My, what a long comment! And all based on a misunderstanding. Of course I do know that "Hill Street Blues" is fiction. But one of the reasons I enjoy it is that it appears to be accurate, realistic fiction. Regardless of the many details, the basic plot idea I mentioned - a political boss who is willing and eager to throw a subordinate to the wolves "for the look of it", regardless of the facts - is something that is common in real life.
A political boss who throws a subordinate to the wolves because he justifiably killed a black man does not happen in real life. It only happens in the fantasy world of racist cops who think the world is conspiring against them. This is right-wing, racist, tough-on crime propaganda. You're citing fiction as if it were real. You can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
What exactly does a stringently controlled supply of government-licensed "taxi" drivers do for the consumer anyway?
New York City streets are built by the government, and that gives them a right to set rules that avoid problems and maximize its utility.
For example, you can't drive at 60mph. You can't drive drunk. You can't drive with bad brakes.
In New York City there are traffic jams in midtown traffic between 6 and 7pm, and it's impossible to drive through it. If I have to go downtown between those hours, I take the train or walk.
If we added more taxis, the traffic jams would last even longer. If we let everyone in Bombay who wanted to make $20 a day drive a taxi in New York City, we'd have traffic jams like Bombay. Our streets would be impassable.
So our government (who built the streets, remember) decided to restrict the number of taxis.
You could say that once the government set the rules by issuing a limited number of medallions, the free market drove the price of medallions up. Isn't that the free market too?
Recently I have been glued to a box set of the complete "Hill Street Blues" - yes, I know that telegraphs my age and unadventurous taste in TV. It was only the other night that I got quite angry at the spectacle of the police chief twisting Captain Furillo's arm to get him to abandon his defence of an apparently "bad cop". This guy, a narcotics agent, had shot and killed a young black man while interrupting some suspicious activity in the small hours. The cop claimed that he had given due warning, and fired only after being fired on - all of which was true. Also, the group he tried to apprehend were in fact committing crimes. Nevertheless, the police chief tells Furillo that it's vital for the department to be seen to throw this "bad cop" to the wolves. It's all about perception, he explains. The facts don't matter at all; all that counts is that this is a good time to throw someone to the wolves.
You know that "Hill Street Blues" is fiction, don't you?
You realize that's the kind of bullshit story that South Carolina cop Michael Slager gave after he shot Walter Scott, a black man, in the back? (Except that a video turned up.)
And you know that there are lots of other documented cases where the cops killed people (usually black) and claimed that they saw a gun -- where it turned out that they didn't have a gun?
And you know that according to sworn police testimony before the Knapp Commission, cops often carry guns around to plant on people they've killed, so that they could say they were defending themselves?
And you know that the police have unions and the kind of scenario you describe could never have happened in real life, don't you?
That's the kind of cock-and-bull story that defense attorneys for cops, and police union apologists, come up with when a cop is guilty as shit of an unjustified, racist murder, and they're getting paid big money to come up with desperate explanations for why their client is really innocent despite the overwhelming evidence that points to his guilt.
The story that you describe is pure pro-cop propaganda to defend the unjustified murders of black people, by creating a fantasy of a minority-loving conspiracy out to get cops.
Really, how can you fall for that? Don't you have more intelligence than that?
I stopped watching TV. I know a bit about the law, and the law and police procedures are so distorted and absurd that it's painful to watch. It's like watching a science fiction program where they don't know that you can't hear sounds through a vacuum. The suspects never say that they refuse to speak without a lawyer.
Hollywood used to have a lot of writers and producers pushing a liberal agenda in their films, until the House Un-American Activities Committee got them blacklisted. Now there's a lot of conservative propaganda like this. The conservative propaganda isn't even as good.
The intent was to focus on merit-based evaluations. Seems noble, right? We want the best doctors we can get. However, the effect appears to be to reduce the number of minority students admitted. This, of course, has people outraged, and scrambling to find ways to work around the system - like sending recruiting teams to primarily-black or latino high schools, and hoping that will increase the applicant numbers.
What shocked me is that everyone is dancing around the race issue (and only certain races; not, for example, Indian or other asians).
I know a lot of doctors, professionally and socially. There is one factor most closely associated with getting into medical school: Having a father who is a doctor. There isn't even any discrimination against daughters of doctors. Male/female ratios are now about equal.
Children of doctors have many advantages. First, they grow up in a family where they learn about medicine and science from table-talk at dinner. They visit their fathers' offices. They have summer jobs in the field.
Second, they have lots of money. Most doctors make $100,000-300,000 a year. They grow up in neighborhoods around wealthy professional families like themselves. They go to schools with involved parents who make sure they get good teachers and a good education. They're bound to succeed in school.
That lots of money means they can go to medical school. Medical school costs around $50,000 a year. I know doctors whose parents just wrote a check. Middle-class parents will have a lot of trouble paying that. If college were free, as it is in most developed European countries, a lot more black students would be applying to medical school.
Everyone agrees the minority graduation numbers have dropped because individuals from a given group don't actually meet the admissions criteria. They're not qualified to be students or doctors. That apparently hundreds or thousands of people's failing grades were ignored because of their race. That prior to the no-race rule, doctors, in this case, were not necessarily the most well qualified individuals for the job. In fact, some significant percentage of them should not have been allowed in.
Well, I don't agree. I know black doctors who teach medical school, write textbooks and serve on professional committees. They're more qualified than most doctors. I'd trust them with my life. (Or with my eyes, in the case of an opthalmologist.) Do you want to see black doctors who are as good as the best white doctors? Look at the military doctors.
If you were a doctor, you'd know that tests aren't always accurate. If you have a PSA of 5, that might mean you have prostate cancer or it might not. A high test score isn't the same as having a disease. That includes medical school admissions tests too. A high medical school test score isn't the same as being a good doctor either.
A high medical school admission test score, or high high school grades and SAT scores, are especially poor at distinguishing between medical school applicants, since they all have high grades. If you have one student with a 3.8 average, and another student with a 3.9 average, that's not a meaningful difference in predicting whether he's going to be a good doctor. There are plenty of black students with 3.8 and 3.9 averages.
Science magazine had a few special issues on minorities in science. They gave the best evidence on why there are so few and how they could be encouraged to succeed, if you want to look up the facts.
I think quotas or preferences are an imperfect solution. The ideal solution would be to first eliminate poverty, by using what works, and the European-style social safety nets have been proven to work. That alone would produce better elementary and high school education. Second, we should provide free college, like most of the European countries do and like we used to do up to the 1970s.
There's another issue -- social fairness.
I used to work with an Indian engineer who told me he
>> Google's $50 million girls-only Made With Code initiative
Somewhere inside Google someone made the decision that a near-future class action targeting Google about its lack of women (whatever the number is, someone will be annoyed until it's at least 50%) would cost a lot more than $50M, so there's the budget.
Well, yes. In a *protected class*-discrimination lawsuit, companies are allowed to tell the jury about all the efforts they made to attract the *protected class* through help-wanted ads in publications read by *protected class*, in hiring interviews at *protected class* schools, in job fairs attended by *protected class*, etc.
That's why you saw all those help-wanted ads for reactor core designers and electrical engineers in Ms. magazine and the Amsterdam News.
I'm sure there are woman nuclear engineers who read Cosmopolitan, but you'll get a lot more responses to an ad in Nucleonics.
You say "Without anonymity, you can't have free speech." Really? On what logic is that true? By what historical example is that based? Most (if not all) of the American Revolutionary pamphleteers I have studied proudly signed their names to their work. The Colonial newspaper editorialists signed their names. Without demonstrating the strength of their convictions by courageously identifying themselves, (we mutually pledge our lives fortunes and sacred honor) free speech isn't worth much. You might just as well put a white pointed hood over your face if you lack the courage to identify yourself, and if you do that, your words offer little to any discourse.
You and I must have studied different American Revolutionary pamphleteers. The Federalist Papers were anonymous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Free Speech does not equate to guaranteed anonymity.
We have a pretty solid tradition of equating free speech with anonymity in the U.S.
The Federalist Papers were published anonymously. Much of the political debate at the creation of the U.S. was published anonymously. People routinely used pseudonyms in published articles.
Defamation, along with obscenity and inciting panic or violence, have never been free speech. Slander and libel are civil crimes that you can be sued for in court, and it's been that way since day one. To facilitate enforcement of defamation laws, the court has decided it's acceptable to try and de-anonymize the poster in question.
Just because the words are about a political candidate, does not make it political speech. This case is not the same as speaking unpopular political views and opinions - that WOULD be protected speech. It's the difference between supporting Nazi idealism (free speech) and accusing someone of being a Nazi (not free speech). =Smidge=
Nope. According to Times v. Sullivan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... it is not a civil offense to make false, defamatory statements about public officials unless you do it with malice, which means that you either knew that it was false or disregarded whether it was true or false. (The Times printed false statements in the advertisement at issue in Times v. Sullivan.) Anyone running for office is a public figure.
People accuse public figures of being Nazis all the time. In the Wall Street Journal comments section, which requires people to use their full names, people accuse Obama and others of being socialists, and sometimes Communists and Nazis. One ongoing debate is over whether Frank Marshall Davis was a Communist, as J. Edgar Hoover and one recent right-wing book said he was. Davis was the unnamed mentor that Obama mentioned in his autobiography.
The rule in civil damages is no harm, no foul. That's the next hurdle. In order to get damages in court, you have to prove that the action caused you damages. John Henry Faulk won a libel suit against Aware, the blacklisting group, because they called him a Communist when he wasn't, and he lost income as a result of being blacklisted.
I haven't seen any evidence that Bill Hadley was harmed by being likened to a pedophile. Hadley is going to try to find someone who will testify that he actually believed the anonymous pedophile accusation, and did something damaging to Hadley as a result.
One of the defenses in a libel case like that would be the "political hyperbole" defense, that nobody took it seriously. That's like the parody defense in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell (where Hustler published a parody of a liquor ad which quoted Falwell of saying that his first time was with his mother in the outhouse).
The founders who wrote the Constitution were lawyers, they knew about prosecutions, and they limited the power of government to prosecute people. They didn't limit the power of government to engage in public works. They knew that governments had to build lighthouses, ports, canals and roads, and run the post office.
Yes and no.... for example, they realized a national company to deliver mail was necessary (as opposed to a bunch of local ones trying to work together), but they don't run it. It's USPS.com and not USPS.gov for a reason. And while they realized the necessity of some infrastructure, they did not give power to the federal government to do it, they quite explicitly left it in the hands of local governments.
Uh, the founders who wrote the Constitution didn't call it USPS.com.
So what do you want to do?
Privatize the post office, and let them withdraw services from poor neighborhoods if they decide they're not profitable?
And take away broadband from people in those neighborhoods so they can't communicate on the Internet either?
For example, girls in black communities who get pregnant as teenagers usually get jobs and do pretty well, contrary to myth.
No, they don't - there's no greater indicator that someone will be living in poverty than being part of a single parent family. The stupid choice was allowing ones self to become pregnant as a teen - that they then own up to it and become responsible doesn't really matter since the bulk of the "damage" is already done - they've completely limited their chances and choices.
How many black single teenagers do you know? You're not talking about that from first-hand experience with real people, like Katherine Eden and the social scientists got, right? You're getting this from articles about pregnant teenagers, right? You're just giving us morality and conventional wisdom, right?
Here's what people who actually talked to pregnant teenagers found out first hand. This is only the first of many studies. You can look up dozens on the Internet.
So what do you believe? Do you believe that people can make rational choices in a free market? Or do you believe that negro teenagers are incapable of making rational choices need a Big Brother, such as yourself, to make decisions for them? If the latter, that pretty much blows your free market ideal, doesn't it?
Is pregnancy a rational choice for poor teenagers? Thomas, Emory Jr. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern Edition). New York, N.Y.:Jan 18, 1996. p. B1 Abstract (Summary)
An article examines a controversial but provocative theory embraced by economist Cecilia A. Conrad: that many unmarried teens are having babies as a rational response to prevailing economic conditions--specifically the job market they face. Conrad is one of a vanguard of academics who are examining the subtle economic forces taking place in America. Conrad poses an unorthodox premise: Teen preganancy is not always the disaster it's presumed to be--indeed some teen mothers do not actually suffer at all economically. Full Text (1258 words) Copyright Dow Jones & Company Inc Jan 18, 1996
A high-school reunion turned economist Cecilia A. Conrad into a contrarian, at least on the issue of teenage pregnancy.
She was an assistant professor at Barnard College in 1987 when she returned to the mostly black Dallas high school where she'd been valedictorian 15 years before. As part of a class that included a throng of girls who'd had babies as teenagers, Dr. Conrad wasn't surprised to find herself, at age 33, the only new mother at the reunion.
Yet Dr. Conrad was struck by how well many of her classmates had fared despite early and often out-of-wedlock motherhood. Almost none had sunk into prolonged poverty or welfare dependence, as conventional wisdom might dictate. One was a laboratory technician. Another was an inspector with the Food and Drug Administration. A third was a veteran Postal Service worker.
Back at Barnard, she puzzled over why she'd postponed motherhood while so many of her classmates hadn't -- and how, rather than regretting having children at an early age, many seemed to count it a plus. Her questions led her away from an academic interest in business competitiveness and headlong into the emerging field of family economics. She eventually embraced a controversial but provocative theory: that many unmarried teens are having babies as a rational response to prevailing economic conditions -- specifically the job market they face.
Dr. Conrad, one of a vanguard of academics who are examining the subtle economic forces shaping seemingly capricious life decisions, stresses that two-parent families tend to be best for raising children. But she poses an unorthodox premise: Teen pregnancy isn't always the disaster it's presumed to be; indeed, some disadvantaged teen mothers don't actually suffer at all economically.
Roughly one of every three births in America is to an unmarried mother, about 30% of them teenagers. Nearly 75% of all single teen mo
Defending the country is easy if you're stopping intruders at the gate. When you are overseas on expeditions to blow the shit out of other people PRE-EMPTIVELY, it starts to get silly and not spendthift at all!
It was obvious that the Iraq war rather than defending the country put us in more danger. I didn't want the war and I certainly didn't want to pay for it.
The parent was arguing for an a la carte government. If you want a welfare system, pay for it with your own money.
Of course that's ridiculous, but if we're going to have an a la carte government, then I don't want to pay for stupid wars (which is most wars). We could cut military spending in half and be just as safe -- maybe safer.
Government IS bad... necessary, but BAD. That's why the founders of the U.S. wrote the U.S. Constitution - specifically to limit government. That the government couldn't help but corrupt, side step, or shred the constitution is only proof.
The free market is even worse. In the free market, hospitals kick people with cancer out the door if they can't pay the bills in advance. If you can't pay for food, you starve. If you can't pay for housing, you wind up in the street (and often in jail).
The founders who wrote the Constitution were lawyers, they knew about prosecutions, and they limited the power of government to prosecute people. They didn't limit the power of government to engage in public works. They knew that governments had to build lighthouses, ports, canals and roads, and run the post office.
I was reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page every day for 30 years, and I was also reading Daniel Patrick Moynihan's books, which is where this stuff about bad life choices and low expectations came from.
I don't believe there's any evidence for it. Social scientists like Kathryn Edin http://soc.jhu.edu/directory/k... who have studied the poor -- by living with them, following them for years, and examining their actual budgets and spending, have seen that the poor make pretty good life choices, given their limited options. For example, girls in black communities who get pregnant as teenagers usually get jobs and do pretty well, contrary to myth.
According to what I read in the news sections of the Wall Street Journal -- as opposed to the editorial page -- low-income people actually work long hours, but when you run the numbers, they don't make enough to survive, and a family crisis like a sickness or the loss of a car can throw them into the shelter system.
There were studies of the results of Clinton's welfare reforms, and it turned out that when the economy was good and they could get jobs, they did get jobs, and survived. When the economy turned down, and even middle-class people were getting laid off, the poor were devastated.
I guarantee you Moynihan never spent a month with a poor black family and looked at their budget.
The "broadband" here simply refers to Internet access. Nobody provides cheap "narrowband."
Today, you need Internet access to live a normal life. You need the Internet to apply for Medicaid and Obamacare. You need the Internet to find out about and apply for jobs. Schools contact parents on the Internet. Kids can't do elementary school assignments without the Internet. Public libraries have been cut back from 90 hours a week to 30 hours a week in most low-income areas here in New York, because we're supposed to do our reading on the Internet.
There are people on Slashdot who say that we should shut down the post office -- they don't need it because they use the Internet.
Will you even bother to follow-up and see if your precious strings are useful and effective, and not feelgood measures yourself, that are only implemented because they SEEM right, not because they do much?
Think about it.
There are some people who just get a malicious enjoyment out of condemning the laziness, bad habits and inferiority of others.
Why do you want to take that simple pleasure away from him?
can't stand to see someone get something for free on principle?
For many people that is, on principle, a bad thing, unless there's a demonstrable benefit.
The benefit may seem self-evident to some people, but others may need it identified and measured.
Paul Krugman discussed that. The Republicans believe that government is bad, on principle. If the government does anything good, it would lead to people believing the government is good. So they must destroy all examples of the government doing anything good.
From helping with education and job hunting, to allowing for home working
All noble and good. But will the government even bother to follow up and see if it makes any difference? It's one thing to help people improve their place in life, but if all this does is provide free entertainment I'm not so sure. Maybe there should be at least some strings attached to it.
Maybe we can have a big brother watching over the poor to make sure they only use our charity for worthy purposes.
Internet access is nearly as important as electricity in our modern age. I'd place it as more important than phones. A phone can call a friend... the internet shows you the world.
If you feel that way, volunteer your own money. You seem to be a spendthrift when it comes to using other people's money.
If you want to invade Iraq, volunteer your own money. If you want to bail out banks, volunteer your own money. If you want to stop and frisk black people, volunteer your own money. If you want to drive on highways, volunteer your own money. If you want to create the Internet, volunteer your own money.
There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision. -- The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich von Hayek
The Readers' Digest left that part out of the comic book.
I find that the vast majority of robocallers are actually robodialers, with an actual human being on the other end. My solution is to get incredibly verbally abusive to them. I'm entirely calm but I use language that would peel the paint on a battleship and get truckers to cry. The amusing part is when they stammer and get defensive that I'm treating them this way and I get to remind them, "hey, you called me, remember?"
That's right. I have to spend all day forced to be polite to people who I would rather strangle (example: health insurance companies). Telephone solicitors give me a useful catharsis of letting me violate the normal social conventions with somebody who doesn't deserve any respect.
I was thinking about the downsides to that. Does it bring me down to their level? Then I heard how an elderly woman was getting scammer calls, falling for them, and getting bills of $500 or more a month. Her daughter had to disconnect her phone line to stop it. The woman had some cognitive decline, but she was capable of living independently. However, not having a phone put her in a dangerous situation where she can't call for help in an emergency and people can't check on her without going over to her apartment. We were talking about a phone with a whitelist.
So I think of how these unscrupulous scumbags are exploiting helpless people, and tell them exactly what I think.
BTW, I'm also on the federal do-not-call list, so their calls to me are illegal from the beginning. Can't the FBI send SWAT teams to them?
There's supposed to be some way to sue them for $1,000 a call, which would be a good living, but I don't know if it's an urban myth.
In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.
Regardless of whether you agree with drugs being criminalized, the fact remains that they are, and so anyone you're involved with who's making money out of illegal drugs is a criminal. Criminals are not good at heart, however much people here like to romanticise drug dealers as Robin Hood characters.
Tobacco kills 400,000 Americans every year. Illegal drugs kill less than 40,000. Cannabis kills virtually no one.
Do you think it's acceptable to sell tobacco (that kills 400,000 people) but not illegal drugs (that kill 40,000 people)? Or the illegal drug cannabis, which kills no one?
I prefer the criminals who sell cannabis to the legal killers who sell tobacco.
I was reading about the Silk Road trial the other day and I was sort of amazed that people would trust sites like this. What is stopping them from running away with all the money stashed in the escrow accounts? Wasn't one of the benefits of bitcoin supposed to be smart contracts? Why aren't smart contracts replacing escrow accounts on these sites?
In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.
Soviet Russia Had a Better Record of Training Women in STEM Than America Does Today Perhaps it's time for the United States to take a page from the Soviet book just this one time By Rose Eveleth smithsonian.com December 12, 2013
Between 1962 and 1964, 40 percent of the chemistry PhD's awarded in Soviet Russia went to women. At that same time in the United States, that number was a measly five percent. In 2006, that number was still lower than the Soviets' from the '60s—just 35 percent, according to the American Institute of Physics Research Center. In 2012, still only 37 percent of chemistry PhDs in America went to women.
Take this letter from a girl from Ukraine to Yuri Gagarin:
I have wanted to ask you for a long time already: ‘is it possible for a simple village girl to fly to the cosmos?’ But I never decided to do it. Now that the first Soviet woman has flown into space, I finally decided to write you a letter.I know [to become a cosmonaut] one needs training and more training, one needs courage and strength of character. And although I haven’t yet trained ‘properly’, I am still confident of my strength. It seems to me that with the kind of preparation that you gave Valia Tereshkova, I would also be able to fly to the cosmos.
Slashdot Mirror
My, what a long comment! And all based on a misunderstanding. Of course I do know that "Hill Street Blues" is fiction. But one of the reasons I enjoy it is that it appears to be accurate, realistic fiction. Regardless of the many details, the basic plot idea I mentioned - a political boss who is willing and eager to throw a subordinate to the wolves "for the look of it", regardless of the facts - is something that is common in real life.
A political boss who throws a subordinate to the wolves because he justifiably killed a black man does not happen in real life. It only happens in the fantasy world of racist cops who think the world is conspiring against them. This is right-wing, racist, tough-on crime propaganda. You're citing fiction as if it were real. You can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
What exactly does a stringently controlled supply of government-licensed "taxi" drivers do for the consumer anyway?
New York City streets are built by the government, and that gives them a right to set rules that avoid problems and maximize its utility.
For example, you can't drive at 60mph. You can't drive drunk. You can't drive with bad brakes.
In New York City there are traffic jams in midtown traffic between 6 and 7pm, and it's impossible to drive through it. If I have to go downtown between those hours, I take the train or walk.
If we added more taxis, the traffic jams would last even longer. If we let everyone in Bombay who wanted to make $20 a day drive a taxi in New York City, we'd have traffic jams like Bombay. Our streets would be impassable.
So our government (who built the streets, remember) decided to restrict the number of taxis.
You could say that once the government set the rules by issuing a limited number of medallions, the free market drove the price of medallions up. Isn't that the free market too?
Recently I have been glued to a box set of the complete "Hill Street Blues" - yes, I know that telegraphs my age and unadventurous taste in TV. It was only the other night that I got quite angry at the spectacle of the police chief twisting Captain Furillo's arm to get him to abandon his defence of an apparently "bad cop". This guy, a narcotics agent, had shot and killed a young black man while interrupting some suspicious activity in the small hours. The cop claimed that he had given due warning, and fired only after being fired on - all of which was true. Also, the group he tried to apprehend were in fact committing crimes. Nevertheless, the police chief tells Furillo that it's vital for the department to be seen to throw this "bad cop" to the wolves. It's all about perception, he explains. The facts don't matter at all; all that counts is that this is a good time to throw someone to the wolves.
You know that "Hill Street Blues" is fiction, don't you?
You realize that's the kind of bullshit story that South Carolina cop Michael Slager gave after he shot Walter Scott, a black man, in the back? (Except that a video turned up.)
And you know that there are lots of other documented cases where the cops killed people (usually black) and claimed that they saw a gun -- where it turned out that they didn't have a gun?
And you know that according to sworn police testimony before the Knapp Commission, cops often carry guns around to plant on people they've killed, so that they could say they were defending themselves?
And you know that the police have unions and the kind of scenario you describe could never have happened in real life, don't you?
That's the kind of cock-and-bull story that defense attorneys for cops, and police union apologists, come up with when a cop is guilty as shit of an unjustified, racist murder, and they're getting paid big money to come up with desperate explanations for why their client is really innocent despite the overwhelming evidence that points to his guilt.
The story that you describe is pure pro-cop propaganda to defend the unjustified murders of black people, by creating a fantasy of a minority-loving conspiracy out to get cops.
Really, how can you fall for that? Don't you have more intelligence than that?
I stopped watching TV. I know a bit about the law, and the law and police procedures are so distorted and absurd that it's painful to watch. It's like watching a science fiction program where they don't know that you can't hear sounds through a vacuum. The suspects never say that they refuse to speak without a lawyer.
Hollywood used to have a lot of writers and producers pushing a liberal agenda in their films, until the House Un-American Activities Committee got them blacklisted. Now there's a lot of conservative propaganda like this. The conservative propaganda isn't even as good.
The intent was to focus on merit-based evaluations. Seems noble, right? We want the best doctors we can get. However, the effect appears to be to reduce the number of minority students admitted. This, of course, has people outraged, and scrambling to find ways to work around the system - like sending recruiting teams to primarily-black or latino high schools, and hoping that will increase the applicant numbers.
What shocked me is that everyone is dancing around the race issue (and only certain races; not, for example, Indian or other asians).
I know a lot of doctors, professionally and socially. There is one factor most closely associated with getting into medical school: Having a father who is a doctor. There isn't even any discrimination against daughters of doctors. Male/female ratios are now about equal.
Children of doctors have many advantages. First, they grow up in a family where they learn about medicine and science from table-talk at dinner. They visit their fathers' offices. They have summer jobs in the field.
Second, they have lots of money. Most doctors make $100,000-300,000 a year. They grow up in neighborhoods around wealthy professional families like themselves. They go to schools with involved parents who make sure they get good teachers and a good education. They're bound to succeed in school.
That lots of money means they can go to medical school. Medical school costs around $50,000 a year. I know doctors whose parents just wrote a check. Middle-class parents will have a lot of trouble paying that. If college were free, as it is in most developed European countries, a lot more black students would be applying to medical school.
Everyone agrees the minority graduation numbers have dropped because individuals from a given group don't actually meet the admissions criteria. They're not qualified to be students or doctors. That apparently hundreds or thousands of people's failing grades were ignored because of their race. That prior to the no-race rule, doctors, in this case, were not necessarily the most well qualified individuals for the job. In fact, some significant percentage of them should not have been allowed in.
Well, I don't agree. I know black doctors who teach medical school, write textbooks and serve on professional committees. They're more qualified than most doctors. I'd trust them with my life. (Or with my eyes, in the case of an opthalmologist.) Do you want to see black doctors who are as good as the best white doctors? Look at the military doctors.
If you were a doctor, you'd know that tests aren't always accurate. If you have a PSA of 5, that might mean you have prostate cancer or it might not. A high test score isn't the same as having a disease. That includes medical school admissions tests too. A high medical school test score isn't the same as being a good doctor either.
A high medical school admission test score, or high high school grades and SAT scores, are especially poor at distinguishing between medical school applicants, since they all have high grades. If you have one student with a 3.8 average, and another student with a 3.9 average, that's not a meaningful difference in predicting whether he's going to be a good doctor. There are plenty of black students with 3.8 and 3.9 averages.
Science magazine had a few special issues on minorities in science. They gave the best evidence on why there are so few and how they could be encouraged to succeed, if you want to look up the facts.
I think quotas or preferences are an imperfect solution. The ideal solution would be to first eliminate poverty, by using what works, and the European-style social safety nets have been proven to work. That alone would produce better elementary and high school education. Second, we should provide free college, like most of the European countries do and like we used to do up to the 1970s.
There's another issue -- social fairness.
I used to work with an Indian engineer who told me he
Are you sick of Slashdot's Bolshevik bullshit yet?
I'm a Bolshevik, you insensitive clod.
>> Google's $50 million girls-only Made With Code initiative
Somewhere inside Google someone made the decision that a near-future class action targeting Google about its lack of women (whatever the number is, someone will be annoyed until it's at least 50%) would cost a lot more than $50M, so there's the budget.
Well, yes. In a *protected class*-discrimination lawsuit, companies are allowed to tell the jury about all the efforts they made to attract the *protected class* through help-wanted ads in publications read by *protected class*, in hiring interviews at *protected class* schools, in job fairs attended by *protected class*, etc.
That's why you saw all those help-wanted ads for reactor core designers and electrical engineers in Ms. magazine and the Amsterdam News.
I'm sure there are woman nuclear engineers who read Cosmopolitan, but you'll get a lot more responses to an ad in Nucleonics.
A column in the New York Times today touched on this.
Traditional concern with broad distributional justice has given way to narrow movements like feminism, gay rights, black power and disability rights.
Collective action, where co-workers cooperated with each other as colleagues and allies, has given way to individualism and competition.
The result is greater inequality and more poverty.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06...
Why Don’t the Poor Rise Up?
Thomas B. Edsall
JUNE 24, 2015
You say "Without anonymity, you can't have free speech."
Really? On what logic is that true? By what historical example is that based? Most (if not all) of the American Revolutionary pamphleteers I have studied proudly signed their names to their work. The Colonial newspaper editorialists signed their names. Without demonstrating the strength of their convictions by courageously identifying themselves, (we mutually pledge our lives fortunes and sacred honor) free speech isn't worth much. You might just as well put a white pointed hood over your face if you lack the courage to identify yourself, and if you do that, your words offer little to any discourse.
You and I must have studied different American Revolutionary pamphleteers. The Federalist Papers were anonymous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Free Speech does not equate to guaranteed anonymity.
We have a pretty solid tradition of equating free speech with anonymity in the U.S.
The Federalist Papers were published anonymously. Much of the political debate at the creation of the U.S. was published anonymously. People routinely used pseudonyms in published articles.
And they didn't have ISP logs back then.
Defamation, along with obscenity and inciting panic or violence, have never been free speech. Slander and libel are civil crimes that you can be sued for in court, and it's been that way since day one. To facilitate enforcement of defamation laws, the court has decided it's acceptable to try and de-anonymize the poster in question.
Just because the words are about a political candidate, does not make it political speech. This case is not the same as speaking unpopular political views and opinions - that WOULD be protected speech. It's the difference between supporting Nazi idealism (free speech) and accusing someone of being a Nazi (not free speech).
=Smidge=
Nope. According to Times v. Sullivan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... it is not a civil offense to make false, defamatory statements about public officials unless you do it with malice, which means that you either knew that it was false or disregarded whether it was true or false. (The Times printed false statements in the advertisement at issue in Times v. Sullivan.) Anyone running for office is a public figure.
People accuse public figures of being Nazis all the time. In the Wall Street Journal comments section, which requires people to use their full names, people accuse Obama and others of being socialists, and sometimes Communists and Nazis. One ongoing debate is over whether Frank Marshall Davis was a Communist, as J. Edgar Hoover and one recent right-wing book said he was. Davis was the unnamed mentor that Obama mentioned in his autobiography.
The rule in civil damages is no harm, no foul. That's the next hurdle. In order to get damages in court, you have to prove that the action caused you damages. John Henry Faulk won a libel suit against Aware, the blacklisting group, because they called him a Communist when he wasn't, and he lost income as a result of being blacklisted.
I haven't seen any evidence that Bill Hadley was harmed by being likened to a pedophile. Hadley is going to try to find someone who will testify that he actually believed the anonymous pedophile accusation, and did something damaging to Hadley as a result.
One of the defenses in a libel case like that would be the "political hyperbole" defense, that nobody took it seriously. That's like the parody defense in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell (where Hustler published a parody of a liquor ad which quoted Falwell of saying that his first time was with his mother in the outhouse).
The founders who wrote the Constitution were lawyers, they knew about prosecutions, and they limited the power of government to prosecute people. They didn't limit the power of government to engage in public works. They knew that governments had to build lighthouses, ports, canals and roads, and run the post office.
Yes and no.... for example, they realized a national company to deliver mail was necessary (as opposed to a bunch of local ones trying to work together), but they don't run it. It's USPS.com and not USPS.gov for a reason. And while they realized the necessity of some infrastructure, they did not give power to the federal government to do it, they quite explicitly left it in the hands of local governments.
Uh, the founders who wrote the Constitution didn't call it USPS.com.
So what do you want to do?
Privatize the post office, and let them withdraw services from poor neighborhoods if they decide they're not profitable?
And take away broadband from people in those neighborhoods so they can't communicate on the Internet either?
Nice guy.
For example, girls in black communities who get pregnant as teenagers usually get jobs and do pretty well, contrary to myth.
No, they don't - there's no greater indicator that someone will be living in poverty than being part of a single parent family. The stupid choice was allowing ones self to become pregnant as a teen - that they then own up to it and become responsible doesn't really matter since the bulk of the "damage" is already done - they've completely limited their chances and choices.
How many black single teenagers do you know? You're not talking about that from first-hand experience with real people, like Katherine Eden and the social scientists got, right? You're getting this from articles about pregnant teenagers, right? You're just giving us morality and conventional wisdom, right?
Here's what people who actually talked to pregnant teenagers found out first hand. This is only the first of many studies. You can look up dozens on the Internet.
So what do you believe? Do you believe that people can make rational choices in a free market? Or do you believe that negro teenagers are incapable of making rational choices need a Big Brother, such as yourself, to make decisions for them? If the latter, that pretty much blows your free market ideal, doesn't it?
Is pregnancy a rational choice for poor teenagers?
Thomas, Emory Jr. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern Edition). New York, N.Y.:Jan 18, 1996. p. B1
Abstract (Summary)
An article examines a controversial but provocative theory embraced by economist Cecilia A. Conrad: that many unmarried teens are having babies as a rational response to prevailing economic conditions--specifically the job market they face. Conrad is one of a vanguard of academics who are examining the subtle economic forces taking place in America. Conrad poses an unorthodox premise: Teen preganancy is not always the disaster it's presumed to be--indeed some teen mothers do not actually suffer at all economically.
Full Text (1258 words)
Copyright Dow Jones & Company Inc Jan 18, 1996
A high-school reunion turned economist Cecilia A. Conrad into a contrarian, at least on the issue of teenage pregnancy.
She was an assistant professor at Barnard College in 1987 when she returned to the mostly black Dallas high school where she'd been valedictorian 15 years before. As part of a class that included a throng of girls who'd had babies as teenagers, Dr. Conrad wasn't surprised to find herself, at age 33, the only new mother at the reunion.
Yet Dr. Conrad was struck by how well many of her classmates had fared despite early and often out-of-wedlock motherhood. Almost none had sunk into prolonged poverty or welfare dependence, as conventional wisdom might dictate. One was a laboratory technician. Another was an inspector with the Food and Drug Administration. A third was a veteran Postal Service worker.
Back at Barnard, she puzzled over why she'd postponed motherhood while so many of her classmates hadn't -- and how, rather than regretting having children at an early age, many seemed to count it a plus. Her questions led her away from an academic interest in business competitiveness and headlong into the emerging field of family economics. She eventually embraced a controversial but provocative theory: that many unmarried teens are having babies as a rational response to prevailing economic conditions -- specifically the job market they face.
Dr. Conrad, one of a vanguard of academics who are examining the subtle economic forces shaping seemingly capricious life decisions, stresses that two-parent families tend to be best for raising children. But she poses an unorthodox premise: Teen pregnancy isn't always the disaster it's presumed to be; indeed, some disadvantaged teen mothers don't actually suffer at all economically.
Roughly one of every three births in America is to an unmarried mother, about 30% of them teenagers. Nearly 75% of all single teen mo
Defending the country is easy if you're stopping intruders at the gate. When you are overseas on expeditions to blow the shit out of other people PRE-EMPTIVELY, it starts to get silly and not spendthift at all!
It was obvious that the Iraq war rather than defending the country put us in more danger. I didn't want the war and I certainly didn't want to pay for it.
The parent was arguing for an a la carte government. If you want a welfare system, pay for it with your own money.
Of course that's ridiculous, but if we're going to have an a la carte government, then I don't want to pay for stupid wars (which is most wars). We could cut military spending in half and be just as safe -- maybe safer.
Government IS bad... necessary, but BAD. That's why the founders of the U.S. wrote the U.S. Constitution - specifically to limit government. That the government couldn't help but corrupt, side step, or shred the constitution is only proof.
The free market is even worse. In the free market, hospitals kick people with cancer out the door if they can't pay the bills in advance. If you can't pay for food, you starve. If you can't pay for housing, you wind up in the street (and often in jail).
The founders who wrote the Constitution were lawyers, they knew about prosecutions, and they limited the power of government to prosecute people. They didn't limit the power of government to engage in public works. They knew that governments had to build lighthouses, ports, canals and roads, and run the post office.
I was reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page every day for 30 years, and I was also reading Daniel Patrick Moynihan's books, which is where this stuff about bad life choices and low expectations came from.
I don't believe there's any evidence for it. Social scientists like Kathryn Edin http://soc.jhu.edu/directory/k... who have studied the poor -- by living with them, following them for years, and examining their actual budgets and spending, have seen that the poor make pretty good life choices, given their limited options. For example, girls in black communities who get pregnant as teenagers usually get jobs and do pretty well, contrary to myth.
According to what I read in the news sections of the Wall Street Journal -- as opposed to the editorial page -- low-income people actually work long hours, but when you run the numbers, they don't make enough to survive, and a family crisis like a sickness or the loss of a car can throw them into the shelter system.
There were studies of the results of Clinton's welfare reforms, and it turned out that when the economy was good and they could get jobs, they did get jobs, and survived. When the economy turned down, and even middle-class people were getting laid off, the poor were devastated.
I guarantee you Moynihan never spent a month with a poor black family and looked at their budget.
The "broadband" here simply refers to Internet access. Nobody provides cheap "narrowband."
Today, you need Internet access to live a normal life. You need the Internet to apply for Medicaid and Obamacare. You need the Internet to find out about and apply for jobs. Schools contact parents on the Internet. Kids can't do elementary school assignments without the Internet. Public libraries have been cut back from 90 hours a week to 30 hours a week in most low-income areas here in New York, because we're supposed to do our reading on the Internet.
There are people on Slashdot who say that we should shut down the post office -- they don't need it because they use the Internet.
Will you even bother to follow-up and see if your precious strings are useful and effective, and not feelgood measures yourself, that are only implemented because they SEEM right, not because they do much?
Think about it.
There are some people who just get a malicious enjoyment out of condemning the laziness,
bad habits and inferiority of others.
Why do you want to take that simple pleasure away from him?
can't stand to see someone get something for free on principle?
For many people that is, on principle, a bad thing, unless there's a demonstrable benefit.
The benefit may seem self-evident to some people, but others may need it identified and measured.
Paul Krugman discussed that. The Republicans believe that government is bad, on principle. If the government does anything good, it would lead to people believing the government is good. So they must destroy all examples of the government doing anything good.
From helping with education and job hunting, to allowing for home working
All noble and good. But will the government even bother to follow up and see if it makes any difference? It's one thing to help people improve their place in life, but if all this does is provide free entertainment I'm not so sure. Maybe there should be at least some strings attached to it.
Maybe we can have a big brother watching over the poor to make sure they only use our charity for worthy purposes.
Libraries offer free internet access.
And who needs cell phones? You can make calls in telephone booths.
Spoken like a true Anonymous Coward.
Internet access is nearly as important as electricity in our modern age. I'd place it as more important than phones. A phone can call a friend... the internet shows you the world.
If you feel that way, volunteer your own money. You seem to be a spendthrift when it comes to using other people's money.
If you want to invade Iraq, volunteer your own money. If you want to bail out banks, volunteer your own money. If you want to stop and frisk black people, volunteer your own money. If you want to drive on highways, volunteer your own money. If you want to create the Internet, volunteer your own money.
...subsidizing a non-essential good for other people.
The downside is the federal government sticking its nose into something that's none of its business, in defiance of the 10th Amendment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.
-- The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich von Hayek
The Readers' Digest left that part out of the comic book.
I find that the vast majority of robocallers are actually robodialers, with an actual human being on the other end. My solution is to get incredibly verbally abusive to them. I'm entirely calm but I use language that would peel the paint on a battleship and get truckers to cry. The amusing part is when they stammer and get defensive that I'm treating them this way and I get to remind them, "hey, you called me, remember?"
That's right. I have to spend all day forced to be polite to people who I would rather strangle (example: health insurance companies). Telephone solicitors give me a useful catharsis of letting me violate the normal social conventions with somebody who doesn't deserve any respect.
I was thinking about the downsides to that. Does it bring me down to their level? Then I heard how an elderly woman was getting scammer calls, falling for them, and getting bills of $500 or more a month. Her daughter had to disconnect her phone line to stop it. The woman had some cognitive decline, but she was capable of living independently. However, not having a phone put her in a dangerous situation where she can't call for help in an emergency and people can't check on her without going over to her apartment. We were talking about a phone with a whitelist.
So I think of how these unscrupulous scumbags are exploiting helpless people, and tell them exactly what I think.
BTW, I'm also on the federal do-not-call list, so their calls to me are illegal from the beginning. Can't the FBI send SWAT teams to them?
There's supposed to be some way to sue them for $1,000 a call, which would be a good living, but I don't know if it's an urban myth.
In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.
Regardless of whether you agree with drugs being criminalized, the fact remains that they are, and so anyone you're involved with who's making money out of illegal drugs is a criminal. Criminals are not good at heart, however much people here like to romanticise drug dealers as Robin Hood characters.
Tobacco kills 400,000 Americans every year. Illegal drugs kill less than 40,000. Cannabis kills virtually no one.
Do you think it's acceptable to sell tobacco (that kills 400,000 people) but not illegal drugs (that kill 40,000 people)? Or the illegal drug cannabis, which kills no one?
I prefer the criminals who sell cannabis to the legal killers who sell tobacco.
I was reading about the Silk Road trial the other day and I was sort of amazed that people would trust sites like this. What is stopping them from running away with all the money stashed in the escrow accounts? Wasn't one of the benefits of bitcoin supposed to be smart contracts? Why aren't smart contracts replacing escrow accounts on these sites?
In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.
40% of chemistry PhDs were women.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
Soviet Russia Had a Better Record of Training Women in STEM Than America Does Today
Perhaps it's time for the United States to take a page from the Soviet book just this one time
By Rose Eveleth
smithsonian.com
December 12, 2013
Between 1962 and 1964, 40 percent of the chemistry PhD's awarded in Soviet Russia went to women. At that same time in the United States, that number was a measly five percent. In 2006, that number was still lower than the Soviets' from the '60s—just 35 percent, according to the American Institute of Physics Research Center. In 2012, still only 37 percent of chemistry PhDs in America went to women.
Take this letter from a girl from Ukraine to Yuri Gagarin:
I have wanted to ask you for a long time already: ‘is it possible for a simple village girl to fly to the cosmos?’ But I never decided to do it. Now that the first Soviet woman has flown into space, I finally decided to write you a letter.I know [to become a cosmonaut] one needs training and more training, one needs courage and strength of character. And although I haven’t yet trained ‘properly’, I am still confident of my strength. It seems to me that with the kind of preparation that you gave Valia Tereshkova, I would also be able to fly to the cosmos.