Civil asset forfeiture seems to be loved so much on Reddit as some kind of evil boogeyman that's coming for each of us, by corrupt police forces stopping you just when you happen to carry cash around from selling your car, or things like that. It's talked about as if people were getting struck by lighting or bitten by sharks every minute in the US.
But the actual cases of this tool/legal mechanism being used are incredibly rare. The paper linked doesn't even go into any stats on how often this happens. It talks about this in isolation as a legal oddity to be fixed. And, sure, it may be worthy of fixing.
But in the popular understanding (admittedly, a specialized, weird-threats-in-our-country understanding) this remains a topic that, like many other things, has harsh and extreme or unfair sounding impacts on people but is actually extremely rare. But it grabs headlines among a certain class of internet news readers. You're statistically not going to face this in reality in your lifetime.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
And there's evidence to the contrary. If you look at the career choices of women, to pick one contentious social issue at random, they tend to be different than the career choices of men, even in countries with a long history of gender equality.
So if I ask ChatGPT to make me a picture of trash collectors or fishermen, it shouldn't rewrite my query to force x% of them to be women.
Relative to the breadth of human history with little to no gender equality, there is no country with a long history of gender equality. And throughout the history of gradually increasing gender equality in human society, there are numerous examples of men structuring the rules of engagement to restrict access for the women attempting to break in. When the Royal Society commissioned a bust of mathematician Mary Somerville, they still refused to admit her.[0]
If women are biologically ill suited to compete with men in these fields, it seems it would be unnecessary to prevent them from trying, like med schools rigging their exams.[1]
[0]https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2010.004...
[1]https://apnews.com/general-news-1c2a635e9faa44daa1225a804288...
Aside, I think this is it for me, I’m changing my HN password to something I can’t guess or remember. This is one part of tech culture I am just sick of responding to. There is more than enough of it in real life and I will always feel obliged to respond. Especially on HN where so many voices are leaders in the real world, the disappointment of seeing it over and over again is just crushing.
Please…if you won’t alter this attitude, don’t bring it to work. For the sake of the women in this field.