Have you actually seen the history of Affirmative Action? I'd suggest you read 'Affirmative Action around the world' by Thomas Sowell. There's a plethora of sources and facts packed onto every page, very enlightening.
I take it the nutshell version is that Affirmative Action is a failure (according to this book at least)? (I mean, that is what your phrasing seems to imply.)
I'd suggest you read the book, it's only 200 pages and I can't summarise it in one sentence. It's sad that someone down voted me for suggesting a book which has voluminous facts and history. Human progress is building on what we have learnt before, if we can't learn from history I don't know how we will make progress.
I did not downvote you. I asked a question. There are only so many hours in the day. So, unfortunately, I cannot read every single thing I wish I could read. It would be nice if you actually answered my question instead of recommending "read this book" for the third time. I heard you the first two times.
Peace.
Edit: and have an upvote as a token of good faith.
I was under the impression you were the parent I initially replied to. I apologise.
So in regards to your question, AA has been disastrous around the world. In India and Bangladesh hundreds of thousands of deaths, people burning each other in the street, terrifying stuff. All because of class wars instigated by benefits to one class over the other. Same results, on a different magnitude, in Malaysia, Nigeria, Iran, Australia and to a smaller extent the U.S.
AA has never worked in all of recorded history.
Thank you. I am not a fan of affirmative action. But I also understand that a) it's a touchy topic and b) many people do not know what else to do and want to do something and c) it actually isn't possible to ever know for sure what the world would look like had these events not occured, so we do not know for a fact that it would have gone better had these initiatives not happened. Racism and hatred are rampant. Things might well have gone worse without these intiatives.
I still hope the world can improve on these models, but that is no small task.
this is ridiculous. "in all of recorded history"? hundreds of thousands of deaths? in Australia?! :D but i guess if you read it in a book, it must be true!
there's also a book out there claiming the Nazi regime was all the work of gay people. look it up, you'll probably love it.
If you had bothered to read my post..."On a different magnitude".
In India and Bangladesh there is recorded history of hundreds of thousands of deaths. The book sources these facts, if you want to invalidate anything I suggest you go to the original sources, not make a straw man arguement.
I will reiterate, read the book, read the sources -- if you want to invalidate something, invalidate the primary pieces of evidence -- than come back here and we can have a productive conversation.
sorry, but you presented it very weakly. i checked wikipedia in the meanwhile, and it does it much better justice.
i certainly don't have the time or will to read a 200 page book for the sake of an HN discussion. this should not be a surprise. you could maybe outline something? i'm particularly interested in how exactly these killings came about. wikipedia quotes some criticism - that the examples were cherry-picked, and not even entirely comparable to affirmative action in the US, the contexts were too different (and, kinda funny, one critic states that he already published this same book in the 90s under a diff name :D). but then, wiki also quotes some very interesting arguments he laid out that i did not see here and that sound good.
all in all, i can agree it's a crude method, but hey, it's better than nothing. lots of people here pointing out problems and only some offering solutions, although strictly laughably unrealistic ones. certainly, no mass killings have happened in the US because of it, and such fear-mongering helps nothing. i personally would bet that, were the US a social democracy, all of this would probably be much less needed. when health and education are provided, opportunities are more available to everyone. but the way it is now, any disadvantaged group is more likely to stay that way.
If anyone here wants to know about the long history of Affirmative Action you should definitely read "Affirmative Action Around the World" by Thomas Sowell.
Can't sing enough praise about it. Sourced incredibly And clear logical points.
What evidence do you have to support this? What personal knowledge to do you have to support this? What accompanying expertise do you have to support this?
It's odd to me that people with (assumingly) no knowledge on the matter feel they can aptly deduce complex situations into one sound bite of a sentence.
The fact that the company is called Uber, which is an obvious reference to Nietzsche's idea of the Ubermensch. The fact that Kalanick has said, publicly, that the point of starting the company was to enable his already-rich friends to "be baller" in San Francisco. The fact that he had Uber build a thing called "God Mode" into their software so that he could watch famous people come and go on the service and occasionally put that enormous power on display to other powerful people.
He's a raging, power-hungry narcissistic sociopath, in public, all the time. This isn't guess work. The parent of my original post is suggesting that Uber exists for reasons other than the ones Kalanick has given in public, and that's just silly.
I can appreciate a point about someone violating privacy by building that particular feature, but your comment is so caustic and accusatory it's just noise, not a valid addition to a legitimate debate.
You cannot call someone a "raging, power-hungry narcissistic sociopath" or accuse him of having a "god complex" for 1. wanting to build a successful company catering to rich people or 2. naming a company after a Nietzschian ideal. Does NASA have a god complex because they used the name Apollo?
Your points about Travis do not seem to be informed by reason or experience with the man. In fact, it just seems as though you're emotionally invested to the point of complete and utter bias.
You can certainly take away a different interpretation of the evidence than I do, but to me the gestalt of the man's public persona and actions add up to a picture of a person entirely driven by a desire for power, not some narrow notion of "improving transportation".
That you don't see the same thing demonstrates your own bias to give certain people and behaviors more room for doubt. Which is fine, as long as you recognize it's still a bias. We are the same kind of meat-machine, with the same bugs. Don't try to act like you're above it.
I have yet to see any 'evidence', or personal insight. Yet you seem to think you understand a man, whom you've never met nor interacted with, and his deep personal motivations. Based upon his 'public persona'. You don't see anything odd about that?
No, I don't. His public persona is what he is choosing to project to the world. It amounts to the things he wants us to know about him. And more importantly, one is what one does, not what one intends.
I couldn't agree more. Travis (and the team) has created $51bn of market value, provided cheaper and more efficient transportation to tens of millions of people in hundreds of cities all around the world. He's fought, and defeated, corruption of city officials in many locations all around the world. Uber has and will have a massive positive impact on tens/hundreds/thousands of millions of people in the world (with the self driving vehicle). How he's portrayed in the media is largely irrelevant, to me at least.
Yep. I'd rather have a MOOC-esque course where you can be certain the quality of eduction will permeate to the areas where quality education is scarce.
The average is meaningless. Venture capital follows the power law. The top 5-10 firms in the U.S. will realise 95%+ of the returns for the entire industry. The Benchmarks, Sequoias, A16Z, etc.
The top companies only want to go with the top investors and vice versa. I wish they'd publish data. I'd love to see Benchmarks ROI on their recent fund, it's likely going to be the best performing fund of all time.
It's largely a guesstimate (open only to around a third of neighbourhoods in a country with population <300M; assume less than 1% of potential user base of ~100M is active on a daily basis) and so entirely possible I'm wrong, though I think my penetration figures are reasonable for this type of network, particularly with the company afaik purposely not announcing any impressive engagement metrics or milestones for user numbers.
I live in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood, which has about 50,000 people in 3-4 square miles, depending on how you count it. I just signed up for NextDoor (and I find it incredibly creepy that they publicly display my address by default), and found that there are 1200 people who have signed up out of 50,000 possible users. 2.4% is probably a high water mark for signups, and it looks like only a couple hundred people participate on here regularly.
