I don't think these are going to stop any shootings from happening, but feel confident that they can stop a shooter in a gun fight. My larger concern is that these types of drones are probably...
I don't think these are going to stop any shootings from happening, but feel confident that they can stop a shooter in a gun fight.
My larger concern is that these types of drones are probably going to see significantly more action in quelling non violent protests in our future.
I'd rather consider adding social welfare, money for education, labor rights etc. instead of drones. But I'm not a billionaire so I can only write stupid things on the internet.
I'd rather consider adding social welfare, money for education, labor rights etc. instead of drones. But I'm not a billionaire so I can only write stupid things on the internet.
I feel like half of the shooter stories I hear about there is someone quoted saying they knew the shooter was troubled. Why aren’t we doing more at that stage?
I feel like half of the shooter stories I hear about there is someone quoted saying they knew the shooter was troubled. Why aren’t we doing more at that stage?
Because a) people still don't take men's mental health seriously, in that they do very little to encourage men to actually seek out mental health support, b) we can't force adults into treatment...
Because a) people still don't take men's mental health seriously, in that they do very little to encourage men to actually seek out mental health support, b) we can't force adults into treatment without the specific threat, c) because people are putting pieces together after the fact, and probably didn't think they were actually going to shoot anyone, and d) a culture of "mind your own business"
ETA: also a genuine desire to ignore and dismiss actual online extremism as the current administration does. That's certainly not helping
This + it's more profitable for billionaires to create police state instead of helping the society. Just look who owns the media and thus who creates the narrative. Who doesn't want men to have...
This + it's more profitable for billionaires to create police state instead of helping the society. Just look who owns the media and thus who creates the narrative. Who doesn't want men to have time to think about their mental health (in a healthy way, not in a way of blaming minorities and women) by driving their attention to other things presented in the media.
I mean I think that happens at a higher level, in the sense that billionaires aren't directly running my school district, but that the "why didn't someone act" is more about the interpersonal...
I mean I think that happens at a higher level, in the sense that billionaires aren't directly running my school district, but that the "why didn't someone act" is more about the interpersonal things and those societal pressures.
Why don't we fix the problem, well, we do like to have "mental health" in our back pocket for any white man who commits a mass shooting while we rarely use the same words for other demographics. And military grade gear is so costly. But we must sacrifice and buy it.
Everyone would benefit from better mental health regardless. And it's generally least accessible to people who need it the most.
Some of those don't apply to the large category of student shooters. What happens when a student is a walking red flag? People just sort of whisper about them?
Some of those don't apply to the large category of student shooters. What happens when a student is a walking red flag? People just sort of whisper about them?
There are care and threat assessment teams that evaluate things. My HS experience is limited because I've only experienced schools attached to universities but for colleges we do threat assessment...
There are care and threat assessment teams that evaluate things. My HS experience is limited because I've only experienced schools attached to universities but for colleges we do threat assessment and sometimes that escalates into conversations with the police to evaluate the level of risk. Sometimes that's us trying to connect them to supports, sometimes both. We have a rubric and distinguish between making a threat and being a threat.
But I also cannot force someone to get help. It helps that more people threaten than act. And while no system is perfect, ours is a pretty good one. I'm not particularly worried about people whose red flags are flying getting missed. Outside of college it depends on too many factors. If there's a credible threat to self or others there's a duty to report/warn. But there's lots of people who I think are walking around as giant threatening red flags and they manage to not quite cross that line or police won't take the threat seriously, etc.
Some of the deadliest school shootings were also perpetrated by people who weren't even in the school. Sandy Hook was a 20-year-old who walked into an elementary school. Uvalde was a former...
Some of the deadliest school shootings were also perpetrated by people who weren't even in the school. Sandy Hook was a 20-year-old who walked into an elementary school. Uvalde was a former student.
The time when my university had a credible threat, it was a student at a college in another state who made threats online, disappeared and had his car spotted in our state. Police were actively on the lookout for the vehicle and were staking out all of the roads to the school. If he had said nothing and just shown up, there would have been zero awareness.
Yeah i do think the four things I listed hit "why nothing is done" most of the time when people say they knew something (but after the fact of course.) And care teams can mostly only act on...
Yeah i do think the four things I listed hit "why nothing is done" most of the time when people say they knew something (but after the fact of course.) And care teams can mostly only act on internal threats. And even then, only with the information that they have.
A student in Wisconsin graduated, but was not able to get licensed as a teacher due to poor performance. She got a gun, confronted her Residence hall Director, shot and killed her, and then herself.
There was no reported threat history. She'd searched for a bunch of stuff including conceal carry, gun permits, how to write a will, how to write a suicide note... But no one knew that beforehand.
The 500+ page report will hopefully help them identify threats like that in the future. But we'll never know all of them.
I'm not a fan of security through obscurity but if it gets used a bunch outside of shootings then shooters will learn how to counteract them. Pepper spray sucks but I've heard you can kind of...
but feel confident that they can stop a shooter in a gun fight.
more action in quelling non violent protests in our future
I'm not a fan of security through obscurity but if it gets used a bunch outside of shootings then shooters will learn how to counteract them.
Pepper spray sucks but I've heard you can kind of learn to fight it, either at least long enough to get a mask on or some people will learn to just power through it. It will be most effective on someone who's never been hit with it before because they'll have very little understanding of what's going on and how to deal with it.
If you understand the tactics the drones will use you can anticipate them. If you've heard them before you'll recognize them quicker. If you know where they deploy from you could plan for that, potentially disable them, or a minimum known where they'll come from.
Any use of them will introduce wear and tear, necessitate a reload of expended "munitions" (I guess), and may then require a recharge before being used again. A shooter could observe what the refurb/reload/recharge situation looks like and exploit that after the next disturbance or potentially engineer a protest or other disturbance. Maybe that last point would be extremely abnormal for the kind of person who usually does a shooting but I wouldn't rule it out.
A shooter could also use any event these drones are deployed to test countermeasures. Actually, any use on other shooters may be brought up in media and allow them to glean info on how they operate.
If my child's school started abusing drones I would probably talk to them about countermeasures or at a minimum how to handle being pepper sprayed.
TL;DR: each use of these makes them less effective.
On a seperate train of thought. How are they really going to have remote operaters operate these things reliably? Especially if one strategy is to ram a shooter at 60mph. They'll have to be using AI or some level of automation to do what they want to do.
Anything except solve the problem huh. Hey it'll probably work to prevent some deaths and possibly deescalate the situation without subjecting a troubled kid to a lethal shootout with a...
Anything except solve the problem huh.
Hey it'll probably work to prevent some deaths and possibly deescalate the situation without subjecting a troubled kid to a lethal shootout with a trigger-happy cop, but the entire thing seems so alien to my non US eyes.
I'm just imagining kids coming to school decked out in the Hong Kong protest outfit Like they already think it's a waste of time to be there, teachers aren't teaching anything they can use in this...
I'm just imagining kids coming to school decked out in the Hong Kong protest outfit
Like they already think it's a waste of time to be there, teachers aren't teaching anything they can use in this doomed economy, it's actually dangerous for them to even show up because of their own peers, and now the school itself is threatening them. Why even go?
I mean I think kids do actually want to learn even when they're not just made to go to school. We still have aspiring doctors and engineers and teachers and all that. I don't want to give up on...
I mean I think kids do actually want to learn even when they're not just made to go to school. We still have aspiring doctors and engineers and teachers and all that. I don't want to give up on them entirely. We just don't have to be like this.
Right no its not the kids fault at all I mean they're acting exactly how I would act given the current state of everything. Off topic but like I kinda don't get how anyone can look around them and...
Right no its not the kids fault at all I mean they're acting exactly how I would act given the current state of everything.
Off topic but like I kinda don't get how anyone can look around them and blame the kids for not doing well in school, like, I went to a rich high school in 2008 and even we were sitting around back then kinda like what's the point in school if you spend all that time get a whole degree and you're still working at Starbucks?
Like it kinda feels like hard work doesn't matter at all any more and when a teenager gets that idea in their head its game over no matter what you do, and that idea is everywhere, coming from social media, designed to keep them on social media instead of learning anything.
Ostensibly you have the drone pilots beholden to Mithril Armor that may not respond unless it's an active shooter. We don't know how it'll work in practice until it does, but let's say they're...
Ostensibly you have the drone pilots beholden to Mithril Armor that may not respond unless it's an active shooter. We don't know how it'll work in practice until it does, but let's say they're true to their word then perhaps it's a good thing there's a non-lethal response option to an active shooter.
I'd love non-lethal responses that are effective, but since they don't deploy pepper spray against guns now, and the spray would not prevent the shooter from killing more people, and the spray...
I'd love non-lethal responses that are effective, but since they don't deploy pepper spray against guns now, and the spray would not prevent the shooter from killing more people, and the spray could hinder the escape efforts of potential victims... I don't think the only reason we don't already do this is because they didn't have drones.
They can certainly "ram" a shooter (though how much space they need to get up to speed? And if they're wearing body armor? Maybe? But get rid of the pepper spray)
I cannot see how this would help me if someone targeted my campus. And while that isn't a high school... I'm familiar with the layout.
Once the tool is there, it seems very likely to me it'll get misused.
Schools don't get to unilaterally determine law. Just based on demographics, if school teachers and administrators were 100% of the voting populace, I have no doubt that we'd already have an...
Schools don't get to unilaterally determine law. Just based on demographics, if school teachers and administrators were 100% of the voting populace, I have no doubt that we'd already have an amended 2nd amendment and stricter gun laws.
But they're not, and a significant proportion of the country prefers a certain amount of kids being shot over losing their ability to own guns. They can think that way if they want, and in a democracy, that's just how the cookie crumbles sometimes. You win some, you lose some.
So from my limited view this seems like a financial win for drone companies, it adds more defensive measures to school to a degree that I'm willing to argue US kids these days are entering...
So from my limited view this seems like a financial win for drone companies, it adds more defensive measures to school to a degree that I'm willing to argue US kids these days are entering military bunkers to get any form of education. Although sadly the level of education is dwindling more and more as US policy makers seems to be more interested in banning anything that might give people the idea anything else but the American dream is a possibility rather than giving people the means to think freely for themselves.
I agree with @DefinitelyNotAFae here that the cause is hardly addressed and people like flashy solutions more than the dealing with the human aspect. You know, putting an arm around someone who's in distress about bigger subjects and hearing them out without prejudice. (Which costs a lot less than a drone system on every campus).
At least nine schools — three in Florida, five in Georgia and one in Colorado — will have storage boxes that house the plastic, nonlethal aircraft made by Austin-based Mithril Defense. The drones, which can be activated by teachers, are capable of reaching a shooter within 15 seconds.
The aircraft are designed to distract their targets by flashing strobes, blaring sirens, spraying them with pepper gel, or ramming into them at 60 mph.
[...]
The programs continue a wave of spending on high-tech security on campuses — a multibillion dollar industry fueled by threat of school shootings. Nearly 400,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since the 1999 attack at Columbine High School in Colorado, according to a Washington Post tracker, which has recorded 435 shootings over that period.
[...]
Teachers will have an app or classroom panic buttons to summon the drones. Mithril Defense’s professional drone pilots can then fly them remotely.
The drones have been tested in simulations but never by a shooting.
"Mithril Defense," huh? We need to devise some sort of test for kids to take to determine if they're sociopaths with entrepreneurial ambitions before they can check out Tolkien books from the...
"Mithril Defense," huh? We need to devise some sort of test for kids to take to determine if they're sociopaths with entrepreneurial ambitions before they can check out Tolkien books from the library. It's beyond ridiculous.
I feel like at this point people could include "Mithril" in the name of something without knowing it comes from Tolkien since Mithril is used in many other fantasy settings that were influenced by...
I feel like at this point people could include "Mithril" in the name of something without knowing it comes from Tolkien since Mithril is used in many other fantasy settings that were influenced by his works or influenced by works that themselves influenced by his works.
While that's true in general there's a trend of defense firms and tech bros naming things after Tolkien he never would have approved of. In this case, they make an ArkenstoneOS, Vilya, Black...
While that's true in general there's a trend of defense firms and tech bros naming things after Tolkien he never would have approved of.
In this case, they make an ArkenstoneOS, Vilya, Black Arrow, Hell Hawk, and a "tower" which is generic but fits the theme. They're absolutely doing it because of LotR.
Not disagreeing at all, I thought about including a reference to a company like Palantir being one where you can point to it being an explicit Tolkien reference in my comment, but I was just...
Not disagreeing at all, I thought about including a reference to a company like Palantir being one where you can point to it being an explicit Tolkien reference in my comment, but I was just focusing on "Mithril" which has gone on to be included in multiple different works inspired by Tolkien.
Back in my day, kids got out of exams by pulling the fire alarm. Can't wait to see what the pepper spray drone AI does when lil' Timmy slams the "active shooter" button to get out of an algebra test 😬
Back in my day, kids got out of exams by pulling the fire alarm. Can't wait to see what the kill pepper spray drone AI does when lil' Timmy slams the "active shooter" button to get out of an algebra test 😬
Cameras have made false fire alarms (and bomb threats) way less common. Still happens but like, when we have had it happen in the halls (once so a guy could try to talk to a girl he knew lived...
Cameras have made false fire alarms (and bomb threats) way less common.
Still happens but like, when we have had it happen in the halls (once so a guy could try to talk to a girl he knew lived there) they get in significant trouble. They're lucky if it's just with the university. Idk what the charge is for pulling it, but failing to evacuate is a 250ish dollar ticket and covering the smoke detector is an actual crime.
Academic buildings (and high school hallways) have way more cameras than our halls do due to privacy reasons.
The bomb threats are mostly handled by the police with campus never finding out about it because they're so clearly false.
Huh! That's actually a decent use of a surveillance tool, tbh, and I'm glad that that isn't as much of a nuisance anymore. Seems like genuinely good news 😊
Huh! That's actually a decent use of a surveillance tool, tbh, and I'm glad that that isn't as much of a nuisance anymore. Seems like genuinely good news 😊
Security cameras in public spaces of buildings like ours with limits over who can do what with them are worth while I think. We have a relative few outside on campus. Good enough to track someone...
Security cameras in public spaces of buildings like ours with limits over who can do what with them are worth while I think. We have a relative few outside on campus. Good enough to track someone moving across campus, bad enough to not cover all the parking lots. It's a trade-off
They're not in classrooms or workspaces, just hallways and most specifically entrances. (And they're only at entrances/lobbies in residence halls.)
To be entirely honest reading about these things is like peering into some kind of alien land. The shootings obviosly have some kind of root cause and that root cause is systemic. As such stopping...
To be entirely honest reading about these things is like peering into some kind of alien land.
The shootings obviosly have some kind of root cause and that root cause is systemic. As such stopping these events neccessitates addressing the actual causes. Better healthcare, education, labour conditions and social safety nets seems like a good place to start.
I think the trouble is that we are guessing about root causes and how to address them. Well, there is gun control, but that’s politically very difficult. And if your plan is to first fix Congress...
I think the trouble is that we are guessing about root causes and how to address them. Well, there is gun control, but that’s politically very difficult. And if your plan is to first fix Congress or fix society then the trouble is that it’s an “if everyone will just” sort of plan.
So, instead let’s go with the unproven techno-fix because that just involves spending money and doesn’t require changing American society. The world gets a little more sci-fi because just about anything is easier than changing society.
The trouble is we'll incrementally change society by putting cops in schools and metal detectors and drones and not do absolutely anything else. We're still changing society, we're just pretending...
The trouble is we'll incrementally change society by putting cops in schools and metal detectors and drones and not do absolutely anything else.
We're still changing society, we're just pretending otherwise
We are always changing society but sometimes it’s a side effect, which seems easier than a deliberate change. Side effects are like like water running downhill rather than having to pump it...
We are always changing society but sometimes it’s a side effect, which seems easier than a deliberate change. Side effects are like like water running downhill rather than having to pump it uphill. Even for deliberate attempts at changes like ads, the ones that take advantage of existing weaknesses will be more effective, unfortunately.
If you have a drone, maybe you can get by without the cop? They seem like competing ways to spend money on security. Hiring people is expensive, too.
I can imagine a drone being marketed as a way to cut labor costs. Maybe it would be a higher up-front cost, but eventually pays for itself assuming there would be a cop otherwise.
There shouldn't be cops in schools but the drone doesn't replace the cop (who often aren't particularly useful in a shooting, it depends.) The point is either way we change society, so it'd be...
There shouldn't be cops in schools but the drone doesn't replace the cop (who often aren't particularly useful in a shooting, it depends.)
The point is either way we change society, so it'd be nice to change it away from locking down and militarizing our schools and towards better paths.
Thing about that is that on a societal level perception is reality. The solution does not have to be if everyone will just, it can be if everyone will just believe it is possible or even just...
that it’s an “if everyone will just” sort of plan.
Thing about that is that on a societal level perception is reality.
The solution does not have to be if everyone will just, it can be if everyone will just believe it is possible or even just wants it to be possible and there will be gradual change.
"Perception is reality" is overstating it. Yes, sometimes it happens that believing in something makes it true. This is why it's hard to beat the front-runner in an election. But after a market...
"Perception is reality" is overstating it. Yes, sometimes it happens that believing in something makes it true. This is why it's hard to beat the front-runner in an election. But after a market crash, we discover that, while getting people to believe in things can indeed be quite powerful, it doesn't necessarily make them true.
Also, as every failed political candidate knows, getting millions of people to believe something is not that easy. Unless they already want to believe.
The Dickey Amendment certainly didn’t help with the just guessing thing.
The Dickey Amendment certainly didn’t help with the just guessing thing.
Although the Dickey Amendment did not explicitly ban it, for about two decades the CDC avoided all research on gun violence for fear it would be financially penalized.
I don't think these are going to stop any shootings from happening, but feel confident that they can stop a shooter in a gun fight.
My larger concern is that these types of drones are probably going to see significantly more action in quelling non violent protests in our future.
I'd rather consider adding social welfare, money for education, labor rights etc. instead of drones. But I'm not a billionaire so I can only write stupid things on the internet.
I feel like half of the shooter stories I hear about there is someone quoted saying they knew the shooter was troubled. Why aren’t we doing more at that stage?
Because a) people still don't take men's mental health seriously, in that they do very little to encourage men to actually seek out mental health support, b) we can't force adults into treatment without the specific threat, c) because people are putting pieces together after the fact, and probably didn't think they were actually going to shoot anyone, and d) a culture of "mind your own business"
ETA: also a genuine desire to ignore and dismiss actual online extremism as the current administration does. That's certainly not helping
This + it's more profitable for billionaires to create police state instead of helping the society. Just look who owns the media and thus who creates the narrative. Who doesn't want men to have time to think about their mental health (in a healthy way, not in a way of blaming minorities and women) by driving their attention to other things presented in the media.
I mean I think that happens at a higher level, in the sense that billionaires aren't directly running my school district, but that the "why didn't someone act" is more about the interpersonal things and those societal pressures.
Why don't we fix the problem, well, we do like to have "mental health" in our back pocket for any white man who commits a mass shooting while we rarely use the same words for other demographics. And military grade gear is so costly. But we must sacrifice and buy it.
Everyone would benefit from better mental health regardless. And it's generally least accessible to people who need it the most.
Some of those don't apply to the large category of student shooters. What happens when a student is a walking red flag? People just sort of whisper about them?
There are care and threat assessment teams that evaluate things. My HS experience is limited because I've only experienced schools attached to universities but for colleges we do threat assessment and sometimes that escalates into conversations with the police to evaluate the level of risk. Sometimes that's us trying to connect them to supports, sometimes both. We have a rubric and distinguish between making a threat and being a threat.
But I also cannot force someone to get help. It helps that more people threaten than act. And while no system is perfect, ours is a pretty good one. I'm not particularly worried about people whose red flags are flying getting missed. Outside of college it depends on too many factors. If there's a credible threat to self or others there's a duty to report/warn. But there's lots of people who I think are walking around as giant threatening red flags and they manage to not quite cross that line or police won't take the threat seriously, etc.
Some of the deadliest school shootings were also perpetrated by people who weren't even in the school. Sandy Hook was a 20-year-old who walked into an elementary school. Uvalde was a former student.
The time when my university had a credible threat, it was a student at a college in another state who made threats online, disappeared and had his car spotted in our state. Police were actively on the lookout for the vehicle and were staking out all of the roads to the school. If he had said nothing and just shown up, there would have been zero awareness.
The Columbine stereotype is outdated.
Yeah i do think the four things I listed hit "why nothing is done" most of the time when people say they knew something (but after the fact of course.) And care teams can mostly only act on internal threats. And even then, only with the information that they have.
A student in Wisconsin graduated, but was not able to get licensed as a teacher due to poor performance. She got a gun, confronted her Residence hall Director, shot and killed her, and then herself.
There was no reported threat history. She'd searched for a bunch of stuff including conceal carry, gun permits, how to write a will, how to write a suicide note... But no one knew that beforehand.
The 500+ page report will hopefully help them identify threats like that in the future. But we'll never know all of them.
I'm not a fan of security through obscurity but if it gets used a bunch outside of shootings then shooters will learn how to counteract them.
Pepper spray sucks but I've heard you can kind of learn to fight it, either at least long enough to get a mask on or some people will learn to just power through it. It will be most effective on someone who's never been hit with it before because they'll have very little understanding of what's going on and how to deal with it.
If you understand the tactics the drones will use you can anticipate them. If you've heard them before you'll recognize them quicker. If you know where they deploy from you could plan for that, potentially disable them, or a minimum known where they'll come from.
Any use of them will introduce wear and tear, necessitate a reload of expended "munitions" (I guess), and may then require a recharge before being used again. A shooter could observe what the refurb/reload/recharge situation looks like and exploit that after the next disturbance or potentially engineer a protest or other disturbance. Maybe that last point would be extremely abnormal for the kind of person who usually does a shooting but I wouldn't rule it out.
A shooter could also use any event these drones are deployed to test countermeasures. Actually, any use on other shooters may be brought up in media and allow them to glean info on how they operate.
If my child's school started abusing drones I would probably talk to them about countermeasures or at a minimum how to handle being pepper sprayed.
TL;DR: each use of these makes them less effective.
On a seperate train of thought. How are they really going to have remote operaters operate these things reliably? Especially if one strategy is to ram a shooter at 60mph. They'll have to be using AI or some level of automation to do what they want to do.
If I could send a headline back to the 80s...
Anything except solve the problem huh.
Hey it'll probably work to prevent some deaths and possibly deescalate the situation without subjecting a troubled kid to a lethal shootout with a trigger-happy cop, but the entire thing seems so alien to my non US eyes.
Idk I feel like it will get used on many non-shooting events in a way that doesn't really deescalate anything.
I'm just imagining kids coming to school decked out in the Hong Kong protest outfit
Like they already think it's a waste of time to be there, teachers aren't teaching anything they can use in this doomed economy, it's actually dangerous for them to even show up because of their own peers, and now the school itself is threatening them. Why even go?
I mean I think kids do actually want to learn even when they're not just made to go to school. We still have aspiring doctors and engineers and teachers and all that. I don't want to give up on them entirely. We just don't have to be like this.
Right no its not the kids fault at all I mean they're acting exactly how I would act given the current state of everything.
Off topic but like I kinda don't get how anyone can look around them and blame the kids for not doing well in school, like, I went to a rich high school in 2008 and even we were sitting around back then kinda like what's the point in school if you spend all that time get a whole degree and you're still working at Starbucks?
Like it kinda feels like hard work doesn't matter at all any more and when a teenager gets that idea in their head its game over no matter what you do, and that idea is everywhere, coming from social media, designed to keep them on social media instead of learning anything.
Ostensibly you have the drone pilots beholden to Mithril Armor that may not respond unless it's an active shooter. We don't know how it'll work in practice until it does, but let's say they're true to their word then perhaps it's a good thing there's a non-lethal response option to an active shooter.
The US has had a pretty bad record on that historically. Taking bets tbat the first noted usage will be in a red state against a student protest.
I'd love non-lethal responses that are effective, but since they don't deploy pepper spray against guns now, and the spray would not prevent the shooter from killing more people, and the spray could hinder the escape efforts of potential victims... I don't think the only reason we don't already do this is because they didn't have drones.
They can certainly "ram" a shooter (though how much space they need to get up to speed? And if they're wearing body armor? Maybe? But get rid of the pepper spray)
I cannot see how this would help me if someone targeted my campus. And while that isn't a high school... I'm familiar with the layout.
Once the tool is there, it seems very likely to me it'll get misused.
Schools don't get to unilaterally determine law. Just based on demographics, if school teachers and administrators were 100% of the voting populace, I have no doubt that we'd already have an amended 2nd amendment and stricter gun laws.
But they're not, and a significant proportion of the country prefers a certain amount of kids being shot over losing their ability to own guns. They can think that way if they want, and in a democracy, that's just how the cookie crumbles sometimes. You win some, you lose some.
Yeah, which is why I thought it important to say this drone may be beneficial in some ways in lieu of more monumental change.
So from my limited view this seems like a financial win for drone companies, it adds more defensive measures to school to a degree that I'm willing to argue US kids these days are entering military bunkers to get any form of education. Although sadly the level of education is dwindling more and more as US policy makers seems to be more interested in banning anything that might give people the idea anything else but the American dream is a possibility rather than giving people the means to think freely for themselves.
I agree with @DefinitelyNotAFae here that the cause is hardly addressed and people like flashy solutions more than the dealing with the human aspect. You know, putting an arm around someone who's in distress about bigger subjects and hearing them out without prejudice. (Which costs a lot less than a drone system on every campus).
From the article:
[...]
[...]
"Mithril Defense," huh? We need to devise some sort of test for kids to take to determine if they're sociopaths with entrepreneurial ambitions before they can check out Tolkien books from the library. It's beyond ridiculous.
I feel like at this point people could include "Mithril" in the name of something without knowing it comes from Tolkien since Mithril is used in many other fantasy settings that were influenced by his works or influenced by works that themselves influenced by his works.
After typing my above message I did a quick Google search for "mithril in fantasy" and found a thread on r/lotr that proved this does happen for some people now: https://www.reddit.com/r/lotr/comments/z8yiu8/tolkien_invented_mythril/
While that's true in general there's a trend of defense firms and tech bros naming things after Tolkien he never would have approved of.
In this case, they make an ArkenstoneOS, Vilya, Black Arrow, Hell Hawk, and a "tower" which is generic but fits the theme. They're absolutely doing it because of LotR.
Not disagreeing at all, I thought about including a reference to a company like Palantir being one where you can point to it being an explicit Tolkien reference in my comment, but I was just focusing on "Mithril" which has gone on to be included in multiple different works inspired by Tolkien.
For sure, just in this case there's not really a distinction between the two - MD and Palantir.
@Promonk 's test might have worked!
Back in my day, kids got out of exams by pulling the fire alarm. Can't wait to see what the
killpepper spray drone AI does when lil' Timmy slams the "active shooter" button to get out of an algebra test 😬Cameras have made false fire alarms (and bomb threats) way less common.
Still happens but like, when we have had it happen in the halls (once so a guy could try to talk to a girl he knew lived there) they get in significant trouble. They're lucky if it's just with the university. Idk what the charge is for pulling it, but failing to evacuate is a 250ish dollar ticket and covering the smoke detector is an actual crime.
Academic buildings (and high school hallways) have way more cameras than our halls do due to privacy reasons.
The bomb threats are mostly handled by the police with campus never finding out about it because they're so clearly false.
But also you know that button gets hit eventually
Huh! That's actually a decent use of a surveillance tool, tbh, and I'm glad that that isn't as much of a nuisance anymore. Seems like genuinely good news 😊
Security cameras in public spaces of buildings like ours with limits over who can do what with them are worth while I think. We have a relative few outside on campus. Good enough to track someone moving across campus, bad enough to not cover all the parking lots. It's a trade-off
They're not in classrooms or workspaces, just hallways and most specifically entrances. (And they're only at entrances/lobbies in residence halls.)
Some shithead teacher is going to take the first schoolyard fight that breaks out as an excuse to test this.
To be entirely honest reading about these things is like peering into some kind of alien land.
The shootings obviosly have some kind of root cause and that root cause is systemic. As such stopping these events neccessitates addressing the actual causes. Better healthcare, education, labour conditions and social safety nets seems like a good place to start.
And like, not having guns. But 乁( •_• )ㄏ
I think the trouble is that we are guessing about root causes and how to address them. Well, there is gun control, but that’s politically very difficult. And if your plan is to first fix Congress or fix society then the trouble is that it’s an “if everyone will just” sort of plan.
So, instead let’s go with the unproven techno-fix because that just involves spending money and doesn’t require changing American society. The world gets a little more sci-fi because just about anything is easier than changing society.
The trouble is we'll incrementally change society by putting cops in schools and metal detectors and drones and not do absolutely anything else.
We're still changing society, we're just pretending otherwise
We are always changing society but sometimes it’s a side effect, which seems easier than a deliberate change. Side effects are like like water running downhill rather than having to pump it uphill. Even for deliberate attempts at changes like ads, the ones that take advantage of existing weaknesses will be more effective, unfortunately.
If you have a drone, maybe you can get by without the cop? They seem like competing ways to spend money on security. Hiring people is expensive, too.
I can imagine a drone being marketed as a way to cut labor costs. Maybe it would be a higher up-front cost, but eventually pays for itself assuming there would be a cop otherwise.
Though of course they can do different things.
There shouldn't be cops in schools but the drone doesn't replace the cop (who often aren't particularly useful in a shooting, it depends.)
The point is either way we change society, so it'd be nice to change it away from locking down and militarizing our schools and towards better paths.
Thing about that is that on a societal level perception is reality.
The solution does not have to be if everyone will just, it can be if everyone will just believe it is possible or even just wants it to be possible and there will be gradual change.
And if "we just" start with a single step. Be active in your school board! Advocate for change!
"Perception is reality" is overstating it. Yes, sometimes it happens that believing in something makes it true. This is why it's hard to beat the front-runner in an election. But after a market crash, we discover that, while getting people to believe in things can indeed be quite powerful, it doesn't necessarily make them true.
Also, as every failed political candidate knows, getting millions of people to believe something is not that easy. Unless they already want to believe.
The Dickey Amendment certainly didn’t help with the just guessing thing.