poster123

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.

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.

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.

Because there is a lot of political correctness in the tech world?

Then the quoted sentence in the article is off-topic.

In general, the NYT is trying to build a case for discrimination based on flimsy evidence of discrimination, as I pointed out.

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."

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?

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."

According to the article, violent criminals, such as a "fugitive murder suspect", have been apprehended using facial recognition technology. It is not clearly dystopian to me to have a society where criminals are always caught -- it depends on whether the definition of "criminal" is good or if it just means someone who criticizes the government.

Where does this basic income come from? If everyone is entitled to a basic income as a matter of right, that means others must be coerced into handing over the fruits of their labor. When the government no longer serves to defend people and their property rights but becomes primarily a means of redistribution, I think it loses its legitimacy.

Since lions kill to eat, their killing is not "wanton". By wanton I mean just for the fun of it.

I strongly disagree. I am atheist but have no doubt that wantonly killing people (or for that matter, animals) is morally wrong. Empirically, I don't think atheists are much more likely than theists to commit crimes.

According to many religions, there are many kinds of consensual sex that are morally wrong. Is every person who believes in the teachings of such a religion a bigot?

I think the discussion in the article of how to define perversion is interesting. Nowadays it is difficult to say that certain consensual sexual practices are morally wrong without being condemned as a bigot.

The atrocities of the first nations against white settlers should also not be whitewashed.

Papers by Balkanski, one of the co-authors, including the one discussed, "An Exponential Speedup in Parallel Running Time for Submodular Maximization without Loss in Approximation", are at http://ericbalkanski.com/publications/ .

White Americans progressively pushed the American Indians off of their land, and in reaction, there were many cases where the American Indians responded by slaughtering the families of white American settlers -- not just the men but non-combatant women and children. So one can see why many white Americans did regard the American Indians as "merciless savages", and also what caused the American Indians to behave as they did.

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17440931 .

I agree that Matlab has a right to be paid for its product, but it is still nice to have a free alternative.

A C++ that broke backward compatibility would force many developers to go through the "weird mess" of their code base making corrections. I think that C++ standards committee should not break working code and that people who value a cleaner language should try another language or decide on a subset of C++ that they will use.

There are a lot of engineers and financial quants using Matlab, and the Octave project makes a lot of that Matlab code usable without an expensive Matlab license.

The vast majority of Americans oppose open borders, and there is nothing inherently wrong with providing services to the government agency that enforces our immigration laws.

For each course on a transcript, the average grade earned should be shown, so that the reader can adjust grades earned for easy or harsh grading. It would be nice to see the average SAT or ACT score in the class too, to see if the "harsh" or "easy" grading is just a reflection of the quality of the students. Put this data in a csv file that employers could download, and I think smart employers would use it.

The book "A Probabilistic Theory of Pattern Recognition" by Devroye, Györfi and Lugosi is available from the site of Gyorfi at http://www.szit.bme.hu/~gyorfi/pbook.pdf .

Thanks for the recommendations. Devroye wrote several books, and I assume the one being mentioned is "A Probabilistic Theory of Pattern Recognition".