231–240 of 241 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Less than 50%???? Ha! Try closer to 10% in Chicago. Yes I want murders solved and think there should be someone doing that job. However, the police aren't doing that so why help them with whatever it is that they are doing.
A large issue is that people refuse to help them. How do you solve a crime if no there are witnesses willing to talk...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In case you didn't notice, every election there's lawn signs saying "endorsed by the Police Union" or similar. So get your facts straight. If you want to see DA politics in action, watch just about any Law & Order episode when they discuss optics. Those "stories" are based on current affairs.
> In case you didn't notice, every election there's lawn signs saying "endorsed by the Police Union" or similar. That doesn't contradict anything I said. There are signs saying that not because public sector unions as a whole either make up the 20% of the electorate you've claimed or vote in a unified block across different public sector unions as you've claimed, but because the general public, and especially voters…
Governments employ 20 percent or more of workers in nine states
https://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/on-numbers/scott-tho...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no austerity. Here is state-and-local spending as a percentage of GDP from 1970 to present: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/courses-images-archive-re... And here is GDP in 2010 dollars: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?location... State and local governments went from spending 10% of $23,000 per person to 15% of $55,000 per person. Per-person state and local spending went up by a factor…
> Subway ridership is up 75% since 1980. The capital budget during the 1980s averaged $3.4 billion annually in 2020 dollars: https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/rescue.pdf (fig. 5). The 2015-2019 capital program (5 years) averaged about $6.5 billion 2020 dollars. So a 90% increase in capital spending for a 75% increase in ridership. Punchline: MTA is so massively wasteful, that wasn't enough. The system…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In case you didn't notice, every election there's lawn signs saying "endorsed by the Police Union" or similar. That doesn't contradict anything I said. There are signs saying that not because public sector unions as a whole either make up the 20% of the electorate you've claimed or vote in a unified block across different public sector unions as you've claimed, but because the general public, and especially voters…
ok, PoliSci man: Governments employ 20 percent or more of workers in nine states https://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/on-numbers/scott-tho...
The claim was public sector unions, not government employees. And the claim was 20% of votes, not 20% of workers. A substantial share of government employees are not unionized; this is particularly true of federal government employees; and a substantial share of voters are not employed (some unemployed, but more out of the workforce, looked students, homemakers, and retirees.)
And nine states leave 41, or 82% of the total, where even that far-from-what-you-originally-claimed situation still doesn't apply.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Subway ridership is up 75% since 1980. The capital budget during the 1980s averaged $3.4 billion annually in 2020 dollars: https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/rescue.pdf (fig. 5). The 2015-2019 capital program (5 years) averaged about $6.5 billion 2020 dollars. So a 90% increase in capital spending for a 75% increase in ridership. Punchline: MTA is so massively wasteful, that wasn't enough. The system…
I mean you're correct--an alternative explanation would be that the baseline sample in 1970 was already in "austerity." That's why I compared it to the London system.
[0] More or less, they've stopped during COVID but it's not a great time to do maintenance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't mean reports are completely independent. Isn't it obvious that the perception of whether the police will do anything is going to affect the reporting?
Wouldn't that affect it in an inhibitory way, though? Black areas would be reporting less crime than actually occurs- so if reported crime rates there are still higher, that tells us something?
By lesser crimes I don't mean trivial things that provide an excuse to harass non-criminals and give "broken window" policing a bad name, but actual crimes which aren't major violent crimes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All theory is made up until we have a practical example to compare against. Using the logic you've already employed, one could conclude that the entire anthology of philosophical texts also have zero bearing on reality because "they're all made up".
What do you think about my point that anyone could write a fiction book saying absolutely anything, and argue against you using that as their source. The two of you could go back and forth forever, both making up stories to fit your argument. What on earth is the point?
Societal and philosophical questions don't work like that, ethics are driven by society and the view of society changes over time with actions like, as an example, eating beef on Fridays being incredibly taboo among christian societies a few hundred years ago (and to this day in some areas) to the point where taking an action like that in public would likely call into question your ability to act ethically.
Ethics is a highly subjective field - if you try and revive geocentric solar system models with a paper that essentially amounts to "I said so" you'll be dismissed since there are theories with more evidence out there. The process of allegorization though is a more subjective and iterative process where two people can honestly state very different theories and have wide support from large groups - including potentially having mutual supporters.
The allegory that comes from Sci-fi isn't a statement of fact, it's an opinion on danger and while objective evidence is always preferred it doesn't mean that subjective evidence is meaningless. The process of going back and forth forever is quite valuable, if it isn't being done with "No, you're stupids" then each participant will be further developing their theory to account for weaknesses or vagaries exposed by the other participant and that process produces a better understanding in both parties and more refined theories to be presented to spectators.
The question of whether it's morally correct to commit murder is still open - there are some really compelling arguments in favor of not murdering people and some of those even arise purely out of self-interest[1] but if I say "Bob murdered Jim" there are all sorts of qualifiers and conditions that can take that from being pretty ethically repugnant (say infanticide) to being generally seen as justified (maybe, ongoing debate yo) at least in the US (say a genuinely necessary and unavoidable act of self-defense).
The problems fantasy is really good at digging into are ethical ones and, physics based fantasy books are super boring. If your sci-fi book was about how the earth would be different if G was actually 1.367×10−10 m3⋅kg−1⋅s−2 you would essentially have a book about how some mechanics of movement are affects and why planes are so expensive to fly - you could build an interesting plot, but the allegorical value would be essentially nil... well that's what I think, lesse is some sci-fi writer comes along and writes a super impactful and interesting novel about an earth that is essentially the same as ours but with slightly less than two times as much gravity.
1. Which tends to be the strongest moral guidance IMO, but I'm jaded :shrug:
They are complaining about "racial bias" in predictive policing products. This "racial bias" is composed of data collected from crime statistics. If reality doesn't support the ideology, reality must be ignored. This is the sorry state of academia nowadays.
African Americans are killed by police at the same or lesser rates than other races. However, they are killed at much higher absolute rates because they commit a significantly greater amount of crime. It doesn't take a PHD in mathematics to figure this out. Here is just one data source from NYC: http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_plan... Subjects firing on Police: 79% Black Subjects killed by Pol…
Almost 65% of black children are raised without a father (white: 24%). Together these numbers imho give a much better explanation towards black crime and disadvantages than inherent bias.