As I recall, air travel is safest in terms of fatalities per mile traveled. If you switch that to hours traveled, it's still safer than cars, but not the safest in general. If you switch it to fatalities per trip, it's actually more dangerous than cars. And commercial pilots basically just fly back & forth repeatedly, so they rack up that trip count pretty fast.

The most amusing part is that when those same guys got their own country to run for a short while, the first thing they did was write a bunch of protectionist language regarding slavery into their federal constitution. States rights my ass.

Who cares? The government is in the business of ensuring that its constituents get a reasonable level of service, not in the business of enabling some private companies' business model. If municipal broadband is good enough that most customers flock to it (regardless of any "unfair advantage" it might have), what's the problem? OTOH, if it's fundamentally broken, so long as it's not a protected monopoly, private entities can still compete by offering a better service - just like UPS and FedEx do vs USPS.

Only if you follow the "Austrian School" line of thinking, and then it becomes largely a matter of definitions and values. Even the article you link to admits that: "What is objected to here is not that the free market has flaws, but that the term “market failure” is a persuasive definition (see How to Think Straight, para 5.47), seeming to say more than it really does by improperly applying the emotive word failure.". They recognize the phenomenon but object to the chosen label.

Not that I agree with that article. Another quote: "Market failure, if the term is to mean anything useful, must mean that there are fundamental defects in the nature of human ability to achieve certain goods through voluntary, as opposed to coercive, institutions. With this definition, the case for market failure is synonymous with the case for government intervention.". Economists like Friedman argue against this line of thinking, and even many statists recognize that where market failure exists, state intervention isn't always the solution and may make matters worse.

That's market failure caused by government failure. Why do you think those laws to limit competition were put in place?

I think that government should not try and compete in a functioning market, but they definitely should have the right (and the inclination) to step in when the market fails. Set a reasonable minimum service, e.g. allow muni broadband if there are less than 3 market players having offered a plan with x Mb/s with an allowance of y GB/month for at most €z/month in the last 12 months or whatever. The incumbent telcos then have a choice to join the 21st century, or compete against the municipality.

Also, if local government is using public funds to run fiber, allow other telcos the use of that fiber at cost. Same as many countries forced the incumbent, formerly state owned telcos to open up part of their infra to newcomers on the market.

Phalanx-like systems are set up for fast inbound targets and have excellent radar tracking and accurate (and self correcting) firepower. What's the issue to reprogram these for slower drones? Maybe it's overkill, but the system's already installed.

We have self-driving trains, but somebody needs deal with the inevitable delays and malfunctioning signals at winter and look out the window to check people do not get stuck in the door, etc. The self-driving once are usually in mostly underground metros where each station is manned, or a personel can get to within 5 minutes if the need arrises.

What kind of goldfish? An African one, or a European? Or a demented goldfish living in a bowl of cheap tequila?

If you only used the word "privilege" to describe those people - the guys who can afford to hire super-expensive tutors etc - then I would agree. But when you talk about "white privilege", you aren't just talking about them. You're also talking about middle class and working class families, all the way down to white trailer trash. Those people don't have any privileges per se. They do have an advantage by virtue of being white, yes, but crucially, that advantage is not privilege. It lies solely in the fact that they're treated as human beings (or at least, more so) than blacks. I don't think it's appropriate to describe normal treatment as "privilege" - it's a right (and I don't want to get into the debate of whether it's a "natural" one or not - it's a subjective categorization that is utterly irrelevant here, in any case).

Yes. It's the same type of emotion as beggars often elicit. But beggars aren't trying to explicitly force people to admit that guilt. If they did, I doubt they'd be very successful. Ultimately, people don't like feeling guilty, and they especially don't like it when someone tries to make them feel guilty, regardless of whether it's just or not. So going from that angle is guaranteed to cause a massive pushback, and increase the racial tensions long-term, even if that increase is masked by a decrease in economic disadvantage. It is an approach that guarantees that color-blindness will never happen, even long after the historical wrongs have been righted, because the process of righting those wrongs will be (and is) perceived by many as unjust itself, and they will seek redress in their turn.

I also don't think that guilt is an appropriate emotion to elicit even from a pure fairness perspective. Most "white privileged" people aren't guilty of discrimination, per se (you could argue that they're guilty of unconscious bias, but even in criminal justice, there is generally no guilt if there's no mens rea). What they're rather "guilty" of is the lack of empathy, and the solution is to make people aware of the issues and relate to them - not feel guilty about themselves. Humans are, on average, altruistic creatures, and if you can make them relate to someone's suffering, they will have a strong incentive to help. But telling them that they're guilty of that suffering is not going to get there - if anything, it's far more likely to make them say that suffering isn't there in the first place (as, indeed, you can routinely see being peddled on Fox News and co).

He was being sarcastic you dumbass.

It's not just California, there are quite a few states with similar laws on the books now.

I always wondered; do these apply to federal government jobs that happen to be located in that state?

My suggestion, if you want people to actually listen to what you say and care about it, is to drop the word "privilege". It is inaccurate to begin with - what you're describing is denied rights and freedoms and opportunities. A right is not a privilege; a privilege is something that a person is not automatically entitled to by virtue of being a person, but granted by a higher authority. Those denied rights and opportunities, OTOH, are something that every human being is entitled to. That's why their denial is so egregious.

The only reason why I can see the word "privilege" being so popular is because it elicits emotional guilt. And because of that, you will always get pushback from people who don't like to be guilt-tripped.

No, it is friendly and helpfull. I actively avoid products I see advertisement for, by block ads, I make sure I am more likely to buy product from those advertising on sites that I visit.

Nothing that you've written contradicts GP's point. As blacks are routinely discriminated against, this affects their economic status. Therefore, race-blind programs that are designed to improve economically disadvantaged will automatically translate to helping blacks, so long as they're disadvantaged (but have the side benefit of also helping other disadvantaged groups, regardless of what they are or why they're disadvantaged - now and in the future).