Tech companies aren't liable for user content on their sites as long as they act as the equivalent of a digital public square. The minute they start selectively editing content they become a "publisher" and can be sued into oblivion for any illegal content they host.
Google search is probably safe but Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter could be argued to be in violation with their policing of conservative content in the past year or so. Social media companies would basically cease to exist without the protections from US communications act 230
I don't recall the Soviet Union creating many new drugs when they were following Lysenkoism and denying genetics for ideological reasons. The result was 50 million people dying in China alone. But I'm sure that was just the evil imperialists fault.
The US adopting universal health care would be a waste of trillions of dollars and arguably the dumbest, most selfish, and most deadly decision in human history when accounting for the much better way those trillions could be spent.
As I stated in another post, their health care is subsidized massively by the US acting as a profit center to fund drug and medical technology development.
The US produces a disproportionate amount of new drugs, other countries mostly create cheaper and easier to make follow on drugs. Get rid of the profit motive and new drug creation grinds to a halt.
No, but having to provide health care to citizens in rural areas is expensive. Many elderly citizens wouldn't be able to travel to large cities to get the health care their taxes paid for. This is an issue that's largely non-existent in europe.
The funding for universal health care would have to come from somewhere, probably higher taxes. So instead of being invested, the money would be stuffed into an inefficient system. There's also the matter of scale, US system would be far larger than any individual Euro country and thus more expensive due to bureaucracy. Also the issue of the US having much lower population density and how to handle that, ie are rural people going to have to drive 5 hours to get the health care their taxes pay for?
Also worth noting that the US is essentially the profit center for the entire world's pharma industry. If that was eliminated investment would be reduced globally, not just the US. US citizens are currently subsidizing European countries public healthcare.
This is why I don't support universal health care. Health care is expensive because of basic supply and demand, everybody needs health care and doctors and drugs are expensive to train/develop. Government regulation can't just magically make a few million nurses and doctors appear, can't make cancer drugs develop themselves. It will only kill investment and innovation in the medical field.
Investing trillions in universal health care would just be wasted money on a shitty system, like trying to make horses faster rather than inventing the car and plane. The solution to affordable healthcare will be a combination of AI for diagnosis and surgery plus cloning and stem cells for organ transplants.
People need to be patient and put things in perspective, 100 years ago the richest person on earth could die from an infected scratch because we didn't have antibiotics. We've come very far in a short period of time.
The only thing that has changed is that people aren't having as many kids and are starting later. Having 5+ kids wasn common 2 generations ago. Older siblings could take care of the younger so parents didn't have to stress so much. If a kid died due to an accident or disease it wasn't so bad, relatively speaking.
Compare that to a 35+ year old couple with 1-2 kids. They have to handle everything and worry because if something happens they don't have another shot.
Helicopter parenting is just a natural reaction in western countries caused by reduced fertility.
People throwing up emotional drivel while doing nothing to refute a point is one the least appealing aspects of hacker news
Please explain to me how humans are immune to natural selection and then go claim your nobel prize for revolutionizing human understanding of genetics.
What I find even stranger is pro-science progressives essentially denying evolution to support their blank slate social policies. We can see that environment can have significant effects on animals in just a few decades, why would humans be immune? Progressives have ironically taken on a near religious ideology that humans are somehow different from other animals and immune to natural selection.
Hundreds of domestic and foreign reporters used to push their agenda. Fun fact, Anderson Cooper interned two years at the CIA and has no formal education in journalism, seems like a drastic change in career path to go from intelligence officer to TV pundit.
This is just manufactured hysteria by the government and MSM to justify further attacks on privacy and regulating content on the internet. The masses will again be fear mongered into giving up their rights lest these shadowy foreign actors brainwash them into committing wrongthink. Just give it time, the goal is to kill anonymity on the internet.
Even if you assume the best case scenario and the government has good intentions, it still means our leaders think the people they represent are too stupid to filter info and form their own opinions.
>Having worked outside the software world, I absolutely do not believe that software people are any smarter, on average, than anyone else
The average CS major has an IQ of around 125[1], meaning the average software engineer is somewhere around the top 5% of the population in terms of intelligence. The average IQ at the top tech companies is probably a standard deviation higher than that. Despite this, the consensus is that the majority of software developers are pretty terrible at what they do.
If you've ever tried to help people learn to code you would realize a good chunk of the population doesn't have what it takes to do anything beyond basic programming. If it was easy more people would do it and salaries would drop.
Tech companies aren't liable for user content on their sites as long as they act as the equivalent of a digital public square. The minute they start selectively editing content they become a "publisher" and can be sued into oblivion for any illegal content they host.
Google search is probably safe but Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter could be argued to be in violation with their policing of conservative content in the past year or so. Social media companies would basically cease to exist without the protections from US communications act 230
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...