retortio

I'm sorry but I don't take your anecdotes seriously. I've seen too many legitimate uses of police force described as "police brutality" recently to take accusations of police brutality at face value. It seems that people have convinced themselves of police brutality through popular narrative and twisted anecdotes.

Removing criminal elements from communities creates safer communities, which is a prerequisite for people thriving.

This is false. Socio-economically disadvantaged areas genuinely have more crime than elsewhere. They require more policing as a result. Without more policing, the crime problems get worse not better. Your sort of thinking has been tried out with disastrous results in cities throughout the US. It is actively harming law abiding citizens living in poor communities.

Policing is not causing crime. People committing crime is causing crime.

And if they accurately predict where crime will occur, they will reduce crime in those neighborhoods. It's likely that they would be able to get good results.

That's like telling someone planning on getting their driver's license to watch The Fast and the Furious as if it has any relation to actual driving anyone encounters.

GP's really should go away. We need specialists and technicians to perform tests when necessary.

Medical training for everyone but surgeons should not take more than 5 total years including undergrad. Arbitrary number, but it should be significantly less time than it takes now.

Technicians who can be trained on specific technologies (x-ray, ultrasound, etc) should be able to handle most cases.

Medical treatment in the US today is a horribly inefficient hybrid of old and new.

In the same genre, I recommend "Countdown to Zero Day" which looks at Stuxnet and Flame and the events surrounding their creation, deployment and aftermath.

Not astroturfing. Technically underpaying is illegal but there are ways around paying an H1-B worker what a US citizen might receive. Title reduction, etc. Even if the total paid is the same, consulting companies that help sponsor workers get a huge cut of the salary so ultimately we have workers being paid less.

One thing to remember is that in many cases H1-B workers are brought over by sponsoring companies which take a huge cut (I know cases of 40% or more) out of their salaries for the service of securing them the Visa. So those salaries might appear to be a certain number but the workers themselves may actually receive significantly less while some rent seeking company stashes the differences.

I know for a fact that in my industry (not in SV) H1-B wages are lower, going off both public data and conversations I've had with H1-B coworkers, many who I consider my friends.

As a side note, I don't blame H1-B workers at all for coming here. They're generally great developers and great people.

H1-B was intended for highly skilled workers that the US had a real shortage of. But now it's just being abused to bring in captive workers that are willing to accept lower wages and worse working conditions than otherwise while crowding out US workers.

What if, instead of bowing to corporate greed which cares not a bit for our country or our people, we actually invested in our own population and trained them to do the jobs H1-B workers currently do.

Scaling back H1-B in this way is the common sense approach. And it benefits other countries too by reducing brain drain.

It's a win-win.

What you're referring to is the codified freedom of speech protection in the Constitution. That's not what I'm referring to.

My post is about the ideal of freedom of speech. There is a debate to be had about the level to which "platforms" should respect that ideal. My position is that relying on the good faith of platforms to moderate speech is dangerous when those platforms are as dominant as Facebook/Twitter/Google are.

So you see this is separate from Article I.

There was a time when the Left was opposed on principle to our lives being controlled by the whims of huge corporations.

Ironically when this monopolistic control extends to our speech and information, the Left has suddenly forgotten its principles. Arbitrary black box moderation is OK because "they're on OUR side".

Well, I know enough of history to know that contenting yourself with a dangerous or corruptible system because it happens to align with you at the present moment is incredibly foolish.

Some of us still believe in the principle of free speech. Its protection from governments and corporations is a solemn duty as far as I'm concerned.

Exactly. Not just that, when the Obama used social media targeted advertising to its advantage it was fawned over in the media.

Cambridge Analytica was targeted purely because they were on the wrong political side, it's as simple as that. Does anyone really think they would have gotten any attention if they were working for Hillary?

Are conservative statements on, say, ending illegal immigration really any more controversial than leftist statements on encouraging illegal immigration? Far more than half of America is against illegal immigration yet the AP, newsrooms across America, Universities, etc refuse to even use the term illegal immigration and recognize the problem for what it is, in spite of the majority of America's agreement on the seriousness of the problem.

It seems that in this case, and in many others, it's really the Leftist position that is "controversial" while the Rightist position is simply not popular among the Leftist elite.

The ones who dictate what is "controversial" or not are often just wielding that term as propaganda for whichever side they support.

Monopolies are able to exist precisely because it's hard to challenge them.

That's why people saying "the free market will sort things out" with regard to free speech are deluding themselves. I'm not willing to wait 50 years for the free market to sort itself out while the ideal of free speech is torn asunder by private corporations.

"On the recent protests, ZeroHedge published an article claiming that protests were fake, while The Federalist published an article claiming the media had been lying about looting and violence during the protests, which were both included in the report sent to Google."

It's a perfectly reasonable argument to make that many mainstream media outlets were downplaying the amount of rioting and looting going on relative to peaceful protests.

Yet somehow it's now WrongThink to even discuss how media may be shaping perceptions through biased reporting?

And now NBC's news-vigilantism unit can tattle to Google and shame them (and advertisers on the Google ad network) into pulling ads because two websites had the audacity to question NBC's narrative?

A healthy society functions best when there are checks and balances on all sides but unfortunately there are some who are using the recent protests and BLM to push Orwellian control of culture and media that is frankly quite disturbing.

As an aside, what exactly is "far-Right"? I've never seen any non Leftist publication described as "Right" so I'm not sure what adding "far" does other than function as a smear on anything Right of the mainstream Left.

Yes.

What's harder: gaining admission to a prestigious private high school that costs $50,000 a year or getting a few cheap SAT test books, watching some free YouTube videos and practicing for a few weeks?

The point is that the SAT can be practiced for (to a small extent), but the resources necessary to improve one's score are cheap and widely available. It's one of the most equitable aspects of college admissions we have.

Ah, those pesky standardized tests.

Sure they're the hardest part of admissions to game and are a major part of establishing an even intellectual playing field for applicants, but it just looks so bad when we discard a much higher proportion of qualified Asian applicants than qualified applicants from other groups! We were even sued over this issue and the suit is going to appeal!

And we're trying so hard to increase the numbers of admitted applicants from other groups but their standardized testing scores just aren't up to snuff...

I know! Let's just get rid of the tests! Then we can enforce whatever arbitrary (and race based) standards we want without annoying complaints that we're discriminating against qualified applicants.

What's that? By enforcing artificial "race" quotas we're just further dividing people based on race? Nonsense, our humanities department tells us that reifying race and obsessing over it is the best way to achieve a post racial society!

I would expect legacies to have a higher admission rate. They are a subpopulation coming from homes with intelligent parents, likely grew up in intellectually stimulating environments, and were probably focused on the Ivy League before many of their peers had even heard that term.

There is definitely some application boost legacies get simply by virtue of being a legacy, but their applications are probably quite strong in general. So it's unlikely that dropping the SAT was meant to cater to them.

Exactly.

First of all a distinction must be made between legacies and big donors. Legacies are often dismissed as getting in only because of their legacy status, but I'd wager that their grades, test scores and other accomplishments put them on the admissions bubble already. Dropping the SAT isn't going to help Harvard let more of them in because they're probably doing quite well to begin with.

Donors' children may have more wiggle room with their grades and scores, but they're a much smaller population than legacies and the idea that Harvard is going to drop standardized testing just to marginally increase the numbers of donors' children they can let in, like some nefarious plot to marginally increase donations, is laughable and culturally tone deaf.

Harvard administrators have no interest in drastically increasing the number of legacy or donor students. The admissions rates for those groups have likely been static for decades.

Harvard administrators do, however, have a huge interest in increasing black (and to a lesser extent Hispanic) admissions rates. This is made much more difficult by standardized testing scores.

In fact much of the stated justification by the schools and other intellectuals for dropping the tests is that it discriminates against the poor and minorities, which is ironic because it is one of the factors of admission least correlated with wealth and also because many minority groups do better on the test than the overall test taking population.