I have never taken a ride in an Uber or a Lyft service so have no first-hand knowledge of how they compare with regular taxis. But a new paper says that Uber drivers practice discrimination against women and people of color and the type of discrimination was different for women than it was for people of color. This article discusses the contents of the paper.
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As more and more reports come in of people feeling emboldened to insult, threaten, and otherwise harass people who they perceive as not belonging in the US, it is good for us to think abut what we might do if we encounter a situation where we see this happening to someone else.
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Donald Trump and the other contenders in the Republican primaries (especially Ben Carson) insisted that ‘political correctness’ was a huge problem in the US and that we needed to be able to speak our minds openly. Of course, they could always do that. What they were really objecting to was being criticized for saying awful things. So they were not calling for the end of censorship but asking for their critics to be censored or to self-censor.
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Now that the election is over, there are plenty of analyses of why the results were so unexpected. It is the task of the party that loses to do serious soul-searching about their performance. The temptation will be to look for scapegoats, some external factors over which they had no control to blame and, if none of them are sufficiently plausible, to blame the voters for their ignorance, since such a conclusion lets them off the hook.
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Well, that was a long night. The surprise of the result has still not worn off for me and I am still trying to digest the news and the future implications. One issue that will be of interest is why the polls were so wrong, with the one exception of the Los Angeles Times that was the only one that predicted a Donald Trump lead in the final days. Another topic of discussion will be how Trump ignored much of the conventional wisdom of campaigning and won anyway. But those are issues of interest mostly to academics and the media. The questions that concern me are what drove the Trump win and where the country goes now.
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The US media have made an agreement in the last few decades to not broadcast the votes for each state until the polls close for that state in order to not influence voters who have not as yet gone to the polls. But this year State magazine has said to hell with that agreement, they are going to report running totals, because they say that news organizations have a duty to report the news as they get it and not conceal it.
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So I voted today at my usual polling place, a former elementary school that is now a pre-school center. The precinct had a small but steady stream of people going in at out but there were no lines at all to get a booth for voting. This was less activity than I was used to in the past but I cannot really compare because in former elections I would go at about 7:30am before I went to work and that was the busy time. Today, as a retired old geezer, I went in at 11:00am.
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I will be going to the polls in a couple of hours and will post my impressions after I return. I am taking advantage of my retired status to vote in the middle of the day and avoid the lines that may exist in the early morning and late evening hours. As this dreadful campaign winds down to its long awaited end, the New York Times has managed to get access to Donald Trump’s campaign to see what the mood is like.
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