Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | poster123's commentslogin

This is an awful idea. The high crime rate in Chicago is due to lots of idle men, and handouts just encourage more people not to work. The unemployment rate is 4%, and it has rarely been easier to get a job.


Driving a taxi is a last-resort job. It may flatter people with safer jobs to attribute racism to taxi drivers, but instead they should try to understand their decision-making.

From a 1997 column by black economist Thomas Sowell:

https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1997/0324/5906052a/ Trading blood for pizza "The city of San Francisco passed a law making it illegal to refuse to make deliveries in high-crime neighborhoods. It all started when someone wanted to order a pizza and the company said that it did not deliver in that part of town. This is not uncommon in other cities or for deliveries of other things besides pizza.

Back during the 1991 Gulf War, those opposed to sending American troops to the Middle East called our military action "trading blood for oil." But none of those people seems to have protested the San Francisco law as trading blood for pizza. ;

Since most people in high-crime neighborhoods are not criminals, it is of course unjust in some cosmic sense that they should be deprived of things that other law-abiding people have available to them. But vandals, hoodlums and murderers are expensive luxuries for their neighbors in many ways, including higher insurance rates, lower property values and fewer businesses to provide either services or jobs.

These costs are undeniable. The question is: Who should pay these costs? Should it be third parties, such as drivers delivering pizza, who might have to pay with their lives?"


Does the author never ride in a car or shop in a strip mall or box store? Life is much better than it was a hundred years ago, and the author should read some books by Julian Simon.

"looking out the window with her at the rows of cars in the hospital parking lot, the strip mall across the street, the box stores and drive-throughs and drainage ditches and asphalt and waste fields that had once been oak groves. A world of extinction and catastrophe, a world in which harmony with nature had long been foreclosed."


Interesting. I do think that any machine learning study of time series should present a statistical time series model such as ARIMA as a benchmark.


The leaders of Iran have called for the destruction of Israel many times, so of course Israel will do what it can to thwart the nuclear weapons program of Iran.


"In the U.S., Facebook is 3.5 percent black, compared to just 2 percent in 2014, and 4.9 percent Latinx compared to 4 percent in 2014. White people, unsurprisingly, still makes up the single largest population of employees (46.4 percent today versus 57 percent in 2014). The upside to this is that white people no longer make up the majority at Facebook."

No mention is made of the fraction of Asians, because their over-representation would undermine the narrative of whites discriminating against minorities. This intellectual dishonesty irks me.

There are industries such as education where the vast majority of workers are female. If men and women are in the workforce at about even levels, there must be some industries where men predominate.


>"In the U.S., Facebook is 3.5 percent black, compared to just 2 percent in 2014, and 4.9 percent Latinx compared to 4 percent in 2014. White people, unsurprisingly, still makes up the single largest population of employees (46.4 percent today versus 57 percent in 2014). The upside to this is that white people no longer make up the majority at Facebook."

So they're actually MORE diverse than the country racially.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...

"The White, non-Hispanic or Latino population make up 61.3% of the nation's total, with the total White population (including White Hispanics and Latinos) being 76.9%"


I don't see much noise about bringing men into female dominated industries either.


There are groups working on bringing men into nursing and teaching. You can find out more about these with a few google searches.


> the narrative of whites discriminating against minorities

You made up that narrative. The narrative presented in the article is

> Williams noted that, "diversity is critical to our success as a company"

Achieving "diversity" is not the same as mirroring the demographics of a company's home country and "over-representation" is not directly related to lack of diversity.


If "diverse" != mirroring the demographics of one's home country, then what does diverse even mean? What could possibly be a better metric than that? Mirroring the demographics of the world at large? If so, why would that be better?


> There are industries such as education where the vast majority of workers are female.

Yes, and they've tended to be the lower-paid professions. Nurses instead of doctors, teachers instead of principals, etc.

This argument is a little like citing "black people have water fountains, too" to defend the segregated South. It misses the point.


Female dominated professions, on average, have more time off, more flexible hours, significant social components, less physically dangerous, etc. Maybe these things matter, on average, more to women than men. Why should we expect women to have the exact same distribution of preferences as men? Why are we accepting the frame that the only thing that matters is salary?

If women choose their profession based on factors other than salary, it is a little strange to analogize them to black people under segregation. Just because someone has different values doesn't mean that they have false consciousness or are acting under duress.


I completely agree and I'm not sure why over-representation isn't a larger issue.


Honest question: Is your concern about over-representation limited to Asian people, or do you have similar concerns about white male over-representation in tech and elsewhere?


Good for Kylie Jenner. Bruce Jenner has six children with three successive wives: Chrystie Crownover, Linda Thompson, and Kris Jenner (Wikipedia). There is what you you are supposed to believe and say about the transgendered, and there is physical reality.


Are you suggesting that one person is representative of a large group of people?


The $225 fee seems high, but nowadays it is easy to start a social media campaign encouraging people to complain, and I don't want the government to spend a lot of money responding to every single complaint. Ultimately the most effective way to constrain the executive branch is to vote out a president whose appointees you dislike.


I thought this part below was interesting. We know that the most selective schools weigh non-academic factors, and many well-off parents are not willing to pay $75/K for a "name" school, so it's reasonable to replace a school filter with a cognitive test.

"Most of the people Vista hires score highly on the cognitive test. Often they are young employees with less-impressive credentials or experience. These HPELs, as they are known, may have gone to state universities and be willing to do a job for $75,000 that an Ivy League graduate in a high-cost market would demand twice as much for."


The paper can be downloaded from https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2018/preliminary/paper/ShD... . From the abstract:

"We find robust evidence that exposure to teacher collective bargaining laws worsens the future labor market outcomes of men: in the first 10 years after passage of a duty-to-bargain law, male earnings decline by $2,134 (or 3.93%) per year and hours worked decrease by 0.42 hours per week. The earnings estimates for men indicate that teacher collective bargaining reduces earnings by $213.8 billion in the US annually."


I wonder why my comment was downvoted. If you start a thread, are you not supposed to make a comment saying why you think the linked article is important?


Many people will try to punish you for your opinions. Luckily, points don't matter.


Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: