 |
|
|
|||||
Students are still setting fire to their Chromebooks for TikTokand now they’re facing the consequences. Fast Company first reported on the #ChromebookChallenge trend last week, following a series of school evacuations caused by students igniting laptop fires. The fires are started by inserting items such as pencils, paper clips, and pushpins into the charging ports of school-issued Chromebooks. This can cause the battery to overheat, potentially sparking a fire or explosion that releases toxic fumes. The #ChromebookChallenge reportedly began in Connecticut and has since spread rapidly. Newington High School was the first to evacuate students on May 1 after a laptop caught fire and the fire department was called. Since then, two students at Southington High School were arrested in connection with a separate laptop fire on May 7. The teens were charged with reckless burning, reckless endangerment, criminal mischief, and second-degree breach of peace. On May 8, a Plainville middle school student was hospitalized for smoke inhalation and is now facing criminal charges for deliberately causing the incident. That same day, Belleville High School in New Jersey was evacuated after a laptop fire started outside a classroom. Responding officers and firefighters found a charred Chromebook just outside the building. A 15-year-old student has since been charged with arson and criminal mischief. The trend has spread westward: As of late last week, Denver Public Schools had received 30 reports of students attempting to ignite their laptops, according to Axios. The Colorado Springs Fire Department has reported at least 16 similar incidents. With no sign of the trend slowing, schools across the countryincluding in California, Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and Washingtonhave issued warnings about the reckless challenge. Parents and guardians are also being urged to talk to their children about fire safety and the dangers of blindly following social media trends. A TikTok spokesperson tells Fast Company that it takes down content that violates the platforms Dangerous Activities and Challenges policy. The company is currently working closely with the National PTA to fund programs in high schools about online safety and civility. In addition, searching for the term Chromebook challenge on TikTok brings up a safety warning: “Some online challenges can be dangerous, disturbing, or even fabricated,” it reads. “Learn how to recognize harmful challenges so you can protect your health and well-being.” However, the trend is still circulating under other hashtags, such as #ChromebookDurabilityTest and #FStudent. Many of these videos go viral, garnering thousands of views and comments from fellow students and baffled adults. The clips often feature a sound bite from fitness podcaster Ben Azoulay: The F students are inventors, Azoulay says. Theyre so creative that they couldnt sit in class. Now theyre sitting in jail cells.
Category:
E-Commerce
Want to enjoy your job a little more? Maybe you need a BFF at work. According to Gallup, having a best friend at work increases job satisfaction, innovation, engagement, and productivity, and it decreases your chances of leaving the company. But can that friend ever be your boss? You may think, If Im going to have a friend at work, shouldn’t it be the CEO? Why not go for the top and get the most benefits from the friendship? says Steve McClatchy, author of Leading Relationships: Build Meaningful Connections, Eliminate Conflict, and Radically Improve Engagement. Gallup is telling us that we should have a best friend at work, but it doesn’t say that best friend should be your boss. Being friends with the boss is more complex than being buddies with a colleague. To understand the difference, McClatchy says you need to understand the definition of friendship. Friendship is always working in each other’s best interest, he says. In that case, I would not ask my boss for an extra weekend vacation, because that wouldn’t be in the boss’s best interest. No matter how they walk that thin line with an employee who reports to them, they can always be accused of playing favorites, whether it’s true or not. Being friends with an employee is a slippery slope for the boss, too. McClatchy compares it to the best player on the sports team being the coach’s favorite. The benefit of that friendship is a commitment to excellence, never letting that person down, and always having their back, he explains. But how do the rest of the teammates perform when one player is the favorite? You get extreme output from that one player, but if the output from the other players goes down, does it warrant that? To determine the type of relationship you can have with your boss, McClatchy says its important to understand the levels of maturity within friendships. Level 1: Acknowledging Each Other The first level of friendship is acknowledging each other. This is the most basic stage of friendship, where we recognize being in the presence of someone we know. Its about making eye contact, greeting each other in an appropriate way, and responding to communication as expected. While level one seems easy, McClatchy says your ego can get in the way. When you’re competing, your ego is your greatest asset, he says. It’s your greatest liability in relationships. If you’ve ever won or lost in a relationship, you don’t have one. The ego loves power, because it ensures survival. When the ego feels bruised, microaggressions can get in the way at this level, such as withholding recognition, being passive-aggressive, or ignoring someone. If you cant achieve level one, the friendship has ended before it even began. Level 2: Exchanging Facts and Honoring Agreements The second level of maturity involves exchanging facts and honoring agreements. To be successful, you need to share information without twisting it to fit your agenda. You also need to do what you say you are going to do. In an employee-employer relationship, the employee needs to live up to their agreements, which is their job description. If you fail to follow through, you need to acknowledge it and apologize. McClatchy calls this level trust in action, and it can get tricky with boss friendships. In addition, bosses sometimes need to break agreements, and they may not feel a need to apologize because theyre used to having power. Before you call somebody a friend, make sure they follow through on what they say they’re going to do. And if they break their commitments, they should be able to swallow their ego and apologize. If the relationship fails at level two, McClatchy says it is not an essential relationship, and you should revert to having only level-one interactions. Level 3: Sharing Opinions The third level is where you can lose a relationship if you or the other person are not mature enough to see the world from a different perspective, says McClatchy. Maturity is understanding that other people don’t see the world the same way you do, he says. Its understanding that opinions come from information and experience. I have opinions today that I didn’t have 10 years ago. Friendships at this level mean you can disagree with someone and still respect them as a person. It also means you can seek to understand their opinion, explain your own opinion, and discuss how the difference could impact your relationship. This can be problematic if your boss has a my-way-or-the-highway approach to leading. If the relationship fails at level three, McClatchy recommends keeping interactions to level two: sticking to small talk and avoiding triggering topics. Level 4: Strengths and Weaknesses People like to play to their strengths and work around their weaknesses. In friendship, that means being willing to do that for another person, says McClatchy. No one likes to be criticized or have their weaknesses pointed out, he says. Admitting mistakes is uncomfortable and puts the ego on high alert. The egos job is to meet your needs. The problem is when someone cant admit when they need help or input. If you cant learn from the people around you, you will not achieve the fourth level of friendship maturity. Failure at level four includes denying or blaming someone else for your mistakes, not apologizing when you should, or withholding positive feedback. If level four cannot be achieved, McClatchy says youll need to stick to the previous levels. Level 5: Understanding Motivations The fifth level of interaction is when you understand what motivates and demotivates another personand you use this information in their best interest. I understand your goals, your aspirations, your values, and I use that information to help you to benefit from you, says McClatchy. This is what a best friend is all about. This is somebody who’s going out of their way, and they care as much about your success as they do their own. You cannot get to level five with somebody and not consider them a friend; it’ll happen by default, says McClatchy. However, its difficult to get to level-five maturity with your boss because you have to navigate a direct-reporting relationship. The power structure can’t be ignored, says McClatchy. When I’m the boss, I determine your raise and pay promotions. Right now, when I say something funny, you laugh a little harder. You’re getting a paycheck. I don’t know where the friendship begins and where the power structure ends. If you somehow get to level five and a strong friendship emerges with your boss, McClatchy says its best to figure out a way to get rid of the power structure so you can enjoy your friendship and the business benefits from you not reporting to each other. We rarely get to 100% trust, confidence, and maturity at work, says McClatchy. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t know what it is. As you explore your relationships, think about acknowledgment and recognition, facts and agreements, opinions, strengths and weaknesses, and motivation. The key is that they’re all about treating others with respect and dignity, whether youre best friends or not.
Category:
E-Commerce
Around a decade ago, Chad Dale watched as some of his friends started to leave Seattle. They wanted to stay in an urban environment, but the city was too expensive for them to have all the things that they wanted to have, Dale says. His friends who were beginning to have kids wanted backyards and guest rooms for visiting in-laws; they looked for single-family houses in the suburbs. But Dale, a developer, wondered whether there could be a different solution. What if he and several friends joined together to build their own apartment buildingand all lived in the same place? [Photo: Andrew Storey/courtesy Johnston Architects] Some friends had already bought a vacation home together on nearby Whidbey Island, and they liked the sense of community there. That house, with a single bathroom used by eight people, wasnt designed for communal living. But Dale realized that it would be possible to construct a new building based on the values that they shared. He and his wife, along with 10 other familiesincluding two from the Whidbey Island projectstarted plotting what the development could look like. They decided to build apartments in a range of sizes, from 500 square feet to 2,000 square feet, based on what each family needed. They also wanted to include 24 units that could be rented out to others. And the development would be filled with shared space. [Photo: Andrew Storey/courtesy Johnston Architects] When they found a lot for sale in Seattles Phinney Ridge neighborhood, they also bought a full-size lot next door to use as a huge yard for all of their children. Everybody shares in the cost of that through rents, Dale says. But more importantly, theres a betterment that happens because there are other kids there. Youre not bummed that youre sharing, youre happythe experience is improved. The building, completed in 2023, has several other shared spaces that go beyond what a typical apartment building offers. A huge rooftop deck includes a large greenhouse with dining tables inside and a firepit outside. (The building, appropriately, is named Shared Roof.) Theres a guest suite that residents can use for visitors. A soundproof room is designed for kids to practice drums or play in bands. An on-site gym goes beyond a standard shared fitness room to include the best equipment; the building financed that effort by renting the space to personal trainers, so its used by the outside community as well as residents. [Photo: Andrew Storey/courtesy Johnston Architects] Residents also share resources like tools. The goal is to live together and then determine what else we want to share, says Dale. Weve talked about everything from electric bikes to a pickup truck. If you use the pickup truck three times a year, it’s not worth it. And it’s annoying when you have to go rent from U-Haul. But if you have 35 groups using it three times a year, then maybe it makes sense. [Photo: Andrew Storey/courtesy Johnston Architects] The friends wanted to make the building as sustainable as possible, and its now on track to get LEED Platinum certification, the highest rating from the green building platform. Solar panels mounted over the roof double as a canopy for the deck space. The building has heat pumps and ventilation systems that recover energy, along with energy-saving electric heat pump dryers. On the ground floor, Dale worked to find new businesses that would add to the neighborhooda bakery, a tap room for a brewery, a wine shop, and an Italian restaurant. The retail space surrounds a courtyard thats open to the public. [Photo: Andrew Storey/courtesy Johnston Architects] From the outside, it looks like a fairly standard apartment building. Inside, its clearly different: The friends who invested in the project each made their own choices about how they wanted their own apartment to look. None of theunits stack, says David Fuchs, principal at Johnston Architects, which designed the building. They’re all different shapes and sizes. Inside, everyone got to choose from several different finishes, so the apartments are unique. The financial arrangement is also unique. “We realized very early that if youre going to ask people who could otherwise be purchasing their own piece of property to live in an environment like this, then you also need to provide a way for them to be an investor, because oftentimes thats a significant component of their retirement income or of their nest egg, Dale says. So we came up with the solution to allow folks to be investors as well as tenants. They calculated that the return from the investment could potentially be similar to the return from owning and selling a single-family home. Three outside investors also joined the project without planning to live on-site. [Photo: Andrew Storey/courtesy Johnston Architects] Each of the original families had the option to invest as much as they wanted in the project; the final investments ranged from $50,000 to millions. Because of that, it made sense to have the families pay market-rate rent and then separately earn investment income from the building. (Twenty percent of the other units are offered at a more affordable rate to moderate-income tenants, through a city program that offers a tax break to developers who include affordable apartments.) Initially, the concept was a tough sell to banks. “When we started, I was so excited about the idea that I’d go out and tell everybody, Look, we’ve got this crazy idea where we’re going to have tenants who are also owners, Dale says. “And for the most part, I just got blank stares from the groups that I was trying to get financing from, like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?'” [Photo: Andrew Storey/courtesy Johnston Architects] He realized that he needed to explain it differently: An LLC owns the building, and the LLC has members, as in most apartment buildings. The difference is that some of the members are also tenants. Starting with a core group of longtime friends as tenants transformed the feeling of the building. “The people who live here now treat each other wildly differently than in a typical apartment building,” he says. “They treat the building differently. And then that all rubs off to the people who aren’t [investors] as well. Walking around in this space, people are happier. They’re engaged with each other.” Apartment living is underrated, Dale says. If someone wants social interaction, it’s immediately available. If something breaks, the building manager can deal with it instead of the tenant. “In the U.S., we’ve got a funny way of idolizing single-family homeownership,” he says. “Apartment living is pretty incredible. In terms of function and livability, it’s actually maybe the best way to live, particularly when you’re in an environment where there are other people that you enjoy being around.”
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||