As IF Times

link Taxi advocate to hacks: profile your passengers – am New York.

Boy this should be fun party conversation.  This is interesting because the issue is exactly the flip side of the TSA grope and feel regimen being employed at airports today. 

The head of the NY taxi union, Fernando Mateo,  is taking the outspoken position of publicly declaring that cab drivers should profile in picking up their fares.

“…Profile your passengers,” that’s the surprising message that a top taxi advocate is sending hacks after a livery cab driver was shot by a Hispanic suspect.  You know sometimes it’s good that we are racially profiled because the God’s-honest truth is that 99 percent of the people that are robbing, stealing, killing these drivers are blacks and Hispanics,” said Fernando Mateo, president of Hispanics Across America and the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers…”

Naturally, the politically correct knee jerk uproar ensues, including of course the canned outrage from Mr. Fair Play himself, the articulate ‘Reverend” Al Sharpton.  Actually if anyone cared to listen closely to what Mr. Mateo had to say, he wasn’t advocating racial profiling per se, he was advocating for drivers to be alert and aware of fares that were potentially dangerous.  It’s purely a coincidence that, “99 percent of the people that are robbing, stealing, killing drivers are blacks and Hispanics”.   The key point is:

“…so if you see suspicious activity, you know what, don’t pick that person up…”

Apparently this advice is too radical and extreme for the PC world.  As usual, people who have no stake in the game are telling people on the front lines what to do because of fanciful theories.  It’s reminiscent of idiots criticizing soldiers who shoot before being absolutely certain that the target was an enemy.  In doing a google search, I am unable to find the following headlines:

“Well dressed middle aged woman holds up cabbie at gunpoint for $20”

“Businessmen force cabbie to drive at gunpoint to Waldorf Hotel”

“Tourists in Hawaiian shirts rough up cabdriver in Midtown”

“Grandmothers beat up helpless cabdriver in Queens”

One of the oldest cliches is “you can’t tell a book by it’s cover” which is mostly starry eyed delusion, especially when it comes to sizing up people in an urban setting.  They’ve obviously never been to the south side of Chicago trying to ask for directions from some fine looking young men in hoodies, baggy jeans and over-sized sneakers.  Very few gangsta wannabes run around in khakis and polo shirts for some reason.   So the PC crowd insists that cabbies expose their lives to pick up a $20 fare in satisfaction of some PC principle.  Cabbies are not allowed to be leery of shady looking characters because feelings would be hurt.

This presumption of innocence only works in the safe confines of the streets.  If you enter the gritty world of airports, that’s different.  In this bizarro world the assumptions are turned upside down.   If you happened to be the middle aged woman, the well dressed businessman or the gaggle of grandmothers, you would be subject to the scrutiny of the beady eyed TSA agents ever alert for signs of nefarious intent.  In fact you would be treated with gloves, not kid gloves, but the blue latex kind.  Here, profiling is reversed: you are actually singled out for extra scrutiny the more innocent you look.  If you are old and in a wheelchair, good luck catching your flight.  You really can’t make this up.

link YouTube – Kelli Space Interview Part 1 – Peter Schiff Radio 11/30/10.

Not really necessary to listen to the entire interview.  The salient point is made from the first few minutes of the conversation.

In another area of human activity rumored to be risky, namely buying stocks or mutual funds, the buyer is practically smothered with disclaimers about the risk of making such an investment.  The boilerplate lines are:

1. Investments may be risky and loss of some or all of invested capital may result

2. Past results are not an indicator of future performance.

Similar to all pharmaceuticals we take these days, the lawyers have draped themselves all over stock investments to warn people away.  Nevertheless, somehow people still take drugs and buy stocks.  Maybe it’s time the lawyers jumped onto the College education bandwagon. 

While I can’t comment on the experiences provided by a  4 year program in sociology, we can probably say that spending close to $200,000 to attain a non professional undergraduate degree without some avenue to employment should not have happened without a prospectus.  No doubt this poor gal is just one of tens of thousands of wide eyed students going to college each year in the hopes of bettering themselves for a competitive job market.  If the parents are able to write the cheque, bully for them.  In the case of this gal, like many other students who are forced to borrow money for the experience, there should be a disclaimer in bold letters at the outset of the school career which states:

“Warning.  In no possible way can the cost of this degree be paid off in your lifetime, we strongly suggest taking courses in waiting tables and selling time shares.  Your degree may have no practical use to society”

Under the noble  idea that no one should be denied the right to higher education because of financial disadvantage, governments have implicitly guaranteed all student loans via their funding arm Sallie Mae.  Similar to the home mortgage fiasco, if lenders are not at risk since the government provides a backstop, why not lend the money to anyone who asked?  Moving up the food chain, if students were willing to pay the tuition, why wouldn’t colleges just ratchet up their fees?  Which brings us to where we are today wherein some private colleges charge 25, 35, or even 55 thousand dollars a year for undergraduate programmes. 

To be sure, colleges can charge what they want, but the original goal of allowing financially disadvantaged students to attend school has achieved, shockingly, the exact opposite effect.  Indirectly, the government is supporting the high cost bases demanded by all colleges.  University educators no longer have to publish or perish, they can make a pretty good wage just teaching.  In this way, the public supports the private school system.  Now, even pedestrian college degrees will cost at least $100,000 even at some state colleges. 

If families cannot afford to underwrite this amount, the aspiring student, like the gal in the interview, takes on a crushing debt load to obtain a degree with little or no guarantee of employment.  Even if a liberal arts student were able to find a job with their degree, the burden of paying off such a crushing debt will guarantee them a miserable life.  It’s only a matter of time before colleges have to issue a prospectus upon taking in students.  Otherwise, students would be better off paying lawyers to sue for misrepresentation.

Update: Aug 18, 2011 http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/08/18/have-b-schools-become-debtors-prisons/