That's the Sinclair Broadcast Group forcing the news orgs they own to read from the same script. They also had "must run" news segments that include conservative commentary. That doesn't mean Russia isn't a threat to democracy world wide, it just means we have a problem with mega corps owning too much media. I don't think that gives the US an excuse to spy on our own citizens however.
We set up a pleroma instance on OpenBSD a while back. It works pretty well. Kind of a pain to get set up due to version mismatches of elixir and Erlang and what not, but it wasn't too painful. I imagine it's a lot easier on a supported distro like Debian. Can't wait to upgrade for the new chat system. Hopefully that goes well on OpenBSD.
Note the .004 overall "Symptomatic Case Fatality Ratio". Quite a few conservative outlets are indicating a true IFR of .26% based on this, instead of the .4 - .6% a lot of recent studies have indicated. Interesting stuff. I think that would indicate we must have had 33000000 cases by 4/29/2020 in the U.S. alone.
I'd argue he's narcissistic and his motives may have both been self-serving, but also not strictly financial. I'd also argue he probably doesn't have the foresight to predict weather or not this would end up being good or bad for him financially. It's all speculation at the end of the day, however. Just gotta watch what he does and draw our own conclusions from there.
Even if they had 30% immunity, that still leaves the majority of the population exposed. I'm sure 30% would be very much preferable (if it's even true), but probably not good enough to allow things like concerts or maybe even sit down restaurants to reopen.
That's super interesting. It's hard to imagine what a legitimately authoritative anti-disinformation campaign would look like. Back when Operation INFEKTION was big, in the 80's iirc, the U.S. Department of State was involved in trying to counter claims of AIDS being of U.S. origin by sending out letters to many news outlets. Mostly the details of these letters were worked out by a group known as the "Active Mea-sures Working Group".
As far as I know, they were basically underfunded and understaffed, but worked hard to try to tease out the truth and track down the origins of disinformation. These days I'm not sure if it would help or hurt to have the likes of the CIA, FBI, DoD, etc running these groups considering peoples lack of trust in them. It's a tough problem for sure.
Use Alpine or something then. I use Alpine as well on a server, OpenBSD on a server, slackware on a server, slackware on my laptop... There's some options. We even use Devuan to host OP's essay, although we'll eventually move to openbsd probably for other reasons.
In terms of package management... why do you need it? I have no problem maintaining everything with slackpkg and sbopkg along with slackbuilds.org. Sometimes it takes a while to find all the requirements for an application and add them to a queue, but once it's set up it's just sbopkg, click on update, upgrade, and you're good. It's pretty much rock solid once I get everything installed and I haven't missed package management much at all. My main gripe is the old packages in 14.2 but -current has a lot newer stuff. I don't mind waiting though.
Slackware doesn't use it, and Patrick Volkerding recently got a Patreon account set up so Slackware 15.0 or 14.3 will hopefully be out soonish with updated packages. I'm writing this on 14.2 and have been running it since it came out with basically no issues. Also have it on a backup server, runs great.
I'd say software doesn't always win out on it's merits, there's almost definitely some social aspects regarding what does and does not get adopted. I do agree the commercial interests probably played the largest role, though. I think beyond the initial knee-jerk one might have towards this it's pretty comprehensive and there's interesting points here that are at least worth exploring.
For me, protecting people from themselves should never be a policy priority. I have struggled with depression, probably still do, but I genuinely don't think the ideal solution to gun related deaths is to take away the right to own a gun. Even if it's effective. We're hitting a point where we are becoming capable of protecting people despite their own wishes due to technological advances, and we're going to have to make some decisions wrt how far we want to take it.
Personally, I'd rather err on the side of freedom than safety. There are alternatives available to us that don't infringe on freedoms so much, such as universal health care and increased treatment options for mental illness, which I think would be very much preferable. I think this argument extends to encryption such that encryption can be used for nefarious ends, just as guns can be used for nefarious ends. There are definitely parallels. How much freedom do we want to trade, how far do we want to take this thing?
There's reviews, seller ratings, and often test results from some EU lab or via store bought tests. It's kinda like amazon and could probably be gamed but it's probably less likely whatever you're buying will be deadly.
You'd need a longer term study to see if the group's recieving it are better off than a control group after x years, assuming that's the specific thing you want out of this study.