I didn’t realize that was now a thing.
To be fair, working a job teaches a lot of life skills as well. I entered the work force as soon as I could, taking over a friends paper route when he moved. Then went to Walmart as soon as I was 16.
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I agree. I was only criticizing the lawsuit, not trying to ban cheaters from the servers.
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I agree with @Mister44 in that a part-time job at 16 is a healthy part of development and having spending money provided it doesn’t interfere with school. But I also think you’re correct in that kids are run so ragged these days preparing for meaningless tests and operating on too little sleep because classes start at unhealthy hours for their physiology that they probably don’t have the time we had when we were in high school.
And of course the existing child labor laws are plenty permissive enough.
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Teenagers in public schools today also have far more work than ever before. Kids I know who go to a public school regularly have 4 or sometimes more hours of homework after school.
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And creeps like Newt Gingrich want to make them even more so.
What some here are missing is that not all jobs are the same. There’s a substantive difference between a 15-year-old taking the option of working a part-time after-school job in retail for some extra pocket money and the same kid doing agricultural stoop work or another back-breaking or dangerous job because he has no other choice.
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I agree completely. I don’t think the impediment to the kinds of jobs and hours a teen can safely work is the law. I think it’s their schoolwork load. I had no problems with the law when I worked part time at a diner after school in high-school. And I had no need to be making coal great again, or whatever it is these cartoonishly evil assholes want kids doing.
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The shenanigans with EULA or TOS is a thing i agree is totally bullshit, and that Epic is going after this family is a giant misstep. The details might matter here on who is in the wrong or right (technically speaking) but no matter what Epic will come out as the bad guy.
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The whole legal arms race just makes me sad. And from a personal standpoint, it sounds stupid. But this game is a shared social space.
Epic games and People Can Fly have a massively multiplayer game they want all who play it to enjoy. They need a mechanism to enforce playing within the game’s rules and to keep it fair and enjoyable for as many players as possible.
They have to have some sort of enforceable agreement that tells players, “If you break the rules we have the right to remove you from the game.” They also want to keep knowledge of these cheats and exploits down until they can find ways to combat them. A large enough community of people ruining the game for others can tank their product. And I guarantee there is a group of poor souls trying to code ways to stop these exploits as we speak.
They are falling back to the EULA because that is what they are legally armed with.
I’m all for a label slapped on the box that says, “Don’t be a dick.” But I bet the company and consumers are looking for something a tad more specific.
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If conservatives have their way, the schoolwork load would not be an impediment as far as poor kids are concerned. To paraphrase their secret role model, “no school, no problem.”
I worked full-time jobs during summers as teenager, but it was understood that school was the priority during the rest of the year (at a time when kids weren’t saddled with 3+ hours of homework a night). Not everyone had that luxury or those family priorities, of course, and many of my peers did have (safe, non-exploitative) part-time jobs after school.
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“Working hazardous, life threatening job at young age is good for them; builds character!”
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Which is probably better for them than letting people create the impression that the game is full of cheaters. I wonder if they do cost/benefit analysis with those considerations…
There’s a level of good-will that will always trump anything else. Once a publisher starts to go down a rabbithole of corporate shenanigans i permanently bail (looking at you EA). Currently i have no problems with Epic but if this becomes a trend going forward i might bail on them too (which wouldn’t be hard since i don’t play a lot of their titles tbh)
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I really wonder if they wouldn’t be better off without an EULA. Forget the maybe-unenforceable-pseudocontract and just put, in large text when you buy the game, “We have a code of conduct. If we don’t think someone is following that code, they may have their accounts banned at our discretion.”
Then make the code of conduct similar to the one for this BBS, simple, easy to read, and with a clear reminder that it is up to them to interpret it and they won’t listen to lawyering on the issue.
They can currently take down youtube videos with no EULA by enforcing the copyright they have on their art assets (I don’t like these laws, but they are the law).
I think EULAs are probably not helping the companies who use them in a lot of cases. Facebook needs one because they want to sell your personal information with a veneer of legality. Is Fortnite trying to fix elections, or are they trying to make money by selling hats in a vanity item shop? If it’s the latter, they don’t really need your permission for anything, they just need to tell you what they are offering you.
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I’ve always been an advocate for this, especially since specific situations are always unique there’s some level of interpretation or bargaining. Zero tolerance policies or ones that are very much black & white tend to do more harm. As i mentioned in a previous post here, during my time as a gaming community admin our golden rule was literally “Don’t be a douche”. We did of course have many specific sub rules, but when in doubt refer to rule #1. Asking oneself “Am i being an asshole right now?” is often enough to curb behavior for the better.
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Are they learning more than past generations?
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In the US? Not likely. When i moved to the US and id my last year of HS here i never studied and would regularly get A’s, found the school system here much easier. The school system however is failing to teach the right things to students despite the increased workload.
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By almost every metric, yes. The US has held onto it’s solid circling outside the top ten countries regarding education for generations and every generation knows more than the one previous.
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I doubt it (echoing @Grey_Devil here). Honestly, there is only so much info your brain can hold. I suspect the only thing they are really learning is that it’s all about hoop jumping and status climbing.
This. They are not really teaching them how to analyze information, how to research, write better, how to think critically about the material they are presented with.
You think so? I dunno. I’m not convinced of that. They can pass standardized tests, but how effective a measurement of education is that, I wonder. You can hold any number of facts in your head, but what does that mean for going out and making a living in this economy? How is that for learning to be a civically engaged human being and global citizen? To my mind, knowing stuff is a poorer measure of a quality education than is the ability to successfully navigate a world so flush with information.
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That makes it sound like those things were in focus a few generations ago when we struggled to educate everyone at all for one reason or another.
EDIT
Not that we educate everyone now.
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