Turf war: Detroit Mower Gang competes in 12-hour playground cleanup
detroitnews.com
detroitnews.com
I have seen some comments here complaining about wildlife not having a place to live close to humans.
You know what else thrives in high grass? Ticks and rats. And if a lot is abandoned too long in Detroit there's a good chance it'll accumulate dead bodies.
Screw your wildlife.
Detroit is a big city; like 140 square miles. The vast majority of that land are neighborhoods that are high crime. It's been that way for a long time. It is changing slowly but mostly around the afore mentioned pockets.
Just my anecdata though.
The unfortunate truth is there are 20,000 cities in the US and in 2018 Detroit ranked #3 for murder. Detroit has more murders than New York, Los Angeles and Chicago combined. You live in a dangerous city and it's not because I said so.
My guess is you guys are new to the city and you live in a nice pocket. That's great for the city, thank you. I used to 'run around' the city in the 80s when it was twice as violent and I too was never harassed because I too could afford to live and play in the nice areas.
I'm not talking about me and you.
If you meant per-capita, Detroit does have more homicides per capita than Chicago, LA, or NYC, but combining per-capita numbers doesn't really make sense/is misleading.
To expand it further. I assume you don't consider below being misleading somehow:
Mary gets paid 90k per annum -- which is more than what both Jane and Jill receive per annum combined. It's the same principle.
> Mary gets paid 90k per annum -- which is more than what both Jane and Jill receive per annum combined. It's the same principle.
This is misleading if all you're saying is that both Jane and Jill get paid less than 90k.
But nobody is saying that. That is a totally normal statement to make. E.g. 90k > (20k + 30k)
It works just as well for the murder rate per 100k residents:
39.80 > (23.14 + 7.01 + 3.39)
Detroit > (Chicago + LA + NYC)
If that's what you're saying, then you're wrong, because the combined death rate of 3 cities would be the number of deaths across 3 cities divided by the number of people across 3 cities. It would not be the number of deaths per 100k in each city added together!
If that's not what you're saying, then I don't understand how it can be meaningful to compare those figures.
As which of the two you take it is obviously very context dependent. If someone would ask you what the combined output of two factories per hour is, would you tell them the average?
I think it's a very meaningful comparison, as it highlights that there is a severely increased risk of dying of murder in Detroit. To put the same in a different framing: You could live one year in Chicago, one year in LA, one year in NYC and run a lower risk of being murdered than if you were living in Detroit for just one year. Of course this is just one small piece in the overall puzzle of mortality statistics, and might not have a big impact even at elevated levels, but that's a different topic.
Such "combined number of second, third, ... places" (= sum) figures are good at quickly highlighting that there must be something out of the ordinary happening, because a smallish deviation of a few percent can not be expressed as a sum of e.g. second and third place. There are of course some other problems with this method of comparing figures (e.g. bias - as a foreigner, I would have assumed a much higher murder rate for NYC), but there is nothing inherently wrong with comparing numbers this way.
If someone asked you the combined output of two factories per worker, would you tell them the sum?!
If the first factory produces 1 item per hour and the second factory produces 1 item per hour, then combined they are producing 2 items per hour. Agreed.
If the first factory produces 5 items with 1 worker and the second factory produces 5 items with 1 worker, then combined they're producing 5 items per worker, not 10 items per worker!
But it does (when we are summing over the time axis)! We always had time built into the unit (deaths/100k people/year), so of course it makes sense to look at it in the context of time by applying specific values for them.
> If someone asked you the combined output of two factories per worker, would you tell them the sum?!
With that specific vague query, I'd probably ask a follow up question, as I assume that the person asking the question doesn't exactly know how to interpret the number, which is often the case if someone asks for "combined" and "per" in the same sentence. I've helped people build enough BI dashboards to spot when people try to avoid thinking about the data implications behind the operations they think they want to do, and "combine" is one of the top keywords for that.
> If the first factory produces 5 items with 1 worker and the second factory produces 5 items with 1 worker, then combined they're producing 5 items per worker, not 10 items per worker!
Factory 1 is producing 5 items/worker/hour, just as factory 2 is, so "combined" they are producing 10 items/hour, which is just as valid as your statement. As long as you are mindful with the units and the context, either way is fine.
> If it's per capita, can't you just list every city that has a lower per-capita rate and claim that it is higher than all of them "combined"?
I can't, since that would be wrong, that basically not how I ever read and understand that sentence(if it has "combined" in it), I am not a native english speaker so I'm maybe wrong on this.
Mary gets paid 90k per annum, this is more than what Jane and Jill get per annum combined. I read it as: Mary's per annum (90k) > Jane's per annum + Jill's per annum
Mary gets paid 90k per annum, this is more than what Jane and Jill get per annum. I read it as two separate comparisons: Mary's per annum (90k) > Jane's per annum, Mary's per annum (90k) > Jill's per annum
When you add 2 annual salaries you're not increasing the number of years that the salary is paid over.
Death rate per capita does not combine additively, that makes no sense. What would it even mean? 0.1 deaths per capita + 0.2 deaths per capita is not equal to 0.3 deaths per capita because the denominator changes.
You're doing very simple fraction addition: 1/100,000 + 5/100,000 = 6/100,000
If there are 100,000 people in city 1, with 5 deaths, and 100,000 people in city 2, with 10 deaths, then we have:
city 1: 5 deaths per 100,000
city 2: 10 deaths per 100,000
Adding them together, we don't get 15 deaths per 100,000! We get 15 deaths per 200,000 (because they each have 100k residents) = 7.5 deaths per 100,000.
I feel like I'm missing the joke here.
EDIT: I mean, yeah, literally, if you add the fractions together, you get what you wrote. But that's not a meaningful way to combine death rates.
- St. Louis: 186 homicides, 302K residents, ~62 homs/100K pop
- Los Angeles: 259 homicides, 3.99M residents, ~6.5 homs/100K pop
- Detroit: 261 homicides, 672K residents, ~38.8 homs/100K pop
- STL + LA: 445 homicides, 4.292M residents, ~10.4 homs/100K pop.
Does Detroit have more homicides per capita than Los Angeles and St. Louis combined? Yeah, technically. Are you more likely to be murdered in Los Angeles and St. Louis combined? That's meaningless, as Los Angeles and St. Louis is not a relevant unit to that question.
A quick search resulted in these statistics from 215:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/718903/murder-rate-in-us...
* Detroit is 3rd on the list with 38.88 murders per 100.000 residents
* Chicago is 9th on the list with 20.7 per 100.000 residents.
Therefore at least according to this data Detroit's homicide rate is roughly twice that of Chicago.
They also said "Detroit, the city with the most violent crime per capita in the US"
These statements are false. Chicago has more murders than Detroit. St. Louis has a higher murder rate than Detroit. The person you are commenting on is correct.
Is it true and if yes, how is this possible, I wonder what's fundamentally different than Europe (I grew up in a poor country, I've lived in plenty of poor neighbourhoods, rarely had trouble beyond aggressive drunks and a few muggings). Or is everyone's life so sheltered that a gang of kids seems like nazis on parade?
In Europe (I'm in Portugal) there are bad neighbourhoods where 'normal' people don't go. Where even the paramedics only enter with a police escort and even police sometimes are scared to go there. Maybe not so many murders as guns are harder to come by (but shotguns for hunting/home defense are easier) but the chances of being mugged are high.
Just an example that happened yesterday when police tried to stop a party and were greeted with stones and some gunshots: https://www.dn.pt/pais/agentes-da-psp-recebidos-a-tiro-quand...
I lived in many places in Europe, all countries have these 'parts of town' but you just don't know much about them unless you live near one of them or know someone that works there (police, nurse, etc).
Nothing. There are neighborhoods in Limerick city in Ireland where the fire brigade only go with a police escort, because people were calling to report a fire and then attacking the fire engines. If you don’t think there are neighborhoods in Europe the police only go in large groups you’re wrong. There are many fewer but the US isn’t some alien planet.
"I fought the lawn, and the lawn won."
I first thought it was some Detroit mafia families competing to clean up playgrounds.
But I had the same mistake; I thought somehow a business consortium had spawned based on mowing rights/contracts, from the title
Reading the article left me wondering about the actual status of this park, and how many others are in the same state.
Clearly you've never owned a home with pest problems nor dealt with animals chewing the wiring harness on your vehicle or inhabiting its air intake circuit.
I'm all for conservation and limiting human population size but there's no sense in encouraging pests to live in/around your house and possessions.
You're right, your sample of one clearly proves the absurdity of it.
(But also I'm with the sibling comments here -- lyme's is no joke and I'm terrified to know that it's been migrating west)
1.3 acres for $6k where you can cultivate whatever plants/habitat you want.
You can buy large acreage in the city of Detroit pretty inexpensively. The city itself will sell you individual house lots for $100.
Sounds like a great opportunity for all the wildlife proponents in this thread to do their share and create a natural reserve where they believe there should be one. That's far more productive than criticizing volunteers for mowig a lawn.
You could, but it wouldn't be fun.
Who are we to impose our aesthetic sensibilities on others.
Having people cook for you used to be reserved for rich people. Are you emulating slave owning aristocrats when you go to a restaurant?
You haven't seen my lawn. ;-)
My view is that the local people seem to prefer a park with cut grass, and these volunteers are helping them out. If the people want something else, they should decide.
Might it be a meadow instead of a lawn?
> Let the birds and the bees live their rich lives.
Can city parks at least be "for humans"?
Where did children play before the invention of the lawn mower?
> Can city parks at least be "for humans"?
You mean, at least, besides the cities themselves, the parking lots, the industrial areas, the roads and highways, the suburbs. Yeah, at least. Poor humans. Give them at least the parks.