Regulation does add friction. And it makes it easier for a parent to say 'no, you aren't allowed that app' (which you can obviously say anyway, but it gives you a very solid and non-negotiable reason to say no). Some children will find their ways round things, but a lot, if their friends aren't using a particular app, won't bother, or they will be the type of children who won't try and break the law.
Most apps and sites are terrible in terms of the parental controls they provide - they tend to be all or nothing. E.g. I'd like to have a group for our family on WhatsApp but I don't want my children to be able to join random WhatsApp groups and there isn't any way to have the former and not the latter.
Homework requires internet-connected devices (I guess you can semi-supervise that, but it becomes harder as they become older as you don't want to sit there watching them do all their homework).
There is also a cost socially, which is hard to navigate as a parent. If everybody is talking about minecraft every break and playing it together in the evenings, then it's hard for them if they haven't even seen the game.
It already exists in the schools near where I live in the UK, but only came into place in some of them in the last year. I was surprised that they had been so slow about it.
I was also surprised it hadn’t been the case. Apparently there were some policies against phone use during class but the enforcement was so toothless and sporadic that teachers and kids alike were ignoring the rule.
Now the rules are firm, universally applied, and have actual consequences. That last part seems to be the key. You can try to say phones are banned but until there are actual consequences it’s not really going to make a difference.
Round here they have a locked pouch they have to put their phone in during school which seems to work reasonably well (although I'm sure not perfectly). It makes it more clearcut if they do find somebody with a phone not in their pouch anyway that they've definitely broken the rules. They get locked at registration at the start of the day and then unlocked when they leave school at special points.
The vast majority of research-level pure mathematics is never going to get used in science or engineering. Obviously it is hard to predict what will be useful, but for the type of mathematics that is unlikely to be, there is a question as to why we care about it, and that almost has to come down to beauty in some sense - some mathematics gives us a new lens to look at parts of the mathematical world and others chip away at problems in more mundane ways in the hope that they inspire or contribute to new parts of mathematics that are beautiful.
The employers will think it requires less skill, whereas in fact it might actually require more skill to do a good job of being the human-in-the-loop.
For example, my sister is a translator and she says that checking AI translations is actually harder in many ways than doing a translation in the first place, but the agencies pay less for checking than actual translation.
I used to do audio transcription and some video captioning. Found it a bit drudgerous and fatiguing in rather specific ways, but I was effective at it and could find some satisfaction in it. It's been some years now, so I haven't had a chance to try out the kind of thing they're doing now, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to. I can raise my blood pressure just sitting here and thinking about what it would be like to have to go through a Word doc and correct the bot's errors. But, even putting aside my professional pride (or indignation), I can only imagine that it would make all kinds of mistakes I never would, and wouldn't be any help with the parts I'd have trouble with. And I'm pretty sure that, at least often enough for it to be an issue, the priming of reading what the bot thought something was could easily make it way harder to hear it correctly, if I notice there's something wrong in the first place. I assume there's a similar problem for your sister along the lines of throwing off how it would occur to her to express something in the target language.
As a parent of teenagers, I feel like the sites make it hard for parents.
When they were young, you had a choice between YouTube being completely locked down with no option to whitelist channels or letting them watch almost anything (although I think this has changed since but it's too late now for those of us with children that age).
Now, there is no way I can whitelist contact/groups on WhatsApp or Discord servers/friends. Once they hit 13, pretty much any option to restrict anything feels taken away from you as a parent.
Luckily, I have sensible children (I think!) but it's really hard as a parent trying to both be reasonably responsible, but not deny all technology, it's really hard to navigate a sensible course.
You gotta understand, the owners of these sites don't care about you, your kids or a good user experience. They care about serving ads, tracking your behavior and selling that behavior data to the highest bidder. If they get to your this behavior to your government ID, it will probably make it more valuable.
There's also a lot of room between YouTube (or even social media) and all technology...
Having owned a house for two decades (well two houses because we moved) and having two children, I would say that owning a home feels like a doddle in comparison :-)
I haven't done the sums to compare expenses, but when they are young childcare/lost earnings is definitely more than insurance/repair/maintenance costs (and tax, although in my country you pay tax as a tenant too).
In the UK if you sell or rent out a house it has to have an energy certificate with a rating (specified by a letter). I'm pretty sure that you aren't allowed to rent out properties with less than a certain rating and that rating which is higher than you might expect.
This is true. The rating is actually pretty low though - they only need to be a band E on the EPC. It’s soon to be C though.
One of the… problems with that is that a lot of our housing stock is very old, and honestly not ever going to reach that. The grading don’t take partial improvements into account so if you do internal wall insulation on half your house it means absolutely nothing on the EPC. The means to get to C for older properties basically require insulation (not practical in pre cavity wall buildings without an ungodly amount of work) and renewable installs. That’s not to say we shouldn’t try but it’s a tall order to ask anyone to rip everything back to brick and build cavity walls in th pre 1930 stock (which there’s absolutely craploads of)
But surely a higher rating would generally commend higher rents meaning either way it's the landlord pocketing the savings and the tenant is no better?
It’s changing to C in a few years. But the ratings are odd - only fully completed items count so if you insulate the rooms as you go, you won’t get the EPC benefit until everything has been completed. There’s no partial credit
Most apps and sites are terrible in terms of the parental controls they provide - they tend to be all or nothing. E.g. I'd like to have a group for our family on WhatsApp but I don't want my children to be able to join random WhatsApp groups and there isn't any way to have the former and not the latter.
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