Pretty sure your chances of the former are higher.

Let's put it this way... would you rather experience an encounter of unknown outcome with a mugger, randomly selected from all muggings, or an encounter of unknown outcome with a cop, randomly selected from all encounters with cops?

It happens mostly to people who commit serious crimes or are around people who commit serious crimes, not to people who are black. There is overlap of course.

Even if you assume racism is involved at various steps of the process, it's hardly "garbage" data.

Then there's the possibility that areas with racist law enforcement genuinely have more crime, either due to people committing crimes in protest, or due to cops becoming racist due to the criminals who they interact with. In that case the "racist" data is completely valid in helping predict future crime levels.

Racial profiling does not take away from a free and fair society though.

Well, it depends exactly what you mean by racial profiling since the term encompasses so many possible actions. Going around harassing black people "just in case" is counter to a free and fair society. But making law enforcement more efficient by looking at factors like race, sex, age, wealth, hairstyle, clothing, gang affiliation, etc is fine.

There are credit card processors today that have a fee structure to take micropayments into account.

Paypal, for instance, charges 5% + 5 cents if that works out to be less than their normal fee.

Amazon Payments used to have the information publicly visible, but now you have to contact sales, but from what I recall it used to be 5% + 5 cents as well.

So your $1 bread will have about $0.10 in fees.

A small business might be paying 2.5%, but a large, multiple state grocery store isn't. There's certainly no way they are paying 5%, which is my cash back reward for groceries.

I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of loss leaders, so why is it hard to believe credit card companies lose money on some customers in the hopes that on average they'll make more money?

You're still missing my point. In the absence of price regulation, what you describe can't happen.

Let's say A pays $20/month/subscriber in infrastructure maintenance, upgrades, new development, etc.

Case 1a - there's no price regulation, and A can still sell to consumers.
Case 1b - there's no price regulation, and A cannot sell to consumers, just to the other providers
Case 2a - there is price regulation, and A can still sell to consumers
Case 2b - there is price regulation, and A cannot sell to consumers, just to the other providers

In 1a, A will charge what the market will bear. They'll have incentives for new subscribers and poor people that let them get on the network. The cost will be like $30/month. For most subscribers, the cost will be $40/month. What will A charge B? If they charge less than $40/month... let's say $35/month... they will potentially lose their core customers because B might undercut them at $39/month. Why would they do that?

In 1b, A cannot sell to consumers, just to B. But A still knows that the market can bear so many subscribers at $30/month plus so many more at $40/month. They know if they charge $100/month, nobody will sign up and they'll lose money. They know if they charge $21/month, more people will sign up but their profit will be too low. What do they do? If they're allowed to charge differential prices, it's exactly the same as 1a. "Oh, you want to lease a new line? $30/month special. After a year it's $40/month." If they're not allowed to charge differential prices, they figure out the weighted average and charge that. Maybe $35/month. Their overall profit is the same, meanwhile B and C make money in some areas and lose money in others (perhaps they're regulated to provide equivalent coverage).

In 2a, with price regulation, you say okay A, we know it costs you $20/month, and we think $30/month is a fair profit, so you WILL charge $30/month per line.

In 2b... it's exactly the same.

As you can see, the fake competition provided by B, C, D, E, etc play no role in establishing the market price for the service, because they do not control the service. Only the price controls work. The sub-divisions of "a" and "b" make no difference either... just the price controls.

The thing is, you're assuming A is required to allow B to hook up their own interconnects. That's incorrect. That was my point with bringing up Comcast in real life... they can say "Yeah I know it's slow. It sucks. But too bad, we're not letting you connect faster lines to OUR network." This has actually come up in real life. I'm sure you read about Netflix offering to pay 100% of the cost to upgrade Comcast's interconnect with Level 3 (the carrier for Netflix). Comcast refused, because they want a nice fat monthly fee, not a one-time free upgrade.

And if the law is purely "You have to lease the lines you control to B, C, D, E, and F" then you have not changed that (even with price controls). You're going to have to introduce additional regulations that say "And you have to let B, C, D, E, and F have access at the interconnects so they can upgrade them at their own cost or whatever."

But then, you can just have that law to begin with and leave the first part out. Once again, the "competition" on the lines owned by A provides nothing, it's the additional regulations that make the difference.

Yes exactly.. from what I've read, this is how it usually works. And then pricing regulations (or in fact the dumb pipes being government owned outright) removes the problem of market pricing that I was talking about above.

I'm not disagreeing with that, and I support municipal fiber projects (the term for it here in America usually). I'm just pointing out that it's useless to try to shoehorn in competition. It's a technique used these days by big-government people to try to appeal to small-government people. "Look, we use competition! Free market! How can conservatives object to the free market?!" That makes it sound nice. But it's a load of crap... it's not competition that makes municipal fiber so attractive, in fact it's the LACK of competition and the LACK of profit motive on the network owner's part that makes it attractive. The government provides it at cost as a public service, and we use it. Like roads.

That's my only point, because I happen to love free market capitalism and I hate to see it abused. Just call a spade a spade. Not everything has to be free market and competitive.

This isn't an echo chamber. You suggested that nuclear power is not flourishing under authoritarian regimes, but in fact it is.. at least among regimes with the technical and manufacturing know-how to build nuclear reactors. Almost every developing country that doesn't have nuclear power wants it. And those who do have it are expanding it.

Flourishing doesn't mean nuclear provides a majority of the electricity in those countries, as you pointed out, but that's okay. The point is China is building 28 reactors or whatever, and the US is building... 4. And they are delayed and over budget. It's definitely flourishing compared to here.

Even under less authoritarian regimes, like India, the simple lack of as many environmental (including human impact) regulations is letting them explore technologies like thorium reactors more feasibly than we could here.

China has 21 nuclear power plants. There are 28 additional plants under construction. Because of lower construction costs and faster time to market, the cost of building THE SAME nuclear plants in China is about 1/3 the cost in America. (They are building modern plants like the AP1000, which is also being considered in the US.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...

Then you have India which is investing in the thorium fuel cycle.

Conclusion: In countries where there is less regulation, or equivalently the government is fully behind the project, nuclear is flowering and provides low cost baseline electricity.

No, I said "But they have to charge end-customers even more, because otherwise provider B would not have a sustainable business."

If you are going to regulate prices anyway, then like I said, this is just an economic welfare project for B, C, D. They aren't providing "competition" that is lowering prices... your regulation is lowering prices.

Yes but whether it's white-label or "real" access is irrelevant because it's still provider A that owns the infrastructure and makes the decisions. Look at the stuff going on with net neutrality. Comcast can just say "Ok, we're not upgrading this peering connection until Netflix pays us extra." And that screws Netflix and the other Level 3 customers trying to use that congested link.

In your scenario, why would it be any different (except apparently your price regulations would prevent Comcast from even being able to ask for more money). Let's say my neighborhood has crappy phone lines and low speed DSL, and I'm like screw provider A, I'm switching to B. When I switch from A to B, A still makes money. When I switch from B to C because of course the network still sucks, A still makes money. When I switch to D, thinking "My God, so many ISPs in this town.. surely one of them must be better" then A continues to make money. A has no incentive to upgrade my neighborhood's phone lines or reduce prices or anything, and the other providers aren't able to upgrade my neighborhood's phone lines or reduce prices below what A charges (plus their own overhead).

Oh, unless you regulate improvements as well as prices... in which case, like I said, the "competition" aspect of the situation is a sham.

No I have never lived abroad, but you're being silly now... ISPs aren't the only businesses that compete. I've seen plenty of competition. Toyota and Ford compete for my business, as an example. That's why I know that the only way to have effective competition is to have separate companies competing on the good or service in question. If I want to contrive a situation where I get provider A to upgrade the network infrastructure in my neighborhood, then I need to invent competition for the network infrastructure in my neighborhood. Not services running on top of it. That makes zero difference. If I want provider A to install new fiber lines, then you could add 15000 "competitors" who are forced to lease A's network and it would accomplish nothing at all.

But add 1 company like Google that runs new lines in my neighborhood, and suddenly provider A will either upgrade its infrastructure, dramatically lower prices, or go out of business. That's competition.

I still don't see the point. Provider A made the investment, and has to charge provider B enough to still be profitable. But they have to charge end-customers even more, because otherwise provider B would not have a sustainable business. So in other words, you've artificially increased the cost to the end-customer, just for the sake of giving provider B a job mimicking provider A.

In your second scenario, where provider A is fully prohibited from selling to the end-customer, how is the network situation any better than now? Provider A still has captive customers... instead of me and you, the captive customers are providers B, C, D, and E. What incentive does provider A have to upgrade their network? I don't see how it's any better than now.

And in this situation you're still imposing an artificially high cost on the consumer. What value-add does provider B give the end-consumer? If it's actually *worth* the extra charge, then there's no need to prohibit A from dealing with end-consumers, because presumably they'd choose B anyway. And if it's not worth it, then you're forcing the end-consumer to pay extra for a service that isn't worth it.

The only real competition is when multiple companies have multiple lines going to your house, and you can totally switch your business between them. For things like water, sewer, and maybe electricity, the costs are so high that it can't realistically happen. But for internet, look, we already have coax cable and copper phone. Why not add another fiber? The costs obviously aren't that high for running a little cable -- as Google showed in their deployments. So let them compete from the very ground up.

It's not a non-sequitor, that's when the conclusion does not logically follow from the premise. What I did was apply your logic to another situation. Unless you can articulate a reason why the wedding band doesn't make a difference, but race does, then it's fair to assume the logic must be the same in the two situations.

My phone (Nexus 5) isn't rooted and I can record calls. Different apps work on different phones apparently. I'm using "Call Recorder" right now.

Why did you switch from "breasts" to "breastfeed"?

The breasts are fundamental to sexual reproduction because they play a part in sexual attraction, which leads to sex, which leads to babies.

Breastfeeding is not.

No, he said that he couldn't whether the 7% difference was significant, not that there was no significance to his findings. He said "What it does show, even with such a small sample, is that in the underlying population there's almost certainly no huge gap between people's opinions of black women vs. white women breastfeeding in photos."

He's right about that.. if there was a huge gap between opinions on black vs white breastfeeding, then even with that sample size there would be a clear difference.

It seems like you (and other posters here) have a double standard about the conclusions here. You are accepting the conclusion from the original article saying that there IS a statistically significant difference in opinions, even though they presented no evidence of it. You accept is so thoroughly that you're ready to toss the "white male privilege" card. Why is that?

There is a difference, one is wearing a ring and one isn't. People are judging the picture as a whole and there are lots of factors that go into that judgment besides whether the person approves of breastfeeding in general.

If it makes no difference to alter factors like marital status between the two pictures, then it must also make no difference to consider factors like race, so you must think the whole issue under discussion is nonsensical.