For someone who hates abstract arguments, you didn't waste any time abstracting the issue to "children suffering and dying."
And come on.. be honest.. aren't you perfectly fine with innocent children suffering and dying? I think you must be, given that you're wasting your time here on slashdot instead of saving innocent children.
Vaccines aren't 100% effective, otherwise you're right that it wouldn't be an issue.
There are also people who can't use vaccines due to allergies, and the idea is they are protected via "herd immunity" -- basically if enough people are vaccinated, then disease can't get a foothold and spreading it is much harder.
I'm not sure how I feel about that case, because to me if you're allowing people to go to public school without vaccination because they are allergic, then you're admitting it's not a safety issue to have some percentage of unvaccinated people.
I think people should be able to choose to not vaccinate voluntarily, and there should be a lottery system for which unvaccinated kids get into schools.
The rich can only get richer if the poor get poorer.
A simple example shows you're wrong. When Bill Gates makes another buck on his stock market portfolio, how does the poorest homeless man in India, who owns nothing, has no family, and is 2 days away from starving to death, get POORER? He can't possibly get poorer.
It's the nature of limited resources.
Can you explain how your theory relates to air, which is a limited resource? Do rich people breathing somehow prevent poor people from breathing?
Disparity in wealth is a highest of us learning to marginalize the lowest of us.
Maybe sometimes, but not always. Sometimes it's because the rich got richer all on their own, like if someone invents a new use for something. That doesn't deprive others of anything, it just enriches everyone (but not equally... the guy who invented profits the most, and/or his employer).
That's called "house poor" -- which is different than just "poor."
You can't complain about not having money just because you spend a lot of money. For example surely you'd laugh if I said I'm poor because my 10000 sqft house, maid, gardener, and two mistresses take up so much of my income that I have very little left over. I'm barely making it!
Similarly, if you live in a high cost area, you don't get to complain about that cost. There's a reason for that cost. You are buying access to an area that lots of people want access to. Your *being there* is what you get for your money. That atmosphere. The connections. The beautiful people and scenery. The actual possibility of giving elevator pitches for your startup. Randomly seeing celebrities having coffee or whatever. You live in the kind of place that other people travel to for tourism because they think it's so great, and you get to live there.
So sick of these whiners who have to "deal" with the problem of living in a popular place.
nor could the department legally require officers to have sex as part of their job.
I'm sure they could find volunteers.
The second scenario is plausible except that you assume that the LEOs have as much or more "firepower" than the gangs.
True but I'm assuming the entire gang isn't going to show up for every incident (unless it's quite a small gang to begin with). I guess if the police started doing this regularly, they might.. on the other hand, they might also just cut their losses and stop hassling people who don't pay because it's not worth getting into a surprise gun fight with professionals over $50 (or whatever).
On the other hand, for a big drug deal where a lot of armed criminals really might show up... well we keep hearing about how police departments are getting all this surplus military equipment for next to nothing, so I'm not sure looking at the pure dollar figures tells you that much. For instance according to http://www.newsweek.com/how-am...
Police in Watertown, Connecticut, (population 22,514) recently acquired a mine-resistant, ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicle (sticker price: $733,000), designed to protect soldiers from roadside bombs, for $2,800.
I guess the real reason isn't that cops are idiots or greedy, it's that they have to weigh the benefit against the risk to their lives. Confronting a john who tries to hire an undercover cop as a prostitute poses little risk if the officer is armed. Little compared to waiting for the enforcer anyway. Busting a guy trying to buy weed is little risk compared to setting up a sting with a big gang and showing up in your MRAP and getting into a fire fight. Is it worth risking your life to put a negligible dent in the drug trade or the sex trade? Maybe not.
Generational poverty laughs at your willful ignorance of the world.
I'm not talking about the world, just America.
As do all the poor straight-A students
When we speak of helping poor students, we generally mean helping them achieve academic success. Not helping them get rich. So "all the poor straight-A students" are actually the success story here, not an object of pity.
It's like you're having the wrong conversation and getting really indignant about it.
Translation: You're not interested in smart kids. You're probably also the type who thinks we should end world hunger before daring to venture into space or mess around with worthless stuff like high speed internet.
troubled kids from the hood, kids with learning disabilities, or poor kids whose single parents are working 2-3 jobs
Not everything has to be about the "troubled kids" you know. We spend more than enough money trying to help the troubled kids. I think society gets more bang for the buck from helping a bright kid achieve more than a troubled kid fail slightly less.
I assume you replied to the wrong person. Surely you meant to say that to the person who said "The terrorists are the Federal Government of the United States; their enemy is We the People" (GGP) rather than GP.
Amiga3d's example of Islamic terrorism is perfect, but the example of the federal government being a terrorist because they have occasionally violated the Constitution is ridiculous.
I think you must have some kind of mental disability or personality disorder to be going on and on about this in such a ranting fashion. Hopefully it makes you feel better to say a bunch of nonsense and then add "objectively true." Sad person.
what is the value, exactly, of saying that because his skin is brown, that we have to ascribe some sort of negative modifier on how we perceive his intelligence
None, because as an individual we can make an individualized determination for him.
intelligence is an INDIVIDUAL value. it does no good to class all people according to an arbitrary signifier.
It does if that arbitrary signifier has correlations with important outcomes.
The "good" is that it allows us to spend resources more efficiently when we want to influence those outcomes, or to conserve resources and accept certain things instead of trying to fight them.
As an example, there is a great deal of money and time being spent to address racial achievement gaps in education. The assumption is the aggregate statistics for each race should be about the same. What if that assumption is wrong? Then we're wasting money that could be put to much better use.
if you were interviewing a bunch of people for computer programmer, and disregarded the ones with brown skin because they were "less intelligent," you might have hired a dumb white person and disregarded the black genius
You're right, and that's a great example of dumb racist thinking. That doesn't mean much because non-racists or anti-racists are dumb too.
therefore, according to racist "thinking," we should assume all white people are rapists
See, this means you don't even understand what you're criticizing. What's this "all" business?
Here's a better example. Men are more likely to commit rape than women. Women are more likely to be raped than men. Pop quiz: did I just say that all men are rapists, or that all women are raped? Answer: nope.
by believing in racism, and all of the logical fallacies that come with it, you have objectively proven to me that you are a stupid person. i don't respect you
To me the biggest problem with you is that you conflate "acknowledging racial differences" with "believing in racism." Acknowledging that men commit more violent rapes than women clearly doesn't make me sexist. Does acknowledging that black men have a higher rate of committing murder than white men make me racist?
I don't consider myself racist, or at least not the dumb kind of racist you were talking about above who wouldn't hire a smart black guy because of a firm belief that all blacks are dumb.
But whatever. I don't respect you either because you've shown you can't have a serious discussion. You're hiding behind calling me "low iq" even though I'm quite smart, as are most people on Slashdot, and that should be evident to you from reading my posts.
Do you think discrimination requires uniform exclusion or something?
Like if I'm a mortgage broker and my subprime mortgages are "targeted at" blacks... but are not "exclusively for" blacks.. then I'm not discriminating?
Moreover, it can actually be more dangerous for a bike rider to come to a complete stop. It is much slower for a bike to accelerate from a complete stop than from a slow yield. That puts the bike rider in the intersection for longer
That is a great point that the other poster made too. I'm still not sure running the stop sign at low speed would make much of a difference, and the faster you go, the less you're able to check for traffic.
Finally, not every biker is in tip-top shape.
That, I'm familiar with. I actually was a biker for about 6 months when I was trying to lose some weight. That's part of why I feel a little comfortable expressing my doubts.. I have biked in those proverbial shoes.
I think it's pretty dangerous for the out of shape biker like you're talking about. We don't have years of experience and many hours per week of practice (or we wouldn't be out of shape). Slowing down and checking for traffic sounds great, but it would be tough to do well because that also means checking behind you. To me, the most dangerous thing I ever ran into is the car behind you that wants to quickly pass you and make a turn. Even at a red light, the car might want to go right on red, and assumes you're not going to just run through the light, so they pass you.
I'm equally paranoid about that as a walker/jogger. When I'm on the sidewalk and about to cross another road, or even worse an entrance to a parking lot, I always look behind me before crossing. I can't believe how many times I've done that to catch a car that thinks "Oh he's going so slow, I'll just sneak ahead of him and turn real quick."
hookers with pimps tend to be better paid and less likely to be victims of violence.
That's interesting. I have no idea what the overall statistics are, but the most disturbing prostitution stories (to me) generally involve pimps. There was a good episode of "Vice News" about prostitution and they told the stories of girls who were being manipulated emotionally by pimps, and occasionally hooked on drugs or beaten... but mostly emotional manipulation and financial threats (kicking them out).
To me that's the bad part of prostitution. I'm not sure legalizing it would make it much better... you're still going to have very damaged girls engaging in it, even if it's legal. Who wants to be a prostitute after all?
what i find interesting is that people who ascribe moronic connections: skin color and intelligence, for example, are, by definition of making that ignorant connection and taking it seriously, stupid people.
What you're doing is called "begging the question." How do you know there isn't a connection between race and intelligence, when so many tests over the years show otherwise?
And why do you oversimplify race to "skin color?" You don't change races when you get a tan right?
Martinique has the lowest rate, with 4.2 per 100k. However, it's only 300k people, compared with 2.7 million in Jamaica (the highest murder rate), so I'm not sure it makes much difference to the overall crime rate in the Caribbean.
U.S. Virgin Islands: 39 murders per 100,000 St. Kitts and Nevis: 38 per 100,000 Guatemala: 38 per 100,000 Colombia: 37 per 100,000 Belize: 30.8 per 100,000 Trinidad and Tobago: 35 per 100,000 Bahamas: 27.4 per 100,000 Puerto Rico (a Commonwealth of the United States): 26 per 100,000 Mexico: 24 per 100,000 Dominican Republic: 25 per 100,000 St. Lucia: 25 per 100,000 St. Vincent and The Grenadines: 22 per 100,000 Panama: 22 per 100,000 Dominica: 22 per 100,000
That's compared to about 4.7 per 100k in the US, which is considered high for the developed world.
I didn't bother checking African crime rates because I'm pretty confident you're wrong there.
By "majority places" were you referring to really small places like individual neighborhoods or something?
Income inequality if the largest driver of murders. Homicide has a r=0.8 correlation with income inequality.
That study wasn't comparing income inequality to other drivers of murder so it's not evidence that it's the largest driver. Also the conclusion says:
however, the causal relationship between inequality, trust and homicide remains unclear given the cross-sectional design of this study
So maybe countries with high homicide rates result in a breakdown of social trust, and that lack of trust results in lack of investment and achievement among certain groups, leading to higher income inequality.
Of course police should apply more resources to high profile cases and areas where violent crimes are more rare.
My safe neighborhood, with zero murders ever, pays as much (or more) into the police budget as a violent neighborhood that has multiple murders a year.
If God forbid we do one day have a murder, I would expect cops to be all over that shit. We should be a much higher priority than the violent neighborhood because we've earned that priority.
That said, cops are largely idiots when it comes to dealing with problem areas. I don't know why they tolerate them so much, except the cynical view that they are more interested in making money than stopping crime. A great example is prostitution... why are they the clients of prostitutes? To make money. If they wanted to end coercive prostitution, they would do this: 1. Hire a prostitute 2. "Do it" 3. Refuse to pay 4. Wait for the enforcer/pimp/whoever to show up and make a threat 5. Shoot him (or arrest him)
There are far fewer pimps than prostitutes and clients. So attacking the pimps is the logical way to end it.
Instead their sting operations are to arrest the guys who DO pay as they're supposed to. WTF??
They could do something similar with drugs: 1. Buy drugs 2. Refuse to pay 3. Keep doing that 4. Wait for core violent element of the gang to come attack 5. Shoot them (or arrest them)
But nah, they'd rather set up a sting and arrest a couple users, or maybe a dealer so they can confiscate his property... pretty ridiculous.
I'm not sure how you call a program targeted at girls non-discriminatory. That's blatant discrimination.
I mean there are plenty of prima facie race-neutral programs that are then labeled as discriminatory based on things like disparate impact. What Google and Facebook are doing goes far beyond inadvertent disparate impact. I don't agree with disparate impact theory when applied too broadly, but if there is disparate impact plus a clear intention to discriminate, that's another story.
Yeah, that's called inertia. In a real meritocracy, there'd be no inertia
Your definition of meritocracy is useless, because that's impossible. Even in the most perfect possible meritocracy, information only travels so fast (speed of light?), so not everybody can dump the erstwhile leader at the same instant. And of course, in reality, it takes much much longer. You don't know that GM's cars have suddenly become worthless for 5 or 6 years, because that's when they start breaking down.
Similarly, you don't know that Japanese cars have dramatically increased in quality because it took 20 years for people to start noticing "Hey there are all these 20 year old Toyota driving around, looking old and boxy, but still running great.. what's up."
How do you think you can get around the fact that measuring quality takes time? How does that fit into your definition of meritocracy having "no inertia?"
If (as you might contend) unions were dragging down the American automakers
No, you misunderstood, I was saying that the (surviving) American car companies showed skill in managing unions and politics. Perhaps that is the meritocracy... not who makes better cars, but who can survive in a hostile world. It takes some kind of skill to get a bailout, which is why Lehman Brothers isn't around, Countrywide isn't around, but Citibank is, Goldman is, etc.
Business isn't all about making the best product, in other words. The guy who makes a great product but can't keep up with his taxes, or mismanages labor and has all his workers go on strike, can still fail. That doesn't violate the concept of meritocracy because those are integral skills in business.
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For someone who hates abstract arguments, you didn't waste any time abstracting the issue to "children suffering and dying."
And come on.. be honest.. aren't you perfectly fine with innocent children suffering and dying? I think you must be, given that you're wasting your time here on slashdot instead of saving innocent children.
Vaccines aren't 100% effective, otherwise you're right that it wouldn't be an issue.
There are also people who can't use vaccines due to allergies, and the idea is they are protected via "herd immunity" -- basically if enough people are vaccinated, then disease can't get a foothold and spreading it is much harder.
I'm not sure how I feel about that case, because to me if you're allowing people to go to public school without vaccination because they are allergic, then you're admitting it's not a safety issue to have some percentage of unvaccinated people.
I think people should be able to choose to not vaccinate voluntarily, and there should be a lottery system for which unvaccinated kids get into schools.
A rising tide does not lift all boats equally.
It doesn't have to be equal.
The rich can only get richer if the poor get poorer.
A simple example shows you're wrong. When Bill Gates makes another buck on his stock market portfolio, how does the poorest homeless man in India, who owns nothing, has no family, and is 2 days away from starving to death, get POORER? He can't possibly get poorer.
It's the nature of limited resources.
Can you explain how your theory relates to air, which is a limited resource? Do rich people breathing somehow prevent poor people from breathing?
Disparity in wealth is a highest of us learning to marginalize the lowest of us.
Maybe sometimes, but not always. Sometimes it's because the rich got richer all on their own, like if someone invents a new use for something. That doesn't deprive others of anything, it just enriches everyone (but not equally... the guy who invented profits the most, and/or his employer).
That's called "house poor" -- which is different than just "poor."
You can't complain about not having money just because you spend a lot of money. For example surely you'd laugh if I said I'm poor because my 10000 sqft house, maid, gardener, and two mistresses take up so much of my income that I have very little left over. I'm barely making it!
Similarly, if you live in a high cost area, you don't get to complain about that cost. There's a reason for that cost. You are buying access to an area that lots of people want access to. Your *being there* is what you get for your money. That atmosphere. The connections. The beautiful people and scenery. The actual possibility of giving elevator pitches for your startup. Randomly seeing celebrities having coffee or whatever. You live in the kind of place that other people travel to for tourism because they think it's so great, and you get to live there.
So sick of these whiners who have to "deal" with the problem of living in a popular place.
nor could the department legally require officers to have sex as part of their job.
I'm sure they could find volunteers.
The second scenario is plausible except that you assume that the LEOs have as much or more "firepower" than the gangs.
True but I'm assuming the entire gang isn't going to show up for every incident (unless it's quite a small gang to begin with). I guess if the police started doing this regularly, they might.. on the other hand, they might also just cut their losses and stop hassling people who don't pay because it's not worth getting into a surprise gun fight with professionals over $50 (or whatever).
On the other hand, for a big drug deal where a lot of armed criminals really might show up... well we keep hearing about how police departments are getting all this surplus military equipment for next to nothing, so I'm not sure looking at the pure dollar figures tells you that much. For instance according to http://www.newsweek.com/how-am...
Police in Watertown, Connecticut, (population 22,514) recently acquired a mine-resistant, ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicle (sticker price: $733,000), designed to protect soldiers from roadside bombs, for $2,800.
I guess the real reason isn't that cops are idiots or greedy, it's that they have to weigh the benefit against the risk to their lives. Confronting a john who tries to hire an undercover cop as a prostitute poses little risk if the officer is armed. Little compared to waiting for the enforcer anyway. Busting a guy trying to buy weed is little risk compared to setting up a sting with a big gang and showing up in your MRAP and getting into a fire fight. Is it worth risking your life to put a negligible dent in the drug trade or the sex trade? Maybe not.
You seem to think the two aren't linked.
How we manage the lowest of us is a function of the achievements of the highest of us.
Generational poverty laughs at your willful ignorance of the world.
I'm not talking about the world, just America.
As do all the poor straight-A students
When we speak of helping poor students, we generally mean helping them achieve academic success. Not helping them get rich. So "all the poor straight-A students" are actually the success story here, not an object of pity.
It's like you're having the wrong conversation and getting really indignant about it.
Have you considered the possibility that you may be too dumb to objectively decide how smart other people are?
Translation: You're not interested in smart kids. You're probably also the type who thinks we should end world hunger before daring to venture into space or mess around with worthless stuff like high speed internet.
troubled kids from the hood, kids with learning disabilities, or poor kids whose single parents are working 2-3 jobs
Not everything has to be about the "troubled kids" you know. We spend more than enough money trying to help the troubled kids. I think society gets more bang for the buck from helping a bright kid achieve more than a troubled kid fail slightly less.
I assume you replied to the wrong person. Surely you meant to say that to the person who said "The terrorists are the Federal Government of the United States; their enemy is We the People" (GGP) rather than GP.
Amiga3d's example of Islamic terrorism is perfect, but the example of the federal government being a terrorist because they have occasionally violated the Constitution is ridiculous.
I think you must have some kind of mental disability or personality disorder to be going on and on about this in such a ranting fashion. Hopefully it makes you feel better to say a bunch of nonsense and then add "objectively true." Sad person.
what is the value, exactly, of saying that because his skin is brown, that we have to ascribe some sort of negative modifier on how we perceive his intelligence
None, because as an individual we can make an individualized determination for him.
intelligence is an INDIVIDUAL value. it does no good to class all people according to an arbitrary signifier.
It does if that arbitrary signifier has correlations with important outcomes.
The "good" is that it allows us to spend resources more efficiently when we want to influence those outcomes, or to conserve resources and accept certain things instead of trying to fight them.
As an example, there is a great deal of money and time being spent to address racial achievement gaps in education. The assumption is the aggregate statistics for each race should be about the same. What if that assumption is wrong? Then we're wasting money that could be put to much better use.
if you were interviewing a bunch of people for computer programmer, and disregarded the ones with brown skin because they were "less intelligent," you might have hired a dumb white person and disregarded the black genius
You're right, and that's a great example of dumb racist thinking. That doesn't mean much because non-racists or anti-racists are dumb too.
therefore, according to racist "thinking," we should assume all white people are rapists
See, this means you don't even understand what you're criticizing. What's this "all" business?
Here's a better example. Men are more likely to commit rape than women. Women are more likely to be raped than men. Pop quiz: did I just say that all men are rapists, or that all women are raped? Answer: nope.
by believing in racism, and all of the logical fallacies that come with it, you have objectively proven to me that you are a stupid person. i don't respect you
To me the biggest problem with you is that you conflate "acknowledging racial differences" with "believing in racism." Acknowledging that men commit more violent rapes than women clearly doesn't make me sexist. Does acknowledging that black men have a higher rate of committing murder than white men make me racist?
I don't consider myself racist, or at least not the dumb kind of racist you were talking about above who wouldn't hire a smart black guy because of a firm belief that all blacks are dumb.
But whatever. I don't respect you either because you've shown you can't have a serious discussion. You're hiding behind calling me "low iq" even though I'm quite smart, as are most people on Slashdot, and that should be evident to you from reading my posts.
Do you think discrimination requires uniform exclusion or something?
Like if I'm a mortgage broker and my subprime mortgages are "targeted at" blacks... but are not "exclusively for" blacks.. then I'm not discriminating?
Somehow I doubt you'd agree with that.
Moreover, it can actually be more dangerous for a bike rider to come to a complete stop. It is much slower for a bike to accelerate from a complete stop than from a slow yield. That puts the bike rider in the intersection for longer
That is a great point that the other poster made too. I'm still not sure running the stop sign at low speed would make much of a difference, and the faster you go, the less you're able to check for traffic.
Finally, not every biker is in tip-top shape.
That, I'm familiar with. I actually was a biker for about 6 months when I was trying to lose some weight. That's part of why I feel a little comfortable expressing my doubts.. I have biked in those proverbial shoes.
I think it's pretty dangerous for the out of shape biker like you're talking about. We don't have years of experience and many hours per week of practice (or we wouldn't be out of shape). Slowing down and checking for traffic sounds great, but it would be tough to do well because that also means checking behind you. To me, the most dangerous thing I ever ran into is the car behind you that wants to quickly pass you and make a turn. Even at a red light, the car might want to go right on red, and assumes you're not going to just run through the light, so they pass you.
I'm equally paranoid about that as a walker/jogger. When I'm on the sidewalk and about to cross another road, or even worse an entrance to a parking lot, I always look behind me before crossing. I can't believe how many times I've done that to catch a car that thinks "Oh he's going so slow, I'll just sneak ahead of him and turn real quick."
hookers with pimps tend to be better paid and less likely to be victims of violence.
That's interesting. I have no idea what the overall statistics are, but the most disturbing prostitution stories (to me) generally involve pimps. There was a good episode of "Vice News" about prostitution and they told the stories of girls who were being manipulated emotionally by pimps, and occasionally hooked on drugs or beaten... but mostly emotional manipulation and financial threats (kicking them out).
To me that's the bad part of prostitution. I'm not sure legalizing it would make it much better... you're still going to have very damaged girls engaging in it, even if it's legal. Who wants to be a prostitute after all?
what i find interesting is that people who ascribe moronic connections: skin color and intelligence, for example, are, by definition of making that ignorant connection and taking it seriously, stupid people.
What you're doing is called "begging the question." How do you know there isn't a connection between race and intelligence, when so many tests over the years show otherwise?
And why do you oversimplify race to "skin color?" You don't change races when you get a tan right?
Well there are a few in the Caribbean: http://www.examiner.com/articl...
Martinique has the lowest rate, with 4.2 per 100k. However, it's only 300k people, compared with 2.7 million in Jamaica (the highest murder rate), so I'm not sure it makes much difference to the overall crime rate in the Caribbean.
There are plenty of majority places in the Caribbean, Africa and the Americas in which the crime rate is low and normal.
Hmm, are you sure about that? Murder rates for the Caribbean:
U.S. Virgin Islands: 39 murders per 100,000
St. Kitts and Nevis: 38 per 100,000
Guatemala: 38 per 100,000
Colombia: 37 per 100,000
Belize: 30.8 per 100,000
Trinidad and Tobago: 35 per 100,000
Bahamas: 27.4 per 100,000
Puerto Rico (a Commonwealth of the United States): 26 per 100,000
Mexico: 24 per 100,000
Dominican Republic: 25 per 100,000
St. Lucia: 25 per 100,000
St. Vincent and The Grenadines: 22 per 100,000
Panama: 22 per 100,000
Dominica: 22 per 100,000
That's compared to about 4.7 per 100k in the US, which is considered high for the developed world.
I didn't bother checking African crime rates because I'm pretty confident you're wrong there.
By "majority places" were you referring to really small places like individual neighborhoods or something?
Income inequality if the largest driver of murders. Homicide has a r=0.8 correlation with income inequality.
That study wasn't comparing income inequality to other drivers of murder so it's not evidence that it's the largest driver. Also the conclusion says:
however, the causal relationship between inequality, trust and homicide remains unclear given the cross-sectional design of this study
So maybe countries with high homicide rates result in a breakdown of social trust, and that lack of trust results in lack of investment and achievement among certain groups, leading to higher income inequality.
Sorry, "why are they *arresting* the clients of prostitutes"
Of course police should apply more resources to high profile cases and areas where violent crimes are more rare.
My safe neighborhood, with zero murders ever, pays as much (or more) into the police budget as a violent neighborhood that has multiple murders a year.
If God forbid we do one day have a murder, I would expect cops to be all over that shit. We should be a much higher priority than the violent neighborhood because we've earned that priority.
That said, cops are largely idiots when it comes to dealing with problem areas. I don't know why they tolerate them so much, except the cynical view that they are more interested in making money than stopping crime. A great example is prostitution... why are they the clients of prostitutes? To make money. If they wanted to end coercive prostitution, they would do this:
1. Hire a prostitute
2. "Do it"
3. Refuse to pay
4. Wait for the enforcer/pimp/whoever to show up and make a threat
5. Shoot him (or arrest him)
There are far fewer pimps than prostitutes and clients. So attacking the pimps is the logical way to end it.
Instead their sting operations are to arrest the guys who DO pay as they're supposed to. WTF??
They could do something similar with drugs:
1. Buy drugs
2. Refuse to pay
3. Keep doing that
4. Wait for core violent element of the gang to come attack
5. Shoot them (or arrest them)
But nah, they'd rather set up a sting and arrest a couple users, or maybe a dealer so they can confiscate his property... pretty ridiculous.
I'm not sure how you call a program targeted at girls non-discriminatory. That's blatant discrimination.
I mean there are plenty of prima facie race-neutral programs that are then labeled as discriminatory based on things like disparate impact. What Google and Facebook are doing goes far beyond inadvertent disparate impact. I don't agree with disparate impact theory when applied too broadly, but if there is disparate impact plus a clear intention to discriminate, that's another story.
I can understand running red lights if it's a "smart" light and the bike doesn't trip the sensor and there's no pedestrian crossing button..
But why should bikers treat stop signs as yields? That seems dangerous and unnecessary.
Yeah, that's called inertia. In a real meritocracy, there'd be no inertia
Your definition of meritocracy is useless, because that's impossible. Even in the most perfect possible meritocracy, information only travels so fast (speed of light?), so not everybody can dump the erstwhile leader at the same instant. And of course, in reality, it takes much much longer. You don't know that GM's cars have suddenly become worthless for 5 or 6 years, because that's when they start breaking down.
Similarly, you don't know that Japanese cars have dramatically increased in quality because it took 20 years for people to start noticing "Hey there are all these 20 year old Toyota driving around, looking old and boxy, but still running great.. what's up."
How do you think you can get around the fact that measuring quality takes time? How does that fit into your definition of meritocracy having "no inertia?"
If (as you might contend) unions were dragging down the American automakers
No, you misunderstood, I was saying that the (surviving) American car companies showed skill in managing unions and politics. Perhaps that is the meritocracy... not who makes better cars, but who can survive in a hostile world. It takes some kind of skill to get a bailout, which is why Lehman Brothers isn't around, Countrywide isn't around, but Citibank is, Goldman is, etc.
Business isn't all about making the best product, in other words. The guy who makes a great product but can't keep up with his taxes, or mismanages labor and has all his workers go on strike, can still fail. That doesn't violate the concept of meritocracy because those are integral skills in business.