HN user
OK, I believe that you understand the difference, it just didn't seem that way in your original post.
I didn't remember that photo from the 08 election (or even see it in the first place). It makes the skull duggery of House of Cards seem every so slightly less fictional!
I wouldn't say it's overtly racist, but there is a very strong correlation between race, class, and privilege in the Bay Area.
Unlike the traditional American narrative around race (black vs. white), in this one, the privileged group consists of well-to-do Whites, Asians, South-Asians, and other highly educated recent-immigrants, while the underprivileged group consists of ghettoized African American and Latino communities.
These underprivileged groups are segregated physically from the former (in East Palo Alto, San Francisco's Bayview, and East/West Oakland), and are mired in a multigenerational cycle of poverty, violence, and disenfranchisement. However, they constitute a significant portion of the low-skilled, low-paid service labor force.
They reap comparatively little benefit from the economic boom brought on by the tech industry. Many of the arguments here on HN and elsewhere about gentrification in the Bay Area and it's benefits/costs ignore that the situation is layered over a long history of race-based tensions in the area.
I can understand why the confusion may arise due to both groups wearing fabric-based head garments, but most (though not all) Sikhs are of Indian origin.
Their cultural connection is much stronger to South Asia than to the Arab world. Also, many Sikhs do not not wear turbans, so to you or anyone else, they would just appear to be "Indians".
holy metaphors!
You seem to be basing all your arguments on national averages. That data shows none of the variances in life expectancy depending on race, class, region, and income.
Other measures of the social ills correlated with being very poor? In cities, if you are also black or hispanic , a high chance of death by violence. A relatedly high rate of incarceration, often for nonviolent crimes. High rates of children in the foster system.
Just because the averages nationwide are slowly ticking up over time, does not mean that there are not significant populations slipping backwards.
Mobility is far too complex a phenomenon to sum up with a single nationwide "rate". Here's an example that reflects on the role of race in metropolitan areas and commute zones on mobility:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/the-complex-sto...
The authors of the study you cite actually provided some input for that article.
Regarding education, the total "quantity" of education people are consuming seems like a meaningless metric. It says nothing about the distribution of high-quality educational opportunities to people on different ends of the income spectrum. The disparities in access to quality education in many cases are strongly correlated to the income distribution.
Measuring health outcomes is similarly more complex than the broad brush of "total health consumed" that you paint it with: http://www.nber.org/reporter/spring03/health.html http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1088996/
We should care about it in as much as it results in massive differences in basic quality-of-life for large numbers of people.
Quality-of-life here is not defined by the ability buy iThings, flat-screens, and XBoxes, but affording decent education, health care, and a fair chance at upward social and economic mobility, regardless of where you come from.
The greatest tragedy of places like this is that the law abiding population is held hostage by the threat (and exercise) of violence by the dangerous members of their own community - who are relatively fewer in number.
In such circumstances, those who can afford to leave - leave, and those who must stay make the choice to speak out against the situation and put themselves at terrible risk, or stay quiet, and witness the decline of the community.
Agreed with legalization not necessarily reducing criminal behavior. Where I live in the Bay Area, the reduction in the street drug dealing trade (perhaps due to legalized dispensaries, and also the prevalence of smartphones) has coincided with an increase in the armed robbery and burglary rate.
Local police investigators have confirmed that many individuals who have been apprehended for robberies were previously involved in the local drug trade.
Per your statement, how does this article cluster any less with "technology & programming" than the "world news" category you mentioned?
There have long been articles dealing with sociological and economic realities of our time on HN.
It's not about not being careful with your devices. In many places in California, people are routinely having guns pointed at them and their electronics are being taken by force, even when the devices are not being visibly used.
This law is intended to mitigate the escalation in armed robberies for smartphones that is hitting urban areas in California.
Armed robbers are aware that many (most?) people of even modest means are carrying around devices that, once stolen by force, can be sold (probably to a fencing operation) for a few hundred bucks.
The ability to render smartphones worthless if stolen would go a long way toward reducing the incentive to commit these particular robberies, which constitute a large part of the recent increase in California's armed robbery (and by implication violent crime) rate.
Recently in the Bay Area, where I live, an armed robber held up several people at once, and took all the phones ... except a feature phone.
EDIT: wording.
I have a hard time understanding how an self-admitted very wealthy person living in a 2 bedroom Manhattan apartment, differs significantly from the one living in Woodside estate. He's choosing an ascetic life, but the fact is that he can, without stress, afford many of the basics that the non-wealthy struggle to afford.
Middle and working class grown ups with families don't care about hot tubs and parties, but the things they struggle to afford: decent schools for their children, their mortgage, etc, are things that he never would have to worry about. His decision to live in Manhattan with less stuff doesn't change that reality for them, and I question whether it really puts him in touch with their reality.
Bringing up his personal life choice detracts from the valid point that the wealthy can isolate themselves from the concerns of everyone else if they choose to.
And his argument about wealth vs. smarts is attacking windmills ... nobody seriously believes that having more wealth makes you smarter.
Edit: lost second half, re-added. Edit2: wording tweak
This is clearly a slimy attempt to dodge his own company's role in the problems.
He's CEO of a multi-billion dollar tech company, based in San Francisco, with probably more highly-paid employees living in SF than than the companies that run the buses.
If you buy the specious argument that the affordable housing problems are caused by tech companies, and not by NIMBY housing development laws, I'd guess his employees living in SF, by sheer numbers, are doing more to drive up the cost of housing in SF than the others. And let's not forget the the lack of affordable housing is the fundamental issue that the bus protesters are upset about.
EDIT: clarification.
No way. Try once an hour at each stop, only during commute hours.
Edit: I'm only talking about one company. I don't know about the others.
The problem with this argument is that it ignores the basic contract of power in a (functioning) democratic government:
The people, through their votes, lend their power to a government that aggregates that collective power to accomplish larger societal objectives (financing wars, building bridges, educating generations, enforcing civil society, etc), that would not be possible if the maintenance of society was left to everyone's individual will.
Just as valid: peoples votes in elections after 9/11 gave the government power to compromise civil liberties in the name of security.
Does your city have a street sweeping service (which are usually publicly funded by taxes approved by ... votes)? Without one, in an urban/suburban environment, your street would be full of garbage in no time, probably too much for you or other like-minded people to clean up.
Votes aren't a solution for every large problem, but it's far fetched to say that don't have any impact. Much of what we take for granted in modern public conveniences happened because people voted for representatives that in turn supported those endeavors.
Even if the income for the poor and working class has risen compared to generations ago, something that many forget is that absolute quality-of-life for many of them has gotten considerably worse in very important ways.
Examples: violent neighborhoods, failing schools, housing blight and decay, lack of access to open space and parks, lack of preventative health care, lack of access to role models for children, lack of access to healthy foods.
Even if they have a smart phone and a flat screen TV, what do those things mean when you don't have the basics listed above?
I don't think the poor are as upset about differences in income as they are about the fact that they are pushed into, IMO, sub-human living situations.
The real question is, why have we made a high income the price of avoiding these terrible circumstances?
EDIT: Added a summarizing question.