One could certainly argue that the income inequality isn’t the only cause, rather the artificially limited housing supply. But, regardless of the cause of the housing crisis there, or potential solutions, I think it provides an example of how inequality can have a negative effect on someone.

I mean, yeah, it does show how wealth inequality can be some part of causing a negative effect in a specific situation. But, the deeper causes are kinda important if you want to use it as an example of how specifically wealth inequality by itself would cause negative effects.

• I mean, it’s also entirely possible to just have a romantic & sexual relationship… without having kids.
• Isn’t “male” and “female” referring to different sides of one (possibly the only, I’m not super well-researched) axis of gender in that scenario? Like, you can both consider gender a spectrum… and want to be on the other side of/in another place on that spectrum. And I don’t think we have common words for anything more specific than splitting it into thirds (ish?) i.e. female, nonbinary, male (or something).
• I think this is a case of popular opinion trailing behind reality. As far as I know, at one point cryptocurrency mining had meaningful negative effects on the environment (or would have had them in the future if it didn’t change), but that has since changed.
• You’re missing another common usage of the term, wherein the individual being gatekept is reading/playing/watching whatever they’re supposed to be fans of but happen to have some side trait that the gatekeeper disagrees with (including such things as “has a different favorite work in the series”)
• Yes, 100% agreed. If such a test wouldn’t be a really powerful lever for any malicious individual or group to wield against people it would be ideal.
• I don’t really have any thoughts on this one.
• That’s not a controversial take, that’s a mundane opinion about your experience of beauty.

I fundamentally question the claim that wealth inequality is bad in and of itself. It doesn’t really harm me that there exist individuals with significantly higher standards of living, or that there exist individuals more capable of effecting large-scale change than me.

Also, it’s not exactly as though any system can somehow remove bad actors and/or human error/foolishness from the equation. But the scenario I described specifically defined them as being beholden to normal rule of law, therefore limiting the effect of maliciousness on their part to what I would consider a reasonable degree

I’m not sure “they might be foolish” is really that much of a downside either—them allocating resources to long-shot ideas is kinda part of the benefit, and if they throw money at some boondoggle like Elon’s hyperloop… oh well, it’s not like that money up and vanished. It’s not exactly as though paying a bunch of people to consider a foolish idea and build prototypes really meaningfully harmed them or society as a whole.

I think a reasonably optimal meal would be at least 10 “Fruits of Evolution” (from “The Fruit of Evolution”) to provide classic Isekai cheat powers, drenched in the Ambrosia of the Greek Gods to grant immortality.

Having individuals (or very small groups) who hold significant power/capital (but are still subject to the rule of law) can be societally useful because they can push forward large-scale, high-cost projects without needing to convince vast numbers of people to care about it.

I vaguely remember reading about some organization that actually fabricated charges of CP against individuals/groups they didn’t like, and then pretend to “lose” their evidence and drop it… once the court of public opinion had destroyed their target.

There was actually an old stigma that being gay was the same thing as being a pedophile.