Penny Arcade - Comic - In Local News

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Penny Arcade - Comic - In Local News

Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.

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Rhesus Positive

Reuters link for those in need of context

Seattle's public school district filed a lawsuit against Big Tech claiming that the companies were responsible for a worsening mental health crisis among students and directly affected the schools' ability to carry out their educational mission.

The complaint, filed on Friday against Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O), Meta Platforms Inc (META.O), Snap Inc (SNAP.N) and TikTok-owner ByteDance with the U.S. District Court, claimed they purposefully designed their products to hook young people to their platforms and were creating a mental health crisis.

Lttlefoot

Anything new and cool is going to attract the attention of young people. Are they going to sue fidget spinners next?

Hevach

Yeah, I'm sure the mental health crisis has nothing to do with the fact that the largest graduating class of 2022 was the empty seats of kids who didn't make it thanks to mass shootings and every damn one of the kids are aware of that fact because if they're in the minority of schools that hasn't had an actual lockdown they've still had active shooter drills. Definitely not related to the fact that a large majority of high school students believe they have no hope for a financial future, or that a significant minority believe they or their children will be the last generation of humans. Couldn't be that the most open and accepting generation in living memory is subject to the level of political attack and slander almost unprecedented in scale and violence.

No, no, those things all sound like OUR fault. Definitely the internet.

V1m

Lttlefoot wrote: »

Anything new and cool is going to attract the attention of young people. Are they going to sue fidget spinners next?

False equivalence is so tedious. Do better.

MarcinMN

The speaker should give black-shirt guy a break. He clearly has a baseball sized brain tumor or something.

dennis

Hevach wrote: »

Yeah, I'm sure the mental health crisis has nothing to do with the fact that the largest graduating class of 2022 was the empty seats of kids who didn't make it thanks to mass shootings and every damn one of the kids are aware of that fact because if they're in the minority of schools that hasn't had an actual lockdown they've still had active shooter drills. Definitely not related to the fact that a large majority of high school students believe they have no hope for a financial future, or that a significant minority believe they or their children will be the last generation of humans. Couldn't be that the most open and accepting generation in living memory is subject to the level of political attack and slander almost unprecedented in scale and violence.

No, no, those things all sound like OUR fault. Definitely the internet.

Only thing you left out was that it totally wasn't because they had a massively exaggerated period of school disruption exacerbated by people who adamantly refused to take even the most basic public health precautions.

Skibby

Human social instincts didn't evolve in, and aren't suited to, a world where everyone in the world can communicate with everyone else. Dysfunction was inevitable. At the same time, no mere court is going to somehow reverse the collision of technology and human nature. We will simply suffer until we adapt. It's as futile as the artists trying to sue OpenAI. Even if you "win" there's no real winning. You might at most compel the genie to change shape in some slight way, but you'll never put him back in the bottle.

Bursar

Suing Google of all companies for making their products "look cool to youth," eh? Have they seen Google in the past decade or so?

Overkillengine

Nothing will sour one on sprawling corrupt systems that exert far too much control over your lives like having to suffer under a sprawling corrupt system that exerts far too much control over your lives.

MichaelLC

Only alphabet they should be suing is the NRA.

Lttlefoot

The teachers union milked covid for all it was worth. But with teachers like that, maybe the kids were better off not seeing them anyway

furlion

Lttlefoot wrote: »

The teachers union milked covid for all it was worth. But with teachers like that, maybe the kids were better off not seeing them anyway

What in the fuck does that even mean? Teachers fucking died because the school system was/is being run by a bunch of corrupt assholes who don't give a fuck about them or the kids they teach.

Lttlefoot

It means the union asked the cdc to change guidelines https://nypost.com/2021/05/01/teachers-union-collaborated-with-cdc-on-school-reopening-emails/amp/

AngelHedgie

Lttlefoot wrote: »

It means the union asked the cdc to change guidelines https://nypost.com/2021/05/01/teachers-union-collaborated-with-cdc-on-school-reopening-emails/amp/

You mean the union did its fucking job and fought to protect its membership? It's almost like health and welfare on the job is literally why unions exist.

dennis

Lttlefoot wrote: »

The teachers union milked covid for all it was worth. But with teachers like that, maybe the kids were better off not seeing them anyway

You utter goose.

dennis

AngelHedgie wrote: »

Lttlefoot wrote: »

It means the union asked the cdc to change guidelines https://nypost.com/2021/05/01/teachers-union-collaborated-with-cdc-on-school-reopening-emails/amp/

You mean the union did its fucking job and fought to protect its membership? It's almost like health and welfare on the job is literally why unions exist.

It's especially rich, considering the overwhelming majority of teachers are doing a job with long unpaid hours, regularly paying for classroom supplies out of their own pockets, simply because they want kids to learn. And there's a reason that so many of them are getting burnt out. My wife was one of them. They've been turned into villains for political expediency, and they're just done with it.

Skibby

I'm not familiar with the specific situation regarding the teacher's unions, but in general retrospect I don't have a hard time believing that we ought to have quarantined all the sickly grandmas and otherwise vulnerable people, but allowed everyone else to more or less get on with the functioning of society. Virtually limitless money and effort could have been devoted to the task without anything approaching the level of social/economic damage sustained in attempting a halfass quarantine of all civilization.

Sterica

This isn’t the place to restart a debate about general covid stuff

Rhesus Positive

For the skeptical amongst us, consider how fucking awful children can be to other children

And thanks to technology and social media, children can be exposed to exponentially more children in their day to day life than ever before

Tofystedeth

And that's before you even get into stuff like the weird TikTok fad of wrecking your school's bathroom.

Lttlefoot

I started school before the internet. We learned the latest trends through a peer-to-peer network

AngelHedgie

Rhesus Positive wrote: »

For the skeptical amongst us, consider how fucking awful children can be to other children

And thanks to technology and social media, children can be exposed to exponentially more children in their day to day life than ever before

The bigger problem is the blurring of spaces in and out of school,which has no really good answers.

garhent

Government schools are taking some rather bad paths lately. You are better off going to a pod, homeschool + do activities at the school or vouchers for a charter school. A lot of schools in large cities got the "I'm the only thing you got"itis going on. They aren't, you have choices. You'll get a better education outside of government schools more times than not, just ask Felicia Day.

dennis

garhent wrote: »

Government schools are taking some rather bad paths lately. You are better off going to a pod, homeschool + do activities at the school or vouchers for a charter school. A lot of schools in large cities got the "I'm the only thing you got"itis going on. They aren't, you have choices. You'll get a better education outside of government schools more times than not, just ask Felicia Day.

There are about 100,000 schools in the US. Unless someone is a scholar in the field, I find blanket statements about "government schools" to require a lot more backing up. Because the news loves to promote sensational news stories from the handful of the most crazy schools in the country. And parents generally don't have that much experience with that many schools by the time their kid(s) get out. And picking one homeschooled kid (Day) who did well in life is about as valid as picking one public schooled kid who did well in life (me). And we even grew up in roughly the same area of the state in the same time period.

I say all that, even though I chose an alternate route for my kids (Montessori) because I wanted something other than the traditional education model. We chose a private school instead, which two years ago became... a public "government" school. So now my kids go to a "government" school in a large city, and I love it.

It should also be noted that we chose this school, and other parents can choose it (up to enrollment capacity and subject to lotteries when that is exceeded). In Minnesota (where I live now), you can choose any school to go to, so there's no "I'm the only thing you got"itis at all. A lot of places don't do that, though, and a lot of that has to do with institutional racism.

I'm going to leave out the assumption of privilege with homeschooling, or vouchers that work great for people with more income but leave a gap that is hard to cover for people without. But lots could also be said about that.

PALaxx

I've said it before to other people, but Social Media has essentially become "the school playground" for modern children. Recess is, after all, the primary socialization space for children during school hours. Well that and lunch, I suppose.

What does this mean? Well, think about what happens on a playground: kids get bullied by their peers, other kids are trying to be like the popular kids, and the popular kids are trying to stay that way by any means available to them. When you were a kid, I'm sure there were trends: yo-yos, handball, fingerboards, etc etc. Apply that mentality to the whole of social media though and what do you get? An unending deluge of trends and fads to keep up with, constant validation checks (via upvotes/retweets/what-have-you), pseudo-anonymity and "follows" to make hounding kids outside of class easier and more frequent than ever before. The major difference is that the playground was a contained microcosm that one could escape, tailored to a specific school demographic; social media is a macrocosm that encompasses all playgrounds and demographics that no one can escape once they're pulled in via the plethora of functionally demanded cross-account-linking (and that says nothing of the terrible OpSec children and young adults have today as a result).

All that said, a school district trying to sue Big Tech over it isn't going to do anything noteworthy, if anything at all. As another poster said, it's far too late to put that genie back in its bottle.

Gasquatch

The bad publicity might as least shame some of the bigger players into offering more tools for parents or making some beneficial changes just for the PR effect of being seen to "care", "do something".