It doesn't have to be equal.

A simple example shows you're wrong. When Bill Gates makes another buck on his stock market portfolio, how does the poorest homeless man in India, who owns nothing, has no family, and is 2 days away from starving to death, get POORER? He can't possibly get poorer.

Can you explain how your theory relates to air, which is a limited resource? Do rich people breathing somehow prevent poor people from breathing?

Maybe sometimes, but not always. Sometimes it's because the rich got richer all on their own, like if someone invents a new use for something. That doesn't deprive others of anything, it just enriches everyone (but not equally... the guy who invented profits the most, and/or his employer).

That's called "house poor" -- which is different than just "poor."

You can't complain about not having money just because you spend a lot of money. For example surely you'd laugh if I said I'm poor because my 10000 sqft house, maid, gardener, and two mistresses take up so much of my income that I have very little left over. I'm barely making it!

Similarly, if you live in a high cost area, you don't get to complain about that cost. There's a reason for that cost. You are buying access to an area that lots of people want access to. Your *being there* is what you get for your money. That atmosphere. The connections. The beautiful people and scenery. The actual possibility of giving elevator pitches for your startup. Randomly seeing celebrities having coffee or whatever. You live in the kind of place that other people travel to for tourism because they think it's so great, and you get to live there.

So sick of these whiners who have to "deal" with the problem of living in a popular place.

I'm sure they could find volunteers.

True but I'm assuming the entire gang isn't going to show up for every incident (unless it's quite a small gang to begin with). I guess if the police started doing this regularly, they might.. on the other hand, they might also just cut their losses and stop hassling people who don't pay because it's not worth getting into a surprise gun fight with professionals over $50 (or whatever).

On the other hand, for a big drug deal where a lot of armed criminals really might show up... well we keep hearing about how police departments are getting all this surplus military equipment for next to nothing, so I'm not sure looking at the pure dollar figures tells you that much. For instance according to http://www.newsweek.com/how-am...

I guess the real reason isn't that cops are idiots or greedy, it's that they have to weigh the benefit against the risk to their lives. Confronting a john who tries to hire an undercover cop as a prostitute poses little risk if the officer is armed. Little compared to waiting for the enforcer anyway. Busting a guy trying to buy weed is little risk compared to setting up a sting with a big gang and showing up in your MRAP and getting into a fire fight. Is it worth risking your life to put a negligible dent in the drug trade or the sex trade? Maybe not.

You seem to think the two aren't linked.

How we manage the lowest of us is a function of the achievements of the highest of us.

I'm not talking about the world, just America.

When we speak of helping poor students, we generally mean helping them achieve academic success. Not helping them get rich. So "all the poor straight-A students" are actually the success story here, not an object of pity.

It's like you're having the wrong conversation and getting really indignant about it.

Have you considered the possibility that you may be too dumb to objectively decide how smart other people are?

Translation: You're not interested in smart kids. You're probably also the type who thinks we should end world hunger before daring to venture into space or mess around with worthless stuff like high speed internet.

Not everything has to be about the "troubled kids" you know. We spend more than enough money trying to help the troubled kids. I think society gets more bang for the buck from helping a bright kid achieve more than a troubled kid fail slightly less.

I assume you replied to the wrong person. Surely you meant to say that to the person who said "The terrorists are the Federal Government of the United States; their enemy is We the People" (GGP) rather than GP.

Amiga3d's example of Islamic terrorism is perfect, but the example of the federal government being a terrorist because they have occasionally violated the Constitution is ridiculous.

I think you must have some kind of mental disability or personality disorder to be going on and on about this in such a ranting fashion. Hopefully it makes you feel better to say a bunch of nonsense and then add "objectively true." Sad person.

None, because as an individual we can make an individualized determination for him.

It does if that arbitrary signifier has correlations with important outcomes.

The "good" is that it allows us to spend resources more efficiently when we want to influence those outcomes, or to conserve resources and accept certain things instead of trying to fight them.

As an example, there is a great deal of money and time being spent to address racial achievement gaps in education. The assumption is the aggregate statistics for each race should be about the same. What if that assumption is wrong? Then we're wasting money that could be put to much better use.

You're right, and that's a great example of dumb racist thinking. That doesn't mean much because non-racists or anti-racists are dumb too.

See, this means you don't even understand what you're criticizing. What's this "all" business?

Here's a better example. Men are more likely to commit rape than women. Women are more likely to be raped than men. Pop quiz: did I just say that all men are rapists, or that all women are raped? Answer: nope.

To me the biggest problem with you is that you conflate "acknowledging racial differences" with "believing in racism." Acknowledging that men commit more violent rapes than women clearly doesn't make me sexist. Does acknowledging that black men have a higher rate of committing murder than white men make me racist?

I don't consider myself racist, or at least not the dumb kind of racist you were talking about above who wouldn't hire a smart black guy because of a firm belief that all blacks are dumb.

But whatever. I don't respect you either because you've shown you can't have a serious discussion. You're hiding behind calling me "low iq" even though I'm quite smart, as are most people on Slashdot, and that should be evident to you from reading my posts.

Do you think discrimination requires uniform exclusion or something?

Like if I'm a mortgage broker and my subprime mortgages are "targeted at" blacks... but are not "exclusively for" blacks.. then I'm not discriminating?

Somehow I doubt you'd agree with that.

That is a great point that the other poster made too. I'm still not sure running the stop sign at low speed would make much of a difference, and the faster you go, the less you're able to check for traffic.

That, I'm familiar with. I actually was a biker for about 6 months when I was trying to lose some weight. That's part of why I feel a little comfortable expressing my doubts.. I have biked in those proverbial shoes.

I think it's pretty dangerous for the out of shape biker like you're talking about. We don't have years of experience and many hours per week of practice (or we wouldn't be out of shape). Slowing down and checking for traffic sounds great, but it would be tough to do well because that also means checking behind you. To me, the most dangerous thing I ever ran into is the car behind you that wants to quickly pass you and make a turn. Even at a red light, the car might want to go right on red, and assumes you're not going to just run through the light, so they pass you.

I'm equally paranoid about that as a walker/jogger. When I'm on the sidewalk and about to cross another road, or even worse an entrance to a parking lot, I always look behind me before crossing. I can't believe how many times I've done that to catch a car that thinks "Oh he's going so slow, I'll just sneak ahead of him and turn real quick."

That's interesting. I have no idea what the overall statistics are, but the most disturbing prostitution stories (to me) generally involve pimps. There was a good episode of "Vice News" about prostitution and they told the stories of girls who were being manipulated emotionally by pimps, and occasionally hooked on drugs or beaten... but mostly emotional manipulation and financial threats (kicking them out).

To me that's the bad part of prostitution. I'm not sure legalizing it would make it much better... you're still going to have very damaged girls engaging in it, even if it's legal. Who wants to be a prostitute after all?

What you're doing is called "begging the question." How do you know there isn't a connection between race and intelligence, when so many tests over the years show otherwise?

And why do you oversimplify race to "skin color?" You don't change races when you get a tan right?