Schadrach

and they always end up bigoted and hateful.

This is at least in part an effect of where the line is to be counted as bigoted or hateful being drawn very, very differently depending on who is on the receiving end.

Put simply, if you want to blame a man or men for something you can freely blame men generically and do so in as aggressive or vitriolic manner as you please and it probably won’t be seen as hateful or bigoted. If you want to blame a woman or women for something you have to be very careful to carve out a narrow slice and be relatively gentle in what you say about them, or it will be treated as bigoted or hateful. It’s a radically different degree of sensitivity.

If you don’t believe me, next time you see someone doing so, gender flip the text and imagine how people would respond.

There is. It just mostly exists in spaces that discuss men’s issues, and those tend to be silenced or ignored broadly. It’s gotten better over the years, at least. Still not great, but better.

…it would be if in your analogy GMail blocks Yahoo because they don’t like the politics of their CEO, Outlook blocks both GMail and Yahoo to create a safe space, and you left Protonmail out of the list entirely because almost everyone else is blocking them for not banning users who email the wrong kind of porn to each other.

It’s not a big deal until you realize the notion that they all talk to each other is mostly a lie and all the big ones block dozens of instances each. Hell, the threads on the larger instances about whether or not Threads and Truth Social should be defederated if they ever enable federation were some of the highest activity topics on Lemmy for a bit. So was people cheering about Burggit shutting down their lemmy server.

SSNs are reused. Someone dies and their number gets reassigned.

Not even that. If you were born before 2014 or so and you’re from somewhere relatively populous theres a pretty good chance there’s more than one living human with your SSN right now. SSN were never meant to be unique, the pairing of SSN and name was meant to be unique but no one really checked for that for most of the history of the program so it really wasn’t either. The combination of SSN, name and age/birthdate should actually be unique though because of how they were assigned even back in the day.

Not even that complicated - SSN are not unique, by design. The combination of SSN and name is supposed to be, but for most of the history of the program no one was actually checking for that so it really isn’t either. Until something like 2014 the first 5 digits of your SSN were basically a code for where you were born and the last 4 were just assigned in order.