If the NFL is giving out 64 cornerback positions, and not even a small percent is going to white guys, then isn't it a given that either there's some discrimination going on, or there's a lack of representation in business by a class of people that obviously needs some assistance to achieve it due to past discrimination?
Jackson and Siemens water meters
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If the NFL is giving out 64 cornerback positions, and not even a small percent is going to white guys, then isn't it a given that either there's some discrimination going on, or there's a lack of representation in business by a class of people that obviously needs some assistance to achieve it due to past discrimination?
My question is, "Why didn't the city of Jackson use its own city attorney to sue Siemens?"
I ask this because my Dad was city attorney for my hometown in Mississippi and as such he handled lawsuits both for and against the city. If Jackson had used their own attorneys they would not have had to cough up 30% in legal fees.
I ask this because my Dad was city attorney for my hometown in Mississippi and as such he handled lawsuits both for and against the city. If Jackson had used their own attorneys they would not have had to cough up 30% in legal fees.
Maybe! The long term effects of systemic racism are pernicious. Sounds like a problem we should be addressing if so, right?
I think you already have minimum standards a bidding contractor has to meet to be eligible. The question is how much above the lowest bidder do you go to take the lowest minority bidder instead? 5% more? No problem. Double? No thanks. But where to draw the line?
Then, do you also incentivize prime contractors to go out and find minority-owned subs? Sounds like a good idea, but tougher to codify how. I'd take a stab at letting them make a claim that there's no qualifying minority subs, subject to approval/appeal/investigation. Should mostly take care of itself.
Did we address this problem with hispanics? The irish? The italians? The chinese? Ok those weren't systemic?
Ok how about the 17ing jews?
Ok how about the 17ing jews?
No, because the racial distribution of elite athletic gifts should not be assumed to equal the distribution of small business owners.
Hispanics and Chinese (and Jews?) are minorities that would be included in incentives for minority-owned businesses.
Last I checked there wasn't a huge push to reduce the societal impact of underemployed Italians and Irish.
Love how cons are always hating on welfare spending and saying we should be doing more to employ minorities, then when we do it's all "wait, not like that".
No, depending on the area. If you're talking about service contracts, then there is a lot of mischief to be made. If you are talking about hard bid contracts, government entities are usually too hesitant to pass up a low bidder, even if they aren't the lowest and best.
That seems to assume a lot. One, who is responsible for the cost of that discrimination? I would say generally it's the people that did the discrimination. Why are unrelated people responsible for discrimination they had nothing to do with? It's even more perverse when you look at a city like Jackson, where the people bearing the burden are also largely minorities. How much burden should minorities who aren't contractors bear to pay extra to make sure contracts go to minorities who are contractors? And it's bad enough when it's just cost. Minorities in Jackson largely don't have access to a reliable source of potable water now. You going to tell them, "yea, you may not have water right now, but some other people that aren't you but have the same skin color got a good deal out of the minority set asides."? How does that make sense?
That could very well be true. But then again why not a local law firm? It's not like we have any shortage of 1-800-ISUE4YOU types here. They are almost one of our biggest industries if you watch enough TV ads. Somebody gotta be makin the Benjamins to afford all that advertising.
Who did they use? I'd agree there's probably firms in Jackson that would have been fine, but you don't exactly want Richard Schwartz handing your $200M lawsuit against a worldwide conglomerate.
The problem is not using out of state attorneys. They certainly could have gotten an equally qualified group of attorneys in state, but certainly attorneys develop very particular niches and it would not be surprising for there to be a group that had already litigated similar cases. The contingency fee is how you know the fix was in. You can litigate very complex cases for a couple of million dollars. WIth $400M in potetnial damages and a $90M contract, you don't give a third of it away, particularly when it is settled.
Agree. What I'm getting at is what was the process used to select this particular law firm? AND why the hell didn't they try to collect damages as well? They left some serious $$ on the table IMHO. There is either some serious incompetency going on here OR some serious graft OR both. Audit. Audit. Audit.
I did. So 17ing what?
And I am all for helping anyone who NEEDS and WANTS help. I'm not for giving anyone **** for free b/c nothing is free.
And my point about hispanics and Chinese are that most of them don't need help. They are some how managing on their own. Or at least they aren't bitching about it daily. Or dems aren't using them daily.
And I am all for helping anyone who NEEDS and WANTS help. I'm not for giving anyone **** for free b/c nothing is free.
And my point about hispanics and Chinese are that most of them don't need help. They are some how managing on their own. Or at least they aren't bitching about it daily. Or dems aren't using them daily.
Hispanics and Chinese are specifically included in the DBE definition. As well as any person who can demonstrate the reason they're disadvantaged. It's worth noting that if you're net worth is much over $1,300,000, you can't be considered disadvantaged.
I didn’t say they weren’t included.
I said we don’t hear them bitching all the time.
And the $1.3 million is logical. I can handle logical solutions.
I said we don’t hear them bitching all the time.
And the $1.3 million is logical. I can handle logical solutions.
So athleticism is a physical gift?
How is it humans can be physically different in many ways across race but not in other ways?
How is it humans can be physically different in many ways across race but not in other ways?
According to Jackson Free press, it looks like they used a local criminal lawyer that was a donor to lubumba's campaign and Lightfoot, a Birmingham firm. The fee probably should have been challenged when the settlement was announced. Not much commercial litigation is done on a contingency fee basis. It happens, but it's not the norm, especially when you're talking about a lawsuit for hundreds of millions of dollars. What kind of company or government entity is going to guarantee they pay tens of millions of dollars if they win just to avoid $1M if they get zeroed? If there was really only a 10% chance of winning, the law firm wouldn't agree to a contingency.
The primary issue with getting qualified people to work for public entities, in my experience, has a lot to do with the competence of the people running the public entity; specifically, the person writing the request for proposal for 3rd party help. From what I deal with regularly, the best rule would be for public entities to pay someone who is a subject matter expert to write requests for proposal that are adequate. I've seen a lot of public $$$ wasted because the RFP was so poorly written that there was no way to get a meaningful result, nor was there a way to measure success, and there was absolutely NOBODY at the public entity who was qualified, or interested, in holding the winning bidder's feet to the fire. Of course the one thing you could count on is the people in at will positions to be swapped out upon the arrival of a newly elected administration and the organization basically starts over from scratch and blames the old guy for the trouble. It's a fantastically depressing set of circumstances once you realize that you, in some small part, subsidize such tragedy.
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I don't think that we enslaved hispanics, irish, italians or chinese for centuries, but my history may be off. To pretend that centuries of slavery did not have an impact that still ripples today is head in the sand. I mean until the Civil Rights Act we weren't even a representative republic with democratically held elections. Our reality did not live up to the marketing material...
Most (not all) of the actual hiring of minority contractors is not done by the state itself but by the general contractor who bid the job WITH the knowledge he would have minority set asides to deal with. Most big contractors have minority contractors that have worked with them for years and are very happy with their position. The thing that decides who gets many of the contracts a lot more than race and quality of work is the ability to "bond" the job.
I doubt the city had much choice. The city of Jackson is constantly broke and a good law firm isn't likely to take on a ton of work for a client that is pretty damn unlikely to pay a legal bill on a lost lawsuit.
The city of Jackson still has something like $75M in annual revenue. There are places to skimp that won't cost you tens of millions of dollars. And even if they inexplicably determined that was the place to cut bills, they could have worked out a better deal. At the very least it was unnecessary to have a law firm other than Lighthouse involved.
From an engineering perspective, the whole thing sounds really dumb.
Why didn't Jackson insist on a contract with milestones? Instead of trying to change out 1/3 of your city's meters, start with one neighborhood of a few hundred houses. Make sure you do it with the subcontractors you plan on using as you scale up.
You'll find most of your bugs in the system at this point. If you have shady subcontractors, it will be easy to track down. If there are software interoperability issues between the meter systems and billing systems, those will become evident. You have to meet the milestone to get to the next level in the contract, which would be to scale it up to several neighborhoods around the city, a few thousand meters. If the city agrees to move on even if the milestones aren't met, they can't come back later and take issue with the fact that it never worked. They would have accepted that fact.
If things are screwed up after a few hundred or few thousand meters, at least you aren't missing out on 1/3 of your water bills. So incredibly dumb.
Why didn't Jackson insist on a contract with milestones? Instead of trying to change out 1/3 of your city's meters, start with one neighborhood of a few hundred houses. Make sure you do it with the subcontractors you plan on using as you scale up.
You'll find most of your bugs in the system at this point. If you have shady subcontractors, it will be easy to track down. If there are software interoperability issues between the meter systems and billing systems, those will become evident. You have to meet the milestone to get to the next level in the contract, which would be to scale it up to several neighborhoods around the city, a few thousand meters. If the city agrees to move on even if the milestones aren't met, they can't come back later and take issue with the fact that it never worked. They would have accepted that fact.
If things are screwed up after a few hundred or few thousand meters, at least you aren't missing out on 1/3 of your water bills. So incredibly dumb.
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