meri_dian

I'm not talking about dating prospects though.

You have it backwards, the "no barriers" mainly came from being wealthy. I'll give a small anecdote: One of my friends is from a very wealthy family. He is a person of color. He was still able to gain admission to an elite boarding school, now works for a prestigious company, is respected by his peers, etc.

Privilege mainly comes from wealth. Of course it is a serious problem in society when certain groups have disproportionate poverty or less wealth, because that indicates some structural cause.

However in the modern day that cause is simply the fact that most people, regardless of skin color, do not move out of their parents' income decile. And when one group is already more economically disenfranchised than other groups, then that economic disenfranchisement will perpetuate itself.

For most people it really doesn't matter, including most people in powerful positions. But we keep telling ourselves it does, unfortunately.

Homelessness, both in San Francisco and elsewhere is not rooted in housing but in drugs and mental illness.

Building more low income housing won't address those root causes or noticeably ameliorate homelessness as a symptom, because most homeless people cannot hold down a job and have 0 income, aside from begging.

There is no easy solution, but allowing the mentally ill to fend for themselves on the streets in the name of freedom is morally naive. Put them in institutions and get them off the streets.

While data security is an issue Facebook must reckon with, it is not the major issue Facebook's existence poses to democracies around the world.

The real issue in my mind is that the platform can be used by bad actors to spread misinformation. It's as if during WWII the Nazi's had the ability to publish editorials in leading newspapers throughout the US.

While this is a feature/bug of the internet in general, the vast scale of Facebook and its near ubiquitous use amongst the general voting public in the US and other democratic nations make it the most potent vector through which a bad actor like Russia could spread propaganda and misinformation.

I'm not sure the recent move to label political advertisements as such will do much to safeguard us from misinformation.

The amount of "bullying and abuse" by the US is grossly overstated.

I think many people, especially in large and proud nations, don't like the idea of being a second class power to the United States. That's certainly what motivates Putin and Xi Jinping. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be the best, of course. I welcome competition.

Unfortunately though this frustration with not being the lone superpower drives people to focus solely on what the US is perceived to have done wrong while ignoring the tremendous amount of good the US has done and continues to do for the global international order. Therefore people develop a very skewed and biased understanding of the world.

Multipolarity means warfare and carnage on a scale much greater than anything we've seen in the period of global peace and stability we've seen since the US has been the superpower.

I see China envy online a lot, especially given our recent political disfunction as people look at the superficial stability of China and want that for their own societies.

Well that would be an inconvenience because I and many others go to work and ride public transport every day. Which is why we don't see TSA checkpoints everywhere; it would be too inconvenient.

People fly infrequently though, and also have a very strong desire to feel safe when flying, so they are for the most part fine with TSA checkpoints. TSA checkpoints are implemented to make people feel safe.

See, it's a balance.

It's funny, hate speech laws are unconstitutional and could not be passed in the US but such laws are commonplace in Europe. Yet people like to mock the US for saying it's the land of the free.

Having to be scanned to get on a plane seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to have to do. I fly often and I'm glad the TSA exists and does what it does. I don't feel like my liberty is being taken away in the slightest.