be more location specific.
Because when someone starts talking about rural living in the US and Canada, Finnish experience has no parallel.
I mean, come on, I've seen farms, just a single farm owned by one man in rural Manitobia, larger than massive cities!
Millions of acres of land, with just wheat and rye on it! Owned by a dude, presumably larger than some countries!
My comment was not an attempt to refute the entirety of what the parent comment stated (since I agree with most of it), merely a response to a tangential aspect of it.
I am quite aware that what I mentioned is not feasible for some of the more rural regions that exist in the US and Canada. However, those constitute a rather small portion of the population. It is as you say; there is no one-size-fits-all solution, but certain solutions are so widely applicable that they could bring significant benefit to the lives of most americans and are thus worth pursuing (where relevant) even if they do not solve the challenges faced by the small number of people living in the more rural regions of these countries.
> Because when someone starts talking about rural living in the US and Canada, Finnish experience has no parallel.
The Finnish municipality of Inari is over 17,000 sq.km, in the same ballpark as the entire country of Israel, with a population of 7,000. This gives it a density of 0.47 people/km2, four times less than Manitoba.
No, the problem isn't suburbs. Those are densely packed enough that a bus picks kids up. It's rural areas that don't have mass transport, which makes sense.
Suburbs are not densely packed. Picking up kids in a school bus would require over an hour, even in the small suburb that I live in. Rather, everybody either drives to school or is dropped off there: the parking lot of the high school is the same square footage as the school itself (excluding the football field).
Then you probably either (a) really live a rural area/exurb or (b) don't understand that they can operate more than one bus or (c) live in one of the areas that has had local government intentionally killing off bus service.
As to the local high school parking lot, that's not an "efficiency" thing - it's a "young people getting a taste of freedom" thing.
I live in a Bay Area suburb that is decidedly not rural.
Also, how is "doubling the school's area and vastly increasing environmental damage" not an efficiency thing? Kids the world over get by without having to rely on cars to experience freedom. If your society requires people to drive multi-thousand dollar pollution machines to experience freedom, then it's not truly free.
It's worth noting that <hotter | colder> than the vast majority of the US isn't a particularly useful metric.
- The people that say their kids can't walk to school because of the winter weather could be in an area where it's constantly below freezing and it's common to have over a foot of snow on the ground most of the time (ie, there is ONLY the road to walk on, and it's unsafe because of the snow).
- The people that say their kids can't walk to school because of the heat could be in an area where 110degree weather is common (somewhat less of an issue since most school doesn't happen in the hottest months; but there is summer school).
- There are plenty of places in the US where the houses are so far apart that its not realistic to have a school that even moderately close to more than a couple of them.
Even if "most of the US" is more temperate than "some location where kids walk to school", there's still plenty of places where its considerably less reasonable to walk to school year round.
> ie, there is ONLY the road to walk on, and it's unsafe because of the snow
As a Finn, the first part is an infrastructure issue and you're building it wrong, and the second part is just plain old weird; snow on the ground doesn't make walking unsafe. Too much snow makes walking slower and more tiring, but that circles back to infrastructure, specifically snow plowing.
Solving the infrastructure problem is extremely costly. Sure it can be done, but that means someone else doesn't get done. You have to pick your battles.
And walking on the road when the road has snow on it (so is slippery) IS dangerous if there's any amount of traffic. Even if you can stay to the side of the road (which is hard when there's a lot of snow), the risk of being hit is increased because cars can lose fine control under such conditions.
The roads are already built, and the towns are already laid out in ways that require cars. Arguing that the roads, towns, and cars could be changed so that walking to school is reasonable... while technically true, is not particularly useful in anything but the very long term. There isn't the money to do that.
So yes, because of the way the roads, towns, and cars exist today, it is not reasonable to have kids walk to school in many cases. The weather conditions for the area are one of the things that go into that calculation; they are one of the obstacles that add up to it not being realistic. Are they the root cause? No. But it's irrelevant, because they _are_ one of the factors involved in outcome. If the weather was always perfect, then those children could walk to school year round. If dedicated walking paths were created that cars could not travel on were created, then those children could walk to school year round. Neither one of those is going to happen.
> It's not the snow that is dangerous, it's the cars.
Pretending it's realistic to magic all the car focused town layouts away is completely and utterly unrealistic, so I'd ask you to not pretend that "if we just admitted cars were the problem, all the problems would go away".
Ok, maybe it is partly caused by the design of cities.
We aren't going to completely redesign all of America's cities for the purpose of making sure teens get a bit more sleep though, so the point is irrelevant.
>for the purpose of making sure teens get a bit more sleep
Add to that the time and resources wasted by millions of parents daily driving around instead of doing something economically productive, something that keeps them healthier, or just anything that doesn't cause environmental damage. And the fact that this is just one small instance of a much bigger issue affecting most people (anyone regularly commuting or using services within or near cities) to some degree. It's obviously not the most important issue out there right now, but it is a whole lot of wasted time and effort that could be eliminated, and you could probably even do it gradually without implementing any sudden sweeping changes.
It is really not. The topic is a legal change in california to change when school starts.
And to respond to this fairly minor topic by suggesting that cities be rebuilt is absurd.
I am going to say that there are more immediate solutions to kids getting enough sleep, due to school starting times, than "Well just redesign all our cities to be more like europe!"
Actually, there's even a name for that kind of hyperbolic misrepresentation of what someone else was saying so you can pretend their argument wasn't even valid.
Suggesting that cities aren't designed correctly is obviously implying that the solution is to redesign cities.
Redesigning entire cities is hard. It is not a reasonable thing to bring up, when talking about a policy regarding when school starts.
That is not hyperbole. Instead it is completely legitimate to dismiss someone suggesting that cities are designed poorly, because to fix such a problem would be a huge undertaking.
No need for a complete redesign. Further up, it was suggested to put the schools near to where the students are - in the suburbs. That's a common sense policy Europe does naturally, and which everyone who spent some time playing SimCity (or the likes) understands.
No need to nuke LA and rebuild, just take a few plots in the middle and put a school in there.
This seems to not take into account the size of towns. For example, the one I live in is ~23.5 sq miles. If you put the schools in the center, you're looking at approximately a 2.5 mile walk each way for the children on the outskirts (the town isn't perfectly round, but close enough). And even that is assuming there's a direct "as the crow flies" path; which there certainly isn't.
At the very least, for most towns, you're looking at moving a bunch of roads around. For many of them, you'd need to add more schools to keep the distances reasonable. I expect, for a large number of the town, the term "complete redesign" is a reasonable description.
Hm, 2.5 miles are 4 kilometers - perfectly walk- and bikeable. Any teenager easily can do that, over here, they would. I do not see the issue, especially since it will not hit everyone.
Alternatively, and this may be a radical idea: If your town is five kilometers across, with a uniform distribution of population: Why not have two, or three smaller schools, evenly distributed? A similar-sized German city (taking Öhringen, ~25.000 citizens, which also follows the 'almost a circle' rule, as an example here) has six highschools (which also take in students from neighboring villages)...
House keys and a bus though could work though for 90%+ of kids even in places with extreme weather [0] and you could have pre-school programs for the 10% that can't either because their too far for bussing or can't get themselves to the bus, eg those with assorted disabilities. You're right though the school start time is tied to it's function as free daycare for children so parents can work, COVID proved that is a critical part of schooling for the modern economy.
[0] Would need to provide more stops and ideally a better more consistent schedule so kids could get there just in time for the bus. Also for hot weather school picks up in the morning so even the hottest places aren't 110+ at pickup time.
Why is it that we can radically transform human society in the first place, but we simply cannot design our cities and schools and work days to just let teenagers sleep in a bit more? There's absolutely nothing immutable here and these are all problems that can be solved. Why can't workdays be vastly more flexible for parents? Why can't public transport be vastly superior to allow teenagers to get to school whenever needed?
These also aren't weird, aspirational goals that have never been done before, there are plenty of places where public transport is good enough even in rural areas so that kids can actually get to school. The areas so sparsely populated that that's impossible are...not the majority, to put it mildly.
I disagree with this, I think it's just a force of habit, where outdated industrial era behavioral patterns keep propagating themselves because no one takes the time to rethink them.
There are plenty of companies with flexible working hours, and large open-source programming projects with completely asynchronous workflows.
Now yes, there are some valid reasons for a business, such as a shop or restaurant, to have certain opening hours - for most shops, being open during the day and at similar times to other shops (to increase chances that a customer who comes to buy something from one shop will be drawn into the shop next door) is ideal.
However, there is no valid economic reason that I can discern for the vast majority of businesses and the school system to keep blindly imitating 19th century factories in their work hours.
Why does no one take the time? Because they don't get paid for it. The root cause of almost everything is "I made more money that way". I remember reading that Feynman tried to work on an education board, but gave up because of corruption, lobbying and no one really caring about learning outcomes while prescribing books for kids..
In some cases, it's more a concern of economically _viable_. Sometimes, the fact that something would cost more means it's not possible. We have teachers that have to pay for the children's school supplies out of their own pockets, because the school system doesn't get enough money.
Phoenix area schools all are required to provide busses for junior high and high school kids that live more than 2.5 miles away. That is generally a walkable distance, even in the May and August heat. I know, as from middle school on I did exactly that (walked or biked ~2 miles to and from school in the Phoenix metro).
For longer distances it’s really not a big deal to bike to school. No one needs to be dropped off by their parents, unless they live out of district and chose to go to a school other than their local one. And even in that situation, many schools open a half hour or more early, where kids can be in the library or cafeteria well before class starts.
So, we're going to start school an hour later to let kids sleep in. And then make them get up at the same early time so they can walk an hour to school? And then likely get to school smelling like a pool of sweat. That sounds sub-optimal.
I’ve ridden skinny tires in the snow and… yeah I’d probably chance it in MN (at least Saint Paul where I actually lived through a winter, can’t speak to Minneapolis but I’d bet it’s just as passable). I’ll never do it again in Seattle, where even arterial streets have a grade unsafe for foot traffic in freezing weather conditions.
you can't speak to Minneapolis from St. Paul? I've never been to either but Minneapolis-St. Paul is one city, isn't it? Twin Cities, Minnesota Twins and all?
I grew up in an incredibly rural town (population ~1200) in new england. I had to walk half a mile down a dirt road to catch a bus at 6:30am. It's often still dark out at this time -- having a later start and still having to do the walk would have actually been safer. Not that it was particularly dangerous. I was more worried about a coyote than anything else. The bus ride was an hour long.
If my parents had time, they'd drive me to the end of the road and let me sit in the car, or if i was lucky drive me to school (allowing me to sleep in more)
> Somebody has to drive the kids to school (hard requirement — there’s no bus and a bike/skateboard is too perilous)
I don't agree with the assessment that there's no bus. If there *really* isn't, change that.
In general: adjust society to make more sense. We know teens have higher sleep requirements. Meet their needs. Find solutions. Work environments can adjust, even if they don't like it.
Maybe well rested teens will be less likely to shoot up the school shrug
when I was a teen I was sent to bed at 10, had no trouble falling asleep and got plenty of sleep. I know teens like to rebel and do what they want and stay up late, but that's different than saying it's difficult for them to actually fall asleep at a reasonable hour and it seems rather drastic to rearrange everyone else's schedule to accommodate staying up late playing games and texting
I'm well aware of the research, I'm talking about the scheduling.
And more research will be produced showing that teen clocks are also offset, but it's still the case that I have all my anecdata about what it feels to be tired, to get enough sleep etc., and what it feels like to be a teen rebelling against any rules.
hunter gatherer teens did not sleep late every morning, they had to get up just like everybody else, probably at the crack of dawn
I always wonder when reading the posts about how it's impossible for kids/teenagers to get to school by themselves because of weather, are the parents happy with the type of dependent children they create? Children that have to rely on their parents to get anywhere until well into their teenager years seems like a disaster to me. How will they ever learn to become independent?
> When the high is 110 F in a Phoenix suburb, you can’t ask the 14 year olds to skateboard 20 miles to school on a country road with no breakdown lane. Similarly, you can’t ask kids from Maine to skateboard to school in the dark on ice.
80% of Americans live in urban or suburban areas [1] and the average school commute distance for high schoolers is (or, was, can't find a recent number) 6 miles [2].
FWIW, I lived a little under 5 miles from school in a non-bike-friendly suburb and managed to transport myself to and from school just fine without a car. We had 100 degree days in the summer, but we also had... summer break. Maybe one hot week in August, but nothing I would call dangerous.
The "20 miles down a county road" scenario is an outlier. If that is representative of your community, then the school policies of your community (including start time) should reflect that reality. The 80+% rest of us are having a different conversation about a different place. No reason to get angry about it.
> city dwellers
Far more Americans live in metro areas than in nonmetro rural areas.
> childless
The vast majority of American children do not live in rural areas. Rural areas are, on average, old and managing to get older.
> think they’re making some massive revelation suggesting that kids just get their own butts to school at a comfortable 10:30 am.
The California law requires a start time no earlier than 8:30am, which is already several hours later than 10:30.
When I was in high school our start time was 7am or something like that, but there were "negative hours" so you could show up as early as 6am. There was cold breakfast in the cafeteria with a staff member present, or you could go to some classrooms for tutoring (I think one per core subject). Hazy on the exacty details -- it was a long time ago -- but I do remember the doors were unlocked 1 hour before classes started and you could either hang out or get tutoring.
Starting -1 hour at 7:30am gives a parent 1.5 hours to commute from school to their job by 9am.
Getting home is a big issue for a lot of families. School ends around 3 pm, but most kids do some sort of after school activity like a sport to bridge the gap until after 5 pm when a parent can come through the pickup line. Growing up, there was also just general “after-school” programs. Basically just day care for after the school day that would cost extra.
most schools are located near public transportation and even if there are no bus stops near the home it is generally easy enough for kids to get to their parent's office/rec center/ friend's house etc. basically you have a lot more options when everyone is no longer rushing to be at work or school
Those kids in Phoenix and Maine should just take a school bus like half the kids in America that cannot take themselves. Phoenix suburbs aren't that sparsely populated.
There are a lot of solutions that don't require school starting before 9 am.
Also, while you may be correct about it affecting a huge area of the US, it doesn't affect many children in the US. Precisely because it's a problem with low density. Maybe the true simple solution is that rural children all telecommute and do teleschool.
from the ages of 8 to 13 i woke up at 5:45 and did a double public bus transfer every weekday to get to the out of district rich kids school, approx 45 miles
at 14 i biked along county roads to get to the hippy school, approx 14 miles.
both my parents worked. i am not a city dweller. kids can absolutely get themselves to and from school and doing so at 9:00 or 10:00 will mean safer roads with less ice and less traffic. if school started at 10:00, snow days would virtually be a thing of the past.
skateboards have a lower fatality & injury rate than bikes(mostly due to the inherently lower speeds involved), although they have limitations for long distance transport and offer no luggage capacity.
in Ontario you are not allowed to leave child alone before age 16. I'm sure there are states with similar age limits.
I do not agree with that - but it's the current law, so we can't just leave out early teenagers alone and run to work.
I too was and am a late sleeper and school mornings were torture. Just saying there is indeed a big dependency between work starting times and school starting times - though that can be solved with optional school child care rather than mandatory early classes.
Wait, what?! A 15 year old cannot be left unsupervised? The parent can't leave to pick up a loaf of bread and the child can't walk over to the neighbor's house?
That's a horrible law and I sure hope there are no states with a similar one!
I agree that's a horrible law. A few states do have similar laws. Illinois e.g. is 14 if I recall correctly.
Note, a state that does NOT have such a law is not necessarily a better one - It leaves the decision up to either various criteria (which may be well or poorly defined, subjective or objective), or opinion/assessment of jury/judge/child protection services. And in a state that does have a law with age such as 8 or 9, does not mean you are absolved of responsibility for leaving a 12 year old home. Ultimately, this is a tricky subject that's hard to objectively measure and decide.
What it comes down to is that times/culture have changed. I walked to school on a non-trivial path when I was 6 years old in grade 1; it was about a kilometer, crossed couple of busy intersections and a bridge. So did all of my classmates. But that was in Bosnia in the 80's. Today, in Canada, a 6 year old walking to school unsupervised for 15-20 minutes, in summer and winter? Largely a complete no-go. Multiple neighbours and observers would report it to police - and this is not an opinion, this is local newspapers articles.
Culture shifts are real. That doesn't mean they're justified. It's certainly not a topic without nuance, but I will say that if and when I have children I will do my best to ensure that they are capable, aware, and that their autonomy is respected within my local community.
As I said, I agree with the notion - we are certainly raising our kids to be independent, critical thinkers and safe operators - and I believe we are succeeding.
To the latter part though - "ensure their autonomy is respected within local community" - unless you started right now and are heavily involved in politics, local school boards, local bylaws, etc... you may find that WAY harder than you think. Culture shift is right - it's not about talking to your 3 neighbours. In the use case of walking to school - it's every neighbour on the way from home to school plus every teacher and school official plus parents of all the kids in the class plus any bystander, jogger, passerby, driver etc who may see your kid alone on the street. The news articles I've seen locally are rarely about the next door neighbour - frequently it's some self-appointed good-samaritan stranger who took it upon themselves to call police or lodge a complaint; or a school counselor etc.
You're right. I certainly didn't mean to imply that I would necessarily be entirely successful. I'm keenly aware of how challenging it is to shift social consensus in even very small groups, let alone larger ones.
I understand that it would be scary to go through such a high consequence interaction as having the police called on you for your good parenting choices, but do you have any sense of what the outcome has typically been in those cases where someone complains?
i.e. do the police typically tend to side with the parent or the busybody paternalist?
Many states in the US have very vague laws about “when the child is ready”. Basically if anything bad happens you are in trouble.. so people are slow to talk about it.
To the degree the community allows it. If society as a whole decided on making things better, tons of things would change (including a mixed zoning and multi-family housing overhaul), but as it stands local cities and counties have vast power in managing themselves, and they have a vested interest in continuing to divert resources to their biggest income sources (single-family homeowners).
When I imagine what a 25 mile dangerous bike ride looks like here, it's living 25 miles out in a place where the US highway is the only route to town. But there's a high school out there, so it wouldn't be 25 miles.
Obviously other situations will exist, but living 20 miles from the school you attend is a corner case and will often be driven by choices the parents are making.
It can be argued that single-family homes and the associated low-density land uses are only cash cows in the short term, and are in fact ticking timebombs in the long term.
It is also bounded in the other end by sports. If your school day goes too late, you won’t have time in the afternoon/evening for sports practices. So, if you still need X hours for classes, you’ll need to start early enough to get over in time for 1-1.5 hour practices.
(It also applies to other extracurricular sports, but I doubt anyone really worries about play practice schedules)
Delusional. Sports are competitive. They require daily reps. Sports are also meant to keep kids physically active and healthy, and to establish a routine of physical activity into their adulthood (alongside intellectual productivity). You can’t just be physically active and healthy on the weekend.
Then have sports be an acceptable substitute to gym classes and a regular part of the day. I doubt anyone can explain to me why the captain of our football team also needed to be in gym class playing flag football with us in order to graduate in a way where the answer isn't bureaucratic.
At some point you have to decide on an optimum between time, sleep, and output.
I’m not defending daily gym class. I’m defending daily sports.
I was fortunate enough to go to a high school that did not have a gym period, but required all students to play an organized sport.
Gym in large high schools is a waste of time due to the student to instructor ratio. One frustrated gym teacher to 50+ kids playing dodgeball? Of course you’re going to have theater kids just going through the motions and goth kids behind the bleachers smoking cigarettes. It’s not real exercise.
You need small rosters, organized practices, uniforms, referees, fans (students and parents) and intra-school competition. It creates seriousness and expectations. You can’t hide from your coach when there’s only 14 kids on the roster. You need to do the sprints with everyone else and take the drills seriously.
I don’t think this scales beyond smaller high schools. Not enough facilities, not enough coaches, not enough money.
That sounds great to me as an athlete, but I know there are many kids who would hate being forced to be part of organized sports.
The important thing is that they get exercise of some kind. Maybe just allow them to choose whatever form of exercise they want as long as they do something each day?
The school could offer sports but also allow them to walk, run, lift weights (when old enough), play tag, do yoga, or whatever they prefer.
If a kid truly hates all exercise and refuses to cooperate, I guess there’s only so much you can do, but you could at least remove as much friction as possible and try to meet them where they are. Anything that gets them moving will offer huge physical and mental benefits over just slouching in shitty plastic chairs all day.
As someone not from the US all this is bizarrely moving a health concern into school which should be about education and nothing else. If it's reasonable for school to prescribe exercise for kids why not have them schedule doctor visits for the kids and create meal plans? Where is the line?
Most schools in the US sell/provide subsidized lunch.
So yeah, there ISN’T much of a line here in the US. The school is daycare, education, basic medical attention, a cafeteria/food welfare program, and sports/after school program all rolled into one.
During early COVID in the Bay Area, the middle school in my neighborhood kept “serving” lunch. That is to say, it was too “dangerous” to hold class. However, they still staffed cafeteria staff and had a line down the street at lunch time of kids with subsidized/free lunch, and they handed out brown paper bags. So the school was literally operating ONLY as a child nutritional welfare program for a while, but not as a school.
That happened in a lot of places. In fact, one of the good policies that emerged from COVID was that in order to remove the stigma of "kids who qualify for free lunch," the school district made all meals free. I think you still have the option of buying extra food if needed. My child still has about $80 unused in his lunch account for the last couple years.
It probably has as much effect on later adult quality of life as anything academic they could be doing, but yeah I suppose there are very different cultural views on this in different places. Where are you from btw?
I do think it’s a bit brutal and unnatural to make kids sit in classrooms all day in uncomfortable chairs under fluorescent lights with no time outside and no time for physical activity.
Afaik lots of schools in the US do facilitate physical exams by a doctor. I remember having one in middle school. It was the subject of much discussion among the boys in my class at the time since it involved a female doctor and a hernia check...
>The important thing is that they get exercise of some kind. Maybe just allow them to choose whatever form of exercise they want as long as they do something each day?
As someone who only took part in high school sports for the exercise, I was really frustrated that I went through 10+ years of education without really being taught anything about the realities of what's required to achieve and maintain lifelong fitness.
I would have been happy to join a "cardio and weight training team" because I frankly didn't give a fuck about wrestling or football, especially since those programs focused most of their effort on the well-being of the top-performing players anyway.
I agree with the option to do other activities. I didn't like sports much, but I liked lifting in off-season, but when I didn't want to play in any sports (we didn't have power lifting) I got taken out of off-season and put back playing full-contact half court while the PE teacher tried to ignore that almost no one was doing anything physically active.
It's not just sports. I didn't do sports in high school but I had quite a few other after school activities. And, no, it wouldn't make sense for everyone who wanted to do extracurriculars to come in on Saturday on a regular basis--probably driven by parents.
In the UK schools get around that problem by running 'Breakfast clubs' kids can turn up early and get a nourishing breakfast from a bit before 8am. The school day doesn't start until just before 9
Not the same game, but I used to work as an Android dev for an imaging company. We had to physically test our apps in meatspace with the real device camera and we had to support hundreds of devices.
I had hundreds of Android devices hooked to a dozen or so dev machines in a test farm. A test script would run. The active device’s screen would turn green. Then a QA engineer would have to physically scan a bunch of different things. Then the next active device would turn green and they’d do it again. And again. And again. I probably could have automated more with a moving conveyor belt and a custom lighting system, but I would’ve put a lot of QA people out of work…
This was during the “bridge” period between android.hardware.camera and android.hardware.camera2, so I had to write a wrapper library bridging the two APIs. About half of our users were on the old API, half on the new. It was a mess. There was no CameraX provided by Google at the time.
Obviously Android has way more device diversity, but I can easily see 40 iPads getting accumulated by even a small iOS shop that’s taking their user experience seriously. The company that I worked for was actually quite small, yet we amassed dozens of iDevices and hundreds of Android devices. The CTO would require every camera crash to be fixed, even if it were on a random developing market junk phone. We had so many single-device workaround in the camera wrapper lib it was insane…
Get a lawyer and do real estate planning, in either case.