darkroasted

This is really neat, although it does not look slick enough to replace my own hacky word-around:

What I have been doing is creating a separate Chrome application launcher for my different life contexts -- http://lifehacker.com/5611711/create-application-shortcuts-i... I have one for anonymous browsing, one for work, one for personal-real-name, and one for pseudonymous browsing. I renamed the application so I can launch by typing "WorkChrome" or "PersonalChrome" in spotlight search. Each Chrome app then runs with a separate profile, separate cookies, etc. I have a different icon and colored theme for each one, so that I never make a mistake with regards to which I am browsing in. I can have multiple open at the same time and tab switch between them.

There is a problem with how parents are involved with their kids education.

This is being too harsh on parents. My parents were very much involved with my own brother's education. They tutored him, got him extra help, set up incentives, etc, etc. But he still did far worse than me. Meanwhile they had to pull me away from the books. I never got help with math homework because I never had any trouble with it. School just came naturally to me. I was just born much smarter than my brother. My parents never had to pressure me to learn programming, I picked it up because it was fun and I was good at it. Heck, I taught myself calculus because I found the problem solving fun.

And I see this observation over and over again. If a person is naturally good at cognitive work, sooner or later they will go whole hog on learning some economically useful cognitive skills. If a person is just naturally a bit slower, it will always be an uphill battle.

These personal observations are corroborated by adoption studies and twin studies. Twins raised separately end up closer together than non-twins raised together. Adopted children end up closer to their biological parents than their adopted parents. Etc. (sources; http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023048987045774784... http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/10/genes-dont-just-influ... )

The existence of people like Jessica is not just something the mainstream media needs to learn to acknowledge, but something feminists need to learn to acknowledge as well. There are successful women who don't like to fight.

There is another lesson here for feminists that PG does not fully articulate. In my experience, most women are similar to Jessica in that they do not fit naturally into an alphadog founder type role. The time-honored tradition for such women to be part of accomplishing great things, is to partner with an alphadog mate. Unfortunately, modern feminism is all about turning women into men, rather than guiding women to fit in as complements and partners to a strong man.

If Jessica was so important to YC, why don't more people realize it? Partly because I'm a writer, and writers always get disproportionate attention.

And also because she was not listed as involved when YC was first founded. I assume that Jessica was "The Fourth Man wants to remain anonymous for now"? https://web.archive.org/web/20050324095016/http://ycombinato...

I didn't answer your question because it was not germane to the discussion. Whether or not there is are innate differences in tendency, behavior is quite malleable via the proper culture, institutions, and law enforcement. But if you really want an answer I will try to humor you.

"I am asking a different question. To be blunt, which contributes more to the current lack of "civilizing influences" in inner-cities: that the actors involved are black, or that the actors involved were born into the same lack of "civilizing influences" 20 years earlier?"

To be even more blunt, I take it you asking whether black genes matter more or whether the environmental conditions matter more? It is not really possible to answer that question along a comparative axis of "more or less." With most human traits, genes determine both the slope of the improvement curve and where the improvement curve plateaus. Environment determines where one is along that curve. I cannot throw a javelin 80 meters. Which matters more, genes or the fact that I have never trained to throw the javelin? That's not really a well put question. I'm sure with training I could throw it 40 meters, I highly doubt I have the genes to ever be able to throw it a world-class 80 meters.

Similarly with African-American neighborhoods -- I think they have the genes to have peaceful, orderly neighborhoods because such neighborhoods have existed in the African-American population before. I am pessimistic that there will ever be an African or African-American Pudong or Silicon Valley, because I don't think the concentration of genes are there. I would love to be proven wrong, but I think more evidence backs that view than not ( https://jaymans.wordpress.com/jaymans-race-inheritance-and-i... https://liberalbiorealism.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/the-likel... )

Most likely, there are statistical differences in gene frequency that make average behavioral traits differ between the races, all things being equal. I say that, because the world looks exactly like you would expect, were that hypothesis to be true. When you compare races, such as the Han Chinese, the Irish, and Africans, the Chinese tend to be the most orderly, regardless of where they live (China, Singapore, Taiwan, the American Chinatowns, etc) whereas those of African descent tend to have higher rates of crime and disorder, no matter whether it be Johannesburg, Belize, Rio, Liberia, Jamaica, Haiti, or Madison, Wisconsin. Worldwide, race predicts crime better than anything else.

But given the right conditions, Chinese can be quite disorderly. And we have proven cases in the past of black communities being quite disorderly. So regardless of the genetic tendencies, the outcomes are malleable.

There is a saying that every generation is invaded by a horde of savages -- they're called children. Humans are savage by default, civilization is not natural. It took generations to build the institutions, the social mores, the web of reinforcing family and peer influences, the culture, the churches/schools, etc, that make civilization possible. The existence of these elements vary by people, vary by ethnicity (ethnicity being a combination of tribe and culture and institutions). If you look at the worst inner-city, ethnically African-American neighborhoods, those elements are all missing. Kids are raised from the cradle to the jail-cell without civilizing influences of parental discipline, good peer influences, and peer role models. Again, read American Millstone, or The Corner or Ghettoside. That is what I mean by a void of civilization.

Honest question: how familiar are you with the actual history of these problems, and the actual situation on the ground? Have you read anything beyond standard zeitgeist sources (sociology classes, NYTimes, Economist), etc?

The dominant social policy of the last 65 years has been that crime and disorder can be cured by addressing "root causes" which means material deprivation, lack of school funding, lack of housing, a school curriculum that was not culturally attuned, etc.

So first in the 50s, 60s and 70s they built public housing, upped welfare spending, eliminated corporal punishment in the schools, and greatly reduced punishment and police enforcement. Here is a poster from the time: http://www.newyork.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/a...

This was a disaster. The welfare spending incentivized women to not get married and to stay on the dole, because you would lose benefits if you got married or got a job. The public housing was not policed at all and was destroyed by the rougher element in the population. Crime skyrocketed. Youths would commit muggings at gun point and end up back on the streets with nothing more than probation.

Then there was a ham-fisted backlash starting in the mid-1970s but really coming into effect in the 80s and 90s. Unfortunately, rather than emphasis consistent discipline and enforcement from the get go, the backlash was more about "three strikes" and using drug offenses as proxy crimes. Even in schools, getting tough meant suspensions, which is not much of a punishment to a roguish street urchin.

So if you look at the situation now, you have kids growing up in homes which are violent and where they don't get punished if they roam the streets and bully other kids. Then you have those kids go to schools that are full of disorder, and where if they cause trouble they just sent to the principals office and then go right back into the classroom. Or maybe they get suspended for a few days. Big whoop, that is only a punishment if you care about school. Gangs are allowed to openly sell drugs on the street. So by age 15 your role models are gang members, you have never been subject to real discipline, you have been fighting others or being assaulted your whole life. And then they commit some heinous crime. At that point, the 15-year-old cannot be permitted to coexist in normal society. Giving them money or something is not going to magically make them civilized when they have spent their live growing up in a barbarous environment. It's not the 15-year-old-murderers fault in the cosmic sense that he was born into such a wild environment. But the fact remains that he his too dangerous to be permitted to roam the streets freely.

But of course I absolutely agree that the problem needs to be addressed earlier. We need to figure out a way that these kids are an environment with order, that is with safety, security, and discipline from the day they are born.

Um, from taking walks a few blocks from my apartment and doing volunteering in such communities. Also just reading the local news. Also reading lots of ethnographies. Go read American Millstone (http://www.amazon.com/American-Millstone-Examination-Permane...) or Ghettoside and maybe you will rethink those scare quotes. I'm not sure how "void of civilization" is an unfair label for what is described in those books.

There were white (mostly Irish) inner city areas with a complete void of civilization, such as old southie, but those areas are less prevalent these days. That said there is lots of degeneracy among the white population in some areas too. I'd call those areas more of a partial void of civilization rather than an utter void of civilization.

Only .7% of those in prison are there for marijuana possession as their only crime - https://www.ncjrs.gov/ondcppubs/publications/pdf/whos_in_pri... And among those possession could mean as much as 100 pounds. The idea that our prisons are full of people who were just smoking pot in their own homes is ludicrous. Whatever our views on whether it is sane to make marijuana illegal, locking up pot smokers is not the cause of mass incarceration.

I don't understand how no one talks about the systemic, generational poverty that a large proportion of the US black population lives in. It's just incomprehensible to me how people can't see how this leads to crime.

Because there are lots of instances of people living in deep poverty without killing each other at ridiculously high rates. Most people in China or India are more materially deprived than those living in the American inner-city, yet the neighborhoods there are much, much safer. Philadelphia in 1890 was much poorer, and much more unequal, yet the homicide rates were 10X lower. Also Edwardian England is a compelling counter-example. Read "The Classic Slum" by Robert Roberts. British society around 1900 was massively unequal and lots of people were desperately poor. But their homicide rates were 100X lower than the rates seen in the contemporary ghetto. The poor working class areas of England during that period had intact families, schools that provided discipline, strict policing, and strong institutions.

We are a savage species and crime is the default. What prevents crime is civilization. What you see in the black inner-cities is an utter void of civilization.

I feel like you're ignoring a whole host of variables with a reductionist statement like "they commit more crimes proportionally". First of all, how do you compare what "more crimes" is proportionally? Different countries have vastly different definitions of what constitutes a crime, and further, different penalties for those crimes.

Robbery and homicide are the two most clearly defined and well reported crimes. Robbery because the victim can see the offender, and has an incentive to report it to get the goods back. Homicide because it is very hard for the police to ignore a body.

* According to surveys of robbery victims, the offending rate of blacks is 6 times higher than that of whites. http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cvus06.pdf

* According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, homicide offending rates for blacks are 8 times higher than for whites.

The proportion of blacks in prison is not at all out-of-line with the proportion of serious crime committed.

"Why is prison even considered for young people?"

Here are some crimes I've seen in the news:

* A man was shot and killed during a robbery while he was getting robbed. He begged for them to not shoot him and they put one more bullet in his chest. The perps were 15. http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Arrest-Questioned-...

* A kid at a local school was gang beaten by other students, had teeth knocked out, and was concussed. He was beaten because of a "mistaken identity" Here is a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjC7yd1OaAk

So what should be done in the case of these offenders? If not jail, then what? Clearly these perpetrators are too dangerous to coexist in civilized society. So there has to be some form of punishment, and some form of separation. I would be ok with sending them to work on a farm instead of prison, but I'm pretty sure that others would describe that as being "forced labor camps" and would rail against that too.

I thought those movies were "sweet nerd girl gets the hot guy by being secretly hot"?

There were those too, there were both types of movies.

You seem to have some very absolute beliefs (eg. Women are attracted to strength and command; crying is in fact a symtom of weakness, etc. etc). How do you justify them?

A bunch of life experience; trading stories and confessions with male and female friends over drinks; reading lots of books, ranging from bios and famous literature to books by dating coaches to books on the science of genes and evolution. My statements were slightly blunt and simplified. But I think that as broad generalizations, they are pretty bloody obvious if you just pay attention in life.

Seriously. The amount of "2+2=5" type writing in the New York Times is truly incredible.

should have never been a male/female differentiator.

Sorry, you'll have to take up that one with the big guy upstairs. The truth is, if you cry, women will be less attracted to you. They will think you are nice and sweet and they will laud your ability to show your emotions. But they will not want to f--k you. Women are attracted to strength and command.

Crying is in fact a symptom of weakness. Your brain only sends you the crying signal for things that are outside your control - a death, a failed harvest, getting fired, getting dumped, etc. Crying is the programmed tactic for woman and children who can only get what they want by convincing someone stronger than them to help them out.

I agree that TV/Movies are a terrible way to learn how to be a man. The worst for me were the sweet-nerd-guy-gets-the-hot-girl-by-being-sweet movies of the 90's (Can't Hardly Wait, Ten Things I Hate About You, etc). That never happens in real life and messed me up. The genetics of attraction have not changed in the past few hundred years, so it makes no sense to keep changing the messaging.

As an American, I've sometimes been bothered by the use of thank you. It is fine as a pleasantry at a restaurant. But it always felt odd coming from a boss or from the company CEO. I think to myself, "I didn't do this piece of work as a favor to you, I didn't because you are paying me and you told me to do it." It is interesting to read that this view is more common in other cultures. I also dislike putting "thank you" in an email, before they have agreed to do the favor or task. It feels very presumptuous. Am I crazy or do other people feel the same way.

What makes a white neighborhood more "nice" than black neighborhoods, outside of the crime rate or the people that live there? Why is Roxbury/Dorchester in Boston "less nice" than Saugus? Dorchester has great homes, near a nice park, has great access to the subway that goes downtown. Why is 50th and Baltimore in Philadelphia "less nice" than Norristown? 50th and Baltimore has great parks, great homes, great public transit access to downtown. If it is the people that live there that make a neighborhood good or bad, than to blame segregation or red lining for bad neighborhoods is to beg the question.

Also Edwardian England is a compelling counter-example. Read "The Classic Slum" by Robert Roberts. British society around 1900 was massively unequal and lots of people were desperately poor. But their homicide rates were 100X lower than the rates seen in the contemporary ghetto. The poor working class areas of England during that period had intact families, schools that provided discipline, strict policing, and strong institutions.

They used to have a lot more control, now barely any. Hence the rising illegitimacy rates across the board, for all races.

Shared environment still matters a lot. One father has a limited impact on his own daughter. But if the community has lots of fathers, all telling their daughters the same thing, and so your daughter has friends who all view it as low-status to have children at 16, then she will be a lot more likely to wait on having kids until marriage.

"To argue that what culture they have is simply handed to them by the "blue tribe" liberals is shockingly ignorant and condescending."

I will not deny the charges of being condescending and privileged, though personally I would describe myself as being in advantaged position and having a sense of Noblesse Oblige. I do not appreciate the name calling on your part.

I will not admit to being ignorant, as I am both well-read on this issue and have considerable personal experience. To think is to generalize; to think is to take the raw data from the world and frame it in patterns that make sense. There will always be imprecision in so doing. There will be mistakes around the edges, or places where the point was not phrased perfectly correctly. If you start calling me names every time I make an imperfect generalization, while I am trying in good faith to explain the core dynamics the best that I can, then we cannot have a productive conservation and this will be my last comment.

"Never evolved an indigenous culture? You've heard rap music, haven't you?"

Well, you are underestimating the role of white (liberal voting) producers and merchants of cool in the creation of hip-hop culture, but that is beside the point. Music is only one tiny part of culture.

More important aspects of culture include: messaging about what makes a good life, norms, mores, institutions, messaging and narratives about how to be successful, narratives explaining the way things are and how to deal with problems, etc, are the important part that I am talking about. And yes, there is some indigenous norms that have arisen, and hip-hop culture is more than music. But this culture is very, very recent, and it takes a long time for a culture to evolve to be pro-social and pro-civilization. Hip-hop culture is similar in some way to the honor culture and feuding culture of the old Scotch-Irish, medieval Europe, Homeric Greece, or many other primitive cultures. But the culture messaging and narratives coming down from blue tribe controlled schools and from ministers are very, very real and give a very flawed view of how the world actually works. And that messaging matters a lot when there is the absence of positive role models in the form of people building their own businesses and making it on their own.

I am quite aware of the history of segregation, red-lining, etc. But these do not explain what is going on. Every ethnic group is segregated. That is the definition of an ethnic group. Segregation doesn't explain why black ghettos have so much more crime than the Jewish or Chinese ghettos of old.

"The theft of wealth accumulation via property values and rent is far greater than the petty crimes of burglary and mugging that justify the police state."

You are going to explain yourself, because this is quite backwards.

There were indeed attempts by the WASP's in charge of the American cities to do slum clearance and move blacks out of their existing neighborhoods into the neighborhoods of working class ethnic poles, Irish, and Jews, who did not have the political clout to defend their turf. This has been written about extensively in books like "The Slaughter of the Cities" or "Canarsie".

However, the WASP's plans did not work out at all like intended. In some cases, blacks were pushed out of great real estate to slightly worse real estate. For instance, in Boston, some blacks who lived where the Prudential now is were pushed out toward Roxbury and Dorchester. But the bulk of the action was in blacks moving up from the south, who pushed out working class whites in neighborhoods like Roxbury and Dorchester. If you look at most cities, blacks live in great real estate from a location point of view - it is an easy commute to the central city, often near parks like Fairmount park in Philadelphia or Franklin Park in Boston. I don't know by what metric you can blacks in the Philadelphia area have the worst real estate. Now, the property values are very low. But that is because of the crime. By definition, any real estate occupied by a high-crime tribe is going to have low values, since people don't want to live near crime. This hardly constitutes left by white people.

Your formulation of blue tribe welfare-for-votes versus red tribe police state is entertaining to read, but it is simplistic to the point of being seriously wrong. Look at the deeper issues.

I have read dozens of books and hundreds of articles on the subject, ranging from the very liberal like the "New Jim Crow" or "When Work Disappears" to the more reactionary like "Slaughter of the City." I have spent years living near ghetto neighborhoods, and doing on-and-off volunteering in these neighborhoods. To think is to simplify, thinking is the act of condensing the raw data of the world into patterns and models that we can use. If you have a better model of what is happening, or can make improvements to my model, then make the argument. But I once believed the conventional segregation/red lining/de-industrialization caused all the problems hypothesis, and I now believe that hypothesis to be seriously wrong.

Lack of basic financial literacy is endemic among the poor, and contributes to the ongoing poverty. It's also endemic among black entrepreneurs. He is also working on a side business as a financial advisor and investment counselor for wealthy black individuals. They often invest very poorly, because they distrust the white-dominated financial industry - and for good reason, given the century-long tradition of outright theft and victimization.

While I wish your friend luck, this goes back to the question of intelligence. The deep problem is that someone of 130IQ will always be able to steal from the person of 80IQ. The stealing can take many forms - unfair financial contracts, convincing that buying Nike shoes will make them awesome at basketball, convincing them to vote for politician X, where politician X then funnels money to his own cronies. I'm not sure what can be done about this. It is a very hard problem. I don't know if history has an example of systematic, long-standing, altruism between ethnic groups.

It's a structural issue and is very hard to fix. Men, everywhere, do what is needed to get sex. If women and the institutions of society do not require a commitment from the man in order to have children, then men will not give such a commitment. Why would they? But traditionally it is the father who restricts access to his daughter, or trains his daughter not to open up so easily. So fatherlessness begets fatherlessness.

"The family structure breakdown among the poor is directly, painfully correlated to the high incarceration rate. Absent fathers are absent because they're in jail, or expect they will be sooner or later, or because they're ashamed because they are unable to provide for their children."

The Moynihan report decrying the break down of black families was released in 1965, before the drug war, at a time when incarceration per crime committed was approaching all-time lows.

The incarceration rates in America bottomed out around 1973. At that time, about 63% of black and poor persons lived in a single-female headed household. By 1978, with incarceration rates still within their historical range, the rate was nearly 70% (source Losing Ground by Charles Murray). Family structure breakdown came first, it was not caused by incarceration. It is wishful thinking to believe that if all these men were not locked up they would be upstanding and faithful fathers, the problems go far beyond that.

Why is that? Is it because of externally imposed social structure issues (the consequences of racism), or is it because of internal nature (blacks are less intelligent and moral than whites)?

Hypothesis #1: Blacks are the pawns in an ongoing civil war between the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe of American whites. The blue tribe, the left, talks a big game about helping black people, but if you look at what they do, they try to pin all the blame for the plight of black people on lack of education and the racism of the Red Tribe. The blue tribe is mostly interested in using blacks as a voting bank, not on finding the true causes and fixing them. The fixes they do spout, such as education, provide massive wealth transfers to Blue tribe labor unions while doing nothing to fix the problems of broken families and crime. The Red Tribe cares mostly about containment. To the extent they want to fix the problem, it is by funneling money to their own political base, police unions and the prisons. "Tough on crime" attorney generals care a lot more about big drug busts and crack-downs on gangs than on the kind of beat policing that would prevent the crime in the first place. Note that this civil war has been ongoing for 200 years, and turned into a hot war a couple times, once in 1860, again in the late 1960's.

Also, because ghetto blacks never evolved their own indigenous culture, what culture messaging they receive comes through the Blue Tribe institutions. The official story in these institutions is that everything good comes from the government. The story of U.S. history as told as government becoming more progressive, a great president is a president who made some new program to help people. This contrasts to my own upbringing. Growing up in a white suburb, most of what I learned about life came from watching my family and neighbors, where you had lots of crusty older guys serving as role models in how they built their own businesses, did work on their own homes every weekend, took care of their family, etc. I didn't learn right or wrong from school, it came from my mom, family, and peers. School was anarcho-tyranny and Lord of the Flies, even in my wealthy suburb.

Thus in all, the Blue Tribe cultural messaging discourages the black communities from self-organizing to figure out their problems on their own. The Red Tribe policing also prevents this. Potentially, if gangs were allowed to fight it out without any interference, eventually one gang would win and they would set up their own government. But there is just enough policing to prevent that from happening. So the whole community is caught in a trap. Alternatively, the police could seek out the good guys in the ghetto, there are good guys, and deputize them as local officers, who could walk beats and police the street. But the Red Tribe police unions would likely hate this, as there is no way they could pay those officers union wages, it would be seen as taking away from union jobs.

Hypothesis #2: The genetic hypothesis. The evidence for this has been covered elsewhere, for example https://liberalbiorealism.wordpress.com/2009/09/13/first-thi... and https://liberalbiorealism.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/the-likel... and https://liberalbiorealism.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/the-vice-... and https://jaymans.wordpress.com/jaymans-race-inheritance-and-i... and http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_natur... For my own part, if you hold a "preponderance of the evidence" standard, then I would say there is more evidence on the side of there being significant genetic difference in average IQ. I avoided this conclusion for a long time, I did not want to believe it, but I think that avoiding the truth will only make it harder to deal with these problems. I do think that the lower average IQ this makes it harder for black ghetto populations to figure out how to build localized institutions to enforce rule of law, and it makes it harder for these ghetto populations to work around the dysfunctions of the broader political institutions. Also, making the problem worse, is that the most intelligent 20-30% of the black ghetto population escapes the ghetto and lives elsewhere. So the ghettos are continually stripped of the human capital needed to make their local institutions functional. For instance, I was reading on one site that the average IQ in the black ghettos of Baltimore is 75, which is stunningly low.

I don't think that identifying the problem of "lack of self-policing" is blaming the victim, it is just identifying the proximate cause. I don't think blame is constructive framing for fixing anything. My goal is simply to get the truth out there, and it will be up for people working locally to figure out fixes, based on the hard realities of the situation. I certainly don't think that finger-wagging at black people saying "you need to self police" is going to fix anything. But we do need a sort of "five why's analysis" for what has happened ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys ), so that we can fix things. Too often in these debates as soon as you get to one cause that can be pinned on the other tribe, the analysis stops and the blaming begins.

There is a final dark implication to ponder, that neither tribe talks about. Many of these ghettos are actually in prime real estate. South-central LA and Oakland have wonderful climates. Brooklyn, Anacostia, etc, are highly proximate to lots of great jobs. If the crime problem was actually fixed, blacks would be pushed out of these neighborhoods by gentrification very quickly.

I don't really have any great solutions myself. The red versus blue tribal war needs to end. The only way these problems can ever be fixed is at a local level, by people who care about the problem and who are close to the problem. Having outsiders moralize or use these issues to score political points just makes everything worse. But even then, a happy fix is unlikely.

Well, in a "wealthy" community, generally the police are members of the community. They live nearby, go to the same schools, etc. So all policing in a sense is self-policing. There is much less of a sense of the police being the "other", and vice versa, the police have less of sense that the population is all "others" and all "savages". When you are an outside police force, you only deal with the criminals, so you it becomes your sense that the entire community is criminal.

Also, I put "wealthy" in scare quotes, because this dynamic also applies to areas like Chinatown or the Hasidic Jew communities of Brooklyn. These communities are not rich, but have low crime rates and rarely involve the police in their disputes, they mostly take care of problems using internal social sanctions.

More generally, "self-policing" means problems are nipped in the bud early before they escalate to crimes requiring the police, and never have a chance to escalate to murders and retaliation killings. Most "policing" is taken care of by families and parents. Growing up, it was normal for one parent to complain to another parent about the behavior of the second parent's child, and the second parent to enforce discipline on their own children. I cannot remember a single time in my neighborhood where we had to call the police on a neighbor. I cannot actually recall a single instance of crime, such as burglary.

It's not just the Warren Court, the other big problem is witness intimidation and the "don't snitch" ethic makes it very hard to convict people for murder, so drug cases are used as a proxy.

From "Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America":

-----------

This was how Coughlin did his job on many a night. Coughlin couldn’t do much about all the shooters in Southeast who got away with it. But he could enforce drug laws, gang injunctions, and parole and probation terms relatively easily just by driving around and making “good obs”— good observations, cop lingo for catching, at a glance, a bulge under a shirt, a furtive motion of hands. A chase might ensue, and sometimes ended with the cops shutting down whole neighborhoods as the LAPD “airship,” or helicopter, thumped overhead. Coughlin took extra risks to get guns— this was the gold standard.

Coughlin’s methods were guaranteed to look like straight harassment to those on the receiving end. After all, how important was a bag of marijuana in a place where so many people were dying? But Coughlin’s motivation wasn’t to juke stats, boost his department “rating,” or antagonize the neighborhood’s young men. He had seen the Monster, and his conscience demanded that he do something. So he used what discretion he had to compensate for the state’s lack of vigor in response to murder and assault.

This practice of using “proxy crimes” to substitute for more difficult and expensive investigations was widespread in American law enforcement. The legal scholar William J. Stuntz singled it out as a particularly damaging trend of recent decades. In California, proxy justice had transformed enforcement of parole and probation into a kind of shadow legal system, sparing the state the trouble of expensive prosecutions. State prisons, already saddled with sick and elderly inmates, were all the more crammed as a result.

But in the squad rooms of Southeast station, cops insisted that desperate measures were called for. They would hear the name of a shooter, only to find they couldn’t “put a case” on him because no witnesses would testify. So they would write a narcotics warrant— or catch him dirty. “We can put them in jail for drugs a lot easier than on an assault. No one is going to give us information on an assault,” explained Lou Leiker, who ran the detective table in Southeast in the early aughts. To them, proxy justice represented a principled stand against violence. It was like a personalized imposition of martial law.

Leovy, Jill (2015-01-27). Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (pp. 140-141). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Do you really think it's random happenstance that urban blacks get arrested for experimenting with drugs in a way that suburban whites do not?

It's more complicated than that. Police are actually much more tolerant of open-air/street corner drug-dealing in black ghetto neighborhoods than in suburbia. If you read books or news articles about these neighborhoods, you see that the dealing gets ignored for months and months, or the dealers are harassed and arrested and then right back out on the street later in the day. This would never be tolerated the same way in suburbia. Then what happens is that there is a shooting, or a gang war with many shootings breaks out. Neighbors demand that the police "do something." Since the police do not know who is responsible and witnesses refuse to talk, the police take the path of least resistance and lock up whoever they can on drug charges. I recommend the books "Ghettoside" and "Don't Shoot" for more on these issues.

Do you know what Ockham's razor is?

The elephant in the room is that black ghetto communities do not self-police and have a dire problem of particular senseless and indiscriminate murders. For instance, Ghettoside recounted a story of a 13-year-old, black kid wandering through the back alleys of his neighborhood, stumbling across a gang of older youths, who immediately started shooting at him. That is just insane. Completely insane. And the book is full of examples like that, of street shootings that take out innocent bystanders because the shooter couldn't be bothered to verify that the target was actually in an enemy gang.

If a community does not self-police, then there are two equally bad options: 1) outsiders can impose their own policing, which is always going to be fraught, brutal, and mistake-prone. 2) other communities can just try to contain the problem, ie, they can segregate themselves.

I posted this because it is an interesting view, and it was written in 1913 and so a lot the ideas here got picked up and included in ideas of economics since then.

But I do have some major disagreements with the author:

"Credit and debt have nothing and never have had anything to do with gold and silver."

The history goes that originally humans used things like shells and beads to signal debts and obligations ( http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html ). The idea is you need to have some collectible that is very hard to produce or fake, otherwise someone could forge it and fake that you owed them a debt. Overtime, it turns out gold and silver make the best tokens, because they are rare, easily molded into tokens of various size, and are very hard to fake. Then the government makes coins out of these gold and silver, and tries to make the coins the official tender, and sets the value of the coins at premium over the bullion included. Finally, the government tries to debase the coins gradually so it can make money from seinorage.

"Such legislation was, no doubt, due to the erroneous view that has grown up in modern days that a depositor has the right to have his deposit paid in gold or in “lawful money.” I am not aware of any law expressly giving him such a right, and under normal conditions, at any rate, he would not have it"

It would have been news to the depositors that they did not have the right to withdraw the money they put in. If they were not given this right, would they still lend? Part of the problem with banking historically is that there needs to be a clearer distinction between a deposit to a vault and investing in a bond mutual fund. Banks are sort of a hybrid of the two, and the contradiction makes the system break down.

"but there is overwhelming evidence that there never was, a monetary unit which depended on the value of coin or on a weight of metal; that there never was, until quite modern days, any fixed relationship between the monetary unit and any metal; that, in fact, there never was such a thing as a metallic standard of value."

If this was the case, then why didn't the Roman emperors make their coins out of iron? Sure, the face value always exceeded the metal value. But the metal was irrelevant. If the government pushes it too far, people stop accepting the coin, as the author notes in other parts of the essay.

"Money, then, is credit and nothing but credit."

There is a sense in which this is true. It is like one of those optical illusions, where the image flips depending on how you look at it.

But, from the point of view of a clean definition of terms, it only makes sense to call something a "credit" if you are promised something specific in return. If a token has no specific promise, then it is a collectible, not a credit.

Heh. The funny thing is that in a way everything on that page makes a lot of sense. If you take mainstream feminist and egalitarian ideology at its face value, and then you look at how things actually play out in the real world, then something like his masculism makes sense. However, most people when noticing a difference between the ideology and the reality will question the ideology. Other people won't think about it too hard and will accept some rationalization for the contradictions. It takes a special soul to make a reductio ad absurdum and actually completely believe the reduction.

"I hope my question is not too obvious, but when OP says that one will get a "PhD level of education," isn't he missing the fact that the point of a PhD is to do original research, and therefore not just "ingest" knowledge, but actually create new knowledge for humanity"

And furthermore, much of the work and reading material (especially in the social science, not sure about other fields) is really about jumping through hoops, learning the game, knowing the rituals of your particular tribe, and knowing how to cite other academics so that you can properly join the social network. If you are just trying to learn for the sake of knowing, 95% of the readings and the problem sets are irrelevant.

"Personalized learning is, somewhat ironically, far more socialist than it may first appear. You can’t “personalize” technology without building models that are deeply dependent on others. In other words, it is all about creating networks of people in a hyper-individualized world. It’s a strange hybrid of neoliberal and socialist ideologies."

This is off the main point of the article, but I really dislike the equating of creating networks of people with socialism. I am a fan of free markets/capitalism. Markets are all about people working together, building organizations, and trading with each other. Somehow not wanting to allocate resources via a top-down government mechanism has been equated with favoring ulta-individualism, which is not the case for most free marketers I know.

Yeah, I cannot believe the article didn't mention the security implications.