"The ideal goal of education is to have the curriculum and the educator as unbiased as realistically possible."
In theory. In practice, we have large amounts of evidence for certain topics (for example, cognitive differences between races), but if you try to teach the facts, you get crucified career-wise.
People want the unbiased truth, as long as it doesn't conflict with their biases.
"I've found waiting times for ERs are way shorter in Canada"
This is because Canada prioritizes lifesaving medicine. For most issues, if you have insurance, the US is better. If you make it to the ER, Canada tends to be better.
"prescription medicine costs a lot less in Canada"
Sort-of. Non-generics tend to be cheaper, if your income is low. If you're professional class, PharmaCare will often not cover anything at all until you are out $10,000. In the States, prescription coverage tends to be cheaper.
If your medication is generic, the US is definitely cheaper. Wal-Mart's $10 90 day generics is amazing that way. Moving here, I went from around $30 USD/mo to around $300 USD/mo, because generics cost so much more here.
"costs are way way less in Canada than in the US."
Sort-of. If you have insurance in the states, it tends to cover more than what's covered here in Canada. If you need dental work or mental health, forget about it, and I've been waiting more than 6 months here in Ontario for a family doctor. I found a great specialist here in Canada, but my spouse couldn't go there without a referral, and ended up with someone who was just a 5 minute pill pusher. It's hit or miss.
In the States, you can generally see whoever you want, unless you are on a HMO.
Toronto costs a bit less, but the wages are significantly lower, and if you manage to avoid that, the taxes and cost of living make up for the cost. Ontario healthcare is not particularly as good, so plan on going private for that.
If you do move to Canada, prepare to pay more for pretty much everything.
"a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives."
Ok.
The representatives serve the people. Senators serve their State (and originally weren't popularly elected). The President serves all States, and is elected by the States.
So, no, not a democracy. It's a representative government, to a degree, but it is not, and never was a democracy. With gerrymandering and lobbying, it's becoming even less of one with time.
Why do you assume that education will reduce hate?
I hate the Mormon church because of what I've seen it do, and researching it's history. It is precisely because of education that I despise it. The same can be said of Islam. It is barbaric.
It is arrogant in the extreme to assume that all "hate" is irrational, and that you can educate people out of it. When it comes to some topics, hate is entirely rational.
The US isn't a democracy, nor has it ever been. It's why (for example) the people don't elect the President. The States do. Generally, they have a nonbinding poll to request input on how they allocate their votes, but are under no legal obligation to do so.
As for why the President can kill a trade deal, the States delegated authority to the federal government to manage international trade, and congress passed laws using their authority to manage international trade.
As is often the case, congress doesn't want to have to pass a law for every individual situation, so they pass a law granting authority to the executive branch.
It is the same reason there is literally a law saying the president can exclude any group of aliens he wants, or all aliens, for any reason benefiting US interests, for any length of time, or add any restrictions he wants. That law will ultimately stand up in court, along with the travel ban.
It also assumes they don't already know the answer. The class may prohibit checking outside sources, but there are always other ways to solve the problem.
I was failed out of a class (at Harvard no less) for doing too well. The instructor didn't think it was possible for me to do as well as I did, in the time I had, and determined that I had cheated on the final project.
Some of us don't need to ask classmates - I was the nerdy autist who (quite literally) asked for DOS manuals for birthday presents as a child. Dealing with extended memory, high memory, upper memory - all of this was common when dealing with video games, and it was often necessary to move things around in memory to deal with (for example) the CDROM driver (or mouse driver) using up memory in a way that caused issues with DOS Protected Mode apps. Or, TSRs would cause conflicts. When teachers assume that students are incapable, they are bad teachers.
If you are talking about a limit on a server (rather than a batch file), then you are likely talking about unix quotas and limits. These are also common limitations, and one I ran into on the FreeBSD nodes that I would use. I was in around 5th grade at the time.
If I ran into a resource limit on someone else's system (for example, a shared CS unix box), I'd check the quota and see if my limit is soft or hard. If it's soft, the command `ulimit` would let the soft limit be raised up to the hard limit, likely fixing the crash. If it's a hard limit, I'm calling IT, not the professor.
It's possible you actually meant batch file, but when you say "needed more than you had", that's an interesting assumption if people are permitted to use their own computers (unless you are talking about the native DOS memory limitations, which can be fixed with LOADHIGH, which gets you out of the DOS conventional memory area.
As a visible deterrent, designed to reduce the number of illegal weapons out on the street, and by property managers to reduce the amount of criminality going on in their buildings?
Black people are much more likely to be stopped for frisk and frill than white people, but the portion of whites who then were found to have drugs with them is higher than the portion of blacks.
Of course. That's what happens when you are more selective in which white people you search - you are selecting specifically for the ones most likely to have something to find. If you are selective enough, you can get the odds of finding something to nearly 100%, but you will make a lot fewer arrests.
So, more criminals were black, and more weapons were carried by black people - they search more black people. They still do search white people, but because they search fewer white people, they do it on the basis of other risk factors and find more guilty people (by percentage). That would be expected in a functional evidence-based enforcement system.
The drugs were a secondary effect, anyway - the point was to discourage people from carrying knives and guns around, a disproportionately black crime.
We stop a selection of people across all demographics, which lets us validate our model, and focus our attention on where we're likely to find problems. If we start noticing that the focus is not justified given the other data, we adjust our model.
It's no different than using any other attribute - we pull over vehicles with AZ plates on the I-10 in Texas, because that's where we've historically seen people running drugs. If the cars getting pulled over start having fewer drugs, and vehicles with New Mexico plates start showing up more with drugs, then the profiling can switch from AZ to NM.
If blacks are more likely to have illegal weapons on them, it makes search to focus on searching black people if you want to find illegal weapons. Anything else is silly, and as long as you have enough other data points to validate the model, its' rational and evidence-based, particularly if enforcement only happens when the person is actually breaking the law.
Like a DUI checkpoint, you don't have to worry about catching innocent individuals in the dragnet. Are DUI checkpoints circular reasoning, because they tend to catch drunks when they do them?
incarceration rates for different races is different;
I was very careful to differentiate between incarceration rates (which are biased due to selective enforcement) and actual commission of crimes. Violent crimes in particular are good for studies, because the police don't tend to selectively disregard murder or enforce it with significant racial disparity. Even when adjusting for differences in enforcement, blacks still commit significantly higher rates of crime, well outside the margin of error.
If AI learns from what the law enforcement / judiciary feed them, then the AI will reflect the biases of said institutions.
That will happen, too, and should be fought. To the extent reality is biased, the AI should be, too. To the extent that enforcement is subject to personal bias, it should be trained out as much as possible.
For example, the data shows more black people carrying illegal items, but mostly because the police stop and search them more frequently than white people.
... which is itself based on the observation that black people are more likely to carry illegal items.
This is a problem that customs deals with all the time. They discriminate in their searches because it's significantly more effective. In Canada, for example, Americans going to Whistler have their electronics searched because there is a high amount of illegal work. Americans going to Alaska are searched for guns (because they found so many).
They have non-profiling days where all selection is random, and they have mandatory times when everyone gets searched. They do this to validate their discrimination models, and waste a lot of time finding very little.
Evidence-based policing is going to end up racist, because reality is racist.
Indeed, I would consider racial bias to be a subset of "faulty programming."
Far from it. A system that lacked the racial bias reflected in reality would by it's very nature be flawed, and racially discriminatory. It would have to be skewed in such a way that it disproportionately benefited specific populations based on their race in the interest of "not being biased".
A simple example to illustrate the point, using something that's not as polarizing as criminality:
Suppose we wanted to estimate cancer risk for individuals. As is often the case in statistics, the goal is to estimate the values of unknown attributes using known attributes.
In this hypothetical scenario, white people have double the cancer risk of black people. We've also decided that for reasons of policy that it's immoral to judge people on the basis of their skin color, whether or not that actually correlates with risk.
If we looked at basketball players (for example), we might see that white people tended to play basketball individually, and focused on activities that could be done by themselves (shooting longer distances), while black individuals tended to grow up in urban environments with busier courts, and that they would focus on shorter shot distances, and skills which would contribute better to 5 on 5 games.
If we train a model using that data, we could easily find ourselves in a situation where the average shot distance ends up correlating with one's risk of cancer, because cancer correlates with race, and race correlates with shot data. This is normal, and expected, because the underlying data itself reflects this reality.
Since blacks have higher criminality rates, and higher recidivism rates, any just risk assessment algorithm is going to end up biased against black individuals. This is true whether their increased crime rates are due to poverty, intelligence, broken families, economic inequality, bad education, increased use of welfare, take your pick.
At the end of the day, the correlation won't tell you why - just that it's there. If the risk is higher for black individuals, and it doesn't assign (on average) a higher risk for black individuals, then the algorithm is a bad algorithm, because it's been weighted in such a way that it will disproportionately favour black individuals. It's social engineering that sends people of other races to prison more often in the interest of political correctness.
I finally upgraded from my 2012 MacBook Pro a couple days ago. I got a name-brand Windows 10 laptop.
I did it because Apple has nothing compelling about them anymore. They innovated (for the time) by rolling out a high-res laptop screen. I bought, and then spent the next 5 years having no reason to change anything (until my laptop started dying).
This time around, I saved the money. 4k screen, pen support (useful to me), decent battery life. Done.
"So there is a genetic reason to have bias about hiring people - some people are just "born lazy and ignorant"?"
Not so much lazy and ignorant as a combination of factors. If you look at performance of individuals in western societies, factors representing success correlate pretty well with IQ, to a point. Generally, we see about 80-85% of performance being innate (genetic), while around 15-20% is environmental. We see the same thing in physical performance - no amount of work will make an Olympic athlete out of someone without the body for it.
Black culture is certainly toxic, but it's also a reflection of genetics. They feed back on each other. There has been a ridiculous amount of money spent over decades trying to solve the black-white achievement gap, yet it doesn't work. It can't work.
There are population differences between the black and white population in the US that are compounded by the effects of poverty, malnourishment, and poor education.
Poor education, culture, and poverty feed back on themselves - it takes only a single student to disrupt an educational environment, so if you have a higher percentage of special needs students (or simply disruptive ones), there will be a greater percentage of classes where it's difficult for children to learn. The ability of a school to fund smaller classrooms is a function of its funding, which is often a function of where it's located and its taxbase. Poverty tends to concentrate individuals into areas where mass transit is an option, and so you get a perfect storm of a population that is already dealing with a lower mean IQ coupled with poorer education across the board.
This is also why voluntary busing can help with education, but only to a point. If you bus the non-disruptive students to better schools, they benefit from being removed from their disruptive classmates. If you bus the disruptive classmates as well, you harm the education of wherever they are bussed to.
I went to one of the former schools - black parents with above-average children who wanted their children to receive the best possible education would choose to send their children to my school. They were driven to succeed, and accountable to their families, and it did not adversely affect our education, but it helped theirs significantly.
So, no, it's not that they are born lazy, or ignorant. Those traits may be present as a class as a function of IQ, but like anything else individuals are individuals, who vary greatly. We can draw conclusions about a population, and estimate likelihood based on those conclusions, but you never really know what an individual will do until they are given the chance to do it.
If you actually read the article, you will see that there are questions asked of the criminal. They are asked to rate statements like "A hungry person has a right to steal" and “If people make me angry or lose my temper, I can be dangerous.”
These types of questions will likely lead to racial bias on their own, while being statistically sound and evidence based.
If black people are more likely to answer that people have a right to steal, since black people are more likely to commit crimes, then that is going to affect the score. The algorithm will (properly) flag black people as more likely to be criminals, and it will do so in a manner that is entirely race-neutral.
This is exactly what we should want - evidence-based policing and enforcement that's color blind, which measures and assesses risk on the basis of attributes other than their skin. We judge defendants on the content of their character, not the color of their skin, while not playing the PC bullshit games where we try to jerry-rig the system to not reflect the reality of racial bias in criminality.
If tall people were more likely to commit crimes, then we would expect playing basketball as a kid to increase one's risk score, and it would work without the system discriminating against you on the basis of something you were (tall) - instead discriminating on the basis of something you did.
Sure, the US can sustain EU-level population density, but why should it? Higher cost of living, longer commutes, higher levels of stress, smaller yards and houses?
Immigrants are generally not a net benefit, and immigrants to the US tend to suppress wages on the lower end of the scale. This puts a drain on resources, and increases income inequality.
"Denying visas because of being afraid they won't go back is just ridiculous."
That's pretty much the point of visas in the first place - they let you screen applicants that are criminals, likely to overstay, likely to illegally work, or likely to file a refugee claim.
"There are other ways to enforce that"
When the government tries that, they get called out as inhumane monsters:
"or just kick them out if they change their plans."... at which point people will start calling the US a police state, since people who disappear are in an unknown location, and people get all upset when you check people's citizenship. Start checking ID, and now you're Nazi Germany.
Why do you think there are over 10 million illegals in the US? As you say, the US has the ability to hit targets at millimetre precision thousands of miles away. It's technically possible to do mass deportations (and it wouldn't be the first time), but people dislike when the government does what it would actually take to enforce it's borders after the fact.
So, the government instead relies on regulating who can come in.
Slashdot Mirror
"The ideal goal of education is to have the curriculum and the educator as unbiased as realistically possible."
In theory. In practice, we have large amounts of evidence for certain topics (for example, cognitive differences between races), but if you try to teach the facts, you get crucified career-wise.
People want the unbiased truth, as long as it doesn't conflict with their biases.
Whether you murder a few people, a few dozen, a few hundred, a few thousand, or a few hundred thousand people, it's still murder.
When it comes to ethics, it's the quality of the act that matters, not the scale.
"I've found waiting times for ERs are way shorter in Canada"
This is because Canada prioritizes lifesaving medicine. For most issues, if you have insurance, the US is better. If you make it to the ER, Canada tends to be better.
"prescription medicine costs a lot less in Canada"
Sort-of. Non-generics tend to be cheaper, if your income is low. If you're professional class, PharmaCare will often not cover anything at all until you are out $10,000. In the States, prescription coverage tends to be cheaper.
If your medication is generic, the US is definitely cheaper. Wal-Mart's $10 90 day generics is amazing that way. Moving here, I went from around $30 USD/mo to around $300 USD/mo, because generics cost so much more here.
"costs are way way less in Canada than in the US."
Sort-of. If you have insurance in the states, it tends to cover more than what's covered here in Canada. If you need dental work or mental health, forget about it, and I've been waiting more than 6 months here in Ontario for a family doctor. I found a great specialist here in Canada, but my spouse couldn't go there without a referral, and ended up with someone who was just a 5 minute pill pusher. It's hit or miss.
In the States, you can generally see whoever you want, unless you are on a HMO.
Toronto costs a bit less, but the wages are significantly lower, and if you manage to avoid that, the taxes and cost of living make up for the cost. Ontario healthcare is not particularly as good, so plan on going private for that.
If you do move to Canada, prepare to pay more for pretty much everything.
"a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives."
Ok.
The representatives serve the people. Senators serve their State (and originally weren't popularly elected). The President serves all States, and is elected by the States.
So, no, not a democracy. It's a representative government, to a degree, but it is not, and never was a democracy. With gerrymandering and lobbying, it's becoming even less of one with time.
Forced displacement, murder and confiscation of property is forced consolidation, murder and confiscation of property.
Nazis by another name.
Try being pro Israel in leftist circles. The left tends not to support genocide.
The right tends to be the ones wanting to give Israel weapons and handjobs.
Why do you assume that education will reduce hate?
I hate the Mormon church because of what I've seen it do, and researching it's history. It is precisely because of education that I despise it. The same can be said of Islam. It is barbaric.
It is arrogant in the extreme to assume that all "hate" is irrational, and that you can educate people out of it. When it comes to some topics, hate is entirely rational.
The US isn't a democracy, nor has it ever been. It's why (for example) the people don't elect the President. The States do. Generally, they have a nonbinding poll to request input on how they allocate their votes, but are under no legal obligation to do so.
As for why the President can kill a trade deal, the States delegated authority to the federal government to manage international trade, and congress passed laws using their authority to manage international trade.
As is often the case, congress doesn't want to have to pass a law for every individual situation, so they pass a law granting authority to the executive branch.
It is the same reason there is literally a law saying the president can exclude any group of aliens he wants, or all aliens, for any reason benefiting US interests, for any length of time, or add any restrictions he wants. That law will ultimately stand up in court, along with the travel ban.
The president has a lot of executive power.
"Clinton who did actually win the election"
I didn't know Bill was running.
The people don't elect the president, the States do. There are only 538 votes cast for president, and Trump won most of those.
It also assumes they don't already know the answer. The class may prohibit checking outside sources, but there are always other ways to solve the problem.
Fuck teachers who do things like that.
I was failed out of a class (at Harvard no less) for doing too well. The instructor didn't think it was possible for me to do as well as I did, in the time I had, and determined that I had cheated on the final project.
Some of us don't need to ask classmates - I was the nerdy autist who (quite literally) asked for DOS manuals for birthday presents as a child. Dealing with extended memory, high memory, upper memory - all of this was common when dealing with video games, and it was often necessary to move things around in memory to deal with (for example) the CDROM driver (or mouse driver) using up memory in a way that caused issues with DOS Protected Mode apps. Or, TSRs would cause conflicts. When teachers assume that students are incapable, they are bad teachers.
If you are talking about a limit on a server (rather than a batch file), then you are likely talking about unix quotas and limits. These are also common limitations, and one I ran into on the FreeBSD nodes that I would use. I was in around 5th grade at the time.
If I ran into a resource limit on someone else's system (for example, a shared CS unix box), I'd check the quota and see if my limit is soft or hard. If it's soft, the command `ulimit` would let the soft limit be raised up to the hard limit, likely fixing the crash. If it's a hard limit, I'm calling IT, not the professor.
It's possible you actually meant batch file, but when you say "needed more than you had", that's an interesting assumption if people are permitted to use their own computers (unless you are talking about the native DOS memory limitations, which can be fixed with LOADHIGH, which gets you out of the DOS conventional memory area.
I have no doubt that the algorithm accurately represents the data it was trained with.
It sounds like they need to add additional factors to the risk scoring, so that it can have greater forward-predictive value, not just backtesting.
My comment is addressed more to the concept that "it's biased, therefore it must be bad". If the data is biased, then the algorithm should be, too.
Apparently, it doesn't work as you think.
As a visible deterrent, designed to reduce the number of illegal weapons out on the street, and by property managers to reduce the amount of criminality going on in their buildings?
Black people are much more likely to be stopped for frisk and frill than white people, but the portion of whites who then were found to have drugs with them is higher than the portion of blacks.
Of course. That's what happens when you are more selective in which white people you search - you are selecting specifically for the ones most likely to have something to find. If you are selective enough, you can get the odds of finding something to nearly 100%, but you will make a lot fewer arrests.
So, more criminals were black, and more weapons were carried by black people - they search more black people. They still do search white people, but because they search fewer white people, they do it on the basis of other risk factors and find more guilty people (by percentage). That would be expected in a functional evidence-based enforcement system.
The drugs were a secondary effect, anyway - the point was to discourage people from carrying knives and guns around, a disproportionately black crime.
It's not circular at all.
We stop a selection of people across all demographics, which lets us validate our model, and focus our attention on where we're likely to find problems. If we start noticing that the focus is not justified given the other data, we adjust our model.
It's no different than using any other attribute - we pull over vehicles with AZ plates on the I-10 in Texas, because that's where we've historically seen people running drugs. If the cars getting pulled over start having fewer drugs, and vehicles with New Mexico plates start showing up more with drugs, then the profiling can switch from AZ to NM.
If blacks are more likely to have illegal weapons on them, it makes search to focus on searching black people if you want to find illegal weapons. Anything else is silly, and as long as you have enough other data points to validate the model, its' rational and evidence-based, particularly if enforcement only happens when the person is actually breaking the law.
Like a DUI checkpoint, you don't have to worry about catching innocent individuals in the dragnet. Are DUI checkpoints circular reasoning, because they tend to catch drunks when they do them?
incarceration rates for different races is different;
I was very careful to differentiate between incarceration rates (which are biased due to selective enforcement) and actual commission of crimes. Violent crimes in particular are good for studies, because the police don't tend to selectively disregard murder or enforce it with significant racial disparity. Even when adjusting for differences in enforcement, blacks still commit significantly higher rates of crime, well outside the margin of error.
If AI learns from what the law enforcement / judiciary feed them, then the AI will reflect the biases of said institutions.
That will happen, too, and should be fought. To the extent reality is biased, the AI should be, too. To the extent that enforcement is subject to personal bias, it should be trained out as much as possible.
For example, the data shows more black people carrying illegal items, but mostly because the police stop and search them more frequently than white people.
... which is itself based on the observation that black people are more likely to carry illegal items.
This is a problem that customs deals with all the time. They discriminate in their searches because it's significantly more effective. In Canada, for example, Americans going to Whistler have their electronics searched because there is a high amount of illegal work. Americans going to Alaska are searched for guns (because they found so many).
They have non-profiling days where all selection is random, and they have mandatory times when everyone gets searched. They do this to validate their discrimination models, and waste a lot of time finding very little.
Evidence-based policing is going to end up racist, because reality is racist.
Indeed, I would consider racial bias to be a subset of "faulty programming."
Far from it. A system that lacked the racial bias reflected in reality would by it's very nature be flawed, and racially discriminatory. It would have to be skewed in such a way that it disproportionately benefited specific populations based on their race in the interest of "not being biased".
A simple example to illustrate the point, using something that's not as polarizing as criminality:
Suppose we wanted to estimate cancer risk for individuals. As is often the case in statistics, the goal is to estimate the values of unknown attributes using known attributes.
In this hypothetical scenario, white people have double the cancer risk of black people. We've also decided that for reasons of policy that it's immoral to judge people on the basis of their skin color, whether or not that actually correlates with risk.
If we looked at basketball players (for example), we might see that white people tended to play basketball individually, and focused on activities that could be done by themselves (shooting longer distances), while black individuals tended to grow up in urban environments with busier courts, and that they would focus on shorter shot distances, and skills which would contribute better to 5 on 5 games.
If we train a model using that data, we could easily find ourselves in a situation where the average shot distance ends up correlating with one's risk of cancer, because cancer correlates with race, and race correlates with shot data. This is normal, and expected, because the underlying data itself reflects this reality.
Since blacks have higher criminality rates, and higher recidivism rates, any just risk assessment algorithm is going to end up biased against black individuals. This is true whether their increased crime rates are due to poverty, intelligence, broken families, economic inequality, bad education, increased use of welfare, take your pick.
At the end of the day, the correlation won't tell you why - just that it's there. If the risk is higher for black individuals, and it doesn't assign (on average) a higher risk for black individuals, then the algorithm is a bad algorithm, because it's been weighted in such a way that it will disproportionately favour black individuals. It's social engineering that sends people of other races to prison more often in the interest of political correctness.
I finally upgraded from my 2012 MacBook Pro a couple days ago. I got a name-brand Windows 10 laptop.
I did it because Apple has nothing compelling about them anymore. They innovated (for the time) by rolling out a high-res laptop screen. I bought, and then spent the next 5 years having no reason to change anything (until my laptop started dying).
This time around, I saved the money. 4k screen, pen support (useful to me), decent battery life. Done.
"So there is a genetic reason to have bias about hiring people - some people are just "born lazy and ignorant"?"
Not so much lazy and ignorant as a combination of factors. If you look at performance of individuals in western societies, factors representing success correlate pretty well with IQ, to a point. Generally, we see about 80-85% of performance being innate (genetic), while around 15-20% is environmental. We see the same thing in physical performance - no amount of work will make an Olympic athlete out of someone without the body for it.
Black culture is certainly toxic, but it's also a reflection of genetics. They feed back on each other. There has been a ridiculous amount of money spent over decades trying to solve the black-white achievement gap, yet it doesn't work. It can't work.
https://www1.udel.edu/educ/got...
There are population differences between the black and white population in the US that are compounded by the effects of poverty, malnourishment, and poor education.
Poor education, culture, and poverty feed back on themselves - it takes only a single student to disrupt an educational environment, so if you have a higher percentage of special needs students (or simply disruptive ones), there will be a greater percentage of classes where it's difficult for children to learn. The ability of a school to fund smaller classrooms is a function of its funding, which is often a function of where it's located and its taxbase. Poverty tends to concentrate individuals into areas where mass transit is an option, and so you get a perfect storm of a population that is already dealing with a lower mean IQ coupled with poorer education across the board.
This is also why voluntary busing can help with education, but only to a point. If you bus the non-disruptive students to better schools, they benefit from being removed from their disruptive classmates. If you bus the disruptive classmates as well, you harm the education of wherever they are bussed to.
I went to one of the former schools - black parents with above-average children who wanted their children to receive the best possible education would choose to send their children to my school. They were driven to succeed, and accountable to their families, and it did not adversely affect our education, but it helped theirs significantly.
So, no, it's not that they are born lazy, or ignorant. Those traits may be present as a class as a function of IQ, but like anything else individuals are individuals, who vary greatly. We can draw conclusions about a population, and estimate likelihood based on those conclusions, but you never really know what an individual will do until they are given the chance to do it.
If you actually read the article, you will see that there are questions asked of the criminal. They are asked to rate statements like "A hungry person has a right to steal" and “If people make me angry or lose my temper, I can be dangerous.”
These types of questions will likely lead to racial bias on their own, while being statistically sound and evidence based.
If black people are more likely to answer that people have a right to steal, since black people are more likely to commit crimes, then that is going to affect the score. The algorithm will (properly) flag black people as more likely to be criminals, and it will do so in a manner that is entirely race-neutral.
This is exactly what we should want - evidence-based policing and enforcement that's color blind, which measures and assesses risk on the basis of attributes other than their skin. We judge defendants on the content of their character, not the color of their skin, while not playing the PC bullshit games where we try to jerry-rig the system to not reflect the reality of racial bias in criminality.
If tall people were more likely to commit crimes, then we would expect playing basketball as a kid to increase one's risk score, and it would work without the system discriminating against you on the basis of something you were (tall) - instead discriminating on the basis of something you did.
Sure, the US can sustain EU-level population density, but why should it? Higher cost of living, longer commutes, higher levels of stress, smaller yards and houses?
It doesn't benefit the population to do so.
Immigrants are generally not a net benefit, and immigrants to the US tend to suppress wages on the lower end of the scale. This puts a drain on resources, and increases income inequality.
"Denying visas because of being afraid they won't go back is just ridiculous."
That's pretty much the point of visas in the first place - they let you screen applicants that are criminals, likely to overstay, likely to illegally work, or likely to file a refugee claim.
"There are other ways to enforce that"
When the government tries that, they get called out as inhumane monsters:
http://nacla.org/news/2015/01/...
"or just kick them out if they change their plans." ... at which point people will start calling the US a police state, since people who disappear are in an unknown location, and people get all upset when you check people's citizenship. Start checking ID, and now you're Nazi Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Why do you think there are over 10 million illegals in the US? As you say, the US has the ability to hit targets at millimetre precision thousands of miles away. It's technically possible to do mass deportations (and it wouldn't be the first time), but people dislike when the government does what it would actually take to enforce it's borders after the fact.
So, the government instead relies on regulating who can come in.
"more visas being declined for sketchy reasons." ... which might matter if there was a right to freely enter foreign countries. There's not.