Real vision is fucked when you can’t actually see what’s behind your car.
Cameras will prevent a lot of unnecessary property damage, and more importantly, fully mitigate risk of killing humans/animals that are behind the car and outside the field of view.
No one is arguing cameras shouldn’t exist. In fact, back up cameras are mandatory in the US. But replacing mirrors and windows with cameras is bad, actually.
Seconding the other comments here. I forgot to close the carrying case on mine (original LCD) and it fell out down a flight of wooden stairs, destroying the screen. I bought an OEM replacement screen from iFixit and swapped it out in an hour or so and the rest of it was sturdy enough to begin with that it still looks brand new. And IIRC the screen replacement was ranked as one of the more challenging repairs to do compared to replacing most other pieces.
But the authoritative root server set is maintained by ICANN, so they have ultimate control (for now) and can essentially dictate terms for all TLDs.
I wonder whether we wventually see some other power establish their own root servers which mirror only the parts of ICANNs DNS that are politically convenient to whoever does this.
IMO it’s a reasonable point to make when compared to something like the Framework. And it took legal action to get them to offer battery replacements for iPhones, I don’t think you can really claim they’re passionate about component reuse.
> "[...] they just last way longer than any of their competitors."
Citations, please.
In the meantime, an anecdote: My oldest modern-era (64-bit) daily driver is one I use heavily since 15 years. An HP, 16 or 17 years old. The only component that ever caked-out in that bird was the original mechanical hard drive, which died just this year. Similar experiences with IBM/Lenovo, Panasonic and Fujitsu. Apple laptops I don't even look at for they don't offer anything I need.
My 1,500-student public California high school currently lists 7 administration-team members (principal, executive assistant, three assistant principals, school-facilities manager and food-services manager) and 11 administrative-support members (school data-processing specialist, print-center technician, senior-clerical assistant, separate registrar and attendance roles, interventions-support specialist, and others). That doesn't include 4 site maintenance, a network-support and a separate network-systems specialists; a separate media-library specialist; 2 psychologists; a college and career advisor; 4 school counselors; a wellness-space support specialist; and a social science and an athletic director.
34 administrative hires. One per 44 students. Many of those roles strike me as fluff.
It’s because there are tons of laws and regulations regarding minors in school, and administration tends to be homegrown (initial expertise in teaching) rather than explicitly developed to navigate the social, political and legal landscape. I’d wager that more than half of those positions are “best practice” staffing decisions in response to this landscape. A handful might also be due to expressed needs and wants of parents. Likely wasteful overall, but students, teachers and families would likely feel the impact and not be satisfied if any positions were axed.
> Which of those roles specifically would you say are fluff?
Food-services manager (it's all oursourced to Aramark), data-processing specialist, print-center technician, senior clerical assistant, one of registrar or attendance, two of site maintenance, one of the network specialists (probably both–one across the district is plenty), and probably at least one of the counselors and the separate social science & athletics person, who should just be one of the physical education teachers. That's about ten people, or a million dollars–minimum–in annual savings.
As a full-time position? Aramark literally ran the lunch counters. I could see it being a district-level position, though it would be better positioned as a general procurement role.
> Data-processing specialist and print-center technician both sound like fancy names for secretarial roles
I agree. I was suspicious when I didn't see a secretary for each of the assistant principals listed.
> You're honestly saying schools need fewer counselors in what has been generally regarded as the worst generation for child mental health in years?
I am. Unless the counselors are constantly doing actual therapy I'm deeply sceptical you need that many for a student body of that size. The fact that they're assigned based on the first letter of your last name versus anything remotely thematic or behaviour based seems to emphasise that hypothesis, for me at least.
(When I went to the school, there were bullshit jobs everywhere. One of the counselors didn't deign to meet with students. Her role was "strategic" or some nonsense.)
> One of the counselors didn't deign to meet with students.
Why would she? That'd distract her from the actually important work of fabricating the reports that make her looking amazingly competent.
My mom is a retired teacher and her main complaint during the last 10-15 years of work was that with all the bullshit paperwork they're required to fill, the teachers literally don't have the time to just plain interact with the students. You want to make an odd, unscheduled extracurricular event? Waste a small pile of paper before organizing it, arguing for how amazing it will be for the students' education, and the an even larger pile of paper afterwards, bluntly telling just how amazing it all worked out and checked some tick boxes the upper management cares about.
This is not creating widgets or lines of code, not creating a product for consumption, this is fostering the development of inquisitive minds, hopefully encouraging them to become critical thinkers and ultimately the next generation of leaders who will push the bounds of human knowledge further than ever before.
Why would better tools be expected to do enable teachers to do that for more students at a time?
There is a lot of research out there showing worse educational outcomes as class sizes increase. This is one of the areas where wealth disparities in education manifest; rich areas tend to have smaller class sizes, and historically the very rich would pay for private tutors for their kids, whereas poor kids are stuck with bigger class sizes, less individual attention from educators, and typically average worse educational outcomes.
>This is not creating widgets or lines of code, not creating a product for consumption, this is fostering the development of inquisitive minds, hopefully encouraging them to become critical thinkers and ultimately the next generation of leaders who will push the bounds of human knowledge further than ever before.
There's plenty of drudge work teachers do that's not "fostering the development of inquisitive minds". Grading papers, preparing lesson plans, etc. I don't see why not at least some of that can be offloaded to AI.
> Why would better tools be expected to do enable teachers to do that for more students at a time?
Khan Academy showed that one great teacher distributed to millions does that pretty well. It doesn't make sense for every teacher in the country (the worst and the best) to create their own syllabus and teach the same thing over and over again.
Sure, let's have 100 child classes which are hell on earth for everybody involved, starting with the little kids who will literally be scarred for life from it.
Teacher costs should be going up as much as we can afford, to keep reducing class sizes as a fundamental part of quality education.
I agree that admin is ripe for efficiency gains. A local school district cut dozens of teaching roles, not even one person from their extremely bloated central administration. It's also out of touch with the schools with no campus visits, and serves mainly as a hindrance to any sort of actual work going on inside the individual schools. It's a horrible caricature of bureaucracy.
> Only if you assume if per-teacher productivity can't increase.
It can't.
The only axis upon which teacher "productivity" could increase is by increasing the size of their classes.
Every study and every practical example of doing that ever done shows that it negatively impacts student outcomes.
Not because the teacher is failing to be whatever it is you imagine "more productive" to be but because there is a minimum amount of attention needed per student for them to not fall through the cracks and one person's attention is not scalable.
> only axis upon which teacher "productivity" could increase is by increasing the size of their classes
And hours in class. Or productivity of time in class. I'm not saying the former is desirable or latter feasible. But the education "production function" has three inputs.
Oh, it definitely can, in a way very similar to the way you can dramatically increase doctor's success rates by being selective about who you treat.
Specifically: take the most disruptive students and eat them. (Be stealthy about it, the point is not fear of punishment.) The productivity difference between a classroom that spends 90% of its time on instruction vs 90% of its time on classroom management is massive.
That's why you have to be careful about applying business notions like "productivity" to governmental duties like education and mail and highways. (I dearly wanted to include healthcare or at least hospitals in the list, but I live in the US.) Businesses can and should be selective and take higher risks. For governmental tasks, productivity isn't even well-defined. If you're failing (or eating) 20% of your students but the other 80% are doing amazingly well, is that better or worse than 99% of everyone doing just okay? How about if everyone's test scores go up and practical ability goes to shit? (This is not a hypothetical, not where the kids have figured out how to use ChatGPT even for the tests. Which is a lot of places.)
Teaching is nowhere near Pareto optimal right now, so I'm not arguing in favor of the status quo. I'm just saying you have to be very, very careful when pushing for "productivity".
You could increase per teacher productivity by running 12 months of school per year, but you would increase costs; and in some parts of California, you would need to rebuild schools with air conditioning to hold classes effectively in the summer.
Covid showed distance learning doesn't work for most kids. So you can't eliminate real estate costs or hire educators in low cost areas. Computerized education doesn't seem to work, either.
>You could increase per teacher productivity by running 12 months of school per year
Productivity is output divided by some input, either labor or money. Working for longer isn't going to magically increase productivity.
>Covid showed distance learning doesn't work for most kids. So you can't eliminate real estate costs or hire educators in low cost areas. Computerized education doesn't seem to work, either.
Right, I don't have a specific solution for increasing teacher productivity, but it's not obvious that it's a law of economics that it can't increase. People thought lawyers and doctors couldn't be automated away, then came chatgpt.
> People thought lawyers and doctors couldn't be automated away, then came chatgpt.
Form contracts and will generators and what not was automation for lawyers. Plenty of enter symptoms to get a diagnosis stuff out there for doctors; or the more paletable, enter symptoms for charting, get a suggestion and enter medicines and get alerts about interactions.
in California there are not more students.. all tiers of schools show falling enrollments, year after year. Except community colleges, where they have discovered that more than 15% of all students are ghost enrolled.
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California K-12 public school enrollment fell by 74,961 students (a 1.3% decline) for the 2025-26 school year, marking the largest drop since the pandemic. This loss was significantly higher than the state’s Department of Finance projection of only 10,000 students.
The decline is driven by lower birth rates and a reduction in immigration, with the latter exacerbated by families fearing enforcement actions. Los Angeles County accounted for nearly half of the state's total loss, losing 32,953 students, largely due to a decrease in newcomer students within the LAUSD.
Private schools saw a steeper drop of 6.6%, while homeschooling declined by 3.7%.
The enrollment drop is causing budget deficits, leading to staff layoffs, program cuts, and potential school closures.
Hispanic students experienced the largest numeric loss (48,064), while white students saw the largest percentage decline (2.68%).
English learner enrollment fell by 8.2%, partly due to reclassification and partly due to out-migration.
From glancing at the numbers it looks pretty similar, but there's been a huge drop in births in California in the last 10-20 years so it's probably the last few years where that will be true.
Peak birth year was 1990 after booming through the 80s, births started falling off a cliff after 2008 and last year there were about the same number of births as in 1980 despite the population increasing by 80%.
Cameras will prevent a lot of unnecessary property damage, and more importantly, fully mitigate risk of killing humans/animals that are behind the car and outside the field of view.
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