I don't need police if I can carry a weapon to defend myself. And yeah, the firemen argument was dishonest from my part. Where can I sign up to carry a gun, not pay the police, not pay for schools, not pay for libraries (I actually buy my books, don't rent them), but pay for firemen ?
Try Iraq, where we destroyed the dictator, his army and police.
You can set up your own gated home behind big walls.
But then the local tribal leader is going to come over with a dozen or a hundred of his followers who can outgun you, and do whatever they want with you.
I remember the Reagan presidency. Reagan made a deal with the Soviets to let the Soviet "Jews" emigrate. I knew a lot of Soviet Jews. They had to claim that they had suffered anti-Semitism and were victims in order to immigrate here as refugees. They had lawyers and fixers who would copy the identical stories of anti-Semitism for new immigrants and hand them into the INS. They would fabricate their stories. It was a scam. A lot of them weren't even Jewish; they forged documents. They immediately got welfare, housing, health care, jobs, vocational training programs, and free college tuition. They were getting more benefits than I could get. It's no wonder they liked capitalism so much. For them, capitalism was a series of handouts that they didn't have to work for. That's welfare, Reagan style.
I know a black woman who worked for the welfare department, and she was annoyed at the way the Soviet Jews would come in and act as if they were entitled to welfare. It was easier for them to get welfare than native Americans. A lot of them turned out to be criminals, and you can still read stories in the New York Times and Daily News about Russian Jews from that immigration who got caught in all kinds of illegal schemes, particularly welfare and Medicaid/Medicare fraud.
The Russian immigrants had several magazines, the most popular of which was Metropol. I once talked to the editor of Metropol. He said that as soon as they became citizens, the Russian immigrants registered Republican and voted for Ronald Reagan. He said once in the while he would get a letter saying, "Why don't we vote for Democrats," but no more than 1 in 100. It was the most brazen quid pro quo. Reagan gave them handouts, and in return they voted solid Republican. Giuliani did the same thing. This is what the Republicans accuse Obama of doing. https://danieljmitchell.files....
The same thing happened to the Cubans in Miami. And all the other favored minority immigrants.
So, you are saying that, by desegregating the schools in the south, the Republican Party under Richard Nixon was demonstrating its racism?
John Dean, a Republican, was talking about the Republican Party after Nixon. Nixon's Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, was Pat Moynihan, a liberal.
Dean said that after the Democratic Party stopped supporting Southern racism, the Republican Party (after Nixon) adopted a strategy of taking their place, by appealing to white racist Southerners.
I can't find Dean's old articles on FindLaw, and Findlaw may have been deleted them after FindLaw changed its format, or Dean may have deleted them after he collected them into his book.
I would suggest that you examine the results of the policies of both the Republicans and the Democrats to determine which party is truly racist. Democrats pursue policies which trap minorities (and others) in poverty while increasing the wealth and power of those who already have it.
Since I read the Wall Street Journal editorial page for 30 years, I have examined those arguments in great detail. The WSJ used to argue that free-market policies, lowering taxes and restricting government, would lead to prosperity, which would trickle down to the poor. They also used to argue that government handouts to the poor, like unemployment insurance, minimum wage, unions, public housing, welfare, free health care, and free education, would give them a disincentive to work and make them lazy. On the other hand, when the rich are born into trust funds, and never have to work a day in their lives, that gives them an incentive to become job creators, like Hank Rearden and Bill Gates.
This was in contrast to the news section of the WSJ, which regularly reported how the conservative policies of the editorial page weren't working as predicted.
When Democrats control the government, the gap between white and black income almost invariably widens. When republicans control the government it usually narrows.
While that is what conservative economists predict based on theory, and that is what they believe without (or in spite of) empirical evidence, I am not aware of any data to prove it. I'd like to see the data.
When did the Republican Party become the party of racism? Was it when they supplied the necessary votes to pass the Civil Rights Act by voting for it in higher percentages than the Democrats? Or was it when Richard Nixon implemented the "Southern Strategy" of actually enforcing the desegregation of schools, especially in the South?
According to John Dean, in a series of articles for FindlLaw about his experience in the Republican party, it happened when some win-at-any-cost Republican strategists decided that there was a large lower-class religious population in the South, who were already being manipulated by preachers, who could also be manipulated by Republicans.
You ought to be shocked at the original purpose of those laws: Segregationist states in the former Confederacy were preventing blacks from registering to vote (which also kept them off juries), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... by methods including killing them if they tried to as late as 1963 vote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... In 2000, the Florida Secretary of State eliminated enough black voters from the voting rolls, by falsely accusing them of being felons, to give the vote, and the presidency, to George W. Bush. http://www.gregpalast.com/flor... So black voters are denied the right to vote, in violation of the constitution, even today. That's the purpose of the picture ID laws.
Racism benefited the Democratic Party, while the Democratic Party was the party of racism. When the Democratic Party tried to reform itself, by giving constitutional rights to blacks, the Republican Party opportunistically took their place as the party of racism. Good for the Republicans, bad for America.
Plus he has a net worth of over $12 million, he'd get more from the interest than all the rest of that stuff put together.
That's peanuts. As I said above, Billy Tauzin got $2 million a year from the drug industry after he let them take as much as they want from the Medicare fund in the Prescription Drug Bill.
GWB got $15 million from speeches, but he's got a long way to catch up with Bill Clinton, who got $100 million.
As the parent said, if Obama pleases the right people, he can make a lot of money after his term expires. This writer http://www.salon.com/2013/07/1... is cynical enough to believe that there's a quid pro quo.
Or as Bill Moyers said: Maybe Obama hasn't sold out. Maybe he's just one of them.
Eventually Obama is going to be a civilian again. If he pleases the right people, he (or his immediate family) can make tremendous amounts of money as a lobbyist, consultant, guest speaker, etc...
Just look at the money that Chelsey Clinton earns from her array of jobs at various consulting, investment, educational, media and humanitarian companies and organizations. Her success was handed to her on a diamond platter as political thanks to her parents.
I don't know if Chelsea Clinton's employers are getting anything, but there's some truth to that.
For example, Billy Tauzin, the Republican representative from Louisiana, made sure that the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill would prohibit Medicare from negotiating cheaper prices with the drug companies, the way the health care systems do in every other country. After he left Congress, he went to work for the drug industry lobbying organization, PhRMA, for $2 million a year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Pretty good investment. PhRMA paid a few million dollars, and got back billions in higher drug prices. That's why all those new drugs cost $100,000 and more a year.
The reason we require insurance coverage for cabs is that we had many accidents in which people were severely injured, including pedestrians who never contracted with the cab driver, and it turned out that the cab driver didn't have enough insurance to cover them.
Which is why Uber now provides a $1M policy covering all of their drivers. Does that address that issue?
Not quite. Cities have established local insurance requirements, and they require cab drivers to provide certain standards of proof that they meet the requirements. For example, NYC has a certain standard policy that all cab drivers have to buy. They get a certificate, with an expiration date, to demonstrate that they've bought that policy.
In NYC Uber could meet that requirement by hiring only licensed cab drivers with that insurance certificate, which I think they do. Otherwise, there's no assurance that they have equivalent coverage, and they probably don't. They could say they have equivalent coverage, but how do we know?
For example, as I recall the case, an Uber driver in California killed a child, and Uber said they had no liability because the driver wasn't carrying a passenger or picking up a passenger, he was waiting for a call. Company lawyers always come up with things like that. Then, as a result of the bad publicity, Uber decided to cover it after all.
The purpose of auto liability insurance is to make sure injured people are compensated under all reasonably forseeable circumstances, and one of the reasons we have insurance regulators is to examine those policies and make sure they do cover them.
New York City personal injury lawyers can tell you of lots of cases in which a taxi horribly injured a passenger or a pedestrian, the cost of medical expenses alone exceeded its $100,000 liability policy, the driver didn't have assets to cover it, and went bankrupt, or went back to Pakistan or the Dominican Republic. They can tell you about insurance companies where somebody committed fraud and they didn't have enough assets to cover their claims. The reason we have regulations is to make sure that people who are injured by others will get compensation.
In the U.S., insurance is complicated, because every state, and every jurisdiction, has its own requirements. That's the price we pay for local choice. (The alternative is a national dictator.) Uber probably can't come up with one national insurance policy that will satisfy the requirements of every jurisdiction. (Hertz has a large insurance department, and a large litigation department.) Uber can't just say, "Oh, we're transformational, we'll just ignore local laws and do it our own way." Driving people from A to B is easy. Convincing local jurisdictions that you meet their insurance and other requirements is the hard part.
The reason we require a hack license is that, among other things, we want cab drivers to go through a police check to make sure they haven't committed crimes in the past.
Okay, but is there any evidence that actually accomplishes anything? Assuming that there is, and that it's useful, then why not just require a background check?
Evidence, in the way that in medicine we have randomized controlled trials to prove that lowering blood pressure saves lives? No, but we seldom have that kind of evidence in public policy. (Or even in medicine.) It seems reasonable that if we put people in jail for robbing grocery stores, they'll be less likely to rob grocery stores, but there's no randomized trials to prove it. It isn't perfect, but it seems reasonable, and we have to do something to keep crime as low as possible, so we do it.
I am often reminded of the way women are concerned about safety. There are several cases in the newspapers which a woman took a cab (or an unlicensed ride) home from a bar because she was drunk, and was sexually assaulted. I guarantee you that women overwhelmingly don't want to take
I'm not arguing that there shouldn't be regulations. I'm arguing that the regulations should exist for actual, important reasons not "just because that's they way we've always done it", which is essentially what people arguing that Lyft and Uber should have to follow the taxi regs are saying.
Step back a moment and think. What are the regs supposed to accomplish? Do they solve actual problems in the new context?
I notice that no one who has responded to my questions actually even tried to answer them.
You are creating a straw man. Who says, regulations should exist "just because that's the way we've always done it"? I don't say that. Nobody here said that. I don't know of anybody who said that. I challenge you to find someone who did. Atlas Shrugged doesn't count.
The parent gave you the regulations that Uber should follow: "displaying a hack lic, certification of insurance or bonding, and penalties for systematic race discrimination."
The reason we require insurance coverage for cabs is that we had many accidents in which people were severely injured, including pedestrians who never contracted with the cab driver, and it turned out that the cab driver didn't have enough insurance to cover them. If a pedestrian loses a leg, $100,000 insurance won't even cover the medical and rehabilitation costs. So the regulations required them to have a larger amount of insurance. There were stories about that in the New York Times in the last few years. An underinsured Uber driver had a major accident already.
The reason we require a hack license is that, among other things, we want cab drivers to go through a police check to make sure they haven't committed crimes in the past. Customers don't want to be alone in a cab and dependent on drivers who have been convicted of violent crimes. Many women want to take a cab home from a bar after they've had too much to drink. They don't want to be raped by the driver. Maybe you think they're wrong, but that's the decision they make in the free market and through the democratic process. Uber claims they screen their drivers but it's up to them to convince us that they screen them as well as the hack bureau does.
That's what the regulations are supposed to accomplish.
Thank you, NRA and Congress, for giving our brave service men and women the freedom and personal responsibility to kill themselves when things get too tough.
http://touch.latimes.com/#sect... Programs to prevent psychological problems in troops questioned By Alan Zarembo February 20, 2014, 7:34 p.m.
Many federal programs aimed at preventing psychological problems in military service members and their families have not been evaluated correctly to determine whether they are working and are not supported by science, says a new report commissioned by the Defense Department.
"A lot of their programs don’t have any good data behind them," said Kenneth Warner, a professor of public health at the University of Michigan who led the Institute of Medicine committee that produced the report. "We remain uncertain about which approaches work and which ones are ineffective."
At the same time, some proven interventions are not being used, the committee found. Researchers said there was ample evidence to suggest that limiting access to personal firearms on military bases would reduce suicides. About 60% of service members who take their own lives do it with guns — usually their own.
"Means restriction has been demonstrated to work," said David Rudd, a psychologist and suicide expert at the University of Memphis who served on the committee.
But in 2011, Congress prohibited the Defense Department from regulating legally owned personal firearms and ammunition on military bases.
http://iom.edu/Reports/2014/Pr... Preventing Psychological Disorders in Service Members and Their Families: An Assessment of Programs February 20, 2014
Among the small number of DOD-sponsored reintegration programs that exist, none appears to be based on scientific evidence. The committee was unable to identify any DOD evidence-based programs addressing the prevention of domestic abuse. More recently, the services have implemented a number of prevention interventions to address military sexual assault, yet a DOD review found that critical evaluation components needed to measure their effectiveness are missing.
The committee also found that environmental strategies with strong evidence of effectiveness are underutilized, such as restricting access to lethal means such as personal firearms to prevent suicide or homicide in domestic violence cases or placing restrictions on the sale of alcohol to reduce substance misuse.
In place of these proven approaches, the committee typically found interventions such as campaigns, Internet tools, or in-person events with no evidence for their effectiveness at preventing the targeted problem.
In this instance it appears that greed got the better of Mr. Williams. If you look at his website he's not doing anything wrong; he may be peddling snake oil but he's hardly the first one and that's not a crime. Read through the indictment and a different picture emerges. He counsels his clients to lie to Government investigators (witness tampering), arranges to receive the proceeds for this venture via the mail (mail fraud) and even ignores his own good judgment. When one of the undercover agents admits to lying on his employment application Williams cuts him off and says he can't work with him, he only works with people that are being truthful but whom are nervous about the test. This is in fact what his website says.
Had he stopped there he would have been fine. Did he? Of course not! He decides to "sleep on it" and comes up with a hair brained scheme to transfer money in a supposedly untraceable manner. He then tells his would-be client to break contact and reestablish it under a different name so that he doesn't have to knowingly counsel someone to lie.
The net proceeds of this particular venture? $5,000. The man is going to lose his freedom for a lousy five grand, all because greed overrode the little voice inside his head that said something was wrong. This is a life lesson that applies to everyone, criminal and honest citizen alike.
You are exactly right. I just read that indictment. I can't understand how Williams would take a chance like that.
He's been taunting the feds. They do a lot of stings like that, and it's prudent to be prepared for one. Even if the undercover agent's story had been true, the agent might have been prosecuted and might as well inform on Williams in hope of a better deal.
He said
You don't have to turn around and say, "Yeah, like I told you, I'm a lying son of a bitch." What the fuck was the reason for that, unless you wanted it on record that I was knowingly teaching someone how to lie and cheat...?
Williams knew what was happening. How could he make a stupid mistake like that? Is it the decline of age?
His line was, "The lie detector is bullshit, they can't catch criminals and then can accuse innocent people, I'm going to teach you how to pass the test. I don't want to hear about crimes. I'm not a lawyer and I can't give you lawyer-client privilege. If you want to talk about crimes, get a lawyer."
Actually, often to get away your only choice is to lie to the cops.
Big mistake. That will net you an obstruction charge. The only safe course of action is to refuse to speak to them at all. Give them your name, address, and the following statement: "I do not wish to make any statement without the benefit of counsel." If you have information that they want badly enough they'll give you immunity. Otherwise keep your fucking mouth shut.
I'm not sure you even have to give them your name and address, if they haven't seen you committing a violation. That may vary from state to state.
A lawyer from the National Lawyer's Guild once told me to say, "Officer, am I free to go?"
In my understanding, the cops can't detain you unless they have reasonable grounds to believe you committed a crime.
That's also a good line to use when they try to intimidate you into giving them permission to search your car.
Pig: Can I search your car?
Driver: I won't resist, but I'm not giving you permission.
Pig: If you don't give me permission to search your car, we'll get the drug-sniffing dog and tear up your car.
Driver: Officer, am I free to go?
(The legal answer is yes. If he doesn't have enough reasonable suspicion to search your car, he doesn't have enough reasonable suspicion to detain you.)
Stay home. Seriously. As someone who has spent the last decade working on technology in the developing world, I can tell you that most of what I do is clean up after well meaning people who don't know enough about technology to avoid making simple mistakes, and who know next to nothing about local conditions. I cut my teeth working on the Canadian frontier, and I suggest you do something similar. Don't try to help until you're confident you can.
There's some merit to that. Doctors without Borders is an unusual organization in that they often operate in areas of danger. They turn down volunteers who don't already have experience in their kind of work.
Unexperienced doctors and others often go into disaster areas without being prepared, get into trouble and have to be evacuated.
Doctors without Borders also maintains a policy of strict political neutrality in the regions where they work. They often have relationships lasting 30 years with the local medical community, and they know exactly what the locals want, without imposing their own ideas on them.
Lyft and Uber drivers should have to follow the same not-free regs as taxi drivers.
Why?
Serious question. Forget about questions of fairness, step back and look at first principles and evaluate whether the regulations are of value to society. Were these rules ever necessary? If so, why? Do the same reasons apply to Uber and Lyft?
We went through this debate in the 19th Century. People got tired of buying milk from tuberculosis cows.
Give me the name of a real-world country without regulations that you'd like to live in.
A lot of doctors who deal with these shootings say that the best way to stop them would be to reduce access to guns.
Just curious, but what makes a doctor an expert on that subject?:)
I would go to them if shot, because they are an expert in doing something about the injury, but not the cause.
Fair question.
(1) Prevention is part of medicine. Doctors have to deal with the results of gun violence, so they spend a lot of time thinking about how to prevent it. The same thing happened with automobile accidents. As Ralph Nader described in Unsafe at Any Speed, doctors saw that automobiles were designed in a way that caused needless injuries, such as dashboard knobs placed at exactly the height and shape that would drive them into a child's face or eye in a quick stop. They asked the automobile manufacturers to change the design, but the manufacturers ignored them, until they got hit with a few big product liability lawsuits.
(2) Doctors know how to use the methods of science, epidemiology and fault-tree analysis to deal with problems. For example, there is a chain of events that lead to a gun injury or fatality. Interrupting some links is more effective than interrupting others. For example, some of the early research found that the gun in a house was several times more likely to be used in suicide than for self defense. If you remove the gun from the house, you eliminate a significant number of suicides. Doctors and psychiatrists are sometimes asked to write notes saying that a patient who is applying for a gun license is not at risk for committing violence. They know that it's impossible to predict that risk. Some people here mistakenly believe that gun violence can be reduced by identifying mentally ill people.
(3) Some doctors own guns themselves. Many of them have been in the military. Many of them go hunting. So they have some expertise about guns.
Of course, the REAL issue isn't even guns, it is mental health. We have kids who are unstable, unbalanced, and unloved, and the system does nothing for them. There is no way to identify problem or challenged kids and get them some help before they go off the deep end.
Actually, it's easy to identify violent children. Teachers see them acting violent. The problem is that nobody knows what "help" would be. Interventions like DARE, where a cop comes around to a school and plays male authority figure, actually make kids more likely to get arrested. We know that sending kids to work camps and prisons makes them more violent.
Some preschool programs, which teach kids to interact with each other, make them less likely to have problems later on. Most violent kids come from families that are disrupted and low income. Since there's a strong correlation between violence and poverty, it seems plausible that eliminating poverty would also reduce violence.
I think studies found that giving people better housing, under certain circumstances, made their kids more likely to succeed in school.
Past behavior predicts future behavior. But a quick Google search of "predicting violence" will show that there's no scientific evidence of any screening method other than past behavior that can predict future violence. And there's no way to predict a school shooting.
"There is no instrument that is specifically useful or validated for identifying potential school shooters or mass murderers," said Stephen D. Hart, a psychologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver who is the co-author of a widely used evaluation tool. "There are many things in life where we have an inadequate evidence base, and this is one of them."
The only thing that can predict shooting is access to a gun. If kids can't get guns, they can't shoot up schools. They often get their parents' guns, or get older friends to buy them. A lot of doctors who deal with these shootings say that the best way to stop them would be to reduce access to guns.
Unfortunately, we don't have good research or evidence on gun violence because the NRA lobbied Congress to cut funds to any federal agency that paid for research on gun violence.
So the NRA has guaranteed your right to say, "There's no evidence for that."
In Section 5, we discuss possible interpretations of our results, focusing especially on two issues. First, we examine whether the race-specic names we have chosen might also proxy for social class above and beyond the race of the applicant. Using birth certicates data on mother’s education for the dierent names used in our sample, we nd little relationship between social background and the name specic callback rates.
"There is a lot that has to change if we want true equality, and that includes everyone"
There is never ever going to be a time when everyone treats everyone equally. That is not in any way even a desirable state.
I would be happy to have a Scandinavian or German level of opportunity and (lack of) poverty. As you may know, there is more social mobility in those countries than in the U.S. [Citation omitted, go look it up yourself on Google]
And there are studies that show that countries like that with more equality have higher GNP, better health outcomes, etc.
I'd be happy to have a free education system like we did in New York City with City College and Brooklyn College, where admission was based on test scores and high school grades, rather than on your dad's ability to pay huge expenses. That was a real meritocracy. The smartest kids in NYC went to CCNY, regardless of race or religion. CCNY has a wall with photos of graduates who went on to get Nobel prizes, or (like Andy Grove) created Silicon Valley. If you read their Nobel autobiographies, you see that some of them were rich kids, but most of them were working class kids whose fathers were tailors or grocers, who would have gone on to do the same if college wasn't free.
Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination (NBER Working Paper No. 9873).
Studies like that have been done repeatedly for decades. I expect that if you read the NBER study, they'd have a bibliography of older research.
Each one repeatedly demonstrates actual discrimination against blacks in hiring. I don't know how anyone could avoid that conclusion. Employers are more likely to hire a person with a white name than a person with a black name with the identical resume. It's not just socioeconomic disadvantage, inability to do the job, lack of qualifications or laziness.
I don't know if anyone has done a similar study in tech fields specifically, but it would be a good thing to do. If you're taking a black studies course, you could get a good paper out of it. Send out 100 resumes to Monster.com from Greg and 100 resumes from Jamal.
If you want to know generally why there are so few minorities in science, Science magazine has had many articles.
Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination (NBER Working Paper No. 9873).
Employers' Replies to Racial Names
"Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback."
Now a "field experiment" by NBER Faculty Research Fellows Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan measures this discrimination in a novel way. In response to help-wanted ads in Chicago and Boston newspapers, they sent resumes with either African-American- or white-sounding names and then measured the number of callbacks each resume received for interviews. Thus, they experimentally manipulated perception of race via the name on the resume. Half of the applicants were assigned African-American names that are "remarkably common" in the black population, the other half white sounding names, such as Emily Walsh or Greg Baker.
To see how the credentials of job applicants affect discrimination, the authors varied the quality of the resumes they used in response to a given ad. Higher quality applicants were given a little more labor market experience on average and fewer holes in their employment history. They were also portrayed as more likely to have an email address, to have completed some certification degree, to possess foreign language skills, or to have been awarded some honors.
In total, the authors responded to more than 1,300 employment ads in the sales, administrative support, clerical, and customer services job categories, sending out nearly 5,000 resumes. The ads covered a large spectrum of job quality, from cashier work at retail establishments and clerical work in a mailroom to office and sales management positions.
In Job Hunt, College Degree Can’t Close Racial Gap
"A more recent study, published this year in The Journal of Labor Economics found white, Asian and Hispanic managers tended to hire more whites and fewer blacks than black managers did."
"There is also the matter of how many jobs, especially higher-level ones, are never even posted and depend on word-of-mouth and informal networks, in many cases leaving blacks at a disadvantage. A recent study published in the academic journal Social Problems found that white males receive substantially more job leads for high-level supervisory positions than women and members of minorities."
simple solution. Have schools for the learning disabled and tailor the curriculum to them. There is no reason for example an illiterate 18 year old should be i nthe same English class with students without disabilities as it will only stunt their ability to learn
im not saying "kick them out" im saying work to better EVERYONE
That's the way they used to do it. It didn't work. I used to work for an organization that dealt with the blind. They used to have separate schools for the blind. They failed. When I worked for them, they were "mainstreaming," re-introducing students back to normal schools as much as possible.
If you stop and think for a second, an entire school full of illiterate 18-year-olds, some of them with behavioral problems, is not the place you'd want your kids to be, and not the place you want to teach. They don't have any role models of kids who can actually read. They don't make any normal friends. It's very expensive to staff a school like that, unless you give up and turn it into a dungeon, and they usually don't get the staffing they need. States never give them the budgets they need to even meet the normal expenses of running an institution.
And the kids are removed from their homes and taken far away. Do you want to take them away from their parents and relatives?
And it's much more expensive to keep a kid in an institution than leave them in their own homes.
They tried it. It didn't work. It was a disaster.
It works much better to mainstream kids and distribute them among regular schools.
Parents don't want their own kids to get kicked out. They want other kids to get out.
It sounds very nice to kick out kids who are deliberately being disruptive or not trying, but everybody in education knows that what makes running a school difficult is that a certain percentage of kids are going to be difficult to teach, usually through no fault of their own.
For example, early premature infants usually have damaged brains, and they range from being blind, unable to sit up, and unable to recognize people around them or speak, to having IQs of 40 or 50. It's pretty difficult and expensive to teach a kid with an IQ of 50, unless you want to warehouse them in dungeons like the Romanians did or execute them like the Nazis did. Public schools have to teach them. Private schools don't. That's why private schools can get higher average grades and sometimes be cheaper.
And a lot of schools kick out the marginally difficult students. There was a study of some of the southern schools where the principals had to meet high-stakes test standards for math and reading. As any teacher knows, there's an easy way to raise the percentage of students who pass the reading tests -- expel any student who has difficulty learning how to read. They were kicking out high school seniors who hadn't learned to read (or "encouraging" them to leave). These were students who were trying hard, but had intellectual deficits, with IQs of 80 or so. What's going to become of them? How are they going to get through life without reading?
In New York City, they don't kick those students out. They regard them as handicapped, give them extra effort, and bring them up to learn as much as they can. That's why New York City schools are expensive. Name a charter school that teaches illiterate 18-year-olds to read.
I worked for public interest lawyers. I saw a lot of lawsuits. When a school kicks out a "problem" kid, they should sue. You want to run a school? Take the good with the bad. Other countries do that.
Every developed country in the world provides free public education to children.
There are some countries like England where the rich send their children to private schools, but that's more for making social connections than for the better education.
And in the US, the main reason for sending children to private schools is to have them grow up among a wealthy class rather than to associate with the working class.
That's the main reason for private schools, and in the US, the public school movement got its big boost in the 1960s and 1970s with the segregation academies, which grew up when white parents in the south didn't want to send their children to school with black students.
You can look up Wall Street Journal editorials about how the federal government had no right to enforce integration.
Most wealthy towns have good public schools. That's why people are willing to pay such high taxes to live in those towns. If you have a school board with adequate funding, that is run by parents whose children are in the school, who want good education, you'll have good schools.
If you want to run an experiment, you can run public schools alongside private schools, give them each the same amount of money, and see who does better. We did an experiment like that. That was charter schools. The conservabots said that the private schools with financial incentives would do better. (The charter schools actually got more money, but never mind.) When after several years they were finally evaluated by the NAEP, which everybody agreed was an objective, qualified evaluator, the charter schools did no better and the public schools did slightly better. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsrepo...
In New York City, there are no private schools as good as Bronx Science and Stuyvesant. They are a meritocracy, and admission is by entrance exam, so a rich kid can't do any better than a smart kid. The private schools will take anybody who can pay $40,000 a year. In contrast, public schools cost the city about $20,000 a year.
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I don't need police if I can carry a weapon to defend myself. And yeah, the firemen argument was dishonest from my part. Where can I sign up to carry a gun, not pay the police, not pay for schools, not pay for libraries (I actually buy my books, don't rent them), but pay for firemen ?
Try Iraq, where we destroyed the dictator, his army and police.
You can set up your own gated home behind big walls.
But then the local tribal leader is going to come over with a dozen or a hundred of his followers who can outgun you, and do whatever they want with you.
It was no big secret. A lot of the Republican loudmouths were bragging about it.
Some of the Republican leadership even apologized for it: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com...
Clinton's welfare reform was a disaster for the poor, and indirectly for the rest of the country.
http://billmoyers.com/2014/05/...
http://www.thenation.com/blog/...
I remember the Reagan presidency. Reagan made a deal with the Soviets to let the Soviet "Jews" emigrate. I knew a lot of Soviet Jews. They had to claim that they had suffered anti-Semitism and were victims in order to immigrate here as refugees. They had lawyers and fixers who would copy the identical stories of anti-Semitism for new immigrants and hand them into the INS. They would fabricate their stories. It was a scam. A lot of them weren't even Jewish; they forged documents. They immediately got welfare, housing, health care, jobs, vocational training programs, and free college tuition. They were getting more benefits than I could get. It's no wonder they liked capitalism so much. For them, capitalism was a series of handouts that they didn't have to work for. That's welfare, Reagan style.
I know a black woman who worked for the welfare department, and she was annoyed at the way the Soviet Jews would come in and act as if they were entitled to welfare. It was easier for them to get welfare than native Americans. A lot of them turned out to be criminals, and you can still read stories in the New York Times and Daily News about Russian Jews from that immigration who got caught in all kinds of illegal schemes, particularly welfare and Medicaid/Medicare fraud.
The Russian immigrants had several magazines, the most popular of which was Metropol. I once talked to the editor of Metropol. He said that as soon as they became citizens, the Russian immigrants registered Republican and voted for Ronald Reagan. He said once in the while he would get a letter saying, "Why don't we vote for Democrats," but no more than 1 in 100. It was the most brazen quid pro quo. Reagan gave them handouts, and in return they voted solid Republican. Giuliani did the same thing. This is what the Republicans accuse Obama of doing. https://danieljmitchell.files....
The same thing happened to the Cubans in Miami. And all the other favored minority immigrants.
So, you are saying that, by desegregating the schools in the south, the Republican Party under Richard Nixon was demonstrating its racism?
John Dean, a Republican, was talking about the Republican Party after Nixon. Nixon's Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, was Pat Moynihan, a liberal.
Dean said that after the Democratic Party stopped supporting Southern racism, the Republican Party (after Nixon) adopted a strategy of taking their place, by appealing to white racist Southerners.
I can't find Dean's old articles on FindLaw, and Findlaw may have been deleted them after FindLaw changed its format, or Dean may have deleted them after he collected them into his book.
I would suggest that you examine the results of the policies of both the Republicans and the Democrats to determine which party is truly racist. Democrats pursue policies which trap minorities (and others) in poverty while increasing the wealth and power of those who already have it.
Since I read the Wall Street Journal editorial page for 30 years, I have examined those arguments in great detail. The WSJ used to argue that free-market policies, lowering taxes and restricting government, would lead to prosperity, which would trickle down to the poor. They also used to argue that government handouts to the poor, like unemployment insurance, minimum wage, unions, public housing, welfare, free health care, and free education, would give them a disincentive to work and make them lazy. On the other hand, when the rich are born into trust funds, and never have to work a day in their lives, that gives them an incentive to become job creators, like Hank Rearden and Bill Gates.
This was in contrast to the news section of the WSJ, which regularly reported how the conservative policies of the editorial page weren't working as predicted.
When Democrats control the government, the gap between white and black income almost invariably widens. When republicans control the government it usually narrows.
While that is what conservative economists predict based on theory, and that is what they believe without (or in spite of) empirical evidence, I am not aware of any data to prove it. I'd like to see the data.
When did the Republican Party become the party of racism? Was it when they supplied the necessary votes to pass the Civil Rights Act by voting for it in higher percentages than the Democrats? Or was it when Richard Nixon implemented the "Southern Strategy" of actually enforcing the desegregation of schools, especially in the South?
According to John Dean, in a series of articles for FindlLaw about his experience in the Republican party, it happened when some win-at-any-cost Republican strategists decided that there was a large lower-class religious population in the South, who were already being manipulated by preachers, who could also be manipulated by Republicans.
You ought to be shocked at the original purpose of those laws: Segregationist states in the former Confederacy were preventing blacks from registering to vote (which also kept them off juries), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... by methods including killing them if they tried to as late as 1963 vote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... In 2000, the Florida Secretary of State eliminated enough black voters from the voting rolls, by falsely accusing them of being felons, to give the vote, and the presidency, to George W. Bush. http://www.gregpalast.com/flor... So black voters are denied the right to vote, in violation of the constitution, even today. That's the purpose of the picture ID laws.
Racism benefited the Democratic Party, while the Democratic Party was the party of racism. When the Democratic Party tried to reform itself, by giving constitutional rights to blacks, the Republican Party opportunistically took their place as the party of racism. Good for the Republicans, bad for America.
No way in hell I'd give my fridge or my toaster access to my network, because I don't see any value in that.
You don't see any value in perfect toast?
Plus he has a net worth of over $12 million, he'd get more from the interest than all the rest of that stuff put together.
That's peanuts. As I said above, Billy Tauzin got $2 million a year from the drug industry after he let them take as much as they want from the Medicare fund in the Prescription Drug Bill.
GWB got $15 million from speeches, but he's got a long way to catch up with Bill Clinton, who got $100 million.
As the parent said, if Obama pleases the right people, he can make a lot of money after his term expires. This writer http://www.salon.com/2013/07/1... is cynical enough to believe that there's a quid pro quo.
Or as Bill Moyers said: Maybe Obama hasn't sold out. Maybe he's just one of them.
Eventually Obama is going to be a civilian again. If he pleases the right people, he (or his immediate family) can make tremendous amounts of money as a lobbyist, consultant, guest speaker, etc...
Just look at the money that Chelsey Clinton earns from her array of jobs at various consulting, investment, educational, media and humanitarian companies and organizations. Her success was handed to her on a diamond platter as political thanks to her parents.
I don't know if Chelsea Clinton's employers are getting anything, but there's some truth to that.
For example, Billy Tauzin, the Republican representative from Louisiana, made sure that the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill would prohibit Medicare from negotiating cheaper prices with the drug companies, the way the health care systems do in every other country. After he left Congress, he went to work for the drug industry lobbying organization, PhRMA, for $2 million a year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Pretty good investment. PhRMA paid a few million dollars, and got back billions in higher drug prices. That's why all those new drugs cost $100,000 and more a year.
The reason we require insurance coverage for cabs is that we had many accidents in which people were severely injured, including pedestrians who never contracted with the cab driver, and it turned out that the cab driver didn't have enough insurance to cover them.
Which is why Uber now provides a $1M policy covering all of their drivers. Does that address that issue?
Not quite. Cities have established local insurance requirements, and they require cab drivers to provide certain standards of proof that they meet the requirements. For example, NYC has a certain standard policy that all cab drivers have to buy. They get a certificate, with an expiration date, to demonstrate that they've bought that policy.
In NYC Uber could meet that requirement by hiring only licensed cab drivers with that insurance certificate, which I think they do. Otherwise, there's no assurance that they have equivalent coverage, and they probably don't. They could say they have equivalent coverage, but how do we know?
For example, as I recall the case, an Uber driver in California killed a child, and Uber said they had no liability because the driver wasn't carrying a passenger or picking up a passenger, he was waiting for a call. Company lawyers always come up with things like that. Then, as a result of the bad publicity, Uber decided to cover it after all.
The purpose of auto liability insurance is to make sure injured people are compensated under all reasonably forseeable circumstances, and one of the reasons we have insurance regulators is to examine those policies and make sure they do cover them.
New York City personal injury lawyers can tell you of lots of cases in which a taxi horribly injured a passenger or a pedestrian, the cost of medical expenses alone exceeded its $100,000 liability policy, the driver didn't have assets to cover it, and went bankrupt, or went back to Pakistan or the Dominican Republic. They can tell you about insurance companies where somebody committed fraud and they didn't have enough assets to cover their claims. The reason we have regulations is to make sure that people who are injured by others will get compensation.
In the U.S., insurance is complicated, because every state, and every jurisdiction, has its own requirements. That's the price we pay for local choice. (The alternative is a national dictator.) Uber probably can't come up with one national insurance policy that will satisfy the requirements of every jurisdiction. (Hertz has a large insurance department, and a large litigation department.) Uber can't just say, "Oh, we're transformational, we'll just ignore local laws and do it our own way." Driving people from A to B is easy. Convincing local jurisdictions that you meet their insurance and other requirements is the hard part.
The reason we require a hack license is that, among other things, we want cab drivers to go through a police check to make sure they haven't committed crimes in the past.
Okay, but is there any evidence that actually accomplishes anything? Assuming that there is, and that it's useful, then why not just require a background check?
Evidence, in the way that in medicine we have randomized controlled trials to prove that lowering blood pressure saves lives? No, but we seldom have that kind of evidence in public policy. (Or even in medicine.) It seems reasonable that if we put people in jail for robbing grocery stores, they'll be less likely to rob grocery stores, but there's no randomized trials to prove it. It isn't perfect, but it seems reasonable, and we have to do something to keep crime as low as possible, so we do it.
I am often reminded of the way women are concerned about safety. There are several cases in the newspapers which a woman took a cab (or an unlicensed ride) home from a bar because she was drunk, and was sexually assaulted. I guarantee you that women overwhelmingly don't want to take
I'm not arguing that there shouldn't be regulations. I'm arguing that the regulations should exist for actual, important reasons not "just because that's they way we've always done it", which is essentially what people arguing that Lyft and Uber should have to follow the taxi regs are saying.
Step back a moment and think. What are the regs supposed to accomplish? Do they solve actual problems in the new context?
I notice that no one who has responded to my questions actually even tried to answer them.
You are creating a straw man. Who says, regulations should exist "just because that's the way we've always done it"? I don't say that. Nobody here said that. I don't know of anybody who said that. I challenge you to find someone who did. Atlas Shrugged doesn't count.
The parent gave you the regulations that Uber should follow: "displaying a hack lic, certification of insurance or bonding, and penalties for systematic race discrimination."
The reason we require insurance coverage for cabs is that we had many accidents in which people were severely injured, including pedestrians who never contracted with the cab driver, and it turned out that the cab driver didn't have enough insurance to cover them. If a pedestrian loses a leg, $100,000 insurance won't even cover the medical and rehabilitation costs. So the regulations required them to have a larger amount of insurance. There were stories about that in the New York Times in the last few years. An underinsured Uber driver had a major accident already.
The reason we require a hack license is that, among other things, we want cab drivers to go through a police check to make sure they haven't committed crimes in the past. Customers don't want to be alone in a cab and dependent on drivers who have been convicted of violent crimes. Many women want to take a cab home from a bar after they've had too much to drink. They don't want to be raped by the driver. Maybe you think they're wrong, but that's the decision they make in the free market and through the democratic process. Uber claims they screen their drivers but it's up to them to convince us that they screen them as well as the hack bureau does.
That's what the regulations are supposed to accomplish.
Or alcohol.
Thank you, NRA and Congress, for giving our brave service men and women the freedom and personal responsibility to kill themselves when things get too tough.
http://touch.latimes.com/#sect...
Programs to prevent psychological problems in troops questioned
By Alan Zarembo
February 20, 2014, 7:34 p.m.
Many federal programs aimed at preventing psychological problems in military service members and their families have not been evaluated correctly to determine whether they are working and are not supported by science, says a new report commissioned by the Defense Department.
"A lot of their programs don’t have any good data behind them," said Kenneth Warner, a professor of public health at the University of Michigan who led the Institute of Medicine committee that produced the report. "We remain uncertain about which approaches work and which ones are ineffective."
At the same time, some proven interventions are not being used, the committee found. Researchers said there was ample evidence to suggest that limiting access to personal firearms on military bases would reduce suicides. About 60% of service members who take their own lives do it with guns — usually their own.
"Means restriction has been demonstrated to work," said David Rudd, a psychologist and suicide expert at the University of Memphis who served on the committee.
But in 2011, Congress prohibited the Defense Department from regulating legally owned personal firearms and ammunition on military bases.
http://iom.edu/Reports/2014/Pr...
Preventing Psychological Disorders in Service Members and Their Families: An Assessment of Programs
February 20, 2014
Among the small number of DOD-sponsored reintegration programs that exist, none appears to be based on scientific evidence. The committee was unable to identify any DOD evidence-based programs addressing the prevention of domestic abuse. More recently, the services have implemented a number of prevention interventions to address military sexual assault, yet a DOD review found that critical evaluation components needed to measure their effectiveness are missing.
The committee also found that environmental strategies with strong evidence of effectiveness are underutilized, such as restricting access to lethal means such as personal firearms to prevent suicide or homicide in domestic violence cases or placing restrictions on the sale of alcohol to reduce substance misuse.
In place of these proven approaches, the committee typically found interventions such as campaigns, Internet tools, or in-person events with no evidence for their effectiveness at preventing the targeted problem.
In this instance it appears that greed got the better of Mr. Williams. If you look at his website he's not doing anything wrong; he may be peddling snake oil but he's hardly the first one and that's not a crime. Read through the indictment and a different picture emerges. He counsels his clients to lie to Government investigators (witness tampering), arranges to receive the proceeds for this venture via the mail (mail fraud) and even ignores his own good judgment. When one of the undercover agents admits to lying on his employment application Williams cuts him off and says he can't work with him, he only works with people that are being truthful but whom are nervous about the test. This is in fact what his website says.
Had he stopped there he would have been fine. Did he? Of course not! He decides to "sleep on it" and comes up with a hair brained scheme to transfer money in a supposedly untraceable manner. He then tells his would-be client to break contact and reestablish it under a different name so that he doesn't have to knowingly counsel someone to lie.
The net proceeds of this particular venture? $5,000. The man is going to lose his freedom for a lousy five grand, all because greed overrode the little voice inside his head that said something was wrong. This is a life lesson that applies to everyone, criminal and honest citizen alike.
You are exactly right. I just read that indictment. I can't understand how Williams would take a chance like that.
He's been taunting the feds. They do a lot of stings like that, and it's prudent to be prepared for one. Even if the undercover agent's story had been true, the agent might have been prosecuted and might as well inform on Williams in hope of a better deal.
He said
You don't have to turn around and say, "Yeah, like I told you, I'm a lying son of a bitch." What the fuck was the reason for that, unless you wanted it on record that I was knowingly teaching someone how to lie and cheat...?
Williams knew what was happening. How could he make a stupid mistake like that? Is it the decline of age?
His line was, "The lie detector is bullshit, they can't catch criminals and then can accuse innocent people, I'm going to teach you how to pass the test. I don't want to hear about crimes. I'm not a lawyer and I can't give you lawyer-client privilege. If you want to talk about crimes, get a lawyer."
If he had stuck to that, he would have been OK.
Actually, often to get away your only choice is to lie to the cops.
Big mistake. That will net you an obstruction charge. The only safe course of action is to refuse to speak to them at all. Give them your name, address, and the following statement: "I do not wish to make any statement without the benefit of counsel." If you have information that they want badly enough they'll give you immunity. Otherwise keep your fucking mouth shut.
I'm not sure you even have to give them your name and address, if they haven't seen you committing a violation. That may vary from state to state.
A lawyer from the National Lawyer's Guild once told me to say, "Officer, am I free to go?"
In my understanding, the cops can't detain you unless they have reasonable grounds to believe you committed a crime.
That's also a good line to use when they try to intimidate you into giving them permission to search your car.
Pig: Can I search your car?
Driver: I won't resist, but I'm not giving you permission.
Pig: If you don't give me permission to search your car, we'll get the drug-sniffing dog and tear up your car.
Driver: Officer, am I free to go?
(The legal answer is yes. If he doesn't have enough reasonable suspicion to search your car, he doesn't have enough reasonable suspicion to detain you.)
Stay home. Seriously. As someone who has spent the last decade working on technology in the developing world, I can tell you that most of what I do is clean up after well meaning people who don't know enough about technology to avoid making simple mistakes, and who know next to nothing about local conditions. I cut my teeth working on the Canadian frontier, and I suggest you do something similar. Don't try to help until you're confident you can.
There's some merit to that. Doctors without Borders is an unusual organization in that they often operate in areas of danger. They turn down volunteers who don't already have experience in their kind of work.
Unexperienced doctors and others often go into disaster areas without being prepared, get into trouble and have to be evacuated.
Doctors without Borders also maintains a policy of strict political neutrality in the regions where they work. They often have relationships lasting 30 years with the local medical community, and they know exactly what the locals want, without imposing their own ideas on them.
Other organizations are not so neutral. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... If you're politically naive, you may not realize the risks you're taking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Lyft and Uber drivers should have to follow the same not-free regs as taxi drivers.
Why?
Serious question. Forget about questions of fairness, step back and look at first principles and evaluate whether the regulations are of value to society. Were these rules ever necessary? If so, why? Do the same reasons apply to Uber and Lyft?
We went through this debate in the 19th Century. People got tired of buying milk from tuberculosis cows.
Give me the name of a real-world country without regulations that you'd like to live in.
A lot of doctors who deal with these shootings say that the best way to stop them would be to reduce access to guns.
Just curious, but what makes a doctor an expert on that subject? :)
I would go to them if shot, because they are an expert in doing something about the injury, but not the cause.
Fair question.
(1) Prevention is part of medicine. Doctors have to deal with the results of gun violence, so they spend a lot of time thinking about how to prevent it. The same thing happened with automobile accidents. As Ralph Nader described in Unsafe at Any Speed, doctors saw that automobiles were designed in a way that caused needless injuries, such as dashboard knobs placed at exactly the height and shape that would drive them into a child's face or eye in a quick stop. They asked the automobile manufacturers to change the design, but the manufacturers ignored them, until they got hit with a few big product liability lawsuits.
(2) Doctors know how to use the methods of science, epidemiology and fault-tree analysis to deal with problems. For example, there is a chain of events that lead to a gun injury or fatality. Interrupting some links is more effective than interrupting others. For example, some of the early research found that the gun in a house was several times more likely to be used in suicide than for self defense. If you remove the gun from the house, you eliminate a significant number of suicides. Doctors and psychiatrists are sometimes asked to write notes saying that a patient who is applying for a gun license is not at risk for committing violence. They know that it's impossible to predict that risk. Some people here mistakenly believe that gun violence can be reduced by identifying mentally ill people.
(3) Some doctors own guns themselves. Many of them have been in the military. Many of them go hunting. So they have some expertise about guns.
We should start a campaign to suggest better names for the next instance after Evolution.
Intelligent Design?
Of course, the REAL issue isn't even guns, it is mental health. We have kids who are unstable, unbalanced, and unloved, and the system does nothing for them. There is no way to identify problem or challenged kids and get them some help before they go off the deep end.
Actually, it's easy to identify violent children. Teachers see them acting violent. The problem is that nobody knows what "help" would be. Interventions like DARE, where a cop comes around to a school and plays male authority figure, actually make kids more likely to get arrested. We know that sending kids to work camps and prisons makes them more violent.
Some preschool programs, which teach kids to interact with each other, make them less likely to have problems later on. Most violent kids come from families that are disrupted and low income. Since there's a strong correlation between violence and poverty, it seems plausible that eliminating poverty would also reduce violence.
I think studies found that giving people better housing, under certain circumstances, made their kids more likely to succeed in school.
Past behavior predicts future behavior. But a quick Google search of "predicting violence" will show that there's no scientific evidence of any screening method other than past behavior that can predict future violence. And there's no way to predict a school shooting.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
"There is no instrument that is specifically useful or validated for identifying potential school shooters or mass murderers," said Stephen D. Hart, a psychologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver who is the co-author of a widely used evaluation tool. "There are many things in life where we have an inadequate evidence base, and this is one of them."
The only thing that can predict shooting is access to a gun. If kids can't get guns, they can't shoot up schools. They often get their parents' guns, or get older friends to buy them. A lot of doctors who deal with these shootings say that the best way to stop them would be to reduce access to guns.
Unfortunately, we don't have good research or evidence on gun violence because the NRA lobbied Congress to cut funds to any federal agency that paid for research on gun violence.
So the NRA has guaranteed your right to say, "There's no evidence for that."
Good point, They thought of that. Their answer is no.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w98...
In Section 5, we discuss possible interpretations of our results, focusing especially on two issues. First, we examine whether the race-specic names we have chosen might also proxy for social class above and beyond the race of the applicant. Using birth certicates data on mother’s education for the dierent names used in our sample, we nd little relationship between social background and the name specic callback rates.
Also see Table 11.
"There is a lot that has to change if we want true equality, and that includes everyone"
There is never ever going to be a time when everyone treats everyone equally. That is not in any way even a desirable state.
I would be happy to have a Scandinavian or German level of opportunity and (lack of) poverty. As you may know, there is more social mobility in those countries than in the U.S. [Citation omitted, go look it up yourself on Google]
And there are studies that show that countries like that with more equality have higher GNP, better health outcomes, etc.
I'd be happy to have a free education system like we did in New York City with City College and Brooklyn College, where admission was based on test scores and high school grades, rather than on your dad's ability to pay huge expenses. That was a real meritocracy. The smartest kids in NYC went to CCNY, regardless of race or religion. CCNY has a wall with photos of graduates who went on to get Nobel prizes, or (like Andy Grove) created Silicon Valley. If you read their Nobel autobiographies, you see that some of them were rich kids, but most of them were working class kids whose fathers were tailors or grocers, who would have gone on to do the same if college wasn't free.
Here's one:
Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination (NBER Working Paper No. 9873).
Studies like that have been done repeatedly for decades. I expect that if you read the NBER study, they'd have a bibliography of older research.
Each one repeatedly demonstrates actual discrimination against blacks in hiring. I don't know how anyone could avoid that conclusion. Employers are more likely to hire a person with a white name than a person with a black name with the identical resume. It's not just socioeconomic disadvantage, inability to do the job, lack of qualifications or laziness.
I don't know if anyone has done a similar study in tech fields specifically, but it would be a good thing to do. If you're taking a black studies course, you could get a good paper out of it. Send out 100 resumes to Monster.com from Greg and 100 resumes from Jamal.
If you want to know generally why there are so few minorities in science, Science magazine has had many articles.
http://www.chicagobooth.edu/ca...
http://www.nber.org/digest/sep...
Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination (NBER Working Paper No. 9873).
Employers' Replies to Racial Names
"Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback."
Now a "field experiment" by NBER Faculty Research Fellows Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan measures this discrimination in a novel way. In response to help-wanted ads in Chicago and Boston newspapers, they sent resumes with either African-American- or white-sounding names and then measured the number of callbacks each resume received for interviews. Thus, they experimentally manipulated perception of race via the name on the resume. Half of the applicants were assigned African-American names that are "remarkably common" in the black population, the other half white sounding names, such as Emily Walsh or Greg Baker.
To see how the credentials of job applicants affect discrimination, the authors varied the quality of the resumes they used in response to a given ad. Higher quality applicants were given a little more labor market experience on average and fewer holes in their employment history. They were also portrayed as more likely to have an email address, to have completed some certification degree, to possess foreign language skills, or to have been awarded some honors.
In total, the authors responded to more than 1,300 employment ads in the sales, administrative support, clerical, and customer services job categories, sending out nearly 5,000 resumes. The ads covered a large spectrum of job quality, from cashier work at retail establishments and clerical work in a mailroom to office and sales management positions.
Here's more:
http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/200...
Study: Black man and white felon – same chances for hire
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12...
In Job Hunt, College Degree Can’t Close Racial Gap
"A more recent study, published this year in The Journal of Labor Economics found white, Asian and Hispanic managers tended to hire more whites and fewer blacks than black managers did."
"There is also the matter of how many jobs, especially higher-level ones, are never even posted and depend on word-of-mouth and informal networks, in many cases leaving blacks at a disadvantage. A recent study published in the academic journal Social Problems found that white males receive substantially more job leads for high-level supervisory positions than women and members of minorities."
simple solution. Have schools for the learning disabled and tailor the curriculum to them. There is no reason for example an illiterate 18 year old should be i nthe same English class with students without disabilities as it will only stunt their ability to learn
im not saying "kick them out" im saying work to better EVERYONE
That's the way they used to do it. It didn't work. I used to work for an organization that dealt with the blind. They used to have separate schools for the blind. They failed. When I worked for them, they were "mainstreaming," re-introducing students back to normal schools as much as possible.
If you stop and think for a second, an entire school full of illiterate 18-year-olds, some of them with behavioral problems, is not the place you'd want your kids to be, and not the place you want to teach. They don't have any role models of kids who can actually read. They don't make any normal friends. It's very expensive to staff a school like that, unless you give up and turn it into a dungeon, and they usually don't get the staffing they need. States never give them the budgets they need to even meet the normal expenses of running an institution.
And the kids are removed from their homes and taken far away. Do you want to take them away from their parents and relatives?
And it's much more expensive to keep a kid in an institution than leave them in their own homes.
They tried it. It didn't work. It was a disaster.
It works much better to mainstream kids and distribute them among regular schools.
Parents don't want their own kids to get kicked out. They want other kids to get out.
It sounds very nice to kick out kids who are deliberately being disruptive or not trying, but everybody in education knows that what makes running a school difficult is that a certain percentage of kids are going to be difficult to teach, usually through no fault of their own.
For example, early premature infants usually have damaged brains, and they range from being blind, unable to sit up, and unable to recognize people around them or speak, to having IQs of 40 or 50. It's pretty difficult and expensive to teach a kid with an IQ of 50, unless you want to warehouse them in dungeons like the Romanians did or execute them like the Nazis did. Public schools have to teach them. Private schools don't. That's why private schools can get higher average grades and sometimes be cheaper.
And a lot of schools kick out the marginally difficult students. There was a study of some of the southern schools where the principals had to meet high-stakes test standards for math and reading. As any teacher knows, there's an easy way to raise the percentage of students who pass the reading tests -- expel any student who has difficulty learning how to read. They were kicking out high school seniors who hadn't learned to read (or "encouraging" them to leave). These were students who were trying hard, but had intellectual deficits, with IQs of 80 or so. What's going to become of them? How are they going to get through life without reading?
In New York City, they don't kick those students out. They regard them as handicapped, give them extra effort, and bring them up to learn as much as they can. That's why New York City schools are expensive. Name a charter school that teaches illiterate 18-year-olds to read.
I worked for public interest lawyers. I saw a lot of lawsuits. When a school kicks out a "problem" kid, they should sue. You want to run a school? Take the good with the bad. Other countries do that.
Every developed country in the world provides free public education to children.
There are some countries like England where the rich send their children to private schools, but that's more for making social connections than for the better education.
And in the US, the main reason for sending children to private schools is to have them grow up among a wealthy class rather than to associate with the working class.
That's the main reason for private schools, and in the US, the public school movement got its big boost in the 1960s and 1970s with the segregation academies, which grew up when white parents in the south didn't want to send their children to school with black students.
You can look up Wall Street Journal editorials about how the federal government had no right to enforce integration.
Most wealthy towns have good public schools. That's why people are willing to pay such high taxes to live in those towns. If you have a school board with adequate funding, that is run by parents whose children are in the school, who want good education, you'll have good schools.
If you want to run an experiment, you can run public schools alongside private schools, give them each the same amount of money, and see who does better. We did an experiment like that. That was charter schools. The conservabots said that the private schools with financial incentives would do better. (The charter schools actually got more money, but never mind.) When after several years they were finally evaluated by the NAEP, which everybody agreed was an objective, qualified evaluator, the charter schools did no better and the public schools did slightly better. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsrepo...
In New York City, there are no private schools as good as Bronx Science and Stuyvesant. They are a meritocracy, and admission is by entrance exam, so a rich kid can't do any better than a smart kid. The private schools will take anybody who can pay $40,000 a year. In contrast, public schools cost the city about $20,000 a year.
"These people already have housing assistance, now they want INTERNET????"
Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons?