It wasn't until the two-ways that I even kind of wanted one. I remember being at the mall with a group of kids and one of the girls got paged by her mom and we had to go around to find a pay phone for her to check in and I recall thinking 'well that's stupid, I just check in when I get somewhere and when I leave, she's just carrying an annoying reminder to go find a payphone'
Once kids started sending little messages with them, I wanted one. Then they had fun colors and transparent cases. Luckily my nokia brick phone was just a few years away, half a life-time then, but just a few years in hindsight. ;)
None of my friends at that time were drug dealers, but they liked to joke they were because of the stigma.
I couldn't believe this worked when one of my friends did it! Felt like such an easy cheat lol
My parents likely wouldn't have approved but this payphone conundrum was what lead to me and my friends attempt to build a red box, which never worked well for us but we learned a lot in the attempt!
Nah, Nokia 3330 with WAP, that stuff was awesome. I built a bunch of WAP sites way back when. Slow, clunky, but usable on a phone with a tiny screen and a numeric keypad. Happy days.
I never knew the Blackberry pagers were 386s. I know they've made a variety of portable 386s (and still do) but had no idea they made them into Blackberries.
Literal beepers were still in use as late as 2012 as backups for on call people, enough so that we supported them at PagerDuty for redundancy (the API was email->provider->beeper)
> Senator Ronald Rice passed away in 2023 - the New Jersey Pager ban still in place - months later The Washington Post editorial board would call on schools to ban cellphones entirely - part of a new moral panic about kids and digital devices, many of whose parents were once prohibited from bringing pagers to school.
I was waiting for the author to point to cellphones in the same breath. Obviously, there is a substantial difference between a one-way receive-only device and cellphones.
> Obviously, there is a substantial difference between a one-way receive-only device and cellphones.
Motorola released their two way pager, the Tango in 1995. In 1996, they had an app for the Tango to access the web [1]. You can't make a call with a pager, but nobody makes calls anymore; there's not a lot of difference in capability; although there's a large difference in distribution.
Service was ~$25/month (and only worked in your area) and you were limited to ~100 messages a month at that price (with each message <100 chars long). I can't imagine browsing the web with that service would be affordable for any real use.
Prior to cell phones being powerful enough to just shove megabytes of JS at them and expect them to work it out, the web had a lot of little subsets like this. I'm sure it wasn't really "the web", but a few pages that used HTTP to access them but if you strayed outside that set it completely disintegrated. I believe I saw some Palm Pilot optimized web sites, there used to be web sites optimized for mobile devices back when that meant something, there were some Dreamcast-optimized sites, etc. It is probably better to imagine it as access to their bespoke services over HTTP, and they were all pretty useless as they lacked any network effect.
I remember learning about these in elementary school. We were sitting in assembly in a room called "The Pod". Listening to rules and administrative things. On the list of banned items never to bring to school, along with drugs, guns, and knives, beepers were listed. I wasn't sure what they were, but from the context and too many cartoons, I assumed they were an explosive device that beeped a few times before blowing up!
In the late 1990s, my dad attended night classes with other adult learners to earn his MBA. Everywhere he went during those years, my dad had a beeper clipped to his belt for an on-call hospital rotation. During his first week of class, my dad's beeper loudly went off during the middle of the lecture. As my dad scrambled out of the lecture hall to call the number on the little screen, the professor accurately guessed: "You're a doctor, aren't you?"
I love that too. You definitely don't see as many of them these days. By 2006 they were kind of a punchline (cf the TV series "30 Rock" and their portrayal as a goofy dead-end tech for weirdos, sold by Dennis Duffy).
This might or might not be an interesting digression (apologies if it's the latter!) but many medical professionals still carry beepers or pagers of some kind. Not like "an app on their phone that will ring your phone at you even through Do-Not-Disturb" (I have one of those), but something that is very recognizably an old school beeper. They often have a SIM card in them, and the newer ones sometimes have wifi as well for redundancy.
My wife is a nurse at a cancer treatment center, she coordinates care for extremely sick people who are getting very specialized treatments and she's kind of the front-line person for dealing with them and project managing emergency situations, so she and all the doctors she work with carry them. I thought it was actually pretty cool :)
I asked her about it once, and apparently the hospital system looked at the more modern app-based paging stuff and decided that while it was cheaper, the reliability hit wasn't worth it to them. The physical hardware for these things is outrageously sturdy, they have a lifespan of like a decade, they're extremely easy to replace. Sure, your wifi might be out or your telephony might be down, but that's a problem your app has to deal with too. Apps are easier to provision, but it's an extra layer of stuff that can go wrong (your phone is getting an update or out of battery, you left it in your car because you were playing music with it and forgot to take it out of the console, it got stolen because phones are recognizably valuable) so they just stuck with the old familiar form factor that does one thing, extremely reliably.
This isn't a criticism of the app-based paging systems or anything; they're quite reliable in my experience. I just thought it was a neat additional data point about the considerations that go in to the thought process about provisioning an alarm for your employees when the alarm almost always means either "I have a time-sensitive question about a patient's ongoing medical emergency" or "your patient is about to die".
Hospitals in my area of the US still use POCSAG pagers, totally unencrypted. They do mention patient information, but I guess the obscurity makes it ok.
> Hospitals in my area of the US still use POCSAG pagers, totally unencrypted. They do mention patient information, but I guess the obscurity makes it ok.
Nope, the obscurity doesn't make it okay. If it takes place over the phone lines, it is arguably exempt from encryption requirements under HIPAA (much like a fax).
Otherwise, they're just turning a blind eye and hoping nobody notices (which is surprisingly common when it comes to HIPAA).
The good news (for them, not for patients) is that, even if they get caught, the maximum fine is $2 million per calendar year per category of violation, so if they're flush enough they don't even need to bother being compliant in this area.
It's over the air, not even phone lines. PDW, SDRSharp, and an rtl-sdr dongle is all that's needed.
And yes, there is a lot of patient info in that traffic. It's not illegal for the hospital to broadcast this, and it's not illegal to listen in and decode the signals, but it is very much illegal to do anything with the information gathered.
> It's over the air, not even phone lines. PDW, SDRSharp, and an rtl-sdr dongle is all that's needed. And yes, there is a lot of patient info in that traffic. It's not illegal for the hospital to broadcast this, and it's not illegal to listen in and decode the signals, but it is very much illegal to do anything with the information gathered.
I'm not familiar with this particular technology, which is why I didn't make a definitive claim in my previous comment. But I am quite intimately familiar with HIPAA and related regulations, and I am extremely skeptical of the third sentence you wrote.
Maybe it uses particular spectrum that is considered illegal to tamper with, just like analog cell phone signals, and HIPAA (inappropriately IMHO) leans on that to explain away an exemption from encryption?
I don't think I have any logs of these any more, but when I was listening on the local hospital's pager traffic, I seem to recall messages that were along the lines of [last name][room number][sexually transmitted disease test is complete].
Surprised me at the time too because I used to do work dealing with processing CDA documents into fhir data and I know how crazy HIPAA can be with PHI/PII, but at the same time these legal frameworks often have carveouts or super serious adoption deadlines that keep getting pushed to next year (and then next year, and then next year).
At least twice, I've accidentally set my iOS devices to the Do Not Disturb focus mode. First time made me miss a job interview calendar reminder, leading to me (1) learn there's no way to disable this 'feature', the 'do not disturb' focus cannot be deleted, and (2) setting the DnD-focus-mode-specific wallpaper to something radically different from normal just so I'd spot it faster next time. It did happen again, but the second time I knew what was up even on the lock screen and turned the focus back to normal before it did any harm.
As an “enterprise” developer in the 80’s, we all had beepers to go along with our suits and ties. People often thought we must be doctors, but we were just corporate mainframe developers.
A law firm I worked for in the mid-90s started a helpdesk rotation with five or six of us taking shift with a single beeper. The only real complain was from the three women on the team, who had no belts or pockets to hang the device from (skirts and dresses were mandatory for female employees at the time, and women's clothes rarely have pockets or belts).
More to do with the fact a pager will reach places a phone won't. Operating theatres are often in the basement or the middle of the building where mobile signals don't reach but pager signals do. They're super high power and lower frequency so they penetrate further.
The history of phone tech is "can we get more done with less joules?", while a pager is "you have one job".
Even when a pager is implemented on top of normal cellular networks like 3/4/5G, it's still better because there's nothing else on the system to drain the battery.
But it doesn't need to be on those systems at all, it can be an even less 'smart' radio receiver such as POCSAG system, on its own frequency, chosen specifically for getting though concrete etc., and disregarding any concerns about bandwidth because 1.2 kb/s is probably more than it needs.
It actually makes a lot of sense. A lot of pagers operate on lower frequencies (~100 mhz instead of 400 or 700) that can penetrate way deeper than the higher frequencies used by modern phones. Plus the data rate is substantially lower, which acts in the favor of getting reception.
So yeah it makes a ton of sense. These are very different devices operating using different frequencies and protocols.
Pagers are typically unidirectional. So a client's inability to transmit back an ACK deep inside a building is not a constraint. Just crank up the broadcast power on the network side.
The policy at my school was that any "electronic device," be it a cellphone or pager, would be confiscated and held until the end of the school year. I had this happen to a (not yet modified) Radio Shack tone dialer.
In most cases they are not, but you need to have a good relationship with your parents and they need to care enough to bother the school about it. Otherwise, they won’t listen to you, a child.
> In most cases they are not, but you need to have a good relationship with your parents and they need to care enough to bother the school about it. Otherwise, they won’t listen to you, a child.
It's more nuanced than that: there's shades of grey in there, not just black and white.
I had a good relationship with my parents, they cared a great deal about anything related to education and would keep involved with everything academic (even though my parents both never finished school at all, not even primary school). Most kids I was in school with had parents with the same outlook.
Telling my parents that I had broken a school rule would definitely get them involved immediately, but "playing with toys when you are supposed to be learning" is unlikely to win sympathy.[1]
The reason that the schools could hold things until the end of the year (mostly they held them for a week, at worst) was because if you complained to your parent that you were playing with a toy during a time when you were supposed to be learning, the parent with likely confiscate the toy permanently.
At least when the school confiscated it, you eventually got it back.
I imagine, even today, with most parents who care about their kids academic outcomes (surprisingly, quite a few don't), the conversation is likely to go like this:
K: The school confiscated my $TOY today. They aren't giving it back until year-end.
P: Why? Was it switched on/used/making/noise during class?
K: Errr ...
At that point, the kid is now in trouble with both school and parents. Only if the kid is reasonably certain that:
a) The parent doesn't care if they were not attending to the lesson at hand, and
b) The parent will call the school to get the $TOY back,
would the child complain to the parent.
[1] Of course, when I was in school you could take anything to school; you just couldn't play with it until a break in classes. I expect that the outrage now is due to confiscation happening not due to usage, but for simply possession of the toy.
This probably has more to do with the fact that 30 years ago if you brought an electronic device into school it was probably relatively cheap and there was a decent chance your parents didn't even know about it. And either way it wasn't really a necessary part of your existence. Now it's a $1200 phone that is most likely the primary way your parents communicate with you between the time you're out of school (around 2:30 or 3 when I was in, unless there were after school activities) and they return from work.
I don't see how it wouldn't be legal. The school has a variety of responsibilities surrounding its students, going back hundreds of years. They aren't a 'guardian', but the school is entrusted with a child's safety, and has responsibility. For example, a school may tell a child to "be quiet" and "sit down" and "sit in this seat" and "why are you not in class", even forcing you to go to school.
The school is allowed to dole out punishments, such as detention or even denying access to the school itself. This isn't a normal "a bunch of random adults are around" relationship.
TBH, most people don't get the `in loco parentis` bit of school. It's maddening that there are comments from well-educated, smart and intelligent people in this thread who are wondering if it is legal for the school to dole out punishment to kids.
Look up the relevant legislation in your jurisdiction; dig deep enough and you will find either explicit legislation or case-law confirming that it is legal, usually with the phrase `in loco parentis`.
Any on the spot decision that needs to be made with regard to the child, the school can make it with no requirement for input or consent from the parents.
Trust me, you don't want it a different way, else one day you are going to be asking the school either a question along the lines of "Why did you wait for a parent callback before you took action?" or a question along the lines of "Why are you requiring my response to these questions every single day?"
Probably one of those things where if the parent contacted the school, the item would have been returned but most kids didn't want their parents to know they had the item at school in the first place.
Children don't really have property rights, and even if they did, courts have consistently ruled that the bill of rights is reduced in school settings.
Children don't have property rights but their parents do and they own their children's things. If a parent went to the school and asked for the confiscated item that school would be insane to deny them.
They'd be insane to deny them because disgruntled parents can cause an incredible amount of trouble for schools, not because confiscating the phone when established by clearly communicated policy is actually meaningfully illegal.
Children own their stuff. Parents can control the child’s things like they control other aspects of child’s life. They give some of the control to schools.
What happens when child becomes an adult? They own all their stuff from before, the parents do not keep it. It can be complicated since parents let child use stuff, but anything given to or bought by the child is theirs.
> What happens when child becomes an adult? They own all their stuff from before, the parents do not keep it.
I think that parents basically "gift" their adult children their old things. At 17 years and 364 days a parent can take everything their child "owns" and burn it/throw it in a wood chipper with zero legal issues (concerning specifically the destruction of property anyway, burning/chipping some things will get you in trouble), however once the adult child has been informally gifted their old "belongings" there's no take backs without legal repercussions.
Things do get more complicated with things the child bought with their own money... I'm guessing the law would be more willing to accept that those things should belong to the child, but even if a 15 year old kid buys an xbox with their own money I doubt the cops would arrest the kid's parents for smashing it with a bat.
> and even if they did, courts have consistently ruled that the bill of rights is reduced in school settings.
Courts have ruled that there are specific interests in school that meet the generally applicable (not special, weaker) standards applicable for permissible action where rights protected in the Bill of Rights are involved.
But establishing categories of and confiscating contraband is... not a disputed state power, in any case.
The underlying legal theory is that schools are 'in loco parentis' and can establish rules while the students are entrusted to the school by the parents.
Because the loophole was you could get it back at any time if your parents came down to claim it. And (for me) it was always easier to get it back at the end of the year than to tell my parent, where I would still lose the item (via my parent's revocation) AND catch an extra punishment on top of it.
I was approached by the principal while I was using my modified tone dialer on a pay phone in the hall and he freaked out a bit and I showed him it was for dialing stored numbers and he looked at it for a second and said “Ok. It’s just that it looks a lot like a pager… maybe be more discrete with it”
In the 80's I had a walki-talkie confiscated till the end of the year also. It "just happened" to be crystaled for the same freq the school narcs/maintenance used.
I got my pager at 18 (no one cool called it a beeper, this was when 'cool' was still a thing), and yes, my weed dealer had one, and knew my beeper code (it was a beeper code but you sent it to a pager, young people just do this). Beeper code is worth explaining: you'd send a number to be called back at, and there was room for more digits, so everyone had a three-digit number which was theirs, and you just kinda had to know it. Which could be tricky, so there would be conversations like "ok who is <three digit number>" "oh thats <friend>" "ah right". This let you page people from places which weren't your home.
The whole thing sort of worked, but we were happy to ditch it for cell phones when they became affordable.
I recall in the 90's we would add 911 if it was urgent and 420 if it was about drugs. We would also end with our 3-digit 'pager code' to identify who sent the message.
Seems like every decade people have to freak out. But it isn't just the common generational trope. The religious right has to always have another issue that can be used as the poster boy for the war on Lucifer. If you don't have a boogie man, then how do you keep the troops lathered up and ready to fight.
Let's also not forget the scares about the dangers of smoking, leaded gasoline, asbestos, licking radium paint, and drunk driving.
Not all new inventions are a net benefit to society just because they are new, not all things are always good in all contexts, and 2024 is not the end of history, or of cultural evolution.
But all of your examples are 'real'. Real physical things that can impact someone materially. Chemicals, products.
Lot of the 'scare' things are just 'ideas'. Should we outlaw ideas is the problem. That is basically how anti-communism works, 'communism' is an idea that the right calls a 'mind virus' that we should ban because it can infect people.
Of course, super hard to tell what is freedom of speech these days. I've been hearing the right scream about freedom of speech for years now, and all of sudden with Gaza they want to round people up if anybody criticizes Israel.
Having a television or radio blasting propaganda into your living room is real. It's an actual physical thing, it's not a concept. So is the Facebook app, and the social dynamics that prevail on it. So are screens in general.
I'm sure that the optimal amount of all those things is non-zero, but it's possible that it's also not 'all day, every day.'
It's not unreasonable for schools to restrict this, just like it's not unreasonable for a school to restrict you from bringing a mariachi band with you to class.
Comic books. Elvis and the rock-n-roll music. Heck, even self-pleasure makes you grow hair on your palms, lose your eyesight, and causes mental illness.
Don't forget home taping destroyed the music industry and nothing new has been recorded since the early 1980s.
And porn on BBSs predated modern Internet porn by a few decades and, as I recall, it was even a Time cover story once--when the weekly news mags were still relevant.
To me, two things are interesting in this post. First, even though urban legends have been documented and debunked for years, people still get suckered by them. Second, using photographs of newspaper pages is an increasingly rare form of documenting past events. While you can forge a newspaper page, it is more complicated than tweaking some HTML.
Yes, you are right, but theoretically, it's easier to prove the forgery if you have copies of the newspaper stored in multiple places. I think we need multiple archives of newspaper articles stored in an archival medium. We can't trust crypto signatures to be future-proof.
I don't carry a cell phone, and stopped using email years ago.
When I do discuss these experiences, most people aren't able to believe me. "How?" is a typical response... which to me seems equally strange a question.
It does make parking difficult ("pay with the app!"); last time I had a court action, the judge required me to sign a document stating I did not use email, because this is "a required piece of information."
Until this year, I handed out my numeric pager as "my phone number," which grateful reduced successful contact [to my chagrin].
But I've learned that, aside from mentioning "I don't have a phone" it's really not useful to discuss it any further on the internet. There seems to be a large cohort of trolls who love arguing with anybody who doesn't have a phone. I guess it bothers them that some of us can be free from what so many are addicted to.
I wouldn't argue with you. I'd just observe that you cut yourself off from a lot of modern conveniences. (I certainly grew up without cell phone until well into my adult life and largely without Internet as well.) You don't need electricity or indoor plumbing either--although those are arguably at a different level.
Modern conveniences is right. Everything is two factor authenticated now. Even if you avoid that in your private life your workplace is liable to roll it out if they haven't already.
There are alternatives to 2FA that don't require phones. But, yeah, at some point you become the weird person who refused to have a smartphone (or a cell phone at all) and, unless you're really special in some way, you probably have a target on your back.
For my workplace it was a choice of downloading duo on the phone or getting sms codes. In the past year they cut out the sms codes, now you get a temporary code from the duo app you need to enter into the login portal vs just a push to duo.
There are TOTP apps for regular computer. I am using an old tablet for the microsoft authenticator and banking apps.
Technically it is pretty much like a phone but it is not used as a phone. No number, no sim card.
I am pretty sure some of these apps could work on waydroid too if needed.
So in the end all this discussion really depends if we are talking about the mobile device as a whole that you carry with you nearly all the time or some parts of the ecosystem that you may have at home.
Not all Amish are the same. You're likely thinking of Swartzentruber Amish. It depends on your community, some have phones, some have a house with a shared phone. The Amish world at the moment is facing some of these changes, and some standards are evolving, but there will always be some separation with the English world until these modernities can be used in ways that don't erode community faith and relationships.
It's very inefficient because every tower must broadcast every message. This is why you can find an archive of pages from the morning of September 11th online, they transmitted unencrypted to a huge area.
So that raises costs and limits the coverage area. Fine for a hospital with 100 idk doctors who need paged, not fine for continental coverage of 100 million users.
It's very inefficient because every tower must broadcast every message.
No, it's incredibly efficient because the messages are tiny.
If you need to send a long message, then you page the person with "you have a long message from XYZ, please use higher-bandwidth mechanisms to retrieve it".
I happily used PagerDirect[.net] 2020-2023 — their service includes a receive-only pager, either numeric or alphanumeric. They also have Tx pagers, but I have no experience with that service.
An issue with Rx-only paging is that your device must be on 24/7, and within RF range — if offline/out-of-range, you will never receive that page.
I only stopped because I moved outside of their reliable service area (but they provide service to practically any metro center with greater than 100k people). When I lived 3 miles from "downtown" the pager was a great asset (for call screening, e.g.: spammers never "figured out" how a pager worked).
>- Basically 2 companies, operating with antequated websites (and prices) still provide service at the historic prices
Hold out companies for obsolete technologies always fascinate me. I remember reading there is like one guy who services candle pin bowling pin setters that run on 90s era Turbo Pascal software on whitebox 486 PCs and he's pretty much retired and drives up and down the North East in an RV doing his work.
I remember having to get an exemption to have my alphanumeric pager in school because my job (pc support for a Fortune 500) required me to have it with me when I got to the office... it was ridiculous but eventually worked out.
--
Alternatively I've got a modern DAPnet ham radio alphanumeric pager now that I use occasionally for notifications related to radio stuff. :) (https://hampager.de)
Hey I was waiting for someone to mention DAPnet. Which pager did you buy? Do you run your own gateway? I have a Pilot AL-A26 which is a neat little device, but my example is filtered for 450 to 458 MHz, and on 12.5 kHz steps. I can get it to just barely work with 449.800 MHz but that's awfully close to a local repeater.
I've just got a normal DMR hotspot and I ended up with the GP2009 just because it was stupidly simple to work with.. my only issue is nigh rechargeable batteries don't last as long as I'd like.
My brother gave me a beeper as a Christmas present in 1996. It was cool, but it got really cool when I bought an 800-number from LDDS Worldcom. The only thing I was charged was (IIRC) 6¢ per minute, and no call setup charge.*
I got paper bills in the mail for $0.34. Friends could page me from a payphone without having to drop a coin.
*(EDIT: I think I misremember a bit. If the call originated from a pay phone, I think I was charged additional for that.)
I had a beeper in high school around the same time, because it came with a voicemail box and was a lot cheaper than a separate phone line. (Around $5/month in 1992 dollars, IIRC.)
It was a way to get messages from friends without my parents and siblings eavesdropping, and despite said siblings monopolizing the home landline.
it's important to note that the fake panic over beepers is not related to the current concerns that kids shouldn't be on their phones all day long and at school. The former is a "fake moral panic" based on the premise that all kids were doing / selling drugs. the latter is a concern regarding mood/attention/bullying/self-esteem well established by statistics and experts (though not all experts, it's hotly debated. For parents with kids, not so much debate as it's extremely obvious).
The article refutes this: "months later The Washington Post editorial board would call on schools to ban cellphones entirely - part of a new moral panic about kids and digital devices, "
There's no "moral" panic about devices right now and this is straight up strawman. it's about mental health and learning.
Seriously, talk to a teacher about dealing with cell phone use in class. A friend relayed a story to me recently of a parent (whose child is constantly on their tablet during class) who had the audacity to respond to teachers' complaints by saying their child "shouldn't be punished for their [internet] addiction."
There's no reason kids should be on smart phones during the school day at all. The only "panic" is from parents who are terrified of being more than ten seconds away from contact with their child.
I think "moral panic" (to paraphrase Terry Eagleton on ideology) is like halitosis in that it's what the other person has and not oneself. Arguments that invoke it seem always to break down into finger-pointing and one-upmanship.
Maybe this is more a reflection of the US being civilized or not, but there are teenage “children” the same size as the kid in this story, using actual guns to commit violent robberies in parts of my city. So it’s not trivial to determine whether an adult-sized human holding a black gun is a threat or not.
This is America; Owning a real gun should not be an acceptable reason to be shot by the police. What the fuck is the point of all the aggressive defense around the second amendment if the second a cop sees a gun they are free to murder people?
Cops are not judge, jury, and executioners, and in fact have zero authority to hand down punishment. Being shot for holding a gun is absurd.
Is it that unreasonable? An adult-sized person was waving a realistic looking gun around and (allegedly) pointing it at houses. Some attempt at deescalation needs to be made, but if that fails, I wouldn’t want the cop to just shrug and leave. I’d expect him to do whatever it takes to remove the gun from this individual.
There’s a huge difference between simply owning a gun vs wandering around in public pointing it at people.
You think fentanyl is magic killing dust? What are you, one of those moronic cops who thinks they'll die from seeing fentanyl?
They only way you're injuring someone with fentanyl is getting them to ingest an unsafe amount of it one way or another. That's not really different from a lot of prescription drugs. Or some OTC ones, like Tylenol. Or lye and many other cleaning agents.
The dose makes the poison. The LD50 for lye is 4,090 (rats) - 6,600 mg/kg (mice). The LD50 for fentanyl is 3.1 mg/kg in rats and 0.03 mg/kg in monkeys. So, very different.
The only way someone is ingesting that accidentally is if a classmate is attempting to poison them. There are a lot of other poisons that can be ingested in small doses if someone is trying to injure you. Fentanyl is not going to leap out of someone's pocket and fly down your throat. It's not magic killing dust.
Accidental drug dosing happens all the time, with things with much larger effective doses. People mix up drugs. Drugs absolutely fall out of people's pockets on a near constant basis.
OP is suffering from the moral panic about fentanyl. It's gotten so ridiculous that cops suffer from a collective begin near it is enough to knock them out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0Vzz_P9JBk
If people wonder how possession worked in the middle ages, look no further than this.
I don't know what it is in US culture and society that makes it so hostile towards anyone and anything even vaguely suspected of a crime, but this sort of thing is shockingly common, even when dealing with children. Here's another case I encountered a few weeks ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Brown_case – there are so many things wrong with the entire thing, starting with charging an 11-year old as an adult(!!!) but what really takes the cake is:
"Presiding Judge Dominick Motto of the Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, Common Pleas Court initially denied decertification and transfer to juvenile court because Jordan would not admit his involvement in the crime."
"We're going to punish you harder because you claim to be innocent" What kind of backward clinically insane shitcunt logic is that?! Especially when we're talking about a 11-year old?!
It's no surprise that the "kids for cash" scandal could have continued for years, because the entire system is rotten. In any half-way decent system giving 3 months detention to a 14-year old for making a MySpace parody page of a teacher should have set off every possible alarm bell, and that it didn't is pretty damning for the entire system. Also: what kind of school brings this matter to a judge in the first place...? This along is pretty crazy.
Because it shows no remorse. The reason for reduced sentences for juvenile offenders is the idea that they ‘didn’t know any better’. That they can learn and grow and NOT be a menace to society soon.
If they still refuse to take any ownership or show any contrition even after being clearly shown something was a major problem (hence the court case), then why reduce the penalty? Who would it be helping, exactly?
Remorse for what? Something he didn't do? There is nothing to be remorseful about. This is the sort of non-logic where you're presumed guilty and/or punished for asserting your innocence. Aside from the obvious absurdness of it, it's also literally unconstitutional as it violates your 5th amendment rights, which is why another judge reversed the decision later on. And considering all of this is about an 11-year old makes it that much worse.
If the court finds you guilty, then by definition within the system you did it.
It doesn't mean you actually did, but it does mean the system says you did.
Which is the point of my comment. It doesn't mean it actually makes sense in real life, but it's why the system does what it does.
And the reason why the system will prosecute kids like adults sometimes - the nominal reason is because they don't think it's worth giving them a pass either due to the severe nature of the crime, or because of the lack of contrition of the accused.
If they're actually innocent, then per the system they should get zero penalty eventually regardless of how they are prosecuted.
We know that being held in an adult jail while awaiting trial is a pretty severe penalty in fact of course, which is why it eventually got thrown out that he got treated that way. Plenty of adults get stuck in jail for years while awaiting trial, then get released and theoretically suffered no penalty either. But we also know that is bullshit. No clear better alternatives (except bail) have shown themselves however.
If the kid had been caught on tape murdering a bunch of other kids and still claimed he was innocent, then no one would be objecting that he be put in an adult jail while awaiting trial though. Since putting someone that violent in a juvenile facility is making it as dangerous as an adult one.
Judges have wide discretion to make these calls, and this judge clearly screwed up.
No one found him guilty of anything at this point. How can they when deciding in which court he should be judged? That happens before the trail. You're talking complete bollocks utterly disconnected from anything to do with this case.
You might want to actually read my comment. He was arrested pending trial. They have to decide where to put him, pending trial.
If the judge expects to try him as an adult for the reasons I listed, then they're going to put him in an adult jail.
If the judge expects to try him as a juvenile for the reasons I listed, then they're going to put him in a juvenile jail.
Either way, someone does have to make the call. And there are circumstances where the call that was made is appropriate.
Since it's 'detention pending trial', if he gets acquitted or charges dropped then per the system he 'suffered no penalty'. Same as anyone else arrested and put on trial. We know that isn't true though, since anyone in jail is still in jail and jail sucks. If he is found guilty, then he gets transferred.
Clearly it was a bad call on the Judge's part doing what they did, which is why it got reversed - eventually.
But as anyone who has dealt with the courts is well aware, everything is glacial - unless it's going to make your life a pain in the ass. That usually happens quickly.
But like everyone else, one you're in the system, you're going to have a bad time regardless.
What else do you propose is going to happen though?
> What else do you propose is going to happen though?
Not parent but I don’t think that we should be holding anyone pending trial when what they’re accused of is so minor, child or otherwise.
Furthermore any decisions about pre-trial detention shouldn’t hinge on remorse or contrition, they should hinge on the alleged offenders risk of flight and their potential risk to the community.
The judge is supposed to consider severity. Obviously it went too far in this case.
Regarding remorse/contrition though - that is absolutely a factor of in potential risk to
the community.
Example - Someone gets arrested for DUI. Who is higher risk? Someone who insists they didn’t do it and fuck anyone who thinks they did and they’ll do what they want, or someone who says ‘that was terrible, and I didn’t do exactly what the prosecution says, but I’m not going to be driving anytime soon until this all gets worked out’?
Because plenty of people in the first category end up driving drunk while pending trial and kill more people.
So you want them to lie? My dad was like that. I admitted to several things I didn't do in order to reduce the amount of caning.
This led to a funny incident at school. Somebody did something, and another grassed. The bully came to question me - I had no memory of telling on him, but the way he described the comments, I though oh that does sound like something I'd say. I took the beating. Then the actual grass came up and asked me why did I admit something I hadn't done?
"Grass" means "report to the authorities." Seems to originate in Britain as rhyming slang between copper and grasshopper, though I looked up the etymology for this post.
The alternative is to charge them as a juvenile, and to refrain from inferring a guilty conscious from their lack of "contrition" (which is a patently ridiculous thing to expect from an 11 year old - which is the real issue with charging children as adults, not that they supposedly are more reformable, but that they cannot be held to the same standards as adults).
You're engaging in a slippery slope fallacy. This was a miscarriage of justice. Civilization would not have crumbled if this child wasn't put through the wringer.
No, I’m not arguing if it is right or wrong. I’ve been explaining why the levers exist as that was what was being asked. And to be clear, the case I’m referring to the kid was tried and convicted (originally) of 1st degree murder with a shotgun. In juvenile court.
And if it turned out the kid did murder them, then people would be up in arms that he got released early - especially if he committed another murder before he got locked up again. Which could happen.
Was it a miscarriage of justice? Perhaps, I haven’t seen the evidence. The courts eventually came to the conclusion it was! Until they did, according to the courts it wasn’t.
it was also legal while it was happening.
And 11yr olds are plenty capable of being defiant, malicious, contrite, etc. too.
And active dangers to those around them.
I wasn’t there in court when this was going on, so I have no idea if the kid was being out of control, or the judge was being out of control. I’ve seen both play out. The appeals court felt it was the judge.
The whole situation is quite terrible regardless. But that’s what the criminal justice system is for - to resolve terrible situations in some eventually sensible way. Woe to whoever gets caught in its gears though.
Children might be incapable of determining certain actions are wrong or illegal. They might be able to do that, but unable to apply this knowledge to their own behavior. A trial won't fix immediately this, just like charging an 11 year old like an adult won't make him grow a beard.
> in US culture and society that makes it so hostile towards
As far as schools go, zero tolerance policies have been put in place. The concept of zero tolerance is something that just makes no sense to me. Not every thing that happens in a school needs police involvement, but because the rules/laws that have been put in place removes common sense and power from principals so that everything is now a police matter.
Legislatures have done similar things to judges with mandatory minimums and other draconian small minded knee jerk reaction to look like they are being effective.
In the 80s, kids would have bows or hunting rifles in the car or truck in the school parking lot. Now eating your pastry the wrong way gets you sent home.
In the early 2000s my middle school had archery for a few days as part of gym class as a special event. Only the girls were actually allowed to do it though, they had something else for the boys (don't remember what though).
Same was true in my middle school in the 80s. In hindsight it really was the right call. That same year we had a sub in gym class playing tennis and four of us boys managed to launch about a hundred tennis balls over the fence and into the woods home run derby style. We would have definitely put an eye out with archery equipment.
Zero tolerance policies are a direct response to discrimination claims.
If you allow people to have discretion, then it will be used(and abused).
Also some of the stories I hear about school in the 70's and 80's make me think that the current claim that "schools were always authoritarian and used to subjugate children to turn them into compliant workers" is probably BS.
Probably current administration needs to justify it's existence and high pay by making rules.
> Zero tolerance policies are a direct response to discrimination claims.
Source? Because if that's true, that's the wrong implementation of a great policy (anti-discrimination).
That's basically saying "well instead of having a policy of reasonable punishment for a given situation, we'd rather be as extreme in our punishment as possible so that we can still hurt kids we hate"
From wiki on Zero Tolerance, specifically talking about harrasment:
>Various institutions have undertaken zero tolerance policies such as in the military, in the workplace, and in schools in an effort to eliminate various kinds of illegal behavior such as harassment. Proponents hope that such policies will underscore the commitment of administrators to prevent such behavior.
It leaves out how when we went into these things, there was outcry over administrators covering up harassment, showing favoritism, etc.
If there is a fight between 2 kids, one kid gets expelled and the other does not, this situation can seem unbalanced.
>I don't know what it is in US culture and society that makes it so hostile towards anyone and anything even vaguely suspected of a crime, but this sort of thing is shockingly common, even when dealing with children.
The justice system has gone mad. Politicians probably encourage it behind closed doors as well. Fear is the road to authoritarianism.
> I don't know what it is in US culture and society that makes it so hostile towards anyone and anything even vaguely suspected of a crime,
In a lot of cases I think it's a proxy for racism.
I think there's also a tendency towards black and white thinking, where people are either good or bad, and they're very willing to bucket people as bad rather than considering shades of gray or that authorities did something wrong.
Additionally, in a lot of threads about crime I also sense a lot of jealousy. The sentiment resembles "I work hard to pay my bills like a chump and this guy has such a sweet and easy life not playing by the rules." They might feel their working life has them too stressed and they want to hurt "criminals" as some kind of revenge fantasy.
In this case it's a white kid though, and a lot of the kids from "kids for cash" were white. If we look at the prison population and include just the white population (~60%), the US still incarcerates vastly more people than other comparable countries. It's not even close. While in general racism is certainly a contributing factor, I don't see it being the main factor.
I don't have the impression the other factors you mention are unique to the US; people from all types of backgrounds seem to have problems with black/white thinking. This sort of thing seems innate to the human condition.
So the question remains, what is so special about the US? I don't really have a good answer to this. "Puritanism", as another commenter offered, seems too simplistic, and the US isn't the only country with a history of that sort of thing, either. Same with "war on drugs", another popular answer. Drugs are illegal (and sometimes heavily persecuted) in many countries. Maybe it's a bit worse in the US, but it's not unique to the US.
Maybe there just isn't a good/clear reason, and it's just "how the chips fell". The Aztecs went to war for no other reason than to capture people so they could rip out their hearts for sacrifice. There have been cultures where cannibalism of slaves, even child slaves, was socially acceptable for no other reason than "it tastes good". Why were these cultures like this? Who can tell... Probably a complex interaction between various factors.
Well, I don't think the tough on crime rhetoric is totally unique to the US either. I hear them coming from other countries too. Eg. when I was paying attention to Javier Milei's presidential bid in Argentina, it's largely the same talking points about crime, could have been lifted word for word from American internet comments.
From what I understand I think northern europe in particular has more of an attitude geared toward prison being about reform of criminals, and less towards vindictive punishment.
PS: Kind of tangential, but since you did bring it up: I believe a lot of the stories about natives being cruel warriors and cannibals were invented or exaggerated by Spaniards.
The main reason is that we refuse to spend money to address the root causes of crime. We won't fix urban poverty or the failing urban education system so most people choose to live in car-dependent suburban hellholes that make our youth uniquely miserable. Some of them shoot up schools, leading to zero tolerance policies and to moral panic campaigns to ban some inanimate object as the culprit that is supposedly corrupting kids.
If we had a functioning safety net and opportunities for people who grow up in the inner city to achieve a better life that doesn't involve playing professional sports, we'd be a mostly urban population like a normal country and we wouldn't have the teen mental health problems that only we have or the school shootings that we've only had for the past 30 years or so of the 400+ years we've had gun rights. We won't do that because that would involve spending our tax dollars for the benefit of people who aren't millionaires, billionaires or corporations.
The thing is, the vast majority of convicts in jail are genuinely guilty. I'd put it at 99% at least, probably more. And even many of the "innocent" people there are more likely to be of the kind: "I did not rob and kill this guy, I only fenced his watch".
What can be done with it? I now believe that the only way is more aggressive policing with almost zero tolerance. At the same time, the jail terms need to go _down_.
So if you steal bread to feed your sister's starving children, you WILL go to jail, just like Jean Valjean. But only for a couple of days, not 19 years.
Additionally, prisons and jails need to become _better_. No unpaid labor, better conditions, different tiers of jails for different offenders. Mental health resources and job training.
Oh, and alternatives to jail such as community service are great too.
I think you underestimate the rate of wrongly accused and wrongly convicted. Estimates vary, iirc I've seen some papers claiming 5% and others claiming as high as 20%. There is a lot of over-charging going on too.
Then, most cases don't get to trial, so you have people pleading guilty to things they did not do because they fear wrongful conviction for something worse.
Sorry, not buying it. There's no way 20% of convictions are wrong. Even 1% is honestly pushing it, especially these days. Extrapolation from convictions overturned via the DNA evidence also results in about 0.5-1%.
I volunteered as an unpaid IT support at a non-profit working with ex-cons who were trying to get back to normal life. So I got to speak with lots of people who were actively trying to get away from the prison life. Some of _them_ were saying that _they_ met no innocent people in jail.
And this is not really an exaggeration. You can pull up a roster of prisoners in your local jail and try to do a search for their names. You'll find that pretty much everyone there has a loooong rap sheet, with jail time merely being the "crowning achievement".
And it's always the same pattern: a long list of crimes that result in no punishment (ignored fines, ignored community service, probation, ignored bench warrants, etc.) until they get unlucky and encounter a prosecutor or a judge who is not willing to tolerate bullshit. Or if they commit a grave crime that can't be ignored.
That's why I think that we should absolutely make jail time one of the _first_ deterrents. And this also should absolutely apply to juveniles (yes, "jail our kids").
HOWEVER, the jail terms also need to go down. Especially for the first time offenders. Not years and months, but days or weeks.
And there is solid research backing that up. It's the _inevitability_ of punishment that is the best deterrent, not the strictness of it (that's also why the death penalty is useless, btw).
You can keep believing this and being confidently wrong.
Seems like my point about plea deals blew past you. Repeat: Innocent people often plead guilty to lesser charges because they fear wrongful convictions for something more serious. The system is set up around this.
When wrongfully convicted, it's also very common to get denied parole because you don't admit to doing something wrong. From what I've heard it's very very hard to overturn a wrongful conviction, even in the presence of new evidence or signs of misconduct the system fights it at every turn.
>>Plea deals don't change anything, the vast majority of takers are guilty.
So all these stories where someone is put in jail, spends months waiting for trial, then the DA comes around and says "look you can go to trial and maybe get few years in prison, or you can plead guilty and we'll count your time in jail as time served so you can go home tomorrow"
1) Do you think these stories are wrong? Or rare?
2) If you were in that situation as an innocent person, can you not imagine yourself being tempted to accept just to go home to your family?
Edit: just to be clear - I don't think anyone is disputing the "majority" part. But I definitely don't think it's so insignificant to be completely ignored either.
> So all these stories where someone is put in jail, spends months waiting for trial
At least in West Coast states, you are almost guaranteed to get a low bail or no bail at all. You'll likely be denied bail only if you are accused of something heinous, so your sentence will be longer than the time in pre-trial. Or if you have a history of skipping bail.
So your scenario is highly unlikely, at least on the West Coast.
> 1) Do you think these stories are wrong? Or rare?
They certainly can happen and do happen, but they are rare. I dislike plea deals in general, and they certainly need to be reformed.
My personal philosophy is that laws must be written in such a way, that they don't require any prosecutorial discretion or plea deals.
> Edit: just to be clear - I don't think anyone is disputing the "majority" part. But I definitely don't think it's so insignificant to be completely ignored either.
If you are interested in criminal justice in the US, you should start communicating with prisoners. Your state department of justice will have a program that allows you to exchange letters with prisoners. Do it, it helps people to stay connected with the outside world.
I did that. I now think that prisoners definitely belong in jail, and that trying to reduce the jail population by just ignoring crimes is folly. However, we absolutely must _improve_ the jail conditions. A LOT.
And very few organizations are lobbying in this direction. Instead, we have people who want to "fix the root causes of crime" or "abolish incarceration". This is destructive, and it's not helping.
> (that's also why the death penalty is useless, btw).
I’d argue that if a criminal is dead, they can’t commit future crimes, therefore the death penalty is quite useful. Why waste space and resources on prisons when there is a more efficient option?
I think your estimates are way off. A study in 2014 found that 4% of death row inmates were wrongly convicted[1]. This is likely to be the highest scrutiny cases in our system, so I'd expect that non-death penalty cases would have a wrongly convicted rate of >= 4%. And that's not even counting the people that have been leveraged into plea deals for crimes they didn't commit simply because the system is so weighted against them.
> what kind of school brings this matter to a judge in the first place...?
The kind of school that prevents a student with dreadlocks to attend schold indefinitely [1]? This is happening right now. In the past, there was also the role playing game (dnd) satanism scare...
Granted, I'm not sure if there have been actual arrests, but it's the logical next step to take.
Arresting kids for bringing something that's legal for them to have is one side of a spectrum of silliness, thinking that arresting a kid for violently assaulting someone is a "maybe" is pretty far on the other end of the same spectrum. There are plenty of things it's completely reasonable to arrest a child for.
I was almost arrested twice; once for having phreaker box plans in my bookbag (in 1998, when they no longer worked), another time for "computer hacking" (fixing the school computer's proxy settings).
And they wonder why we grew up to hate authority figures.
Treating public school as public space with public rules creates a huge class divide with the private schools. Short of actively shooting up the place, I can't think of a single rule you could break at the private university I went to that could result in law enforcement getting involved. I knew of at least one kid who got caught with most of a kilogram of cocaine, who got off with little more than a slap on the wrist.
In contrast, a kid at my brother's public uni got arrested for petty vandalism. It's an extremely stark class divide.
It doesn’t need to be this way. Essentially all UK universities are “public” and none operate this way. There aren’t special police forces that roam their campuses (Oxford had this for a time, but I think it was the only one). Violation of university rules is no more serious from a legal perspective than violating any other private rules.
I think campus police are an insane idea. There should obviously be a good relationship between any university and the police in their area, but the idea that they should report to the university leadership is nonsensical.
Nobody was arrested for pagers at my school, but both pagers and cell-phones were minimum 3-day suspension on first offense and expulsion for repeated offense -- larger minimum punishments than bringing a knife.
My late father owned a small commercial radio business for a few decades. It provided sales, install, repair, and repeater service to primarily public safety groups and companies with a fleet of vehicles. A more consumer oriented side to his business was pagers through Metrocall.
A major drug dealer in our region was a kid in my high school. He leased a pager from my dad's company. During the investigation, authorities had my dad create a cloned pager. They could then record all pages sent to the drug dealer, about 6k in as many months, to track his activities and build their case.
For the youngins here, I can confirm this, getting caught with a beeper in my school was just as serious as getting caught with weapons or drugs. They were the ultimate contraband.
We never had this in the Netherlands. But we got them later.
In fact for a long time they were the only way to be reachable in hospitals because they banned mobile phones for fear of interference with medical equipment.
No they don't interfere because they only receive. They send nothing. At least the pagers of those days didn't, two way pagers did exist but they were super expensive and really uncommon.
To be honest I wish I could still buy one because I'd love to be reachable but not trackable at times. Unfortunately Spain has no pager network in operation anymore.
In regards to how they work, the messages were broadcast over the whole country. Because the network had no idea where you were or if you even were reachable. This is why they had to be so short and why text paging was expensive.
The messages were not encrypted either so everyone could see them. It was not a perfect system but really most people just received codes or at most a phone number.
There were two way pagers (receive and send). The receive only ones rarely interfered with medical equipment. But occasionally the local oscillators on receive only pagers would interfere with medical or sensitive research equipment.
Yeah, initially they were associated with drug dealer types. Eventually in my group everyone had one so our parents could get in touch with us. The beep had a certain cadence when it started and even now when I hear it I get fun flashbacks to being a teen.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 330 ms ] threadOnce kids started sending little messages with them, I wanted one. Then they had fun colors and transparent cases. Luckily my nokia brick phone was just a few years away, half a life-time then, but just a few years in hindsight. ;)
None of my friends at that time were drug dealers, but they liked to joke they were because of the stigma.
My parents likely wouldn't have approved but this payphone conundrum was what lead to me and my friends attempt to build a red box, which never worked well for us but we learned a lot in the attempt!
https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/short-emails-for-your-pager/
I was waiting for the author to point to cellphones in the same breath. Obviously, there is a substantial difference between a one-way receive-only device and cellphones.
Motorola released their two way pager, the Tango in 1995. In 1996, they had an app for the Tango to access the web [1]. You can't make a call with a pager, but nobody makes calls anymore; there's not a lot of difference in capability; although there's a large difference in distribution.
[1] http://www.wirelesscommunication.nl/reference/chaptr01/dtmms...
Ahh yes, I remember fondly the days in the 90's I spent watching porn on my beeper as a teenager. Good times.
Alphanumeric, watch out.
Personally, I was always thinking...you're in class. Who the hell is calling you and expecting you to answer?
This might or might not be an interesting digression (apologies if it's the latter!) but many medical professionals still carry beepers or pagers of some kind. Not like "an app on their phone that will ring your phone at you even through Do-Not-Disturb" (I have one of those), but something that is very recognizably an old school beeper. They often have a SIM card in them, and the newer ones sometimes have wifi as well for redundancy.
My wife is a nurse at a cancer treatment center, she coordinates care for extremely sick people who are getting very specialized treatments and she's kind of the front-line person for dealing with them and project managing emergency situations, so she and all the doctors she work with carry them. I thought it was actually pretty cool :)
I asked her about it once, and apparently the hospital system looked at the more modern app-based paging stuff and decided that while it was cheaper, the reliability hit wasn't worth it to them. The physical hardware for these things is outrageously sturdy, they have a lifespan of like a decade, they're extremely easy to replace. Sure, your wifi might be out or your telephony might be down, but that's a problem your app has to deal with too. Apps are easier to provision, but it's an extra layer of stuff that can go wrong (your phone is getting an update or out of battery, you left it in your car because you were playing music with it and forgot to take it out of the console, it got stolen because phones are recognizably valuable) so they just stuck with the old familiar form factor that does one thing, extremely reliably.
This isn't a criticism of the app-based paging systems or anything; they're quite reliable in my experience. I just thought it was a neat additional data point about the considerations that go in to the thought process about provisioning an alarm for your employees when the alarm almost always means either "I have a time-sensitive question about a patient's ongoing medical emergency" or "your patient is about to die".
Nope, the obscurity doesn't make it okay. If it takes place over the phone lines, it is arguably exempt from encryption requirements under HIPAA (much like a fax).
Otherwise, they're just turning a blind eye and hoping nobody notices (which is surprisingly common when it comes to HIPAA).
The good news (for them, not for patients) is that, even if they get caught, the maximum fine is $2 million per calendar year per category of violation, so if they're flush enough they don't even need to bother being compliant in this area.
I'm not familiar with this particular technology, which is why I didn't make a definitive claim in my previous comment. But I am quite intimately familiar with HIPAA and related regulations, and I am extremely skeptical of the third sentence you wrote.
At least twice, I've accidentally set my iOS devices to the Do Not Disturb focus mode. First time made me miss a job interview calendar reminder, leading to me (1) learn there's no way to disable this 'feature', the 'do not disturb' focus cannot be deleted, and (2) setting the DnD-focus-mode-specific wallpaper to something radically different from normal just so I'd spot it faster next time. It did happen again, but the second time I knew what was up even on the lock screen and turned the focus back to normal before it did any harm.
Unfortunately, we will probably think the same about 2024 in thirty years...
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/15/1219737658/why-do-doctors-sti...
I detect sarcasm, but yes, it does.
The history of phone tech is "can we get more done with less joules?", while a pager is "you have one job".
Even when a pager is implemented on top of normal cellular networks like 3/4/5G, it's still better because there's nothing else on the system to drain the battery.
But it doesn't need to be on those systems at all, it can be an even less 'smart' radio receiver such as POCSAG system, on its own frequency, chosen specifically for getting though concrete etc., and disregarding any concerns about bandwidth because 1.2 kb/s is probably more than it needs.
So yeah it makes a ton of sense. These are very different devices operating using different frequencies and protocols.
How things like that were even remotely legal?
It's more nuanced than that: there's shades of grey in there, not just black and white.
I had a good relationship with my parents, they cared a great deal about anything related to education and would keep involved with everything academic (even though my parents both never finished school at all, not even primary school). Most kids I was in school with had parents with the same outlook.
Telling my parents that I had broken a school rule would definitely get them involved immediately, but "playing with toys when you are supposed to be learning" is unlikely to win sympathy.[1]
The reason that the schools could hold things until the end of the year (mostly they held them for a week, at worst) was because if you complained to your parent that you were playing with a toy during a time when you were supposed to be learning, the parent with likely confiscate the toy permanently.
At least when the school confiscated it, you eventually got it back.
I imagine, even today, with most parents who care about their kids academic outcomes (surprisingly, quite a few don't), the conversation is likely to go like this:
K: The school confiscated my $TOY today. They aren't giving it back until year-end.
P: Why? Was it switched on/used/making/noise during class?
K: Errr ...
At that point, the kid is now in trouble with both school and parents. Only if the kid is reasonably certain that:
a) The parent doesn't care if they were not attending to the lesson at hand, and
b) The parent will call the school to get the $TOY back,
would the child complain to the parent.
[1] Of course, when I was in school you could take anything to school; you just couldn't play with it until a break in classes. I expect that the outrage now is due to confiscation happening not due to usage, but for simply possession of the toy.
The school is allowed to dole out punishments, such as detention or even denying access to the school itself. This isn't a normal "a bunch of random adults are around" relationship.
Look up the relevant legislation in your jurisdiction; dig deep enough and you will find either explicit legislation or case-law confirming that it is legal, usually with the phrase `in loco parentis`.
Any on the spot decision that needs to be made with regard to the child, the school can make it with no requirement for input or consent from the parents.
Trust me, you don't want it a different way, else one day you are going to be asking the school either a question along the lines of "Why did you wait for a parent callback before you took action?" or a question along the lines of "Why are you requiring my response to these questions every single day?"
I’m also pretty sure that 75% of the students had a newer iPhone than I do!
What happens when child becomes an adult? They own all their stuff from before, the parents do not keep it. It can be complicated since parents let child use stuff, but anything given to or bought by the child is theirs.
I think that parents basically "gift" their adult children their old things. At 17 years and 364 days a parent can take everything their child "owns" and burn it/throw it in a wood chipper with zero legal issues (concerning specifically the destruction of property anyway, burning/chipping some things will get you in trouble), however once the adult child has been informally gifted their old "belongings" there's no take backs without legal repercussions.
Things do get more complicated with things the child bought with their own money... I'm guessing the law would be more willing to accept that those things should belong to the child, but even if a 15 year old kid buys an xbox with their own money I doubt the cops would arrest the kid's parents for smashing it with a bat.
Yes, they do.
> and even if they did, courts have consistently ruled that the bill of rights is reduced in school settings.
Courts have ruled that there are specific interests in school that meet the generally applicable (not special, weaker) standards applicable for permissible action where rights protected in the Bill of Rights are involved.
But establishing categories of and confiscating contraband is... not a disputed state power, in any case.
<wink> I just used a walkman
I can't imagine having a smartphone in grade school or high school. It's so alien.
The whole thing sort of worked, but we were happy to ditch it for cell phones when they became affordable.
Rock-Satan scare of the 80's.
Rap-Drug Scare
Walkman will let kids get snatched up.
The pager
Trans people are coming for your husband.
Seems like every decade people have to freak out. But it isn't just the common generational trope. The religious right has to always have another issue that can be used as the poster boy for the war on Lucifer. If you don't have a boogie man, then how do you keep the troops lathered up and ready to fight.
Not all new inventions are a net benefit to society just because they are new, not all things are always good in all contexts, and 2024 is not the end of history, or of cultural evolution.
But all of your examples are 'real'. Real physical things that can impact someone materially. Chemicals, products.
Lot of the 'scare' things are just 'ideas'. Should we outlaw ideas is the problem. That is basically how anti-communism works, 'communism' is an idea that the right calls a 'mind virus' that we should ban because it can infect people.
Of course, super hard to tell what is freedom of speech these days. I've been hearing the right scream about freedom of speech for years now, and all of sudden with Gaza they want to round people up if anybody criticizes Israel.
I'm sure that the optimal amount of all those things is non-zero, but it's possible that it's also not 'all day, every day.'
It's not unreasonable for schools to restrict this, just like it's not unreasonable for a school to restrict you from bringing a mariachi band with you to class.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/72/Occult_dnd.pn...
Don't forget home taping destroyed the music industry and nothing new has been recorded since the early 1980s.
With how many people are skilled in Photoshop compared to web development, forging a scan of a page is probably easier for a lot of people.
A Tribe Called Quest - Skypager (1991)
- Some beepers are made to only RX, not TX, as to not skew results of medical equipment
- Basically 2 companies, operating with antequated websites (and prices) still provide service at the historic prices
- Beepers are still sold today, new in box
- Two-way pagers have been almost totally displaced from the market (lack of service and hardware) despite being more advanced than regular beepers.
Anybody want to share a testimonial about their current beeper for someone who's looking for a good option?
When I do discuss these experiences, most people aren't able to believe me. "How?" is a typical response... which to me seems equally strange a question.
It does make parking difficult ("pay with the app!"); last time I had a court action, the judge required me to sign a document stating I did not use email, because this is "a required piece of information."
Until this year, I handed out my numeric pager as "my phone number," which grateful reduced successful contact [to my chagrin].
But I've learned that, aside from mentioning "I don't have a phone" it's really not useful to discuss it any further on the internet. There seems to be a large cohort of trolls who love arguing with anybody who doesn't have a phone. I guess it bothers them that some of us can be free from what so many are addicted to.
I remember my dad worked at a bank in the 90s and had one shaped like this to enter one of the buildings: https://www.amazon.com/HyperOTP-Time-Based-6-Digit-Services-...
But if you don't have a phone to program it you'd need a camera or some way to manually enter the data.
Technically it is pretty much like a phone but it is not used as a phone. No number, no sim card.
I am pretty sure some of these apps could work on waydroid too if needed.
So in the end all this discussion really depends if we are talking about the mobile device as a whole that you carry with you nearly all the time or some parts of the ecosystem that you may have at home.
It's very inefficient because every tower must broadcast every message. This is why you can find an archive of pages from the morning of September 11th online, they transmitted unencrypted to a huge area.
So that raises costs and limits the coverage area. Fine for a hospital with 100 idk doctors who need paged, not fine for continental coverage of 100 million users.
No, it's incredibly efficient because the messages are tiny.
If you need to send a long message, then you page the person with "you have a long message from XYZ, please use higher-bandwidth mechanisms to retrieve it".
Within the scope of "How does no-TX work?" it's very inefficient, because the payload is small.
An issue with Rx-only paging is that your device must be on 24/7, and within RF range — if offline/out-of-range, you will never receive that page.
I only stopped because I moved outside of their reliable service area (but they provide service to practically any metro center with greater than 100k people). When I lived 3 miles from "downtown" the pager was a great asset (for call screening, e.g.: spammers never "figured out" how a pager worked).
Particularly the one-way (RX only) pagers.
Very interested in this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40070092
> - Basically 2 companies, operating with antequated websites (and prices) still provide service at the historic prices
If you get a chance to add the names/links of these companies I would really appreciate it.
Still would like to know what the other one is.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40072714
Hold out companies for obsolete technologies always fascinate me. I remember reading there is like one guy who services candle pin bowling pin setters that run on 90s era Turbo Pascal software on whitebox 486 PCs and he's pretty much retired and drives up and down the North East in an RV doing his work.
Ps I would not want a two way pager anyway as that defeats the privacy purpose.
--
Alternatively I've got a modern DAPnet ham radio alphanumeric pager now that I use occasionally for notifications related to radio stuff. :) (https://hampager.de)
I got paper bills in the mail for $0.34. Friends could page me from a payphone without having to drop a coin.
*(EDIT: I think I misremember a bit. If the call originated from a pay phone, I think I was charged additional for that.)
It was a way to get messages from friends without my parents and siblings eavesdropping, and despite said siblings monopolizing the home landline.
The article refutes this: "months later The Washington Post editorial board would call on schools to ban cellphones entirely - part of a new moral panic about kids and digital devices, "
There's no "moral" panic about devices right now and this is straight up strawman. it's about mental health and learning.
There's no reason kids should be on smart phones during the school day at all. The only "panic" is from parents who are terrified of being more than ten seconds away from contact with their child.
Edit: fuck me, I was half joking and thought I'd check anyway. What a shit show. Latest case was 5 days ago. https://www.google.com/search?q=American+police+shoot+kid+wi...
Still sucks that the kid got shot for it, but I can see the confusion, compared to the usual colorful water guns.
Cops are not judge, jury, and executioners, and in fact have zero authority to hand down punishment. Being shot for holding a gun is absurd.
There’s a huge difference between simply owning a gun vs wandering around in public pointing it at people.
They only way you're injuring someone with fentanyl is getting them to ingest an unsafe amount of it one way or another. That's not really different from a lot of prescription drugs. Or some OTC ones, like Tylenol. Or lye and many other cleaning agents.
The only way someone is ingesting that accidentally is if a classmate is attempting to poison them. There are a lot of other poisons that can be ingested in small doses if someone is trying to injure you. Fentanyl is not going to leap out of someone's pocket and fly down your throat. It's not magic killing dust.
If people wonder how possession worked in the middle ages, look no further than this.
i do agree with your point though.
"Presiding Judge Dominick Motto of the Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, Common Pleas Court initially denied decertification and transfer to juvenile court because Jordan would not admit his involvement in the crime."
"We're going to punish you harder because you claim to be innocent" What kind of backward clinically insane shitcunt logic is that?! Especially when we're talking about a 11-year old?!
It's no surprise that the "kids for cash" scandal could have continued for years, because the entire system is rotten. In any half-way decent system giving 3 months detention to a 14-year old for making a MySpace parody page of a teacher should have set off every possible alarm bell, and that it didn't is pretty damning for the entire system. Also: what kind of school brings this matter to a judge in the first place...? This along is pretty crazy.
If they still refuse to take any ownership or show any contrition even after being clearly shown something was a major problem (hence the court case), then why reduce the penalty? Who would it be helping, exactly?
It doesn't mean you actually did, but it does mean the system says you did.
Which is the point of my comment. It doesn't mean it actually makes sense in real life, but it's why the system does what it does.
And the reason why the system will prosecute kids like adults sometimes - the nominal reason is because they don't think it's worth giving them a pass either due to the severe nature of the crime, or because of the lack of contrition of the accused.
If they're actually innocent, then per the system they should get zero penalty eventually regardless of how they are prosecuted.
We know that being held in an adult jail while awaiting trial is a pretty severe penalty in fact of course, which is why it eventually got thrown out that he got treated that way. Plenty of adults get stuck in jail for years while awaiting trial, then get released and theoretically suffered no penalty either. But we also know that is bullshit. No clear better alternatives (except bail) have shown themselves however.
If the kid had been caught on tape murdering a bunch of other kids and still claimed he was innocent, then no one would be objecting that he be put in an adult jail while awaiting trial though. Since putting someone that violent in a juvenile facility is making it as dangerous as an adult one.
Judges have wide discretion to make these calls, and this judge clearly screwed up.
But that's the how and the why.
If the judge expects to try him as an adult for the reasons I listed, then they're going to put him in an adult jail.
If the judge expects to try him as a juvenile for the reasons I listed, then they're going to put him in a juvenile jail.
Either way, someone does have to make the call. And there are circumstances where the call that was made is appropriate.
Since it's 'detention pending trial', if he gets acquitted or charges dropped then per the system he 'suffered no penalty'. Same as anyone else arrested and put on trial. We know that isn't true though, since anyone in jail is still in jail and jail sucks. If he is found guilty, then he gets transferred.
Clearly it was a bad call on the Judge's part doing what they did, which is why it got reversed - eventually.
But as anyone who has dealt with the courts is well aware, everything is glacial - unless it's going to make your life a pain in the ass. That usually happens quickly.
But like everyone else, one you're in the system, you're going to have a bad time regardless.
What else do you propose is going to happen though?
Not parent but I don’t think that we should be holding anyone pending trial when what they’re accused of is so minor, child or otherwise.
Furthermore any decisions about pre-trial detention shouldn’t hinge on remorse or contrition, they should hinge on the alleged offenders risk of flight and their potential risk to the community.
Regarding remorse/contrition though - that is absolutely a factor of in potential risk to the community.
Example - Someone gets arrested for DUI. Who is higher risk? Someone who insists they didn’t do it and fuck anyone who thinks they did and they’ll do what they want, or someone who says ‘that was terrible, and I didn’t do exactly what the prosecution says, but I’m not going to be driving anytime soon until this all gets worked out’?
Because plenty of people in the first category end up driving drunk while pending trial and kill more people.
This led to a funny incident at school. Somebody did something, and another grassed. The bully came to question me - I had no memory of telling on him, but the way he described the comments, I though oh that does sound like something I'd say. I took the beating. Then the actual grass came up and asked me why did I admit something I hadn't done?
No admittance of fault, but not going to fight the prosecution either because it isn't worth it.
It isn't necessarily fair or sane - it's predictable though. Which is something.
Practically, what are the alternatives?
Every arrest is cite and release pending conviction? Society would be even more out of control.
You're engaging in a slippery slope fallacy. This was a miscarriage of justice. Civilization would not have crumbled if this child wasn't put through the wringer.
And if it turned out the kid did murder them, then people would be up in arms that he got released early - especially if he committed another murder before he got locked up again. Which could happen.
Cases like this too [https://www.klfy.com/local/iberia-parish/trial-for-11-year-o...].
Was it a miscarriage of justice? Perhaps, I haven’t seen the evidence. The courts eventually came to the conclusion it was! Until they did, according to the courts it wasn’t.
it was also legal while it was happening.
And 11yr olds are plenty capable of being defiant, malicious, contrite, etc. too.
And active dangers to those around them.
I wasn’t there in court when this was going on, so I have no idea if the kid was being out of control, or the judge was being out of control. I’ve seen both play out. The appeals court felt it was the judge.
The whole situation is quite terrible regardless. But that’s what the criminal justice system is for - to resolve terrible situations in some eventually sensible way. Woe to whoever gets caught in its gears though.
As far as schools go, zero tolerance policies have been put in place. The concept of zero tolerance is something that just makes no sense to me. Not every thing that happens in a school needs police involvement, but because the rules/laws that have been put in place removes common sense and power from principals so that everything is now a police matter.
Legislatures have done similar things to judges with mandatory minimums and other draconian small minded knee jerk reaction to look like they are being effective.
This happened about 5 miles from where I grew up: https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/7-year-old-suspende...
In the 80s, kids would have bows or hunting rifles in the car or truck in the school parking lot. Now eating your pastry the wrong way gets you sent home.
If you allow people to have discretion, then it will be used(and abused).
Also some of the stories I hear about school in the 70's and 80's make me think that the current claim that "schools were always authoritarian and used to subjugate children to turn them into compliant workers" is probably BS.
Probably current administration needs to justify it's existence and high pay by making rules.
Source? Because if that's true, that's the wrong implementation of a great policy (anti-discrimination).
That's basically saying "well instead of having a policy of reasonable punishment for a given situation, we'd rather be as extreme in our punishment as possible so that we can still hurt kids we hate"
>Various institutions have undertaken zero tolerance policies such as in the military, in the workplace, and in schools in an effort to eliminate various kinds of illegal behavior such as harassment. Proponents hope that such policies will underscore the commitment of administrators to prevent such behavior.
It leaves out how when we went into these things, there was outcry over administrators covering up harassment, showing favoritism, etc.
If there is a fight between 2 kids, one kid gets expelled and the other does not, this situation can seem unbalanced.
The justice system has gone mad. Politicians probably encourage it behind closed doors as well. Fear is the road to authoritarianism.
In a lot of cases I think it's a proxy for racism.
I think there's also a tendency towards black and white thinking, where people are either good or bad, and they're very willing to bucket people as bad rather than considering shades of gray or that authorities did something wrong.
Additionally, in a lot of threads about crime I also sense a lot of jealousy. The sentiment resembles "I work hard to pay my bills like a chump and this guy has such a sweet and easy life not playing by the rules." They might feel their working life has them too stressed and they want to hurt "criminals" as some kind of revenge fantasy.
I don't have the impression the other factors you mention are unique to the US; people from all types of backgrounds seem to have problems with black/white thinking. This sort of thing seems innate to the human condition.
So the question remains, what is so special about the US? I don't really have a good answer to this. "Puritanism", as another commenter offered, seems too simplistic, and the US isn't the only country with a history of that sort of thing, either. Same with "war on drugs", another popular answer. Drugs are illegal (and sometimes heavily persecuted) in many countries. Maybe it's a bit worse in the US, but it's not unique to the US.
Maybe there just isn't a good/clear reason, and it's just "how the chips fell". The Aztecs went to war for no other reason than to capture people so they could rip out their hearts for sacrifice. There have been cultures where cannibalism of slaves, even child slaves, was socially acceptable for no other reason than "it tastes good". Why were these cultures like this? Who can tell... Probably a complex interaction between various factors.
From what I understand I think northern europe in particular has more of an attitude geared toward prison being about reform of criminals, and less towards vindictive punishment.
PS: Kind of tangential, but since you did bring it up: I believe a lot of the stories about natives being cruel warriors and cannibals were invented or exaggerated by Spaniards.
If we had a functioning safety net and opportunities for people who grow up in the inner city to achieve a better life that doesn't involve playing professional sports, we'd be a mostly urban population like a normal country and we wouldn't have the teen mental health problems that only we have or the school shootings that we've only had for the past 30 years or so of the 400+ years we've had gun rights. We won't do that because that would involve spending our tax dollars for the benefit of people who aren't millionaires, billionaires or corporations.
What can be done with it? I now believe that the only way is more aggressive policing with almost zero tolerance. At the same time, the jail terms need to go _down_.
So if you steal bread to feed your sister's starving children, you WILL go to jail, just like Jean Valjean. But only for a couple of days, not 19 years.
Additionally, prisons and jails need to become _better_. No unpaid labor, better conditions, different tiers of jails for different offenders. Mental health resources and job training.
Oh, and alternatives to jail such as community service are great too.
Then, most cases don't get to trial, so you have people pleading guilty to things they did not do because they fear wrongful conviction for something worse.
I volunteered as an unpaid IT support at a non-profit working with ex-cons who were trying to get back to normal life. So I got to speak with lots of people who were actively trying to get away from the prison life. Some of _them_ were saying that _they_ met no innocent people in jail.
And this is not really an exaggeration. You can pull up a roster of prisoners in your local jail and try to do a search for their names. You'll find that pretty much everyone there has a loooong rap sheet, with jail time merely being the "crowning achievement".
And it's always the same pattern: a long list of crimes that result in no punishment (ignored fines, ignored community service, probation, ignored bench warrants, etc.) until they get unlucky and encounter a prosecutor or a judge who is not willing to tolerate bullshit. Or if they commit a grave crime that can't be ignored.
That's why I think that we should absolutely make jail time one of the _first_ deterrents. And this also should absolutely apply to juveniles (yes, "jail our kids").
HOWEVER, the jail terms also need to go down. Especially for the first time offenders. Not years and months, but days or weeks.
And there is solid research backing that up. It's the _inevitability_ of punishment that is the best deterrent, not the strictness of it (that's also why the death penalty is useless, btw).
Seems like my point about plea deals blew past you. Repeat: Innocent people often plead guilty to lesser charges because they fear wrongful convictions for something more serious. The system is set up around this.
When wrongfully convicted, it's also very common to get denied parole because you don't admit to doing something wrong. From what I've heard it's very very hard to overturn a wrongful conviction, even in the presence of new evidence or signs of misconduct the system fights it at every turn.
Plea deals don't change anything, the vast majority of takers are guilty. It's just a method of cutting down on the cost of the trial.
Wrongful convictions certainly exist, but they are not even close to the main reason for the prison population.
Try it. It might help you. Or not.
So all these stories where someone is put in jail, spends months waiting for trial, then the DA comes around and says "look you can go to trial and maybe get few years in prison, or you can plead guilty and we'll count your time in jail as time served so you can go home tomorrow"
1) Do you think these stories are wrong? Or rare?
2) If you were in that situation as an innocent person, can you not imagine yourself being tempted to accept just to go home to your family?
Edit: just to be clear - I don't think anyone is disputing the "majority" part. But I definitely don't think it's so insignificant to be completely ignored either.
At least in West Coast states, you are almost guaranteed to get a low bail or no bail at all. You'll likely be denied bail only if you are accused of something heinous, so your sentence will be longer than the time in pre-trial. Or if you have a history of skipping bail.
So your scenario is highly unlikely, at least on the West Coast.
> 1) Do you think these stories are wrong? Or rare?
They certainly can happen and do happen, but they are rare. I dislike plea deals in general, and they certainly need to be reformed.
My personal philosophy is that laws must be written in such a way, that they don't require any prosecutorial discretion or plea deals.
> Edit: just to be clear - I don't think anyone is disputing the "majority" part. But I definitely don't think it's so insignificant to be completely ignored either.
If you are interested in criminal justice in the US, you should start communicating with prisoners. Your state department of justice will have a program that allows you to exchange letters with prisoners. Do it, it helps people to stay connected with the outside world.
I did that. I now think that prisoners definitely belong in jail, and that trying to reduce the jail population by just ignoring crimes is folly. However, we absolutely must _improve_ the jail conditions. A LOT.
And very few organizations are lobbying in this direction. Instead, we have people who want to "fix the root causes of crime" or "abolish incarceration". This is destructive, and it's not helping.
The stories I've read were mostly in New York where this kind of thing happens not infrequently, so I guess - I have no data to prove otherwise.
>>My personal philosophy is that laws must be written in such a way, that they don't require any prosecutorial discretion or plea deals.
Well, we 100% agree then.
>> Instead, we have people who want to "fix the root causes of crime" or "abolish incarceration". This is destructive, and it's not helping.
I also agree.
I'm not too familiar with NY data sources, but it looks like they have reformed bail recently: https://www.fwd.us/news/new-york-bail-reform-success-story/
But even before that, they had a below-average ratio of pretrial/post-sentencing detention.
I’d argue that if a criminal is dead, they can’t commit future crimes, therefore the death penalty is quite useful. Why waste space and resources on prisons when there is a more efficient option?
1: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1306417111
I feel sorry for you if this is your lived experience. This isn't normal, even in HCOL left-leaning US cities. You might be the problem.
The kind of school that prevents a student with dreadlocks to attend schold indefinitely [1]? This is happening right now. In the past, there was also the role playing game (dnd) satanism scare...
Granted, I'm not sure if there have been actual arrests, but it's the logical next step to take.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68377156
Submit to authority or face the consequences future wage slave.
And they wonder why we grew up to hate authority figures.
In contrast, a kid at my brother's public uni got arrested for petty vandalism. It's an extremely stark class divide.
I think campus police are an insane idea. There should obviously be a good relationship between any university and the police in their area, but the idea that they should report to the university leadership is nonsensical.
https://securelist.com/satellite-turla-apt-command-and-contr...
A major drug dealer in our region was a kid in my high school. He leased a pager from my dad's company. During the investigation, authorities had my dad create a cloned pager. They could then record all pages sent to the drug dealer, about 6k in as many months, to track his activities and build their case.
We never had this in the Netherlands. But we got them later.
In fact for a long time they were the only way to be reachable in hospitals because they banned mobile phones for fear of interference with medical equipment.
To be honest I wish I could still buy one because I'd love to be reachable but not trackable at times. Unfortunately Spain has no pager network in operation anymore.
In regards to how they work, the messages were broadcast over the whole country. Because the network had no idea where you were or if you even were reachable. This is why they had to be so short and why text paging was expensive.
The messages were not encrypted either so everyone could see them. It was not a perfect system but really most people just received codes or at most a phone number.
Hmm yeah but then it was really really poorly designed equipment.
If they were that senstive that they'd even pick up a LO they'd be screwed by a police car mobile radio driving by, an FM station in the area etc.
You kids complain about always on. This was the late 90's the beeper was so they didn't have to pay for my cell phone. I was making stupid money so...
I grew to hate that fucking thing.
One got dropped down 4 stories in a wire chase.
Another I threw in front of a steam roller on its way to flatten some asphalt. The driver gave me a thumbs up and I pitched it.
I nailed one to a the bar of a dive I hung out in.
I think I "flushed" two... The first one was a mistake (I think the first to die) I brought it back in a plastic baggie. I was told to throw it out.
One out the car window at 80 (I was young and stupid and it was BFE texas... there wasnt a car for miles)
Another in a lake...
At some point they asked me to stop, I did, but it was fun while I could get away with it.