Comments By midnight fox

That reduced the need for unions to a degree, but what should we do about the growing divide between the rich and poor? It's a massive problem, and it's only getting bigger because it's running unchecked.

That's interesting, the connection between unionization and CEO pay/wage inequality. I just read yesterday support for unions polls at 70% right now, the highest its been in decades. Multiple Starbucks locations look to be moving forward with unionizing, and Amazon might see it happen soon. It's possible this connection between the two is naturally tipping the scales back in the other direction again.

I'd say it's a non-complex metaphor for picking right back up where you left off.

Congrats!

Geez, we get it, you're super smart, quit kicking the dead horse already.

Three people said they didn't get what I was saying, so I approached it from a different angle to see if it would help make it clearer.

WOW. I just don't even know what else to say to someone like you. I wouldn't have believed people like you even existed until I just saw it with my own two eyes...and 10 fingernails. Enjoy your "Holiday celebrating the purposeful genocide of the indigenous peoples of the North American continent at the hands of the murderous, oppressive white occupiers day", i will enjoy Thanksgiving day.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.

He lost me at fingernails...

It's like when they would say the average American household has 2.3 children. Where'd all those third ones' limbs go?

Mikey put 100 people in a room so we could see who was responsible for all those homicides. 13 of them were Black people, but they were standing in for 44 million Black people, so like one family having 2.3 children, only 0.00001 of those Black people in Mikey's room were homicide offenders.

If you wanted to picture that like Mikey wanted us to, you look at all their fingernails. The rest of their bodies never killed anyone.

Yet you forgot to weigh in the body parts needed to include violent crimes as that was part of the original comment.

I already spoke to the statistic about being responsible for violent crime when I quoted the FBI showing Black Americans are responsible for 33% of non-fatal violent crime. Since being responsible for 33% of that kind of crime is significantly less than being 55.9% of homicide offenders, there was no reason to explicitly state there would be less fingernails per Black person in the second room made for visualizing the ratio for that kind of crime.

they are viewed with more apprehension entirely because of the extremely disproportionate amount of violent crimes and murders committed by some members of their race.

Yes, it is natural for people to make that kind of error.

Equating murder numbers as not so bad because its only half as many people as die from falling...

Where did I say that?

On the second...what with the sheer ridiculousness of you now pulling all 10 fingernails from the black people, giving an estimated weight for each nail combined with the attempt at mathematically explaining how many black men commit violent crimes or murder based off the calculations of fingernail weight and quantity......are you punking me or trolling me? Are you being serious? Because it seems like its an attempt at punking or humor.

Why would you pull their fingernails off?

You used imagining a room of 100 people to make it easier to visualize how many people were responsible for being more than half of all homicide offenders. You identified 13 Black people and said a percentage of them were those responsible.

To visualize that percentage of those, the proportion was worked out between those Black homicide offenders and the general population, and that proportion was used to make the visual comparison.

I only followed your lead by taking your visual aid to its logical conclusion so we can clearly visualize how many of those Black people in the room are responsible for being more than half of all homicide offenders. It's ten fingernails from each of those 13 of the 100 people in the room.

If it seems ridiculous, it's probably because we are dealing with a very small fraction of a small fraction regarding a crime that kills twice as less people than the number of Americans who die each year from injuries sustained from falling.

By the age 23 one out of three black males have spent time in jail or prison.

I couldn't find this data. It sounds like a version of the "1 out of 3 black men will go to prison at some point during their lifetime" that goes around sometimes. That came from the 2001 'Prevalence of Imprisonment in U.S. Population' report the Bureau of Justice Statistics puts out.

It was an estimate that said, if the rate of first-time incarcerations in 2001 and the mortality rate remained the same in every single year, about 1 in 3 black males born in 2001 would be expected to go to prison at some point in their lives.

But it was just a future estimate; the rate changes each year, overall incarceration of Black people had dropped by around 20% from 2001 to 2015, it was just one way of looking at what the data might suggest for how things could lead over the next several decades for people born in that year.

The hard data from that report showed that in 2001, 1,936,000 Black male adults had at some point served time in state or federal prison. That's 16.6% of all Black male adults at the time, half the '1 in 3' estimate.

But it is true Black men are far more likely than White people to at one point in their lives be imprisoned, over twice as likely than Hispanics and over six times as likely than Whites. It's also true this likelihood is a completely different statistic than homicide offenders and violent crime. Black people are six times more likely to be imprisoned on drug charges than White people, for example.

I think as far as responsibility for one's actions goes, an individual is more responsible than any other factor, since its their brain that formulates their priorities and makes a decision. Yet I also recognize the reality that what determines a choice involves more than just the individual, both in terms of what the individual is repeatedly presented with to choose from and in terms of the experiences they didn't choose that shape their perspective and subsequently their formulas for prioritizing their needs and values and formulating a response. This is reflected in that example where over 50% of thirty years' worth of gun assaults in Boston took place in just 7% of the city. I couldn't say what one person's crime or incarceration owes to without knowing the specific circumstances of what specifically happened.

However, it is prudent and I think wise to use precaution for a police officer to be on guard for the possibility that he COULD be a violent criminal when their reason for contact is for alleged or a possibility of a crime to have been or is taking place. The police also use the exact same precaution when dealing with a white guy or Hispanic guy or Asian guy or whomever if also contact is for the same reason.

I agree. Ideally every police officer would maintain situational awareness while approaching a potential crime scene suspect and respond appropriately to what they directly observe in that individual's behavior.

Your percentages of one fingernails worth are woefully off.

You randomly selected 100 people distributed by race. In 2019 there were roughly 44 million Black people in the country, and with a total population of around 329.5 million, that would mean 13 people in the room are Black, like you said.

You said a percentage of those 13 would be responsible for half the homicides in the country. From those FBI statistics we'd been discussing, there were 6,425 Black homicide offenders in 2019, which is where that 55.9% of all homicide offenders came from.

Of those 13 Black people in the room, 0.0001 of them would proportionally represent 55.9% of all homicide offenders in the country. Apparently one fingernail weighs 1 gram, so divided by one 70kg/154lb body, one fingernail works out to be 0.00001 of one body. So ten fingernails is 0.0001.

But you're right, I overlooked something, it should've been ten fingernails from each of the 13 Black people in the room in order to represent 55.9% of the country's homicide offenders.

Again, we're talking 6,425 individuals out of 44 million, or the equivalent of ten grams of body weight per 70,000g person.

Just because they tend to commit more crime in their neighborhood area doesn't mean crap. They have feet and cars, they can move around and if they are willing to randomly shoot someone on their block, they are just as open to shooting someone 100 miles away.

I'm aware violent criminals are able to change their location. The discussion wasn't about violent criminals, the discussion was about whether it was a reasonable assumption that random Black people be profiled as a violent criminal.

If you had a room of 100 random people made up by their representative percentage of the population there would be 13 black people. Those 13 or a percentage of them, are responsible for over half of all murders and over half of all violent crimes.

Yeah, if you took ten fingernails from 1 of those 13 Black people in the room, that would apparently approximately be the percentage of them responsible.

To set the record straight. Us justice department has African American at 13 percent of total population yet they commit more than 67 percent of violent crime. Given that number, reasonable to assume they may get profiled.

The numbers from the FBI are 33% for non-fatal violent crimes and 55% of homicides in 2019. It’s true, it’s disproportionate—when the only factor being evaluated is skin color. But when it comes to making reasonable assumptions about who is going to commit a violent crime, those numbers offer nothing.

The most important data you need to make a reasonable assumption about who is going to commit a crime is location. I like this study because they divided up the city of Boston into tiny little bits by street segments and intersections and pinpointed on the map thirty years of gun assaults and found that 3% of the city was responsible for more than 50% of those assaults.

If you’re not looking at where the crime is taking place, you can’t reasonably assume anything about who is commiting the crime. If you specifically look at where the crime is taking place, you’re also much more likely going to find out why it’s taking place.

Blacks are 13% of the total population and did account for 55.9% of all homicides in 2019. They also accounted for 54.7% of all homicide victims. Did the assailants commit the crimes because of their race, and were their victims racially targeted? Or did race have nothing to do with it, and the crime took place because of where they were both located?

Black people are more than twice as likely than White people to be poor, and from this research people with family incomes of less than $15,000 are three times more likely to be the victims of crime than people making at least $75,000.

It might make sense to profile Black people as being much more likely to be violent criminals, on certain street corners. It would also make sense to profile Black people as being much more likely to be victimized by violence, on certain street corners. The poorest areas of the largest cities host a disproportionate amount of violence, and certain races are far more likely to live there. The history of why they are far more likely to live there is an interesting read.

Alaska is the state with the highest amount of violent crime, and the reason why again comes down to location.