What's appalling (beyond the obvious racism) is the asymmetric risks involved. The amount of hassle that can be caused by somebody saying, "I'm sorry, we'll have to verify this, and that can't be done through our normal process" is, first of all fairly low risk to the person doing it; they're just being cautious after all, and secondly starts a cascade of things which, generally, can't be stopped just by somebody saying, "oh, wait, actually this is okay."
It seems like once something gets flagged as a potential problem it's frequently the case that nobody can easily unflag it.
It creates a ratchet effect in which the situation can only get worse, not better.
Oh, this is hella ratchet, that's for sure.
What's criminal is that anyone anywhere thinks I'm going to read a story in the format of fifteen godamn pages of tweets. I don't care if it's revealing the time and place a meteor will wipe out the earth, fuck right off with that shit.
If it's going to wipe out the Earth, why does it matter where it hits?
5: You can't fool us -- you read it, and you can't think of anyway to defend the cops, so had to go with Plan B.
What's appalling (beyond the obvious racism) is the asymmetric risks involved.
But isn't taking somebody's ID a potential crime?
I mean, it's not a symmetric risk, but it seems to me that you could press them on that in a lawsuit.
I read this several times because I was sure I had to be missing something, but I'm struck by how routine this seems to have been for the cops. They seemed to have shown up and said "Oh, there's a black kid, I guess we're supposed to arrest him" without taking any time to figure out the what the situation was -- as naturally as a firefighter would presumably say "Oh, there's a kitten up in the tree, better get the ladder."
True (according to my dad), but off topic, story: Someone in my hometown called the city to get a cat out of a tree. The city sent the police because the fire department is volunteer. Rather than use a ladder, they thought they would scare the cat down using a type of projectile that is (was?) used to get cattle moving. This was a non-lethal projectile, to a cow. But not so much to a cat.
This is why analogies are banned.
I mean, it's not a symmetric risk, but it seems to me that you could press them on that in a lawsuit.
True, and that seems very unlikely.
In their defense, that part of Nebraska was largely treeless as recently as 1880 and it takes time to evolve responses to new stimuli.
5: "Fifteen pages"? You mean fifteen scrolls? It's fewer than forty tweets.
Yeah, I was about to ask. Aren't you just...scrolling?
There's a gofundme thing at the bottom, but it's for the coding program and not for suing anybody. I'm not sure I want to be responsible for kids learning Java.
I'm kinda with gswift on how annoying those tweet-stories are. If only there was some way to publish text documents of arbitrary size to the web! Someone should really invent that!
I tried to read it backwards, because Twitter, before realizing that somebody already flipped it for me.
I mean, the story is also really horrible and was a big reminder about how easy my own code-school experience was, etc., etc. But FFS, 3.6mb download for a couple hundred words and two photos? I hate twitter.
... although I realise that I'm being stupid here, since obviously if you don't have a blog but you do have a twitter, and you want to tell everyone about something awful that happened, you're not going to create a new blog or whatever just for that, you're going to tweet about it. So I'll shut up about the kids on my lawn.
I think if that happened to me I'd totally lose my shit. Of course, "white privilege," so it probably wouldn't happen to me. I do know young white people who have had similar experiences but with less law enforcement added.
17
This was a Storify thing. Maybe Twitter has enough coders to cause a Storified series of tweets to actually look like a story. Or maybe they don't. Or maybe they are just useless and lazy.
20: Tweets can contain links to web pages.
Personally I find Twitter atrociously annoying, but not as annoying as having someone steal my ID and then getting arrested for nothing.
But FFS, 3.6mb download for a couple hundred words and two photos?
Isn't such bloat common to all sorts of publishing platforms these days?
Also, its much easier to get people to get people to read and spread tweets than visit your blog. That's the problem that social media solves that blogging couldn't compete with.
Also, administration is morality. The only way they could find to distribute cash to the students was by cheque, that needed cashing at some brutal vig at Fat Toni's Cunty Loans, not, say, the program's own bank? In Uganda you could do an MPESA drop!
And the moral here is that it's through shitty admin that the racism leaks in. There was a reason the iconic legislation of the Civil Rights era is all technical stuff about organising local elections. Boring wonk shit is not boring. Technocratic quality is not value-free or apolitical.
Isn't such bloat common to all sorts of publishing platforms these days?
Yes, it is. So, again, I take back my griping. I mean, I'm still griping about the ecosystem. But not about people using the tools they're given.
If it's going to wipe out the Earth, why does it matter where it hits?
Some of us have wagered on particular coordinates, Moby. Excuse us for enjoying the odd flutter, guv'nor!
17/19/20: Then publish it on Facebook. No length limit. I agree, Twitter is not a good format for a story like this.
Facebook has its flaws too. It's not obvious how to break up a long comment into paragraphs on a computer, and I don't even know how to do it on a phone. But it still seems better than Twitter.
6: You wouldn't want to go outside and watch?
14,15: My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and a page is what I can see all at once and that's the way I like it. On my 17'' laptop screen it's 14 punches of the pgdn button to get to the end of that nonsense with the screen being like 70 percent white space. I'm refuse to participate in that shitshow.
I did notice the pics counting my keystrokes. Looks warm and all the cops were black. In the South somewhere? And 25 is a good point. I'm assuming this is coding for poor youth which probably is all brown kids. Why assume they even have ID? WTF kind of moron distributes the funds that way?
In the South somewhere?
Atlanta.
Why assume they even have ID?
It's only 17 kids, perhaps they checked, made sure that everybody had ID, and counted themselves lucky.
But, yes, 25 is correct, and the person tweeting acknowledges that the check cashing place was taking 10%, so I imagine he'd be happy to find a better way.
It does say at the top: "Today, the 2nd full day of the program, we experience the following." So it sounds like the whole thing is fairly new.
WTF kind of moron distributes the funds that way?
It was a postal money order. Lots of people do.
And I looked at the guy's Twitter stream. He says he tried to send the to the post office if they didn't have a bank.
At coding school, he should learn that go to is considered harmful. Example, go to check cashing store.
Why pay with postal money orders, and not Venmo, PayPal, or prepaid 'credit/debit' network cards ? Might there be grounds for an age discrimination case here ?
I don't know what Venmo is. I know that you can't get PayPal if you are unbanked. I would bet that the fees for a prepaid credit card are killer if you use them for large amounts and have to put them into cash first, say to use a stipend to pay rent. The PO money order fee is like $2 per thousand.
In America, first you get the money, then you find out shit is fucked up and bullshit if you're not already in the banking system.
The only way they could find to distribute cash to the students was by cheque.... In Uganda you could do an MPESA drop!
It is my repeated experience that the kind of people who donate money (via foundations or otherwise) to support programs like this absolutely INSIST on an audit trail* even for the most minuscule amounts of money. The sheer amount of human energy wasted on hounding [often very poor] people to turn in, e.g., bus transfers so they can be properly reimbursed** is insanity-inducing.
*And yes, you can audit mobile money. But Americans (to a first approximation) don't use mobile money and they don't understand how it works. Heck, many UMC funders I've dealt with can't wrap their minds around a person who doesn't have a checking account and credit cards. In some of the programs I ran, I literally gave up on getting the funders to pay for small stipends for focus groups etc and just paid them out of my own pocket, because they wouldn't accept postal money order receipts because we couldn't "prove" that the money order was made out to the person it was supposed to be made out to. Argggghhhhhhhhh.
**I know someone who deals with a major university (rhymes with Ben Tate) and the amount of disdain and contempt she gets from the accounting department about her staff members' bus transfers and subway tokens is enraging.
In conclusion: Philanthropy is a %*$(Q!%$! way to pay for important social goods. THIS IS WHY WE INVENTED TAXES.
THIS IS WHY WE INVENTED TAXES.
Which, I guess, is why you have to take a SSN to give somebody a $50 stipend.
40: The threshold is $600!!!
Sigh. I know you know this.
Anyway, back when I was involved with it, there was no problem. I used to have interviewers hand out twenty dollar bills. But the project managers are complaining about it and when I did a study, they made me give them my SSN.
AIUI, the IRS only makes you do a 1099 for someone if you pay them more than $600 in a calendar year. So if you are doing a one-time event and paying people $25, you shouldn't have to collect tax info from them. One would think.
One would. But, how is a university accountant going to know a given participant got less than $600 over the year when they don't have the SSN of everybody paid for a study. Lots of people do multiple studies. Also, most of our studies are multi-visit, though not sufficiently involved to be worth $600.
If you tell them they should spend their time making it harder for doctors who want to murder their wives to buy cyanide on a university credit card, they get all upset. And, to be fair, there was on the one murder.
Just be glad you're not getting paid in Buffalo Wild Wings giftcards.
45.1 is perfectly reasonable, I admit. The focus group example came from my own work, not the big university. I'm 100% sure there wasn't anybody else at my organization paying these folks to do anything.
The cyanide thing...yeah. My go-to explanation for a lot of stuff like that is "How did X think he could get away with it?" is "He'd gotten away with everything else he'd tried." Substitute genders as necessary, and it's remarkably true in my experience. People don't suddenly wake up one day and do one horribly wrong thing.
I hope there's a different mechanism for studies about more sensitive topics. I would think it is an IRB issue and a selection bias for many studies.
Why does everybody go away when I mention IRBs?
Aside from graphic design, I do like Twitter essays in moderation. The format encourages (good) writers to boil down to major steps and points, but not going so far as to make it Powerpointy.
Booo to Twitter essays. New topic, the dreadlocks thing at San Francisco State.
1. Legit or staged?
2. God that white kid is annoying, but if it's legit I really wanted him to immediately punch her in the face for grabbing him.
3. Who's in the background bringing back the "Kid" hairstyle. Is that a thing again?
And I'm feeling old after I found out both dudes from Kid n Play are now in their fifties.
39: I don't mean they should use M-PESA - it's not deployed in the US, after all - just that one of the problems here is the US's weirdly dated personal banking sector.
Thinking about it, this is actually a use-case for postal banking, the official Jacobin Reader's Next Favourite Policy Proposal of 2014.
52: My feeling that is was a performance for the camera on her part, but not on his. Her smiling, and especially her touching and grabbing, shows to me that she thought that her intentions and mood since not serious or sincerely hostile, wouldn't generate hostility or violence in the man.
And if y'all can't recognize massive motherfucking privilege when you see it, try reversing genders and races in that scene.
And that's the thing about privilege, that while it does use group identity to protect and empower individuals, it really only manifests or becomes apparent in particular concrete interactions between individuals of differing status or differently interpreted perceived status. Which is why the Scalzi metaphor is such pernicious bullshit.
This was news to me:
African American workers are hurt more by the decline in union and manufacturing jobs
"In 1983--the earliest year for which we have comparable data--31.7 percent of black workers were union members or covered by a union contract, compared to 22.2 percent of white workers.
Prior to the 1990s, both black and white workers were equally likely to be employed in manufacturing. In 1979, the share of African Americans working in manufacturing was 23.9 percent, essentially the same rate for white workers of 23.5 percent. In 1990, both of these rates had fallen but remained the same for black (18.4 percent) and white (18.3 percent) workers." ...and then it diverges
Wow. I did not know that.
Well, it looks like you'll have to retract about half your comments all the way back to 2005...
Not going to lie, in New Zealand everyone in that programme would have had (a) a bank account linked to an Eftpos card that would be usable for 95% of all transactions (b) which could also be accessed via the internet as well as (c) probably via smartphone app and (c) cash transfers to and from such an account could be made electronically and in close-to-real time.
I mean obviously the racism thing is more important, but man US banking is weirdly backward.
I saw the Kid hairstyle IRL just the other day.
I'm not going to lie, or if I am, I'm not going to warn you first. I don't use internet banking unless you count on-line bill paying. I set it up, but I didn't use it often enough to remember the password. I don't have a banking app on my phone. I use cash for about all transactions under $100.
I feel like I have this stereotyped posture of being shocked and depressed at weird shit Americans do. And that's not fair! New Zealand is fucked up in lots of ways.
But honestly, cash? I can't even remember the last time I paid for anything with cash.
I do business with plenty of places that won't accept cards.
I think part of the difference is that credit card companies charge higher fees here than aboard. That's why smaller merchants, especially ones where everybody involved is related, will not accept them.
Over here, if you don't take eftpos, you have to explicitly say so. And probably expect to lose significant custom. It's down to guys in trailers selling shitty burgers, and even then you kinda expect them to have an eftpos machine somewhere nearby.
(Seriously, I've been trying to think when I last used physical cash. And I think maybe a coffee a fortnight ago?)
We also don't use the word "fortnight" very often.
60, 61: This comes up all the time here. What I never understand about the alleged USA vs. everywhere else dichotomy is that I need cash constantly in Germany, including to pay €100 dinner bills. So why is it that every other non-USA place supposedly lets you use a card to buy a hot dog off a street vendor?
That said, 57.1 is clearly true. I still don't understand why I'm supposed to care* about chip & pin vs. whatever, but I fully recognize how stupid it is that they're moving us from strip & sign to... chip & sign. In practice, they've managed it by raising the limit on how big a transaction you can make without signing at all, reducing friction.
*I understand why it matters; I don't understand why I should be emotionally invested. When I read things about the it, the writers always seem to think it's up there with climate change as an issue.
At one point I found myself needing to transfer funds with no delay from my account with one bank to my account at another. Because I didn't have this all set up, the only way I could get it done in that day was to take cash from one bank and walk it over to the other.
I couldn't even use the ATMs because of the daily withdrawal limit.
65 - I think NZ is really an outlier in uptake of Eftpos, probably because of some stuff to do with being a small, pretty homogenous, wealthy, high-trust society.
My experience in Europe is being frustrated at how much cash you have to carry.
Nearly every* Eftpos transaction is NZ is strip & pin or chip & pin; how else would you do it?
* apart from maybe if you're on the Cook Strait ferry or maybe the phone network goes down real bad.
So, when Lorde talks about counting dollars on the train, is that because young people don't have cards or are they looking at their phones to see how much money they have left?
Lorde actually lives on the North Shore in Devonport where there are no trains. I mean, it is possible she has taken a bus or ferry to Britomart and is now heading to somewhere in the inner west or south Auckland, but in reality I think she is not speaking from lived experience.
(Semi-seriously, some Auckland bus drivers struck for better pay, and as a work-to-rule refused to touch cash, instead making people pay via a contactless smart card. And I think really it's just a nice line.)
The cash-eater on the bus is so slow that I sort of wish cash on the bus would go away. But that would maybe cause problems for people who don't get free bus fare as part of their employment.
When I ride with my son at rush hour, some drivers don't make me pay a fare for him. I think because the kid fare ($1.25) isn't worth holding up the line.
man US banking is weirdly backward.
To be fair, one of the reasons sophisticated, low-friction payments systems like M-Pesa are so widespread in Kenya and other developing countries is because the banking system is so undeveloped or unstable. America's uniqueness is having shitty-but-developed retail banking and an even shittier payments system. The ability to piggyback services like Paypal or Apple Pay on the banking system relieves a lot of the pressure to make things better at the infrastructure level, though it doesn't do anything to help the unbanked.
(Semi-seriously, some Auckland bus drivers struck for better pay, and as a work-to-rule refused to touch cash, instead making people pay via a contactless smart card. And I think really it's just a nice line.)
In much of London you can only pay via contactless smartcard. At least once you get on the bus.
About three months ago, I got a contactless smartcard. I've always swiped it because that's what I'm used to.
Except for the bus. That one you just tap.
There's a proposal for cash on MBTA buses to go away.
Yesterday I had to transfer a large amount of money to my wife's account because we had to pay a couple of contractors working on our house and I'd left my checkbook at work and her account didn't have enough. I did this large transfer while standing in the shower, after drying my finger off enough so that touchID would work, so hooray for internet banking.
74 - I think that's the medium term goal, although there's issues about which card becomes the standard nationwide - Auckland uses one format (i.e AT HOP) & Wellington another (Snapper, based on a Korean system), while Chch has a dumber but very prevalent option - and because NZ is small enough & there's a nationwide free off-peak scheme for 65+, NZTA wants to have a nationwide standard.
The Oyster system in London now works with ordinary chip-and-pin cards as well as dedicated cards, so presumably that could be implemented in NZ too (though it would involve changing the terminals I imagine).
And by "chip and pin" I mean contactless credit/debit cards.
I have a weird mental thing where I sometimes forget my PIN. It's like writer's block at the ATM.
My understanding is that there's some very detailed and complex but basically stupid politics around who owns the system that ends up implemented nationwide, and who has to, as you say, replace the terminals.
Do you guys have the self-feeding furnaces or do you need to shovel coal in each morning?
Our buses are free. It's the right answer.
60, 62: My wife and I carry a lot more cash and try to be consistent about paying with it at small stores. Losing 1.5-3% of a sale to the credit card company can be a substantial fraction for a mom & pop type shop. I'd rather they have that for paying staff.
66: I've done the walk cash from one bank to another, but it was after hours so it was via ATM on both ends. Fortunately, it was in a town where the branches of the two banks were across the street from each other. I could have done it electronically, but the bank wanted a crazy amount for... walking the electrons across the street to the other bank I guess.
Every 15 minutes in the core routes from downtown to the mall. More suburban routes might be every 30, and the route out by me (and to the airport) is just every hour.
I don't ride the bus, though. The closest stop to me is 1.7 miles away, and if I'm going to bike that, I may as well bike the whole 6 miles downtown. I usually park downtown for free, so it becomes a time thing.
Yes, I know I'm selfishly destroying the planet. I should bike it more often.
If everybody lived within six miles of their work, I'd bet that greenhouse emissions would be much lower no matter how much driving was done.
Google maps says its 4.9 miles if I ride on the interstate, which may even be legal (I see people doing it fairly often).
Honestly, the last third of the ride home, with a 250 foot elevation gain, is a bigger barrier than it ought to be. If I took the bus with my bike to the nearest stop, I'd have that whole gain. Which really shouldn't be an issue. OK, I'm convinced.
I think I have a 250 foot elevation gain between the bus stop and my house.
Don't think of it as a 250 foot elevation gain - think of it as an awesome start to your ride home!
60, 62: My wife and I carry a lot more cash and try to be consistent about paying with it at small stores. Losing 1.5-3% of a sale to the credit card company can be a substantial fraction for a mom & pop type shop. I'd rather they have that for paying staff.
I do that.
I like to have dollar bills so I can give them to the Street Speech vendors. This allows me to have a moment where I can consider the possibility that I am not such a horrible person.
man US banking is weirdly backward.
I thought it was really cool when I could take a photo of a check to deposit into my bank account. But then my bank just updated the app so now is says "What, you are currently located outside the United States? Fuck you." (I'm paraphrasing)
What this means is that now, every time I get stuck with a paper check, I have to hope I'm transiting through the Miami airport sometime soon so I can take a picture of the thing on US soil and have it deposited.
92: I don't affirmatively bother to pay cash when I like a store a lot, but I do affirmatively use my AmEx with its higher merchant fee at places I don't like.
94: Can you fool them with a VPN?
94: I wrote a cheque just last month! It was a strange feeling. Then I found a tape cassette in the back of a drawer.
Crossing Parker's Piece today, I saw a man sitting on a plaid blanket, a panama hat placed carefully by his side, typing away on a manual typewriter. The clacking of the keys was audible from a long distance away, and I wondered if he'd been thrown out of the house for working too noisily, a kindred spirit to the lonely bagpipe player in the middle of a field I once passed while driving at speed along the A14. But I expect he was just being pretentious.