Lottos: are known to give each ticket a fair chance based on a published set of rules. I think if that existed for hiring then many of the issues we see here would be gone. Unfortunately for many jobs it is difficult to give a test which is a fair sole determiner of suitability for work. And if I understand correctly also illegal in some jurisdictions, more or less because it can be abused.
Roads: maintenance does in fact vary by the wealth of the supporting area. Try driving from Nebraska to Kansas on US77 for a stark example. In addition, roads are networks and thus it makes sense to subsidize maintenance of connections to increase overall network value.
Police: some people do indeed advocate a form of this because they say police already relatively over-investigate crimes of minorities. That is, a white person has a higher chance to get away with any one given crime (for some categories)
While road funding may be distributed based on usage data after the fact or density projection before construction, should we throttle traffic flow so that roads wear evenly?
But should a murderer go free? And what of the scenarios where a given minority group collectively _does_ commit more crimes? It may in fact be nurture not nature (although it doesn't really matter) that yields such an outcome yet we would ignore such behavior because it feels overbearing to subject the group to "more" scrutiny relative to other groups that requires less.
I think the point is that it is confusing to entertain such diversity policy when applied outside of a socially hot topic such as the tech labor market. But also a challenge to find a scenario where equality of outcome is objectively desirable and draw parallels.
To give a few examples where quota would not work, lets talk about lotto winner. Why should winners not be on a quota so that winners are proportional to the population demographics? How is it fair that winner demographics don't match the population in race, gender and location?
Or what about having quota on roads in order to create equal road maintenance based on population. You drive through a unpopulated area and suddenly only one car per hour can drive through.
Or say that the police would use a quota system when deciding which crimes to investigate. Would it be fair to base how many murder investigations should be done by cities proportional population to the country? What about police budgets?
It would be nice if we could talk about what other systems that we want quota on and see what commonality there is between those and what distinguish them from the others.