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occam

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Secret language 17 years ago

"Top of mind" doesn't quite sound native to me. The use of the ampersand like that seems Indian too. Finally the exclamation point is slight evidence.

He has described symptoms well, but his explanations only make sense if you ignore other immigrant groups. Latin American immigrants come from similar range of poor, politically unstable backgrounds, yet their children aren't being driven to academic excellence by their parents. In fact, instead of outperforming the white American natives, they substantially underperform them. Why the difference?

Let me give an answer: it appears to be genetics. Why else are the very different experiences of mainland Chinese, Chinese Hong Kongers, Chinese people from Taiwan, Chinese people from Singapore, Chinese people from Indonesian and Malaysia resulting in only minor differences in average outcomes in the USA?

Secret language 17 years ago

OK, but to be fair to MS, this appears to have been written by a nonnative English speaker. Indian, I think. So there's another factor at work.

I have a hard time believing this about Australians:

"...Madam made me work from 6am to 1am every day, with no day off. I was exhausted and pleaded for a break, but they just shouted: 'You came here to work, not sleep!' Then one day I just couldn't go on, and Madam beat me. She beat me with her fists and kicked me. "

I wasn't France in WWII, I was Britain.

Off topic: actually France and Britain attacked and declared war on Germany. So probably neither works as a metaphor for a victim of bullying.

That doesn't explain why west Africans are so strong at sprinting but very weak at distance running, while east Africans are the opposite (dominant in distance running, very weak sprinters), nor why whites are somewhat competitive in the middle distances but not sprints and long distances.

Who is killing slightly controversial comments here? What's wrong with the following dead comment?

They have tried this extensively. Inner city block grants, subsidizing business, etc.

The idea that you can 'fix' another person's neighborhood is equally as racist as the policies that caused blacks to concentrate in those neighborhoods in the first place (they were chased out of the countryside in the KKK era and left with few alternatives to the city). What if the government started offering grants to 'fix' your neighborhood? How demeaning that is, and how absurd! As though subsidized bike shops and coffee shops are going to pressure crack dealers to go away.

As for the police patrols and condemned properties, do you think that there is a functioning local government in these areas? Look at DC and Detroit! The local city government is so corrupt that they can't even provide basic services, or basic levels of non corrupt policing, much less an effective attempt at crime reduction. On my way to work in DC a few years ago I would see the same police officer asleep under the same overpass every single day. This was right next to the highway, so maybe 2000 people would see him every morning, and yet he would sleep away, sometimes with his face pressed on the drivers side window. Do you think a bagel shop can fix that!?