Oh sure, it's okay for you to insinuate violent revolt if the government tramples on your rights, but a black guy follows through and suddenly it's too far?

I think that's just a more detailed description of what I was referring to. What needs to be done is putting serious effort and resources into fixing these issues. It seems like, at best, people are happy to say, "Hey! I found the racism!" and leave it at this. I think apathy toward minorities is probably far more harmful than latent racist attitudes.

What really irritates me about the Democratic party is that they will pick up the back vote by paying lip service to the passing popular complaints of black people, and then put them at the bottom of their to do list. As if playing statistical games with affirmative action is a meaningful solution to anything. I think the opinions expressed by the black community often don't make a lot of sense, but I sure as hell get why they are pissed off.

****ing christ

Yeah, because mainstream analysis of complex cultural problems is always perfectly on point.

But hey, you get to climb up on your high horse without meaningfully engaging in the discussion! After all, that's what black people are for; to provide a moral high ground for white people to appropriate.

Obviously the culture is the problem. The best way of avoiding that is to remove these poor minorities at a young age from their destructive home lives so they can be properly educated and immersed in civilized culture.

We can put them in a sort of school, which doubles as a residence. A residential school, if you will.

Are you mistaking me for someone else, who's said things in this thread previously??

So a man was wounded in the leg by a police officer. No fatalities, but the whole situation is an utterly confounding example of what can happen. It's just baffling to think that firing those shots at that man would occur as the appropriate course of action to anyone, let alone an officer supposedly trained for these things.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/21/florida-police-shoot-black-man-lying-down-with-arms-in-air

Also:

HILTON NAPOLEON

Blue lives matter

Hey, so Wookie06 I have another question about movement Republicans.

You all hate wasteful unionized government jobs, where incompetent people hide in the bureaucracy where they can never get fired or punished, right? Well, but y'all also seem to like the police an awful lot, so I was wondering how you decide which unionized government jobs are good and which are bad.

Here's a fun update for you guys:


Police Union representative announced today that the officer was actually trying to protect Charles Kinsey from his autistic patient, but missed and hit Kinsey instead. Of course, the Union rep forgot to explain why they then handcuffed the person they were trying to protect after shooting him....

Cops be coppin', always lying and covering for their bros.

Or just stop criminally under-funding schools in black majority areas just because they are poorer. That could help too. But maybe that's crazy talk.

The two things that attenuate educational attainment are, in order, parental involvement and classroom disruptions. School wealth and teacher quality are statistically insignificant once you account for the former variables. So, funding distribution is certainly unfair - after all, inner city rentiers are probably not paying enough property tax to keep the local schools staffed, and federal funding is based on results which are guaranteed to be worse at these schools - but improved funding isn't going to change things materially.

Our time and money would be better spent making the world a better place to live. Nuclear family bonding correlates with an even population gender balance, adequate free time available to both parents, the lack of major stressors, and positivity about country, community, and the future. Families who are closer spend more time together, and talk more together, which has a positive effect on language skills, social skills, and educational attainment.

Unfortunately, western governments and labor markets are actively working to undermine all of those things.

The fun thing is, these forces are even starting to tug at college-educated whites.

By the way, try googling "residential schools", because it sounds like you thought I was being serious.

Edit: i.e. Trying to "fix culture", even if well-meaning, is fated to cause more sadness and misery than the status quo, and in practice is tantamount to genocide.

I was suggesting that as a starting point. I fully agree on the other points as well. Teacher can only do so much, but throwing the only teachers who are willing or desperate enough to take a dangerous 20K$/yr job isn't doing everything we can.

We spend so much on social safety nets that only allow the problem to sustain itself. They are like a 1000$ car that you spend 6000$ in repair bills to keep running. If we could be a little less cheap for a decade, a well thought out system could significantly reduce what we spend on safety nets. We'd see a massive GDP and tax receipts boost is blacks had a similar level of economic attainment as whites. A well run social safety net should make itself obsolete, and if it isn't doing that, you either aren't investing enough into it, or your are doing it wrong, or both.



No, I understood the reference. My point is that we can take steps to solve the problem with out trampling on Constitutional rights, and destroying families. Collectivizing child rearing has always failed catastrophically. "Fixing a culture" is necessarily an indirect process that requires patience. You can provide opportunity, but you can't force people to take it.

You can't just treat the poor like perfectly capable people who've been screwed over by the economy. If you are raised by a single mother in a bad neighborhood, you can't just "get a job". You need a social program that teaches those important life skills that they missed out on. These things take time and investment. If you want to reduce welfare spending, you have to have an actual plan to make people self-sufficient.

You don't understand. All evidence suggests that your idea is pointless: better funding and teachers will not reduce classroom disruptions, or increase parental involvement, and those are the key obstacles to educational attainment. Prior studies have shown, for example, that private school students perform better because rich kids are less disruptive and have parents with more free time. The improved teacher quality literally does nothing.

And reducing social safety nets is a goal because...?

You know what would cause a much bigger GDP and tax receipts boost? Making executive compensation by dilution illegal again, which is straight up stealing money from investors to line their own pockets. Making stock buybacks illegal insider trading again. Slapping down Delaware until shareholders can successfully sue to replace the thieves and liars who run their companies again. Stop using monetary policy to suppress the natural inflation rate, letting capital prices rise and encouraging companies with savings to invest them or lose them.

Giving blacks and poors a runway to either fly or die isn't going to do ****.

Clearly so

Why is cutting welfare a goal, again?

Republicans are against welfare, and I don't mean excessive spending.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-police-gear-exclusive-idUSKCN1012KW

Nice, Obama is considering lifting a ban on military gear for the police due to Dallas.

C'mon, Pasco. You're in the army now, use the right words. Let me translate that from union gangster:

"A grenade launcher can also launch chemical weapons for area denial."

It's not a magic bullet, but hiring people who are trained to deal with those kinds of situations and their parents, could be helpful in conjunction with other programs.



Because if fewer people are using the safety nets, it means fewer people are impoverished, and there is more money for everything else. This seems so obvious, that maybe I'm missing your point.



Improving the overall economy isn't going to address inequality. That's what the republican's strategy always is, but the poorest people have the least to gain from economic improvements. They have no capital, and they will be the last to get hired. Especially in an economy that is driven by skilled labor.




Um, see previous statement. That's like asking why increasing GDP is a goal, or reducing poverty is a goal.

It's not even a regular bullet. The money that you spend hiring more teachers with specialized training could be just as easily spent to give their parents a guaranteed minimum income, money which would let them quit a job and spend more time with their kids. Or it could be spent on improved mass transit, which would shorten their commutes. That would directly result in more parental involvement.

It is not progress to do a random thing for the sake of action. What you're talking about probably won't be productive unless your goal is to create more government jobs.

The actual function of social safety nets is to dampen shocks, not to address long term poverty. This includes injuries and disabilities, major loss of property, and even long-term macroeconomic challenges for the individual like structural unemployment. Social safety nets can help some people "walk it off", but in many cases they indeed must function as a permanent remedy for unexpected events.

Assuming you want them to stay adequate, spending less on social programs would require some unrealistic conditions. You would need a period of full natural employment; if presently less, it will tax the social safety nets we have today, while overemployment today is bought with higher frictional unemployment today and acute structural unemployment tomorrow. You would need no significant technological changes; such changes directly cause structural unemployment. You would need stable demographics; the balance between the healthy working age population must remain constant with respect to the at-risk, infirm, and elderly populations over the long term, otherwise you will eventually face unsustainable surges in either population. And the population must remain stable; economies of scale mean that fewer people per capita are required to provide many goods and services to a larger population than to a small one, so population growth presages decreased demand for labor.

Which is why reducing spending on social safety nets shouldn't be a goal: because, at least as far as the free market is concerned, the current rate of receipt is the efficient rate. But removing the free market as an arbiter would, of course, increase the cost as well.

On the contrary, per capita economic growth is the way to address inequality.[/quote]Actual evidence shows that high inflation and high per capita GDP growth both correlate with declining economic inequality. Under such conditions, labor carries high prices, capital is inexpensive, debt rapidly devalues, and new business starts are perceived as relatively low-risk. By comparison, in our present low-inflation economic environment, new business starts are at a historic low, particularly due to the elevated perceived risk (almost all new business starts were in Silicon Valley; outside of one industry, it is dead earth). Since neither corporations nor individuals are investing anything in increasing economic output, our GDP is naturally stagnant, and with it total wealth.

Republicans are not wrong about growing the economy. The problem is that they are miserably incompetent at accomplishing economic growth. Billionaires do not create economic growth, small family businesses do in aggregate. But both parties are working to make it as difficult as possible for those small companies to open and operate efficiently. That is why pro-business platforms never lead anywhere: because they are not pro-business, they are pro-moneylender and pro-insurance and pro-landlord and pro-everything except for the people who actually sit down and make a widget to sell.

I'm quite ignorant as far as economics, and I have a question about this. So my intuitive reasoning for why billionaires don't create economic growth is this: they spend relatively little, first of all, focusing on keeping the wealth and growing it, which keeps money out of circulation. Secondly, a lot of what they do spend goes into the sort of high-end luxury goods and services that are rather marginal in society, and so the money spent on those ends up not circulating that effectively. Also, billionaire investments favor conglomerates, promoting unhealthy market situations like monopolies and cartels (I realize these are regulated by law, but it's not like we don't get them or at least something very close). Finally, there's tax evasion, which has various effects against growth (this point overlaps pretty heavily with my first point, though). Is this pretty much it? I know you've covered the actual reasons before, but that was back when I didn't yet bother paying attention.

The US start rate is functionally zero. Other than a handful of Silicon Valley wunderkind, most new fortunes are being created by finance or professional managers. The problem is the manner in which those people are extracting those fortunes.

For the former, this'll do to explain it: https://tcf.org/content/commentary/graph-how-the-financial-sector-consumed-americas-economic-growth/

For the latter, it is a different, fairly technical discussion.

Something like 70%-odd of CEO compensation today is in the form of stock grants and options on average. Due to some complicated scheming, this stock isn't awarded from a designated ISO pool (incentive fund) like your stock grants would be, but instead by issuing new stock. Issuing new stock devalues the stock held by all other shareholders, in a process called dilution: it means that every outstanding share represents ownership over less of the whole company, and since the market has decided that a company is 'worth' a certain amount in aggregate, the value of each share declines. To get around this drop in share price, the CEOs order the company to buy back its own shares, imposing an effective price floor on the shares, and increasing liquidity so it is easier to sell the shares they issued themselves.

The net result of this is that professional managers - the C-levels, in particular - skim almost all economic growth right off the top. The rest is taken by finance for management fees, as discussed above. And the result of that is the real owners of the companies, the shareholders, have less money to spend on more productive enterprises, and the companies themselves are starved for reinvestment. Perhaps 35, 40 years ago, all of this was illegal. Stock buybacks, in particular, were considered insider trading by the SEC. Today, though, they are standard practice.

If you ever wondered why companies wither and die when their founders retire, this is why: because professional managers are parasites.

http://fusion.net/story/330672/algorithms-recidivism-loomis-wisconsin-court/

"Racism is okay, as long as a computer says so" - white people in Wisconsin.

No one thing is going to help. Simply dumping money in poor schools is being tried, and it doesn't work. You have to put in the effort to actually understand and address the problem. That's a major task in itself, and any specific suggestions right now are preliminary and speculative.

Fundamentally, you need to give opportunity to people who are willing to take it, and limit the damage propagated by those who don't. I don't think there's much to be gained by paying a basic income to a single mom who is primarily interested partying with friends. But there's a lot of advantage to be found in helping a mom who is willing to put in effort to help her kid have a better future. Coming up with programs that inherently reward initiative would be a good start.





The current market is operating on a society that has a large number of very low quality, low skill laborers. They don't have anything of value to contribute to a developed economy. The lump of labor fallacy tells us that if they had worthwhile, marketable skills, the economy as a whole would adapt.





That's extremely obvious, but declining economic inequality isn't quote the same as declining racial inequality. A really strong labor market will definitely by great for laborers, but it still tends to leave minorities at the bottom. And when the strong labor markets go away you get rust belt urban decay. I think it's going to be difficult to achieve a strong labor market for unskilled labor in a developed nation at this point in time.

I'm not sure I agree with the idea that small businesses are a magic bullet for the economy. Yes, they are driving most growth right now, but large business fill economic needs that small ones simply can't. I think it would be difficult to unravel the difference between policy and social trends here as well.

I think it's a mistake to assume that the strongest impact on the economy right now is our implementation of universal economic policy. I think the first world is struggling to adapt to the massive developing economies in Asia. There's a lot more competition for resources, and economically justifying our massive wealth advantage over historically impoverished Asian nations is difficult.

Very interesting Sam Harris podcast on the topic of Racism and Violence in America with Glenn Loury.

So, I am actually beginning to think that Jon has been right on the money all along about impending catastrophe at the hands of unfettered neoliberalism. Reading the New York Times today, I really am beginning to think that the closest thing we'll ever see to Marxist revolution in the U.S. will probably have a racial spark.

Here's to hoping that I don't get hanged publicly as a result of my vote for HRC!

And why shouldn't it have a racial spark? Neoliberalism is at the heart of the racist policies, whether it is the means by which the policies are implemented, or by accident. The policies that hit black people hardest, like mandatory minimum sentencing and the war on drugs, are handouts to government contractors like the police unions, or like slashing public defenders funding, are the product of uncritical austerity budgeting. The permanent eradication of neoliberal thought is a prerequisite of the social change groups like Black Lives Matter want, whether they understand their true enemies or not.

Fortunately, the only way you'd get hanged is if someone recorded your vote. But the secret ballot is so important to democracy, and nobody powerful would ever subvert democracy that way.

Marx urged that "workers of the world unite".

But I suppose that whites are content to wait until they are ejected from the middle class and become (unemployed) workers, before they unite.

Yeah, we're lucky that nobody is trying to get electronic voting to be used everywhere...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/16/ex-aston-villa-footballer-dalian-atkinson-threatened-to-kill-his/

Let this be a lesson to the British: in a Free Country™, he would haver never gotten into threatening his father with death in the first place, since he would have been curb-stomped and put on a chokehold the moment a Proud Hero™ out there to Protect and Serve™ would have noticed him.

when i turn 35 i am going to run for president and make america england again

New York and London, like a Voltron of corruption.

Some good news today.

Although the rentiers (is that the right word?) are unsurprisingly fighting it:

Yes, that is the correct word.

Good, but only a drop in the bucket in regards to America's terrible prison system.

Donald Trump's double down syndrome is in full effect. He's doubling down on his double down strategy. He hired Breitbart's executive chairman to his campaign! As a CEO! Expect more delusional right-wing conspiracies.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-is-doubling-down-on-a-losing-strategy/

I'm still amazed at how hard the GOP is working to throw this election. They could have run a stained mattress and won, as long as the mattress was 35 years old and made in America.

They do say the fish rots from the head down, although the cancer did start at the bottom (Tennessee), so that the tumors won't be totally eradicated even if a majority of the states follow the feds.

Interestingly enough, the private prison companies are now looking to diversify beyond government prisons (I'm sure they'll do a fine job):

Source: Wikipedia

Donald Trump actually did something smart on the campaign trail. We might have just witnessed the first intelligent move of the campaign.

Which is?

Not making a complete ass out of himself in Mexico.