East of Palo Alto’s Eden
techcrunch.com
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EPA however met all that criteria perfectly. Landed on a Friday, picked out an apartment over the weekend, and had the keys on Monday. Unlike many areas in the bay, demand is fairly low in EPA and there are available apartments everywhere.
Despite being a perfect fit for my needs, never did I realize what kind of judgement I would get from so many people for living here. I get a shocked expression almost every time I mention I live in EPA. Some people even get angry. "Why would you drag your wife to place like that?!?!". Many people I know when shopping for apartments themselves openly say there is no way they could ever live somewhere so "unsafe" and just consider my wife and I to be "lucky" or "living dangerously". The very idea that a white couple with a tech job income would -choose- to live in EPA blows peoples minds. I used to just tell people I live in Palo Alto to avoid the judgement, but now I happily claim it and discuss the misconceptions. My wife and I are pretty happy with all our ideals met. We won at housing by ignoring meaningless stigma and will be squatting here for a while. Might even buy a house while the market is still 1/4. Property value here is sure to soar once people realize the "murder capitol" age is distant history.
The stigma from past history is incredibly present, but the _reality_ is this is one of the safest feeling places I have ever lived. (And I have lived a lot of places)
Baltimore's problem isn't the poor blacks. It never was. (Yes, there are some in the drug trade, just as there are some low-income whites in it.) I feel sorry for them, because they've been abandoned by the economy (deindustrialization) and the politicians, and they almost never do any harm to others. Its problem is the whites in the suburbs ("the county") who've basically abandoned the city, going in for July 4th and New Years and an occasional trip to the Aquarium but otherwise avoid never deign to live there (and, therefore, don't pay taxes and leave the city poor despite being in one of the wealthiest states in the country).
Baltimore's disciplined voting habits have given it disproportionate power in the state government. The late William Donald Schaefer appeared to regard Maryland as a life support system for Baltimore, not just when he was mayor but when he was governor. I doubt it will do as well under Hogan who is a) Republican, and b) from Prince Georges County as it did under O'Malley.
But yes, there are perfectly fine parts of Baltimore.
Baltimore is also plagued by The Wire. More people than I can count have tried to wax philosophical about Baltimore's problems despite having never stepped a foot there.
Baltimore is actually in the midst of becoming more hipster. There was a reverse flight of poor people to areas in the county when they demolished the high-rise projects and replaced them with single family homes. There are areas downtown that feel more young professional and vibrant with upscale bars and breweries.
EPA has been a dump long before the 1950s, when this article begins its history. When Stanford opened for business, alcohol was prohibited in a one mile radius. Right outside that mile was Whiskey Gulch, where EPA began and high crime rates with it.
5 years ago I got my house for 1/2 of what the same house in other parts of town would cost. People thought I was crazy despite how much the area had changed for the better. These days the area is undergoing some gentrification, and it's sad seeing families move out to be replaced by graduate students - I like a neighborhood where there are children playing, and families hanging out. Heck, someone broke into my house once, shortly after I moved in, and the fact that there were families at home meant the cops were called and caught them in the act, rather than now, where I suspect an afternoon break-in would go unnoticed since no one is around.
But despite all of that - people still say "wow, it must be scarey living over there. You have good job, upgrade out to the booneys, is being close to downtown really worth the risk?". I just laugh. And consider buying the next house up for sale to rent to grad students.
Btw, the same things have been said about Oakland for many years. I try to tell people that the (bad) crime in Oakland is very much contained in bad areas, and most of Oakland is not bad, even downtown.
Glad you found a place that you're happy with. Congrats!
Have you had any issues with car breaking or other nonviolent crimes? Do you see lots of 'street youths' loitering so to speak? :)
EDIT: this post quickly digressed into a four page behemoth that was too long to post in a single comment. It's long and I fear the formatting would have been awful. I will put up a WP site sometime tomorrow so that I may edit it and format it nicely. Below is a brief excerpt from the end. I'll make an edit to this post as soon as the WP site is up.
----------------------
If anything is to be taken away from my experience and these stories is that the men and women who are forced to grow up in this environment live in cyclical state of despair. A vacuum that requires quite nearly a winning lottery ticket to escape.
For it to be located so close to the affluent areas of silicon valley is practically criminal. It is eerily close to being the pit in which Bane grew up in during the Batman movies, the one where he lived in a prison that could see freedom and happiness just a couple hundred feet away.
If I make any sort of dime in Silicon Valley I fully intend to research and hopefully participate in philanthropy that will contribute to problems such as these.
I believe it becomes our responsibility when it is in our own back yard.
Also, let's not forget the myriad trailer parks which dot bay area cities and towns. They're hidden behind freeway sound abatement walls so people forget about them but they have it pretty tough as well.
The jest is that by having two disparate groups so close to each other, it encourages an us versus them mentality that discourages community members from embracing some of the attributes of the other group (in the case of my essay it would be education, because I write a lot about the different ethos that students had depending on which region they lived in).
Regardless I believe your points still have a large amount of merit. Especially the last which points out how those that are fortunate tend to alternate between fads of 'caring' for various less fortunate groups, in this case it is that of East Palo Alto.
Regarding the reporter's sincerity about caring, it's hard to tell, it could be just getting brownie points on a topical issue or they may really care. However if they actually really cared and wanted to make a difference doing it from TC does not inspire too much credibility. Typically people who really care move closer to the issue (meaning working on the issue constantly. If I cared about feral cats then I'd be involved directly with doing something about feral cats -- otherwise it's just a nice opinion.
This is not true, the airport preceded other development, having been opened prior to World War 2.[1] There were similar voices after the twin-engine Cessna crash as to the outrage of building an airport next to (inexpensive) housing[2]. The causality is reversed from the truth: the housing was/is cheap because there was a pre-existing airport. (And routes do not go over East Palo Alto's residential areas).
(Oh, and the starting photo brings back memories of entering the pattern to land)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Alto_Airport_of_Santa_Clar...
[2] http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0217/Tesla-plane-crash-Con...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Minds
It was grimy, I'd frequently hear cop car sirens at 4 in the morning. And, there wasn't much to do in the immediate area unless you wanted to cross the freeway into Palo Alto. Being there was always a stark reminder of how little that community had, and also how little we had compared to all of the riches around us. Being there felt appropriate for us.
I appreciate my time in EPA, because it was a little microcosm that trapped some of the larger, harder problems of the real-world, hidden inside the bubble that is silicon valley.
To be honest, I'm not sure why your own comment adds to the discussion either.
I appreciate my time in EPA, because it was a little microcosm that trapped some of the larger, harder problems of the real-world, hidden inside the bubble that is silicon valley.
I suppose it is that.
[1] dead link made a snarky comment towards bravery and a movie flick.
A lot of people have the distorted view of SV as some golden paradise, where the roads are paved with 1's and 0's. That is not the case. There are very real problems, but most times people try to talk about it, it's always rooted in some struggle to make SV better (e.g. housing).
I think we should start paying a lot more attention to authors than to the domain names they write on. Not reading the byline is something I've been guilty of for sure, which is why I'm trying to become a lot more conscious of it now. In this case, both pieces were written by Kim-Mai Cutler.
https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/nbnlkqx...
https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/oakland...
EPA's has a really interesting history, back in the 1920s an entrepreneur by the name of Charles Weeks started a Poultry Colony, preaching "one acre and independence". (http://www.paloaltoonline.com/print/story/2008/04/16/one-acr... , http://www.santaclararesearch.net/SCBIOS/cweeks.html) - you can still see the remnants of this in the structure of the lots along Runnymede street. http://epawiki.pbworks.com/f/Remnants+of+a+Failed+Utopia.pdf
There doesn't seem to be any appetite whatsoever for filling in more of the San Francisco Bay to create land, and there are restrictions and conservation easements on most of the land stretching from 280 to the Coastside.
One possible area to expand into would be Coyote Valley, south of San Jose, which was a growth target during the first dot.com bubble in 1999, around a Cisco campus. If Caltrain could put in a station there, along with express lines, that may open up a middle-class area to new housing opportunities.
Old timers could keep their quaint towns --whatever, but at least allow a modern city corridor down The Camino with good density and the accompanying amenities (design it with self-reliance in mind so as not to incite needless driving). The thing that irks me most is the anti building anti progress contingent which aims to keep the whole of the bay area preserved as it was in 1964. Look at China Japan Singapore Holland get a clue learn to change with the times
Redwood City is doing that. Check out the huge new buildings next to the railroad tracks.
Besides, this boom is probably temporary. Social and apps have probably peaked.
From San Jose through Carlmont, Burlingame etc., each city already has a large amount of development and more importantly, are residential neighborhoods containing schools, parks, and the like.
There are already very large amounts of traffic congestion at certain points (currently have Ralston and Hillsdale in my mind), and near the various high schools in the area.
I'm not saying we shouldn't strive for better infrastructure and development planning but the Camino Real strip is not the low hanging fruit in my opinion.
Rent control ordinances in East Palo Alto probably help the current community stay in place (unlike other Peninsula towns).
The article also explains the role of subprime loans (in the context of refinancing for existing homeowners) in causing a loss of home equity with the existing community, especially between 2003-2008, which was in-between the booms in the SF Bay Area.
Basically, it's a complex situation and many (but different) people will be unhappy with the different possible outcomes of change in the community.
It would be unrealistic to expect workers in any one local workforce of a particular occupation to match exactly the overall national ethnic proportion (or even the overall national male:female ratio). Local distributions of people by ethnicity are not the same as the national distribution, in almost every locality, and preferences for pursuing various occupations are not culturally the same across all ethnic groups. But socially perceived ethnicity also influences personal opportunities,[1] so smart employers go out of their way to look for talented people who have something to contribute not just in the usual places, but in all the places the employers' desire to hire talented people can be communicated.
If that's how I'm going to analyze my life, I had better be well prepared for weird things. It's silly to view my life trough the lens of stereotypes. Why did my parents not send me to private school? Stereotype. Why did that person turn me down for a date? Stereotype. Why was I encouraged to do X? Stereotype.
I would like to see us move towards a help people who need it mentality, and not have to worry so much about the ethnicity of the person who needs it. I realize that this isn't quite possible currently due to the strong correlation between the two at the moment, but it is the long term goal that would prevent this type of issue from perpetuating.
Other classes of issues include "budgetary", "political", "legal", and "personnel". The way you approach each class is different.
Although most issues that cross a public official's desk are not systemic, the most publicly debated ones are. That may explain your semantic fatigue around the word.
I do this in all sorts of discussions when I don't understand the terms. "We want to increase engagement." "How do you define engagement?" "We want the estimator to be robust." "How do you define robust?"
You can call a request for clarification of terms "derailing" (or just flag me and call me racist, as many people do), but that makes it look like you simply want to avoid clarity. Asking for clear statements of claims and definitions of terms isn't derailing - it's simply good practice if your goal is understanding.
In contrast, using the word "vibrations" or "fred" instead of "sound" doesn't change the physical behavior of the air. That's why disputing definitions is pointless.
You just used all those words, and I would like you to educate me.
Your comments are no different from someone going to a graduate physics symposium and telling people, "Why are you using all this jargon? Tunneling? That means digging a tunnel through rock! And why are you using 'spin' and 'color' wrong? Please, I just want to understand!"
Well, just like Quantum Physics can't be explained in full in a HN comment, so can't history, economy, social work. So please. Either learn a little bit more about the subject, understand that the explanations you are given here are just small snippets of a much larger field of study (and reality), accept that you might not fully understand the terms, or stop making these juvenile comments over and over.
If you're trying to get people to believe things about society you're propagating an ideology, implicit or explicit. You should expect to get pushback on that all the time unless you're preaching to the converted.
Systemic is like privileged; there's a real, defensible academic sociological meaning. when used outside of that narrow context it's used as a stick to beat one's opponent with, to proclaim moral superiority and display tribal membership.
You should not expect people not already of your political persuasion to be persuaded by jargon you don't care to explain. It's like a Catholic theologian expecting to convert a Muslim one by argument.
"It all totally makes sense once you read this bookshelf."
But while I often discuss the realities of our world with those who are intentionally ignorant, I find the kind of "pushback" you see here to be the most interesting and entertaining. The "unconverted" in this case, uses what he (and it is almost invariable a he, and a young he in most cases) considers science (or scientific thinking) to fight against other sciences, and chooses to ignore the fact that in the realms of intractable math, definitions are often open to debate, or at least discussion, and that does not make them any less valid.
For instance, did you know that even in biology (which yummyfajitas might or might not consider a science, I don't know), one of the most basic definitions -- at the very core of the science -- is not so clear-cut, and, in fact, stands in complete contradiction to other well-established facts concerning itself and even to its own definition? And yet, scientists involved in the field are able to look past such things, as they know physics-level rigorous definitions won't help their science in this case. I am talking, of course, about the term "species". While there is a sorta/kinda definition of a species, it is an undisputed fact that any organism belongs to the same species as its direct ancestor(s) -- hence an immediate contradiction. Yet, biologists understand this fuzzy notion of species and go about their business. The reason is that in the intractable sciences (biology, sociology, and even climate), it is often useful to describe a present state, even if the process that originated it is not fully understood. Thus is the nature of intractability.
And, after all, we're not debating ideas here -- we're debating facts. And when facts are debated, I tend to believe those who have actually studied them rather than those who haven't and just wish they weren't true.
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again.
In contrast, consider "structural". Structural and non-structural oppression is treated differently. For example: http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/on-nerd-entitlement...
I'm also not sure what facts you feel we are debating, or why you feel I "pushed back". I don't even know which facts lsiebert is attempting to assert, which is why I asked.
And the analogy you make to physics or other technical topics is a bit silly. Consider alternate technical topics which have critics - consider HFT. Go read kasey_junk or tptacek's comments on the topic - they don't don't appeal to unstated authorities, refuse to define their terms and attack anyone who asks questions. Strangely, they tend to be far more precise than the critics.
You call this "appeal to authority", but it's nothing than an appeal to science. I am really sorry about your frustration -- you can go on believing what you like, but know that your beliefs are in opposition to thousands and thousands of studies conducted in the past 40 years or so in many countries. Nerd discrimination makes sense to you? Great, go study it in earnest. You know what, if you publish a serious paper citing, say 20 of the top 200 papers done on racial and sexual discrimination, comparing them to anti-nerd sentiments, I will be an enthusiastic supporter of your findings. In fact, I'll be especially interested in the section on nerd disenfranchisement.
But the thing is, that some people spend their careers studying these things. They are called experts, but if you don't like the "appeal to authority" just look at their findings! But of course, you won't, because you're one of those people who keep saying "we haven't found the missing links" over and over, even though the fossil record is right in front of them.
Now HFT is a much, much, much simpler topic than racial marginalization in the United States. And trust me, the evidence on the nature of racism and sexism is a lot more convincing than tptacek opinions on HFT. Like an evolution denier, you just insist on not looking at the facts, going over your mantras again and again.
EDIT: Oh, and I just remembered how when I succumbed to your pleas for education and gave you the actual definition of sexism -- a new word invented by feminists in the 60s -- you still insisted that the people who invented the term use it wrong!
EDIT2: BTW, you and the writer of that infamous comment about nerd privilege both seem to think that what we're discussing is a lot less objective, and more subjective than it actually is. For example, you confuse misogyny (which is subjective and carries judgement) with sexism (which is simply an objective description of the state of affairs). Scott Aaronson confuses suffering (which is subjective) with disenfranchisement which is objective. Because you resent what you perceive as judgment (which may, indeed, be there) you try as hard as you can to misunderstand what is being said, which is no more than fact.
Unfortunately, we never get that far in this discussion because you want to argue about what words to use (and now throw ad hominems at me) rather than the real world.
And trust me, the evidence...
Not citing evidence and merely disputing definitions does not inspire trust.
Could you clearly state what positive claims you think I'm "denying"? Or is asking what you are talking about also somehow equivalent to creationism?
That racism in the US is the primary cause of segregation and marginalization of black people, and that that racism is systemic, i.e. cultural as well as bureaucratic (and so not directly related to personal xenophobia).
Further, I compare it to tribally informed consumption choices of extremely non-xenophobic people, such as my girlfriend's consumption of African American comedy.
Then somehow you conclude that I don't think racism/tribalism is the primary cause of segregation/separation? Or that I don't think it's cultural rather than bureaucratic, and not directly related to personal xenophobia?
Um, ok. Clearly I'm just a big racist nerd and you have excellent reading comprehension skills. And you are right that I definitely did bring up the topic of causes of marginalization in the auras and penumbras of my comments.
You see, if you asked something like, "well, teenaged nerds are in fewer romantic relationships, which are a source of social status and hence power, isn't that like racism", then at least you'll be in the ballpark. But as long as power is missing from your discussion of what you think racism (or sexism) is, then you're missing the issue altogether.
Why do you deny my claim that water is wet?
Seriously dude - get a grip. Read the post before dropping a gigantic wall of text on an unrelated tangent. And please read an article by uncited experts showing that disputing definitions is pointless.
Just kidding, here it is: http://lesswrong.com/lw/np/disputing_definitions/
Second, my definition of racism might be different from common usage, but so is that of spin or color in QM (as is that for energy), and I'm not going to start a debate on the use of the word color, when discussing a QM paper. What matters here isn't the common usage, but usage by the people quoted in the article. They use the definition(s) common in academic circles, or among those who study or care about the issue. Reading the introduction for the Wikipedia article on racism should suffice to at least know what kinds of definitions are commonly used in academia. And, in fact, the dictionary definition is much closer to the usage in academia than to your tribalism.
And that segregation in the US is a result of racism is, indeed, a near tautology, yet you were saying it's a result of tribalism, which is simply factually wrong.
As to Less Wrong, that blog and the people behind it are the subjects of a recent, brilliant Harper's article which I'll be happy to email you, if you want.
I meant systemic in the sense of our society being a system.
Does this mean that more definitions of "systemic" are floating around?
I'd bet the arguments you're seeing are not disputing whether what's happening to nerds is systemic; they're disputing whether it's oppression.
Russia has around a 10 to 12 per 100,000 murder rate. Belarus is around a 5.7 per 100k. Tallinn is over 7 and Tirana is over 6, and Chishinau is near 6, Riga is 5.4, Vilnius is 5.4, Amsterdam is 4.4.
The murder rate in NYC is lower than those for example at about 4 per 100k. The US murder rate is about 4.7, so it's comparable to Amsterdam as a whole country of 320 million people, including the extremely violent parts of the US.
The murder rate in Boise Idaho is about 1 or 2 per 100k typically. Seattle is in the 3's these days, comparable to Brussels. Mesa Arizona has half a million people at a 3 murder rate; Portland is around 600k at the same. San Diego is at around 1.35 million people with a 3.x murder rate.
The US has numerous cities with severe murder problems, and it also has a lot of cities without such. You can find many cities in the six figure population zone with murder rates of 1 or 2 per 100k.
Ultimately in the US you can live in whatever kind of world you feel like living in.
Nordic countries have about 25 million people total. Well, the US has 320 million people, and a lot more people in the US live under a 1.x murder rate than do in Nordic countries.
I typically see people make comparisons using the Nordic countries for everything in Europe, while ignoring the half of Europe that is problematic for those comparisons. The US compares extraordinarily well to the Nordic countries, if you want to do an Apples to Apples comparison, since the Nordics represent the elite outcomes of Europe - then let's compare using the elite outcomes of the US; ie the top 10% of Europe vs the top 10% of the US.
---
"The same issue affected Asian-Americans. When progressive suburban developer Joseph Eichler’s company sold a home in 1954 to an Asian-American family in Palo Alto, word spread through the neighborhood and five homeowners approached the company demanding immediate refunds.
'Get out,' Eichler’s business partner, Jim San Jule, told the white homeowners. 'We don’t even want people like you in our subdivisions.'"
---
Segregation is an insidious evil that can exacerbate problems such as violence and poverty for generations after legal controls or social pressures disappear. See: the entire city of Chicago and the issues it has faced.
"Seperate but equal" was abandoned by SCOTUS decades ago. Maybe it's time for you to catch up.
He's describing voluntary movement. For example, the tendency of Mexicans to live near each other, or for Indian immigrants to the US to live in Jersey City or Edison.
Enlightenedfool's point is that most people, including very pleasant people, harbor tribalist feelings. And these tribalist feelings inform consumption choices. For example, the bad romantic comedies my girlfriend watches have a disproportionate number of black people in them - eventually google informed me that "African American Comedy" is a genre.
A steelman of enlightenedfool's point might note the condemnation of white people making consumption choices based on tribalism, and ask if a black woman preferring to watch movies with Meagan Good and Taraji P. Henson rather than Kate Hudson and Jennifer Aniston deserves similar condemnation.
> Housing segregation traditionally has been the practice of denying African American or other minority groups equal access to housing through the process of misinformation, denial of realty and financing services, and racial steering. Misinformation can take the form of realtors or landlords not giving a certain ethnic group, or race, an accurate portrayal of available units. Racial steering typically occurs when realtors or landlords steer European Americans to available units in white communities, and African Americans to black or racially mixed communities. Generally, racial steering involves misinformation on the part of the realtor or landlord as well, because they will not tell the African Americans or other minorities about the available units in the European American communities.
That used information asymmetry, not threats of violence, to steer 'voluntary movement' and end up with a higher amount of segregation than would have occurred if all parties were equally informed.
While illegal, these forms of housing segregation still exist: see http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-obtains-120... as an example. The quote "Unlawful steering by real estate agents frustrates the rights of people to make fully informed housing choices and perpetuates segregated housing patterns" shows that these non-violent policies are directly tied to segregation.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/np/disputing_definitions/
The point I was making: Yzzxy was arguing against a straw man, acting as if enlightenedfool advocated in favor of using violence to confine certain groups to certain regions ("separate but equal"). Enlightenedfool argued no such thing.
Now if you really want to argue against consumption choices based on tribalist preferences, make that argument. Also be wary of the fallacy of expanding a definition and then expecting all conclusions drawn from the narrow definition to also hold for the wide one - I've noticed when people dispute definitions on topics like this, that fallacy often follows.
Nobody except you said there was a threat of violence. The original article even compared the violence of the Jim Crow South with "the Californian way [which] worked tacitly through housing, jobs and education policies. On top of racially restrictive covenants, realtors around the San Francisco Bay Area were engaged in a practice called blockbusting."
This isn't violence. Restricted covenants have been unenforceable by the government since Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948, so it's not like there's even any threat of government force to back up a covenant through the civil courts.
The comment by enlightenedfool are personal, but don't reflect the law. It is illegal to discriminate based on national origin just like it's illegal to discriminate based on race. Both have been illegal since the Civil Rights Act of 1968/Fair Housing Act. Currently the only legally accepted threat of violence, for those who hold that government force is backed by a threat of violence, is against those who use discriminatory practices.
In any case, enlightenedfool was not talking about violence either. ("And that's not because of violence.") Neither was yzzxy, who referred to the housing discrimination in Chicago, which were very similar to the non-violent way of California.
For your statement to make sense means (I believe) that you inferred that yzzxy's reference to "separate but equal" was a statement that equated enlightenedfool's beliefs on "own kind" as identical to the specific government practices ruled illegal in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and that you believe laws are only possible via the threat of violence by the government, and therefore yzzxy must mean that enlightenedfool also want coercive violence.
This is a stretch. It's much easier to believe that yzzxy uses it as a short-hand for the thinking behind the separate but equal doctrine rather than specific implementation points. For one, Brown v. Board of Education was not about private discrimination in the housing market but about government discrimination. For another, the theory of "laws backed by threat of violence" is extremely tenuous here. Redlining occurred through mortgage discrimination, via the National Housing Act of 1934, where banks ended up denying mortgage capital to high-risk/strongly minority areas. Where is the violence in "we will not give federal mortgage insurance to houses in this neighborhood"? For a third, if anything, it is yzzxy who supports government-backed violence as a way to prevent further segregation.
The only way I could understand your conclusion required an implicit acceptance of an incorrect definition - that 'housing segregation uses threats of force to live separately.' It seemed easier to first start with that wrong statement, as it would otherwise be impossible to address your other substantive points.
Instead you ended by asserting that any definition arguments are pointless - quite odd from someone who asked "What does "systemic" mean?" on this very thread? If you really believe that definition arguments are meaningless, why do you get into them?
You say you are "trying to understand", and yet reject as meaningless anything which might lead to a change in your understanding.
How disingenuous. And yes, I'm using my own private definition that you can't respond to because I haven't told you what it means.
Yzzxy did refer to violent segregation: ""Seperate but equal" was abandoned by SCOTUS decades ago. Maybe it's time for you to catch up."
The fact is that housing segregation in this era was enforced by threats of violence, aka "law". Same for banking regulations.
Instead you ended by asserting that any definition arguments are pointless
Providing definitions is important to clarify thinking. Thanks to you providing a definition, I know what concepts you refer to when you say "segregation". In contrast, I don't know what concept "systemic" refers to because of the lack of a definition.
There is no point in me telling you your definition is wrong. If I convince you, all that will happen is you'll apply different mental labels to the same things. Your conclusions will remain the same, they'll just be phrased with different words.
Further, all this argument over definitions has gotten us completely distracted from the actual point. The point is this: humans often allow tribalist feelings to influence consumption choices (housing, movies, etc). Is this a bad thing that should be prevented and/or condemned? The definition of segregation is completely irrelevant to the answer to this question.
No, see what you did there? While humans often allow tribalist feelings to influence their choices, there is a difference between those who can choose more and those who can choose less, and the discussion is about those who can can choose more restricting the mobility of those who can choose less. Those are facts -- they are not a matter of opinion or ideology, but the objective reality. It is you who decided that "tribalist feelings" are the cause of segregation, which is a nice hypothesis but a factually wrong one. What you have here isn't tribe A and tribe B, but a dominant tribe A and a weak tribe B, and power dynamics has a far stronger effect than in-group dynamics, as proven by history in this particular case and others like it. That there are several dynamics here concurrently does not mean that they're all equal in influence.
If you scroll up, you'll realize that we are discussing cases where no one has the power to restrict anything. The only power anyone has is to buy or sell a good (movies in my example or houses in enlightenedfool's example) to a willing partner in trade.
I also didn't "decide" anything. I merely asked a normative question. I know you have some vendetta against me, but it might help to read my comments before carrying on this vendetta.
This is something you keep saying to different people. The common factor is you.
You claim to ask the difficult quesions when all you do is spew inane trash; then bicker about weird definitions; and then play the victim card by claiming everyone has a vendatta against you.
That is not at all what was being discussed, but what you decided the discussion was about by making the wrong assumption that housing choices were as voluntary as picking movies. They are not, neither are they voluntary, as research shows (as well as the discussed article). Going back to "systemic", bureaucracies in the US (both private and governmental) do restrict housing choices by discriminating based on proxies for race (i.e. correlated variables, that are sometimes directly related to race, and sometimes less directly).
I have no vendetta against you, but the way you're discussing these issues is insincere, and shows complete disregard to the vast body of evidence collected. But it does provoke an emotional reaction on my part because it is a prime example of "nerd bigotry" that's so rampant among startup people.
You say you discuss objective facts, where, in fact, you make false analogies and presumptions that are precisely where racism is often found. The most obvious example, given by countless people before you, is that of "voluntary choice", while racism works precisely by restricting choice. I will not go at length into how that's done, because the process has been documented so many times and in great detail. But if person A has choices, say, 1 through 5, and person B has choices 1 thorough 3, and exercising those choices requires more effort on the part of person B, it is true that whatever person B chooses is voluntary, but it is no less true that it is less voluntary than the choice of person A. This is doubly true, if choices 4 and 5 -- unavailable to person B -- or, say, choice 3, which is available for person B but extremely hard to achieve, are precisely the choices that confer more power on their chooser.
So: 1/ restriction of choice is not binary, and is often done in roundabout ways (which is why studies are required). 2/ Not all discrimination is equal :) - discrimination that results in unfair power distribution is far worse than discrimination that has little effect on the distribution of power.
I.e., banks choose who to extend loans to based on non-racial factors like debt/income, job tenure, home appraisals and models of future home value? Yep, nothing voluntary at all about a private party choosing who to trade with.
Anyway, it's completely tangential to this particular thread, which is about people choosing which houses to buy based on tribalist feelings.
But it does provoke an emotional reaction on my part because it is a prime example of "nerd bigotry" that's so rampant among startup people.
Asking concrete questions is "nerd bigotry"? Um, ok. I'm not even sure what that is, but asking makes me just a creationist so meh.
I will not go at length into how that's done, because the process has been documented so many times and in great detail.
My uncited experts proved that your uncited experts are wrong and also worse than Hitler. I win! <- See how appeals to unstated authority are not productive?
Now remember how I compared to discussions on topics like HFT? If this were an HFT discussion, one of the HFT's would have just linked to a page on nasdaq.com and said "go read the docs on hide-not-slide orders, you'll see they work like I just described".
The fact that those factors are non-racial does not mean it's not racism! We're back to that again. Racism (like sexism) does not require malice or ill intent (or even bigotry or prejudice) once its systemic! Suppose you make sure by some way that there's a strong correlation between race and wealth, and then a bank gives loan only to rich people. Well, that's racism! That doesn't mean the loan officer is a bigot! This is something you need to understand. Banking practices can be racist even if no one at the bank is prejudiced (they can all be liberal Democrats who voted for Obama, twice), and all of their decisions are based on pure financial reasons, only because hundreds of years ago society was organized in some particular way. That's how it works. In fact, you could say that everyone is a victim, because those bank officers, through no fault of their own, are now cogs in a racist machinery. So they're victims, too, except that some people are bigger victims than others -- some are part of a racist system, and some feel its consequences every day.
If you, by some mechanism, create a society in which people's rational, self-serving actions would result in a system where power is largely withheld from some racial groups then you've built a racist society even if no one in that society is a xenophobe.
> which is about people choosing which houses to buy based on tribalist feelings.
No. "Based on tribalist feeling" is your conjecture. Yes, tribalist feelings are probably a contributing factor, but racism is a much more dominant one. How do I know that? Well, because I bothered to read some studies.
> Asking concrete questions is "nerd bigotry"? Um, ok. I'm not even sure what that is, but asking makes me just a creationist so meh.
No. Pretending to ask question you don't really want the answer to, and ignoring science because it isn't physics is.
In fact, there are a lot of interesting questions an interested nerd could ask. For example, while anti-nerd discrimination is certainly not systemic, one could ask about discrimination against unattractive people. I think there are studies that show they are being discriminated against even on loan applications (and from there you could take it to other correlations and discrimination by proxy etc.). Of course, it's not too hard to show how that's not at all like racism or sexism (if only in measure), but at least there is something interesting to talk about. That would be a college-, or even graduate- level question. But your "questions" are kindergarten level, and show that you have no desire to even learn the very basics of this issue.
> See how appeals to unstated authority are not productive?
My uncited experts can be found in a 2 minute Google search. Yours are made up so I win.
> If this were an HFT discussion, one of the HFT's would have just linked to a page on nasdaq.com and said "go read the docs on hide-not-slide orders, you'll see they work like I just described".
Wow, those guys are really smart! I won't send you links to the top 50 papers showing the data, or even to the top two, because either you won't read them, or, if you do, you'll make up a baby-nerd argument to invalidate them because the definitions (which, as always, would rely on you having some basic background in the science) won't be rigorous enough to your liking (because you don't have the background). Then, I'll send you links to books with the definitions, which you won't read, and it will end up just you asking me to teach you all of psychology and history back to first principles, which you won't find satisfactory until I go back to elementary particles, which is impossible because we're dealing with intractable science (and hard because I'm not knowledgable enough). So, no thank you.
Also -- and that is the real reason you find HFT discussions different -- this kind of discussion evokes a response in you that makes you unwilling to open yourself up to new information. HFT doesn't. Yes, just like a creationist; I'm sorry, but it's the same kind of emotional response, only you and the creationists reach for your own kind of weapon -- yours is misused logic. I mean, you know all those thousands of studies exist (I'm sure you've seen those buildings at your university), and you know everyone who has studied them reaches similar conclusions (similar enough for you, that is; there are quite a few controversies), but you choose to believe that those conclusions are based on faulty logic rather than on data (they are based on data), and you think you can argue with them using logic (logic, BTW, is not so effective in the intractable sciences, just as it's not so effective in QM -- until you learn the basic mechanics of things). Those conclusions are the result of 40 or so years of research by thousands of historians, social workers, sociologists and psychologists. Some of them -- though not all -- are great scientists.
Similarly, much as I dislike them, the "No Students, Foreigners or Bachelors" restrictions imposed by most housing societies near me are voluntary.
We're all humans? Aren't we all our own kind? There is no need to make further segregation.
If you segregate individuals into sub-standard education, you end up with people who's ability doesn't match their potential.