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Comment by packet881 | Hacker News Reader

Feel free to make your voice heard by your vote and donate from your paycheck. This is a zero sum game and my ancestors were not oppressing either latinos or Africans.

I'll make my voice heard by not voting for Democrats.

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Education is not a zero-sum game.

College admissions are zero-sum

Not if we keep building colleges, no.

Except there is only one Harvard University. You could spend billions making a new University next door that has just as high standard of teachers and facilities, but it wouldn't be Harvard.

Not that being "Harvard" would make it better, but to a lot of people the prestige of the name is important.

So to that effect, it is a zero sum game.

Does Harvard maintain that lauded reputation if it's known to admit a racial monoculture? Especially in, say, the technology fields, where we've seen the negative impact of such monoculture in the quality of software developed using machine learning algorithms?

All of the biggest software companies have almost no black engineers and relatively few female engineers. They still manage to make money hand over fist, looks like their software is good enough to do the job.

So you're satisfied with "makes money, but has known biases against people's inborn traits."

In general, we is a society (in America at least) have decided that's not good enough. It hasn't been good enough since the time there was one facility for the whites and one facility for the coloreds.

So it's either 1) accept affirmative action and we'll increase spending on education, or 2) reject affirmative action and we would spend this money somewhere else (maybe whatever else gets the votes)?

How do we magically give new colleges Harvard-level endowments?

> my ancestors were not oppressing either latinos or Africans. I'll make my voice heard by not voting for Democrats.

so I guess you're making up for lost time? or setting the precedent for your own progeny? because I'm like 100% sure that during the era of slavery the same arguments were made by slavers - "my ancestors didn't participate in the crusades so I'm morally absolved..."

This Judge was confirmed by the Senate which has been in Republican hands for some time.

You should go start your own Harvard and you can exclude or admit anyone you want.

> This Judge was confirmed by the Senate which has been in Republican hands for some time.

The judge was appointed by President Obama and confirmed by a Democrat controlled Senate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allison_Dale_Burroughs

Federal judgeships are lifetime appointments so the current makeup of the Senate, short of impeaching her, has no relevance.

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