20 hours a week?? Maybe if you want to do day trading. Then you should expect to put in those kind of hours, and you'll probably lose anyway.
It's sad because this myth that investing is a rigged game really hurts a lot of naive people who are susceptible to being scared. Maybe some poor guy reads your comment and says "Gee willickers, I better cash out that 529 account for my son's college and put it under my mattress. Can't trust them darn bankers!" Yay for you, you screwed someone.
I honestly can't understand how people like you have the balls to give actual, actionable investment advice. And yeah, your depiction of the entire market as out of reach of the average small investor is as incorrect and arrogant and dangerous as some other guy who pumps some specific investment that "can't lose". "Can't win" is the other side of the exact same coin.
That's way too simplistic. If there's a loss, of course they bear it. Bailouts happen when the loss is so large it's going to overwhelm the particular bank plus other big companies connected to them (such as insurers like AIG).
While I agree that's not fair, it's also not as bad as you're pretending.
You can't seriously propose that companies pay money into employee pensions as they contractually agreed to, now can you?
Hah, forget companies, if you can get the government to fully fund their pension promises you'd get the Nobel prize. I mean for God's sake look at the hoops people jump through to argue that the USPS is paying too much into their retirement funds. They come up with bogus arguments like "They are paying for employees who aren't born yet." Ummmmm nooooo, they are paying an extra catch-up amount because it's underfunded to begin with. The catch-up amount is equivalent to them paying the normal amount for additional employees that don't exist, but that's not what is *actually happening.* It's like talking to a wall though... they will insist that, no, the evil Republicans are bankrupting the USPS by making them pay retirement benefits literally earmarked for people who are not born yet. It's so funny, but also really sad.
Seriously though, the lack of private pensions is small potatoes (I mean, we do have Social Security for those private sector employees) compared to underfunded pensions in federal and state governments. That is a looming crisis.
How were these reasonable people hurt? They traded their credit scores for a few years of living in subsidized housing (not government subsidized but investor subsidized), they cashed out their equity based on ridiculously inflated appraisals, they bought new cars and paid off their student loans, etc.
Many of these "victims" were not "otherwise reasonable people." They saw dollar signs and correctly concluded that they could pull a fast one, and only the bank would get hurt. How many? I don't know. It's not something that's received a lot of scrutiny, because people prefer blaming evil bankers.
It was the wholesale fraud which happened when bankers packaged up bad loans, and with the help of ratings agencies passed them off as AAA investment
No no. I wish people were more familiar with statistics. It should be a required math course in high school, rather than geometry.
Look, if I package up 100 subprime loans paying 12% interest with an expected delinquency rate of 10% (which is really bad, historically), I can do the math and figure out a 99% confidence interval on making *some* amount of money. I can turn around and say, I bought these 100 loans paying 12%, and I'm writing a derivative that pays 1% interest but I'm 99% confident that it WILL pay 1% with no delinquency. Because the high interest rate from the payers masks the non-payers. Plus what we estimate we can recoup from foreclosures, etc. Plus we can buy some of the loans at a discount because the original lender wants to get rid of them, etc. There are many factors.
This is real, sound math, and it works as long as you have the numbers right. There's nothing wrong with it, and there's nothing unethical about doing such math and selling products based on it.
The problem with the financial crisis was (to extend the example) rather than a 10% delinquency rate, they got 15% or whatever. So we fell into that 1% case where the "virtually guaranteed" payout fell below 2%.
It happens. There was a gas crisis. There was government intervention to promote loans to people who shouldn't get them. Etc. There's always a chance that something goes wrong instead of right.
Yes, that's right, even a completely sound, 100% legitimate AAA-rated investment... CAN LOSE MONEY. So just because these investments did in fact lose money does not mean the AAA rating was unwarranted.
Essentially Wall Street and the financial industry made HUGE mistakes in who they loaned money to
Don't forget quasi-government agencies like FNMA which lost $23 billion in one single quarter (http://money.cnn.com/2009/05/08/news/companies/fannie_mae/?postversion=2009050812) on bad loans.
A point of clarification, technically it wasn't just people who couldn't afford the houses they bought, it was people who chose not to afford the houses they bought. It's perfectly legal to refinance and max out your LTV, use the cash to buy a new car and pay off credit cards, then walk away. I mean, depending on where you live, if your mortgage is a non-recourse loan then the bank gets the house back and your credit score is trashed for a few years, and that's about it.
I almost bought a house from such a person. The house was in preforeclosure, they were seeking a short sale, and they had a brand new Mercedes in the driveway (still had the paper temporary tags on). I declined to proceed, realizing they were horribly irresponsible people and probably hadn't maintained the house well, and a month later the bank had foreclosed and they were gone.
Crowdsourcing and open source have nothing to do with capitalism, either for or against. They are orthogonal.
But just as Quicken, Peachtree, etc put probably a hundred thousand bookkeeping operations out of business in the last thirty years or so
That's hilarious, you're using an example of one product of capitalism (like QuickBooks) supplanting another product of capitalism (like small accountancy firms) to show that capitalism is obsolete. Do you see why that makes no sense? That is how capitalism is supposed to work. Your example shows that capitalism is thriving and continues to show resiliency and ability to adapt over time.
As a matter of fact, AT&T is charging $120 for 1 gbps and apparently does not enforce their data cap on gigabit plans. And if Google is interested in your area, they drop the price to $70. That's what's happening here, anyway, and some other places I've read about online.
The choice to sign up is tough though. Here's what's going on in my area.
1. AT&T installed fiber in my neighborhood this Monday (I was really impressed.. they started Monday and were done by Tuesday afternoon, for about 150 houses). They haven't announced service yet, but I'm guessing that'll be fairly soon now. They're already up in a few other neighborhoods and recently sent out a flyer saying they were dropping the price to $70 (without mentioning Google of course).
2. Time Warner is upgrading the area to their "MAXX" speeds. I'm paying $65/month right now (was $55 but they upped it recently) for 30/5 and this tier is supposed to be upgraded to 200/20 "by the end of the year."
3. Google is coming also by the end of the year. Should be around $70/month.
If I sign up with AT&T, and by projection other people interested in 1 gbps in my neighborhood also sign up, will we have enough interest to get Google when they do their neighborhood feasibility polling? On the other hand, if AT&T becomes available this month and Google just starts by year end and doesn't really come up until next year some time, is it worth waiting? Well if TWC upgrades me fairly soon, I could comfortably ride out a wait at 200 mbps. But what if it's more like December?
Bull. The "average American" uses way less carbon than you do.
Reducing our carbon emissions can be done without everybody installing their own personal solar power plus battery system. Centralized nuclear power for instance. Then it doesn't matter how big your AC unit is in terms of carbon emissions.
No, we aren't going to get a carbon tax because there are too many people with your kind of wasteful attitude in office.
I live in a 1300 sq ft house and my electric bill is like $80/month, which is below the median for my area. I don't consider myself wasteful with energy. When the roof on this house needs replacing in (guessing) 10-15 years, I'm willing to pay quite a bit extra to get solar shingles or whatever equivalent is available then. I don't really care about ROI.
But when people start talking about new laws and taxes to "encourage" others to see it their way, I think you can just fuck right off. I don't support that at all. Some tiny reduction in carbon emissions among my countrymen (while developing countries continue to get exemptions that more than offset our reductions) isn't worth the introduction of new levers on the free market that the government can tweak whenever it wants.
Eh, the Central Park Jogger case is a great example of people being appropriately punished, just the reasoning is a bit off. They all admitted they were out committing various crimes that night, just not THAT crime. The people who were going out attacking random people in gangs should all be put to death.
I support the death penalty, but the act of killing itself is just a small part of the punishment. I think the real punishment is the anticipation. Dostoevsky gave a pretty good account in "The Idiot."
First of all, let me say I agree it's a pretty ridiculous situation.
But my point was asking whether $6/test was the actual cost or not, and this shows that it clearly is not. He manufactured 500 tests from 1962 to 1963, for a total cost of $6000. He obviously was not counting the cost of the rental house or his own salary.
I'm not saying $262 was a fair price, but at the same time, we don't know what the ultimate low price would be for the privately manufactured test. As the story says, "There was no pricing provision, an omission that Guthrie later deeply regretted."
I find it pretty amazing that a smart guy would say "Hey can you guys please manufacture this for me, and I don't care what it costs. Here's an exclusive deal!"
In light of these details, I don't think this anecdote provides a very good case for your claim that private industry isn't as great as it thinks it is at cost containment.
You think that it is normal because you only hang with your white tribe
Wrong, things like skin lighteners and hair conditioners are huge in non-white cultures as well. Maybe you need to hang out with some other "tribes" -- like try visiting your local Indian grocery store. You'll see far more skin lightening products than at any store commonly frequented by whites.
That would be an interesting addition. I'd also like to see how varying the color of the player's character affects the results. In computer games, teams are often identified by color (red vs blue) so you'll be more cautious when someone of a different color appears -- they could be about to attack you. Also a racially neutral test where the characters are a completely artificial color like bright green would be good to include.
It also shows that the non-profit / academic market isn't as great as they think they are. At the end of the day they chose to contract out that work instead of having that doctor continue making kits for $5. That's on them. Perhaps it was greed, perhaps they rationalized it and said "Your time is better spent back in the lab, and anyway if we get $100/kit we can use that money to fund more development."
I would also question the $5 price. Was that a nominal fee or did it actually cover materials and labor? It sounds like a case of "Hey guys I'll just make these kits until the manufacturer fixes their problems. I keep getting paid right? Okay cool." Obviously not sustainable.
Sounds like a straw man argument. Nobody is saying geniuses are self-sufficient islands. And it seems silly to conflate the ideas of "self-made man" and "genius" anyhow.
The special thing about geniuses is that they are rare. The guy who crafted the first violin that Mozart ever heard was probably a fine craftsman. But there are hundreds or thousands of other fine craftsmen who could have made just as good of a violin.
The farmers who grew the food that Mozart ate were good, hard working people. But there were thousands or millions or other good, hard working people who could have grown that food.
But there weren't many (if any) other people who could have taken Mozart's place. There is other good music, but it even looking at other musical geniuses it wouldn't be the *same* music, whereas the potato I have with my dinner could be any of a million other potatoes and I wouldn't even care.
Wrong. For example, on https://www.madewithcode.com/c... you can see a list of grantees that Google gave money to. One of them is Girls Who Code. Go to http://girlswhocode.com/progra... and look at the signup link. It takes you to this form (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Jp00FbcDXSig4eoGMDSy979gal7rpo4YYMZ_eCeS_pM/viewform) which asks:
Your Current Grade or the Grade of Students You Work With (if applicable) Note: Only current 10th and 11th grade female students are eligible to apply for the Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Programs in 2015.
It's amazing that you genuinely thought that programs targeted at getting girls into coding would necessarily include boys. How did you come to that conclusion anyway?
That's the same thing as saying they can't when you're generalizing about large groups.
Observe: I'm not saying black people can't make good doctors, but black people won't make good doctors. What??
No, I think they need to be served by people who understand and care about the issues which affect them in particular.
White people can understand and care about issues affecting black people. Black people can understand and care about issues affecting white people. To deny that is to say there's something inherent in white/black people that prevents them from understanding certain things that other people can understand, and that's racist.
Observing racism is not itself racism.
That's not always true, of course, because the classification of something as racist can be subjective. If I attribute some behavior that one black person exhibits (say, an interracial crime) to "Oh, yeah of course, he's doing that because blacks are all racist against whites" then that is definitely racist.
But that's just nitpicking. I see your point and my serious response is that observation is different from calling for action. Saying black people are treated differently is one thing. It's quite another to say that white people can't (sorry, won't) treat black people better and that only black people can treat black people correctly.
When businesses more accurately reflect the makeup of the nation, they better serve the nation.
It's racist to even make that claim. Racism is "the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races."
You're saying that an all white company can't serve as well as one with more black people. That's racist against whites because you think they can't serve black people on their own, and it's racist against blacks because you think they need special accommodations to be adequately served.
I've started to do this as a minor hobby as well. Now I want to take it a step further and get contact I do to report them. They really don't like giving out a working phone number though.
Next time I get "card services" on the line I want to try reeeally playing the part of genuinely being interested and then suddenly something comes up and I have to go. Perhaps they'll risk it.
I just had another conversation with someone about this topic and I wanted to add this because it came up.
You seem to be confused about whether "Allah" is a proper noun or a generic. Like the word "God" in English it is both.
I think it is a confusing concept, but one way to think of it is one word with two meanings. God can mean "the one monotheistic god" or it can mean "a deity." But when translating a word to another language, it's not true that every meaning gets translated the same way. As a concrete example, the word "set" has tons of English definitions. One translation of "set" to German is "Satz." That encompasses several of the same definitions as "set" including "a collection of things" and "a series of tennis games."
But another definition of "set" in English is equipment, like a TV set. In German that gets translated as "Gerat."
So even if it's true that one form of Allah (the generic form) should be translated as God, that doesn't hold that all meanings of Allah should be translated as God.
Your statement relies on a false premise. If race were "irrelevant" as a factor, then there would be no disparity along racial lines.
You've missed what I was referring to when I said it's irrelevant. To take a concrete example, I don't think black kids are less able to program. So race is irrelevant in their programming ability.
That's not to say race isn't relevant to things like "what populations are less exposed to programming classes."
But a race-blind program that targets all children who can't program would automatically take those demographics into account. If more black kids currently aren't exposed to programming, then a program that helps all kids program would disproportionately help black kids.
But creating a program that specifically helps black kids to the exclusion of other kids is racist, even though it would have a similar effect (disproportionately helping black kids).
Slashdot Mirror
Why should it attack your dignity to need help and ask for it? Maybe that's the problem that should be addressed.
20 hours a week?? Maybe if you want to do day trading. Then you should expect to put in those kind of hours, and you'll probably lose anyway.
It's sad because this myth that investing is a rigged game really hurts a lot of naive people who are susceptible to being scared. Maybe some poor guy reads your comment and says "Gee willickers, I better cash out that 529 account for my son's college and put it under my mattress. Can't trust them darn bankers!" Yay for you, you screwed someone.
I honestly can't understand how people like you have the balls to give actual, actionable investment advice. And yeah, your depiction of the entire market as out of reach of the average small investor is as incorrect and arrogant and dangerous as some other guy who pumps some specific investment that "can't lose". "Can't win" is the other side of the exact same coin.
That's way too simplistic. If there's a loss, of course they bear it. Bailouts happen when the loss is so large it's going to overwhelm the particular bank plus other big companies connected to them (such as insurers like AIG).
While I agree that's not fair, it's also not as bad as you're pretending.
You can't seriously propose that companies pay money into employee pensions as they contractually agreed to, now can you?
Hah, forget companies, if you can get the government to fully fund their pension promises you'd get the Nobel prize. I mean for God's sake look at the hoops people jump through to argue that the USPS is paying too much into their retirement funds. They come up with bogus arguments like "They are paying for employees who aren't born yet." Ummmmm nooooo, they are paying an extra catch-up amount because it's underfunded to begin with. The catch-up amount is equivalent to them paying the normal amount for additional employees that don't exist, but that's not what is *actually happening.* It's like talking to a wall though... they will insist that, no, the evil Republicans are bankrupting the USPS by making them pay retirement benefits literally earmarked for people who are not born yet. It's so funny, but also really sad.
Seriously though, the lack of private pensions is small potatoes (I mean, we do have Social Security for those private sector employees) compared to underfunded pensions in federal and state governments. That is a looming crisis.
How were these reasonable people hurt? They traded their credit scores for a few years of living in subsidized housing (not government subsidized but investor subsidized), they cashed out their equity based on ridiculously inflated appraisals, they bought new cars and paid off their student loans, etc.
Many of these "victims" were not "otherwise reasonable people." They saw dollar signs and correctly concluded that they could pull a fast one, and only the bank would get hurt. How many? I don't know. It's not something that's received a lot of scrutiny, because people prefer blaming evil bankers.
It was the wholesale fraud which happened when bankers packaged up bad loans, and with the help of ratings agencies passed them off as AAA investment
No no. I wish people were more familiar with statistics. It should be a required math course in high school, rather than geometry.
Look, if I package up 100 subprime loans paying 12% interest with an expected delinquency rate of 10% (which is really bad, historically), I can do the math and figure out a 99% confidence interval on making *some* amount of money. I can turn around and say, I bought these 100 loans paying 12%, and I'm writing a derivative that pays 1% interest but I'm 99% confident that it WILL pay 1% with no delinquency. Because the high interest rate from the payers masks the non-payers. Plus what we estimate we can recoup from foreclosures, etc. Plus we can buy some of the loans at a discount because the original lender wants to get rid of them, etc. There are many factors.
This is real, sound math, and it works as long as you have the numbers right. There's nothing wrong with it, and there's nothing unethical about doing such math and selling products based on it.
The problem with the financial crisis was (to extend the example) rather than a 10% delinquency rate, they got 15% or whatever. So we fell into that 1% case where the "virtually guaranteed" payout fell below 2%.
It happens. There was a gas crisis. There was government intervention to promote loans to people who shouldn't get them. Etc. There's always a chance that something goes wrong instead of right.
Yes, that's right, even a completely sound, 100% legitimate AAA-rated investment... CAN LOSE MONEY. So just because these investments did in fact lose money does not mean the AAA rating was unwarranted.
Essentially Wall Street and the financial industry made HUGE mistakes in who they loaned money to
Don't forget quasi-government agencies like FNMA which lost $23 billion in one single quarter (http://money.cnn.com/2009/05/08/news/companies/fannie_mae/?postversion=2009050812) on bad loans.
A point of clarification, technically it wasn't just people who couldn't afford the houses they bought, it was people who chose not to afford the houses they bought. It's perfectly legal to refinance and max out your LTV, use the cash to buy a new car and pay off credit cards, then walk away. I mean, depending on where you live, if your mortgage is a non-recourse loan then the bank gets the house back and your credit score is trashed for a few years, and that's about it.
I almost bought a house from such a person. The house was in preforeclosure, they were seeking a short sale, and they had a brand new Mercedes in the driveway (still had the paper temporary tags on). I declined to proceed, realizing they were horribly irresponsible people and probably hadn't maintained the house well, and a month later the bank had foreclosed and they were gone.
Crowdsourcing and open source have nothing to do with capitalism, either for or against. They are orthogonal.
But just as Quicken, Peachtree, etc put probably a hundred thousand bookkeeping operations out of business in the last thirty years or so
That's hilarious, you're using an example of one product of capitalism (like QuickBooks) supplanting another product of capitalism (like small accountancy firms) to show that capitalism is obsolete. Do you see why that makes no sense? That is how capitalism is supposed to work. Your example shows that capitalism is thriving and continues to show resiliency and ability to adapt over time.
As a matter of fact, AT&T is charging $120 for 1 gbps and apparently does not enforce their data cap on gigabit plans. And if Google is interested in your area, they drop the price to $70. That's what's happening here, anyway, and some other places I've read about online.
The choice to sign up is tough though. Here's what's going on in my area.
1. AT&T installed fiber in my neighborhood this Monday (I was really impressed.. they started Monday and were done by Tuesday afternoon, for about 150 houses). They haven't announced service yet, but I'm guessing that'll be fairly soon now. They're already up in a few other neighborhoods and recently sent out a flyer saying they were dropping the price to $70 (without mentioning Google of course).
2. Time Warner is upgrading the area to their "MAXX" speeds. I'm paying $65/month right now (was $55 but they upped it recently) for 30/5 and this tier is supposed to be upgraded to 200/20 "by the end of the year."
3. Google is coming also by the end of the year. Should be around $70/month.
If I sign up with AT&T, and by projection other people interested in 1 gbps in my neighborhood also sign up, will we have enough interest to get Google when they do their neighborhood feasibility polling? On the other hand, if AT&T becomes available this month and Google just starts by year end and doesn't really come up until next year some time, is it worth waiting? Well if TWC upgrades me fairly soon, I could comfortably ride out a wait at 200 mbps. But what if it's more like December?
Problems!
"Just as likely" huh. Seems legit.
Bull. The "average American" uses way less carbon than you do.
Reducing our carbon emissions can be done without everybody installing their own personal solar power plus battery system. Centralized nuclear power for instance. Then it doesn't matter how big your AC unit is in terms of carbon emissions.
No, we aren't going to get a carbon tax because there are too many people with your kind of wasteful attitude in office.
I live in a 1300 sq ft house and my electric bill is like $80/month, which is below the median for my area. I don't consider myself wasteful with energy. When the roof on this house needs replacing in (guessing) 10-15 years, I'm willing to pay quite a bit extra to get solar shingles or whatever equivalent is available then. I don't really care about ROI.
But when people start talking about new laws and taxes to "encourage" others to see it their way, I think you can just fuck right off. I don't support that at all. Some tiny reduction in carbon emissions among my countrymen (while developing countries continue to get exemptions that more than offset our reductions) isn't worth the introduction of new levers on the free market that the government can tweak whenever it wants.
Eh, the Central Park Jogger case is a great example of people being appropriately punished, just the reasoning is a bit off. They all admitted they were out committing various crimes that night, just not THAT crime. The people who were going out attacking random people in gangs should all be put to death.
I support the death penalty, but the act of killing itself is just a small part of the punishment. I think the real punishment is the anticipation. Dostoevsky gave a pretty good account in "The Idiot."
Nah. Killing is justice for some crimes.
First of all, let me say I agree it's a pretty ridiculous situation.
But my point was asking whether $6/test was the actual cost or not, and this shows that it clearly is not. He manufactured 500 tests from 1962 to 1963, for a total cost of $6000. He obviously was not counting the cost of the rental house or his own salary.
I'm not saying $262 was a fair price, but at the same time, we don't know what the ultimate low price would be for the privately manufactured test. As the story says, "There was no pricing provision, an omission that Guthrie later deeply regretted."
I find it pretty amazing that a smart guy would say "Hey can you guys please manufacture this for me, and I don't care what it costs. Here's an exclusive deal!"
In light of these details, I don't think this anecdote provides a very good case for your claim that private industry isn't as great as it thinks it is at cost containment.
You think that it is normal because you only hang with your white tribe
Wrong, things like skin lighteners and hair conditioners are huge in non-white cultures as well. Maybe you need to hang out with some other "tribes" -- like try visiting your local Indian grocery store. You'll see far more skin lightening products than at any store commonly frequented by whites.
That would be an interesting addition. I'd also like to see how varying the color of the player's character affects the results. In computer games, teams are often identified by color (red vs blue) so you'll be more cautious when someone of a different color appears -- they could be about to attack you. Also a racially neutral test where the characters are a completely artificial color like bright green would be good to include.
It also shows that the non-profit / academic market isn't as great as they think they are. At the end of the day they chose to contract out that work instead of having that doctor continue making kits for $5. That's on them. Perhaps it was greed, perhaps they rationalized it and said "Your time is better spent back in the lab, and anyway if we get $100/kit we can use that money to fund more development."
I would also question the $5 price. Was that a nominal fee or did it actually cover materials and labor? It sounds like a case of "Hey guys I'll just make these kits until the manufacturer fixes their problems. I keep getting paid right? Okay cool." Obviously not sustainable.
Sounds like a straw man argument. Nobody is saying geniuses are self-sufficient islands. And it seems silly to conflate the ideas of "self-made man" and "genius" anyhow.
The special thing about geniuses is that they are rare. The guy who crafted the first violin that Mozart ever heard was probably a fine craftsman. But there are hundreds or thousands of other fine craftsmen who could have made just as good of a violin.
The farmers who grew the food that Mozart ate were good, hard working people. But there were thousands or millions or other good, hard working people who could have grown that food.
But there weren't many (if any) other people who could have taken Mozart's place. There is other good music, but it even looking at other musical geniuses it wouldn't be the *same* music, whereas the potato I have with my dinner could be any of a million other potatoes and I wouldn't even care.
Wrong. For example, on https://www.madewithcode.com/c... you can see a list of grantees that Google gave money to. One of them is Girls Who Code. Go to http://girlswhocode.com/progra... and look at the signup link. It takes you to this form (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Jp00FbcDXSig4eoGMDSy979gal7rpo4YYMZ_eCeS_pM/viewform) which asks:
Your Current Grade or the Grade of Students You Work With (if applicable)
Note: Only current 10th and 11th grade female students are eligible to apply for the Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Programs in 2015.
It's amazing that you genuinely thought that programs targeted at getting girls into coding would necessarily include boys. How did you come to that conclusion anyway?
No, I'm saying it won't.
That's the same thing as saying they can't when you're generalizing about large groups.
Observe: I'm not saying black people can't make good doctors, but black people won't make good doctors. What??
No, I think they need to be served by people who understand and care about the issues which affect them in particular.
White people can understand and care about issues affecting black people. Black people can understand and care about issues affecting white people. To deny that is to say there's something inherent in white/black people that prevents them from understanding certain things that other people can understand, and that's racist.
Observing racism is not itself racism.
That's not always true, of course, because the classification of something as racist can be subjective. If I attribute some behavior that one black person exhibits (say, an interracial crime) to "Oh, yeah of course, he's doing that because blacks are all racist against whites" then that is definitely racist.
But that's just nitpicking. I see your point and my serious response is that observation is different from calling for action. Saying black people are treated differently is one thing. It's quite another to say that white people can't (sorry, won't) treat black people better and that only black people can treat black people correctly.
When businesses more accurately reflect the makeup of the nation, they better serve the nation.
It's racist to even make that claim. Racism is "the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races."
You're saying that an all white company can't serve as well as one with more black people. That's racist against whites because you think they can't serve black people on their own, and it's racist against blacks because you think they need special accommodations to be adequately served.
I've started to do this as a minor hobby as well. Now I want to take it a step further and get contact I do to report them. They really don't like giving out a working phone number though.
Next time I get "card services" on the line I want to try reeeally playing the part of genuinely being interested and then suddenly something comes up and I have to go. Perhaps they'll risk it.
I just had another conversation with someone about this topic and I wanted to add this because it came up.
You seem to be confused about whether "Allah" is a proper noun or a generic. Like the word "God" in English it is both.
I think it is a confusing concept, but one way to think of it is one word with two meanings. God can mean "the one monotheistic god" or it can mean "a deity." But when translating a word to another language, it's not true that every meaning gets translated the same way. As a concrete example, the word "set" has tons of English definitions. One translation of "set" to German is "Satz." That encompasses several of the same definitions as "set" including "a collection of things" and "a series of tennis games."
But another definition of "set" in English is equipment, like a TV set. In German that gets translated as "Gerat."
So even if it's true that one form of Allah (the generic form) should be translated as God, that doesn't hold that all meanings of Allah should be translated as God.
Your statement relies on a false premise. If race were "irrelevant" as a factor, then there would be no disparity along racial lines.
You've missed what I was referring to when I said it's irrelevant. To take a concrete example, I don't think black kids are less able to program. So race is irrelevant in their programming ability.
That's not to say race isn't relevant to things like "what populations are less exposed to programming classes."
But a race-blind program that targets all children who can't program would automatically take those demographics into account. If more black kids currently aren't exposed to programming, then a program that helps all kids program would disproportionately help black kids.
But creating a program that specifically helps black kids to the exclusion of other kids is racist, even though it would have a similar effect (disproportionately helping black kids).