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adamrezichyesterday at 8:14 PM1 replyview on HN

Either you're willfully ignoring the American citizen's right to free movement between States, or you're actually saying that any given black person who moves to Oakland has—regardless of any life circumstances or decisions they've made, simply as a fact of their ethnicity—some arbitrary-percentage chance of ending up homeless, as some immutable localized nth-order structural outcome, regardless of any choices they make.


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roughlyyesterday at 8:25 PM

Oh, I see the confusion - in America, we use the word “free” to mean both “allowed to” and “doesn’t cost money,” which leads to the kinds of odd circumstances where one is “free” to do something, but that thing isn’t “free,” so if they lack the money or resources to do so, they’re not actually able to do it. It’s a confusing part of our language and our system.

Similarly, we’ve got a bunch of cases where the law says X, but actually conforming with the law, or proving what you’re doing is legal, also costs money, and is therefore not “free” either. That one catches a bunch of people.

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