thisiszilff

Yes, unfortunately black people are disproportionately poor, so they bear the brunt of issues associated with a lack of money in America. In the present day, I suspect most things people call systemic racism is rooted in and perpetuated by how disproportionately poor blacks in America are.

To be perfectly upfront with my own beliefs, I believe economic disparities is the mother of all other disparities and that many of these statistics that show disparities in outcomes for whites vs blacks are just echos of that economic disparity. That, I think, is the core disparity and the core way in which "the system" oppresses people across generations.

That being said, I don't think gender is a good counterpoint given that biology does have a significant role in some disparities in outcomes for men & women (for example life expectancy). With race, as cited in the letter, biological explanations aren't enough to explain the differences.

> Why is it so popular to talk about these same issues as systemic oppression against group X (relative to group Y), while ignoring or the fact that those same issues affect group XY, often to an even greater degree (relative to group XX)?

Speculatively, with respect to blacks in America, I'm going to guess that it isn't any single issue that is concerning, but the totality of them. Yes, a given issue X might affect group Y more than it does blacks, but blacks in the US as a population are affected by multiple such issues and I can't think of many areas where they have a leg up over other groups.

It is important to note that this isn't just about police brutality. There are a number of racial disparities that result in more black deaths. From the letter:

> lack people suffer from dramatic health disparities in life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, chronic medical conditions, and outcomes from acute illnesses like myocardial infarction and sepsis. Biological determinants are insufficient to explain these disparities. They result from long-standing systems of oppression and bias which have subjected people of color to discrimination in the healthcare setting, decreased access to medical care and healthy food, unsafe working conditions, mass incarceration, exposure to pollution and noise, and the toxic effects of stress.

So 1k-2k per year would be a low estimate. Some will correctly point out that that 1k-2k killed by police includes people that are committing violent crimes (ie, killing them may not be unjust). The response to that argument is to look at the intersection of poverty and race to see how systemic racism drives crime in black communities.

Their letter has a paragraph addressing some of their concerns:

> White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19. Black people are twice as likely to be killed by police compared to white people, but the effects of racism are far more pervasive. Black people suffer from dramatic health disparities in life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, chronic medical conditions, and outcomes from acute illnesses like myocardial infarction and sepsis. Biological determinants are insufficient to explain these disparities. They result from long-standing systems of oppression and bias which have subjected people of color to discrimination in the healthcare setting, decreased access to medical care and healthy food, unsafe working conditions, mass incarceration, exposure to pollution and noise, and the toxic effects of stress. Black people are also more likely to develop COVID-19. Black people with COVID-19 are diagnosed later in the disease course and have a higher rate of hospitalization, mechanical ventilation, and death. COVID-19 among Black patients is yet another lethal manifestation of white supremacy. In addressing demonstrations against white supremacy, our first statement must be one of unwavering support for those who would dismantle, uproot, or reform racist institutions.

Edit: these aren't the calculations you asked for, but should give you an indication of what they are thinking about.

It is important to not the latter did not mitigating police brutality as a public health interest, but racism in general.

From the letter:

> White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19. Black people are twice as likely to be killed by police compared to white people, but the effects of racism are far more pervasive. Black people suffer from dramatic health disparities in life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, chronic medical conditions, and outcomes from acute illnesses like myocardial infarction and sepsis. Biological determinants are insufficient to explain these disparities. They result from long-standing systems of oppression and bias which have subjected people of color to discrimination in the healthcare setting, decreased access to medical care and healthy food, unsafe working conditions, mass incarceration, exposure to pollution and noise, and the toxic effects of stress. Black people are also more likely to develop COVID-19. Black people with COVID-19 are diagnosed later in the disease course and have a higher rate of hospitalization, mechanical ventilation, and death. COVID-19 among Black patients is yet another lethal manifestation of white supremacy. In addressing demonstrations against white supremacy, our first statement must be one of unwavering support for those who would dismantle, uproot, or reform racist institutions.

The remainder of the letter goes into strategies for mitigating the spread of COVID-19 during protests.

Their letter makes it clear they are taking about racism, not necessarily just in police brutality.

The letter to me reads as 100% political because it is suggesting that you can get rid of the protests by addressing their concerns. That option is available to you. Their motivation for writing the letter is largely to say "hey, you can stop the protests by addressing their concerns" and to point out that addressing their concerns in this case also advances what they consider to be a public health interest.

It is possible we had different interpretations of what they wrote, but this felt more like "1000 doctors make a poltiical statement about the protests" rather than "1000 doctors say in their scientific opinions that protests are justified."

> That's a shining example of weasel speak. They don't explicitly say it's not risky - because that would be plain lying, it is obviously risky - but they are saying they are not condemning it as risky.

Another excerpt from the article state:

> "We created the letter in response to emerging narratives that seemed to malign demonstrations as risky for the public health because of Covid-19," according to the letter writers, many of whom are part of the University of Washington's Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "Instead, we wanted to present a narrative that prioritizes opposition to racism as vital to the public health, including the epidemic response. We believe that the way forward is not to suppress protests in the name of public health but to respond to protesters demands in the name of public health, thereby addressing multiple public health crises."

They are not thinking about it in terms of supporting/opposing the protests. Rather the protests are a fact and you need to deal with them somehow. You can do that by either suppressing them or addressing their concerns. They do not want their concerns of COVID-19 to justify suppressing the protests, especially if addressing the protestor's concerns is a viable option.

> They are saying that the protest is too important to take health considerations into account, but they are reluctant to speak plainly and tell people there's risk but they should be adult and choose to manage the risks themselves and maybe neglect small risk in order to achieve bigger thing.

This seems almost exactly the sentiment they are addressing in the letter. COVID-19 is a public health concern, so is racial disparities that result in racial disparities in medical outcomes. Their concerns over COVID-19 transmission should not be taken as justification for suppressing the protests.

From the article,

> "Staying at home, social distancing, and public masking are effective at minimizing the spread of COVID-19. To the extent possible, we support the application of these public health best practices during demonstrations that call attention to the pervasive lethal force of white supremacy," the letter says.

They are still giving the same advice they've been giving. The letter also states protest-specific COVID-19 harm mitigation strategies for protestors & police.

> Just in this case, our betters had decided the COVID risk is less important than protesting - so it's OK for us. But only in cases which are approved by our betters.

A more charitable interpretation is that some medical professionals do not believe that the risk of COVID-19 spread is a compelling reason for suppressing protests against racial inequality, especially when the risk of COVID-19 spread can be addressed by responding to the protestors concerns & therefore advancing public health by both mitigating the spread of COVID-19 and addressing the role racism plays in medical outcomes.

It's also important to distinguish between the protests vs elements using the protests (and pandemic) as a cover for crime. In NYC it least, it seems that the protests & those looting are two separate groups.

> The taxes from these stores are less and less helping them with social programs etc and go more towards funding police departments that brutalize them.

That sounds like an assumption whose truth is heavily dependent on being in a specific locality.

> How do the looters benefit from having stores in their area that they are too poor to buy from?

Again, an assumption that is highly dependent on geography and specific looting. You're also assuming that the looters are necessarily poor -- forgetting about, for example, organized crime.

Success in this case is spreading to more people. Mutating to cause less severe symptoms + be more contagious is evolutionary the way these things go.

It does seem logical: your in person interactions are mediated by your personal relationship with people. Online you can come across anything and everything. The in person equivalent would be walking by ten or twenty small protests set up with megaphones loudly arguing for various things you vehemently disagree with.

I struggle to understand how those points are related to the substance of the post you're replying to. The situation OP describes is between bad & worse -- you can have empathy for people while recognizing the reality of the situation.

Are you arguing that OP's analysis of the situation is wrong because of a lack of empathy for people affected more severely by pandemic?

A big part is anxiety about the future. You are not guaranteed economic opportunities in the future, so we make the most we have of the present to ensure we can provide for ourselves in the future.

You also enjoy not subsisting. I enjoy not subsisting.

UBI feels like a way of addressing the incoming loss of jobs due to automation.

> No, people work more than they currently need to because they are exercising prudence, common sense, and planning for the future. Which every adult human being is supposed to take responsibility for doing for themselves, and not expect a "trust fund" to magically take care of for them.

It may not be materially possible for everyone to actually do this within our current economic organization in light of automation. People that benefit from UBI may very well be responsible and organized.

We can twist this a little and say that the responsible and organized thing is to plan for automation, to develop skills that make sure you aren't put out of work, etc. Personally I find that position logically valid, but I ideally would push for UBI while also making sure I have a good chance for not needing it.

A cynical take is that UBI is just enough to ensure the masses of unemployed would be complacent enough to not riot.

If Bob is a machine, then yes!

To an extent that is what it ends up being 90% of the time given that a lot of the inheritance people use don't satisfy the LSP (Liskov Substitution Principle). We've been using mypy with our python codebase and it will complain if you violate the LSP so much so that it prevents most inheritance. We mainly subclass for simple data models when it's a case of "every model has these 10 fields" and there are next to no methods on the data model classes.

Hey, do you have specific examples of the damage you're concerned about?

I've been reading up about this a lot as it is something that concerns me, but so far most of what I've says that longterm damage is mitigated by taking regular eye breaks (ie, starting at something 20+ feet away every 20 minutes for 20 seconds) & getting enough sleep (giving the eyes time to properly rest). Are these mitigation strategies insufficient?

Thank you, I was genuinely curious as to what you had in mind -- I came up with a lot of possible examples, hence the question.

I think it's going to come down to definitions unfortunately. For example, what do we mean when we say

> enforce the minimum basic rules that are necessary to have a civil society

One could argue that Brown v Board of Education had little to do with policy and more to do with basic rules for civil society. For your other examples, I can see compelling arguments for why the federal government took this actions (with a justifiable reason). Many of them fall under the fact that the government is ultimately a forum for resolving large scale organizational challenges that the market is not properly incentivized to tackle.

Yes, these powers can be abused, and while restricting the government from acting in certain ways may be a method of curtailing those abuses, it would be a tradeoff in terms of the government effectively being able to accomplish its purpose.

> But in either case, you're arguing from an implicit assumption that the government is supposed to fix problems, and you're arguing about whether it did a good or a bad job. Nobody ever even asks why the government is intruding in all these activities in the first place, if it's just supposed to be enforcing the basic rules needed to have a civil society.

It builds down to a tension between "fix problems" and "enforce basic rules needed to have a civil society." Even in the situations you cite, the two can be in conflict. I suspect a lot of the people that one perceives as trying to use the government to "fix problems" may very well be seeing themselves as "enforcing basic rules needed to have a civil society."

Do you have some specific examples of the latter?

In theory you would be trading hanging out with your coworkers for hanging out with your friends, you neighbors, others in your community + a lesser commute. You would definitely lose some and gain some, the question is whether that gain would outweigh the loss. For some people, their lives are organized around work (makes sense, mine defiantly is) so it would be a big shift.

Everytime someone posts something along these lines I am reminded how difficult it is to get a sense of exponential growth & how the gap between needing them, not needing them, being overwhelmed, having this blow over is a smaller than it intuitively feels.

I am puzzled by your comment.

Are you saying that the person you're responding to mischaracterized Trump's statements? That there is nothing objectionable to Trump's statements? Or something else?

Reading your comment the best interpretation I come up with is that "Trump advises drinking bleach" is not an accurate representation of Trump's statements, but I cannot tell if you are saying there is nothing objectionable to the situation or if you're objecting to the sloppy characterization of it.

My reading of the article was that it sought to point out that how "bad" it is today isn't unusual or an anomaly. Today's divisions are more par for course in America than a new development. That perspective is relevant when we try to improve the current situation.

The loser is exploited. Imagine if the losing condition were that the loser is enslaved. Just because you can't tell at the start which party will be the loser (and so exploited) doesn't mean the contract itself isn't exploitative

Especially a test environment that accurately mirrors a production environment.

I'm taking this comment as evidence that I've succeeded in figuring it out.

Not who you're replying to, but I imagine bad, immediate reactions will be easy to spot, but more subtle, chronic problems would be found only after analysis. A part of this work would be figuring out what is attributable to the vaccine and what is not.

For your enjoyment: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/

You don't need to modify that data. The methods can produce other objects in which case OOP starts to look very functional, the main difference being that you lead with the data (a.to_foo() instead of food(a)). There's a lot of different definitions of OOP and some of that is willy nilly state modification everywhere, but other parts of it are encouraging you to see what data is coupled together and to treat that as a unit, therefore helping you think at a higher level about what you're doing.

You want to learn more about both pure and applied mathematics. Pure math is very proof heavy which is excellent for self learning because you never have to take anything on faith. Proofs are meant to be very clear explanations.

One of the best resources for learning in this way is to find books that are structured to have you develop the theory via the problem sets. Of the top of my head, Tao's Analysis books and Atiyah & MacDonald's Commutative Algebra book are exemplars of this style. These books often show the basic definitions, some results, and then break up remaining results into step by step problems.

Proofs will be the hardest part to wrap your head around. Once you understand proofs, can read them, the remaining is going to be a question of time. Think of it like programming: you can't learn by reading, lectures, etc. You need to learn by doing. In this case, the doing is doing proofs.