Ohio: Not as Stupid as Dan Gilbert Thought (“Casino revenue projected at well below 2009 estimates”)

Good lord.

China: Communist.

India: Socialist Democratic Republic.

Another mystery solved, hooray! Agree that we should be a lot more like both of those places. You can be the one to deliver the message to Danny Boy. LOL.

Of course there’s also the fact that the people in each of those countries are pretty much all the same race.

When I read this stuff from you about “victimization” and “manipulative and harmful to the people they claim to help” I wonder how much exposure you’ve had to real poverty in America. How much time have you spent in a real ghetto? With people from a real ghetto? Do you have any stories you can share because these conclusions of yours are really wearing thin.

You’re obviously not racist, you just lack any direct experience to inform your extremely limited perspective and probably really should stop talking about it. While a lot of what you’ve written here is embarrassing, the Lombardi analogy is an especially cringeworthy accent to it. Football is a simple game, one that I’ve played, watched, analyzed and otherwise consumed on many different levels. Tell me more about your “poverty armchair.” Ugh.

And I don’t know if that’s any worse than the idea that the Great Society survived past Reagan. What history is it that you’re watching?

I think it’s more Serena v. country club granny with rickets and that the match ended six hours ago, but I still love you, and it’s good that you brought up that you work in the tech world. Perfect timing here: http://gawker.com/5981825/racism-doesnt-exist-in-tech-because-white-tech-blog-millionaire-jason-calacanis-has-never-seen-it

I’ve worked for a tech consulting company for the past 12 years and will second your notion on qualified minority candidates. I’m not sure that it’s entirely a tech thing either – I see this with my clients and also have experienced it in past jobs/internships. There’s something really special about working in a diverse workplace as it breaks down the ‘us vs. them’ barrier and replaces it with ‘we’. You really learn a lot. I’d say that we (society/government/corporate) have gone about as far as we can to level the playing field policy-wise, glass ceilings at the extreme top notwithstanding.

One challenge to your premise on an individual’s ability to determine their path/success – families, culture and environment play a far bigger role IMO than the individual or laws/policy. I’ve seen this first hand. For 8 years I lived in a unique community in Chicago that had a mixture of upper middle class-ish and Chicago public housing families living side-by-side (in basically in the remnants of what once was Cabrini Green ghetto and is now luxury condo’s and townhouses). As part of this I’ve watched families grow up on both sides of the fence. I’ll save all the stories but will state that it’s been heartbreaking to see how most of the CHA kids have developed relative to their non-CHA ‘peers’ even when presented with great opportunities to break the cycle. I saw stuff daily within their environment that just make me shake my head. The parents and families are decent and well meaning in many cases (but not all) but they just don’t know anything different. Most of these kids had no chance.

So you can state that a black guy with a VCP can write their own ticket and that is probably true. You just have to acknowledge that a black man from the ghetto faces challenges far beyond what I faced in my middle-class, 99% white suburb. There isn’t a law or policy or public aide package that can change this.

Absolutely, though there isn’t much that can be done which hasn’t been done already to fix it (IMO). What’s striking is how this stuff persists through generations, and when you see it up close you can see why. It’s the same story you’ll read in the media (no fathers, no role models, peer pressure etc.) so I won’t rehash. The parents don’t know any better and the kids don’t know anything different.

For a kid from that environment to get that golden $91k job they basically have to swim upstream through a steady toxic cultural current hellbent on making sure they wind up just like their parents. And they basically have to go it all alone, with little guidance from anyone, and while avoiding the wrath of their peers along the way. It’s a long and lonely road filled with plenty of opportunities to fall off.

Anyways – way off topic at this point. This and terrorism, fundamentalism, our broken political system, and why the Browns can’t/won’t ever be good are things I think about long and hard about during quiet moments, and unfortunately never come up with a good answer.

“though there isn’t much that can be done which hasn’t been done already to fix it”

I think it makes a whole lot more sense to keep trying than to not.

“For a kid from that environment to get that golden $91k job they basically have to swim upstream through a steady toxic cultural current hellbent on making sure they wind up just like their parents. And they basically have to go it all alone, with little guidance from anyone, and while avoiding the wrath of their peers along the way. It’s a long and lonely road filled with plenty of opportunities to fall off.”

Amazingly well put BD! And when swimming up that stream being good is not good enough. That street kid has to be the fastest salmon, there are no options, one failure and it may all come crashing down. Above average is not an option, he must be the best, far above second place.

China and India do not value “individual initiative” practically at all, if you pressed me I’d put them near the bottom of countries that I deal with on this trait. The reason you can get good tech workers from these countries has a little to do with scientific infrastructure and a cultural respect for learning that goes back thousands of years, and a TON to do with tight familial and community bonds.

Family, community, and the cultural history of these two elements predicts and explains outcomes for individuals within groups about 9000 times better than the randian mythology you are dancing on the edge of. This is not to say that such mythology cannot be salutary, as perhaps you feel to be so in your case and others. Practically anything can be the proximal cause of good when deployed within a properly functioning family or community. Just as practically anything can be the proximal cause of bad in disfunctional ones. I think some meditation on this reality, as well as the reality of what slave society wrought in this regard would go a long way here

Your perspective on poverty and race is informed by absolutely no direct experience or interaction with the other side, yet you argue so vehemently about what’s wrong with the people who are afflicted and what’s really good for them.

Stay tuned next week for Kanicki’s lecture to fish on breathing through gills underwater.

(Nobody doesn’t think hard work and focus aren’t good things. The problem is with banging the table for it when what you should be banging the table for is structural changes to ensure that certain peoples’ hard work and focus will go as far as others. I know we’ve been over this before, but to take one easy example, how is it that you think something like Cleveland.com exists if you think this is anything close to a world where people are rewarded proportionally to talent and efforts. Relatedly, how is Eric Mangini not a head coach in the NFL. Look at our politicians. Etc. Etc. Etc.)

Things have been looking up since LeBron moved into the neighborhood. Anyway, I do make it out of mom and dad’s house every once in awhile, believe it or not. That was a low blow.

First, what is the different and demonstrably helpful path? I just don’t get this at all. Getting poor folks from broken families and communities certified in cloud computing? Do you have any idea how incredibly unrealistic this is as anything other than a drive for annecdotes to support Randian myths? You’re in tech. Whether you know it or not, you probably deal with what is socially speaking the top fraction of 1% of the populations of those countries. I can’t tell what point you are trying to make vis-a-vis the United States in citing them at all, but it seems like at least this — >>>.. i’ll just say they work harder as a group than americans.>>>>

I would note from my perspective dealing with lots of industries besides tech– especially manufacturing– that the idea that Chinese and Indian workers are on the whole better or more diligent than their American counterparts in similar sectors (if you are suggesting such a thing) is much more wrong than right. The prevailing wisdom is that moving your plant to China or India means things will be sloppier and less efficient, worker oversight and protocol will have to be tighter, but that the cost of that will be more than offset by the greatly lower wages folks in these countries can afford to accept.

I’m confused on tons of points here, most especially whether we are talking about individuals or nations… I mean, the only thing that chart really shows is that labor has globalized, to the comparitive national advantage of some really poor countries with good education and familial structures. That has nothing to do with “personal initiative” however defined or understood. And once those countries are no longer so poor, the market will move on. It already is.

As sad as you find it that anyone still thinks slavery overshadows everything, history has consequences that you can’t erase with money or the latest ISO-9003 certification. Slavery’s systematic destruction of the family created an entire sub-society of physically identifiable people arguably as dislocated, unrooted, and disadvantaged as human history has ever seen. The implicit conservative position that this was all remedied (or over-remedied) years ago and washed away by the endless opportunity of the hidden hand is to me much the sadder side with which to be milling about.

I have to actually work anyway, but I’ll register my dissent that anything you write should be vaporized. Ah well, more windmills and more tilting to come no doubt.