Recent submissions

Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
You seem awfully sure. I was able to find only one study that directly compared crime, race, and income group: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/23/poor-...

Unfortunately the metric it uses is whether they were ever incarcerated for any reason. Someone hostile to those results would probably dismiss them as due to police racism.

One could try to use homicide and victim surveys as a mostly objective proxy for all violent crime (very difficult and impossible, respectively, for racist police practices to affect), compare that to the violent crime rate of each racial group, and use any disparity to estimate how racist the police and justice system are being.

But then one would risk getting a result one doesn't like.

Comment · 5 years ago
> Which happens because black people are overrepresented when it comes to crime, which happens because they are overrepresented in being poor as dirt.

Have you tried to confirm this hypothesis, by for example looking at studies that examine the crime rate by both socioeconomic status and race?

Comment · 5 years ago
Yes, Western journalism is famous for uncritically praising the West, holding it up as the realization of a perfect, flawless ideal, to which all other societies can only aspire to. But when it comes to those other societies, the headlines are filled with dire warnings that they will taint our perfect system with their backwards or dystopian ways if we allow them to immigrate.

> It seems to be a very common theme in Western journalism to describe Asian countries as dystopias or dystopias in the making.

Whereas they would never describe their own countries this way. Just look at the praise heaped upon Britain:

The Guardian view on surveillance: Big Brother is not the only watcher now - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/13/the-gu...

Welcome to London, the city that never sleeps because it’s too busy watching you. - https://www.inverse.com/article/22198-london-surveillance-th...

'We are hurtling towards a surveillance state’: the rise of facial recognition technology - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/05/facial-re...

London’s police department said on Friday that it would begin using facial recognition to spot criminal suspects with video cameras as they walk the streets, adopting a level of surveillance that is rare outside China. - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/business/london-police-fa...

Britain is at risk of becoming a surveillance state more intrusive than the Oceania of George Orwell’s 1984, a government watchdog has warned. - https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/surveillance-state-becomi...

For several years now, the British media have been telling us that theirs is a surveillance society. "It could be the 4 million closed-circuit television cameras, or maybe the spy drones hovering overhead, but one way or another Britons know they are being watched. All the time. Everywhere," Luke Baker wrote in a representative Reuters article published in 2007, going on to note that "Britain is now the most intensely monitored country in the world, according to surveillance experts, with 4.2 million CCTV cameras installed, equivalent to one for every 14 people." - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/londo...

Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
What's most painful is that an email client would silently degrade files sent with it. A typical case of "we know better than the user". Which client did they use?
Comment · 5 years ago
> A whopping 43% of white students weren’t admitted on merit. One might call it affirmative action for the rich and privileged [..] benefits that white people are now supposedly [emphasis mine] left out of

Funny how the article is entirely lacking in plain demographics, focusing exclusively on the legacy sub-category. Lets fix that, shall we?

38% of Harvard's undergrads are white: https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/harvard-university/s...

And 10% of those are Jewish: https://www.hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/harvard-uni...

So Harvard is 28% non-Jewish white, compared to 59% of the US overall (And even that is too much, according to the Guardian. White people must be really dumb! Of course the Guardian didn't bother to include direct proof of this, such as, say, average SAT score of undergraduates by race). And 10% Jewish, compared to 2-2.4% of the US.

But the Guardian is more likely to report that until 43 years ago Harvard limited the number of Jewish students, rather than to honestly report on what the status is today:

How elite US schools give preference to wealthy and white 'legacy' applicants [..] Many institutions, including Harvard, used a discriminatory quota system to limit the number of Jewish students. - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/23/elite-school...

Comment · 5 years ago
> such authority

Key word "such". Prescribing which certificates I am obligated to trust is many many steps beyond e.g. banning DRM circumvention (which is itself a step too far IMO).

Comment · 5 years ago
> In a nutshell, the revised Article 45 would force browsers to suspend the ‘root store’ policies that are essential for maintaining trust and security online. [..] At the same time, the types of website certificates that browsers would be forced to accept, namely QWACs

Can someone explain where this 'force' comes from? I wasn't aware the EU had such authority to decide how programs on a users private computer must behave. Would e.g. making a fork of Firefox that does not comply with this digital identity framework be illegal? Or is this just hyperbole from Mozilla, and the browser would be merely non-compliant?

Comment · 5 years ago
Tying a financial product with a web browser? I see MS has been hard at work finding innovative new ways to respect user browser choice.

Next step: Guaranteed skipping automated job application filters for CVs written using MS Word.

Comment · 5 years ago
Also The Guardian:

Immigrants needed to save west from crisis - Italy pays the price for a declining population, as the UN warns that worse is to come for developed world - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/mar/22/population.mic...

UK needs more immigrants to 'avoid Brexit catastrophe' - Ageing population, labour shortages and low productivity mean UK needs net inward migration of 200,000 a year, says thinktank - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/may/19/uk-needs-mor...

I imagine most people in the West would find sacrificing parenthood pointless. They have had sub-replacement fertility for about 50 years, yet their population somehow keeps growing. How can you then ask them to reduce their population even faster, and expect to be taken seriously?

Comment · 5 years ago
Do you think math education needs an overhaul so it sets up more students for success and is more useful for work and life? Or do you think the way math is taught should largely stay the same?

"Do you think we should make things better or leave them the same?" - objective journalism from the paper of record.

Comment · 5 years ago
It seems to me all it needs to assume is that genetic* ancestry/ethnicity matters - i.e. it has some effect beyond just appearance (if you think caring about appearance is illegitimate). Could you explain why all those other strict assumptions are necessary?

Edit: Actually, I've just noticed this question shifts us from "it's not happening" to "it's happening but it doesn't matter". Is that your claim now, and you're conceding that it is happening? Or would "it's not happening but if it did it wouldn't matter" be closer to your opinion?

*'Genetic' to separate it from the culture and customs that are also passed down through ancestry.

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