Flock doesn't do facial recognition.

>or people could just start to realize that [A] is [B] and stop [C] it.

Possible values for A = heroin, alcohol, tobacco, weed, porn, TV… B = addictive, causes cancer, has an effect on brain health, spreads HIV… C = using, consuming, eating, injecting…

Seems that this “people realizing” does not seem to work with other highly addictive chemicals or electronic media, since healing oneself from addiction requires far more than just “realizing” it is bad for you and the society. Perhaps there is a reason why we limit by law the sale of tobacco, drugs, alcohol and other highly addictive substances.

> They argue that SIM card regulation could help “disincentivise” online manipulation, and say their tool can be used to test policy interventions the world over.

Their solution is to deanonymize communication, which you're probably familiar with. That's not a tool for social good, but for government power. We could give government virtually any power, if we assume it will be used only for good.

What's a solution to online manipulation that is actually a social good or cannot be misused? What's a freedom-promoting technology that can replace the disaster that is current social media?

I don't know why people take him so seriously. He said some decent things about software freedom, and the rest of his entire existence seems to be him being deliberately obtuse and generally off-putting. I find it bizarre that there's this strange carve-out here for him, especially considering that he would absolutely loathe 99% of the software that gets discussed here.

> The only system which will work in the US is one in which the ultra wealthy have an incentive to provide funding to the public system, and that seems like you’d need to force them to be on the public system too.

In my state, I pay $15k/year in school taxes, yet I have no children. I pay $1000/year in property taxes to support my city's library, yet I don't have a library card. People are taxed for lots of things they don't actually benefit from. I don't think we would need to force rich people to use the plans. If they want to buy medical services from private doctors, sure we can let them.

The issue then becomes more about allocation of resources (how many doctors are available to be seen on the public system vs. only available to self-pay customers) rather than the issue being about how to collect taxes.

It's a reference to the theory that perhaps covid came from, and accidentally escaped from, a lab.

Joe Public doesn't provide oversight. He's mostly good at generating outrage. Experts provide oversight, and animal research in the US is highly regulated by experts!

When I studied chemistry at university, only a handful of select students were introduced to the nuclear science lab in the basement. It had a lot of spicy isotopes, neutron sources, etc. Even as a chemistry student with free run of the place for years I had no idea it was in the building until the department head pulled a few of us aside.

The reason for the informal secrecy, as it was explained to me, is that every so often someone would find out there was plutonium etc in the basement and have a public freak out, including on occasion other (non-STEM) professors at the same university. These people would try to organize crusades to get it shut down because evil. Intentionally obscuring its existence greatly mitigated this drama. They appreciated us continuing the tradition of keeping it out of sight and out of mind from the general public.

The publicity around this Kodak case was an example of why no one talks about nuclear labs. The public cannot be trusted to engage in a discussion about anything “nuclear” in good faith. There are quite a few areas of science like this.

University towns are exceptions that the rural and suburban parts of these states largely hate. They are the tiny pleasant exception to the whole that is not representative.

Ann Arbor is a nice town. Bloomington sounds like a nice town. The vast majority of Indiana and Michigan are sparsely populated and full of people who distrust anyone not like them and are not interested in broadening their experiences.

"Got tired and decided this is good enough" is literally true - small town midwest America is full of the kind of people who don't want to travel or experience new things because they're content in their house with their hobby and their 6 friends and trying to do something like understand how to ride a bus is terrifying.

This is not a stereotype. I know tons of these people. I got out of the midwest to get away from them.