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People outside of tech have no concept of what the algorithm does and in general take what’s on their feed at face value. How could they not? The news very often runs stories about tweets and Twitter trends as if they represent the real organic sentiments of the citizens.

Americans eat too many calories already. Let us eat some vegetables for a few weeks, it won't kill us.

Small government means not making laws which otherwise interfere in the citizens' ability to make their own choices about how to live. It doesn't have anything to do with the size of the military, whose missions are mostly abroad to protect trade routes anyway.

Putting them in jail prevents them from doing things that the taxpayers don't like: building fires under overpasses, leaving needles and human waste in the streets, harassing passersby, etc. It also puts them in contact with social services, in some cases.

It's not a perfect solution, or even a good one. We can and should develop a more compassionate alternative.

There are no simple solutions here. I do believe the homeless ought to be assigned housing by making California’s Project Room Key permanent and national. If you can prove some connection to the location where you’re sleeping rough, you get first crack at local housing. Otherwise it’s back to where you have that connection — could even be where you were born.

These motels will be slums. There will be prostitutes, and drug dealers, and crime. But it will also be a central location for service outreach without the prerequisites of other places.

>ultimately it is an illegal annexation of public land that belongs to the taxpayers and has other intended uses (even if that use is just greenspace or empty land).

This is exactly how I feel seeing the homeless camps in Austin. Primarily, the first question I had was: what happens when one homeless person wants to spot of another? Neither has a legal right to it; are we not encouraging interpersonal violence by refusing to enforce the property laws that separate us from the state of nature?

>my experience has been that most are not locals, despite what surveys say, because the surveys always rely on volunteered answers about origins, rather than proven identity

Right. Why would anyone tell a volunteer they're from out of town? Seems like the first rule of being homeless: get a story that appeals to people. "Born here and down on my luck" is much more compelling than "Where I came from is worse than this place so I hopped a ride here."

Basically, we can spend all the money in the world and build all the housing that people need, but the personal liberty that this country espouses -- personal liberty I agree with! -- means that no one is obligated to take it. There is already a myriad of excuses I hear in these threads for why the homeless don't go to the shelters, participate in the programs, etc. "They don't allow my dog." "They would make be get sober", etc. Until we accept that there is a significant population of unhoused that prefer it that way, and then decided what we want to do about that, all the little villages and things won't scratch the surface of the problem.

Really? I recall netbooks being pretty bad. Cramped keyboards, short battery life, weak processors... the worst of all worlds, really. What attracts you to them?

This was written by a person, not the editorial board of NYT. Could you please back your claims of antisemitism? That is a serious accusation that is unfortunately overused to apply to anyone who criticizes Israel.

I made no statement about whether anyone's actions were justified, only that they made sense given the state of affairs.

This is a the consequence of having an administration that transparently lied at every turn. Even if they were right, no one would believe them.

>It would be unusable. Porn is legal, gore is legal, hate speech is legal, as is any threat that’s not likely to cause “specific and imminent lawlessness”.

Such is the nature of living in a free society. Certainly there are ways, in even the most basic social media platforms, of un-following / blocking certain posters. And if the content isn't targeted by algorithm, should be fairly easy to avoid content you don't want to see.

Any if not, well, there's always Facebook and Twitter.

My vision doesn’t create a distinction between commercial and personal speech. In fact, it does the opposite, by not privileging commercial speech and giving it a special space on the page. If you want to advertise you wares, do so, but you don’t get to pay to get attention. Get people to follow you because they like what you have to say.

> There are already tons of sites you can move to if you get banned from a platform, so there is no functional difference.

But none of those platforms draw a direct line between the constitutional guarantee of free speech and implementation of that speech. That’s the idea behind the public option: it’s the constitution with teeth, freedom in its purest form, while leaving corporations open to experiment with restrictions as the market demands.