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.

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).

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.

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).

Ironically, what it does in practice is making more people more biased.

There are different degrees of racism. Pointing out that stronger forms of racial discrimination exist doesn't make the milder forms any less disgusting.

The problem is that while hard work is a prerequisite for success, it is by no means a guarantee of one. No matter how hard you work, all your gains can literally be wiped out in an instance by, say, a disease that requires treatment that you don't have the money to pay for.

You don't have to get into function pointers to see why C syntax is messed up - you just need to have any deeply nested constructed type, e.g. array of pointers to arrays.

It's easy, except for all the corner cases (as is usual in C++). See my other comment in this thread.

Yes, with proper discipline, you can absolutely do this in C++, I'm not disputing that. But Rust takes it one step further by enforcing said discipline on you. Escape hatches are still there; but unlike C++ where they (raw pointers & arithmetic, arrays etc) are the default, and you have to consciously force yourself to use smart pointers instead, and know how to use them right, in Rust the defaults are safe, and the "fuck off, I know what I'm doing" mode must be explicitly requested. Needless to say, this generally leads to better code, regardless of how good your programmers are (all humans make mistakes).

Like, say, Iraq? Or someone's fetus?

"Sentience" is kinda like "soul": we can start talking about it meaningfully as soon as someone defines what it actually means. Until then, there's no reason to believe that it's a qualitative rather than quantitative difference, or, for that matter, that it is even a meaningful thing in and of itself, and not just an aggregate of some random and unrelated factors (which, in fact, changes over time as we learn more about ourselves and other species) that we believe distinguishes us from all the other "nonsentient" beings.

The concept of hell itself is rather murky, and different Christian denominations understand it differently. If you take the stereotypical Protestant fire-and-brimstone interpretation, where hell is basically a giant torture chamber, then yeah, your conclusion is spot on. But e.g. in Eastern Orthodoxy, hell is canonically interpreted not as a place, but rather a state of mind that a soul is when it is subjected to the presence of God, and does not love that God, or has otherwise separated itself from him. In other words, God does not do anything special to torment sinners or to make the saints blissful; but the essence of what he is has the corresponding effect on either.

Of course, the glaring logical hole in that explanation is, why exactly is that state eternal and unchangeable after one's death? It would stand to reason that souls would be able to "reconsider" and therefore switch their state at any given moment.