- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
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I don’t get it. I was never this stupid as a kid.
Edit: thank you for explaining to me that many of you were that stupid. I guess I never hung around any of you.
Are you sure? Kids are pretty stupid.
I never intentionally destroyed expensive electronics to “try to impress” anyone in real life, let alone online (although that didn’t quite exist yet).
So, yeah, I’m sure.
When I was a kid schools didn’t have expensive electronics to destroy. But we sure drew a ton of penises in expensive textbooks.
Those textbooks cost pennies. It’s the licenses that were expensive.
My buddy stuck a paper clip in an electrical socket while we were in the cafeteria. Because his cousin had told him it would shoot sparks across the room. All it did was make him scream real loud, then the power to half of the cafeteria went out when the breaker blew.
Another friend “accidentally” stapled his homework to his hand, to try and get out of going to music class. Apparently his plan was to ham it up and go to the nurse instead. The teacher laughed, called him an idiot, and sent him to music class with a band-aid.
Kids have always been fucking stupid. The only difference is that now every kid has an internet-connected camera in their pocket, so their stupidity is more visible.
In second grade I remember a kid stapled his tongue lol
I used to be a teacher in the 2010s. I remember boys having this ghost pepper challenge they would do that would put them in literal tears.
I never stopped them. Some just have to learn through experience that being an idiot to impress your buds isn’t going to result in a good time for you.
That’s, like, a normal logical one. It’s actually food, it’s spicy. It makes sense to compete to see who can handle the spicy food. This is independently invented every day.
Stealing faucets from public bathrooms? That’s not a normal logical one. That’s a devious lick, and something invented to be highly memetic and propelled by a highly optimized algorithm that incentivizes recency, novelty, and dopamine hacking. It even effectively had a brand name!
How about pooping on top of the toilet reservoir?
My kid calls it an “upper decker”
We called it that in the 80s in rural Canada.
That’s actually harming someone, at least the janitor but it’s a hygiene issue and potential disease source. Yes it’s a stupid teenage prank but it does actual harm to someone else. Not cool (plus i don’t get why this would be funny: I’d groups it with the crayon eater and glue huffer , possibly complain to the school about special kids that need more assistance)
Eating a spicy pepper is just harmless fun. I’d join in that activity today.
Yeah, but some of that stuff isn’t just a spicy pepper. One kid died because of extreme capsaicin revealing a heart issue: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/death-teen-ate-spicy-chip-experts-rethinking-capsaicin-effects-rcna152766
I don’t think anyone should be living their lives in fear of being killed by zestiness
Plus did you read the article? It’s whole shtick is adverting “intense pain and searing heat” as a challenge yet the lawyer is trying to make it a truth in advertising issue. While I feel for the family, I don’t see how requiring an “adult use only”has any benefit to anyone nor clarify what the product is. There so many issues with lying advertising, I don’t see focussing on “telling the truth asa challenge”
If he died because playing soccer revealed a heart issue, would you ban soccer? At some point you need to stop overthinking all possible edge cases, stop attempting to pad yourself from all possible danger
I defend that one, it’s just challenging yourself, no harm to anyone else or any property, almost no danger of medical harm. What’s the harm in letting them embarrass themselves for the right to claim they did something others couldn’t?
That’s why I let them do it. If it would have harmed them seriously or someone else I would have stopped it. But still doesn’t make it less stupid. They put themselves in legit pain due to peer pressure.
If anything it served a good lesson so they might be less likely to succumb to peer pressure on things which may cause real harm in the future.
If so, I never learned that lesson. When I first heard about the one chip challenge, I was seriously tempted to challenge my teens to see if they could beat me
I was pretty stupid
You didn’t have the same social and monetary incentives TikTok provides.
Same, but I had classmates who were.
Some of my shenanigans definitely involved breaking electronics
Most of us were differently stupid, only because we didn’t have access to other people’s stupid ideas.
My worst moment of stupidity was lighting off fireworks in a barn full of dry hay. That could have gone so much worse than just ruining some cheap disposable electronics
Ditto. I grew up helping fix VCR by replacing displaced bands and gears. I knew to be careful not the let the magic smoke come out. Bad genie!
I was. When the bell would ring and the halls were hectic I would put popcorn in the communal microwave and put like 20 min and leave and sometimes nobody would notice till it catches fire
I almost burned down the school a couple times
Hopefully you’re less of a piece of shit now
Woah
Dude I was like 12 and severely bullied haha I’m a grown up now with a mortgage and a job
I feel you. I suppose a lot of people can’t imagine what it was like.
Dude, Sounds like you were old enough to understand that almost burning down your school intentionally, multiple times, was bad. Bullies or not. I’m not sure why you’re taken aback by someone thinking a little arsonist in training isn’t a good kid.
IIRC constant abuse tends to ‘reset’ the brain to earlier points of development where there was no abuse as it attempts to find less painful behaviour patterns. This results in delayed development of certain areas of the brain; most notably the prefrontal cortex that is heavily involved with decision making and social behaviour but that isn’t fully developed until one reaches ~25 years old so I don’t know what you mean by “should be old enough to understand” because they clearly weren’t physically capable of it.
Source is introductory psychology courses. One of my professors is a researcher in child development and worked a lot with kids like the person you’re replying too. Treating them like “pieces of shit” just leads to more damage, so chill out.
It never burned down just ruined the microwave
You literally said you nearly burned the school down multiple times.
Exaggerated obviously. The school is made of brick it wasn’t going to burn if I tried
I was a victim of this prank in college. We were on a road trip, sleeping in a lounge at another school and were awakened by a fire alarm. Somehow while we were sleeping a toaster with broken spring appeared on a table, filled with bread we didn’t have. The room filled with smoke, the entire dorm was evacuated, the fire department came.
After the fact, I realized I was probably explaining the situation to the perpetrators, but I don’t know if my annoyance at stupid prank was still amusing. They did keep straight faces.
TikTok is poison for the mind.
It literally shrinks your brain with excessive usage.
Youthful rebellion transcends technology.
Is there much difference between this and, say, using a pen to drill a hole in your desk?
Desks are cheaper, and the hole only slightly impairs functionality.
I’m not so sure about cheaper. A quick google search shows the desks I used in school are priced around $400-$600 depending on type (different subjects had different desks), whereas the Chromebooks are around $250. I definitely agree with your second point, though.
Huh. Never realized chromebooks were priced that low.
Thanks for the correction.
Chromebooks are designed to be cheap and disposable. I’ve seen some as low as ~$100. That doesn’t mean you can’t get some very expensive ones, but since they basically only allow you to use Google and a select few apps from the play store, I don’t know why the expensive ones exist.
I got an EOL Chromebook for $50, dropped Mint on it & use it to run a 3D printer instead of a raspberry pi.
laptops > raspberry pi imo. Having a screen is SO useful. I just got an old laptop to watch YouTube and mp4s on my TV without ads. Way better than the slow ad filled Roku OS
I used to have one as my primary work device for a few years. Honestly, it was surprisingly usable once you find online analogs for all typical things you do on a computer.
The biggest issue is you’d be using a free online service for some application, and then they start charging per month or the company goes under and you lose your work, so you have to keep finding new services and exporting your work to a common format that won’t disappear to a central file system like Drive diligently.
They are very cheap. We had to buy them ourselves for our kids, which at least gave choices. We settled n $400 because for the cost of the cheapest piece of shit laptop, we could get a high end Chromebook that ran circles around it: faster, much more durable, much lighter, multiple times battery life
i don’t know much about school desk but I can get a nice standing desk for $600. That is nuts.
Also I wonder if they sell replacement parts.
Industrial strength furniture that can withstand decades of abuse is not cheap.
And isn’t rendered unusable by a “hole drilled by a pen”. The person comparing a desk to a Chromebook is making a ridiculous comparison.
I’m sure the schools don’t pay that much for the desks (or the Chromebooks) since they buy in bulk – those are just the prices I could find for single units. I was more trying to show the difference in price, rather than exactly how much the schools spend.
Not even that, but they are simple and repairable. I remember we had these sleigh-style desks (same idea except the seat was one-piece molded plastic) that were a total of four parts (two rails, the seat and the desk top) aside from bolts/hardware, and they had a graveyard of parts to replace pieces as needed. And those desk were tough as all hell.
Sounds great, but… unfortunately, it seems impossible to tilt on the chair with those, which I see as an essential part of going to school.
Also, the heights of the chair and table seem unadjustable, and it seems the pupil is seated too far away from the desktop to actually be comfortable.
What a useless piece of piss. Yeah, at least it’s repairable, but is such a stupid piece of faulty furniture even worth repairing?
Again, that was the style and not the exact ones we had, but yeah they were all fixed position, however ours weren’t too bad. I dunno, I don’t remember anyone complaining much, I was on the taller side of my peers and fit fine while I recall even the smaller kids were alright too. Id wager a big reason they were chosen was so kids couldn’t balance on the back legs, fall back and crack dome. They were great for cracking your back!
Also, most school laptops are old. Someone did this at my school and got charged (iirc) $175 since it was the really old kind
What sort of hole were you drilling in a desk with a pen in order to completely render the desk unusable?
They also don’t release magic smoke. All my homies hate vandalizing desks.
Pen is less likely to start a fire and or create toxic smoke.
I’ve never done that either. The fuck? did you eat paint as a kid?
We did it for the love of the game and not to impress strangers
Bullshit you did it to impress the other nosepickers, same reason these kids are doing it.
Yup, the nose pickers just moved online.
Drilling a hole in your desk doesn’t lead to cancer.
Thank you, it’s relieving to see that some people don’t fall for the “kids today” bullshit
Aren’t the families responsible for the damages?
Yes they are. These 9th graders are feral though. That realization would require forethought.
Some of these kids should have been sent out to cut trail for a year between HS and Middle School.
This is highly dependent on the state and even the areas within a state. Here in California for instance we have the Williams Act which lays out a ton of guidance. Some of which impact students paying for things at schools. Some districts in the state view Williams Act and 1:1 Chromebook deployments as being something that the student/parents aren’t responsible for paying for even when they purposefully damage it. This can change though from region to region in the state based on how a districts legal team and its board chooses to read the law since no one so far (at least as far as I was last aware and I work in edtech) has pushed to see where it stops or starts. I’ve worked for districts that were on separate ends of that spectrum and even in the district that made parents pay for damages we still would give them a replacement and not charge them since it was added to a “tab” and only if they wanted transcripts did they have to pay.
That’s fair. In my district your insurance is covered if you qualify for assistance, but intentional damage isn’t included in insurance.
In my school we will still replace the Chromebook though (barring admin or district saying otherwise), and the financial impact will be fought by others at the district level. It’s above my pay grade.
What does “cut trail” mean in this context? Do you mean literally going to walking trails and maintaining them? Is there precident for that?
That was what I was referring to. I was being a bit hyperbolic, but a year in national service (beyond just the military) to do community service and gain skills in general not a new proposal. Pete Buttigieg suggested it after HS as part of his candidacy during the 2020 democratic primary.
I was having a similar conversation with my teen - out hiking and wondering how the trails were built and maintained. We talked scouting service projects and all the way back to the WPA, but have no actual info. The park is a hill so there are several rough stone stairways up to the ridge trail. They probably last years but do need attention
Occasionally you see online ideas about a year of service for every new adult and this would be a good option
*Junior High
In the states I’ve lived in, Junior High and Middle school are both synonymous with grades 6-8
the so-called Chromebook Challenge includes students sticking things into Chromebook ports to short-circuit the system.
I am rather surprised that works. I thought any modern device would have overload protection in place. I think I even remember accidentally tripping it on some device, but it would just reset after reboot.
I also tried to see the max output current of my previous phone this way. Load it up till the protection trips. Result: Stable up to 2.1A, tripped at 2.5A.Oh, yeah. A Xiaomi phone charger I have also shuts down if I either overload it or immediately load it near max rating rather than gradually increase the load.
once put usb-c in a usb-a port and my desktop pc performed an immediate reboot without any permanent harm…
Maybe they are poking a hole in the lithium battery
People used to do this in the UK with their ZX spectrums.
It’d be a crying shame if the students were required to complete the school year with physical books and a notebook.
Normally that’s exactly what they would do if enough students destroyed their computers to blow through the loaners. The frustrating thing is this is happening right when schools are set to do state testing and state testing is mostly online now. This requires every student in the building to have a device at the same time. Normally all the loaners would be for kids who forgot theirs that day.
Kids were doing dumb shit like this before there was a TikYik to put it on.
I wish we lived in a world where they’re doing it because they don’t want locked-down toys issued by an evil corporation. But of course that’s not the reason.
P.S. proprietary software should be illegal in education. Full stop.
I suppose the question would be the alternative.
Note the devices actively discouraging offline save is a huge asset to schools, since kids screw up a lot, forget their devices and need loaners to get through a day and such. Extra bonus if the device can’t be too fun, to avoid them being overly used at home and get broken more.So Chromebook is desirable because they suck so much.
I was thinking of buying a Chromebook for travelling cause it’s cheap. I was very close to buying one, but someone told me about the world of used ThinkPads. I ended up buying a used ThinkPad with an AMD R7 4750U and I am so glad I did. It can run literally every game I want lol
It depends on your use case. A same cost Chromebook would be much lighter, faster with the things it can do, and over ten hour battery life. As always, a lot depends on cost: a school districts bulk $50 buy will always be horrible but you can get a much nicer “high end” Chromebook for a couple hundred
I don’t game much and considered a Chromebook for basic travel use, but went with a tablet.
faster with the things it can do
What do you mean by this? Surely you don’t mean actual performance, right?
I don’t game a ton but having the performance to be able to do so is really nice IMO. The battery life is great as well (like 6+ hours depending on what you do etc), and being able to put any OS I want on it is huge too. I also like how durable it is too.
I feel like if I got a tablet, I’d want a keyboard, and then a mouse too. That’d still be best for portability though, most likely, but it’s kind of nice having a full laptop experience.
Perhaps it’s more like “Kids short-circuiting school issued chromebooks because of excessive surveillance.”
…but probably not (or at least, not entirely) because many kids are dumb.
source: was a dumb kid.
Nah, before Chromebooks we’d vandalize the text books and desk.
I would take the balls from mice
And also computer mice
Which also meant that they had to seal them in…
Which means that you couldn’t clean them out when they got dirty.
Fun times.
Excessive surveillance? It’s school property lol
It’s school property with a camera and microphone in their homes lol
Recording everything just in case they’re cheating lol
You’re assuming that they’re ones that leave the school property. You’re also assuming that they are constantly recording audio and video, which being chromebooks we know they’re most likely not since they’re low spec low storage devices since they’re cloud based.
This is also assuming there’s some mastermind at the school compiling all this data versus some teacher working essentially a second job dealing with broken chromebooks every day because kids are irresponsible. Suggeating this is anything but good old fashioned vandalism of school property is ludicrous, but it’s also an expected conclusion for here on Lemmy. Some of the comments in this thread are seriously unhinged.
To sum it up, kids are dumb and always have been and it’s nothing more than that.
It happens, for security sake it’s usually safer to prepare for the worst case scenario.
Hi there, I’m currently in highschool. You don’t understand how school laptops work. There was a court case where a school laptop was recording from a child’s home - it actually happened.
Also when you shut the screen it doesn’t turn off all the way. I’ve had times where I shut the screen, out it in my bag and 45 minutes later on my Bluetooth headphones I’ll head the windows notification sound.
And just for clarity, do I personally believe that they are spying with audio/video? probably not tbh.
Do they track EVERYTHING you do on the laptop? yes. Very obviously yes.
I remain utterly convinced that Tiktok is nothing but a chinese psyop experiment to see how far they can manipulate people into actions that would otherwise be prevented by our brains screaming in self preservation.
Has there ever been a “good” trend on tiktok? Every week its just another destructive thing that gullible idiots are being tricked into doing.
Soon as Chump took office the moderation flipped. It was open and handled well. Now if you call a corrupt politician an asshole you get a violation.
Talk about Palestine get a violation. Critical of the Chump regime get a violation.
Chow somehow inserted himself fully up Chumps ass on like Jan 22. TT hasn’t been the same since.
TikTok always favored Trump because China always favored Trump and TikTok is operated by Chinese Military directly out of Chinese servers which also store location data, contacts, text message history, and photo library of every device which has ever installed TikTok.
It’s a weapon to be used against the US now and since always.
I agree. I was exposed to a lot of leftist content on tiktok and it’s made me want to protest. Good thing you explained that it’s stupid.
TBF TikTok wants the US Government to fail regardless of who is in office at the time.
It’s like that meme from flippanarchy the other day.
Accurate username
As I age I find myself feeling more and more like the cool step-dad or uncle.
Y’know I hate everything Chromebooks stand for. “You get 'em, kid. Now how about we get some pizza?”
Google didn’t respond to Ars Technica’s request for comment.
To be fair, I don’t really see why they should. Chances are they didn’t factor in that level of stupidity when designing those things.
It makes sense that they wouldn’t have anything to comment anyway. Google themselves don’t actually manufacture most Chromebooks, they only provide the OS. I imagine the majority of the mass of Chromebooks in the world by weight are actually designed and made by Lenovo, Asus, Dell, HP, etc. Even the Google branded ones are manufactured by someone else under contract.
It’d be like demanding Microsoft explain to the news why your Dell caught fire simply because it had Windows installed on it.
That’s another thing I was wondering about; Google used to design their own Chromebooks, but those always were the premium options and way too expensive for school use.
Fuck chromebooks anyways, Google shouldn’t be allowed to steal so much information about our youth directly from the devices they use at school. They should be using laptops with Linux installed on them, preferably PopOS to preserve the kids privacy.
I don’t condone damaging school property, although I think it’s a lesser evil to Google’s privacy practices on Chromebooks.
I agree but I’m not sure why specifically popos though
Pop!OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution featuring a custom GNOME desktop.
It is designed to have a minimal amount of clutter on the desktop without distractions in order to allow the user to focus on work.
This distro was also designed with security and privacy in mind.
So students can more easily focus on their work while also being more secure and private while using an easy to use interface, I know it’s not the only one but its a good one!
Linux mint or something fedora based are also good choices. Lots of flavors out here in the linux world.
Yeah, no worry about the lithium fires. Fuck those chromebooks.
I’m with you, but that’s not the reason these kids are doing this. It’s because they are idiots.
If this were an unbiased and honest article; then it would read “Kids are short-circuiting their school-issued Chromebooks for social clout.” The subtle message, in this article, is TikTok = bad, which is illogical because events such as this will occur regardless of platform or even lack of a platform. It will ALWAYS happen. The question is how to mitigate these events as much as possible, because it’s impossible to completely eradicate “kids doing X for social clout.” It’s a part of learning and being human.
Yes but without tik tok this is a kid or two being stupid and charged a couple hundred at one school. I think we had 3 kids today at school destroy their laptops.
You can replace TikTok with any social media platform. That’s why this argument is illogical in that it blames TikTok.
I don’t remember Friendster causing mayhem like this.
Lemmy seems to not be spreading challenges either.
You have a point, but TikTok has a unique power in this moment.
And if the students did see it on TikTok, then it’s factual, specific, reporting.
TikTok is at the forefront of designing algorithms that optimize for this sort of situation. Reddit isn’t. YouTube does not appear to be. They have their own issues, but it’s not exactly this sort of optimization.
VRChat is another social network not optimized around incentivizing this mimicking and reposting behavior.
Snapchat is not built around this sort of algorithm either.
If it had happened on Friendster; then it would have been because of the specific user(s) creating and posting such content, not because of the platform. To say platform = bad because a user or users post negatively affecting content is a sweeping generalization which does not reflect reality, meaning that the negative connotation of TikTok = bad is still incorrect. The users which created and posted such content, in this case, are to blame.
If students see such content on social media; then the first thought should not be: platform bad; it should be: who posted it, and for what reason(s).
It can be an issue with the people starting these challenges while also being an issue with the way tiktok works with sharing these copycat videos on the platforms algorithm.
I don’t think “omg tiktok bad” but in the case of these dumb challenges, it is one of the few things I can see people actually pointing at when saying tiktok is bad, rather than “but china.”
it is one of the few things I can see people actually pointing at when saying TikTok is bad
Yes, and this article reinforces that idea, regardless of whether or not TikTok = bad is correct, which is my point.
But it’s not happening on any social media platform. These sorts of “challenges” and trends seem to happen almost exclusively on TikTok, for whatever reason.
Yeah, could have been called “kids are learning how circuits work thanks to TikTok trend” and suddenly the story has a whole other meaning
Nearly 20 years ago, I was in a computer programming class surrounded by clunky towers and desktops.
Suddenly, a loud popping, then one of the machines starts belching smoke like a budget fog machine. The kid using it is calmly moved to another station while the prof investigates.
Fifteen minutes later - pop. Smoke again.
Turns out the kid was jamming a paperclip into the power supply like he was playing Operation: Arson Edition.
That was his last day.
On the bright side, computers are a lot cheaper now - and kids are still dumb. So, maybe progress?
I have the same memory, except the teacher would just pop his head out from the office and tell us to knock it off. Someone managed to draw a giant line of Axe spray across the electronics desk/counter things and made a massive fireball. Nobody really got in trouble in that class.
Just got a notification about this from my kids school district in Northern CA.
