What point are you trying to make? Systemic racism is way bigger than just police killings.
Do you want to ignore the (non-lethal) evils of prejudice, and just play a numbers game with fatalities? From some back-of-the-envelope math, the average POC in America will still lose more years of their life from simply living in a racist society than from COVID-19.
Life isn't a pissing contest of "my problem is bigger than your problem".
The first means "it doesn't make sense to compare these."
The second means "Even though you're trying to compare these problems, you've massively underrepresented the impact of systemic racism by simplifying it to the number of police killings."
>Systemic racism is way bigger than just police killings.
A single protest movement isn't going to end systemic racism, no matter how large it becomes. Even revolutions don't end conservatism -- just ask Leon Trotsky.
However, the coronavirus epidemic is here today and it may well be gone in a year. This may be the worst possible time for a protest movement since the Spanish Flu.
Black people in America have a measurably lower life expectancy than white people [1]. For people born in 2015, it's down to about 5%, but as recently as 1970, it was over 10%. That's a lot of years of life being cut short.
(There are well-known social causes for this which are direct consequences of racism, like access to quality health care, housing, education, credit, etc.)
COVID-19 deaths aren't taking nearly that many years. According to [2] (about 1.5 weeks old), 1 in 1850 (or around 0.05% of) black Americans have died from COVID-19. Even if this continues for the rest of the year, it still can't hold a candle to plain old racism.
Joking aside, you can sometimes prove causality. It's just not as easy as proving a correlation. The most broadly accepted method would be a RCT (randomized controlled trial), though it is often unethical or unfeasible.
You can also build on causal assumption that everyone agrees on. (Like: A person's gender cannot be caused by a government policy. A person winning the lottery is not caused by anything other than playing the lottery.) From such knowledge you can build a causal graph, and (in some cases) draw new causal conclusions from statistical data.
Long story short: you cannot just dismiss a correlation as being useless for any proof of causality.
I sympathize with a lot of these problems, but I wonder if the police issue getting all the attention is going to prevent these other issues from getting serious attention. :|
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.
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.
It's really hard not to read this as "my mass killing is okay because I have a good reason." I assume that's not what you mean. Can you help clarify the differences between deaths downstream of these mass gatherings and deaths downstream of more conventional violence?
I never understood why ortholinear keyboards aren't the standard. It's bizarre that the fingers on my left hand would move slightly to the left for the top row, but the fingers on my right hand would also move slightly to the left for the top row. And to the right, on both hands, for the bottom row. Fingers don't naturally move like that! My hands have mirror symmetry. Why doesn't my keyboard?
The number 6 exemplifies the problem. Touch-typing classes teach that it's pressed by the right hand, but the number row has drifted so far left that it's actually closer to the left hand. Sure enough, (non-ortho) split keyboards can't agree which side of the split to put it on. Sometimes even different models from the same company disagree.
Staggered keys is even crazier, to me, than QWERTY. There's no spending 2 weeks relearning where every letter is. There's no messing up spatial mnemonics like Z/X/C/V. It just instantly fixes your fingers from being slightly out of alignment.
And the craziest is when touchscreens do it. Keys were only staggered in that funny way to make room for the keylevers. Computer keyboards never had keylevers, but touchscreens really never had keylevers!
You aren't alone, the thing boggles my mind too. I like better staggered columns layout than ortholinear, but yeah staggered rows don't make any sense, I hate using the keyboard in my notebook.
Joking, I would say only Apple could find the "courage" to introduce columns staggered/ortholinear keyboards... ^__~
You joke, but I've wondered the same thing. Apple, of all companies, is happy to re-examine (or discard) the status quo. They dropped the headphone jack on many products -- as they said, it's "over 100 years old, used to help quickly exchange in switchboards". Yet their keyboards still look pretty much like a 19th-century Remington.
You are holding your forearms at an angle. To reach things closer to your body, you move your right arm back and to the right. To reach things farther away, you reach up to the left.
So the question is, do you move only your finger when reaching for the number line, or move your whole lower arm?
You're trying to exploit a slippery slope. There are many churches which have had no such scandals, and are not associated with any who have.
Just because Monitor (dozens of offices, thousands of employees) worked for Gaddafi doesn't mean "John & Jane's IT Setup Helpers" around the corner must also be an inherently immoral institution.
A core part of the slippery slope argument is some sort of slippage along the slope, ie, change. I'm not arguing anything will change; I'm saying having an impact on the real world always runs an ethical risk. The slope slipped at the birth of commerce, thousands of years ago.
And what if Monitor contracts John & Jane's IT Startup Helpers to do some work? Are they ethically firewalled in some way that Monitor's IT staff are not? Ethics issues could be resolved by clever corporate structure and contracting out services instead of bringing them in-house.
And the tester just happened to pick two friends, who live 20 miles apart in different cities, who have never ordered from the restaurant? That is both a remarkable coincidence, and a bizarre choice of test data.
> You do not communicate the full state of your system or even a small portion thereof when you use speech.
Right, but that's not even the purpose of speech. Abstraction is a feature, not a flaw.
Even with electronic systems where perfect and complete transfer is possible, we prefer simplified serialization of messages.
> So whatever the feeling of "I'm being direct" or "I'm being clear" is, it is almost certainly itself faulty. We're not built for that and language isn't either.
I half-disagree with you here. Given that language is so ambiguous, it's admirable to try to reduce unnecessary ambiguity, when your goal is to communicate a specific message.
A window manager may be only 2000 lines of source code but it implements a host of formal and informal standards and interacts with hundreds of other programs on my computer.
You may need only a day or two to orient yourself to the source code, but that’s on top of months or years of experience with X11R6 and ICCCMv2 and EWMH and such. How much debugging did you first need to do to discover your current issue was even in dwm?
EDIT: I especially love the phrasing in Wikipedia's ICCCM article: dwm "can be configured for compliance". If 'configuration' can include editing source code, I'm sure that's true!
I agree to an extent. I'll admit, there is much more under the surface of dwm that 2000 lines of source code. It's all abstractions in the end. But Gnome and KDE are more likely to have bugs because they cover such a wide scope. I've never had dwm fail to do what it claimed to do. But I have had weird Gnome glitches with taskbar hovering and window dragging with workspaces, etc.
Dwm "wins" by just giving up, in a sense. It doesn't try to implement a taskbar, therefore it cannot have a buggy taskbar.
EDIT: I guess it does have a "Taskbar", but in a very, very limited scope.
Yeah, I guess a better word is "statusbar" or "workspace bar". It just displays the currently selected workspaces, the current window's title, and dwmstatus. The point is that it doesn't try to manage buttons and icons for minimize/maximize/multiple-stacked window types etc, like a traditional window manager
Do you want to ignore the (non-lethal) evils of prejudice, and just play a numbers game with fatalities? From some back-of-the-envelope math, the average POC in America will still lose more years of their life from simply living in a racist society than from COVID-19.
Life isn't a pissing contest of "my problem is bigger than your problem".