You have two candidates, one African-American and one majority white, applying for a job, each with equal qualifications? The theory behind giving the job to the African-American is two-fold.
What you just described is not affirmative action, it's an illegal quota. Affirmative action is about making sure that admissions/hiring policies aren't racist (for example if your factory is located in a mostly black region and yet 99% of your workforce is white guys, AA policies say you have to make sure your hiring practices aren't excluding/precluding blacks from apply there. If the owner investigates his hiring policies and the ultimate reason is "there just aren't enough qualified black guys out there for us to hire" that is a legitmate reason for blacks to be under-represented). The final hire/admit decision is still based on merit, basing the decision on race (either way) is illegal discrimination.
A big reason why people seem to be opposed to affirmative action is that they believe it means giving the underqualified black guy the job over the qualified white guy (or giving the job to the black guy if the applicants are "equally" qualified). It just ain't so, if it were black unemployment would be comparable to general unemployment across education and skill levels, not almost double the general figure.
You're advocating treating people differently based on nothing more than their skin color.
Please quote the specific statement of mine that you are referring to.
THAT is racism, and that makes you a racist.
I am saying is that people are being treated differently based on their race, and any solution to that problem will have to acknowledge that. Consideration of race is not the same as treating people differently based on race. Ignoring race doesn't work..
Sorry, I don't have a pat answer for that, but I'm sure that no solution I'd advocate would be racist in nature
I for one would love to see a solution to a racism problem that doesn't involve race. If you come up with a solution, let me know, I'll be here (seriously).
The affirmative action policies I've encountered only state that minorities should be preferred only when two or more job candidates are equally qualified.
I'm pretty sure the name issue I'm sure has more to do with "commonality" than "black/white sounding."
From the report:
"Names might also influence our results through familiarity. One could argue that the African American names used in the experiment simply appear odd to human resource managers and that any odd name is discriminated against. But as noted earlier, the names we have selected are not particularly uncommon among African Americans (see Appendix Table 1). We have also performed a similar exercise to that of Table 8 and measured the rank-order correlation between name-specific callback rates and name frequency within each gender-race group. We found no systematic positive correlation.
So you're advocating racism. Sorry, but two wrongs don't make a right.
In what way am I advocating the belief that there are inherit differences in people's traits and capactities due to their race?
Wrong. You're doing absolutely nothing about the problems, and instead you're creating new problems to try to "make up" for the other problems.
How would you suggest addressing the problem that an employer would rather interview a white guy with a criminal record over a similarly qualified black guy without a criminal record?
My point is that skin color matters, and trying to pretend that we can solve problems just be addressing "actual need" is not much of a solution.
I can't find the link at the moment, but there was a report released a couple of months ago about the achievement gap between white and black schoolboys in NYC schools. If you dig into the data used to compile the report, you'll see a plot of test scores of white boys and black boys going back several years. The curious thing about the data is that they show that the scores between black and white boys track each other pretty closely except for the gap between them - when white scores decline, black scores decline; when white scores increase, black scores increase, but the gap stays the same. My interpretation is that whatever general teaching methods are being employed, they seem to be beneficial or harmful to both groups, but don't erase the gap. To erase the rap, society will have to look at race - not that race in and of itself is a causal factor, but there may be some other factor that aligns along racial lines, and ignoring race will miss that.
How about trying to fix these problems you list, instead of ignoring them
The problems aren't being ignored, society is attempting to address them by (admittedly imperfect) solutions. If you have a better solution, by all means get into a position to influence policy and implementing them (I'm being serious here).
I could go on (blacks and whites use/sell drugs at similar rates but blacks are arrested more and serve longer sentences, unemployment among blacks is worse than among whites despite similar qualifications and education levels, etc), but you get the point.
(accidentally posted as AC, posting again under my account)
He represents the minorities. You know, the same minorities that get offered scholarships based on their race or gender;
The overwhelming majority of those "minority" scholarships (including the United Negro College Fund) are actually open to all. There are a few scholarships that are limited to various demographics, including those of European ancestry.
the minorities that get hired in order to fill a quota,
Sounds just like "welfare queens driving Cadillacs" in that it doesn't exist. Quotas are illegal (in the USA at least), it's been that way since the 1970's.
with no regard for their actual qualifications;
Which would explain why minority unemployment in the USA is less than that of white unemployment, amirite? Oh wait.
the minorities that can say whatever they want and play the discrimination card when someone calls them out, while the rest of us are told to shut up and be tolerant; the minorities that never seem to be at fault for anything, always shifting the blame to the persecution of the majority.
Remember the time when Al Sharpton picketed the Colleen Pageant? Yeah, neither do I.
This being the internet, I expect some of you may interpret this as a specific attack toward blacks and Latinos
This being the internet, I would have expected that you would have backed up your rant with some, what are they called again? Oh yeah, facts.
Keep in mind that 1) almost $300 billion of the $787 billion stimulus (not $1 trillion) went to tax cuts, and 2) a good chunk of the stimulus (about $100 billion) hasn't been spent or (or is in the process of being spent).
As for where the money went, check the wiki article I linked. I will not that a few thousand dollars of the stimulus went to my bottom line for a couple of wind turbine projects, which I promptly spent on buying equipment and services to expand my business.
The other trades pay more, give you better conditions,
Pay more? Sure, under certain (perhaps many) scenarios. "give you better conditions"? Are you high? I'm an engineer that spends a fair amount of time doing field work in subway tunnels, construction sites, rooftops and so on, and "better conditions" is not at all how I would describe it all all. Breathing in steel dust & fumes for 8-hour shifts; working in freezing rain at night; working on 100-degree rooftops; having to take extra care to make sure your metal tools don't touch the live third rail or you could die; hands being dried out working with concrete or bentonite slurry; suffering in the heat because safety regs require hard-hats, thick clothes and steel-toed boots.
I could go on (in fact there are at least three times I can remember that I came within seconds of getting killed under those conditions, and again, I'm not someone that works under these conditions full time. You can make more money, but don't think for a second that the "conditions" are going to be nicer than an office job. In fact, I'd bet against it.
Tax people a flat rate per year based on their weight (as that's the true determining factor in how much damage they do to the environment).
So they guy with the show truck that drives 50 miles per year gets to pay more than the guy with the Prius that drives 25k miles per year? That sounds fair.
"You don't know anything about Sport A, so you should look at Sports X, Y, and Z (even thought the original comment had nothing to so with Sports X, Y, and Z).
Seriously??
In any event, the response to the question "How much more mental dedication do you need to stay focussed for 90 minutes compared to a game where you have downtime every couple of minutes and only half your team is playing at any one time??" "not necessarily any because of the unique aspects of those two games (including weather conditions, injuries, skillsets, reactions times, endurance, substitutions, etc)."
"How much more mental dedication do you need to stay focused in [some other sport] compared to American football" is a different question that someone else can answer.
In Soccer the ball is in play for 90 minutes and the players have to keep going [...]
You commented on soccer, I responded to your comment about soccer. If you meant one of the other forms of football, your comment should have reflected that.
In Soccer the ball is in play for 90 minutes and the players have to keep going knowing that in all likely hood they game could end in a draw and all the players are on the field for the entire time.
Yes the players are on the field for the entire time, but there are substitutions, and they aren't all going full speed the whole game (for example when the ball is on one side of the field).
How much more mental dedication do you need to stay focussed for 90 minutes compared to a game where you have downtime every couple of minutes and only half your team is playing at any one time?
You're talking about a game that is played under every imaginable type of weather condition (football games are generally only canceled or delayed when the weather poses a danger to the fans rather than the players) where for every play, the player (at the higher levels) may have 2-8 different options they have to perform depending on what the opposing player does, they have 1 to 3 seconds to decide which option they perform, they have to deal with the elements (sun in their eyes, rain/snow/ice making the field or ball slippery, traction on the turf, etc), one mistake can result in points for the other team or (tragically) severe injury to themselves or another player. American football certainly isn't a game you can play on cruise control.
In discussing the ARC project and the Gotthard Base Tunnel pundits have been asking why the 35-mile Gotthard tunnel costs $10 billion dollars while the ARC project (with it's much smaller tunnel) is projected to cost up to $15 billion dollars.
There are a few reasons:
The Gotthard tunnel was bored through solid rock while the ARC tunnel will be going through a combination of soil nod chalk. Tunneling through soil is a more complicated operation than tunneling through rock. Using a TBM to tunnel through rock, you can just kick the muck out and keep going. With soil, since soil can't support itself, you have to bring in concrete to support the tunnel as you go or else it will just cave in behind you. Also, different types of cutting wheels may be needed for different types of soils so as you go, you may have to switch out comments on the TBM or you'll get stuck.
The Gotthard tunnel was bored through an empty mountain. The ARC tunnel will be bored through through on of the most populous cities in the world with an extensive subterranean infrastructure - it will be going under existing Amtrak and MTA tunnels, various gas/water/sewer lines and surface buildings and care must be taken to prevent subsidence problems (this was an issue with the Big Dig as well).
The ARC cost isn't just for the tunnel - it's also for a new station underneath 34th Street (a big deal by itself), a new rail maintenance/storage yard in New Jersey, vent buildings, electrical substations, and rolling stock. Those elements by themselves probably add up to a couple of billion dollars.
The wildcard is New York City itself - this project will be happening under and at one of the most populous cities in the world - given real estate costs, the project will be paying top dollar to acquire land for project and construction staging purposes. The project will have to jump through hoops to minimize impact to New Yorkers (it's an underground project but there will be plenty happening at the surface). There will undoubtably be all kinds of contaminated soil the project will come across that will have to be disposed of properly which will also add to the cost.
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I have no definitive answer other than my own experiences but it is my understand that FRA regulates pretty much everything on a system that interconnects with the national system, unless the operating authority (usually a freight railroad) cedes authority to the local jurisdiction. It used to be that local jurisdictions could create "quiet zones" but that authority was yanked by Congress a few years ago. FTA or local operating authority regulate captive systems.
This appellate court decision covers the issue of a state trying to regulate rail activity. The court ruled that Federal regs pre-empted the state regs.
You are correct and the parent is wrong, trains are regulated at the Federal and state levels (with the possible exception of grade crossings where towns may have some input).
Slashdot Mirror
You have two candidates, one African-American and one majority white, applying for a job, each with equal qualifications? The theory behind giving the job to the African-American is two-fold.
What you just described is not affirmative action, it's an illegal quota. Affirmative action is about making sure that admissions/hiring policies aren't racist (for example if your factory is located in a mostly black region and yet 99% of your workforce is white guys, AA policies say you have to make sure your hiring practices aren't excluding/precluding blacks from apply there. If the owner investigates his hiring policies and the ultimate reason is "there just aren't enough qualified black guys out there for us to hire" that is a legitmate reason for blacks to be under-represented). The final hire/admit decision is still based on merit, basing the decision on race (either way) is illegal discrimination.
A big reason why people seem to be opposed to affirmative action is that they believe it means giving the underqualified black guy the job over the qualified white guy (or giving the job to the black guy if the applicants are "equally" qualified). It just ain't so, if it were black unemployment would be comparable to general unemployment across education and skill levels, not almost double the general figure.
You're advocating treating people differently based on nothing more than their skin color.
Please quote the specific statement of mine that you are referring to.
THAT is racism, and that makes you a racist.
I am saying is that people are being treated differently based on their race, and any solution to that problem will have to acknowledge that. Consideration of race is not the same as treating people differently based on race. Ignoring race doesn't work..
Sorry, I don't have a pat answer for that, but I'm sure that no solution I'd advocate would be racist in nature
I for one would love to see a solution to a racism problem that doesn't involve race. If you come up with a solution, let me know, I'll be here (seriously).
The affirmative action policies I've encountered only state that minorities should be preferred only when two or more job candidates are equally qualified.
Then those policies are breaking the law.
I'm pretty sure the name issue I'm sure has more to do with "commonality" than "black/white sounding."
From the report:
"Names might also influence our results through familiarity. One could argue that the African American names used in the experiment simply appear odd to human resource managers and that any odd name is discriminated against. But as noted earlier, the names we have selected are not particularly uncommon among African Americans (see Appendix Table 1). We have also performed a similar exercise to that of Table 8 and measured the rank-order correlation between name-specific callback rates and name frequency within each gender-race group. We found no systematic positive correlation.
So you're advocating racism. Sorry, but two wrongs don't make a right.
In what way am I advocating the belief that there are inherit differences in people's traits and capactities due to their race?
Wrong. You're doing absolutely nothing about the problems, and instead you're creating new problems to try to "make up" for the other problems.
How would you suggest addressing the problem that an employer would rather interview a white guy with a criminal record over a similarly qualified black guy without a criminal record?
So what's your point?
My point is that skin color matters, and trying to pretend that we can solve problems just be addressing "actual need" is not much of a solution.
I can't find the link at the moment, but there was a report released a couple of months ago about the achievement gap between white and black schoolboys in NYC schools. If you dig into the data used to compile the report, you'll see a plot of test scores of white boys and black boys going back several years. The curious thing about the data is that they show that the scores between black and white boys track each other pretty closely except for the gap between them - when white scores decline, black scores decline; when white scores increase, black scores increase, but the gap stays the same. My interpretation is that whatever general teaching methods are being employed, they seem to be beneficial or harmful to both groups, but don't erase the gap. To erase the rap, society will have to look at race - not that race in and of itself is a causal factor, but there may be some other factor that aligns along racial lines, and ignoring race will miss that.
How about trying to fix these problems you list, instead of ignoring them
The problems aren't being ignored, society is attempting to address them by (admittedly imperfect) solutions. If you have a better solution, by all means get into a position to influence policy and implementing them (I'm being serious here).
But the help we give should be based on actual need, not on skin color.
Like it or not, skin color matters.
White guy with a criminal record has a better shot at a job callback than a black guy with no criminal record
Person with a "black sounding" name has a worse shot at a job compared with a similarly qualified applicant without a "black sounding" name.
I could go on (blacks and whites use/sell drugs at similar rates but blacks are arrested more and serve longer sentences, unemployment among blacks is worse than among whites despite similar qualifications and education levels, etc), but you get the point.
(accidentally posted as AC, posting again under my account)
He represents the minorities. You know, the same minorities that get offered scholarships based on their race or gender;
The overwhelming majority of those "minority" scholarships (including the United Negro College Fund) are actually open to all. There are a few scholarships that are limited to various demographics, including those of European ancestry.
the minorities that get hired in order to fill a quota,
Sounds just like "welfare queens driving Cadillacs" in that it doesn't exist. Quotas are illegal (in the USA at least), it's been that way since the 1970's.
with no regard for their actual qualifications;
Which would explain why minority unemployment in the USA is less than that of white unemployment, amirite? Oh wait.
the minorities that can say whatever they want and play the discrimination card when someone calls them out, while the rest of us are told to shut up and be tolerant; the minorities that never seem to be at fault for anything, always shifting the blame to the persecution of the majority.
Remember the time when Al Sharpton picketed the Colleen Pageant? Yeah, neither do I.
This being the internet, I expect some of you may interpret this as a specific attack toward blacks and Latinos
This being the internet, I would have expected that you would have backed up your rant with some, what are they called again? Oh yeah, facts.
Keep in mind that 1) almost $300 billion of the $787 billion stimulus (not $1 trillion) went to tax cuts, and 2) a good chunk of the stimulus (about $100 billion) hasn't been spent or (or is in the process of being spent).
As for where the money went, check the wiki article I linked. I will not that a few thousand dollars of the stimulus went to my bottom line for a couple of wind turbine projects, which I promptly spent on buying equipment and services to expand my business.
The other trades pay more, give you better conditions,
Pay more? Sure, under certain (perhaps many) scenarios. "give you better conditions"? Are you high? I'm an engineer that spends a fair amount of time doing field work in subway tunnels, construction sites, rooftops and so on, and "better conditions" is not at all how I would describe it all all. Breathing in steel dust & fumes for 8-hour shifts; working in freezing rain at night; working on 100-degree rooftops; having to take extra care to make sure your metal tools don't touch the live third rail or you could die; hands being dried out working with concrete or bentonite slurry; suffering in the heat because safety regs require hard-hats, thick clothes and steel-toed boots.
I could go on (in fact there are at least three times I can remember that I came within seconds of getting killed under those conditions, and again, I'm not someone that works under these conditions full time. You can make more money, but don't think for a second that the "conditions" are going to be nicer than an office job. In fact, I'd bet against it.
According to TFA, the terms ban:
Apps which contain DUI checkpoints that are not published by law enforcement agencies,
But aren't all DUI checkpoints supposed to be publicized ahead of time?
You'd be incorrect. Road systems are more than paid for by their various taxes and fees (gas and registration, mainly).
With a healthy dollop of money from the general fund.
I'll wager that road systems don't pay for themselves and require considerable taxpayer support.
You would win that bet.
Tax people a flat rate per year based on their weight (as that's the true determining factor in how much damage they do to the environment).
So they guy with the show truck that drives 50 miles per year gets to pay more than the guy with the Prius that drives 25k miles per year? That sounds fair.
Don't click his link.
And how exactly were the days when Microsoft propped up Apple to prevent Microsoft from becoming a noticeable monopoly halcyon?
"Propped up Apple"? More like "settled a lawsuit" that could have cost MS billions of dollars.
Let's see:
Seriously??
In any event, the response to the question "How much more mental dedication do you need to stay focussed for 90 minutes compared to a game where you have downtime every couple of minutes and only half your team is playing at any one time??" "not necessarily any because of the unique aspects of those two games (including weather conditions, injuries, skillsets, reactions times, endurance, substitutions, etc)."
"How much more mental dedication do you need to stay focused in [some other sport] compared to American football" is a different question that someone else can answer.
You wrote:
In Soccer the ball is in play for 90 minutes and the players have to keep going [...]
You commented on soccer, I responded to your comment about soccer. If you meant one of the other forms of football, your comment should have reflected that.
In Soccer the ball is in play for 90 minutes and the players have to keep going knowing that in all likely hood they game could end in a draw and all the players are on the field for the entire time.
Yes the players are on the field for the entire time, but there are substitutions, and they aren't all going full speed the whole game (for example when the ball is on one side of the field).
How much more mental dedication do you need to stay focussed for 90 minutes compared to a game where you have downtime every couple of minutes and only half your team is playing at any one time?
You're talking about a game that is played under every imaginable type of weather condition (football games are generally only canceled or delayed when the weather poses a danger to the fans rather than the players) where for every play, the player (at the higher levels) may have 2-8 different options they have to perform depending on what the opposing player does, they have 1 to 3 seconds to decide which option they perform, they have to deal with the elements (sun in their eyes, rain/snow/ice making the field or ball slippery, traction on the turf, etc), one mistake can result in points for the other team or (tragically) severe injury to themselves or another player. American football certainly isn't a game you can play on cruise control.
Day after some nutcase kill someone on a high speed train, we will ahve patdowns and all the rest...
It already happened and yet rail security here hasn't been changed.
Why would he want it? The TESB costume was based off the ordinal Cheney has.
In discussing the ARC project and the Gotthard Base Tunnel pundits have been asking why the 35-mile Gotthard tunnel costs $10 billion dollars while the ARC project (with it's much smaller tunnel) is projected to cost up to $15 billion dollars.
There are a few reasons:
You're joking, right?
I have no definitive answer other than my own experiences but it is my understand that FRA regulates pretty much everything on a system that interconnects with the national system, unless the operating authority (usually a freight railroad) cedes authority to the local jurisdiction. It used to be that local jurisdictions could create "quiet zones" but that authority was yanked by Congress a few years ago. FTA or local operating authority regulate captive systems.
Some examples that back me up:
You are correct and the parent is wrong, trains are regulated at the Federal and state levels (with the possible exception of grade crossings where towns may have some input).