From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu May 16 2002 - 19:52:24 MDT
well... I tried. I suppose no matter how carefully
one chooses ones cavaets, ceteris parabis's, etc.,
some people will ignore them and plunge ahead argueing
with what you didn't say.
I tried to indicate that my choice of who to save was
predicated upon not knowing anything about the people
except age and/or sex. Certainly more knowledge would
make for better choices, given that one's criteria
were valid to begin with.
People DO face this very kind of situation all the
time, BTW, in other contexts. Any businessman who has
to deal with the public, either as customers and/or
employess and/or business associates is going to use
every hint he can muster as to reliability,
credit-worthiness, etc. as he makes business
decisions. Unfortunately, since our society has not
made very good provisions for recognizing and
verifying individual merit, these decisions are often
made on the basis of averages, using statistics -
compiled, scientific, prejudicial, anecdotal,
whatever.
When I drove a cab I had a couple dozen or more rather
direct and personal encounters with random individuals
as customers per day, and several hundred
less-personal (if I was lucky, anyway) interactions
with other drivers in traffic. I quickly discovered
that certain ethnic groups in the areas that I drove
had very distinct characteristic traits of major
importance to me as a businessman.
Ethnic hispanics, for example, who spoke very little
English - meaning that they were recent immigrants -
NEVER ran out on a fare. Not ONCE in five years, and
they were 90% of my fares. On the other hand, young
hispanics from the barrios who spoke good English had
a 50% record of attempting to stiff me, as did
American-born blacks of all ages, sexes or apparent
income level. But while American blacks and young
English-speaking hispanics would run out half the
time, given the chance, they almost never were
physically violent, while the affluent white beach
guys, with about a 15% rate of run-outs, were about as
likely to try to intimidate or beat up a cabbie.
Thus, I had to come up with strategies to deal with
each problem. With blacks and English-speaking young
hispanics, I got money up front - NO exceptions. (So
did our hispanic and black drivers.) I avoided the
beach areas, and had my mace and shock device ready
whenever I carried young beach guys. At the first
hint of intimidation - "Wo! Look at that meter. That's
runnin too fast. Hey, we don't wanta even talk about
BEATING UP THE CAB DRIVER." - I would pick up the
mike, make sure noone was behind me in traffic, and
then SLAM! on the brakes, piling my would-be attackers
into the dash, etc. Then I would calmly ask the
dispatcher to send the cops. This invariably resulted
in the perps suddenly falling all over themselves to
assure me that they were "just kidding around..."
Right. Except that I and other drivers had plenty of
experiences that said otherwise. (Forget all those
Avalon/Funicello Beach Blanket movies. There are no
sleazoids on Earth that can stand a candle to the
Beach sleazoids of Orange County.)
Until we develop the social technology to provide
cheap, accurate assessments of individual merit on the
fly to people having to make business decisions,
people will be judged by the significant group they
are associated with by appearance. This is
unfortunate and imposes huge, unfair costs upon the
innocent members of various groups, but it is public
goods, free rider problem to date. E.g., the
con-artists in the black community free ride upon the
good will and attempts to be fair of members of the
white community. There are quite a few blacks who
make a profession out of this (not a majority by a
long shot, but it only takes one in twenty to be a
business killer) - enough that virtually every white
person who tries to bend over backward to be fair -
ends up being burned.
One of the potential benefits of the explicit social
contract which I have discussed before in this forum
would be to provide accurate individual assessments on
demand. A signatory to the contract would be bound to
resolve disputes in a timely manner according to
established contractual procedure. A person who
provided good ID demonstrating that he or she was in
good standing as a contractee would generally be a
good risk, whether as a cab fare or a business partner
- ceteris parabis.
On that note, let me issue a bit of a market warning.
When Altavista shut down its free email service
recently, I moved my old archive files, including
various references containing passwords, etc. to a
promising appearing service titled "fiberia.com."
Within a few weeks, fiberia.com started posting a
notice that they were upgrading their service and that
email access might be slow or unavailble for a few
days. This notice remained for several weeks. I was
never able to log back on to get to my email. Now,
fiberia announces that they are sorry but they have
discontinued their free email, and suggest that one
might want to sign up for paid access.
If you go to their site now, you will be directed to
contact them at <sales@aplus.net>. When I called
A-Plus, I talked with several salespeople who had no
idea what to do about my email. Twice I was put on
hold, while they "consulted with management." Each
time I was cut off. Finally I got a toll-free number
for their tech support, and spoke with a totally
obnoxious person who apparently thought it amusing
that I had lost all that data.
So, knowing this - and I'm sure I'm not alone - how
enthusiastic are you to trust A-Plus with your email -
or anything else??? I will be researching this
further to find the actual names of the participants.
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