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Black Americans are less likely in a given encounter to be shot by police than white Americans which makes perfect sense when you consider the spotlight of a police shooting involving a black american vs a white american. This has been born out in several studies, one: link. The only reason this seems not to be the case is that a disproportionate amount of young black men get into encounters (homicide numbers) with police in the first place. I'm not going to get into the President but to the third point, criminal statistics based on race and country of origin are well known these days. I'm assuming you don't need me to cite them

We typically find the opposite; women are MORE likely to be offered a job, rather than less.

When the job is in childcare that is true (male names fare very badly). For technical and managerial jobs the opposite appears to be true, male names get the interview, female names get far LESS. Also there's some work to suggest that gender-blind job applications raise the number of women considered. Though this has been contradicted elsewhere on the basis that blind applications leave glaring lacuna in the CV, where women have taken time to have children, and thus work against such women. (Just ask my wife: mothers are far more discriminated against than women in general).

If you want to expand your knowledge here, just even to assess the enemy's armoury, I'd suggest reading Part 1 of Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender, which is as empirically rigorous as anyone with a horse in the race --all of us --can get really (it get's more wishy-washy feministy in the later parts imho).

It's a tax on workers, just like SS/Medicare, health insurance requirements, HR paperwork regulations, etc... Almost the entire burden of the taxes, including the supposed "employer's share" are passed on the employees in the form of lower wages.

From the Tax Foundation:

"It turns out that the supply of labor – that is, workers’ willingness to work – is much less sensitive to taxes than the demand for labor – or employers’ willingness to hire. This is because workers who need a job are not as responsive to changes in wages, but businesses are able to “shop around” for the best workers or shift production to different locations."

This view is backed up by the academic papers on the subject. See The Incidence of Payroll Taxation: Evidence from Chile ("I find strong evidence that the incidence of payroll taxation was fully on wages, with no effect on employment") and The Incidence of Mandated Employer-Provided Insurance: Lessons from Workers' Compensation Insurance ("Empirical analysis of two data sets suggests that changes in employers' costs of workers' compensation insurance are largely shifted to employees in the form of lower wages.") and The Labor Market Effects of Rising Health Insurance Premiums ("Thus, rising health insurance premiums may both increase the ranks of the unemployed and place an increasing burden on workers through decreased wages for workers with employer health insurance and decreased hours for workers moved from full time jobs with benefits to part time jobs without. ")

The amazing part of unemployment is how quickly people whose unemployment ends find a job, when they couldn't possibly find one the whole time they were getting paid...

It's a tax on workers, just like SS/Medicare, health insurance requirements, HR paperwork regulations, etc... Almost the entire burden of the taxes, including the supposed "employer's share" are passed on the employees in the form of lower wages.

From the Tax Foundation:

"It turns out that the supply of labor – that is, workers’ willingness to work – is much less sensitive to taxes than the demand for labor – or employers’ willingness to hire. This is because workers who need a job are not as responsive to changes in wages, but businesses are able to “shop around” for the best workers or shift production to different locations."

This view is backed up by the academic papers on the subject. See The Incidence of Payroll Taxation: Evidence from Chile ("I find strong evidence that the incidence of payroll taxation was fully on wages, with no effect on employment") and The Incidence of Mandated Employer-Provided Insurance: Lessons from Workers' Compensation Insurance ("Empirical analysis of two data sets suggests that changes in employers' costs of workers' compensation insurance are largely shifted to employees in the form of lower wages.") and The Labor Market Effects of Rising Health Insurance Premiums ("Thus, rising health insurance premiums may both increase the ranks of the unemployed and place an increasing burden on workers through decreased wages for workers with employer health insurance and decreased hours for workers moved from full time jobs with benefits to part time jobs without. ")

The amazing part of unemployment is how quickly people whose unemployment ends find a job, when they couldn't possibly find one the whole time they were getting paid...

It's a tax on workers, just like SS/Medicare, health insurance requirements, HR paperwork regulations, etc... Almost the entire burden of the taxes, including the supposed "employer's share" are passed on the employees in the form of lower wages.

From the Tax Foundation:

"It turns out that the supply of labor – that is, workers’ willingness to work – is much less sensitive to taxes than the demand for labor – or employers’ willingness to hire. This is because workers who need a job are not as responsive to changes in wages, but businesses are able to “shop around” for the best workers or shift production to different locations."

This view is backed up by the academic papers on the subject. See The Incidence of Payroll Taxation: Evidence from Chile ("I find strong evidence that the incidence of payroll taxation was fully on wages, with no effect on employment") and The Incidence of Mandated Employer-Provided Insurance: Lessons from Workers' Compensation Insurance ("Empirical analysis of two data sets suggests that changes in employers' costs of workers' compensation insurance are largely shifted to employees in the form of lower wages.") and The Labor Market Effects of Rising Health Insurance Premiums ("Thus, rising health insurance premiums may both increase the ranks of the unemployed and place an increasing burden on workers through decreased wages for workers with employer health insurance and decreased hours for workers moved from full time jobs with benefits to part time jobs without. ")

The amazing part of unemployment is how quickly people whose unemployment ends find a job, when they couldn't possibly find one the whole time they were getting paid...

The H1B program is designed to replace Americans with cheaper offshore workers.

Got a citation for that? Or is it just more racist bullshit from the likes of Breitbart, Fox News, etc.?

Employers have used a work-around which clearly goes against the intent of H1B visas: fire the Americans and outsource their jobs to contracting companies that use mostly H1B employees. IMHO, this practice should not be legal.

Can you cite a case where Americans were directly replaced by H1B workers?

Where did the jobs go? It's hardly a mystery: automation.

It's so obvious that people who track this stuff for a living aren't sure.

From the abstract cited: "Our review of the evidence leads us to conclude that labor demand factors, in particular trade and the penetration of robots into the labor market, are the most important drivers of observed within-group declines in employment. "

I'm not saying you're wrong, but do you have any data, or just your gut?

You mean, other than what was in the article being discussed? The first one is annoyingly paywalled, but the WP article linked in the summary isn't:

" Robots:
Automation also seems to have cost more jobs than it created. Guided by research showing that each robot takes the jobs of about 5.6 workers and that 250,475 robots had been added since 1999, the duo estimated that robots cost the economy another 1.4 million workers."

Where I work zero jobs were lost to automation. All of our cut jobs just had their duties dumped on someone else, who in 2009 was just happy to still have a job. Unfortunately after a decade, the company, and some employees, have forgotten that what they do used to be three jobs.

(my italics). Nice anecdote. You just told me that each person now does the work that used to be three jobs. Sounds like "jobs cut due to automation" to me.

Basically, anyone I can find who has any direct experience with the issue and any sort of credentials which might lend them some credibility seems to agree that guns are not the problem and there's some greater force making us want to kill each other in the US. Unanimously, and regardless of their status as a gun owner, anyone who's actually dealt with or earnestly studied gun violence and is qualified to understand human interaction and behavior agrees that guns would just be replaced with some other weapon if we didn't have them.

I simply don't believe this statement. It defies not only logic, but reality. It's simple economics. Guns are an easy way to kill people, knives are more personal, more dangerous to use, require more effort, and are less effective. It's much easier to shoot 100 people, than it is to stab 100 people. That means reducing access to guns will both reduce the number of incidents, and reduce the severity of the incidents as it becomes harder to obtain guns. Basically, the desire to kill people is a demand curve, and the easier it is to carry out the objective the more people die. And beyond the simple logical understanding, there is plenty of research that disagrees. Which makes your comments fail the "no true Scotsman" sniff test because you seem to be excluding everyone who disagrees with you from your pool of experts.

And think about it: what makes guns so powerful? There's nothing magical about a gun that makes it more deadly as the best available weapon than a knife would be if that was the best we had. A bit easier to kill with? Sure, and harder to stop with anything other than another gun. But a knife will kill you just as dead as a gun and, if we didn't have anything more powerful than a knife, someone with a knife would be just as hard to stop with anything but a knife.

Do you even know what a gun is? It's point and shoot. It's not magic that makes it more deadly than a knife. It's the little pieces of metal travelling at around 1,700 mph that we call bullets that make them more deadly than running around trying to stab people with a knife.

So we get rid of guns. Then what? Knives take their place. We get rid of knives? Okay, then we've got people running each other down in vehicles. So we get rid of those, right? What next? You can sharpen a spoon into a weapon, we should get rid of those as well. Follow that to its logical conclusion and we find ourselves back in the stone age.

This is both a strawman argument and a slippery slope argument. Most people don't want to get rid of all guns, they'd just like to see more restrictions on who can own them, and more respect for their death dealing capabilities. Also, restricting access to knives is not likely to significantly impact murder and assault rates, because the difference between a knife and a blunt object isn't nearly as big as the difference between a knife and a gun.

My friend, again, you are absolutely correct. But you need to realize that you're arguing against people who fear guns more than they fear people wielding guns; as though it's the gun who wants to kill them, rather than the person holding it. They won't ever admit that there's a people problem, because it would force them to admit that they, themselves, are flawed.

Once again, you are completely wrong. Murder is a people problem, but there are many different ways to deal with the problem, and reduced access to guns is one method that will reduce the effects of the people problem. Increase the barrier to commit the crime, and there is less of that crime. There are other approaches that also need to be taken, because it's a demand curve, so increasing barriers only reduces the effect of the problem, it doesn't eliminate it. It's not a silver bullet. So reducing violent

OK:

1. The narrative that black people are more likely to be killed in error or unjustifiably by police officers than whites is statistical fact...

WRONG

You are full of shit.

On the most extreme use of force - officer-involved shootings - we find no racial differences

Your bias is showing dude.

Pot, meet kettle.

Now go grow a brain.

Actually, the election evidence shows that the GOP absorbed the Peripheral South and gained in the South primarily from the importing transplants into the region, not by converting Dixiecrats and Democratic Party KKK leaders like Robert Byrd into Republicans.

See? I already said they know the name of Byrd, but not ACTUAL Dixiecrats like Strom Thurmond that were warmly embraced by the GOP. Mysterious oversight that.

Anyway, It's almost as if you are reciting a scholarly lesson that you see fit to educate us with. In fact, you sound like you borrowed somebody else's phony lecture.

The racist Democrats in the Solid South primarily stayed Democrats.

Oh? Like how numbers of them voted for Reagan? Or Goldwater? Or even Nixon of all people. That's basically because they forgot about the GOP being the party of Lincoln.

The GOP got more votes from the non-racists, both among the existing population and from immigrants from other States to turn the South into their voting block, beginning with the least (not most) racist States.

You mean the states that they gained first were the ones that were the least part of the Solid South? Gosh, who knew!

But the tide quickly turned, and by the 1980s, the Solid South was clearly trending Republican.

The details have been written up in many places, but here’s one I found with a quick Google search if you’re looking for more details.

To quote that article in relation to the myth you keep trying to spread:

Or you can read another study that comes to a different conclusion.

In sum, the GOP's Southern electorate was not rural, nativist, less educated, afraid f change, or concentrated in the most stagnant parts of the Deep South. It was disproportionately suburban, middle-class, educated, younger, non-native-Southern, and concentrated in the growth-points that were, so to speak, the least "Southern" parts of the South."

Suburban middle-class represents the most racist and bigoted groups across the country, or what I would call the "most" White and Southern parts. In reality, the GOP's Southern electoral was and is nativist, their education level is a meaningless distraction, they are afraid of change, and they are indeed not concentrated in the poorest regions of the South because that's where the minorities are, and they know that the GOP doesn't care one bit about them.

(This was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in Congressional voting.)

Yes, thanks to Newt's broken Contract with America, that ended up being the Impeach Clinton show. Great job there, huh?

Only a few years later, what did we get? Interminable war in the Middle East, a massive economic collapse brought on by fraud, and the revelation of a sex abuser among the prosecution team.

Wealthy Southerners shifted rightward in droves but poorer ones didn’t."

That's because they were predominantly (though not exclusively) minorities. Which the Republicans lost in droves. Of course, others are naive enough to fall for the Republican dogma, but that's because well, the party of Reagan and Trump is blowing their dog-whistles for them.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w14...
"By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging -- one with higher subjective well-being for men."

To expand on your point, while this is obviously a complex topic with many possible causes, could part of that decline in overall happiness be the result of well-meaning people encouraging (or even forcing) women to do things they don't really want to do for whatever reason?

Black males are not oppressed. I am a black male living and working in one of those supposedly terrible conservative places, run by righties, and I have never faced meaningful discrimination. I have never been in, seen, or heard of a workplace that intentionally tried to treat black males badly. I know a lot of conservative republicans, and none of them want black males to be treated badly.

The people I see complaining about the treatment of black males are people trying to invent a villain to blame their failures on.

While I'm not going to suggest that racism doesn't exist (there are plenty of scientific studies or statistical analysis of data that have found racial bias exists or cannot explain race-based gaps for different outcomes) I would argue that the people on both sides who are creating or perpetuating a victim narrative should just fuck off because they're not doing anything to help.

Everyone knows that phone support sucks, but it's a great place to get in the door and hone troubleshooting skills. And, once you know the products of a company, you have a far better chance of moving into the engineering organization that does QA on those products ... That's how I did it. Now I'm working at one of those companies that thousands of people try to get jobs at, and over 99% get turned away.

That may have worked for you but it is risky. The effects of taking lower paying jobs or those which are not a great fit for your career ambitions can remain for an entire career. For most workers the effects of a poor first job dissipate after about 8 years, but it take more average or slightly under average graduates far longer.

And research has shown these workers generally catch up by moving to new employers, not by getting their foot in the door and being promoted. I know someone who literally moved up from the mail room to becoming a senior developer, but that is by far the exception to the rule (it was a very small company when he was moving up the ranks). Everyone else I know who was in similar circumstances got stuck in low paying QA jobs and couldn't break out of that role.

You just want to play video games. Mommy's basement gamer clicking "like!" "like!" "like!" on UBI stories. She's on board as well; no hope of getting rid of you otherwise.

It's going to cost about $160k to get my kid through college

Put away the silver spoon if you don't like the costs.

The bulk of universities in the US charge around $8K-$12K per year. Google's top result says the average was $9650 for the 2016-2017 academic year, and $33480 average at private universities. It's even cheaper to start at a community college then transfer to a bigger school after the associate's degree. Don't complain about the $160K for-profit private school when there is the $40K option that can be paid with scholarships, grants, and subsidized loans.

Some people are ironically stupid about education when it comes to quality and cost. Quite a few studies have shown difference between the $140K education and the $40K education is only the cost. For one link of many, there is no significant difference between the choice of school attended. While attending the school gives an enormous boost, the difference between cheap public schools and big-name private schools are, in the words of that one report, "generally indistinguishable from zero". I've seen plenty of other reports with the same conclusion. The cheapest schools yield the same career results as the most expensive.

If you want it yet cannot budget the costs of the private for-profit school then don't go there. As parallels, don't buy the porterhouse or lobster dinner when your budget is better suited for the cheeseburger, and don't buy a Lamborghini as your commuter vehicle if your budget is better suited for a Honda Accord.

Coal burning has enormous economic costs, Just ask the national bureau of economic research who say that it should cost at least a factor of four more to offset just local costs.

The wage stagnation statistic is largely a myth that economists don't agree with. It uses an inappropriate measure of inflation, discounts changing household size and tax changes, and fails to take into account the improved quality of goods that lead to a higher real purchasing power.

Also, play money doesn't work... it''s not money.

Again perhaps surprisingly, play money vs real money doesn't seem to have much of an effect (See also this post).

If you consider the market to be a kind of weighted voting algorithm that exponentially amplifies the predictions of good experts (as you've said), then it doesn't greatly matter what the weights correspond to in the real world. All that matters is that good experts get their weights amplified, bad experts "go broke", that you have enough players to begin with to catch some good experts, and that the players can't do Sybil attacks to get around going broke.

As sites like StackOverflow show -- or MMOs for that matter -- there are plenty of people that are incentivized simply by getting a high score, even if that high score doesn't translate into real money. So while it may seem counterintuitive that play market should work, it's not that weird if you consider it from the point of view of an exponential weighting algorithm.

Here's an example that side steps deflators by looking at real changes in consumption http://www.nber.org/papers/w23...

There is no gender gap in wages among men and women with similar family roles. Comparing the wage gap between women and men ages 35-43 who have never married and never had a child, we find a small observed gap in favor of women, which becomes insignificant after accounting for differences in skills and job and workplace characteristics

The wage gape is entirely explainable by the choices people make. It's not teh sexism, which is why no matter how hard the government cracks down on employers it will never go away.

whatever. As someone old enough to have lived through the period. There wasn't a recession in the late 1990s.

See links below. There was a recession in 1990-199 and another in 2001

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://www.nber.org/cycles.htm...

The BIGGEST problem in the US is the over-regulation of residential building in the most productive cities that keeps the housing supply artificially low.

In the study "Why Do Cities Matter? Local Growth and Aggregate Growth", the authors show that lowering regulatory constraints on housing in high productivity cities like New York, San Francisco and San Jose to the level of the median city would expand their work force and increase U.S. GDP by 9.5%. That is three or more years of current economic growth rates "for free".

Increasing density in these cities is simple. For example, see these reasonable designs for enhanced density while maintaining green space and livability. You don't have to be like Toronto with 37 residential towers over 46 stories. You can achieve a density of 100,000 people per square mile using a mix of buildings up to 8 stories tall.

To see how screwed-up things have become, 40% of buildings in Manhattan would be illegal to build today, because of height, too many residential units, or too much mixed-use between residential and commercial.

More people living in the most productive cities will also increase the tax bases there, allowing for more investment in transport, education, etc. However transport needs would decline (or at least stay the same) if most new residents live inside these cities instead of the distant exurbs.

The strongest motivation for a climate scientist would be to prove everyone else wrong; the one who did that would become extremely wealthy.

That's how science ought to work, but it doesn't. As Max Planck put it:

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

And that view is supported by research, e.g.:

Overall, these results suggest that outsiders are reluctant to challenge leadership within a field when the star is alive and that a number of barriers may constrain entry even after she is gone. Intellectual, social, and re- source barriers all impede entry, with outsiders only entering subfields that offer a less hostile landscape for the support and acceptance of “foreign” ideas.

Of course, there are tons of historical examples where entire fields have stubbornly stuck to erroneous ideas for decades, and there is a large literature now on widespread errors in the scientific literature.

I imagine there aren't (m)any earth scientists among your circle of friends if you think their career choices are limited to either (potentially) lying about global warming or spraying foam on top of hot liquid.

Well, and they would be sort-of correct: right now, there is some opportunity small numbers of climatologists to move into other, related fields, and it involves a loss of status and a lot of work on their part. But the market doesn't have room for $2 billion worth of climatologists who need to switch research areas/fields. And switching is not an attractive option for people who have achieved success and fame in their field; if your most highly cited papers provide results that the community considers irrelevant or disproven, you're worse off than a fresh graduate.

Of course, a lot of graduate students and scientists overestimate their market value and their abilities, so your failure to understand the impact of funding cuts is not surprising.

> Those zoning decisions are anything but stupid. They're carefully thought out to achieve a certain goal.

There is a pretty strong consensus that poor zoning in SF, NYC, etc. is a major cause of housing unaffordability. e.g. https://www.nber.org/papers/w8...

> The question that's being asked in TFS is: is that goal forcing families and lower income people out of San Fransisco?

Where do you get that from? TFS blamed long hours and public school quality.

> Remember, the young rich people there need poor and lower middle class people to cook food, clean, fix toilets, etc, etc. They're gonna get those people one way or the other. Abusing them (in the form of 4 hour commutes or tent cities) is one option.

4 hour commutes... I don't see how you'd ever get there. If these abused lower middle class people are necessary, then prices would increase until those people could continue to live within commute distance. This is the kind of comment people make by projecting a line from current state onward without any concern for counteracting market forces.

Regarding tent cities, well that is pretty much what I said in my comment. If you impede efficient sprawl, your only option is density.

If you are interested in this, I would suggest digging into the housing affordability debate. It is pretty rigorous and does not break on party/ideology lines as closely as you might expect. It is one of those rare topics where nuance is appreciated and you have some "civil wars" within party, especially in local elections. For example, here in Austin, there is a heavy debate between the people who want to use zoning to protect NIMBYs in their district while pushing high density housing into specific locations, and the people who want to encourage SFH growth everywhere, and people who just want to remove a lot of zoning restriction and let the market fix it (yes, these people are on the left). Another interesting source: http://marketurbanism.com/

http://www.nber.org/digest/dec...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

From Work and Leisure in the U.S. and Europe: Why So Different?, hours worked by Europeans and Americans were about the same in the 1960's, although the number of hours were dropping for all every year. In about 1980, the US and Europe diverged, with hours continuing to drop in Europe, but the US plateauing.

Two reasons have been explored. The first is due to tax differences, and indeed labor taxes have been rising in the EU since the end of the 1960's. The other is differences in labor regulations, such as the requirement for contracts, limitations in legal working hours (such as the 35 hour workweek established in 2000 in France).

I agree in general, everything is the same until it is not.

History is really long. We've had thousands of years of civilization.
So it is sometimes worthy to ponder where your grounding is.

Essentially so much of our understanding of labor and economics is rooted in the industrial revolution. Which represents a sliver of time under very specific conditions.

Are we leaving the conditions of our current economic system that worked well within the industrial age? Could be or it could not. But it is a great question. I'd just be careful about presuming everything continues as before and it will all work out because it worked out for the past 200 years or so. That's a short time scale historically.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com...
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18...

Could you please back this up with some citations?

You can Google it yourself, but a good reference is: http://www.nber.org/papers/w15...

given that most of the stuff that you get for free in my country is something you have to pay for in your country

You get nothing for free in your country; you pay for it through taxes, and if you are above average (which you are as a software developer with a Master), you are paying a lot more than you would in a free market.

(I get it you're a happy American. Good for you. Happy European here.)

I used to be a happy European, until I became a pissed off European when I discovered what a lousy deal Europeans get, and then I chose to stop being a European.

statistically speaking white people are more likely to get killed then black

http://www.nber.org/papers/w22...

Statistically unarmed, complying Black people are about 5 times more likely to be killed by a cop than a white person.

https://www.theguardian.com/us...

Wow, both of those pieces of information could be useful in trying to find a solution to our current issues. Let me just check the citations ... oh.

Learn to use a fucking search engine.

The police couldn't have known if backing off wouldn't lead to her shooting someone by trying some stupid shit like stealing a car on gunpoint.

White people get hours, and teargas. Black people get bullets.

Nice victim rhetoric. However according to empirical evidence[1] [2](paywalled) it is entirely false.

Good links, thanks.

But why does the USA let babies die?

http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Health/Infant-mortality-rate

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/howard-steven-friedman/infant-mortality-rate-united-states_b_1620664.html

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr63/nvsr63_05.pdf

http://www.nber.org/papers/w20525.pdf

Here is one paper that talks about deflation and depression, many others can be found in a google search.

Indeed. "Tough on crime" does not work, or rather it has the opposite of the intended effect. That has been known reliably for a long, long time. Criminals do not expect to be caught, and hence penalties do not figure in their motivation.

That's not "settled science":

1) Sentence Enhancements Reduce Crime

2) Longer prison terms really do cut crime, study shows

Here's a simple thought experiment on deterrence. In each of the following scenarios, do we get a) More crime, b) less crime, c) no change?:
1) If we actively rewarded crime?
2) If crime had no state-imposed penalty?
3) If crime had state-imposed minimally inconveniencing penalties?
4) If crime had harsh state-imposed penalties?

You're suggesting deterrence doesn't work because no offender thinks he'll be caught. I don't think that's true. The possibility of capture likely has some place in the offender's risk analysis. Hence many criminals' actions to minimize their possibility of capture.

I admit that deterrence will not deter everyone. But it is safe to say it will deter at least some. And we should take what we can get.

Yes, because it's RACIST! /s

SWJ's don't let cold hard facts get in the way. Same day delivery must be offered equally, even if it doesn't make financial sense for Amazon to offer it. When this logic is applied to home loans, it should not have been surprising what the outcome was.

Your understanding of the financial crisis is disputed by researchers in the field. Here is a National Bureau of Economic Research paper on the subject. For a summary, read this opinion post.

No, "you can't buy if you don't have money" is not a hypothesis. Nor is "you can't sell if no one can buy".

Hmmmm your reasoning is simplistic, and you can't even state your own hypothesis correctly. Your hypothesis is, "giving money to average people will stimulate the economy." Another way of stating that is, "demand side economics are the way to economic improvement."

No, they didn't. They gave money to "job creators" who promptly hoarded it away because there's no point in investing if no one is buying due to lack of funds.

You're a moron. Seriously, please go shoot yourself if you're not willing to do your basic research. http://www.nber.org/digest/mar... https://www.irs.gov/uac/The-Ma...

We already covered it, in the U.S., if you have to go on disability, it pretty much does mean insolvency

No, we did not "cover" it. You made this unsubstantiated claim, that's all. It remains unsubstantiated. But, hey, here, I'll help you out:

Ten years after disability onset, a person with a chronic and severe disability on average experiences a 79 percent decline in earnings, a 35 percent decline in after-tax income, a 24 percent decline in food and housing consumption and a 22 percent decline in food consumption.

So, a 35% decline in after-tax income. That sucks, but it does not automatically mean, a person can't pay his debts! And that's average — some are better off than others, but our government "forgives" them all...

You seem to be pointedly dodging the question

No, I told you — all of the insolvent ought to be treated the same. Now you have dodged my question several times: why should not single parents be "forgiven" too? Their median income is 2/3rds (per adult) that of a married family — no data for "after tax" income.

As for nationalizing the program, that has nothing to do with creating the situation in question here

It has everything to do with it. I will not be automatically forgiven my credit-card debt, for example, if I become disabled — because the bank is controlled by the people, whose money will be on the line. But a nationalized institution spends money of the captive taxpayers and so can afford to be "generous".

The protectionist measures suggested by Trump will harm everyone including the ones supposedly being helped.

This is a bit of a misunderstanding of free trade. In theory, free trade *on balance* benefits everybody, but even with the theoretical best free trade agreement possible, some people are more adversely affected in the short run than others. And in practice, reestablishing equilibrium at a higher rate of output may be difficult to achieve, as argued in an important new paper about free trade.

It would be wonderful if there existed policy positions that have all upside and no downside, but free trade does not appear to be one of them.

The only way NIRP can "work" is for all accounts to charge interest and there to be no physical cash option. This is not conjecture or conspiracy theory.

Negative Nominal Interest Rates: Three ways to overcome the zero lower bound , published: Buiter, Willem H., 2009. The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 20(3), pages 213-238, December.

The paper considers three methods for eliminating the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates and thus for restoring symmetry to domain over which the central bank can vary its policy rate. They are: (1) abolishing currency (which would also be a useful crime-fighting measure); (2) paying negative interest on currency by taxing currency; and (3) decoupling the numéraire from the currency/medium of exchange/means of payment and introducing an exchange rate between the numéraire and the currency which can be set to achieve a forward discount (expected depreciation) of the currency vis-a-vis the numéraire when the nominal interest rate in terms of the numéraire is set at a negative level for monetary policy purposes.

Costs and benefits to phasing out paper currency (PDF) By Kenneth Rogoff, Harvard University.

This paper explores the costs and benefits to phasing out paper currency, beginning with large-denomination notes, later extending to all but small coins and bills, and eventually those as well. It is hardly a simple issue; paper currency is deeply ingrained in the public’s image of government and country, and any attempt to change long-standing monetary conventions raises a host of complex issues. The symbolic value of the euro, for example, as a flag for nascent European Institutions, is hard to overstate. Nevertheless, it is important to ask whether currency in paper form has outlived its usefulness. Credit and debit cards today are increasingly being used for even small transactions. And although today’s crypto-currencies fall far short of being true currencies – for one thing their prices are simply too volatile – the underlying technologies may ultimately strengthen the menu of electronic payments options.

For more information, the Tom Woods Show covered this in an episode last summer. Also note that so far, NIRP isn't even achieving the desired result of increased loans to spur aggregate demand. The only thing it has achieved is wealth transfer.

to be fair black people have more privilege, everyone bends over backwards to be more inclusive of the poor dears.

Indeed! The police bend over backwards to include them in stop and search, and employers bend over backwards to include black people in the category of people discriminated against purely on the basis of their name.

Wow such inclusion many privilege.

"Americans average 25.1 working hours per person in working age per week, but the Germans average 18.6 hours. The average American works 46.2 weeks per year, while the French average 40 weeks per year. Why do western Europeans work so much less than Americans? Recent work argues that these differences result from higher European tax rates, but the vast empirical labor supply literature suggests that tax rates can explain only a small amount of the differences in hours between the U.S. and Europe. Another popular view is that these differences are explained by long-standing European "culture," but Europeans worked more than Americans as late as the 1960s. In this paper, we argue that European labor market regulations, advocated by unions in declining European industries who argued "work less, work all" explain the bulk of the difference between the U.S. and Europe. These policies do not seem to have increased employment, but they may have had a more society-wide influence on leisure patterns because of a social multiplier where the returns to leisure increase as more people are taking longer vacations."

Full paper here.

What is the approximate socioeconomic and racial background of the people in the States that you are interacting with?

I'm not American either, but the evidence is that negative discrimination is prevalent. Here's an example: http://www.nber.org/papers/w98...

An important thing is that the people who read these resumes don't think they are paying attention to the names. They don't consciously think "black = bad". It just biases them unconsciously. And yes, you can absolutely find individuals who have the opposite bias without disproving the position. Aside from any notion of fairness, it is an objective problem because it leads to suboptimal allocation of resources, and is self-perpetuating. The problem is not easy to solve.

When we're talking about racism, chatting with your American friends is a terribly biased sample. It's one of the worst possible ways to get an accurate view of anything.

I know almost nothing of the state of Gypsies in Romania so I won't comment there at all.

pays their full-time workers so little that they can't afford food or a place to live without welfare and foodstamps?

Could you please provide a source for this claim? In 2014, the Wal-Mart blog fisked a hit piece that was claiming things similar to what you just claimed, and pointed out that the average hourly wage at Wal-Mart was $12.91 per hour (and that is specifically not including highly-paid management).

http://blog.walmart.com/fact-check-the-new-york-times-the-corporate-daddy

How does it help me that my tax dollars have to subsidize Walmart employees

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/11/13/apologies-but-welfare-payments-to-employees-are-not-subsidies-to-walmart-and-mcdonalds/

Wal-Mart makes about 3% profit. In comparison, Apple Computer makes about 24% profit. Additionally, Wal-Mart has a more ethnically diverse set of employees than Apple Computer has. You seem to hate Wal-Mart; do you hate Apple Computer even more?

https://www.aei.org/publication/every-month-walmart-gets-one-profit-day-from-its-sales-while-apple-gets-7-5/

Also, low-income people like to shop at Wal-Mart because the low prices are a benefit. Some economists have written papers attempting to estimate the impact.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/08/11/walmart-destroys-jobs-yes-but-the-benefits-go-to-consumers-not-the-top/
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11809

So, to summarize: Wal-Mart pays a lot of taxes, employs a lot of people at an average hourly rate 78% over the US federal minimum wage, and benefits the poor by helping them spend less on the things they need.

I just don't understand all the Wal-Mart hate.

Two points.

1) for spinning platters, being able to recover significant amounts of data after even one pass of zeros is a myth. See this article on recovering overwritten data or any of the top google results.

2) SSDs are different, but far easier to wipe if you get a good model. There is an ATA Secure Erase command, and you can use it directly with hdparm on linux. It takes seconds to wipe most SSDs this way.

However, firmware implementation of this is spotty. You will find some studies showing secure erase failures. But the paper is 4 years old, and manufacturers seem to have gotten better. So if you're REALLY concerned about this level of security, encrypt your SSDs and find a manufacturer that properly ATA Sanitize Block Erase.

Historically, small businesses create more jobs than any corporation does. Mom and pop businesses. Family businesses. Local cooperatives. Some individual who sticks his neck out - and entrepreneur. Young companies create jobs - older, more established businesses do not.

http://www.sbecouncil.org/abou...

http://smallbusiness.house.gov...

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/ar...

http://www.nber.org/digest/feb...

Of at least equal importance, is the question of WHEN do businesses create jobs?
Small businesses, new businesses, and startups create jobs all the time. Large corporations instead only "create" jobs in times of plenty. That is - they stand back, and watch the small players take the risks. When they see little guys making a go of it, then they either buy out the little guy, or go directly into competition with that little guy.

There was a very well-controlled study where two sets of anonymous letters of application ...

This study was conducted by Stephen Levitt, and is described in his book Freakonomics, which is a fantastic book for anyone interested in the application of statistics to social science. Here is the original paper.

I suggest you give this paper (http://www.nber.org/papers/w12663.pdf) a read.

This was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research and it was an analysis of the studies on the employment effects of minimum wages.

From the abstract:

A sizable majority of the studies surveyed in this monograph give a relatively consistent (although not always statistically
significant) indication of negative employment effects of minimum wages. In addition, among the
papers we view as providing the most credible evidence, almost all point to negative employment
effects, both for the United States as well as for many other countries. Two other important conclusions
emerge from our review. First, we see very few - if any - studies that provide convincing evidence
of positive employment effects of minimum wages, especially from those studies that focus on the
broader groups (rather than a narrow industry) for which the competitive model predicts disemployment
effects. Second, the studies that focus on the least-skilled groups provide relatively overwhelming
evidence of stronger disemployment effects for these groups.

It's not that men are better negotiators, it's that they are more likely to try to negotiate in the first place, when an offer is not explicitly described as negotiable.*

I thought this was really well known. It is scientifically recorded -- one citation is here: http://www.nber.org/papers/w18...

It's actually often cited as a big reason for the gender pay gap, especially when you consider that negotiation isn't just about salary but also about position.

* There are also further possibilities, not fully proven, that can compound that. One you've already identified: perhaps women are just worse at it, either biologically or through socialization. Another is that people on the other end of the negotiating table might be better at negotiating against women, again either biologically or through socialization or other economic factors.

We perform a field experiment to measure racial discrimination in the labor market. We respond with fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers. To manipulate perception of race, each resume is assigned either a very African American sounding name or a very White sounding name. The results show significant discrimination against African-American names: White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. We also find that race affects the benefits of a better resume. For White names, a higher quality resume elicits 30 percent more callbacks whereas for African Americans, it elicits a far smaller increase. Applicants living in better neighborhoods receive more callbacks but, interestingly, this effect does not differ by race. The amount of discrimination is uniform across occupations and industries. Federal contractors and employers who list Equal Opportunity Employer' in their ad discriminate as much as other employers. We find little evidence that our results are driven by employers inferring something other than race, such as social class, from the names. These results suggest that racial discrimination is still a prominent feature of the labor market.

There have been recent studies that point that it's not necessarily a lack of opportunities that prevent girls from getting into CS fields of study, but that early educator's biases may be more to blame.

I wonder what would happen if they added a third group: teachers who knew the names of the students, but didn't know them personally? Because all we've demonstrated here is that the teachers who personally knew the students were biased towards the boys

No doubt the same bias as the teachers considering it only takes a name that sounds like certain racial demographics to reveal bias in hiring. No reason I can think of to prevent that same bias from showing up here too.