Could these storms have interfered with WiFi? I had a few days during which I could not get my home network to work at all, in spite of maximum 40 foot / 13 meter distances between router and PCs, and trying pretty much every legal WiFi channel available. I'm in northeast Ohio. As of this morning things are gradually returning to almost-normal.
As an architect, designer and coder, I see this all the time, and fight it all the time, but usually lose. There is a place for ORM layers, dependency injection, TDD, poorly documented libraries, closed-source libraries, etc.; however, my experience leads me to believe that most of the time, in expert hands they are unneeded, while in less than expert hands they just get in the way, create more work, slow things down, and make both getting to market, *and* subsequent maintenance, orders of magnitude slower.
I often work with people who would rather write 1000 lines of XML than 25 lines of SQL, or write 25 irrelevant unit tests rather than gather and correctly implement one testable requirement. Give me a managed environment (Java/.NET/Python), a decent RDBMS, and a decent, preferably managed API around any hardware I need to access or I/O I need to perform, and I can generally get the job done with few if any other tools, and it will get done quickly and be at least as maintainable and flexible as the more "enterprisey" solution that needs 50 incompatible libraries just to build. But then the so-called "architects" whose experience comes from reading Pointy Head Weekly^H^H^H^H^H^H Gartner, rather than building or maintaining real systems, will tell me I'm doing it wrong, and make me redo it with the 50 libraries.
"If you're right, and we're just making more work for you, well, think of it as job security." Another canard. Job security comes from adding value and contributing to the success of the organization. Which I try very hard to do, and others try very hard to undo. Not so much at my current job, but my previous employer - a good, but very bloated and bureaucratic organization - was famous for it, and ended up having to outsource almost all their development because it became so inefficient. Now, a bunch of people in Chennai have job security, instead of my former colleagues, because they will be adding value whereas our "architects" did their very best to ensure that we could not.
Core dumps?? Whipper-snapper. In my day, they just exploded. We had to bring in TSA officials to analyze the debris patterns just to figure out what went wrong.
One person's anecdotal experience here: I've run between 2-5 Linux boxen for about 13 years, most of which did some combination of desktop, server, and real-time audio processing, and during that time, on a box I built and installed myself, I have NEVER had a driver regression, EVER. I've seen plenty while helping friends with Ubuntu and other allegedly user-friendlier distros. But insofar as possible, I use only officially-supported hardware, with free (libre) drivers, and I also use a source-based distribution (Gentoo) which allows me to upgrade kernel, OS, and application functionality separately and on my own schedule. If I suspect that the upgrade of a kernel or anything else has broken something, I can always downgrade to a previous version, with very little risk of permanent dependency breakage due to tools such as the slots mechanism and revdep-rebuild. (The latter detects and fixes the temporary breakage that can result from package downgrades or subtlely broken ebuilds, which do happen from time to time.) I'm not saying a stable ABI wouldn't be useful or that many Linux users don't experience significant pain when trying to upgrade. I am saying that my approach mostly avoids this kind of problem, and that in my view at least it is more true to the way Linux and free software in general was designed to work. The code is the source. The binaries are merely an intermediate representation of the code, and can be easily updated or replaced as long as the source remains available and open.
Developer and former DBA here. Yes, the relational model is more than capable of expressing hierarchical data. However, the SQL language, at least the subset common to most popular RDBMSs, doesn't grok hiearchical data very well. And that leads to a point Codd, Date and others make pretty much every day of their lives: Relational =! SQL. The relational model has elegance and power that can't be expressed in SQL, at least not easily. But many of those confronted with the shortcomings of SQL falsely assume these to be shortcomings of the relational model as well, which in most cases they are not.
And we have the right to cancel our service if we don't like it. That is how a free society works. I don't like it any more than the next person; I probably will cancel streaming since I rarely use it and it doesn't support my OS of choice (Linux), and I might well switch if I knew of a better value for the things I watch, but I don't, and the higher-priced Netflix is still the best option for me for now. If Amazon and Google come out with some truly competitive offering, at that point Netflix had better think carefully about pricing because a lot of folks including myself might switch . . . or might not, if the prices come back down. Again, that's how a free market works. If you like something, vote for it with your dollars; if you don't, vote for something else you like better instead.
From my U.S. perspective, "liberal democracy" does not eliminate atrocities; it hides but still very much depends on them, much as a grocery store meat rack hides the horrors of the slaughterhouse and meat packing facility, yet utterly depends on this horror. It's become increasingly clear that the welfare/warfare state depends for its very existence on refined and "civilized," but nonetheless very real, forms of robbery, enslavement, and murder. The state can be viewed as the perpetrator of these crimes, but a slightly closer look reveals that it is largely acting as an agent of the masses, who are manipulated by powerful interests into acting in the latter's interests instead of their own. It is those powerful interests, not the people *or* government, who truly rule any democracy. Political scientists since at least Plato have recognized this as an inherent flaw therein: once people realize they can "vote" themselves benefits at the expense of others, politics degenerates into a slightly more "civilized," but still very real, war of all against all, directed and profited from exclusively by the powerful; a negative-sum game of who can take the most, instead of the positive sum game of more market-based (and historically monarchical or anarchist) societies where power and wealth can best be acquired by producing products and services others are willing to pay for voluntarily.
Great explanation insofar as it goes. But there is one additional quality that money must have in order to fully serve its purpose: it must hold its value over reasonably long periods of time. Paper money tends not to, because its issuers almost invariably come to find they can enrich themselves at the expense of nearly everyone else by increasing its supply relative to demand. This is what is now happening to both the dollar and the euro, and why many people, myself included, have shifted much of their assets to things like gold and silver which have held their value much better than paper money, throughout virtually all of recorded history.
We Austrians like silver and gold because both have served in nearly all civilizations, through nearly all of history, as excellent means of exchanging and/or storing value. This has been true through all kinds of times - peace, war, economic growth, economic collapse, despotism, anarchy, and whatnot. Every alternative thus far has been found lacking. Paper money is great as a medium of exchange, but sucks as a store of value due to the universal tendency of its issuers to deliberately inflate. Digital money is, in my view untested. Austrians are not particularly afraid of deflation and the like, but most of the other mainstream critiques of Bitcoin specifically seem valid to me. Like paper money, it's of little intrinsic worth. It is not propped up, even temporarily, by legal tender laws. It is likely to incur the wrath of governments who don't like to be inconvenienced in their attempts to shut down rival drug organizations by Bitcoin's attempts to preserve anonymity. The anonymity makes dispute resolution or arbitration difficult. But, most importantly, it really does not seem to be backed by anything at all. I would love to see some digital money succeed, but I don't think Bitcoin is the right implementation of the concept, and I'm still not totally convinced that there is one.
I realized that after I posted. I still think it's a big improvement over most of what we've got running today. But my guess is that more research into pebble bed, thorium fuel cycle, TWRs and other technologies will yield designs orders of magnitude safer than today's, not to mention more efficient and with a tendency to produce far less waste. The concept of passive safety is key. Much like a nuclear weapon, you want to make it very, very hard to reach criticality, and make sure that any failure mode that can possibly be foreseen, and every foreseeable combination thereof, results in stopping the reaction or at least slowing it to a point where external cooling or heat transfer is unnecessary. Are there engineering challenges involved? Sure. But none that are insurmountable as far as I can see. And no quantum leaps are required, simply a continuing evolution of the best available designs that we already have in place. Nuclear fission is already the safest way we have to produce energy, by a very substantial margin. But we still could make it a LOT better.
The most rational, prudent, safe, and progressive thing to do would be to phase out the current, 1st generation plants, but simultaneously remove, insofar as possible, obstacles to safer 2nd / 3rd generation designs such as CANDU.
Schizophrenia, paranoia, depression, and various psychoses can be induced through drugs rather easily. How large quantities of these drugs could be delivered to specific individuals without their awareness, or how lower levels of those drugs might be delivered to a much broader population, I will leave as an exercise to the reader.
If you try to outlaw justice under the law, many people will attempt to take justice into their own hands, with very unfortunate results. If I suspected that a doctor messed up, and I did not have access to the discovery and litigation process, I'd probably be MUCH more likely to assume the doctor's guilt than if I were able to participate in that process, and perhaps discover that someone else screwed up, or, even more likely, that the outcome wasn't due to anyone's negligence or incompetence to begin with. The adversarial system is far from perfect, even in theory, but those who are tempted to ditch it should consider the most likely alternatives. They tend to suck.
The ability of the U.S. government to project military power relies very heavily on cheap oil and food. It also relies on the cooperation of over 100 other nations where U.S. military bases are located. When the dollar collapses, so will all of these things, and the collapse of U.S. military dominance over the world will not be far behind.
The dollar has dropped a bit already, judging by the dollar price of gold. I'd say there is a 20-30% chance of real panic over the next few days. Everyone even halfway informed knows the dollar and the U.S. economy are grossly overvalued at current exchange rates. The dollar will have to fall 90% or more to bring them into balance, and at that rate, the U.S. would no longer be considered a developed country nor would U.S. imports constitute a significant part of world trade. U.S. consumers would no longer be able to afford any food or energy that is not domestically produced, although domestic production and exports would rise significantly, eventually, after 10-20 years, restoring some of our lost income and wealth though by no means all.
It's a terrible, terrible feeling to know that my children are unlikely to experience anything like the level of freedom, safety, or prosperity that I and others of my generation enjoyed growing up. On occasion, it literally drives me to tears. If I knew how to change that, I would. They should have a better life than we did, not a crappier one.:(
I live in a part of Euclid that is relatively safe for someone with caution, common sense and a bit of luck, but there are parts of Euclid that are just as bad as East Cleveland, and anyway we are trying to escape to the West Side if we can figure out how to sell our house. It's competing with an inventory of foreclosures that go for literally pennies on the dollar. Lakewood is actually where we hope to end up - it's actually either as safe a place as we can afford, while still being fairly compact and conveniently located, or possibly a bit more than we can afford.
Umm, my church is in the inner city as are most of my friends. I'm planning to move closer to there (not *right* there, but close) and in fact I'd have done it years ago if I'd been able to sell my house. I don't even watch the news. I don't have to. It's always pretty much the same thing. Usually the worst stuff happens in the worst areas, which are mostly East Side, but sometimes it does happen here, to people we know and care about. Six or seven people in our fairly small church have lost family members due to murder. We consider moving there anyway in spite of the risk because their are offsetting advantages, like being closer to work and to our friends and our children's friends, and being a more active part of a ministry that really is trying, and trying very successfully in many ways, to be part of the solution rather than the problem. What we are NOT considering, however, is allowing our children to run the streets. We don't now, even though our current neighborhood is quieter and arguably safer. They will be supervised until they are old and strong enough to be reasonably safe on their own.
The older kids often do want to join. The younger kids just want to not get the crap beat out of them or worse. Cleveland isn't quite as much of a gang town as LA or Chicago, but it's still bad enough that it does happen, and not always just in the inner city.
Where I live and work and attend church (Cleveland, Ohio and its inner suburbs), kids of all ages are frequently kidnapped, raped, shot, forced into gangs and prostitution, forced to work for drug dealers, and so forth. Drivers are far too busy trying to get home to their marginally safer and whiter suburbs to be bothered by the possibility of kids or pedestrians wandering into the street, or to stop even if by chance they do hit one. Stopping, even in that situation, can easily get you killed, so no one does. Shootouts between rival gangs, and drivebys, are very common in many neighborhoods, and a LOT of innocent bystanders including children are hurt and killed this way. Not all neighborhoods are quite this bad, but more are than not, and some are worse. Children do play in parks and other fenced-in places, with heavy adult supervision and often police presence. They do NOT wander the streets alone if they have even a single parent (and that is all most of them have) who is not at that moment working 3 jobs, in jail, in a crack or meth house, or dead. The children who are forced to fend for themselves, without the care of a parent or (as is very common, thankfully) older siblings or relatives, either become adults very quickly, or become statistics. There really isn't any in between. Cleveland isn't unique in that regard; most of the other poor cities in the U.S. are in similar shape and some are worse, and even in the bigger and wealthier cities, there are plenty of neighborhoods like this. People who don't spend time in the ghetto have NO idea how bad it is, especially for children. TV and movies don't come close to doing it justice. And that's not even getting into the moral and spiritual vacuum, the nihilistic and fatalistic attitude that I consider even more dangerous and fundamental than the violence. Kids don't expect to have a future, so they act accordingly, turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. They don't care about learning, about respecting others, or about any kind of planning for any kind of future. It's incredibly, amazingly sad. There are pockets of light and hope here and there; my church is one of them, and we happen to have a big, diverse, and wonderful group of kids who, albeit with a lot of adult help, are bucking the odds and helping turn things around in their own neighborhoods and circles of friends. There also are a number of members who moved here (very inner city neighborhood) partly to be close to church and each other, and also partly to try to be a good influence to their neighbors and to try to be part of the solution to the problems of the city, rather than to try to flee them. We could use a lot more (more people for our church, and more churches like ours that see the city, in spite of its very serious problems, as a place that God cares about and is therefore worth saving).
Free markets don't mean that individuals, or groups of individuals such as businesses, get to harm others without their consent, or pollute that which they don't own.
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Could these storms have interfered with WiFi? I had a few days during which I could not get my home network to work at all, in spite of maximum 40 foot / 13 meter distances between router and PCs, and trying pretty much every legal WiFi channel available. I'm in northeast Ohio. As of this morning things are gradually returning to almost-normal.
As an architect, designer and coder, I see this all the time, and fight it all the time, but usually lose. There is a place for ORM layers, dependency injection, TDD, poorly documented libraries, closed-source libraries, etc.; however, my experience leads me to believe that most of the time, in expert hands they are unneeded, while in less than expert hands they just get in the way, create more work, slow things down, and make both getting to market, *and* subsequent maintenance, orders of magnitude slower.
I often work with people who would rather write 1000 lines of XML than 25 lines of SQL, or write 25 irrelevant unit tests rather than gather and correctly implement one testable requirement. Give me a managed environment (Java/.NET/Python), a decent RDBMS, and a decent, preferably managed API around any hardware I need to access or I/O I need to perform, and I can generally get the job done with few if any other tools, and it will get done quickly and be at least as maintainable and flexible as the more "enterprisey" solution that needs 50 incompatible libraries just to build. But then the so-called "architects" whose experience comes from reading Pointy Head Weekly^H^H^H^H^H^H Gartner, rather than building or maintaining real systems, will tell me I'm doing it wrong, and make me redo it with the 50 libraries.
"If you're right, and we're just making more work for you, well, think of it as job security." Another canard. Job security comes from adding value and contributing to the success of the organization. Which I try very hard to do, and others try very hard to undo. Not so much at my current job, but my previous employer - a good, but very bloated and bureaucratic organization - was famous for it, and ended up having to outsource almost all their development because it became so inefficient. Now, a bunch of people in Chennai have job security, instead of my former colleagues, because they will be adding value whereas our "architects" did their very best to ensure that we could not.
Core dumps?? Whipper-snapper. In my day, they just exploded. We had to bring in TSA officials to analyze the debris patterns just to figure out what went wrong.
One person's anecdotal experience here: I've run between 2-5 Linux boxen for about 13 years, most of which did some combination of desktop, server, and real-time audio processing, and during that time, on a box I built and installed myself, I have NEVER had a driver regression, EVER. I've seen plenty while helping friends with Ubuntu and other allegedly user-friendlier distros. But insofar as possible, I use only officially-supported hardware, with free (libre) drivers, and I also use a source-based distribution (Gentoo) which allows me to upgrade kernel, OS, and application functionality separately and on my own schedule. If I suspect that the upgrade of a kernel or anything else has broken something, I can always downgrade to a previous version, with very little risk of permanent dependency breakage due to tools such as the slots mechanism and revdep-rebuild. (The latter detects and fixes the temporary breakage that can result from package downgrades or subtlely broken ebuilds, which do happen from time to time.) I'm not saying a stable ABI wouldn't be useful or that many Linux users don't experience significant pain when trying to upgrade. I am saying that my approach mostly avoids this kind of problem, and that in my view at least it is more true to the way Linux and free software in general was designed to work. The code is the source. The binaries are merely an intermediate representation of the code, and can be easily updated or replaced as long as the source remains available and open.
Developer and former DBA here. Yes, the relational model is more than capable of expressing hierarchical data. However, the SQL language, at least the subset common to most popular RDBMSs, doesn't grok hiearchical data very well. And that leads to a point Codd, Date and others make pretty much every day of their lives: Relational =! SQL. The relational model has elegance and power that can't be expressed in SQL, at least not easily. But many of those confronted with the shortcomings of SQL falsely assume these to be shortcomings of the relational model as well, which in most cases they are not.
And we have the right to cancel our service if we don't like it. That is how a free society works. I don't like it any more than the next person; I probably will cancel streaming since I rarely use it and it doesn't support my OS of choice (Linux), and I might well switch if I knew of a better value for the things I watch, but I don't, and the higher-priced Netflix is still the best option for me for now. If Amazon and Google come out with some truly competitive offering, at that point Netflix had better think carefully about pricing because a lot of folks including myself might switch . . . or might not, if the prices come back down. Again, that's how a free market works. If you like something, vote for it with your dollars; if you don't, vote for something else you like better instead.
What kind of society do we get if we decide that any abomination, any violation of due process rights, can be used to justify any other?
From my U.S. perspective, "liberal democracy" does not eliminate atrocities; it hides but still very much depends on them, much as a grocery store meat rack hides the horrors of the slaughterhouse and meat packing facility, yet utterly depends on this horror. It's become increasingly clear that the welfare/warfare state depends for its very existence on refined and "civilized," but nonetheless very real, forms of robbery, enslavement, and murder. The state can be viewed as the perpetrator of these crimes, but a slightly closer look reveals that it is largely acting as an agent of the masses, who are manipulated by powerful interests into acting in the latter's interests instead of their own. It is those powerful interests, not the people *or* government, who truly rule any democracy. Political scientists since at least Plato have recognized this as an inherent flaw therein: once people realize they can "vote" themselves benefits at the expense of others, politics degenerates into a slightly more "civilized," but still very real, war of all against all, directed and profited from exclusively by the powerful; a negative-sum game of who can take the most, instead of the positive sum game of more market-based (and historically monarchical or anarchist) societies where power and wealth can best be acquired by producing products and services others are willing to pay for voluntarily.
Great explanation insofar as it goes. But there is one additional quality that money must have in order to fully serve its purpose: it must hold its value over reasonably long periods of time. Paper money tends not to, because its issuers almost invariably come to find they can enrich themselves at the expense of nearly everyone else by increasing its supply relative to demand. This is what is now happening to both the dollar and the euro, and why many people, myself included, have shifted much of their assets to things like gold and silver which have held their value much better than paper money, throughout virtually all of recorded history.
Gold has a LONG track record as being an acceptable store of value. Bitcoins do not.
Every year people put crap in their gardens, and, a few months later, edible plants magically appear!
We Austrians like silver and gold because both have served in nearly all civilizations, through nearly all of history, as excellent means of exchanging and/or storing value. This has been true through all kinds of times - peace, war, economic growth, economic collapse, despotism, anarchy, and whatnot. Every alternative thus far has been found lacking. Paper money is great as a medium of exchange, but sucks as a store of value due to the universal tendency of its issuers to deliberately inflate. Digital money is, in my view untested. Austrians are not particularly afraid of deflation and the like, but most of the other mainstream critiques of Bitcoin specifically seem valid to me. Like paper money, it's of little intrinsic worth. It is not propped up, even temporarily, by legal tender laws. It is likely to incur the wrath of governments who don't like to be inconvenienced in their attempts to shut down rival drug organizations by Bitcoin's attempts to preserve anonymity. The anonymity makes dispute resolution or arbitration difficult. But, most importantly, it really does not seem to be backed by anything at all. I would love to see some digital money succeed, but I don't think Bitcoin is the right implementation of the concept, and I'm still not totally convinced that there is one.
I realized that after I posted. I still think it's a big improvement over most of what we've got running today. But my guess is that more research into pebble bed, thorium fuel cycle, TWRs and other technologies will yield designs orders of magnitude safer than today's, not to mention more efficient and with a tendency to produce far less waste. The concept of passive safety is key. Much like a nuclear weapon, you want to make it very, very hard to reach criticality, and make sure that any failure mode that can possibly be foreseen, and every foreseeable combination thereof, results in stopping the reaction or at least slowing it to a point where external cooling or heat transfer is unnecessary. Are there engineering challenges involved? Sure. But none that are insurmountable as far as I can see. And no quantum leaps are required, simply a continuing evolution of the best available designs that we already have in place. Nuclear fission is already the safest way we have to produce energy, by a very substantial margin. But we still could make it a LOT better.
Unfortunately most of them have retired or passed on. These are REALLY old designs.
The most rational, prudent, safe, and progressive thing to do would be to phase out the current, 1st generation plants, but simultaneously remove, insofar as possible, obstacles to safer 2nd / 3rd generation designs such as CANDU.
I would expect gas to be fairly prevalent around anyone's anus.
Schizophrenia, paranoia, depression, and various psychoses can be induced through drugs rather easily. How large quantities of these drugs could be delivered to specific individuals without their awareness, or how lower levels of those drugs might be delivered to a much broader population, I will leave as an exercise to the reader.
If you try to outlaw justice under the law, many people will attempt to take justice into their own hands, with very unfortunate results. If I suspected that a doctor messed up, and I did not have access to the discovery and litigation process, I'd probably be MUCH more likely to assume the doctor's guilt than if I were able to participate in that process, and perhaps discover that someone else screwed up, or, even more likely, that the outcome wasn't due to anyone's negligence or incompetence to begin with. The adversarial system is far from perfect, even in theory, but those who are tempted to ditch it should consider the most likely alternatives. They tend to suck.
The ability of the U.S. government to project military power relies very heavily on cheap oil and food. It also relies on the cooperation of over 100 other nations where U.S. military bases are located. When the dollar collapses, so will all of these things, and the collapse of U.S. military dominance over the world will not be far behind.
The dollar has dropped a bit already, judging by the dollar price of gold. I'd say there is a 20-30% chance of real panic over the next few days. Everyone even halfway informed knows the dollar and the U.S. economy are grossly overvalued at current exchange rates. The dollar will have to fall 90% or more to bring them into balance, and at that rate, the U.S. would no longer be considered a developed country nor would U.S. imports constitute a significant part of world trade. U.S. consumers would no longer be able to afford any food or energy that is not domestically produced, although domestic production and exports would rise significantly, eventually, after 10-20 years, restoring some of our lost income and wealth though by no means all.
It's a terrible, terrible feeling to know that my children are unlikely to experience anything like the level of freedom, safety, or prosperity that I and others of my generation enjoyed growing up. On occasion, it literally drives me to tears. If I knew how to change that, I would. They should have a better life than we did, not a crappier one. :(
I live in a part of Euclid that is relatively safe for someone with caution, common sense and a bit of luck, but there are parts of Euclid that are just as bad as East Cleveland, and anyway we are trying to escape to the West Side if we can figure out how to sell our house. It's competing with an inventory of foreclosures that go for literally pennies on the dollar. Lakewood is actually where we hope to end up - it's actually either as safe a place as we can afford, while still being fairly compact and conveniently located, or possibly a bit more than we can afford.
Umm, my church is in the inner city as are most of my friends. I'm planning to move closer to there (not *right* there, but close) and in fact I'd have done it years ago if I'd been able to sell my house. I don't even watch the news. I don't have to. It's always pretty much the same thing. Usually the worst stuff happens in the worst areas, which are mostly East Side, but sometimes it does happen here, to people we know and care about. Six or seven people in our fairly small church have lost family members due to murder. We consider moving there anyway in spite of the risk because their are offsetting advantages, like being closer to work and to our friends and our children's friends, and being a more active part of a ministry that really is trying, and trying very successfully in many ways, to be part of the solution rather than the problem. What we are NOT considering, however, is allowing our children to run the streets. We don't now, even though our current neighborhood is quieter and arguably safer. They will be supervised until they are old and strong enough to be reasonably safe on their own.
The older kids often do want to join. The younger kids just want to not get the crap beat out of them or worse. Cleveland isn't quite as much of a gang town as LA or Chicago, but it's still bad enough that it does happen, and not always just in the inner city.
Where I live and work and attend church (Cleveland, Ohio and its inner suburbs), kids of all ages are frequently kidnapped, raped, shot, forced into gangs and prostitution, forced to work for drug dealers, and so forth. Drivers are far too busy trying to get home to their marginally safer and whiter suburbs to be bothered by the possibility of kids or pedestrians wandering into the street, or to stop even if by chance they do hit one. Stopping, even in that situation, can easily get you killed, so no one does. Shootouts between rival gangs, and drivebys, are very common in many neighborhoods, and a LOT of innocent bystanders including children are hurt and killed this way. Not all neighborhoods are quite this bad, but more are than not, and some are worse. Children do play in parks and other fenced-in places, with heavy adult supervision and often police presence. They do NOT wander the streets alone if they have even a single parent (and that is all most of them have) who is not at that moment working 3 jobs, in jail, in a crack or meth house, or dead. The children who are forced to fend for themselves, without the care of a parent or (as is very common, thankfully) older siblings or relatives, either become adults very quickly, or become statistics. There really isn't any in between. Cleveland isn't unique in that regard; most of the other poor cities in the U.S. are in similar shape and some are worse, and even in the bigger and wealthier cities, there are plenty of neighborhoods like this. People who don't spend time in the ghetto have NO idea how bad it is, especially for children. TV and movies don't come close to doing it justice. And that's not even getting into the moral and spiritual vacuum, the nihilistic and fatalistic attitude that I consider even more dangerous and fundamental than the violence. Kids don't expect to have a future, so they act accordingly, turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. They don't care about learning, about respecting others, or about any kind of planning for any kind of future. It's incredibly, amazingly sad. There are pockets of light and hope here and there; my church is one of them, and we happen to have a big, diverse, and wonderful group of kids who, albeit with a lot of adult help, are bucking the odds and helping turn things around in their own neighborhoods and circles of friends. There also are a number of members who moved here (very inner city neighborhood) partly to be close to church and each other, and also partly to try to be a good influence to their neighbors and to try to be part of the solution to the problems of the city, rather than to try to flee them. We could use a lot more (more people for our church, and more churches like ours that see the city, in spite of its very serious problems, as a place that God cares about and is therefore worth saving).
Free markets don't mean that individuals, or groups of individuals such as businesses, get to harm others without their consent, or pollute that which they don't own.