What's funny is my generation's brain rot was mainly Looney Tunes and The Three Stooges. So technically it was actually the brain rot from forty years prior.
Lol I spent almost a year living in a part of Florida that had two broadcast stations, ABC and PBS. And I had a TV without a remote, just the two old-fashioned dials. And I would spend entire fucking evenings just flipping between those two channels. The weed helped, but I finally gave in and paid the $100 or so installation fee to get cable.
I grew up in the '70s. My parents limited us to one hour of TV per day, but I had friends who spent nearly every waking hour when they weren't in school parked in front of the television. Like, six to seven hours per day and more on the weekends. The stats back that up, too.
I'm a school bus driver and we're unionized (Teamsters) ... at least for now. Our contract states that if ever fewer than than 50% of the drivers are in the union, the contract is voided. A lot of the newer drivers are not signing up for the union because they don't want to pay the dues which are around $80 per month. We are surrounded by non-union school districts that pay their drivers about $8 less per hour and don't provide health insurance, PTO or a pension like we get.
In case this isn't obvious, school bus drivers are generally some dumb motherfuckers.
Except that’s a rare thing to happen because it’s a serious crime.
Lol it's not rare at all. I'm a school bus driver and it happens multiple times on each run. It's not uncommon to have multiple cars pass me at a single stop.
including divided highways in their school bus law
Rural state? Whether or not divided highways make sense depends on whether or not kids are crossing these highways to get to their stops. Seems like that wouldn't happen anywhere but you never know. In my district (Philly suburb) we design our runs so that kids rarely have to cross any street at all, and never have to cross even just multi-lane roads (let alone divided highways).
FYI I'm a school bus driver and our buses are equipped with these BusPatrol cameras. Our director of transportation told me about the financial arrangement, which I'm not sure most people know about. BusPatrol pays all costs relating to the cameras and their installation. They then get all of the ticket revenue generated ($300 per incident) until the cameras are paid for, after which the company splits the revenue with the school district (my boss told me this is a 50/50 split but Google says it's about 60/40 in favor of the company). The money that goes to the school district is further split (50/50) between the school system and the police department, who have the responsibility for reviewing the recordings and mailing out the tickets. The "until the cameras are paid for" part is interesting: according to my boss, the installation cost of the cameras for our 40 buses was in the neighborhood of $1.5 million dollars, which seems a bit improbable. $37,500 per camera?
The revenue these things generate has to be fucking enormous. I've had runs where I get passed by 10 to 15 cars with my lights on and stop sign out. The main benefit to me personally is lowered stress. I used to get genuinely angry at cars doing this, and I would waste time and attention span horn-blasting them (one time I even had a cop pass me like this, driving with one hand and looking at his cell phone in the other hand). Now I don't give a shit, knowing that they're (likely) getting a big ticket for it.
I'm a school bus driver and we have these BusPatrol cameras on our buses. One of my stops in the morning is at a place where a divided highway becomes not-divided. In my state you don't have to stop for school buses on divided highways, but my stop is about ten feet into the not-divided area. Most people stop anyway but a lot of people don't. I've had people ask me whether they're supposed to stop or not and I have to tell them that I have no idea. The drivers are not involved with the cameras at all -- we don't make the determination of whether somebody gets a ticket or not and we're not told anything about how many tickets our cameras are generating.
"Don't You (Forget About Me)" might be the best '80s song ever, complete with the band (Simple Minds) originally hating the song.
I miss the good ol' days when mass-market TV is what rotted kids' brains. Brain-rotting TikTok slop is totally different from that.
I went from mobile apps programmer to school bus driver. 100X happier even if I make 1/6 what I used to.
No argument here.