Other things that are extremely important to determining successful outcomes in higher education.
1. oxygen. If you can't breathe, you won't be doing any learning while you suffocate to death.
2. energy. You know what happens when we run out of usable energy at the heat death of the universe? Learning grinds to a halt.
3. organic molecules. DNA? absolutely essential for transferring genetic material to you from your parents and creating proteins. ATP? There's that important energy thing again. Without organic molecules, all your organs would shut down. And do you know what your most important organ is? Your brain.
4. Gravity. How are you supposed to learn if you can;t even keep your pencils and paper on your desk?
5. Electromagnetism, in addition to being the force that keeps the whole earth from collapsing into a black hole, it also deflects harmful cosmic radiation away from earth's surface. You think your classes are hard now? Try taking your final in a black hole while dying of radiation exposure.
All through school, I remember being pushed into groups, for the reason that often times cooperative group learning is more effective than banging your own single head on the book on your desk.
Group learning is really helpful to the people that need the help and not so helpful for those using their time to help others in the group rather than learning new things.
Here's a novel idea. The learning group is the whole class, and it is the teacher + assistants are the ones helping everyone, and to compensate the teacher + assistants, they are paid money.
I am claiming that companies can be racist, in that they can have unofficial policies that are discriminatory on the basis of race.
I guess it depends on what your definition of an "unofficial policy" is. If it's unofficial, how is it a policy? Did the CEO just instruct all the hiring managers to hire people of a certain race without actually writing it down? Or is it just something hiring managers are doing subconsciously?
There's lots of people who complain about the difficulty of getting a job when you're over 40 (which I didn't find a problem when I started dying my hair), and it's illegal to discriminate on the basis of age against anyone between 40 and 65.
I know at my work we hire lot's of people over 40, and on the whole, they (in my opinion) tend not to turn out so well. Not only do they require higher salaries, but they are often incredibly stubborn and are unwilling to learn to use new technologies.
So in my example, if you hired only people who were willing to embrace new technologies, you'd end up discriminating against older people, but not directly because of their age, but merely due to the correlation between age and lack of willingness to embrace new technologies.
There are going to be racist people at any company of reasonable size, but companies are not necessarily racist because of that.
A company could have *only* racist people working for it, but if it were diverse, then you might still maintain that diversity (black hiring managers only hiring black employees, asian hiring managers only hiring asian employees, etc.)
However, if they essentially do not hire qualified whites, say, the company is racist.
What I am saying is that the assumption that qualified candidates reflect the diversity of society as a whole is simply not true.
There just aren't as many women interested in software engineering as men. There are no doubt many reasons we would want to change that and many ways that we could try to change that, but it is just a fact as of right now. If a large enough company employed 50% women in it's software department, it is very likely that there was discrimination in order to achieve that.
If anything having a "perfectly" diverse employee demographic, for nearly every profession is evidence of racism, sexism, ageism, etc of some sort (legal or otherwise).
But I agree that if a company refuses to hire a particular demographic of otherwise qualified people simply based race, that's racism.
And I would expect that the company that does hire those qualified (and undervalued) workers then has a competitive advantage, compared to the companies paying a premium to hire overvalued workers of the preferred race.
It is because I actually believe that these stereotypes are generally false, that I believe that being rational rather than racist is a competitive advantage.
I don;t believe a company can be very successful by willfully hiring worse candidates and/or hiring equally qualified candidates for more money. It's just too easy for competitors to exploit such an obvious weakness, especially in a thriving market like technology.
I believe it is the lack of racism compared to other industries and to the past, that we see such a willingness to employ foreigners to such a high degree.
You seem to be intentionally misreading/flat out making stuff up about what I'm saying.
When debating someone that is contradicting themself and/or has an incoherent line of reasoning, it's important to ask questions to find out what they are actually claiming. Notice that what I asked is what's known as a question.
At this point, I'm saying you're an idiot.
Name-calling? Did you really have no good rebuttals?
He said "You are naÃve if you think corporations motivated by profit can't have diversity issues. Perhaps not outright racism, but for example by having poor job advertising and networking a corporation can end up unintentionally reducing the number of candidates from certain groups."
I was claiming that "diversity issues" is an arbitrary designation, and in most cases you must discriminate on the basis of race in order not to have "diversity issues" (i.e. hiring based on quotas). I was not contesting the idea that Apple has "diversity issues", I was saying that diversity issues are not evidence of racism. Furthermore the lack of "diversity issues" is probably a strong indication of (albeit legal) discrimination.
You took an absolutist position, that for-profit companies do not discriminate on race or other illegal criteria.
That is actually not what I said. I never said they didn't discriminate nor did I claim they follow discrimination laws.
What I said was that they are not racist. It was not intended to be an absolute statement, but one that is "basically" true.
For example:
Alice: Democrats are pedophiles
Me: Democrats are not pedophiles
Bob: Actually your absolutist statement that democrats are not pedophiles is wrong, because some are.
This does not mean that every single person in a for profit company is not racist, nor does it mean that there are never any instances of racism committed by individuals in that company. But I don;t think it is fair to characterize a whole company as racist merely because they may (and certainly do) have some racist individuals.
For example, I wouldn't say "The democratic party is racist", if I manage to find one or a few members of that party who are racist.
This is different than claiming something like "Planned parenthood supports women's rights". This would be true even if not all people involved with planned parenthood supported women's rights. The organization itself does.
I don't accept the notion that the total is merely the sim of the parts. All the proteins that make up our bodies are not alive, common sense might conclude that our cells, and whole body must also not be alive if it's made up entirely of non-living things. Obviously this isn't true generally.
Similarly, if you claimed that drug-related violence was due to the fact that those drugs are illegal, you'd be partly wrong. If nobody wanted those drugs enough to do anything illegal, there wouldn't be the violence. If some of the drugs made people homicidal, there would be drug-related violence despite legality.
I would say that it's not the drugs that make people homicidal. I've been around a lot of people on drugs, and it's not like you need to call the cops when you find someone on drugs because they are likely to kill someone. The people who kill others on drugs, are usually quite troubled even without the drugs.
I don't discount the theoretical possibility that some drugs really will cause anyone who takes them to become homicidal with a high degree of probability, but in reality I just don't think any drugs like that exist (yet). And should such a drug exist, I would certainly support making the use of such a drug illegal as a matter of public safety.
No I am not saying that every single instance of violence related to drugs was caused by the fact that they are illegal. I am saying that the overwhelming majority of violence caused by drugs is their illegality to the point that we might consider the other causes of drug related violence insignificant in comparison.
I am also saying that we should consider the racism of for-profit companies (especially the large and successful ones) to be nearly non-existent compared to the racism of individuals.
I am claiming that some companies practice illegal hiring practices (although I'm not going to name any publicly)
I don't doubt that they exist, just like I don't doubt that *some* people are caused to commit violence simply because of the effect of drugs.
"An Illinois state judge issued a warrant ordering Apple and Google to unlock the phones and share with authorities any data therein that could potentially solve the murder. Apple and Google replied, in essence, that they could not — because they did not know the user's passcode. The homicide remains unsolved. The killer remains at large."
They could probably solve even more cases if they had the ability to remotely decrypt and access the contents of everyone's cell phone. They could solve *even more* cases if they were able to search anyone's property without a warrant.
What if we just put everyone in prison. It'll be pretty hard for anyone to commit crimes from inside a jail cell.
I suppose it's easy for some people to fall into the mindset that crime prevention is the *only* thing that matters.
I don't understand how robbery is preferable to natural death. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Firstly, if you choose to live in a democracy where we have voted to have socialized healthcare (or any kind of taxes at all), it's not robbery as long as you are free to leave.
Secondly, I would absolutely prefer robbery over *preventable* death (natural or otherwise).
The pursuit of happiness (and medical care) should be protected. That's different from dropping medical care in someone's lap. If someone decides to pick and choose a tough career/lifestyle that can pay for the medical care he wants, don't punish him for that.
Let's say a person is born with cystic fibrosis, and needs $100,000 of medication every year to stay alive. It's easy to say "tough shit for him, I shouldn't be forced to help him", but I acknowledge the fact that I could have been born with cystic fibrosis, or maybe one of my children could have it, and I'd rather live in a society where we take care of our citizens.
If you don't like this society and aren't having much luck changing to be like what you would prefer, I suggest you leave. There are plenty of places with no government at all. You'd fit right in.
You keep somehow massively getting the wrong end of the stick.
I'm not claiming there's a false dichotomy, I'm addressing the original claim that corporations don't behave in a racist way because of the profit motive. That requires the *people* within a corporation to rationally chase profit. However racism is an *irrational* trait of people. If people are irrational you cannot expect them to be rational.
So you are saying that everyone is equally racist?
No, not even slightly. That would only work if the market is very efficient and the markets are of infinite size.
So you are saying only perfect markets work at all? (i.e. no spectrum of market performance)?
Let's take and old fashioned example first. The largest, richest and most powerful company to have ever existed in the world was the East India company. Wanna bet there was no racism there?
Did you even read what I wrote? Did I say there was no racism at Apple? If you had read my post you would be comparing the East India company's level of racism to other companies from the same time and place. A *more* racist contemporary might have refrained from going to India at all due to racism.
Furthermore, do you *really* not think that being more ration and less racist gives a company a competitive advantage? If you don't accept this basic premise you will never accept any of the conclusions I make, and we can just stop this discussion right now.
Look at microsoft for example: for years they produced terrible products, but they had the market completely nailed down as a monopoly (and were conviceted for monopoly abuse) so they could do what they liked and still remain massively profitable. If they'd had flagrantly racist hiring practices it wouldn't have made a dent, becuase they weren't competing on the quality of their products.
You have to be more specific with your timeline. There were years where microsoft made "terrible" products, but there were no better alternatives (implying that their products were not so terrible at the time). Secondly, I don't think Microsoft would have been so successful in the first place if they were leaving all the best engineers of other races and genders to be scooped up by other companies.
If I said "people who go to MIT are really smart compared to people who go to community college", your counter example would be "There could be someone stupid at MIT because their parents were rich". This doesn't mean that what I am saying is wrong.
Or if you prefer, efficient markets require rational actors.
No... more efficient markets require more efficient actors. It's a spectrum.
Furthermore, the markets that corporations compete in is already far more rational than the market for headphones. Shareholders are better at analyzing profitability of companies than teenagers are at analyzing headphones.
Or let's say you're based in Helena, Montana. You could be massively, flagrantly racist against non cacusasian and it would have more or less no effect (5%?) because the popualtion has very little diversity.
In a population with limited diversity, there is limited opportunity to be racist. If Helena was 100% white, then you couldn't act on your racism at all, and that's why non-racist companies in Helena wouldn't have a competitive advantage.
Slo let's now take some HFT companies. Basically you need enough capital to get your server closer to the exchange than anyone else, to cut down on latency. That is the primary driving factor. Beyond that it makes much less difference who you hire (yes, I know some HFT people, no they ain't that impressive).
So what you are saying is that the people developing HFT algorithms are dummies, and it doesn't matter what race they are, so a company will be just as successful if they hire dumb white software engineers
I re-read it, and I still think it misses the point I was making.
It's like if I said "The real cause of drug-related violence is the criminalization of drugs", and someone rebuts "Yeah but some drug addicts kill people in muggings."
This response fails to grasp that what I am saying is that the criminalization of drugs is also the cause of the muggings by addicts.
You don't know that Apple is hiring the right people among the applicants, or that "most suitable" isn't discriminatory.
I am absolutely sure Apple's hiring process is discriminatory. They are certainly discriminating based on talent, and even if they are discriminating based on race, it's discrimination against non-indian people.
I will say that if Apple were in the habit of passing up more qualified workers for less qualified workers of a different race, it would decrease their profitability. And given that they are one of the most profitable companies on the planet, I'm willing to bet that they are one of the least discriminatory.
"Cultural fit" is often an excuse for violating Equal Opportunity hiring laws, and we do know that Apple hasn't always conformed to the law.
I don't equate conformance with EOE laws with non-discriminatory hiring. For example, you can practice age discrimination by only hiring old people, and it is not in violation of the law. I would certainly not want to hire people who do not fit in the culture (e.g. homophobic people, racist people, sexist people, etc).
Obviously, if Apple were hiring without attention to race, they'd still have a very large disparity, but that doesn't mean they're clearly innocent.
I am not claiming that Apple isn't discriminating. I am saying that if we assumed Apple was unbiased, I think we would see something similar to their current demographic distribution.
If we assumed they were hiring with an affirmative action mentality, we would expect to see a microcosm of the United States.
If we assumed they were hiring with a white supremacist mentality, we probably wouldn't see so many south asians working there.
I don't think any employee demographic would be proof that the hiring process that resulted in it was completely non-discriminatory, but I think Apple's demographic comes close (unlike some other companies).
If you really want to catch some racist companies, I would go after the ones that are not hiring a bunch of indian people, despite the clear profit potential.
You don't understand the drugs thing. DNA isn't making anyone do drugs.
I never once mentioned DNA, but this statement does say a lot about your misguided rationale.
You can dump millions in rehab expenses on certain people and they will stay addicted to drugs.
You can dump millions in heart bypass surgery on certain people, and they will still die of a heart attack. I personally knew a man who had a $1 million heart bypass surgery and died of a heart attack 6 months later.
I do feel sorry for those people, and I am willing to help them as a private citizen. But to ask the tax payers to write out a check and feel like they've done something is profoundly mistaken.
You seem to feel less empathy for them than other people in need of medical care. You clearly feel they are less deserving of medical care. Why is that?
If there were a DNA mutation that caused drug addiction, would that make a difference? Why or why not?
Picking and choosing isn't an ugly side effect of good policy. It is central to and inseparable from it.
I'm claiming that what you are picking and choosing is flawed. What if they criteria for picking and choosing who gets medical care is "rich people". Is that good policy?
Don't quibble with freedom... embrace it!
So when some kid is dying of cancer, and he can't raise enough money for his chemotherapy, we should embrace that? The market has spoken. Little Timmy should die?
I believe in markets to solve lots of problems. Markets do a very good job of streamlining the allocation of resources. In the case of healthcare, markets do a very good job of allocating resources to those that can best afford them. When it comes to people's health, I don't want markets to decide who gets healthcare and who doesn't.
I think everyone should get a basic level of healthcare that is beyond just emergency room services. The retributivist in me would say, that if any class of people does not deserve tax payer funded healthcare, it's not drug addicts, it's callous people.
I literally have no idea what you're talking about.
No kidding...
Profit motive does not make corporations non racist. Racism is one of many irrational trait of *people*. Corporations are made of people. There is nothing in the structure to make people rational.
If the people making up a corporation are racist, then the hiring decisions of the company (i.e. the people within it) are racist.
This idea that "either people in a company are racist or they are not" is a false dichotomy. The racism of people, groups, companies, etc, fall along a spectrum.
Irrational decisions (e.g. hiring people based on race rather than performance) in general decrease profit. So if you look at the most profitable corporations, it makes sense that those would be the least racist corporations (i.e. they make the most rational decisions).
So no profit doesn't preclude racism, but it is evidence of rationality in decision making.
For example, being extremely poor doesn't preclude you from becoming a doctor. One might be tempted to say that "becoming a doctor and growing up in poverty are unrelated". But growing up in an affluent family sure does greatly increase the probability that you will become a brain surgeon.
In the same way when you look at doctors, you will see that a higher percentage of them are from affluent families than the normal population, if you look at profitable companies you will see that they are more rational than the normal population of companies.
Assuming that a profitable company is full of racist people is like assuming a doctor must have grown up in poverty.
Legislators and voters are people too. So they aren't going to be rational when voting for legislators nor making laws. You can do this ad infinitum, and it doesn't lead you to any solutions, so why bother.
Humans aren't rational and companies are made of people.
Aah yes, the old "corporations are people" argument, or a variation on the theme on the personhood of legal entities.
If anything Apple is racist against non-indian people. When you have a bunch of white people deciding through their hiring practices that indian people are better workers than any other ethnicity, (including other white people), then something is going, but it isn't racism.
I don't think you read my post very well. I'm saying that the "diversity issues" (as defined by society), are not the result of racism of the corporation. They are a result of the society we live in and unequal education given to people of different skin colors. Apple is simply hiring the people most suitable for their company. If we want Apple to be diverse, it is out job as a society to ensure that the pool of qualified applicants from which apple is choosing is diverse.
When you have certain groups of people going to terrible inner city schools, and other groups going to well funded schools, and better colleges, do you really expect their to be no difference when it comes time for apple to decide to hire?
I'm sure this subset of congress doesn't have more important things to do, like working on getting better schools in impoverished areas.
Apple is a for-profit corporation. They are not racist. They care about profit. If there were tons of qualified applicants of the right colors (whatever they may be), apple would hire them and profit from it. If you want a different distribution of colors of employees at apple, work on making those colors of people the best educated in STEM.
You could just try to pass a law forcing Apple to hire people they don't want to hire, but then they would probably end up like all the companies who no one cares what kind of diversity they have.
If diversity matters to you, work on diverse talent, not diverse employment. Furthermore, I would suggest the idea that diversity is more than just skin color and gender. Simply hiring people who look different doesn't guarantee that those people think differently.
Slashdot Mirror
Other things that are extremely important to determining successful outcomes in higher education. 1. oxygen. If you can't breathe, you won't be doing any learning while you suffocate to death.
2. energy. You know what happens when we run out of usable energy at the heat death of the universe? Learning grinds to a halt.
3. organic molecules. DNA? absolutely essential for transferring genetic material to you from your parents and creating proteins. ATP? There's that important energy thing again. Without organic molecules, all your organs would shut down. And do you know what your most important organ is? Your brain.
4. Gravity. How are you supposed to learn if you can;t even keep your pencils and paper on your desk?
5. Electromagnetism, in addition to being the force that keeps the whole earth from collapsing into a black hole, it also deflects harmful cosmic radiation away from earth's surface. You think your classes are hard now? Try taking your final in a black hole while dying of radiation exposure.
All through school, I remember being pushed into groups, for the reason that often times cooperative group learning is more effective than banging your own single head on the book on your desk.
Group learning is really helpful to the people that need the help and not so helpful for those using their time to help others in the group rather than learning new things.
Here's a novel idea. The learning group is the whole class, and it is the teacher + assistants are the ones helping everyone, and to compensate the teacher + assistants, they are paid money.
When is anything *always* a great idea?
Also the bad people were probably brown and not Christian, and you could hear their stupid accents through their ascii characters.
The Caddy! Where's the Caddy?
I am claiming that companies can be racist, in that they can have unofficial policies that are discriminatory on the basis of race.
I guess it depends on what your definition of an "unofficial policy" is. If it's unofficial, how is it a policy? Did the CEO just instruct all the hiring managers to hire people of a certain race without actually writing it down? Or is it just something hiring managers are doing subconsciously?
There's lots of people who complain about the difficulty of getting a job when you're over 40 (which I didn't find a problem when I started dying my hair), and it's illegal to discriminate on the basis of age against anyone between 40 and 65.
I know at my work we hire lot's of people over 40, and on the whole, they (in my opinion) tend not to turn out so well. Not only do they require higher salaries, but they are often incredibly stubborn and are unwilling to learn to use new technologies.
So in my example, if you hired only people who were willing to embrace new technologies, you'd end up discriminating against older people, but not directly because of their age, but merely due to the correlation between age and lack of willingness to embrace new technologies.
There are going to be racist people at any company of reasonable size, but companies are not necessarily racist because of that.
A company could have *only* racist people working for it, but if it were diverse, then you might still maintain that diversity (black hiring managers only hiring black employees, asian hiring managers only hiring asian employees, etc.)
However, if they essentially do not hire qualified whites, say, the company is racist.
What I am saying is that the assumption that qualified candidates reflect the diversity of society as a whole is simply not true.
There just aren't as many women interested in software engineering as men. There are no doubt many reasons we would want to change that and many ways that we could try to change that, but it is just a fact as of right now. If a large enough company employed 50% women in it's software department, it is very likely that there was discrimination in order to achieve that.
If anything having a "perfectly" diverse employee demographic, for nearly every profession is evidence of racism, sexism, ageism, etc of some sort (legal or otherwise).
But I agree that if a company refuses to hire a particular demographic of otherwise qualified people simply based race, that's racism.
And I would expect that the company that does hire those qualified (and undervalued) workers then has a competitive advantage, compared to the companies paying a premium to hire overvalued workers of the preferred race.
It is because I actually believe that these stereotypes are generally false, that I believe that being rational rather than racist is a competitive advantage.
I don;t believe a company can be very successful by willfully hiring worse candidates and/or hiring equally qualified candidates for more money. It's just too easy for competitors to exploit such an obvious weakness, especially in a thriving market like technology.
I believe it is the lack of racism compared to other industries and to the past, that we see such a willingness to employ foreigners to such a high degree.
You seem to be intentionally misreading/flat out making stuff up about what I'm saying.
When debating someone that is contradicting themself and/or has an incoherent line of reasoning, it's important to ask questions to find out what they are actually claiming. Notice that what I asked is what's known as a question.
At this point, I'm saying you're an idiot.
Name-calling? Did you really have no good rebuttals?
No, I think you're missing what he is saying.
He said "You are naÃve if you think corporations motivated by profit can't have diversity issues. Perhaps not outright racism, but for example by having poor job advertising and networking a corporation can end up unintentionally reducing the number of candidates from certain groups."
I was claiming that "diversity issues" is an arbitrary designation, and in most cases you must discriminate on the basis of race in order not to have "diversity issues" (i.e. hiring based on quotas). I was not contesting the idea that Apple has "diversity issues", I was saying that diversity issues are not evidence of racism. Furthermore the lack of "diversity issues" is probably a strong indication of (albeit legal) discrimination.
You took an absolutist position, that for-profit companies do not discriminate on race or other illegal criteria.
That is actually not what I said. I never said they didn't discriminate nor did I claim they follow discrimination laws.
What I said was that they are not racist. It was not intended to be an absolute statement, but one that is "basically" true.
For example:
Alice: Democrats are pedophiles
Me: Democrats are not pedophiles
Bob: Actually your absolutist statement that democrats are not pedophiles is wrong, because some are.
This does not mean that every single person in a for profit company is not racist, nor does it mean that there are never any instances of racism committed by individuals in that company. But I don;t think it is fair to characterize a whole company as racist merely because they may (and certainly do) have some racist individuals.
For example, I wouldn't say "The democratic party is racist", if I manage to find one or a few members of that party who are racist.
This is different than claiming something like "Planned parenthood supports women's rights". This would be true even if not all people involved with planned parenthood supported women's rights. The organization itself does.
I don't accept the notion that the total is merely the sim of the parts. All the proteins that make up our bodies are not alive, common sense might conclude that our cells, and whole body must also not be alive if it's made up entirely of non-living things. Obviously this isn't true generally.
Similarly, if you claimed that drug-related violence was due to the fact that those drugs are illegal, you'd be partly wrong. If nobody wanted those drugs enough to do anything illegal, there wouldn't be the violence. If some of the drugs made people homicidal, there would be drug-related violence despite legality.
I would say that it's not the drugs that make people homicidal. I've been around a lot of people on drugs, and it's not like you need to call the cops when you find someone on drugs because they are likely to kill someone. The people who kill others on drugs, are usually quite troubled even without the drugs.
I don't discount the theoretical possibility that some drugs really will cause anyone who takes them to become homicidal with a high degree of probability, but in reality I just don't think any drugs like that exist (yet). And should such a drug exist, I would certainly support making the use of such a drug illegal as a matter of public safety.
No I am not saying that every single instance of violence related to drugs was caused by the fact that they are illegal. I am saying that the overwhelming majority of violence caused by drugs is their illegality to the point that we might consider the other causes of drug related violence insignificant in comparison.
I am also saying that we should consider the racism of for-profit companies (especially the large and successful ones) to be nearly non-existent compared to the racism of individuals.
I am claiming that some companies practice illegal hiring practices (although I'm not going to name any publicly)
I don't doubt that they exist, just like I don't doubt that *some* people are caused to commit violence simply because of the effect of drugs.
"An Illinois state judge issued a warrant ordering Apple and Google to unlock the phones and share with authorities any data therein that could potentially solve the murder. Apple and Google replied, in essence, that they could not — because they did not know the user's passcode. The homicide remains unsolved. The killer remains at large."
They could probably solve even more cases if they had the ability to remotely decrypt and access the contents of everyone's cell phone. They could solve *even more* cases if they were able to search anyone's property without a warrant.
What if we just put everyone in prison. It'll be pretty hard for anyone to commit crimes from inside a jail cell.
I suppose it's easy for some people to fall into the mindset that crime prevention is the *only* thing that matters.
I don't understand how robbery is preferable to natural death. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Firstly, if you choose to live in a democracy where we have voted to have socialized healthcare (or any kind of taxes at all), it's not robbery as long as you are free to leave.
Secondly, I would absolutely prefer robbery over *preventable* death (natural or otherwise).
The pursuit of happiness (and medical care) should be protected. That's different from dropping medical care in someone's lap. If someone decides to pick and choose a tough career/lifestyle that can pay for the medical care he wants, don't punish him for that.
Let's say a person is born with cystic fibrosis, and needs $100,000 of medication every year to stay alive. It's easy to say "tough shit for him, I shouldn't be forced to help him", but I acknowledge the fact that I could have been born with cystic fibrosis, or maybe one of my children could have it, and I'd rather live in a society where we take care of our citizens.
If you don't like this society and aren't having much luck changing to be like what you would prefer, I suggest you leave. There are plenty of places with no government at all. You'd fit right in.
Well even if they don't get unbrainwashed, they will just turn into adults which are fucking awesome to kill. So win-win, right?
Another fun fact: shooting Boko Haram people doesn't just work on it's leadership, it also works on the child soldiers they've brainwashed. Fuck yeah!
You keep somehow massively getting the wrong end of the stick.
I'm not claiming there's a false dichotomy, I'm addressing the original claim that corporations don't behave in a racist way because of the profit motive. That requires the *people* within a corporation to rationally chase profit. However racism is an *irrational* trait of people. If people are irrational you cannot expect them to be rational.
So you are saying that everyone is equally racist?
No, not even slightly. That would only work if the market is very efficient and the markets are of infinite size.
So you are saying only perfect markets work at all? (i.e. no spectrum of market performance)?
Let's take and old fashioned example first. The largest, richest and most powerful company to have ever existed in the world was the East India company. Wanna bet there was no racism there?
Did you even read what I wrote? Did I say there was no racism at Apple? If you had read my post you would be comparing the East India company's level of racism to other companies from the same time and place. A *more* racist contemporary might have refrained from going to India at all due to racism.
Furthermore, do you *really* not think that being more ration and less racist gives a company a competitive advantage? If you don't accept this basic premise you will never accept any of the conclusions I make, and we can just stop this discussion right now.
Look at microsoft for example: for years they produced terrible products, but they had the market completely nailed down as a monopoly (and were conviceted for monopoly abuse) so they could do what they liked and still remain massively profitable. If they'd had flagrantly racist hiring practices it wouldn't have made a dent, becuase they weren't competing on the quality of their products.
You have to be more specific with your timeline. There were years where microsoft made "terrible" products, but there were no better alternatives (implying that their products were not so terrible at the time). Secondly, I don't think Microsoft would have been so successful in the first place if they were leaving all the best engineers of other races and genders to be scooped up by other companies.
If I said "people who go to MIT are really smart compared to people who go to community college", your counter example would be "There could be someone stupid at MIT because their parents were rich". This doesn't mean that what I am saying is wrong.
Or if you prefer, efficient markets require rational actors.
No... more efficient markets require more efficient actors. It's a spectrum.
Furthermore, the markets that corporations compete in is already far more rational than the market for headphones. Shareholders are better at analyzing profitability of companies than teenagers are at analyzing headphones.
Or let's say you're based in Helena, Montana. You could be massively, flagrantly racist against non cacusasian and it would have more or less no effect (5%?) because the popualtion has very little diversity.
In a population with limited diversity, there is limited opportunity to be racist. If Helena was 100% white, then you couldn't act on your racism at all, and that's why non-racist companies in Helena wouldn't have a competitive advantage.
Slo let's now take some HFT companies. Basically you need enough capital to get your server closer to the exchange than anyone else, to cut down on latency. That is the primary driving factor. Beyond that it makes much less difference who you hire (yes, I know some HFT people, no they ain't that impressive).
So what you are saying is that the people developing HFT algorithms are dummies, and it doesn't matter what race they are, so a company will be just as successful if they hire dumb white software engineers
So you are saying that every member of Boko Haram is a paedophile? Or just some? We don't want to stereotype.
No, they were playing the old bluegrass hit "Won't somebody please think of the children".
I re-read it, and I still think it misses the point I was making.
It's like if I said "The real cause of drug-related violence is the criminalization of drugs", and someone rebuts "Yeah but some drug addicts kill people in muggings."
This response fails to grasp that what I am saying is that the criminalization of drugs is also the cause of the muggings by addicts.
You don't know that Apple is hiring the right people among the applicants, or that "most suitable" isn't discriminatory.
I am absolutely sure Apple's hiring process is discriminatory. They are certainly discriminating based on talent, and even if they are discriminating based on race, it's discrimination against non-indian people.
I will say that if Apple were in the habit of passing up more qualified workers for less qualified workers of a different race, it would decrease their profitability. And given that they are one of the most profitable companies on the planet, I'm willing to bet that they are one of the least discriminatory.
"Cultural fit" is often an excuse for violating Equal Opportunity hiring laws, and we do know that Apple hasn't always conformed to the law.
I don't equate conformance with EOE laws with non-discriminatory hiring. For example, you can practice age discrimination by only hiring old people, and it is not in violation of the law. I would certainly not want to hire people who do not fit in the culture (e.g. homophobic people, racist people, sexist people, etc).
Obviously, if Apple were hiring without attention to race, they'd still have a very large disparity, but that doesn't mean they're clearly innocent.
I am not claiming that Apple isn't discriminating. I am saying that if we assumed Apple was unbiased, I think we would see something similar to their current demographic distribution.
If we assumed they were hiring with an affirmative action mentality, we would expect to see a microcosm of the United States.
If we assumed they were hiring with a white supremacist mentality, we probably wouldn't see so many south asians working there.
I don't think any employee demographic would be proof that the hiring process that resulted in it was completely non-discriminatory, but I think Apple's demographic comes close (unlike some other companies).
If you really want to catch some racist companies, I would go after the ones that are not hiring a bunch of indian people, despite the clear profit potential.
You don't understand the drugs thing. DNA isn't making anyone do drugs.
I never once mentioned DNA, but this statement does say a lot about your misguided rationale.
You can dump millions in rehab expenses on certain people and they will stay addicted to drugs.
You can dump millions in heart bypass surgery on certain people, and they will still die of a heart attack. I personally knew a man who had a $1 million heart bypass surgery and died of a heart attack 6 months later.
I do feel sorry for those people, and I am willing to help them as a private citizen. But to ask the tax payers to write out a check and feel like they've done something is profoundly mistaken.
You seem to feel less empathy for them than other people in need of medical care. You clearly feel they are less deserving of medical care. Why is that?
If there were a DNA mutation that caused drug addiction, would that make a difference? Why or why not?
Picking and choosing isn't an ugly side effect of good policy. It is central to and inseparable from it.
I'm claiming that what you are picking and choosing is flawed. What if they criteria for picking and choosing who gets medical care is "rich people". Is that good policy?
Don't quibble with freedom ... embrace it!
So when some kid is dying of cancer, and he can't raise enough money for his chemotherapy, we should embrace that? The market has spoken. Little Timmy should die?
I believe in markets to solve lots of problems. Markets do a very good job of streamlining the allocation of resources. In the case of healthcare, markets do a very good job of allocating resources to those that can best afford them. When it comes to people's health, I don't want markets to decide who gets healthcare and who doesn't.
I think everyone should get a basic level of healthcare that is beyond just emergency room services. The retributivist in me would say, that if any class of people does not deserve tax payer funded healthcare, it's not drug addicts, it's callous people.
I literally have no idea what you're talking about.
No kidding...
Profit motive does not make corporations non racist. Racism is one of many irrational trait of *people*. Corporations are made of people. There is nothing in the structure to make people rational.
If the people making up a corporation are racist, then the hiring decisions of the company (i.e. the people within it) are racist.
This idea that "either people in a company are racist or they are not" is a false dichotomy. The racism of people, groups, companies, etc, fall along a spectrum.
Irrational decisions (e.g. hiring people based on race rather than performance) in general decrease profit. So if you look at the most profitable corporations, it makes sense that those would be the least racist corporations (i.e. they make the most rational decisions).
So no profit doesn't preclude racism, but it is evidence of rationality in decision making.
For example, being extremely poor doesn't preclude you from becoming a doctor. One might be tempted to say that "becoming a doctor and growing up in poverty are unrelated". But growing up in an affluent family sure does greatly increase the probability that you will become a brain surgeon.
In the same way when you look at doctors, you will see that a higher percentage of them are from affluent families than the normal population, if you look at profitable companies you will see that they are more rational than the normal population of companies.
Assuming that a profitable company is full of racist people is like assuming a doctor must have grown up in poverty.
Legislators and voters are people too. So they aren't going to be rational when voting for legislators nor making laws. You can do this ad infinitum, and it doesn't lead you to any solutions, so why bother.
Humans aren't rational and companies are made of people.
Aah yes, the old "corporations are people" argument, or a variation on the theme on the personhood of legal entities.
If anything Apple is racist against non-indian people. When you have a bunch of white people deciding through their hiring practices that indian people are better workers than any other ethnicity, (including other white people), then something is going, but it isn't racism.
They may have more important things to do, but since schools are State-level, getting better schools isn't one of those things.
It used to be.
Now we have a Department of education, common core, and federal dollars going to state schools that decide to play by federal rules.
I don't think you read my post very well. I'm saying that the "diversity issues" (as defined by society), are not the result of racism of the corporation. They are a result of the society we live in and unequal education given to people of different skin colors. Apple is simply hiring the people most suitable for their company. If we want Apple to be diverse, it is out job as a society to ensure that the pool of qualified applicants from which apple is choosing is diverse.
When you have certain groups of people going to terrible inner city schools, and other groups going to well funded schools, and better colleges, do you really expect their to be no difference when it comes time for apple to decide to hire?
I'm sure this subset of congress doesn't have more important things to do, like working on getting better schools in impoverished areas.
Apple is a for-profit corporation. They are not racist. They care about profit. If there were tons of qualified applicants of the right colors (whatever they may be), apple would hire them and profit from it. If you want a different distribution of colors of employees at apple, work on making those colors of people the best educated in STEM.
You could just try to pass a law forcing Apple to hire people they don't want to hire, but then they would probably end up like all the companies who no one cares what kind of diversity they have.
If diversity matters to you, work on diverse talent, not diverse employment. Furthermore, I would suggest the idea that diversity is more than just skin color and gender. Simply hiring people who look different doesn't guarantee that those people think differently.
And if you don't have a thumb drive, there are probably a bunch just strewn about the parking lot.
The only true way to protect an airgapped machine is write-only memory.