“So no matter what, you will almost certainly be guilty of crime. Even when you are entirely innocent.”
Don’t think that isn’t by design. Were it possible to follow all regulations the same time, there would be no pretext for a lawfare-style shakedown, which most “prosecutions” of businesses ultimately are.
One glaring example is BP and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. They faced dire legal consequences if they didn’t pay some $10billion to an extra-legal entity comprising FoB’s (Friends of Barry). No matter what you think of BP, that was a shakedown, pure and simple.
Or the “auto industry bailout”, which was clearly (to anyone paying attention) an irregular, illegal, coerced bankruptcy proceeding.
Or the bank “bailouts” where solvent banks that were in no distress were, in 2008 or 2009, forced to take government money, and bow to the onerous strings attached.
Or the shakedown of a famous manufacturer of hot sauce, because the smell coming from the factory was “harming residents” even though there were no complaints.
No doubt there are many more such examples perpetrated at state and local levels as well. Many, possibly a majority, of governments at various levels seem to be rackets — organized crime.
SLAPP lawsuits are another tactic to crush opposition by ruination by lawyer fees. It costs too much to defend against an infinitely funded government.
If I remember right, this allegedly happened to Aaron Scwartz about free access to scientific papers that were already paid for with government money. Luckily, the case was never argued, so paywalls are de rigeur.
Tim Ball was financially ruined and sent to his grave by hockey stick Michael Mann. Ball won the case but Mann did not ever pay up.
The health food store had to stop selling anything in bins. The owner said this was because the health department wanted another sink installed, for health and safety of course. She couldn't afford or need another sink.
The situations in the movie Falling Down are ubiquitously applicable these days.
A PDF solver for race-huckstering, I love it. People might get caught up in the algebra, but what I love is how you explain the calculations, showing the absolute absurdity of using this kind of analysis to determine fairness. One additional element that I think might be fun to explain how variance and 'randomness' actually show up in datasets in the real world.
I'm a poker player (for fun, not a degenerate gambler) and the bane of Texas Hold'em poker is that there is no winning starting hand. Going deeper into the stats what you'll find is that profitable tournament poker players 'lose' more tournaments than they win, kind of like a hitter in baseball where a .335 average is considered 'good' but that means you are making an out 2/3s of the time.
Huh, so being a good poker player means you lose more than you win. One ends up 'living variance' if you will. And its clear that things are not evenly distributed. You'll lose 4 tourneys in a row to 'suckouts' where your opponent hits the 4% hand to knock you out of the tournament, and find so many ways to 'lose' when you are statistically ahead that you feel the randomness. Fyi, this drives some poker players to the brink of insanity. I had a 3 month run once where I lost almost every big tourney I played in, costing me thousands, it's called 'running bad' in the poker world. And then won it all back and them some in 2 weeks. That's variance for real and in living color. Fyi, the way I manage all that is bankroll management, I'm never playing with the 'rent money' so I have a detachment that keeps me rational no matter the results of any given tourney.
The chance that out of 100 people you will have anything like a distribution representative of the national average is very low. Given the confounding factors of geography and time already pushing 'bias' into the population one is sampling for a job opening (time in the sense that one has to be looking for a job at that time), there is no way one could ever expect to get a distribution that reflects some national population's racial proportions. As for geography, people live in clusters of 'ingroups' for the most part, self-segregating. Drawing from any local population for a job someone needs to physically show up for has little chance of mapping to the percentages of the national population.
I've recently semi-retired from corporate America and I can tell you how they do this diversity game for the most part. The idea is to stuff as many 'diverse' candidates into the top of the hiring process 'funnel'. This is seen as a way that isn't biased, lol. These HR idiots literally think that if you pre-select for race early in the process by 'encouraging' diverse people (whatever they hell that even means) to apply, that this isn't discrimination. Wrong, it's just discrimination that's harder to detect. Determining the race/sex of who gets to apply is no different than basing the final hiring decision on those aspects. They seem to have utterly forgotten that this is illegal.
It's hard to be in that hiring seat though. Without going into specifics (cuz I don't want to get sued), let's just say nobody is immune to all these word games and the underlying fear/guilt manipulations it relies upon. I remember finding myself wanting to give a black candidate more of a chance for a particular job (professional role, he had an MBA), it was like gravity. I also found I was not comfortable sharing my critical feedback and overall uneasiness with the candidate.
On paper he was good (not the best) and was decent in the interviews but something felt off with the guy. Fyi, I've bounced many white people out of interview processes based on this kind of intuition. It's often a feeling that the candidate isn't really being honest and rather is trying to get over on me somehow but I don't have 'evidence'. I've found throughout my life that this instinct/intuition is quite reliable. But now? I'm not allowed to operate on intuition. I found myself doubting my judgment, trying to analyze my own reasoning and seeing if I was biased. I felt like cuz he was black, I had to 'give him the tie' or a chance, ya know?
We ended up not hiring anyone for the role, but the process really brought me up short. I saw how this corrosive ideology just seeps into you, and how a subtle culture of fear becomes ambient when dealing with 'diverse' candidates. I'm sure other white folks who have done hiring can relate. Fyi, I felt all this while being a very active anti-woke guy politically and conservative. I am as unbigoted as I can be, and not woke, so why was this working on my brain so hard?
And then I got it. None of us can escape the totalizing institutional brainwashing that is ambient in society and has been for my entire life. When something gets as much of a push as 'diversity' and 'racism' etc, it will effect you. The social conditioning gets to us all eventually to some degree or the other.
I thank God every day that I have never had an office job. Working class jobs don't engage in this fuckery. If they need someone, they need someone - and hire whoever can do the job and asks first.
Oh, Briggs. You have such a way of ruining my morning with pesky facts. Given those statistics, it seems the chances that an honest person will want to grow the economy by hiring new workers are about the same as Bigfoot knocking on my front door tonight...
"The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."
Ayn Rand
"When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors; when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work, and your laws no longer protect you against them, but protect them against you. . . you may know that your society is doomed."
Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged
“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission.”
According to the Smithsonian, punctuality is a characteristic of whiteness, so of the first 100 people to apply, you can expect a disproportionate number to be white, quite possibly all of them.
Since DEI is a "critical theory" mind virus that sets up: all whites up as oppressors to persons of color, all men up as oppressors to women, and all normal sexuality up as oppressors to deviant behavior ... What is the probability that the United States is under Neo-marxist attack?
I seen the sign outside ... "HATE ARE US". Said to self, self this is where I needs be. I've been hatin since forever. When I was just a wee sprout, my favorite episodes of The Little Rascals was the ones about the He-Man Woman-Haters Club. And I guess I musta been ahead of my time, as people say, because lo and beholdeth, hatin is bigger than ever. The more people tryin to stamp it out, the stronger it gets. Don't have an explanation for that. Except just maybe, the ones who hate the haters are keepin hate alive. Only thing I can imagine.
Lobaczewski's approach is truly profound. These people are growing observably more aggressive. Their victimhood may be synthetic, but their vindictiveness is real.
I agree with the thrust of your article - as the number of protected classes grows, the chance of violating civil rights law approaches 1, but wanted to make some small technical nitpicks -
The government does not step in whenever the representation of a protected class drops below it's exact percentage of representation in the sampling population. They rely on a four-fifths test: "In employment discrimination cases, where the members of one race or other protected class are selected at four-fifths (or less) the rate of another (80% or less), the EEOC, DOJ, and the Department of Labor have adopted this formula for use in identifying evidence of disparate impact. "
To dial back my own objection a bit, there are many cases where you wouldn't have to hit 80%: any hiring process can be challenged on disparate impact even if it does not hit the 80% threshold: "courts have found a prima facie case where the disparity fell just short of four-fifths but the causation analysis (discussed below) was statistically significant" at a level "greater than 1.96 standard deviations" (which, in practice, is every possible hiring criteria), so that if you do hire at any process rather than completely random, you will eventually have to prove to the Department of Justice that your hiring criteria is "justified" (court cases have by this time excluded pretty much all tests of general aptitude and are recently moving onto claiming that discrimination based on criminal history is racist and illegal.)
This is an important piece. It seems clear that this concept hasn't yet made it through the legal system, probably because no jury would be willing or capable of accepting this explanation.
“So no matter what, you will almost certainly be guilty of crime. Even when you are entirely innocent.”
Don’t think that isn’t by design. Were it possible to follow all regulations the same time, there would be no pretext for a lawfare-style shakedown, which most “prosecutions” of businesses ultimately are.
One glaring example is BP and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. They faced dire legal consequences if they didn’t pay some $10billion to an extra-legal entity comprising FoB’s (Friends of Barry). No matter what you think of BP, that was a shakedown, pure and simple.
Or the “auto industry bailout”, which was clearly (to anyone paying attention) an irregular, illegal, coerced bankruptcy proceeding.
Or the bank “bailouts” where solvent banks that were in no distress were, in 2008 or 2009, forced to take government money, and bow to the onerous strings attached.
Or the shakedown of a famous manufacturer of hot sauce, because the smell coming from the factory was “harming residents” even though there were no complaints.
No doubt there are many more such examples perpetrated at state and local levels as well. Many, possibly a majority, of governments at various levels seem to be rackets — organized crime.
This is what happens when you have a lot of feel good laws on the books. They sound nice, but are actually horrifying in execution.
SLAPP lawsuits are another tactic to crush opposition by ruination by lawyer fees. It costs too much to defend against an infinitely funded government.
If I remember right, this allegedly happened to Aaron Scwartz about free access to scientific papers that were already paid for with government money. Luckily, the case was never argued, so paywalls are de rigeur.
Tim Ball was financially ruined and sent to his grave by hockey stick Michael Mann. Ball won the case but Mann did not ever pay up.
The health food store had to stop selling anything in bins. The owner said this was because the health department wanted another sink installed, for health and safety of course. She couldn't afford or need another sink.
The situations in the movie Falling Down are ubiquitously applicable these days.
A PDF solver for race-huckstering, I love it. People might get caught up in the algebra, but what I love is how you explain the calculations, showing the absolute absurdity of using this kind of analysis to determine fairness. One additional element that I think might be fun to explain how variance and 'randomness' actually show up in datasets in the real world.
I'm a poker player (for fun, not a degenerate gambler) and the bane of Texas Hold'em poker is that there is no winning starting hand. Going deeper into the stats what you'll find is that profitable tournament poker players 'lose' more tournaments than they win, kind of like a hitter in baseball where a .335 average is considered 'good' but that means you are making an out 2/3s of the time.
Huh, so being a good poker player means you lose more than you win. One ends up 'living variance' if you will. And its clear that things are not evenly distributed. You'll lose 4 tourneys in a row to 'suckouts' where your opponent hits the 4% hand to knock you out of the tournament, and find so many ways to 'lose' when you are statistically ahead that you feel the randomness. Fyi, this drives some poker players to the brink of insanity. I had a 3 month run once where I lost almost every big tourney I played in, costing me thousands, it's called 'running bad' in the poker world. And then won it all back and them some in 2 weeks. That's variance for real and in living color. Fyi, the way I manage all that is bankroll management, I'm never playing with the 'rent money' so I have a detachment that keeps me rational no matter the results of any given tourney.
The chance that out of 100 people you will have anything like a distribution representative of the national average is very low. Given the confounding factors of geography and time already pushing 'bias' into the population one is sampling for a job opening (time in the sense that one has to be looking for a job at that time), there is no way one could ever expect to get a distribution that reflects some national population's racial proportions. As for geography, people live in clusters of 'ingroups' for the most part, self-segregating. Drawing from any local population for a job someone needs to physically show up for has little chance of mapping to the percentages of the national population.
I've recently semi-retired from corporate America and I can tell you how they do this diversity game for the most part. The idea is to stuff as many 'diverse' candidates into the top of the hiring process 'funnel'. This is seen as a way that isn't biased, lol. These HR idiots literally think that if you pre-select for race early in the process by 'encouraging' diverse people (whatever they hell that even means) to apply, that this isn't discrimination. Wrong, it's just discrimination that's harder to detect. Determining the race/sex of who gets to apply is no different than basing the final hiring decision on those aspects. They seem to have utterly forgotten that this is illegal.
It's hard to be in that hiring seat though. Without going into specifics (cuz I don't want to get sued), let's just say nobody is immune to all these word games and the underlying fear/guilt manipulations it relies upon. I remember finding myself wanting to give a black candidate more of a chance for a particular job (professional role, he had an MBA), it was like gravity. I also found I was not comfortable sharing my critical feedback and overall uneasiness with the candidate.
On paper he was good (not the best) and was decent in the interviews but something felt off with the guy. Fyi, I've bounced many white people out of interview processes based on this kind of intuition. It's often a feeling that the candidate isn't really being honest and rather is trying to get over on me somehow but I don't have 'evidence'. I've found throughout my life that this instinct/intuition is quite reliable. But now? I'm not allowed to operate on intuition. I found myself doubting my judgment, trying to analyze my own reasoning and seeing if I was biased. I felt like cuz he was black, I had to 'give him the tie' or a chance, ya know?
We ended up not hiring anyone for the role, but the process really brought me up short. I saw how this corrosive ideology just seeps into you, and how a subtle culture of fear becomes ambient when dealing with 'diverse' candidates. I'm sure other white folks who have done hiring can relate. Fyi, I felt all this while being a very active anti-woke guy politically and conservative. I am as unbigoted as I can be, and not woke, so why was this working on my brain so hard?
And then I got it. None of us can escape the totalizing institutional brainwashing that is ambient in society and has been for my entire life. When something gets as much of a push as 'diversity' and 'racism' etc, it will effect you. The social conditioning gets to us all eventually to some degree or the other.
Thanks for this.
'We ended up not hiring anyone for the role"
I thank God every day that I have never had an office job. Working class jobs don't engage in this fuckery. If they need someone, they need someone - and hire whoever can do the job and asks first.
Ya, note that all the attention is on the high level jobs. You can have a dept of sanitation that is 90% men, nobody will gripe about that.
Oh, Briggs. You have such a way of ruining my morning with pesky facts. Given those statistics, it seems the chances that an honest person will want to grow the economy by hiring new workers are about the same as Bigfoot knocking on my front door tonight...
"The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."
Ayn Rand
"When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors; when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work, and your laws no longer protect you against them, but protect them against you. . . you may know that your society is doomed."
Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged
“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission.”
Ayn Rand
According to the Smithsonian, punctuality is a characteristic of whiteness, so of the first 100 people to apply, you can expect a disproportionate number to be white, quite possibly all of them.
Since DEI is a "critical theory" mind virus that sets up: all whites up as oppressors to persons of color, all men up as oppressors to women, and all normal sexuality up as oppressors to deviant behavior ... What is the probability that the United States is under Neo-marxist attack?
N=1
If you are a white male and want to be hired, show up in a dress, heels, and lots of makeup.
I seen the sign outside ... "HATE ARE US". Said to self, self this is where I needs be. I've been hatin since forever. When I was just a wee sprout, my favorite episodes of The Little Rascals was the ones about the He-Man Woman-Haters Club. And I guess I musta been ahead of my time, as people say, because lo and beholdeth, hatin is bigger than ever. The more people tryin to stamp it out, the stronger it gets. Don't have an explanation for that. Except just maybe, the ones who hate the haters are keepin hate alive. Only thing I can imagine.
This is how disparate impact is assessed in practice!
https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/laws/regu/sor-96-470/latest/sor-96-470.html There has been hundreds of paid pages written about it. They are not using computer programs which allow you to single out companies and read pit how many cripples they employ.
Lobaczewski's approach is truly profound. These people are growing observably more aggressive. Their victimhood may be synthetic, but their vindictiveness is real.
I agree with the thrust of your article - as the number of protected classes grows, the chance of violating civil rights law approaches 1, but wanted to make some small technical nitpicks -
The government does not step in whenever the representation of a protected class drops below it's exact percentage of representation in the sampling population. They rely on a four-fifths test: "In employment discrimination cases, where the members of one race or other protected class are selected at four-fifths (or less) the rate of another (80% or less), the EEOC, DOJ, and the Department of Labor have adopted this formula for use in identifying evidence of disparate impact. "
To dial back my own objection a bit, there are many cases where you wouldn't have to hit 80%: any hiring process can be challenged on disparate impact even if it does not hit the 80% threshold: "courts have found a prima facie case where the disparity fell just short of four-fifths but the causation analysis (discussed below) was statistically significant" at a level "greater than 1.96 standard deviations" (which, in practice, is every possible hiring criteria), so that if you do hire at any process rather than completely random, you will eventually have to prove to the Department of Justice that your hiring criteria is "justified" (court cases have by this time excluded pretty much all tests of general aptitude and are recently moving onto claiming that discrimination based on criminal history is racist and illegal.)
Love it, Matt!
The trick is that having served as a corporate attorney I already knew the answers - with no need for the math.
The answer (in program form) works as follows:
Q1: Are you in the Oppressor class?
A1: If yes, go to A2. If no, go to A3.
A2: You're f*cked, Bigot. Don't hire any white people unless you want a lawsuit.
A3: Nice try, Capitalist Liar and White-Adjacent Oppressor. Go back to A2.
This is an important piece. It seems clear that this concept hasn't yet made it through the legal system, probably because no jury would be willing or capable of accepting this explanation.
Also because they recruit the victim groups that benefit from these laws to be on the juries enforcing said laws.
Your enemies run amok: should it be "Oppressors: 43.5%; Victim group 1: 43.5%..." ?
And who is that first victim group?💅🏼
Those dirty SO & SOs. Now they're moving decimal points? Does their perfidy have no end?
Maf bees HARD!