If you don't have, or don't want, and/or cannot use a smartphone, you need professional care!

[Igel]

60. Discrimination is in the eye of the perceiver.

A lot of things aren't intentionally discriminatory, they just turn out to have a disparate impact on some groups.

HRC in yesterday's speech talked about the "achievement" gap where a lot of kids don't have access to computers at home. That's not discriminatory. It just is.

Some of what "just is" is due to income, either of the community (yielding insufficient broadband infrastructure build-out) or of the household. Some is poor decision making.

But there's enough research into how low SES versus high SES kids tend to use the hardware that they're given in different ways.

The real problem is that the achievement gap starts early and continues without continued intervention that remediates the job the parents (don't) do, but we see correlation and think it's causation. You can spot the achievement gap by age 5, before the kids learn the alphabet or have any significant tech. However, that's damned hard for self-proclaimed social saviors to fix, nobody but "victims" can be blamed for it, and so we find somebody we can blame and something that "we" can do to fix the problem. If a politician got up and said, "The primary cause of the achievement gap is bad parenting practices and low parent education levels" it would be accurate but that politician wouldn't get elected. So misdirection is a job skill. (It's worth saying that all the previous fixes for the problems have come up seriously short, boosting achievement by a few points at best. Some research shows painting school walls a better color can produce the same results. If we had the engineering fail rate that we have with education and spent a few trillion of dollars on upgrading engineering education and design skills and materials with the same results we got for education it would be considered a huge boondoggle. Instead, we get calls for even more money to be spent on more get-smart-quick schemes.)