lxwang

If the new media is an inevitable byproduct of the digital era simply existing, which is how things look to me, it still makes sense to follow things back to the root cause. How many examples are there of successful media organizations that don't at some level run the same way as the one you're lambasting? Being owned and funded by a government or a multibillionaire to serve as their propaganda outlet are viable but have their own problems that might or might not be worse.

One reason people refuse vaccination is that they are worried the vaccines are secretly an attempt to sterilize undesirable segments of the population. For example, see what happened with the tetanus vaccine in Kenya in 2014.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tetanus-vaccine-sterilizat...

It surprised me too, and it's unclear what their basis is for saying this.

This WHO page [1] on measles statistics claims a 60% increase for the Americas. Maybe the BBC interpreted a <100% increase as a decrease, or maybe I'm misinterpreting it, since I don't see the raw numbers.

1: https://www.who.int/immunization/newsroom/measles-data-2019/...

Abolishing patents is radical enough to begin with, so why stop there? If everyone had UBI and free healthcare to cover the material costs of living, is it really so implausible that people who were interested in looking for apples that cured something would do so?

That aside, the obvious answer would be to publicly fund this kind of activity that we deem beneficial to society.

Because businesses donate more money to politicians than you do.

If everyone just buys tanks, eventually they'll have no choice but to change the regulations.

The most famous example is the DES S-boxes, where the NSA made a change that nobody else understood - until years later, when it was discovered that they had made the algorithm more secure against cryptanalysis techniques that had just been "discovered", but which had evidently been known to NSA long before.

>blindly support the actions of whichever leader bears your label

No, rather than being the worst, that avoids saying pretty much anything of substance about the political world at all. If the leaders are well-chosen and accurately labeled, you've actually described the best system.

Betteridge's law of headlines: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

And what of it? The internet and cheap worldwide shipping/travel have made it easy to work around a lot of laws whose jurisdiction is limited by geography. A system where you can use gmail, google+, youtube, etc and be subject to Google "law" or use outlook.com, bing, etc and be subject to Microsoft "law" seems like the natural place to go from here. Google is even investing in walking robots and self-driving cars to use for enforcement already :D

Nice theory, but you don't want to marry someone who doesn't behave like a 10 year old, you want to marry the person you love.

If you are seriously worried about that, it's a huge sign you're not committed. Tiny resale value is preferable here.

It's better if everyone in society can agree on the same signal to use. Otherwise it's too hard to verify.

Yeah, if you're lucky enough to never have to teach, pass quals, take classes of your own, etc. In reality, research takes up less than 30% of your average day.