Sunday, May 01, 2022
Study: Uber and Lyft Drivers Don’t Like Picking Up Black People Either
Now why would that be? Would it be because of the high levels of violence among black males? I am a former cab driver and I know how dangerous that job is. Drivers will be very aware of possible danger and the plain fact is that there is more to fear from black than white riders. I never refused a fare because of the race of the rider but I can understand those who do. Women drivers are very game to do that job at all. Some do but mainly in daylight hours
An academic report published Monday has found what many Uber and Lyft users already know firsthand: Both apps have instances of drivers declining to pick up their black fares.
According to the New York Times, researchers studied around 1,500 combined trips in Seattle and Boston, with both African Americans and white test subjects hailing separate rides with both services.
“We found that African-American travelers in Seattle experienced statistically significantly longer delay waiting for a trip request through UberX or Lyft to be accepted,” said the researchers, from the University of Washington, M.I.T. and Stanford.
“We theorize that at least some drivers for both UberX and Lyft discriminate on the basis of the perceived race of the traveler.”
This spells big trouble for the two services, both of which largely built their brands on the premise that their apps would eliminate the possibility of such bias.
Instead, passengers with black-sounding names were found to have their trips cancelled by drivers twice as often as passengers with white-sounding names. When the riders are men with black-sounding names, the number jumps to three times as often.
Uber and Lyft drivers see information about potential fares in different ways. Uber drivers don’t have any information about their riders before accepting them, but they can cancel them once their names become available; Lyft drivers, on the other hand, have access to names and photos before accepting, meaning they can opt out of picking up whoever they want.
Researchers also found that drivers took longer to accept ride requests from black men using both apps, though total wait times were the same for both races using Lyft. On Uber, wait times were longer for black men.
Similar instances of discrimination have have plagued Airbnb, where people with black-sounding names found it harder to book apartments and rooms. But Airbnb took swift action to curb racism in its services, instating a strict anti-discrimination statute that includes a bias-detection team, less-obvious personal photos, and the company hiring a more-diverse staff. The site also committed to helping users who experienced discrimination find new accommodations at the last minute. But Uber and Lyft have the additional roadblock of operating in an industry known for racism.
While the outcome of the study certainly isn’t positive, neither is the reality when it comes to street hails. As quoted in Slate:
The first taxi stopped nearly 60% of the time for white RAs, but less than 20% of the time for African American RAs. The white RAs never had more than four taxis pass them before one stopped, but the African American RAs watched six or seven taxis pass them by in 20% of cases.
Writing for Medium, Jenna Wortham saw presciently this problem coming, even in the heady days of 2014 while everyone was still lauding the rise of ride-share apps as the anti-discrimination savior we’d been waiting for.
“It’s also not entirely clear that Uber’s system is completely foolproof,” she wrote. “Because drivers can reject riders for any reason, you have no way of knowing whether it’s because of your rating, your name (from which race can often be inferred), or the neighborhood you’re in.”
Troublingly, though, neither Uber nor Lyft have yet hatched any plan to address the issue of racist drivers. Rachel Holt, Uber’s head of North American operations, told the Times there was “no place for racism on the company’s online platform,” though it has no plans to alter how it functions.
“Studies like this one are helpful in thinking about how we can do even more,” she told the paper vaguely.
Lyft similarly offered a flat statement about how the company does not “tolerate any form of discrimination.”
Amazing how a problem just vanishes when you simply deny its existence
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Sweden’s failed integration creates ‘parallel societies’, says PM after riots
Sweden’s prime minister has said the Scandinavian country has failed to integrate many of the immigrants who have settled there over the past 20 years, creating a nation of “parallel societies … living in different realities”.
Unveiling a series of measures to tackle organised crime after violent riots over the Easter weekend that left more than 100 police injured, Magdalena Andersson said Islamism and rightwing extremism had been allowed to fester in Sweden.
“Segregation has been allowed to go so far that we have parallel societies in Sweden,” the Social Democrat prime minister told a news conference. “We live in the same country but in completely different realities. We will have to reassess our previous truths and make tough decisions.”
Integration had been “too poor, at the same time as we have experienced very substantial levels of immigration”, Andersson added. “Society has been too weak, resources for the police and social services have been too weak.”
The number of people living in Sweden who were born abroad has doubled over the past 20 years to about 2 million, or one-fifth of the population. Andersson said it was “crucial to prevent more children and young people from being drawn into crime”.
She said she aimed to introduce local “youth delinquency boards”, in which social services and police would collaborate closely, in addition to putting in place tools to ensure young people stayed in school and off the streets.
The justice and home affairs minister, Morgan Johansson, outlined plans to give the police greater electronic surveillance powers, facilitate the exchange of information between authorities, and deny residence even to people not yet convicted of a crime.
“What we saw were no political protests,” Andersson said of the riots. “Police were attacked with stones and molotov cocktails. It was not a political act, it was a criminal act – an attack on the democracy that many have actually fled to.”
The riots erupted after a notorious anti-immigrant provocateur, the Danish-Swedish politician Rasmus Paludan, threatened to tour the country burning the Qur’an. Police clashed with groups of mostly masked young men in several towns and cities.
Police insisted they had to grant permits for Paludan’s incendiary events, planned mainly in areas with large Muslim populations, because of the country’s liberal freedom of speech laws, but Johansson said those freedoms were being abused by “extremists” to foster “hate, division and violence”.
Dozens of people were arrested after three days of rioting in Norrköping, Linköping, Landskrona, Örebro, Malmö and the capital, Stockholm. A school was also set alight and 20 police vehicles either damaged or destroyed.
Sweden has radically tightened its immigration policies since taking in more people per capita than any other EU country during the migration crisis of 2015, and now has one of the bloc’s most restrictive policies along with neighbouring Denmark.
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Kids as young as FOUR are asked if they are boys or girls or 'NON-BINARY GENDER-FLUID' before they can play sport
Children wanting to sign up to play soccer have been asked to tick a box about their gender including one answer which allows them to choose 'non-binary' - sending parents into meltdown.
The Play Football site that lists clubs around Australia for children as young as four gives several options underneath 'gender' when players or parents go to register.
The answers players can choose are male, female, non-binary/gender fluid or 'gender identity not sufficiently represented'.
A general practitioner from Logan, Queensland, Thomas Lyons, said clubs didn't have to confuse children when only a small portion would have concerns about their gender.
'I have seen with my own eyes six-year-olds having panic attacks over the boy or girl debate,' he told The Saturday Courier Mail.
One father who was registering his eight-year-old claimed 'damaging' questions over gender identity were 'why small children are turning up with mental health problems'.
'No small child should be asked if they are a boy or a girl,' he said. 'Let them be kids and stop pushing an adult agenda on them.'
Football Australia said football was one the most 'multicultural, diverse and inclusive sports in Australia'.
'Living its values, Football Australia will always seek to create environments where people of all experiences and identities, regardless of background, race, or gender, feel welcome and encouraged to participate in the world game,' a spokesperson said.
It comes after draft guidelines from the Northern Territory Education Department revealed teachers may be encouraged not to use gender exclusive language.
School sport days would not be split between boys and girls while students on overnight excursions and school camps would be allowed to sleep in rooms and use bathrooms of their 'affirmed gender' according to the draft, Sky News reported.
'Using gendered language such as 'girls and boys' or 'ladies and gentlemen' confirms gender stereotyping and roles and can be alienating for gender questioning and gender diverse children,' the document says.
'Avoid this by using vocabulary such as 'students', 'class', 'crew', 'everyone', people' or 'year X' that are more inclusive.'
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It's Time for Conservatives to Move Beyond the Frontal Assault on Ag Subsidies
It has been almost ninety years since the federal government created agricultural subsidies to stop the ravaging of our national food production capacity due to severe drought in the Plains states.
The federal government reaction to the “Dust Bowl” was to create a support system designed to ensure that farmers were not wiped out by the wild year to year swings in production which drove farmers out of business when the crops were too good and prices fell below the cost of production and when crops failed because of weather or other factors.
And ever since, conservatives have sought to end this farm welfare to no avail.
The answer for the failure is obvious when one looks at the political map. The states of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota and North Dakota are each huge farm states. All fourteen US Senators from these states are Republican. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that between 1995 and 2020 these states combined received $108.5 billion in commodity subsidies or crop insurance payments.
Raise your hand if you think you can end farm subsidies with a solid fourteen Republican Senator bloc against you. These quixotic frontal assaults by conservatives against agriculture subsidies have failed time and again because a core GOP constituency opposes them.
This is why Americans for Limited Government has embraced a third way that enjoys bi-partisan support to begin the process of ending or substantially curbing these subsidies. In the modern world, governments subsidize agriculture production with the goal of dumping excess production into foreign markets, driving prices down and domestic competing farmers out of business, which makes it a trade matter between nations to be reciprocally negotiated.
The two largest sugar producers, Brazil and India each heavily subsidize sugar production and dump the excess produced to drive down the world sugar price and eliminate sugar industries around the world. To show just how dominant Brazil and India are the two countries combine to produce about 17 percent more sugar than the total produced by the next eight largest sugar producing nations in the world. Just as Saudi Arabia is the market maker in the world of oil, Brazil and India are the market makers in sugar.
And they exploit this subsidy driven dominance by controlling the world sugar price through the massive supply they dump onto the world market. Their goal is to increase their market share in countries like the United States and in doing so, driving the currently robust U.S. sugar industry into the history books. And if not for the supports in the current system, they would have in a large way have succeeded, putting American consumers at the whim of an international market that is notoriously volatile.
So what can be done to create a semblance of free markets for the sugar industry with the goal of using it as a model for the rest of agriculture?
U.S. Representatives Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) and Dale Kildee (D-Mich.) have introduced bi-partisan legislation which serves as a good starting point. Known as Zero for Zero, the Cammack-Kildee proposal urges the President to pursue trade policies which would result in the “elimination of all direct and indirect subsidies benefiting the production or export of sugar” by countries who subsidize sugar production at a proscribed level.
The resolution goes on to urge the president to present sugar policy reform legislation once the ending of these major subsidies is certified.
While some may worry that this approach is too tepid, and would take years to accomplish, the truth is that the seventy-to-eighty-year frontal assault on ending agriculture subsidies have failed time and again. Zero for Zero puts a focus on the President’s ability to jawbone other nations into limiting or ending their sugar supports, allowing the United States to end or dramatically limit ours.
No approach is perfect, but the Cammack-Kildee bill provides a credible pathway to creating agriculture trade agreements which keep the American farmer on a level international playing field while ending the pernicious effects of government subsidized agriculture.
When faced with a level international market, no one can out-produce the American farmer, with the reciprocal Zero for Zero approach, the entire agricultural subsidization can be overhauled and hopefully eliminated. Without it, it is likely we will face another seventy years of grinding our teeth in disgust at a corporate welfare system as conservatives flail in futility at the agricultural subsidy windmills that always defeat us.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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