Chinese people are able to leave China and work abroad with no checks from the government.

Except they can't. Chinese people who have passports are free to leave China and work abroad, but the Chinese government decides who gets and who doesn't get a passport, and they can also revoke existing passports at whim to prevent political dissidents or people they otherwise do not like from getting out of the country. They're now rolling out the new social credit system, and there's already evidence that the system is being used for example to restrict people's movement even inside China itself. From a report titled 'The Chinese social credit system: A model for other countries?' by the European University Institute's law department, page 13:

"The specific penalty mechanisms that are already operational aim to enforce the blacklists of persons
who have violated the law. They are implemented and enforced by different government authorities.
The process started with a decision of the Supreme People’s Court on public blacklists of persons who
defied legally binding judgements, but there are now also many further blacklists compiled by other
authorities, for example, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism lists those who have violated transport
rules, such as smoking or carrying prohibited items.100 Subsequently, a degree of centralisation has
taken place. A central website makes the names of the blacklisted persons publicly available. There
is also now a system in place that requires cooperation of authorities in their sanctions (the Joint
Punishment System). This means that a violation of the law can lead to a variety of sanctions; it may
start with a fine, but the perpetrator may subsequently be banned from flying or using high speed
trains. It is also possible that these blacklists have implications on private-law relationships: while
Chinese businesspersons may merely care about their own profits (and therefore be willing to do
business with everyone), the recognition of blacklists by financial institutions can mean that
blacklisted persons may not be able to use the funds on their current accounts in order to purchase a
car or other luxury items."

(emphasis mine)

So, if they're already restricting people's access to trains and planes inside China, do you honestly believe they will not prevent people from flying abroad?

My wife did, and she isn't a communist.

The central government does not care whether your wife is or is not a communist, they only care that she's not a vocal opponent to the Chinese government, or someone in a position to leak Chinese state or technological secrets to outside parties,

I don't know why so many people suddenly think that VPN's are some kind of safety measure.

Because that's the nr. 1 thing they highlight in their marketing. NordVPN especially has been pushing ads and sponsoring channels on Youtube really heavily for the past year, and their ad on Youtube I've seen several times begins with 'Someone's watching, now they're not... NordVPN secures your connection with military grade encryption...' and so on and so forth. Some of the collaborations I've seen them do with Youtube-channels specifically make mention of data leaks and so on. Literally the first thing you see if you google NordVpn is 'NordVPN - Protect your online privacy', followed by 'Make sure there's only one person watching your online activities: you.'

There are only 2 main reasons why people buy these services:

1. Being able to watch geolocked content on streaming sites (probably the most common reason)
2. "Safety/privacy"

Abuse of either/both these angles is a huge problem, but tax cuts do ignite further economic activity.

Yes, but creating economic activity at the cost of driving the country into further and further debt makes absolutely zero sense, because in the long term it's going to lead into widespread problems.

It's a handout if you take wealth from people who've created it and hand it to people who did not.

But the wjhole point of taxes to begin with is to fund services and systems that are not aimed at wealth creation directly, but that allow for wealth creation to take place. Policing, defense, public infrastructure, etc. These are all things that any functioning society requires. The fact that my tax money is used to provide these services, and other services like health care benefits me in multiple ways, because not only do I use these services myself, I benefit immensely from the fact that even people who're poor or unemployed have access to treatment and education lowers crime while also giving the poorer people a chance to lift themselves up from poverty by not gating them out of higher education simply based on the economic conditions that they're born into. Likewise, companies benefit from the fact that they do not have to provide their employees with health insurance etc because that's handled via taxes, and in total overall spending every single existing universal model (whether single payer or a mixture of private insurance and a public option for all) is cheaper (and more covering) than the current american system which is the most expensive on the planet per capita. Moving to the american model would increase costs across the board and lessen access to it, leading to more deaths and generally worse public health, which is why it makes no sense from a purely selfish perspective nor from an economic perspective.

Amazon, etc pay little or no taxes - no working class people, at least. It's a problem that we do not expect to see fixed.

But it's a problem that totally could be fixed. The fact that people are resigned to this state of things is indicative of just how effective the megacorps have been at buying out the political system. As long as basically unlimited corporate money is allowed to pour into politics things are going to keep being broken, but it's not like this has to be the case forever.

Then I invest in a corn shucking apparatus and allow you to operate that instead of do the job manually, increasing production by 70%, now you should get a 70% pay increase? Sorry, bro.

That's not what I said. I simply used the number to showcase just how effectively the benefits of the american economy are accumulating at the top. I would never expect the rising pay to follow the rising efficiency entirely obviously, but one would still expect to to be more than 9 %. Moreover, american consumers are the primary customers of most american companies, so increasing pay is spent on goods and services that stimulate the economy.

False. The US has more debt than any entity in the history of human civilization. That you could breezily ignore the inter-generational theft that our budget has become is a serious red flag about your economic judgment.

I do not ignore it, but this debt has been caused by electing politicians who only focus on tax-cuts. Republicans claim (or at least used to) to be 'fiscally conservative', but if you actually look at historical deficits, it's the republicans that keep driving the deficits up by cutting taxes and not cutting spending, while also waging many massively expensive wars. The money is still there, the budget could be balanced, but it's not, and that's entirely the fault of the current politicians and those who vote for these kinds of politicians.

The US still remains the wealthiest country on the planet. The fact that politicians opt to fund public spending so heavily on debt makes exactly no sense.

These "systems" the rest of the West put in place happened during a decades long military welfare system that guaranteed recipient nations' safety from the red menace, allowing them to spend huge sums of money on elaborate programs.

Military spending is a huge part of US expenses, but the bulk of the american military spending since the soviet union collapsed has been used to wage wars in the middle-east, not 'against the red scare', and even during the cold war there are countries like mine (Finland) and Sweden which are not in NATO and pay for their own defense and we've still managed to enact these systems. Right now in fact, US military spending is costing Europe a lot of money by proxy, because the refugee crisis is the result of years of US foreign policy destabilizing large parts of the middle-east creating a humanitarian catastrophe.

But purely on point of principle: the US is under no obligation to provide for the defense of other countries. Were I american, I'd much rather desire american tax-money to be spent on americans.

Russian oligarchs are a Russia problem

Sure they are, and I was not implying otherwise. But the point was that I don't believe americans want their society to keep developing into the same direction as Russia by maintaining a political system that increasingly favors the rich at the cost of both the middle-class and working class.

On a couple of these he at least shook the board.

Yes, but not in a good sense. Trump's policies on these issues are systematically failures that have done nothing but weaken the US position on the global stage.

The only good thing about Trump (so far) is that he has not started any new wars, but I would not put it past him to do so in the future.

I disagree with a legion of Trump's policies

If you're genuinely worried about the deficit and rising levels of debt and the general stability of the american economy in the long run, then voting for Trump and people like him is the worst possible option, because he's done nothing but kept making the problem worse.

The deficit is hardly given away to the the rich - there's no handouts to them

The deficit is caused by the government not collecting as much in taxes as it spends money. Trump cut the taxes while not cutting spending, making the deficit worse. The bulk of the cuts targeted the richest Americans. So the rich now make even more money, while the state collects even less taxes and spends more money that it doesn't have so it has to take more debt.

This focus on 'handouts' in american economic discussion has always baffled me as a European leftist. Why is it that the government using money to make sure American citizens have their basic needs met and do not die in the streets or from preventable illnesses (something no-one living in a first world civilized country should have to face) is deemed a 'handout' or 'socialism', while at the same time the government allowing some of the richest people and corporations on the planet to pay next to no taxes is deemed A-OK?

I mean hell, worker productivity has gone up by like 70 % since the 70s, while wages have gone up only 9 %. The american (and in the larger picture Western) worker in general is more productive than ever thanks to technological advancements, but they're not getting compensated for that efficiency. Instead, CEO compensation and bonuses are through the roof, while at the same time the US still remains the only first world country where medical bankruptcies are still a major thing because you guys lack universal health care, something which has been standard in most of the West for half a century now. You're also the only first world country that offers no mandatory paid leave and no paid maternal leave. And what's the argument used against these systems? 'We can't afford them".

Yes, yes you can. You have more money than any country in the history of human civilization. This notion that you couldn't put in place systems that the rest of the West already has in place to improve the lives of everyday americans without crashing the economy is entirely bullshit, and is manufactured by the same group of greedy asshats who've been spouting BS about 'trickle down economics' for decades now.

Weirdly enough, Trump is a logical conclusion of this chain of behavior: people, everyday people, workers, the backbone of any economy, instinctively understand that they're being fed lies and bullshit by the status quo. There's an understanding that politicians by an large serve not their voters, but their donors, most of whom belong to the richest few % of the economy. Thus when presented with a choice of 'more of the same old BS' (Hillary) and something entirely new and radical (Trump), it makes a lot of sense to me that people would gravitate towards Trump. Remember, he promised to deliver universal health care to americans, among a number of things. Trump's rhetoric during his campaign was waaay to the left of the republican baseline: he even talked about taxing the rich more,

Now has he actually delivered on any of his grand promises? Obviously not, because he's a semi-demented reality tv-star and a conman who knows how to sell ideas to people and take his audience, but he doesn't have any principles that he wouldn't sell to the highest bidder, and he's so incompetent of a leader he's managed to bankrupt casinos of all things, which is pretty damn hard to do when you're allowed to run games where the odds are rigged. But the point is that Donald is what happens when you have a system in place that churns out immense amounts of wealth and funnels the bulk of it to the wealthiest fraction in their mansions, while the workers' situation is stagnant or declining, and the middle-class is shrinking from both sides.

If this development keeps going, you'll end up in a situation where you'll have high amount of extremely wealthy people, and a huge amount of extremely poor people. There are already plenty of such countries on the planet right now: most of the gulf-states being run by and for oil-sheikhs building entire cities on the desert sands with effectively slave labor, and Russia for example, where the bulk of the populace lives in continuously worsening conditions while Putin and his cadre of oligarchs live in opulence and totally above and beyond any laws.

I personally do not believe this is the direction most Americans, regardless of their party affiliation, want the country to head to, but it's the way you're currently headed to. I hope to see that course changed in the years and decades to come because even though I'm on a different continent I know enough Americans that I care about the society they live in and the immense benefits that american innovations and scientific minds bring to everyone on the planet, but for that to happen you need leaders who're actually competent and care about these issues and not drooling idiots who waste time altering weather maps with sharpies and talking about nuking tornadoes.

Certainly people in the US use guns successfully to defend themselves.

However, at the same time the amount and homicides and mass shootings in the US is higher than the average in the western world. In the case of mass shootings, the US is in a class of its own.

If a highly armed populace would be something that'd be effective at stopping (mass) shootings, the US would be at the bottom of the list for these incidents, but it's not, it's at the top. This is why no other western state is currently moving towards the US model of gun laws, because the data is pretty clear that transitioning to such a model would make people overall less safe and more vulnerable to violence.

Personally what I find interesting as an outsider about this debate is that the rate of mass shootings is much higher than the rate of terrorism incidents. That is, these incidents claim much more american lives than terrorism currently does domestically, yet law enforcement and politicians seem not to act at all despite repeated incidents, many of them targeting and claiming the lives of children. Now it's also true that as a cause of death, in the larger picture, death by mass shooting is still an extremely unlikely event even in the US, but so is death by acts of terror. And somehow I'm certain that if instead of white mentally deranged loners these incidents were done by middle-easterners who'd be storming schools yelling allahu akbar we'd be seeing much more resources being poured into preventive measures.

Guns themselves are just one part of the equation obviously. The US is also the only western country that currently lacks universal health care which also means access to mental health care is much more limited which also plays a major part, as does the fact that unlike many other western states, a doctor's visit is not required for a gun permit.

It's a complicated issue, and has much more nuance than simply the amount of guns around. Most gun owners in the US are responsible and never hurt anyone. The question that americans need to answer is how to improve the system so that the mentally unstable individuals have less access to weapons.

So while they didn't hold a gun to the banks head they made any bank that didn't throw out loans to anybody with a pulse non competitive as their competitors could just dump the loans on Freddie/Fannie

As I said initially, deregulation/lack of regulation is the root cause of the problem, so we're in agreement about this. It's still however extreme short-sighted from the banks to start shoveling these loans up without realizing the systemic risk they're creating, and extremely careless from the credit-rating agencies to continue to stamp these loans and the securities backed by them with AAA ratings. It can be reasonably argued that had the credit rating system worked as intended and given these products the poor grade that they should have gotten, the bubble would have never formed or become so massive.

If your competitor is part-taking in an extremely high-risk bubble, 'being competitive' does not mean that the rational thing to do is to jump in. The banks failed on this, and they failed hard.

True, it should have never been possible to begin with to give out such loans, but just because it's possible doesn't mean it's financially smart to do so.

The government said that lenders had to lend in areas where the loan would most likely be bad. A distinction without a difference.

But that's still not what your linked response claimed: Basically Clinton-era deregulation of banks changed the definition of a sub-prime loan which allowed the banks to do this, which lead to many banks starting to do it and then others following (out of greed) because they did not want to be left out. This deregulation itself is obviously bad, but it doesn't 'force' the banks to give out shitty loans, it just makes it possible.

So it's still in line with what I said: with proper regulation and oversight this could have been avoided, but neither clinton nor bush seemed to care. That however doesn't take the blame off the banks for starting to shill out these new sub-prime loans.

They couldn't send them to jail for the "housing bubble" because it was have shined a light on the inconvenient truth that the bubble was CAUSED by congress forcing banks to give out loans to those with shit credit that had zero chance of paying it back or "they be raciss yo"

I'm not american, nor an economist so I don't claim to be an expert on the subprime crisis, but based on what I know of the circumstances there's nothing that the congress did that forced the banks to do anything. Quoting the wiki:

The following is excerpted (with some modifications) from former U.S. President George W. Bush's Address to the Nation on September 24, 2008:[2] Other additions are sourced later in the article or in the main article.

The problems we are witnessing today developed over a long period of time. For more than a decade, a massive amount of money flowed into the United States from investors abroad. This large influx of money to U.S. banks and financial institutions — along with low interest rates — made it easier for Americans to get credit. Easy credit — combined with the faulty assumption that home values would continue to rise — led to excesses and bad decisions.

Many mortgage lenders approved loans for borrowers without carefully examining their ability to pay. Many borrowers took out loans larger than they could afford, assuming that they could sell or refinance their homes at a higher price later on. Both individuals and financial institutions increased their debt levels relative to historical norms during the past decade significantly.

Optimism about housing values also led to a boom in home construction. Eventually the number of new houses exceeded the number of people willing to buy them. And with supply exceeding demand, housing prices fell. And this created a problem: Borrowers with adjustable rate mortgages (i.e., those with initially low rates that later rise) who had been planning to sell or refinance their homes before the adjustments occurred were unable to refinance. As a result, many mortgage holders began to default as the adjustments began.

These widespread defaults (and related foreclosures) had effects far beyond the housing market. Home loans are often packaged together, and converted into financial products called "mortgage-backed securities". These securities were sold to investors around the world. Many investors assumed these securities were trustworthy, and asked few questions about their actual value.

Credit rating agencies gave them high-grade, safe ratings. Two of the leading sellers of mortgage-backed securities were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put the financial system at risk.

The decline in the housing market set off a domino effect across the U.S. economy. When home values declined and adjustable rate mortgage payment amounts increased, borrowers defaulted on their mortgages. Investors globally holding mortgage-backed securities (including many of the banks that originated them and traded them among themselves) began to incur serious losses. Before long, these securities became so unreliable that they were not being bought or sold.

Investment banks such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers found themselves saddled with large amounts of assets they could not sell. They ran out of the money needed to meet their immediate obligations and faced imminent collapse. Other banks found themselves in severe financial trouble. These banks began holding on to their money, and lending dried up, and the gears of the American financial system began grinding to a halt.

It can certainly be reasonably argued that the US government is partially to blame but not in the sense that you suggest. The government could have acted earlier and put in place laws and regulations that would have prevented banks from giving out such high-risk loans. At the very least the SEC should have looked into the behavior of the credit rating agencies, which were stamping these garbage-loans with AAA ratings based on faulty reasoning and unsound logic for their own benefit.

So could the crisis have been prevented if the government and its regulatory agencies were more vigilant? Yes, absolutely. Is it fair to say that 'congress forced the banks to give out loans for people without the ability to pay?'. No, it's not. That was a decision taken by the banks themselves out of greed and a failure to properly asses the risks involved and see the bubble forming.

It's striking to me that the same people who oppose the US tariff's meant to help the trade imbalance hurting the US are willing to start a hot war where hundreds of thousands (potentially millions) would die over independence for a Chinese territory that has never been independent.

Indeed. People don't realize the strategic importance of Hong Kong to China: the Hong Kong stock exchange is the 3rd largest in Asia and the 2nd largest in China, and unlike other Chinese stock exchanges it's completely open to foreign capital and it lists many of their largest public companies like Tencent It's the way for foreign investment into China. Hong Kong is one of the major economic hubs in the world. HK alone represents like ~4-5 % of the entire Chinese economy, There's simply no way they will let that important of an economic engine go free of their control.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love for Hong Kong to become independent and be free. I'd also love for world peace to exist and for everyone to have a pony. I'm also an adult who realizes the world is a pretty cruel place and stamping my feet about for virtue points won't change that fact one bit. Unfortunately there's nothing we can do about it.

Also agreed. Though the one good thing about the economic importance of the city is that China absolutely does not want it to burn and for the protests to turn violent because the economic impact of that would be massive. At the same time however, this issue is far too important for China domestically that they'll ever cave to any amount of external pressure here: if the government were to allow itself to be swayed by foreign powers here, the precedent this would set for other existing separatist movements within China would be massive. Hong Kong becoming independent would plunge China into massive turmoil, potentially even a civil war,

This is why Beijing is not letting Carrie Lam to resign even though she just privately admitted she'd do so 'if she could'. They understand that if they start to yield to any demands now, the situation will just escalate. So their plan is simply to wait the protests out: the Chinese state-controlled media and propaganda machine has made sure that the HK protesters have no support in mainland China, so they can just play the long-game here and focus on protecting the city's infrastructure It's a safe bet that Chinese intelligence agencies have people inside the protest movement giving them information about any planned developments ahead of time, so they can't really be caught by surprise.

It might take months, hell it might take years, but eventually China will solidify its hold on HK. They waited a hundred years to get it back from the Brits. A few years more is not really a problem for them.

This is how the climate-blame game works globally:

People in the West: B-b-b-but China and India are emitting so much more, why should we do anything when they're not doing enough!
People in the East: B-b-but The US and EU are consuming and emitting so much more per person than we are and the US is doing fuck all to curtail their emissions, why should we be forced to limit our emissions?!?

And thus no-one is to be blamed for anything, and nobody does a god damn thing.

The same is true on an individual level:
People not eating meat or eating very little of it: We should tax-meat consumption more heavily, but don't touch air travel cause I like to fly around!
People eating meat: Stay off my bacon, we definitely should tax flying more though!
etc.

Like with so many things, it's always the other guy. Fact is the blame is shared. Yes, the developing countries and places like China have grown their emissions rapidly, but that's in large part because manufacturing has exploded driven by demand for cheap products from the west. Likewise, the west consumes a lot more than the east and developing countries, but that consumption is the cornerstone of the rapid rise of the Chinese economy.

It's all interlinked. If we all engage in this neverending Mexican standoff where nobody is willing to figure out global solutions, nothing will get done and the situation will keep worsening and worsening.

We have the technological skills to ditch fossil fuels in energy production. In fact China is doing this already because their dependency on coal is causing them to have a massive pollution problem and they also know coal is not a good solution in the long-term, which is why they're building a massive amount of nuclear power plants as well as renewable energy. It's obviously going to take some time to redo the energy grid of close to 1,5 billion people, but they're working on it. Meanwhile here in the EU, the cap and trade system after some changes is finally starting to show some effects: coal is becoming less and less competitive because of its emissions and many countries are slowly facing it out in favor of natural gas (not perfect, but a lot better), renewables, and nuclear.

The fundamental problem is that this is all just seen as an expense instead of as an economic opportunity: the green/cleantech industry is already pretty large, and it's only going to keep growing, whereas the oil business is already starting to be less and less lucrative and is losing money. The thing to realize is, majority of the opposition to climate action has been coming from the oil lobby. There are entire economies in the middle east that are running on nothing but oil that have worked hard to keep feeding misinformation to the public because they need to be able to keep selling their product. The climate 'controversy' is directly traceable to pseudo-scientific 'think tanks' funded by oil moguls that have been obfuscating the issue for the past 3-4 decades while the actual science on the matter has been pretty clear for a long time.

It remains, as ever, an axiom of conventional wisdom that the use of propaganda as a means of social and ideological control is distinctive of totalitarian regimes. Yet the most minimal exercise of common sense would suggest a different view: that propaganda is likely to play at least as important a part in democratic societies (where the existing distribution of power and privilege is vulnerable to quite limited changes in popular opinion) as in authoritarian societies (where it is not). It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.

-Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty

Because people are lazy and companies like to cut corners to cut costs.

It's not like people don't know how to securely store passwords, or that you should never have the password for the admin to be 'admin' (which is how the Panama papers got 'hacked' a couple years back: one of their subsidiary companies somewhere in south america had literally never changed their password for the admin for a system that was accessible online and contained millions upon millions of private documents), it's that people will take the easy route quite often. Company says: 'do X and do it fast', and some underpaid guy who doesn't actually give a flying fuck about the client or the implementation 'cause he's just doing it to pay his bills does it the fastest way he can think of. Then, instead of reviewing the implemented solution, his manager who also doesn't give a flying fuck about the actual implementation, 'cause he's under strict time constraints to deliver results lest his bonus is in danger, doesn't want to waste time to actually review the solution but merely asks 'is it done?' and then takes it to his superiors. Those guys are usually high enough that they don't even understand anything about actual coding and will just go 'great work guys, send out the invoices and rake in the cash!"

Bottom line is this: companies care about profit, and profit only. Doing things securely and properly costs time and money which eats profits, so security and stability are often sacrificed for speed, and this is not just limited to the software industry.

It's not that they don't know, it's that they do not care.

I imagine the cost of this cure is probably nothing compared to the ongoing costs of containing these outbreaks.

Exactly. This is the thing the global community needs to realize. I work in health care on the logistical side in Finland, software related but I'm high enough in the command-chain that I've been in a few meetings with epidemiologists where we go through and plan pandemic readiness and procedures.

When the current ebola outbreak started a few years back, we got a single suspected case of a Finnish backpacker tourist coming in from africa from one of the neighboring countries to the outbreak, with symptoms that might be early signs of ebola. We sent out a team to meet the guy at the airport and take him into quarantine. The docs in charge had to make a decision as to whether or not all the other people in the flight need to be quarantined as well while the bloodwork is done. The dude was interviewed as soon as he landed before the rest of the plane was let go, and he had not been in the infected areas nor involved with any persons that had the infection, and it's not transmitted via air, so they decided against it. Turns out they were right, it came back as some sort of other viral infection and not ebola, and he was released from care next week.

With flights to and from the third world being so numerous, all it takes is one dude boarding a plane somewhere prior to developing symptoms and landing in a major city to create a massive emergency. Ebola is actually not even the worst kind, because untreated it tends to incapacitate/kill people so fast that it doesn't spread very rapidly, thanks to a large part for it not being airborne. Most infections in Africa occur when relatives and family members touch the infected sick person or handle their corpse after death. With airborne pathogens, the spread can happen very rapidly, and containment of all exposed individuals can be near impossible unless the entire plane is quarantined upon landing.

The epidemiologists are by their nature paranoid about this stuff, which is fine, it's their job to be so. And they keep reminding us that we're in fact statistically overdue for a global pandemic, the last major one really being the Spanish flu in 1918 which killed an estimated 75 million people globally. The global medical/scientific community coming together and working overtime to fast-track vaccines and other treatments for new emerging outbreaks is absolutely critical, and should be participated in by all developing countries, because it's the most effective (both in terms of monetary cost and lives lost) way to destroy these outbreaks before they spread all over the globe.

The faster the top-level authorities of all continents communicate, co-ordinate and converge on new outbreaks, the safer we all are. That's why the work the WHO is doing is so extremely valuable.

I suspect the reason the Indian government is reluctant to give out numbers of those afflicted by the water shortage is that they're keenly aware many of them are going to die. Chennai is pretty huge, with a population of 4,6 million people and according to Wikipedia 'bout 29 % of those people are living in slums. That's about 1,3 million people living in abject poverty. Let's do some rough math here. The temperatures in Chennai routinely exceed 30 Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) during summer. At those temperatures people need at least 2 liters (half a gallon) of water a day, likely more, but let's go with that for now.

2 * 1,3 million = 2,6 million liters (or 680 000 gallons) a day just for the poorest in the city. Google tells me that the capacity of water tanker ranges from 20 000 L to 40 000 L (5500 to 11 600 gallons). Let's be generous here and go with the upper limit of 40 000 L. That's 65 tankers each and every day just to meet the bare minimum for the poorest in the city. The actual number of trucks needed to supply the whole city is 3-4 times that, probably more seeing as many of the trucks are likely smaller, and this is not even accounting for any of the industrial or agricultural operations that also need water to function, so in actuality the need is much, much higher.

When you factor in the chaos going on in Indian cities of this size daily with traffic, the logistical puzzle that needs to be solved here to avoid mass deaths due to dehydration is massive. The Indian army may be able to provide the basic logistics needed for the supply chain and distribution, but I have no idea how far the water needs to be hauled from. Every mile increases the costs, and I have no idea how much money the Indian government is able or willing to allocate to the project.

As the climate heats up, these kinds of situations are going to become more and more common, especially closer to the equator. The old saying goes that any society is 2 meals and 24 hours away from anarchy, but with water, the fuse is even shorter.

Woops, typo:

member of a religion or a political ideology as a sub-human or a criminal

Should say member of a religion or an ethnicity. Political groups are not protected, and that's fine.

'Muslim' is often used here interchangeably with terms like 'arab' and 'middle-eastern' to signify the entire ethnic group(s) which is why statements like 'all muslims should be [insert act of violence here or removal of rights]' is considered a breach of the ethnic incitement law even though it's not an ethnic group, and I think that's fine. Critiquing religions, religious institutions and theocrats should be fully allowed, but I do not think openly calling for violence against any single religious group or an ethnic group should be allowed, which is basically what the far-right is trying to do by blaming the entire group for the act of a single individual.

Someone's subjective offense is a terrible reason to restrict the free speech rights.

Agreed in most cases. However you should also not that libel and slander are laws in most countries. I agree 100 % that someone simply being offended by an opinion is not in and of itself enough of a reason to prosecute someone, but if someone's spreading false information about someone else that offends them and their reputation, that's a different thing.

They're not enforcing reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions, they're enforcing blanket bans. Some insults are illegal, even against the long-dead if they're a religious figure, like the recent case about how you can't call Mohammed a pedophile for fucking 9 year olds

I agree that criticism of religions should be always allowed. However here's an interesting tidbit: here in Finland there are 2 separate laws (in addition to universal things like libel and slander) limiting freedom of speech. One of them is for 'guaranteeing religious peace' (this is the law that was used here years ago to fine a far-right politician for calling Mohammed a pedophile) and the other is 'incitement against a racial or ethnic group' law (this is the law basically preventing libel and slander against entire groups of people based on their ethnicity).

As a liberal and a proponent of free speech, I'm against the first one and okay with the second one. Why? Because as I said I believe that religions and political ideologies should not have any extra protection under the law and should be exposed to any and all criticism. However, that doesn't mean people should be free to essentially label every member of a religion or a political ideology as a sub-human or a criminal, because that has real-life implications that leads to people who believe such claims acting and often becoming violent. I know an Iranian atheist who lives here and speaks nearly fluently Finnish, has no intention of going back to Iran. After the only terrorist attack this country's ever had in the summer of 2017 where a Moroccan islamist whose asylum application got rejected went on knife attack spree and killed 2, social media was flooded with cries blaming all muslims for this stuff, despite the fact that the vast majority of muslims living in Finland do so peacefully and are not in fact islamists.

As a consequence of all of this vitriol, many people got very angry and a few days later, my Iranian friend got attacked on the street by a couple of bald-headed neonazis wannabes simply because he looks middle eastern. The fact that he dresses like a westerner, is not a muslim and doesn't even have a beard (in fact he looks way more like a Californian skater that a muslim) did not matter. All that mattered was that these dimwits so a middle-eastern guy and went 'that's one of THEM, get him!" Luckily he did not get seriously hurt, but the perpetrators were never caught. Now I oppose islamists every bit as much as other theocrats and totalitarian assholes, but here's a fact; there's no law against calling all islamists abhorrent assholes and scum. 'Islamist' is neither a race nor a religion, so it's open to criticism, which I've doled out in public and on social media without ever facing any problems with the law. Now I'll grant that ideally neither of these laws would be in the books, however the people and political instances who're campaigning for the reversal of the ethnic incitement laws are people on the far-right, who're doing so precisely because they'd like to be able to amp up hatred against ethnic groups in their political advertising, which I do not see as a good thing, having seen first hand what these kinds of comments can actually cause, even if only a small minority of people are stupid enough to actually fall for such rhetoric.

However the 'extra' protection of religions from criticism is a serious problem with out laws and one that I hope we will fix, but it is to be noted that this law is in the books because of the Finnish Lutheran church, the main religion here in Finland that used to use said law way back in the days (up until the 1950s in fact) to prosecute atheists and other 'anti-christian values' in works of art for example, which is why it's colloquially known as the 'blasphemy law'. Luckily the enforcement of said law is much laxer these days, and only a handful of sentences have been given during the 2000s, but even so as an opponent of said law I find it important to underline that the biggest group in favor of keeping the law is not the muslims, but the hardcore Christians. Luckily the church membership is falling rapidly year (it's now just shy of 70 %), by year and with it the power and influence of the church, so in a decade or 2 the overturning this law might become politically feasible, and I'll be at the forefront of that push when the time comes as an atheist and a secular liberal.