Honestly, if I saw white text on a CV then I’d likely skip the candidate because I wouldn’t trust them and trust is everything. But if I saw someone being open and explicit on their CV, then I’d at least trust their honesty a little more even if I didn’t agree with the technique.
An admirable ideal, but declarative languages always seem to devolve towards some frankenstein imperative/declarative hybrid. We need to stop going down this path and embrace Pulumi's pattern: use existing general purpose imperative languages to generate a declarative structure. Instead, people try to take their not-mature declarative language and fit a weird general purpose language inside it.
EDIT>> I'm not suggesting that SQL needs to be declarative, only that if a problem space would benefit from declarative structures, generate them imperatively instead.
Pulumi serves as the strongest contender to Terraform when doing IaC (infrastructure as code). Terraform attempts to be a declarative markup language (HCL) but it has a lot of weird imperative quirks due to (understandably) trying to support common complex use cases. In the end they have a clunky custom language that tries to do what general programming languages have done well forever. Pulumi doesn't re-invent the wheel, and lets programming languages do what they do best. Pulumi only really cares that the programming language generates a declarative spec that can be used to compare with your infrastructure. It's the best of both worlds.
> Pulumi only really cares that the programming language generates a declarative spec that can be used to compare with your infrastructure. It's the best of both worlds.
Fully agree! I've called this approach "imperatively generating declarations".
Things might get complicated, though, if you try to nest this approach. E.g. if you imperatively generate the structure of your deployment pipeline, which in turn, contains imperative code to generate your infrastructure spec. :) Or something like that[0].
But that's probably just the nature of the problem.
[0]: I can't come up with a fully realistic scenario right now because it's late. Maybe tomorrow!
I don't really know what you're saying, can you say it another way? "Most realistic evolution"... why is that needed? If the problem is different database engines implementing the SQL spec differently, that's not something that can be papered over with another abstraction without a lot of wrinkles.
SQL does not need to be replaced, in the same way that COBOl never needed to be replaced. It can get the job done, but we have superior tools today. Better abstractions enable more productivity.
That there are N flavors of SQL is annoying, but there are foundational design choices in the language which we are stuck with today. PRQL is quite readable to those with SQL experience and feels like a plausible next language in the space without reinventing paradigms.
To go back to my original post, my main beef is with turning an imperative language into a declarative one. If you've seen enough of these types of languages degrade, you start to see a pattern.
Here's EPIC's statement on why Worldcoin is a "potential privacy nightmare":
>Worldcoin is a potential privacy nightmare that offers a biometrics-dependent vision of digital identity and cryptocurrency, and would place Sam Altman’s Tools for Humanity company at the center of digital governance. Worldcoin’s approach creates serious privacy risks by bribing the poorest and most vulnerable people to turn over unchangeable biometrics like iris scans and facial recognition images in exchange for a small payout. Mass collections of biometrics like Worldcoin threaten people’s privacy on a grand scale, both if the company misuses the information it collects, and if that data is stolen. Ultimately, Worldcoin wants to become the default digital ID and a global currency without democratic buy-in at the start, that alone is a compelling reason not to turn over your biometrics, personal information, and geolocation data to a private company. We urge regulatory agencies around the world to closely scrutinize Worldcoin.
> To validate the quality of the algorithms at scale, their performance was evaluated by collecting 2.5 million pairs of high-resolution infrared iris images from 303 different subjects. These subjects represent diversity across a range of characteristics, including eye color, skin tone, ethnicity, age, presence of makeup and eye disease or defects.
> It is important to note that many health conditions, like cataracts to a certain degree, do not impede iris biometrics. Already today, iris biometrics surpass the inclusivity of other PoP verification alternatives like official IDs since less than 50% of the global population has digitally verifiable identities. However, if the proof of personhood mechanism becomes essential for society, it is important that eventually every single person can verify if they want to. Although not currently established, there could be specialized verification centers to facilitate alternative means of verification for individuals with eye conditions, via e.g. facial biometrics. The introduction of alternative means of verification for World ID could potentially create loopholes.
So eyeless people have to jump through extra hurdles that the rest of us don't have to. The Worldcoin grand misvision is that their terrible World ID would be required to get government benefits, and yet makes it harder for some of the people who most need them to get them.
I don't 'believe in' or support Worldcoin, but I don't think it's realistic to expect any one verification system will serve everyone who needs/wants any given service. Government ID, and even governments themselves don't serve everyone in need.
They're talking about using it for things like government benefits.
The moment they opened that can of worms, they're on the hook for making it serve, at the minimum, everyone that the current government mechanisms serve.
I'm using eyeless people as an example here, because it's the obvious case of people who can't possibly use Worldcoin even if they wanted to. The direct implication today is that blind people would lose their benefits under Worldcoin. If that's not true, then either.
1. Government doesn't actually need Worldcoin's ideas as much as Worldcoin hopes they do.
2. There are workarounds that don't require Worldcoin, in which case let's just use those in the first place.
'Blind' is a much larger category than 'eyeless', and I think you're making the implicit assumption that the government's current identity verification methods work much better than they really do. Just look at the HN post yesterday about the woman whose identity was stolen and used to import 'counterfeit' goods. Worldcoin's system may not be perfect, but having it as an option might have helped in a case like that.
Again, I am not a Worldcoin booster, but I also didn't say it had the same disadvantages. Everything has trade-offs, and Worldcoin has definite advantages against using a small piece of plastic with a bad 2D picture on it.
A government ID is a lot more than that. I have an official ID card that has:
- A bunch of personal identifying data including a unique number (which is as much of a secret as my name or my date of birth)
- A bunch of old-timey security stuff like thumbprint and signature
- An RFID chip containing all this info, ICAO 9303 compliant
- A PIN protected certificate that I can use to sign documents digitally
- Several security measures to make falsifying it very hard
Everybody who lives in this country has one of these, and these features are not uncommon for ID cards to have in other countries. It also has the full backing of the state, which means that if I lose it I can easily get a new one, and is very illegal for somebody to use it to impersonate me, or to create a false one.
I'm not sure what advantages I or my fellow citizens would gain by moving to a distributed system in charge of some foreign capitalists who have never even been to this country.
Maybe, but who knows? The Worldcoin people are making this a problem, so it's up to them to fix it without increasing the burden on people who can't use it as-it.
The overlap GP is suggesting is that society has ways for owners who lose their passports and keys to nonetheless keep owning their stuff. Replacing lost passports and keys is slow and inconvenient, but possible.
Good point, and I'm not saying giving control to this random group makes sense, but at the same time, actual governments seem to be completely failing.
The plan that governments have for resolving the geopolitical and economic problems seems to be WWIII. And then things like WorldCoin, but very poorly implemented, and people already distrust the government so much that those ideas never even reach lawmakers since they know they won't be accepted.
The thing is though that humans may not be able to survive without a truly functional international government. And it also has to integrate with technology since that is ubiquitous now.
There just isn't a way to do it without some kind of identification.
Not trying means we will still descend into a cyberpunk dystopia.
And then after hundreds of millions die in WWIII, we would still end up getting our irises scanned. It would just be administered by the superintelligent Chinese police robots. And we would also all have to learn Chinese and would be subjected to the CCP's social credit system.
The threat is so broad that giving examples is trivial. One that immediately comes to mind:
Imagine science discovers that 99% of people with a certain feature in their iris is likely to develop colon cancer.
The discovery leads to insurance companies purchasing iris data from OpenAI behind the scenes.
A lot of poor people suddenly would get insurance mysteriously declined, or their policies would include a hidden clause in fine print stating that colon cancer is not covered.
sometimes I forget that most people on HN live in uncivilized countries like the USA
In normal countries that would mean we could save thousands of lives by warning people without even having to test them. Since denying insurance because of some random data from a data broker is completely illegal in any civilized country.
It’s completely illegal in the US too. Health insurers are extremely limited in the information they can use to price coverage, and in general they can’t outright deny coverage at all.
Awesome, I love it when my questions are trivial to answer.
But I'm not sure how a company such as OpenAI would connect iris data to colon cancer cases. How would they even access iris data? let alone connect iris data to personal identity? I don't see a way of doing that within the Worldcoin framework.
> Your biometric data is first processed locally on the Orb and then permanently deleted. The only data that remains is your IrisCode. This IrisCode is a set of numbers generated by the Orb and is not linked to your wallet or any of your personal information. As a result, it really tells us — and everyone else — nothing about you. All it does is stop you from being able to sign up again.
> As a result, it really tells us — and everyone else — nothing about you. All it does is stop you from being able to sign up again.
Which means it tells them something about you.
What about this scheme prevents identification through somebody scanning your iris to get your hash on the pretext of a legitimate purpose, then connecting your hash to your actual identity and passing it on?
This seems like a large risk, considering how many companies exist entirely to compile data from disparate databases into a single record. The existence of those sorts of businesses is why there is no such thing as an anonymous unique identifier.
How would they go from iris data to World ID (hash)?
Also, World ID is anonymous because the service one uses it with does not recieve the ID, not because they recieve the ID without one's real name. In other worlds, you can sign up to a service using at once both World ID and your real name and they will still have no way of connecting your World ID to your real name.
Exactly right. Biometrics are more like usernames than passwords. They are on display for all, and immutable. I should be able to change my password. Ideally username too, but not an expectation most sites hold to.
I'd rather not have my username indelibly linked to my identity. for example, I should be able to delegate to my accountant, or let my kids do stuff on my steam account, etc. Not to mention using an indelible ID that is cross-site, meaning i have to use the same username on all suchlike sites and services. The temptation of having that singular id is so great, it is inevitable it will be known to all — including those corrupt governments who will use it for enhancing their power.
I honestly don't see an upside. Combine this with web attestation and I shudder a bit.
>And yet we know perfectly well that there were many people who were vaccinated who did get breakthrough infections and some of those have gone on to get long Covid, but we know that in those breakthrough cases in the vaccinated people, your chance of long Covid is further reduced perhaps by another 50 percent.
As far as I see, they aren't referencing a specific study. But they are clearly making a connection between your long covid chances and vaccination. Does anyone have a link off hand to this data?
i'm interpreting this as: they're making a connection between reduced (but not eliminted) long covid risk after vaccination (compared to a higher risk when not being vaccinated at all).
How do you do science on LLMs? I would imagine that is super important, given their broad impact on the social fabric. But they're non-deterministic, very expensive to train, and subjective. I understand we have some benchmarks for roughly understanding a model's competence. But is there any work in the area of understanding, through repeatable experiments, why LLMs behave how they do?
I'm pretty much certain the cost of training and running large LLMs is going to come down, because it's only a matter of time before truly customized chips come out for these.
GPUs really aren't that. They're massively parallel vector processors that turn out to be generally better than CPUs at running these models, but they're still not the ideal chip for running LLMs. That would be a large even more specialized parallel processor where almost all the silicon is dedicated to running exactly the types of operations used in large LLMs and that natively supports quantization formats such as those found in the ggml/llama.cpp world. Being able to natively run and train on those formats would allow gigantic 100B+ models to be run with more reasonable amounts of RAM and at a higher speed due to memory bandwidth constraints.
These chips, when they arrive, will be a lot cheaper than GPUs when compared in dollars per LLM performance. They'll be available for rent in the cloud and for purchase as accelerators.
I'd be utterly shocked if lots of chip companies don't have projects working on these chips, since at this point it's clear that LLMs are going to become a permanent fixture of computing.
It takes a while to design an ASIC and it hasn't been that long since the hype wave really arrived for these things. I would bet on LLM chips showing up in 2024-2025.
There's also a run on foundries right now which might delay things further. The new foundries in the US being built under the Chips act in Arizona and Ohio won't be online until probably 2025.
Ah that's an excellent point about the foundries, I hadn't considered that. Also, in reflection, I'm being pretty handwavy about the "as soon as it was determined there was real money involved."
Honestly, I'd probably be pretty unsurprised to learn if the time difference between "big commercial interest" and "custom chips appear" is probably pretty similar for both cases.
I would imagine it's a bit like doing science on human beings, who are also non-deterministic, expensive to train, and subjective. Perhaps there's scope for a scientific discipline corresponding to psychology but concerned with AI systems. We could call it robopsychology.
There's a field called Interpretability (sometimes "Mechanistic Interpretability") which researches how weights inside of a neural network function. From what I can tell, Anthropic has the largest team working on this [0]. OpenAI has a small team inside their SuperAlignment org working on this. Alphabet has at least one team on this (not sure if this is Deepmind or Deepmind-Google or just Google). There are a handful of professors, PhD students, and independent researchers working on this (myself included); also, there are a few small labs working on this.
At least half of this interest overlaps with Effective Altruism's fears that AI could one day cause considerable harm to the human race. Some researchers and labs are funded by EA charities such as Long Term Future Fund and Open Philanthropy.
There is the occasional hackathon on Interpretability [1].
Here's an overview talk about it by one of the most-known researchers in the field [2].
Some people (namely the EAs) care because they don't want AI to kill us.
Another reason is to understand how our models make important decisions. If we one day use models to help make medical diagnoses or loan decisions, we'd like to know why the decision was made to ensure accuracy and/or fairness.
Others care because understanding models could allow us to build better models.
Affirmative action shouldn't ever have been a contest with prizes for the most unfortunate. It was sold as a way to fix the wrongs of slavery. Having been enslaved legally in the US is not a race, it's an atrocity.
The reason we should be paying for foster kids' college is because the state is their parent, so it's our responsibility. In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived, and how well-raised they were. There's no clearer illustration of our values than the fact that children who, through no fault of their own, have become the responsibility of the state are treated like unwanted trash. The idea that a society like that could figure out how to ethically treat prisoners or immigrants is laughable.
I agree completely. Something so striking about the situation as well is that on balance, we have a staggering amount of wealth to share with the less fortunate.
Yet these are children, specifically, who deserve every opportunity we can afford them by default. Not “hopeless addicts” or some other group deemed not worth saving by so many of us, but people quite literally the epitome of worth saving. These people need every ounce of reassurance that we care and that they can integrate and function in society. That they deserve opportunity as anyone else does.
If we had to be self serving we could look at it like “each one of these people is statistically far more likely to be a burden on my own children in the future, so a small investment now could save a lot later”, but we seem to fail even in being selfish about it. I find this topic heart breaking.
For me, state wards are one of the four metrics for judging the quality of a country.
Wards of the state: our responsibility, through no fault of their own.
Prisoners: our responsibility, their fault.
Immigrants: not our responsibility, but an indication of how well we can manage our economy. We should be able to put anybody who comes here to work.
Emigrants: we should let people leave who don't want to be here.
The first three are connected because there's no way to sustain providing anything for prisoners and immigrants that you don't provide for regular citizens. Wards of the state are the nation's children; there's nothing that normal citizens get that they shouldn't get. If they don't get anything, normal citizens are getting less than nothing.
What percentage (approximately) of prisoners in the United States would you categorize as "their fault" and not some product of their upbringing/situation?
At the end of the day, and this will be controversial it does not matter.
Prisons should be a place to house people that have been deemed unable to function in society until such time they can (sometimes that is never). This is not necessarily only violence but violent offenders should be the majority, but people that simply refuse to follow the rules of a society also degrade and are a danger to the society over all. We see this today in the way of rampant shoplifting, and car thefts/breakins taking place in some communities.
These are deemed "non-violent" so the offenders are just let go, however once these "non-violent" crimes reach an extreme level businesses close, people stop shopping in the area, insurance companies stop offering insurance, etc etc etc. That is all with out getting into the real psychological effects of having your property stolen and violated in that way.
At the end of the day I am not concerned about their upbringing/situation, I am concerned about their criminality
We've tried it your way for decades - where prisons are permanent storage for badly made humans - and it doesn't work. They fill up, cost the taxpayer and become yet another thing to exploit. Society looks the other way whilst they get mistreated. Obscenities like rape are constant grim realities of such facilities, and organizations like gangs thrive in them too. Recidivism rates are alarming to boot.
The point of prisons, which Americans consistently fail to grasp, given their penchant for cruelty and selfishness, is reform.
That's what "our responsibility" means. We need to take these broken people and try to rebuild them, because they, their parents and society failed them the first time. Not all of them can be helped, but not to try produces what we have now, which is an abomination.
In reality no one has "tried it my way", you have made the assumption I agree with the current prison system, I dont.
I also do not agree that the "reform" we need is simply letting criminals go who commit property crime, or because of the socio/econimic circumstance, or any of the other "liberal" or "left" visions of reform
Today's system is centered around punishment, not protection of society, or reforming people, etc. It is just punishment. The criminal owes a "debt to society". I disagree with this model.
There is a whole host of reforms I would support both to prisons, and to criminal justice over all. However simply refusing to prosecute shoplifting, or other "minor" property crimes is not one I can support.
You're making non-points. California has not effectively deployed various progressive policies. There exists certain people who are intractably violent or cruel and who cannot be healed or changed with the cutting edge of therapy or medicine.
So what?
This knowledge is not a sufficient excuse to give up on the problem. The status quo is unacceptable. That's the key fact.
These are acts that are not aligned with the topic of reformation of prisoners. Critique of claimed progressive acts (acts done by self proclaimed progressives vs those acts aligned with formalized progressive ideology) is irrelevant. If you just want to dump rhetoric, you can make a new submission for that.
Okay, but this logic is explicitly filtered through class in the US context. Some of the most antisocial members of our society are CEOs, politicians, and similar leaders. The damage they inflict on society often far exceeds that by individual acts of violence, fraud, thievery etc. Think about what has been wrought by Sacklers, the people running 3M, or those who led the country into war premised on lies.
Indeed, your example of how urban cores have been affected by wealth inequality and real estate speculation is a great example of this. San Francisco was a lovely city until landlords and real estate speculators turned it into a casino for gambling on housing and office space.
> San Francisco was a lovely city until landlords and real estate speculators turned it into a casino for gambling on housing and office space.
People were complaining about land speculators in SF in Mark Twain’s time. That was literally when the city started growing. So I’m trying to figure out when you thought SF was a lovely city? Maybe during the property bust of the 1990s?
>>>San Francisco was a lovely city until landlords and real estate speculators turned it into a casino for gambling on housing and office space.
before I even begin to address your others points, many I probably agree with we need to stop with this gas lighting narrative.
landlords and real estate speculators are not the villains of the San Francisco of the story. The city government (and the larger state government) is.
From the endless zoning regulations, environmental regulations, and building regulations that make it impossible to build affordable housing, and a decades long process to build any housing at all to the activist prosecutors refusing to prosecute crime in the city, to the "de-fund the police" movement that has put the local police dept at a huge understaffed situation.... Those are the root causes of the problems. not landlords and real estate speculators
You want to have an honest conversation about corporatism I am game, but you are starting out with disinformation and lies so....
> From the endless zoning regulations, environmental regulations, and building regulations that make it impossible to build affordable housing, and a decades long process to build any housing at all
Who do you think it is exactly that demands that politicians enact these laws? The homeless? Renters? No, it’s the landlords and the real estate speculators who are trying to pump up the value of their investments. This is a very simple case of cui bono.
I’m not in anyway spreading “disinformation and lies,” you just seem to have a very distorted understanding of cause and effect. Here’s the order of operations:
Landlords and real estate speculators buy properties -> Landlords and real estate speculators pressure politicians to protect their investments -> New housing doesn’t get built as a result of this pressure -> Cities become unaffordable because of lack of supply -> Crime and homelessness spikes.
I try to avoid propaganda. The fact your authoritative source is the LA Times provides important context as to why you think the things you do
That said your link does not prove your claim, the fact that Newsom is supported by liberal elite is not news, and only 1 of the families in the story seemingly have connection to being landloards
The other were a oil company, a retailer, and 2 owners of hotels, of which all of them seem to be old money with seemingly no direct connection to current San Fran real estate market.
Well let me also tell you that proactively playing the victim and daring people to challenge you is cringey and gross.
I don’t really like our democratic republic setup personally. I would prefer a popular vote based democracy for presidential elections with federal holiday voting and no ID requirements. Same for city elections although the problems on that scale are different.
Well good news, The local elections in San Fran I believe are already your dream.. How is that working out?
I really like our electoral college system, believe we need stronger ID requirements to vote, and believe we need to repeal the 17th amendment returning more power to the states, removing it from the federal government.
I will agree with one of your reforms, that of a voting holiday, though i would prefer instead to just have Voting week, starting on Sunday, ending on Sat, with no state allowed to release results until the next Monday eliminating the 24 hour news cycle on "election day" and eliminating problems like "voting day bugs" or "rain outs" etc. and the constant battle for "news" organizations to "call" an election 2 seconds into the voting
My support for the Electoral College is not due to outcome.
My Support for it is because we are a Union of States, i.e the United States. Our founders rightly believed government is most responsive at the local level, as such they only engineer one 1/2 of 1 branch of the federal government to be popularly elected. I believe this is the correct measure.
Direct Democracy tends to devolve into dictatorship, and we have seen this in American History as we become more and more "democratic" in our processes, more and power power has shifted to the federal government, and as more and more power has shifted to the federal government that power is further concentrated not in congress but in the Executive Branch, and the Administrative State.
So much so today that agencies of the federal government on a whim or executive order can simply establish new regulations that make millions of people criminals, or completely change entire economic markets with no input from Congress or the people, and in fact it takes an act of congress (or worse the Supreme Court) to stop them.
This is a complete and utter bastardization of a republican form of governance.
Eliminating the electoral college further drives us towards a more direct democracy, something I oppose
We've had tons of voter initiatives totally steamrolled by lobbyists in Sactown and SF. We passed a law to restrict rent increases, a couple years later the corporatists got it shut down before it could become a law. doesn't matter if the citizens elect the city government when rich people and rich corporations can come in and literally bribe their way out of anything.
People that really feel this responsibility become foster parents. But saying the state should deal with them isn't taking on that responsibility - at the end of the day actual people need to be their parents. I'm happy to support those people by having taxes directed their way, but the state doesn't get credit for their good deeds.
It’s unreasonable to expect individuals acting on their own to solve social issues. I am perfectly willing to support 1% of the financial needs of a severely disabled child, but in no way willing to step up and provide 100% of the support they need. There are people willing do do so but it’s not 1:1 with the existing need and so it’s simply not an option.
The common US system where foster families receive funds to provide temporary care for kids in the system isn’t parenting it’s a disaster that’s a massive disservice to kids in the system. In many individual cases it works, but overall it also results in unacceptable amounts of mental, physical, and sometimes even sexual abuse.
This is uselessly dismissive and reductionist. I have a special needs child who just hit remission from Leukemia. To feel that the state has a responsibility for those kids I'm now supposed to also take in a foster child?
Your statement reeks of someone who lives in an ivory tower somewhere.
IMO, the state bears the responsibility to structure the laws and regulations to make it easier for regular people to be heroes. Servant leadership is generally not a characteristic of democracies, as politicians need to take credit in order to win votes.
Is it because of a heavy reliance on government, or a general issue that we face when dealing with hard problems?
Put another way, when we don't rely on governments to help with things like this - does that incentivize people to take on responsibility? I suspect not...
> we have a staggering amount of wealth to share with the less fortunate
Many Americans will stop you at that first word. Who is this we you speak of?
If the pandemic taught me anything, it's that to all too many Americans the most important freedom is freedom from strangers' problems. They don't want to see them, they don't want to hear them, and they sure as hell don't want to pay for them.
Now, if THEY happen to have that problem, that's a different story...after all THEY are real people, unlike...checks notes..."foster kids".
America is the most charitable country in the world[1]. But, as evidenced by the parent's comment, there is no shortage of people willing to spend other people's money, and Americans are justifiably cautious of that.
> America is the most charitable country in the world
Maybe double check your link next time?
> The most noticeable change was arguably the United States, which ranked first in the world in giving for the years 2009-2018 but fell to 19th in the world in 2020.
(I also seriously doubt the methodology of this confident ranking of the world's charity based on self reported charitable behavior in surveys, but this was more humorous)
> However, the U.S. was not the only high-level giver to drop. In fact, many countries that landed in the top 10 most charitable countries in previous years slid completely out of the top 20. According to Charities Aid Foundation Chief Executive Neil Heslop, these changes are not a sign that people's willingness to donate decreased, but that their opportunity to donate diminished, largely as a result of pandemic-related lockdowns. Charity-based retail stores were forced to close, fundraising events were canceled, and many elderly charity volunteers had to shelter themselves instead of volunteering.
I think what you will find is that a stunning amount of that "charity" falls within the giver's social circle. My understanding is it includes donations to the giver's own religious organization. Or even donating to a cause once it's touched you personally -- your mother dies of cancer so you donate to a cancer charity. Giving within your own monkeysphere, and being willfully ignorant of everything outside it, is what I am talking about.
As a spot check I googled "turkey earthquate donations by country". The result is a table with US on top donating $185M, followed by UAE donating $100M, Kuwait $68M, and finally the UN $50M.
I’m convinced this is a structural characteristic of America, resulting from the immigration patterns that built the population.
If you look at polls worldwide, most people wouldn’t leave their home country even if they had the choice to emigrate somewhere else: https://news.gallup.com/poll/468218/nearly-900-million-world.... In South Asia, where I’m from, it’s just 11%. Even in sub-Saharan Africa it’s under 40%. Immigrants are the outliers who are willing to leave everything they know behind.
Of course over time there’s regression to the mean, and new communities form here in the US. But most of the US population traces their ancestry only back to the late 19th century or early 20th century. This constant population turnover means there’s a very limited ability to develop the kind of solidarity required to make sacrifices on behalf of strangers in your community.
You're correct, and I don't think this has to be true indefinitely but it's certainly in the DNA of most of North America.
I could go on at length about this. I'm deeply convinced this component of North American culture has contributed significantly to many aspects of decline and general loss of well-being. I won't go on at length of course, I just wanted to say I think you're on point and this feature of a lot of our cultures here is quite harmful.
I think you deserve help as well. This is why I suppose universal basic income, because for someone like you, an extra $1000/month would help tremendously.
Who pays for this magical UBI? Pretty sure you'd have to at some point increase taxes for the very people you're trying to "help" in order to give them back that $1000
Taxing mega corporations more aggressively is one often cited approach, but I agree this doesn’t really provide enough for UBI. 1000 a month to each household would be about 1/20th of our GDP.
Do reparations for slavery even make logical sense? Please cut me some slack here, by the nature of the world we live in, I have not uttered these thoughts to another human being, and they might have obvious flaws. It's tough when you can't talk about ideas out of fear of the consequences.
I think nobody argues that it's a vile, morally repugnant thing to enslave another human being. But that was a long time ago, and all those slaves and the people who enslaved them are all dead.
The descendants of those slaves are now much wealthier and better off by pretty much any metric than their relatives who were not enslaved. How do you make an argument that those descendants are victims in need of reparations? No crime was committed against them directly, and they seem to have benefited from the crimes committed against their ancestors.
I must stress that this is not in any way excusing or justifying the wrongs that occurred. But how would you make an argument for reparations, given how things turned out?
It's true that enslaved people and their enslavers are no longer alive, but the legacy of slavery has left significant and enduring socio-economic disparities between descendants of enslaved people and those who are not. Inequalities in wealth, education, health, and opportunities persist, often along racial lines. These disparities aren't merely coincidental, but have been reinforced by racially discriminatory policies and practices like segregation, redlining, and racial violence, all of which have historical roots in the institution of slavery.
Also the argument that descendants of slaves in America are better off than their counterparts in Africa is problematic because it assumes that the progress of African nations would have been the same without the devastating effects of the Atlantic slave trade, which significantly hindered their development. Furthermore, it risks minimizing the experience of ongoing racial discrimination faced by Black Americans.
The idea of reparations isn't necessarily about compensating individuals for specific harm done to them, but about a society taking responsibility for historic wrongs and making a concerted effort to rectify those systemic inequalities. Reparations could take many forms, including investment in education, healthcare, housing, and economic opportunities for communities disproportionately affected by racial discrimination.
> the legacy of slavery has left significant and enduring socio-economic disparities between descendants of enslaved people and those who are not. Inequalities in wealth, education, health, and opportunities persist, often along racial lines. These disparities aren't merely coincidental, but have been reinforced by racially discriminatory policies and practices like segregation, redlining, and racial violence, all of which have historical roots in the institution of slavery.
This is a fact.
> Also the argument that descendants of slaves in America are better off than their counterparts in Africa is problematic because it assumes that the progress of African nations would have been the same without the devastating effects of the Atlantic slave trade, which significantly hindered their development.
Maybe, don't forget the slave trade enriched tribes inhabiting those regions. It was Africans enslaving other Africans and selling them (at least to my limited understanding on the subject, which may be wrong.)
> Reparations could take many forms, including investment in education, healthcare, housing, and economic opportunities for communities disproportionately affected by racial discrimination.
Why make it about race? Just make those things available to all disadvantaged individuals, period.
> Why make it about race? Just make those things available to all disadvantaged individuals, period.
Because…
> the legacy of slavery has left significant and enduring socio-economic disparities between descendants of enslaved people and those who are not. Inequalities in wealth, education, health, and opportunities persist, often along racial lines. These disparities aren't merely coincidental, but have been reinforced by racially discriminatory policies and practices like segregation, redlining, and racial violence, all of which have historical roots in the institution of slavery.
Parent made the case very plain.
Try a thought experiment: your ancestors were enslaved in America. After emancipation, every generation of your ancestors was subject to both systemic and individual discrimination and violence.
The question is, what would you want done? Do the answers “well that’s all in the past” or “how about these other people though” satisfy? It’s worth thinking about. Personally I do not know what my own answer would be, other than that I would almost certainly be angry and distrustful.
I do know what my answer would be. I don't make excuses or play the victim card or blame my current condition on external circumstances. I accept what has passed, what my current situation is, and try to play the hand I was dealt the best way I can. That's my personality, I don't think that'd change.
I can certainly understand why one would be bitter about "every generation of your ancestors was subject to both systemic and individual discrimination and violence". They have a right to be upset. A lot of people have a right to be upset about a lot of things. I don't think you can jump from that to reparations though.
> Also the argument that descendants of slaves in America are better off than their counterparts in Africa is problematic because it assumes that the progress of African nations would have been the same without the devastating effects of the Atlantic slave trade, which significantly hindered their development.
Slavery in Africa was widespread before the Atlantic slave as well as after the Atlantic slave trade. There's some apologism (interestingly enough, quite similar to Southern U.S. slavery apologism) claiming that it wasn't that bad, but if you look at the actual accounts it could be extremely brutal. Like with the U.S. there was certainly a degree of different experiences, but like in the U.S., that doesn't justify the practice.
In the end it was actually European powers that ended most slavery in Africa, often with a great deal of local opposition ("The End of Slavery in Africa" is a decent starting place if you want to see how it happened in each individual area).
Ethiopia is an interesting example - it wasn't colonized[1], and so slavery there persisted long after it ended in most of the continent. The League of Nations kept pressuring the country to end the practice, but it kept dragging it's feet. It only ended when Italy invaded in the run-up to WWII (it's also interesting as a non-colonized control country when it comes to colonization).
[1] It was conquered by fascist powers for some years, the same as most of Europe.
> Also the argument that descendants of slaves in America are better off than their counterparts in Africa is problematic because it assumes that the progress of African nations would have been the same without the devastating effects of the Atlantic slave trade, which significantly hindered their development
That’s the hight of results-oriented reasoning. The historical norm is that different societies did not progress at the same rate. Europeans got ahead of Africa and Asia in the 1500s-1900s. That’s why they were positioned to engage in things like colonialism to begin with.
But go back a bit further—Britons were about a thousand years late to the Bronze Age. Nobody held them back. It’s just that key milestones of civilizational development aren’t distributed evenly. Because of course they aren’t.
> the devastating effects of the Atlantic slave trade, which significantly hindered their development
It was my understanding that most of the slaves traded were already slaves, so it wasn’t just plundering the continent to kidnap people.
I’m not particularly well studied about this. Am I wrong? What were the effects that hindered the continent’s development? Was it the incentive to capture slaves to trade led to more wars of capture/conquest?
So there's actually a lot of academic debate on the merits of reparations, and exactly what and how much reparations should be.
A very oversimplified pro argument: if it wasn't for slavery, these families would have generational wealth and better social situations. African Americans in the US ARE disproportionately lower wealth/income and this has CLEAR historical origins.
The oversimplified con argument: Okay, but if you come from a wealthy African American family, why should you have a leg up over a poor (or otherwise more disadvantaged) white student? What about an immigrant, who didn't benefit from slavery at all?
Fundamentally there's a huge swath of different injustices across society, and we obviously can't fix all of them at once, so a big challenge in this sort of debate is how you slice the injustices and how you prioritize fixing them.
I don't think it's possible to do that, in general. Anyone can find an injustice if they look hard enough.
I have some ancestors that fled religious persecution in France. Many died. The ones that fled gave up everything. Should I play the victim card and petition France to restore the land my ancestors were chased off of?
History is pretty ugly, I'm sure everyone could find a justified grievance if they tried hard enough.
I think the logical thing is to focus on equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. What things can we do to distribute opportunity more equally in society? Things like free post-secondary education, free health care would seem to be a better use of resources.
you know the reason that we don't have those things is precisely because politicians campaigned on the narrative that black people (welfare queens, etc) would unfairly take advantage of a system like that and they won.
So it seems like you understand what needs to be done but what not what the blocking issues are.
To reinforce your point, those same politicians are fighting against student loan forgiveness. This is telling; to them, only suffering under the burden of non-dischargeable debt entitles you to the same opportunities as a wealthy family.
> A very oversimplified pro argument: if it wasn't for slavery, these families would have generational wealth and better social situations. African Americans in the US ARE disproportionately lower wealth/income and this has CLEAR historical origins.
I'm confused by the pro argument. My known lineage was not enslaved, but my grandparents immigrated with 0$, and my family has no generational wealth and we don't receive reparations.
Isn't being freed from slavery the same as being freshly immigrated with 0$?
Furthermore, there are tons of Asian immigrants that come from a third world country with virtually nothing, but become top earners because of their cultural values of education and filial piety
One could argue that despite being free, African Americans still had to work against racism, unfair laws, and a system rigged against them in many ways. Those are things a white immigrant wouldn't have had to deal with, but black immigrants would have. Is the black immigrant excluded or included in any potential reparations?
The overall precedence is that reparations are paid to the people who experienced the harm, and the reparations are paid by those culpable of the harm. The Japanese who experienced internment were paid reparations by the United States government that took their property. Holocaust victims that had their property stolen were paid reparations by the former Nazis.
By contrast Irish Americans could very justifiably claim that were it not for Anglo oppression, they would be far wealthier. But we wouldn't fine Anglos today to pay Irish Americans. Slavery hits a similar issue, limiting the reparations to the party that did harm is very vague when you're approaching two centuries later. Most proposals for "reparations" aren't anything remotely close to actual reparations. A recent immigrant is assigned as much liability as a descendant of plantation owners. This isn't a reparation, this is a tax assigned without regard to culpability.
The harms from slavery didn't end after the civil war. We had to pass laws a century later in the 1960s to outlaw the racist policies implemented by federal and state govts after reconstruction. The social (and legal) structure of american society has always had black people at the bottom, and until that is fixed then black people as a group are still being actively damaged by the legacy of chattel slavery.
And now you have to start picking which racist policies are worthy of compensation and which aren't. Asians faced the Chinese exclusion act, as well as redlining for example. Will the aforementioned anti-irish and anti-catholic discrimination also receive reparations? And again, how wilp you identify the liable party, or will we just tax everybody?
What injustice? Each of these people have the same rights: those enumerated in the bill of rights. That is justice. If there were economic rights in our system there would be case for calling the status quo injustice but there aren't.
(this isn't to say that things can't be changed, but it would require the adoption of new amendments).
Yes, that is true (I don't know about the exact numbers, but there's no question there's a difference.)
Asian Americans are even better off, but why should they have to pay for reparations? Their ancestors weren't involved in slavery in the US.
Hispanic Americans are also pretty poor (more so than African-Americas if memory serves), but they weren't disadvantaged by slavery, should they have to chip in for reparations?
Southerners were clearly disadvantaged by fighting and losing the civil war, does the North owe them anything?
What about the survivors and next of kin of the soldiers that put it all on the line for their country in Iraq and Afghanistan only to find out the government lied to them and everyone else about why they were there?
Everybody could find a grievance if they look hard enough. Which ones do we try to address?
Honestly, who gives a shit? We are a society, not a bunch of White people and Asian people and Black people and Hispanic people. A functioning society would work to fix those numbers, because it's absolutely a problem that needs to be fixed, not a punishment for being a member of a "successful" ethnicity.
I agree, work on creating a more equal society, with better opportunities for all, instead of playing the game of who's the bigger victim. Because we can all play the victim card, including me and you, and it's just not productive or beneficial to anyone.
I agree exactly. And what about people who’s families moved here in the last 140 years. They surely didn’t own slaves.
And who even gets reparations? If someone’s great great great grandmother was a black slave but every other relative was white, does this person get reparations?
I think the key question is: do reparations actually change anything? You give one generation a 'payout' so the politicians can wipe their hands of the issue, then what, are we back to the same point with the next generation? What about those old enough where the handout won't do anything for them?
How do reparations actually move the relationship forwards? Handing out money does not solve anything fundamentally. They need to focus on understanding and building a positive future for all, which means working towards ensuring legally and policy-wise there is no remaining racial bias or discrimination (equal opportunity for all - not outcome) and working away from holding the grudges of previous generations.
The descendants of those slaves are now much wealthier and better off by pretty much any metric than their relatives who were not enslaved
Do you mean each successive generation of blacks were wealthier than the previous? What about a comparison to the average white person?
There were many laws that existed well after slavery that could prevent a black person from succeeding.
That's my justification for affirmative action (not reparations). Should it last forever? No but it hasn't been that many generations since the civil rights act
> Do you mean each successive generation of blacks were wealthier than the previous? What about a comparison to the average white person?
No I mean the average African-American is easily over 10x wealthier, and has far better opportunities than the average citizen of the countries that now inhabit the lands they originally came from. Were it not for slavery, again as abhorrent as it was, they'd be a lot worse off today.
> here were many laws that existed well after slavery that could prevent a black person from succeeding.
It is also easy to forget that the suppliers of slaves were African nations that practiced slavery themselves. They found the Europeans to be great customers for their slaves. So descendants of the Ashanti and others benefited from the selling of slaves. If we really want to look at reparations, we probably need some way to determine what percentage each person benefited from slavery and what percentage they suffered from it. Also there were slaves from Asia and other places that are probably just as deserving of payments if that happens. But all of this flies in face of the narrative that slavery was something whites did to blacks.
A better approach would be to try to provide opportunities that people can take advantage of. The US actually does a great job of this which is why we don't see mass exodus of people trying to go back to the African nations.
Easily forgotten? It's brought up in just about every discussion on the subject, including this one, already, by the person you were replying to agree with.
Well if you want to take money from the general population and give to people whose ancestors were harmed by slavery, you need some way to differentiate between ancestors who were harmed by and ancestors who benefited from slavery.
If that isn't part of the discussion, then people are just proposing a welfare system to give money to people based on the color of their skin.
No I mean the average African-American is easily over 10x wealthier, and has far better opportunities than the average citizen of the countries that now inhabit the lands they originally came from.
Because those countries were devastated by Europeans
Those countries were created by Europeans, they didn’t exist before that. The tribes that were there before were not much of a civilization. They weren’t behind the rest of the world because of colonialism, they were colonized because they were behind the rest of the world.
you keep saying that but your set of facts is clearly missing many pieces (you admit as much) so to keep repeating it doesn't make it any more true and is really revealing a lot.
It’s not really a personal attack to point out that your “just asking questions” routine happens to dovetail nicely with certain political talking points. Why so defensive?
Why don't you name the pieces of facts that are missing then so the parent can respond to it?
You keep making personal attacks and asking if the parent is employed by the state of Florida. What does their employment situation have to do with anything?
Ahh, I honestly don't pay attention to usernames. I replied to someone who is defending your attacker and making the same low effort quips so I assume they have no problem with the bizarre employment question or they would have flagged the comment or called it out for what it is.
To point you in the right direction: "to keep repeating it doesn't make it any more true and is really revealing a lot" of undesirable things about you as a person. The latter words added by me and implied. That's a personal attack.
nobody gives a shit about the logical arguments. it's social maneuvering for power and money. in other words, it's politics. the sooner you understand that people are looking out for their own monetary interests the less confused you will be about the whole thing.
> Do reparations for slavery even make logical sense?
Yes. The slaves did labor. That labor demands wages. The fact that the formerly enslaved also benefited from public goods to which all citizens had access does not pay down the debt owned to them for their labor.
I guess a better question is whether reparation paid out to 5th+ generation descendants of slaves make sense. How do you even implement that practically?
Figure out how much the labor was worth. Throw on punitive damages for having enslaved them against their will their entire lives. Now calculate for having invested that money at the time that slavery ended.
That's a good STARTING point.
Japanese-American citizens got locked up for a few years during WWII and the result was that Reagan signed a bill allowing for their descendants to receive $20K for each incarcerated person.
Now consider how many LIFETIMES were wasted in slavery.
Turns out that the same people who always complain about others having their hands out are just upset at any situation that doesn't personally enrich them.
Or themselves since plenty of the victims were alive. This was a single event that lasted ~4 years with comparatively very good records.
Slavery lasted for several hundreds years, there are not records for most slaves and even cases where they can identified good luck tracking down all of their descendants. That's several magnitudes more complex, to an incomparable extent.
> Figure out how much the labor was worth
So do you need to find specific ancestors who were slaves and the payout would be based on how long did they work for? So... somebody who's great-great-great-great-grandfather died when he was 72 years old would receive twice as much than someone who's ancestor only lived to 36?
Of course you'll be especially lucky if you can find any ancestors who were shipped to the America in the 1600s. I bet slaveholders kept perfect record, especially back in those days.
Then you have to figure out how to split the payout between 50 to 1000 (un)verifiably descendants of the same individual or will be on first come first serve basis?
All this just seems so bizarrely impractical that I can't believe anyone would seriously suggest it after spending more than 2-5 minutes thinking about how would it work.
Your argument is that we should never do anything because attempting to do the right thing to people who have had their pasts and futures stolen is hard.
Meanwhile we've got censuses going back hundreds of years. Do the math. It's not that difficult to come up with a minimum standard unless you're in the "do nothing" category.
I also have some more "ideological" objections. .e.g why don't we just focus on creating opportunities for all presently disadvantaged people regardless of who their ancestors 150-300 years ago were?
> is hard
Not hard, objectively infeasible to accomplish in a sufficiently equitable way.
> we've got censuses going back hundreds of years. Do the math
What math? And what would you do with those censuses? There are no individual records... Could you at the very try least try clearly define who would receive these "reparations"? Would any descendants of black slaves or enslaved Native Americans (or are we not thinking about the natives at all?) get the same share? Would it depend on the proportion of your ancestors who were enslaved? Would your current financial circumstances affect this? Would you have to do a DNA test measuring the proportion of your genome coming from Africa, Europe etc. and use that to calculate the payout?
One of the basic principles in Western law, stretching back 700 years or so, is that prosecuting people not involved in a crime is unacceptable. The slaves and the enslaved are long dead. No one has legally owned slaves for 150+ years.
How do you apportion the taxes? Do new immigrants owe the same as people here generations? Do the descendants of Irish immigrants owe the same as descendants of slave owners? What about the black descendants of black slave owners, of whom there were over a thousand?
And how far does this go back? The Comanches were extremely brutal. They killed and enslaved many people from many tribes, especially the Apache. Should they be responsible for reparations to the Apache and other tribes they crushed?
You're missing the point. No one is being "punished" for their ancestors having owned slaves. The idea is to assist people whose ancestors were exploited, legally and systemically.
It may help to think of it as assistance for victims of a natural disaster, which seems pretty universally acceptable. The disaster being a very messed up society. Or as something like the Marshall Plan that helped restore Europe after, again, society’s global screwup.
If foster children were raised so well that people were jealous, maybe that would create an adverse incentive for people to create more children than they can handle and desert children that they’ve already had?
You live in a democracy. If ward's of the state were well taken care of, it would imply a voting majority who recognize this as valuable. Maybe they would also do other things with that power, like vote for increased assistance and benefits for parents in general, or expand the program to be a blanket "everyone can have free state college".
Social constructs don’t determine what is real or not. Instead they function as processes within a wider ecosystem. Every political decision that’s made has adverse consequences since they require force, no matter the political structure. If something is valuable to people they will do it freely without requiring force; but if something is valuable to a select group at the expense of others, the result is always some degree of negative side effects. It may be possible to argue some social good outweighs those effects, but dismissing them because “we live in a democracy” reveals a totalitarian view of the state.
So tell me, how are state congressman chosen? Senators? Federal congressmen? Local school boards, state judges, county sherriffs. What happens before a new president takes power? What procedure is implemented to facilitate that?
The word “democracy” is never mentioned in the declaration if independence or the constitution. Very specifically because the founders recognized how dangerous democracies are. To prevent the runaway issues you’ve pointed out.
Democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for lunch.
So lower class kids (through no fault of their own as well..) should not have access to higher education? That's was very weird of phrasing. What about making education accessible to all people regardless of their who their parents were instead of trying to make people jealous?
>The reason we should be paying for foster kids' college is because the state is their parent, so it's our responsibility. In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived, and how well-raised they were.
Absolutely. As my mother used to say, parents should (at a minimum) pay for education and therapy (not to mention housing with electricity and indoor plumbing, food, clothes, etc.). Since the government of California is the legal guardian of these children, it's really the least they can do.
Disagree. It is not the states job to raise foster kids. It’s the states job to match them with families that want to take them in and care for them like their own. There’s a line a mine long of people that are desperate to adopt but have to job through endless hoops.
Fix the adoption system and stop needlessly expanding the state and taking on more clients.
It was sold as a way to fix the wrongs of institutionalized bigotry. Unfortunately certain minorities get turned away from AA benefits because the narrative is focused on only one group despite historical slights affecting many more. As implemented, it wasn't even fair to the people it was claiming to assist.
> regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived
Given that the money to do that would have been taken from those parents, you can see why in a democracy parents would object to having their resources stolen for government kids to have better lives over their own.
This makes me think that your original comment was some form of sarcasm. So your plan is to incentivize lower class parents to abandon their children because the state would be able to take better care of them?
Affirmative action came in response to Jim Crow. When slavery ended during the civil war, people had the idea that it wasn’t needed. It wasn’t until reconstruction ended and southern states leaned heavily into racist policy making that it became popular.
> In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived, and how well-raised they were.
Actually this sounds completely dystopian. In what world should people really wish they were foster kids? Its no wonder people warn against an effort to destroy the nuclear family.
It's probably the most dystopian and I'm very glad I didn't have to scroll to the bottom before someone said otherwise.
The logical end of this thinking is that people who would otherwise be perfectly capable of raising children would put them up for adoption because they would want the best outcome for their kids.
Foster children are not a protected class under the law.
Perhaps foster kids could or even should be a protected class, however unlike most protected classes that have faced historical systematic discrimination codified in law, the general hardships of foster children are not based in unjust laws.
I have worked in Dependency law (ie with children that have been abused, abandoned and neglected) which deals a lot with foster kids.
I favor programs that provide funding for foster kids like this and provide assistance when they “age out” of care, but it is a broad brushstroke and doesn’t take into consideration individual situations as you suggest. In other words foster children are not all alike nor are their situations. Some live in group homes and they are just a number or a check for foster parents, some live in loving and supportive homes, even sometimes in the homes of relatives when parental rights were lost but they are still considered foster children. Some become foster kids at 17 and others are born into it. There is everything in between.
It is about the equivalent in terms of diversity of situations as being a minority/protected class that has historically been discriminated against.
There's another unique aspect to this particular case--if the children "aged out" without being adopted, then they don't have functioning parents to pay for the massive costs of college, which is what the current financial aid and pricing model relies on. Even if the kids had a good childhood, they aren't going to have the financial resources to pay for college themselves.
And even if they have an almost adopted type of situation with their final foster parents, those parents still shouldn't have to pay all the college costs. They may not have even had the children placed with them long enough to save for that.
That’s just it, some foster parents might actually be very wealthy, some might have had the children all their lives, some nearly destitute and use foster care as a paycheck, and some kids might have gone into foster care a few months before graduating high school and aging out. This was my entire point in response to the parent comment, I like the program, just want to highlight that foster care isn’t as much of a individualize circumstance as they may believe, it’s just as diverse a experience as growing up a minority.
I mentioned in another reply, in Florida we have programs that offer financial assistance to kids that age out and continue their education. I support the programs, but there are things that should be acknowledged like it resulting in foster kids not getting adopted that otherwise would as financial strategy, or kids going into foster care right before aging out to qualify for the program.
You missed the part where I say I support the program and programs like this for foster kids that age out, I just don’t agree that the program is narrowly tailored to individual situations.
Trust me here in Florida there are many parents who put their kids in foster care at 17 so they qualify for governmental housing allowances.
I’m all for free college tuition, for all. I want an educated society, I want better paying jobs resulting in higher taxes, and I don’t want government guaranteed loans resulting in unaffordable tuition and life long debt.
Yeah, the one where freshman physics in college blew threw 2 years of daily honors public school physics in 2 weeks. The one where the high school diploma is nigh worthless in the marketplace. The one where the students have no skin in the game and disrupt the classes and assault the teachers.
It all does not have to be free, just a government funded option to provide a floor. Public school was my only saving grace, being from an immigrant family that did not know English or how to navigate America.
Although, I also do not think government needs to pay for free schooling for 17 years. Can easily cut some fluff and drop that to 15 years, and still give people a solid foundation equivalent to a Bachelors.
The issue is the pareto principle. As it is the CSU/UC systems cannot support every applicant that wants to come in. But making it completely free they'd be flooded with most of the country's prospective students.
Also, schools are state funded as well as federally funded. So there's a bunch of issues when it comes to out of state students and who should cover. That exists even with today's crazily high priced tuition.
In most cases higher education is to some extent "rationed" and generally less accessible than in the US. Only a few countries in Europe have more University graduates. Which is of course perfectly rational if you have no ideological objects to some degree of centralized planning.
Oxford (like Harvard) is often less about what you'll know and more about WHO you'll know.
At the undergrad level, the subject matter is generally very well-established. But when you want a job after graduation, being close friends with the CEO's child helps far more than a few tenths of a point on your GPA.
Legacy admissions and nepotism are still very much a thing.
> what affirmative action should be... helping people out based on their individual situation
Also, just helping them out. Nobody gets hurt. This isn't creating an allotment of seats for foster kids. The selection process, and thus odds, are the same for them and everyone else.
UNC Chapel Hill, UVA, Virginia Tech, College of William & Mary, Georgia Tech, UT Austin, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Wisconsin Madison, Purdue...
America has a solid stable of top-tier public universities.
> Those are universities and not colleges. Cãnada College, Foothills college, De Anza College are examples of “community colleges”.
Community colleges are rarely described as "state colleges." The latter refers to state-backed higher education institutions, from De Anza College to the University of Pennsylvania.
The delineation between colleges and universities varies regionally. Nowhere does it solely signify exclusivity. In America, there is an accreditation difference that largely pertains to graduate school.
Free prenatal and neonatal care seems like an obvious first step. It's literally taking care of the unborn and babies, so they have a healthy start to life. (I similarly believe education, school breakfasts and lunches, and pediatric care should be free.)
We could sidestep all the drama by letting anyone who meets the academic qualifications attend public universities and colleges without tuition (or at least an insubstantial fees). We might actually end up with a system like we had 75 years ago… but with less overt racism and sexism.
I've only seen them used this way in public policy circles, and left-leaning ones at that. It's also totally discontinuous with the treatment of equality in classical literature.
Put another way, isn't equity just a masking term for top-to-bottom wealth transfers?
It depends on with whom I'm speaking. Even the Wikipedia page for the former is a disambiguation [1].
The historical (and international) use of the former is closer to that of egalitarianism [2]. I fail to see what is gained by redefining equality and creating the term equity
when equal opportunity vs. equality of outcome has decades of scholarship behind it, to say nothing of being clearer on first glance.
I don't know enough to render judgement. But it smells like the tail-chasing semantics the social sciences love, randomly re-appropriating jargon instead of debating the underlying problem.
In any conversation, inter-discplinary or not, agreeing on what a word means is important.
For me, there is a difference between equity and equality.
As you mentioned, people will hammer on the lens of the interpretation without being aware of it, or not being able to explain the core of it.
I would start with the idea of access to education and access to opportunity to apply education to uplift current and future generations.
Removing built in barriers that have been in the public education system (based off the industrial education system to keep turning out reliable and obedient factory workers by omitting certain information) is one place to start.
Still, not every baby starts at the same start line, and not everyone has the same headwinds, or tailwinds. Some argue its impossible to make everyone equal or equitable, but there are some parts of that spectrum that will never be able to to even be close to equals in average, and the conversation starts around that, and those who are in a position to more default succeed by failing upwards, and those who are not.
There's a lot of focus on breaking ceilings. I often wonder about how it looks for the average person, however that is defined to access opportunity compared to someone who is not a part of the majority, for example.
The interpretation on whether this should be made equitable for everyone, or only to a certain degree is definitely a topic of discussion.
In 1968, H. George Frederickson articulated "a theory of social equity" and put it forward as the 'third pillar' of public administration.[4] Frederickson was concerned that those in public administration were making the mistake of assuming that citizen A is the same as citizen B; ignoring social and economic conditions.
Using the term launched, similar to how tech companies launch products, implies a conspiracy to bring this word to the public's attention
Affirmative action was to address systemic inequalities, not individual ones. Bringing it up in an article about foster kids and then further including the bit about gender feels like flamebait.
True, but many forms of discrimination are legal and good. Minimum age to drive is ageism, but I think we would all agree that it’s a good form of discrimination. You say “no matter how well intentioned” as if the intention isn’t important. But intention and outcome are both very important and determine whether a given form of discrimination is good or bad.
The parent referred to affirmative action, not a specific case. Affirmative action is practised by many organizations in many different forms. That’s what I was replying to. If you’re genuinely interested, you can find well though out opinions on that specific case with a quick Google search.
Asians are over-represented in Harvard (note: I do no know if this is actually true) and the kinds of students rejected from Harvard but who'd get in anyway aren't exactly the kinds of students who'd fall out of society.
I recognize the racism, but I also see the point of justification there. There is some distinct difference in discrimination at the top and discrmination at the bottom of the societal rungs.
I don't see where it could possibly be justifiable to discriminate against Asians. Where is the systemic racism that somehow gives Asians an advantage?
It's almost as if they are being punished for ruining the narrative through their own hard work, which would force people to admit that other minorities being underrepresented at Ivy League colleges is due to something other than just "systemic racism".
>I don't see where it could possibly be justifiable to discriminate against Asians
I just did. You don't have to accept that justification, but I don't imagine it's an uncommon sentiment. There's a difference between not getting into Harvard but pretty still having a dozen top universities of choice and barely even getting out of high school because your area's education was under-funded due to historical factors.
I don't know the historical factors that lead to Asian-Americans being so successful in comparison to other minorities, but it's clear they need less help as a whole compared to other minorities. There's your justification.
>It's almost as if they are being punished for ruining the narrative through their own hard work
You can interpret it that way. You can also say that the AA is starting to focus more on those who need it, and Asians seem to need it the least as of now.
>force people to admit that other minorities being underrepresented at Ivy League colleges is due to something other than just "systemic racism".
So what are you suggesting? Again, my Asian american history is very superficial, but I think it's hard to deny that it's a shorter history than African or Mexican American history in this context.
I don’t think it’s ironic, it is acknowledged by the Supreme Court that hears and rules on affirmative actions cases with some regularity.
The reason they take these cases so often is because affirmative action must be narrowly tailored and affirmative action programs are often found to be Unconstitutional.
Also, affirmative action as a whole, as acknowledged by the Supreme Court, is a temporary measure to level the playing field of prior systemic racism. So even in the instances a program is currently a constitutional even that is for a temporary period of time.
People often complain about the nature of it, but generally don’t have any solutions to address the realities of historic discrimination codified in law, at best people suggest to ignore it a do nothing be happy those old laws have been over turned and move on, the problem there is typically the people that suggest doing nothing to right the wrongs of the past benefit from damage of historical systematic racism and discrimination.
And the use of a police, courts, juries, and prisons to punish and prevent violence is violence, yet very few people complain about fighting fire with fire in that spectrum (even if they disagree with the implementation).
In the United States, a lot of times the individual situation is correlated to their skin color.
The condition of being descendants of slaves, or people who faced other forms of official discrimination cited in the prevention of intergenerational wealth such as redlining, blockbusting or unfavorable treatment in the GI bill, etc., is ultimately an individual situation for each individual affected.
The idea that you can dismiss that as not an individual hardship -- though it kind of is for those impacted -- strikes me as pretty much a word game, nothing more. Not unlike the word games American laws started to use when they could no longer punish people de jure for their race.
How many slaves in the family tree should someone have to qualify? Do white slaves count? How far back should we go? Would citizens whose families have immigrated to this country after the deed be also on the hook for reparations? Should reparations only be given to struggling people, or should they be given out regardless of the situation of the descendant of a slave?
It's a lot easier to quantify and equalize the situation here and now rather than to try to make up for a future that could have been, and for which no living being is responsible. The past is complex and blurry, and families aren't a straight line. And generally, people aren't bound by their ancestor's misdeeds.
Poor people should get more help from society in the US, that's a fact: race might be a strong predictor for poverty, but the best signal for poverty remains income and wealth, right here and right now.
Why bother looking at anything else? Are poor whites or asians somehow more blameable for their poverty than poor blacks? Should a successful black person get reparations from a white hobo, simply based on their lineage (that none of them have control on)?
I agree, it's hard to codify. But there is undoubtedly a large group of people, often identified by their race, that face disproportionate hardship and continued to be legally discriminated against well after slavery was abolished. And note that I mentioned other, post-slavery problems, and you jump right into "how many slaves??"
It is very possible to have someone with dark skin today who is descended equally parts from former slaves and Africans who were responsible for selling the slaves to the Europeans.
That doesn't address his questions. If you're going to codify these things into law, then you should be able to answer questions like this. My paternal grandfather was discriminated against for being black. In truth he was half black, but that didn't temper the racism he faced from people who considered him to be black. For the purposes of reparations, am I 1/4th black or 1/8th black? Because he was my paternal grandfather and family wealth has traditionally been passed on predominantly through father to son, does my paternal grandfather count more than my maternal grandmother? And if I marry a white woman, will my son be 1/8th black or 1/16th black for the purposes of reparations? Does he get any?
These are sticky questions, but if you're serious about reparations being law then you should be prepared to give some straight-forward answers without deflection.
Because other people seem to be pushing the idea that race is the signal, as they are pushing for a redistribution along racial lines rather than economic lines.
I don't think anyone here is denying that there is a correlation, but there's a very legitimate question over whether policy should target the correlated trait (skin color) or the hardship itself (poverty) when trying to fix the problem.
The issue is, a lot of problems have been nominally "fixed". But the black community on average has not caught up with the gaps created and re-enforced by these earlier systems. eg. They didn't get to participate as much as white peers in housing booms due to redlining, blockbusting, etc. So if you started out European-American in 1930 [random 20th century year], or having the same wages and being black in that same year, odds are pretty good descendants of the latter are doing poorer, due to multiple racist housing policies.
If they haven't caught up, that's presumably true as measured by several concrete metrics, correct? So the question still is: why target skin color (the correlated trait) instead of those metrics?
I'm not staking out a position here, I haven't made up my mind myself. I'm just pointing out that OP raised a valid point which you didn't really address.
It's a hard question to answer because the two are entertwined. Hence the term socio-economics.
Poverty is disproportionately in minorities' court due to historical discrimination based on skin color. That doesn't mean that there aren't poor white people. But it does mean that actions targeting minorities end up overlapping a lot with poverty.
The main reason it's relatively easy to target skin color is, well, visuals. Another can of worms in and of itself, but for the most part it's pretty easy to look at a certain minorities and pin them as such.Meanwhile financials are private and it's not like every millionaire is driving a fancy car with a suit and tie.
> actions targeting minorities end up overlapping a lot with poverty
Yes, but they also have a false positive rate (rich minorities) and a false negative rate (poor white people) that is much higher than a properly administered means test.
Given this, and given how controversial race-based affirmative action is, it's worth questioning whether attempting to sort based on race as a sort of shortcut to sorting based on economics is doing more harm than good. If we could implement a race-blind affirmative action program that got bipartisan support, could we not solve poverty faster than if we continue to alienate one side by insisting on excluding poor white people?
> The main reason it's relatively easy to target skin color is, well, visuals. Another can of worms in and of itself, but for the most part it's pretty easy to look at a certain minorities and pin them as such.Meanwhile financials are private and it's not like every millionaire is driving a fancy car with a suit and tie.
Why should a goal of an affirmative action system be to be able to make the accept/reject call based on a quick glance at the applicant's photo?
We already ask college students to provide an assessment of their means for the FAFSA, and about 3/4 do so. It's not long or complicated, and I see no reason why a similar system couldn't be used for a means-based admissions process.
> If we could implement a race-blind affirmative action program that got bipartisan support, could we not solve poverty faster than if we continue to alienate one side by insisting on excluding poor white people?
The issue is that it's hard to make something "race blind". Not without essentially making a lottery system in the process with how little data you're given. The moment you give high school data, you give approximate data on your area, which means your area's demographic and economonics. If we could have a world where standardize grades and national test scores it may be possible to pull it off (btw: national test scores also correlate with income levels, especially since they cost money/time to take and can be taken multiple times. IQ tests have also shown their bias). But as is it is a utopic dream.
>Why should a goal of an affirmative action system be to be able to make the accept/reject call based on a quick glance at the applicant's photo?
It's not just a photo. your race is considered a public statistic. You can opt to say "prefer not to answer" but I imagine 95%+ of applicants to report it.
It's the exact opposite of finances, and it's not as easy to grab that data even as a public institution. I don't think submissions offices even get that data to consider. Should they get that data? I don't know. I think we can imagine a dozen ways that can help and also be a complete catastrophe. That's a much larger topic of discussion.
Being Black in America is actually a specific situation with structural inequality baked in. It is strictly based on skin color and it is backed up by a significant number of studies, as well as observed by its actual victims [1]
Affirmative action is about reinforcing the bottom so it doesn't fall any further. It isn't about supporting anyone for a particular reason, but anyone in a condition they can not control.
What's your secret for getting 1 upvote per minute even when the link doesn't work?