Forms of Inquiry: 12/2/14 Today's Inquiries

I bet you thought I wasn't going to post these.

The Links:

TNC on Ferguson. Again.

Widening wage gap linked to more deaths among black Americans.

White people can't tell how old black people are. That's why they keep shooting black children. Or something.

Police in Utah kill more people than gang members. I wonder what the national statistics look like?

Police are evolving into a security service.

Not an iPhone commercial:

More here.

An excellent interview with Chris Rock which covers much of the above.

My Health Insurance Company Killed Me, Despite Obamacare. Yes, but they saved money!

Calling out corruption in medical care.

Hartzband and Groopman, who teach at Harvard Medical School, explain that cold numbers are poor drivers of quality care. What’s commonly called “metrics,” or numerical standards doctors are supposed to meet under contracts for medical care that reward “pay for performance,” are derived from whole population studies. That is, they’re generic standards for large groups of people, not measures to be applied to individual patients. People are different, and although metrics are useful in research and in shaping policy, they’re woefully inadequate in the assessment and support of a single human being.

Metrics, the writers say, do not account for patient preference, differing opinions or optimal practice for a given doctor-patient circumstance. Yet metrics are what the industry demands from providers if they expect financial support.

Obama's immigration action is going to lead to an ethnic cleansing of whites, according to Kansas republican Kris Kobach.

The US and UK governments are painting social media companies as allies of terrorists.

But there’s something else significant going on here that I want to highlight. All of this is part of a clear and definitely coordinated campaign by the U.S. and UK Governments to demonize social media companies as terrorist-helpers in order to force them to act as (even more) obedient snooping agents for the National Security State.

More lawsuits against Apple for its illegal no-poaching deals. Good thing Obama cleared the way for more H1B folks. That should keep wages nice and low.

Your surge-priced nightmare future.

I am Uber. I can see my thousands of cars. I don’t know if I am an extension of them or they are an extension of me. They run over streets filled with pipes and electricity that I am also responsible for monitoring and optimizing. Hundreds of thousands of people are reporting back to me where they are. Beneath them is also an unoptimized subway system that runs empty trains at night, where everyone pays the same price no matter the time or demand. It is a form of madness. And of course it is failing, flooded, useless.

There is no American Dream. Link goes to awesome local news video.

Failed for-profit schools bought out by student-loan debt collector. This should end well. Fox, welcome to the hen house.

Meanwhile, colleges that pledged to help the poor have been doing the opposite.

The proceeds from Mr. Jefferson’s Capital Ball are destined for merit aid for applicants who have the high grade-point averages and top scores on entrance tests that help institutions do well on college rankings. Merit aid can also attract middle- and upper-income students whose families can pay the rest of the tuition bill and therefore furnish badly needed revenue to colleges and universities.

As institutions vie for income and prestige in this way, the net prices they’re charging the lowest-income students, after discounts and financial aid, continue to rise faster on average than the net prices they’re charging higher-income ones, according to an analysis of newly released data the universities and colleges are required to report to the U.S. Department of Education.

Why couples move for the man's job but not the woman's.

The big take-away: Women enter professions that make it easy to work anywhere, and move for any reason, including for a spouse. Men choose careers in fields that are geographically-constrained. In other words, men have to move in order to move up.

Demographics for renting and buying.

For buying, the 30 to 39 age group (blue) is important (note: see Demographics and Behavior for some reasons for changing behavior). The population in this age group is increasing, and will increase significantly over the next 10+ years.

This demographics is positive for home buying, and this is a key reason I expect single family housing starts to continue to increase in coming years.
Read more at http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2014/12/housing-demographics-for-renting-and.html#SeEbwYVeUe5GQFM7.99

Home ownership and wealth creation. I'm not sure that I agree that we need more policies to promote home ownership if they're not sustainable for the individuals buying the homes. I liked this part though:

The solution is to lift wages, not only with new policies like higher minimum wages and toughened labor standards, but also with approaches to managing the economy to ensure that a fair share of growth goes to wages and salaries, rather than going disproportionately to corporate profits.

More on the job market being better than it looks.

More on the success of the Stimulus program. If only all the states hadn't simultaneously cut their budgets and fired lots of workers.

SCOTUS tackles whether or not online threats are really threats.