Microsoft patents 'Avoid Ghetto' feature for GPS

First night home from 1HP, and they gave me these directions:
Go north and Biscayne Blvd. (Eugene Robinson Way), and do not stop or turn left until you cross into Broward County. Solid advice.

 

Or my neighborhood.

 

It'd be every bit as accurate and less offensive if they named this feature "avoid newspaper offices"

 

That's not bad.

When I was a teenager, I got a job in NYC. In the good neighborhoods, they had replaced the street signs, with the current green and white ones.

Lesser neighborhoods still had the old yellow & black ones. I got nervous anytime I saw a yellow street sign.

As for MLK Street, it's also pretty accurate, but it depends how long it is.

When I moved to St. Petersburg, my apartment complex was on MLK Jr. St. I was in a fine neighborhood, but when I called my bank to give them my new address, the woman on the other end of the line said, "oh, you moved to the ghetto."

I thought it was pretty funny. I'm sure others might have been offended.

 

I don't understand the connection you're drawing between poverty & crime.

As I understand it, this feature avoids high crime areas, not poor ones.

 

My first day of high school (in the Bronx) our dean told us to never use the bus stop across the street, in front of the public high school. Said we may never be seen again.

Luckily, I took Metro North.

 

Luckily for who? ;D

 

If you're on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, watch out for these guys:

 

You'll have to find Wall Street on you own from now on.

 

The correlation between crime and poverty remains a point of contention, but in urban areas especially the overlap between low income levels and high crime rates on those maps is going to be pretty evident.

www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2010/10/19/property-crime-rates-by-income-level

 

GPS is for losers. And no matter neighborhood I'm in, I'll play this ...

 

Yeah. How would i ever get home with that GPS?