As a parent: happiness is about expectations. The exhuberance of youth can carry them as long as we aren’t preparing them for the halcyon, easy days of the 1990s. Life will be hard, it always has been, but there can still be fun and rewarding experiences. They need to know resilience, independence, and be quick on their feet both mentally and physically.

There are many Great Filters, but this one is mine (ours).

Sure, but whether you’re talking about military might or economic might, more people is more leverage. That was my point.

This “too dangerous to exist” argument is seemingly more true for nuclear technology, but the world recognized the threat and came together to manage it.

I will grant you that database and ability to search it lends itself easily to popular oppression, but it still requires thinking, breathing humans to do the oppressing.

Most technology is not dangerous without psychopaths in power, and damn near everything is dangerous with psychopaths in power.

I came here to make this comment less cogently. You have it exactly.

Now, does it violate US law and multiple Executive Orders to search the database to get dirt on US Citizens and use it against their election campaign? Yes. Yes it does. But this administration thinks laws are for sissies.

I think the argument to make space for them is more practical than compassionate. WTF are we going to do if we just refuse to speak to or have any dealings with 1/3 of the working age population. Are we relocating all Trump voters South of Virginia and splitting the Union here?

Setting aside our own authoritarian problems for a second, if you want to have a wealthy country that can oppose authoritarian regimes (like China and Russia), you need all 350 million of us. (And you need Europe, India, and democratic Asia on board, perhaps even some middle eastern countries, all people you may have philosophical differences with that you have to learn to work with).

The US has needed rank choice voting since Nixon at least.

We can’t hold any of them accountable without remaking the Supreme Court.

I don’t see why we have to contrast the US and China so that one is a good guy and one is a bad guy. Has the US exploited the rest of the world since WWII for our own financial interests? Yes. Do we have an increasingly authoritarian government seeking to eventually crush internal dissent? Yes.

None of that makes China good.

If you don’t want to talk about Tiananmen Square, talk about China forcefully relocated migrant workers ahead of the Olympics in 2008. Talk about China sending Uyghurs to reeducation camps and forcefully sterilizing some of them. Talk about how China forced women to abandon/ abort babies for 30 years throughout vast swaths of their country. Talk about how people residing in China can’t actually talk about any of these things, to the point where citizens of Hong Kong fought back with violent protests and many fled to resist their encroaching authoritarian hand.

Did China raise more than a billion people out of brutal poverty in a single generation, and was it one of the most impressive and important developments of the last century? Yes, absolutely. Is an authoritarian technocracy better able to deal with the issues facing humanity in the near future like climate change? Potentially.

That doesn’t mean China’s citizens enjoy civil liberties.