Stabbing Peckham today Fri. 28th April

[uncleglen]

This is how these kids think they can do what they like

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/28/postman-confiscates-five-year-olds-water-pistol-ambushed-rounds/

[snowy]

You are Alf Garnett aicmfp

[rendelharris]

Dogkennelhillbilly Wrote:

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> I had 2 eggs this morning. Yesterday I had 1. If

> this trend keeps up, I'll be eating more than 3

> million eggs a day by next May!!!

>

> (For the less perceptive: a comment on how to look

> at numbers).

How about if we monitored your egg consumption since 1990 and found in 1990 you ate 184 eggs in a year but in 2014 you ate 83, would it be accurate to say that you ate fewer eggs in 2014 than you ate in 1990? Or would my belief that you ate fewer eggs in 2014 than in 1990 just be a symptom of my poor perception of how to look at numbers?

[Dogkennelhillbilly]

Yes.

[rendelharris]

.

[rendelharris]

DulwichFox Wrote:

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> Once in a while. ? Six people stabbed to death in

> a week. ?

And perhaps next week there will be none...ghastly spikes of unrelated incidents will always happen from time to time, year on year it's not getting worse, in fact if anything it's getting...I won't say better, let's say less bad.

[jaywalker]

Relatively few guns, some move towards knives. Murder rate falling.

Misconceived calls for mandatory tougher sentences (no evidence of any deterrent, quite the contrary).

Nostalgia for when people didn't do this sort of thing (oh please tell me when).

Astonishing calls for stop and search (as if no one has read a thing written by Akerlof).

We, generally, live in a MUCH more docile and safe environment in the City than EVER before. So think all should grow up a bit. (For calibration: it has been estimated that diesel vehicles alone cause several thousand deaths a year in the city).

[rendelharris]

jaywalker Wrote:

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> Astonishing calls for stop and search (as if no

> one has read a thing written by Akerlof).

Well, what with one thing and another, I'm not as up on the works of Mr.Akerlof as I'm sure most forum users are, and googling him in relation to stop and search offers no clues, care to elucidate?

[????]

Try googling "Intellectual Signalling" instead R :)

Got to agree with the saner voices though, panic because there's been a cluster of stabbings enhanced by some local is creating a bit of moral panic; horribly regrettable although every stabbing is I don't think we're much above average.

Where I'm going to disagree with the saner though is just a reminder that the sole purpose of prison isn't rehabilitation (for which it has a poor record generally, sadly) it is also punishment and keeping offenders off the street thus less likely to inflict their babarity on others - both of these are good things, ideally we'd get all three. But the 'liberals' just going on about rehabilitation miss the others way too often.

[jaywalker]

At the end of his 'market for lemons' (I don't really go in for economics, but on this occasion the Nobel prize was certainly deserved).

Suppose we have a population made up of subgroup A and subgroup B, each exactly 50% of the total, each equally likely to carry knives (neither recognisable group any more criminal than the other).

Now suppose the police stop and search on that basis (50 : 50) and come across someone with a knife. They then adjust their stop and search sampling (in a way they perceive as fair because they are charged with stopping criminality as efficiently as they can) to reflect what they see as the higher probability of someone carrying a knife from the subgroup from which their (in fact completely chance) discovery came from. With further success, in a general population completely even in its propensity to iniquity, they are very soon only stopping people from that sub-group. And that is the sub-group who go to jail and are stigmatised. This quite apart from all the other factors involved in stigmatisation. Economics is only a tiny vision, but here it is a profound one.

Stop and search is locally rational. There is no insinuation here of any bias by the police - that would of course never happen because the police are always-already on our side, that is why they joined up. But it is here shown to be generally irrational. IF the case for stop and search is that it is rational (on anything other than random sampling that persists in the face of 'results') it is here refuted.

Hence Akerlof's immortality.

(this principle applies much much more generally, but is generally not recognised).