If you haven’t heard of the Kia boys over here in the states, it’s definitely something. This vid is…a bit controversial but the Kia boys are definitely a thing in Milwaukee:
please do not assume what a black person would think. also, there isn't a "black" person. I know its hard for many "nice liberals" but black people are diverse and do not share a monoculture or single thoughts. stop generalizing over race or even skin color.
that is way more racist than op comment.
You are wrong to focus on the color of someone's skin.
Classism is the issue. Opportunity is the issue. Greed of the wealthy reaping rents in a quest to squeeze out every last bit of blood money possible is the issue.
Even the choice to forego a proper security system for the cars is an example of greed, of cutting every corner possible and still charging a premium. Who pays? On both ends of this equation it is the poor.
The author claims a large amount of the difference is explained by family structure. I'm inclined to agree, and I wish our leaders touched on this more often. You can't welfare or police your way out of a failed subculture where kids aren't raised to respect life and property, or themselves for that matter.
It’s worth pointing out that insofar as the failed subculture is failed, its failure was deliberate. Same thing happened with Native Americans. The playbooks for destroying cultures are centuries old and they’re intended to reap exactly the sort of dysfunction you still see generations down the road.
Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be addressing the issue head on and talking about it openly, but it’s definitely more complex than the genetic argument that tends to emerge.
This history is important and relevant in the abstract, but what does it tell us about solutions for today's problems? I don't see what Dred Scott tells us about stopping rampant car thefts in Milwaukee. We are where we're at, now how do we improve?
Not sure! But one important component of a solution is probably to avoid the thinking that generated or at least perpetuated many of the problems in the first place (i.e. intrinsic racial inferiority). Probably also not by acting like everything is all good or that there’s no agency within these communities.
Class and income are not direct parallel. An upper class person falling on hard times still has a generation or three of family and connections and other support structures to reduce the impact. This notion of treating class as about primarily income rather than relationship to control over your own life obscures more than it enlightens. Income affects that control, but so does e.g. societal structures. Family structure is itself a class issue.
Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, both very poor parts of the world on average, have a higher ratio of married couples with children to single parents than do the United States and Canada:
David Drummond, former head of legal at Google and recipient of $47M in total comp in 2019, had a child with a woman who he abandoned and abruptly cut off:
I can provide more anecdotes and data if you like, but my strong sense is that family formation isn't as nearly as tied to class as you think. If anything, low-income people save relatively more money by co-habitating.
Um, have you been to America before, or read any of it's history? Of course we don't openly discuss the racialized class of cheap reserve peon labor that is maintained for everyone else's benefit, that would be super uncomfortable.
"Rent" is an economic term, meaning roughly "income derived from mere ownership of an asset" such as land, but also including things like other monopolies.
No it isn't. It is labour. In fact it actually an example of something where the distinction between labour and rent is crystal-clear.
If you're a landlord and you outsource the working of the land to a peasant tenant farmer (as was the norm in many places for thousands of years), your cut is 100% rent, as it is only derived from your (violence-enforced) exclusive ownership rights to the land.
Appalachia is poor as dirt, yet has half the crime rate. And that's just one comparison - there are lots of others in the world.
Crime is a meme (in the Dawkins sense). You see your peers memeing and you start to repeat the same meme yourself. The more you're surrounded by the meme, the more it becomes part of you and how you operate. It's how our brains operate as pattern recognizers and pattern repeaters.
The spread of school shootings is a meme - it didn't happen in the pre-internet era, yet the uptick in news about it has led to a proliferation. It's become a part of the public consciousness, including amongst those that feel disaffected and likely to fall into destructive patterns of thought. It's easy to find online communities that reinforce these feelings and dispositions.
"Incel behavior". Meme.
Anti-trans politics. From out of nowhere, it's suddenly everywhere. Also a meme.
Through this lens, gang behavior amongst disaffected youth is no different than shitposting on Twitter in how it latches on to people and spreads.
If you transplanted the seeds of Atlanta crime into Pickens County, Georgia, I've no doubt the same behavior would take root there. It's independent of skin color or genes. It's a brain modality.
Behavior spreads as a meme. If there are pockets that support or reinforce a particular behavior, then the fire can't and won't die out.
There's definitely more at play than just bad thoughts. Actions result from emotions and expectations that are conditioned by complex patterns of social behavior reinforced by material pressures and legal institutions providing complex feedback to behaviors and all of that is also part of the explanation why memes spread farther and faster in some places, like American schools, than in other places.
In the limit, when we have brain-computer uploads, people will be all races, genders, furries, dragons, whatever. People of the future will happily change their personas frequently, and they'll look upon history as being full of genetic Luddites.
If people had a pill that made them not-ugly, they'd take it. Or to get a bigger penis, or to be taller, or to be less fat, or have a higher VO2 max. You wouldn't even question it. So why go out of your way to make a point about gender?
There's no reason why any of us should be satisfied with what we were born into. Especially if it doesn't feel right. Boxing people into genetic confines is stifling.
This is a rather heat generating post (as opposed to light).
I think the things that cause this are:
* References to some supposed collective discourse ("so many refuse to discuss this.").
* Statements about what "we" do (who is "we"? Americans? Anglos? English speakers? The world?).
* Heavily political topic central to the USA Culture War.
* Use of (USA) identity group divisions ("white", "black").
I think this is a really unproductive line of discourse and a particularly bad way of approaching that line, focusing on consensus building and a call to action (in this case, a change of discourse). I think this post is unsuitable for hackernews.
I think a lot of people who didn't know the contours of this auto theft crime wave, or perhaps even know such a crime wave was happening, now have a better understanding of what's happening and why.
> If these were white kids we'd publicly shame them, crack down on the worst offenders, and figure out a program to help the rest back on track.
The problem is that black kids get publicly shamed and cracked down on when they haven't done anything, making that ineffective, and nobody bothers with the third part of actual programs to help them.
The easier solution would be for TikTok et al to have proper moderation controls and have nipped this in the bud when the first video dropped, but ByteDance just wants to instill chaos in the American public so they don't care one iota.
It’s hilariously misguided to look for singular causes and singular fixes for any issue that persists beyond the first few attempts to solve it. They’re almost always overdetermined and multicausal, and yes, media (not TikTok alone) does play some role in the system.
> It’s hilariously misguided to look for singular causes and singular fixes for any issue that persists beyond the first few attempts to solve it.
Sorry but that's wrong. If you try to fix an issue by doing useless things, such as attacking TikTok, and then conclude that the problem is not solved because it is "overdetermined and multicausal", you just confused yourself into impotence.
You should of course start with your highest-conviction fixes and I don’t think TikTok lands there. But no, most persistent behaviors, not even problems specifically, are multicausal and overdetermined. Behaviors that are not this way are fragile and rarely persist long enough to even be labeled as “a behavior”.
> You should of course start with your highest-conviction fixes and I don’t think TikTok lands there.
I would rather start with things that provably work...
> But no, most persistent behaviors, not even problems specifically, are multicausal and overdetermined. Behaviors that are not this way are fragile and rarely persist long enough to even be labeled as “a behavior”.
Salvador seemingly proved that its very high murder rate had a single major cause: gang activity [1]. Some "social" problems have simple solutions. Some don't.
Now that's an excellent proposal: look into the future to pre-determine what will work and then pick the things that'll work.
El Salvador proved what was already known. You can rapidly eliminate crime by just imprisoning anyone suspected of crime. Now tell me... why doesn't every country on the planet do this? Why does the United States have such strong restrictions against this, by design (e.g. "Blackstone's Ratio" to let 10 guilty men go free rather than imprisoning a single innocent one)?
Could it be that this behavior tends to scoop up innocent people, delegitimize the state, and yield more violence and more chaos?
This is exactly the type of simplistic thinking I'm cautioning against. Maybe it'll work out for El Salvador, but in general throughout history this has not yielded good outcomes, which is why most of the prosperous countries on the planet do not behave this way despite its obvious near-term advantages.
If you can't make reliable predictions then try looking into the past.
> You can rapidly eliminate crime by just imprisoning anyone suspected of crime.
Overgeneralization from the get-go is how you end up confusing a situation and do nothing.
> why doesn't every country on the planet do this?
A first reason would be that they don't have gangs, so it would be useless to target them. Then, if they have large gangs and they can identify members of such gangs, then yes -- why don't they do this?
> Could it be that this behavior tends to scoop up innocent people, delegitimize the state, and yield more violence and more chaos?
This is changing the conversation. Those are not causes, but potential consequences. You said that problems are always multicausal and can't be solved by simple solutions, but isn't it more like you have strong moral standards that prevent you from considering such solutions? So this is not about a correct analysis of causes and such, this is about how to solve problems within your own framing.
To answer: if you outlaw being in a gang, then anyone identified as part of one is not innocent. Arguably a state is more delegitimized when it fails to prevent its peaceful members from being murdered or ran over by carjackers. Third is simply: no, I don't think so at all. Third, is a "theory of inverse": having more order, creates more disorder. It's never applied anytime in my life -- when I clean my place, it doesn't get dirtier, and it doesn't seem to me that this theory has worked on a societal level either.
> but in general throughout history this has not yielded good outcomes, which is why most of the prosperous countries on the planet do not behave this way despite its obvious near-term advantages.
Speaking of framing, the "most prosperous countries on the planet", by which I assume you mean the U.S. and various Euro countries, executed a large percentage of their population for centuries until the (late) second part of the 20th. If you look at the UK for example [1], the Bloody code (in the 19th) included 220 reasons for capital punishment (including many dismeanors).
It would be simplistic to conclude that extremely harsh legal systems lead to prosperity, but it seems that not only are there obvious short-term advantages, there might even be long-term advantages.
Finally, I will say that, amusingly, El Salvador doesn't have the death penalty, so instead of executing a few gang-members every year, and having the police control them on the road every day, they're just locking up a large number of them with huge short-term success.
The harshness of the punishments and strictness of enforcement are not the relevant dimensions: the legitimacy of them is.
El Salvador is very likely committing extrajudicial killings and imprisoning people without anything resembling fair trials. Again, this will have the intended effect in the short term and will very likely not in the long term.
For example, why does MS-13 et al exist anyway? Well, as consequence of the Salvadoran Civil War which was kicked off in part due to extrajudicial killings that the government at that time was using to maintain control over a brittle society!
You’re just seeing a repeat of the same cycle that produced the violent gangs in the first place. The problem will re-emerge and I’m sure we’ll have another proposal to do “the simple thing” and just go imprison and execute a bunch of people extrajudicially. Maybe it’ll work that time.
I don't understand this insistence on extrajudicial executions; doesn't the U.S. have them too? Those are not part of the Salvadorean legal system, are they? It brings nothing to the discussion, and seems an attempt at pointing fingers at best. If you want to discuss vigilantism, you realize that's another thing?
In any case, I can't agree with anything you said. Obviously reducing murders by half will have very deep trickling positive effects on a society. And the Salvadoran Civil War was simply not due, even in part, to cracking down on gang crime.
I reiterate that, even though you may not like it, or may want to use softer methods, or may resent one for making this observation, repressive methods provably work at stopping violent crime. Unless you're a slippery slope afficionado, what this should tell you is not that you should declare martial law on Earth, but that violent crime is a provably solvable problem. Arguably, alongside with morals, it would be nice to also have the imagination and motivation to achieve such result.
Conflating state-sponsored extrajudicial killings (El Salvador) with homicide (the US) seems like bad faith argumentation.
I guess we'll see how stable El Salvador seems in a few years. I would bet that it will either be an authoritarian state rife with human rights abuses as a matter of daily operation or it will be once again overrun with crime bordering on civil war.
>If these were white kids we'd publicly shame them, crack down on the worst offenders, and figure out a program to help the rest back on track. They're black so we don't, and this is somehow less racist. I do not understand it.
Would we? This is merely grand theft auto, not rape or murder, so why would we treat them worse than Brock Turner or Kyle Rittenhouse? If they were white, why not give them a book deal?
Kyle Rittenhouse didn't commit any crimes. Brock Turner received public vitriol commensurate with his crimes; I think a better comparison would be with the hockey player who pushed an empty wheelchair down some stairs. It's indefensible but at the end of the day not the kind of thing that warrants an Internet Week of Hate. Certainly less bad than hundreds of acts of grand theft auto.
It's indefensible but at the end of the day not the kind of thing that warrants an Internet Week of Hate.
I'm sorry, but what?
Brock Turner was convicted of sexual assault.
He served 3 months, and likely gave someone else a lifetime of hurt because he couldn't control his sexual urges to the point he was willing to have sex with an unconscious person.
He served 3 months. after being rich enough to post bail and hire decent lawyers.
But somehow, he doesn't deserve hate and this is less bad than grand theft auto?
Kyle Rittenhouse was not convicted by a Jury, something very different.
The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was toothless primarily because of its Jury trial clause, which guaranteed that no one violating civil rights would ever be convicted by a jury of their white peers.
It's not "self defense" when you arm yourself and drive yourself intentionally into an are trying to create and/or find trouble.
> If these were white kids we'd publicly shame them
Not sure why you want make this a black and white issue.
So instead of stealing cars do you want them to destroy the economy and get bailouts or steal college seats from deserving candidates by just buying college admissions, you want them to do "respectable" crimes?
You may or may not have intentionally started a flamewar in this thread, but you've certainly broken the site guidelines by perpetuating it badly. Please stop and please don't.
Edit: when a new account shows up with a dossier of links under one arm and a briefcase of arguments under the other, on a classic flamewar topic, that's not a good-faith use of the site. Pre-existing agendas are not what HN is for. They're repetitive, tedious, and usually inflammatory—certainly that's the case in this thread. This destroys the curious conversation that the site is supposed to be for, so please stop doing this.
Mentioning a 1958 article to justify your racism really doesn't help.
"Abetting the concealment campaign is the feeling shared by many whites that it is unfair, inflammatory and even un-American to talk about Negro crime." This is the first sentence of the article, dude, seriously.
It's really sad to see more and more far right racists on HN, this place used to be filled with smart people.
"Negro" was the word in common use by people of all races at the time. Wikipedia:
>Negro was accepted as normal, both as exonym and endonym, until the late 1960s, after the later Civil Rights Movement. One example is Martin Luther King Jr. self-identification as Negro in his famous "I Have a Dream" speech of 1963.
Do you have any comment on the content of the article?
So, I have now put /War of Art/ and /Art and Fear/ in my queue. I also have a physical of /Art of War/ somewhere. I'm assuming that is a different thing, though.
One datapoint to the contrary - I had an excellent experience with their support. Shortly after I bought my original OP-1 (the $800 version), I managed to brick it during a firmware update (my computer died while loading the new FW IIRC). They're a Swedish company but had an "authorized repair" guy based in the states, so I just dropped it in the mail and had it back in about a week.
Can't remember if they covered shipping, but they were super communicative through the whole process.
This was a few years ago, so maybe that's changed!
historically, LEO have been fairly aggressive on the road to Burning Man...i think i've had a "close call" the past several years.
for example, last year when i was driving from Reno to Black Rock City, i went through a well-known zone on tribal land where the speed limit goes 55->45->35->25 and then back up. it was about 1am and pitch black...so i was particularly freaked out by the unmarked, unlit police SUV aggressively tailgating me. it followed me for about a mile and then turned around when i didn't budge.
BIA is a new character, though. there's chatter that they had a DUI checkpoint setup on Monday (the event starts this upcoming sunday). the tactics are roughly the same but the infractions seem more minor than in the past. local police were pretty happy to collect speeding tickets.
was at a startup where the split was 72.5/10/10 (eng)/7.5 (me) when we got into an incubator; investors tried to convince the ceo that we should do an even split iirc, but he felt the business was built up enough that the equity split was fair. we were all dumb kids (oldest was 21), and didn't know what we were doing. when the 16 hour days with no pay were too much for me, the lack of equity made it very easy for me to walk away.
i would never do a split like that again, and would not recommend it. i still can't watch Silicon Valley because it reminds me of those times haha.
when i was working at fb, i specifically got a s7 as a work phone to use with gear vr to dogfood and i found the phone-insertion experience to be rather annoying. it was so annoying, in fact, that i would just leave my s7 in the gear vr and continued to use my personal phone, an iphone, for everything. the only reason i took it out was to charge it when it died after an hour of use.
i used to be deeply skeptical of the idea of these standalone vr units, but it's good to see oculus exploring it.
why didn't you buy last week? the price is never too high to buy, and never too low to sell.
if you really believe it will go up, why not buy when you think the chart looks good and move your stops up as it increases? your position sizing algorithm and exit strategy should allow you to capture some of that profit and protect yourself from a large correction
at UIUC, there's a project in the systems class (CS241) that is exactly this. there's a leaderboard with projects and how it compares to the system malloc for a variety of metrics
this is definitely one of the best projects i ever did in school and a great coming of age project. worst case, there's always an implementation at the back of K&R ;)
I agree. That assignment was one of my favorites. It was a lot of fun because it was fairly easy to get something that functioned, and as you came up with ideas for making it better (or just got ideas from reference implementations), you could watch your metrics get better or worse.
Exactly the experience I'm trying to provide with the challenge. For the price of forking the repository you get a framework for trying out and comparing your own allocation strategies.
There was also ComponentKit, which was used heavily in fbobjc: https://github.com/facebook/componentkit