chuckee

Totally unrelated: Diversity statements required for one-fifth of academic jobs: https://freebeacon.com/campus/study-diversity-statements-req...

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.

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?

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...

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29254468

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?

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...

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).

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

is a conspiracy theory about how

You mean a conspiracy theory about why. Though the article does not dispute that demographic changes are taking place, or even that they are the result of deliberate changes of immigration policy, it does go to great lengths to avoid mentioning them. This is not by accident - there is a lively debate on its talk page about including (more) demographic statistics*, to which the editors are highly resistant.

For example, there is not a single graph found in the entire article similar to that at the beginning of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_France

Like refusing to mention JFK is dead on JFK assassination conspiracy articles.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Great_Replacement#Lack_of... among others

If you don't want to pay a million quid for a house in London, refuse the game. Move elsewhere. Find a different way to get by in life, perhaps even a different country.

People did exactly what you suggest. And the country they moved to was England, and the city, London, which now has 38% non-UK born residents:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

In 2014, another internal report, titled “Feed ranking is good,” summarized the results of tests that found allowing users to turn off the algorithm led them to spend less time in their news feeds, post less often and interact less. Ultimately, they began logging into Facebook less often, imperiling the years-long growth in user engagement that has long powered the company’s lucrative advertising business. Without an algorithm deciding which posts to show at the top of users’ feeds, concluded the report’s author, whose name was redacted, “Facebook would probably be shrinking.”

No surprises here.

And someone might "spy" on a whistleblower that leaked an incriminating video, by issuing a warrant for the media fingerprint [1], and finding which TV was used to view the leaked footage. Google doesn't "spy" on you either, by your ridiculously narrow definition, and yet their data sends people to jail [2].

Or a personality/political profile could be built on a person from the shows they watch.

Or your social score could be reduced if you watch too many subversive shows. Oh but that's in China, and could never ever happen here, so no worries about building all the infrastructure to enable it. Except if you view terrorist content, then the UK feels justified in jailing you for 10-15 years [3]. But hey I don't think there's precedent yet for using smart TV fingerprinting for that, so why worry?

Lets give up our autonomy and privacy one tiny slice at a time. And when there is nothing left, you can point to each individual slice and explain to us how losing that one was totally insignificant and non-nefarious.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_fingerprinting

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/16/geofence-war...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41479620.amp

And a lot of people knows this. So for the past few years it turns out plenty of people are willing to sell their watching habits for a cheaper TV.

Because every TV has all the ways it spies on you listed as prominently as the price? And there's a near identical model for sale next to it, without the spying-enabled discounts?

Framing this as consumer choice implies consumers were informed and given a choice, but they were neither.

Is it user hostile to prevent the user from speeding? From parking in front of a fire hydrant? From driving to an illegal gathering? All of those can result in jail and death (including the last one, as those protest epidemic studies can attest to).

How about driving without a license, or past curfew?

Any action contrary to the user's wishes is user hostile. You are welcome to give inanimate objects (and those who control them) power over you, but don't drag the rest of us into your utopia of begging our cars and appliances for permission.

Ah but I'm committing the slippery slope fallacy. I'm sure that unlike all the other surveillance state creep, this particular genie, once out of the bottle, won't spread.

The discussion offers a glimpse into how criminal trials are affected by a judge's unfamiliarity with technology—even when that technology is a common consumer feature that's grasped intuitively by millions of people of all ages.

Is Ars Technica, supposedly a tech-focused news site, really so clueless as to confuse using a technology, with understanding it?

While the judge might be overly cautious in this instance, it's definitely plausible that Apple, in their closed-source software, is using machine learning-enhanced zoom.

Is this the first legally mandated user-hostile feature? Will it be the last?

to know what I am missing out on.

You mean to know which stories they choose to fact check. Just like media (necessarily) choosing which stories to report and which to ignore or downplay, it's all too easy to turn fact checking itself into propaganda, despite treating each individual story with full even-handed honesty.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29172979

Sorry for the miscommunication. Yes, you are technically correct. I did not mean to imply that the border is literally not being enforced at all. Only that the enforcement is deliberately undercut to make it ineffective. I believe the news reports presented suffice to make that conclusion.

Directly addressing a claim made in the post I replied to (police manipulation/bias of statistics) is not "moving past" anything.

You're welcome to continue onto ever more abstract or systemic claims of racism and bias, but please don't begrudge me pointing out when some of the stepping stones crumble along the way.

New Guidance Bars Immigration Enforcement in ‘Protected Areas’ -- https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/27/us/politics/biden-immigra...

Migrants were encountered 1.7 million times in the last 12 months, the highest number of illegal crossings recorded since at least 1960. -- https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/22/us/politics/border-crossi...

“The Biden administration has created a disaster,” added Mr. Morgan [chief of the U.S. Border Patrol in the Obama administration], currently a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “It did so by methodically – and by all indications intentionally – undoing every meaningful border security measure that had been in place.” -- https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/oct/19/bidens-bung...

President Biden Eviscerates Border Security and Immigration Enforcement on Day One [Please try to refute the many specific claims made in the article, instead of attacking the site itself.] -- https://www.fairus.org/legislation/presidential-administrati...

Attorney General Merrick Garland has rescinded a Trump-era memo blocking so-called sanctuary cities from receiving funding from the Department of Justice. -- https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/550675-doj-resci...

Christopher Magnus [..] He is an advocate of Sanctuary cities [..] Magnus was nominated by Joe Biden to become the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Director. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Magnus

I'm sure I could keep going, but I think I've made my point. At the very least, you should be able to understand how I got the impression that the current administration disfavors border enforcement (as if the record-high legal immigration, that continued even under Trump, was not enough).

Raytheon lobbyists find a safe space in NY Times foreign policy pages: https://thecolumn.substack.com/p/on-afghanistan-withdrawal-n...

As for this article: His unfounded claim that electronic voting machines will be rigged

Let's see how unfounded it is:

the machines are made in Brazil by Procomp, a subsidiary of Diebold Nixdorf, an American firm [..] Hackers invited by the TSE to test the system concluded that, while an unscrupulous politician would find it nearly impossible to commit large-scale fraud because the machines are not connected to the internet, someone with access to the software, ie, someone connected with [Brazil's supreme electoral tribunal], could manipulate results without being detected. That is because Brazil lacks a “voter-verified paper audit trail”. Congress has voted twice to modify the system so that voters receive printed receipts, which could be checked in case of technical glitches or allegations of fraud. Mr Bolsonaro, in fact, sponsored such a proposal. But in June Brazil’s supreme court struck down a law that would have introduced paper receipts for 5% of ballot boxes. It said the measure would be too cumbersome and expensive to use on a large scale. -- https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2018/10/05/brazils-vo...

Known vulnerable machines, created by a foreign firm, whose machines were previously derided as insecure even in its home country [1], and actively resisting even a 5% paper trail? Can't imagine why Mr. Bolsonaro doesn't trust them.

In fact I'm sure that if a Russian or Chinese firm, with a history of security issues, had made voting machines, and the judiciary overturned paper trail requirements, Americans would have no issues trusting the security and legitimacy of their elections!

[1] Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_Election_Solutions#Sec...

A moment ago the conversation was about violent crime and "over-policing creates racist bias in crime data". Now it's about laws treating corporate crimes more leniently.

You raise good points, and use them to deftly move past all the claims of racism that homicide statistics and victim surveys largely (but not entirely) refute.

Taxes

Keep in mind the graph shows only state taxes, and does not include federal taxes. Though it's interesting all the same that the rich pay less (as a % of their income) - does anyone know why?

The more expensive the neighborhood, the more funding goes to the school

Schools also receive funding from state-wide and federal taxes [1], so much so that [2]:

"on average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively. This is anticipated due to the strong relationship between race and poverty (Reardon & Owens, 2014) and the increased federal funding targeted toward students in districts with concentrated poverty"

To say I was shocked when the world-class, esteemed professional journalists at the New York Times omitted this very pertinent fact that even I, an amateur and foreigner, know, would be a severe understatement.

[1] https://www.heritage.org/education/report/the-myth-racial-di...

[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724...

Doesn't your link point to Teflon? What is missing from the article?