Honestly I think people like you would be best served by a postbacc-and-up-only program--where your students are there to get their research experience & you aren't asked to do any more teaching than what's needed to get them settled into the lab group doing something useful. (I feel that there is nothing wrong with this kind of deal...as long as it's entirely transparent from day 0.)

Bots, mostly, which is very likely half of why Twitter's nuked the followers, and the other half is because they don't want him to see the number drop to just the bots. After all, wasn't the fact that most of their accounts were bots or pretty dead what sunk Twitter's ability to sell itself a while back?

On that note, it looks like Twitter's stock is doing hilariously. Hasn't crashed, but it's dropped about an average of a dollar a day since 1/6. Facebook's stock has dropped nearly $20, though it's had a bounce...but it could be just a dead cat bounce. I don't think their stockholders are going to be happy with their c-suite at the next meeting, as regardless of how you feel about what happened on 1/6...they kind of chose the worst possible way to handle it. (I can't say how it's hitting Amazon as Amazon has been dropping like a stone since 12/29; it's lost $200 since then, with what's likely a dead cat bounce that peaked 1/13.)

It's also how a lot of the people who are pushing the idea are selling it, put more honestly. One of the great maxims about free stuff is that it tends to be worth what you paid for it--unless it's being done to get your goodwill and/or sell you on a product, the person who is paying for it doesn't have much incentive to care about the quality, and often has incentive to care about getting as much as possible as cheaply as possible. Which, in the case of free medical, includes being very cheap about paying labor...to the point where many may go elsewhere or switch careers.

I am not proposing that. I am saying, flat out, that what you are proposing requires heavy-duty magical thinking in anything short of a stable post-scarcity economy, and it may also require that the system for the distribution of goods be such that there is simply no way to block anybody from obtaining the means of survival & it would be entirely unacceptable to try to do so.

Cancel culture exists, and is tolerated. We're not going to be to where we actually have the resources necessary for a very long time, nor the sort of culture needed for this to not end badly.

We aren't in a stable, permanent post-scarcity economy. We need jobs, especially because jobs have psychological benefits that being handed a check by the state does not provide--such as some confidence that you won't find yourself starving because you offended your political masters--and the general realities of the fact that money still does not grow on trees.

Except this is being done by government fiat. You yourself may work in the warehouse or the lab or maybe even the bakery--your employer can still be a large office-based employer in the eyes of the government, because of how they may define that.

And speaking of bakeries, many of those jobs which can't be done remotely will still be at risk of going away even if they're not judged to be at a large office-based employer, simply because if your place of work is kept afloat by things like the office lunch rush and those are now gone...

Besides, if it really won't have that significant an impact? Then the mandate is basically going to be screwing over the commoners in order to let the rulers make a public display out of how morally superior they are.

You've not been watching the business news have you? Your employer is not the one making money forcing you to drag your ass into the office when it's not necessary--most of that office space is rented, and even when it's not it can be quite a drag on the books. The pandemic has finally gotten upper management to listen to their accountants who have been flat-out saying that office space is hella expensive--and we can expect more pandemics because currently the groups in power in the West won't accept that we have hit a point where we have to force global adoption of basic sanitation. (Just pushing for a global end to wet markets on the grounds of health and humane treatment of animals would do a massive amount here, and the people who will benefit most will be those whose food supply becomes safer to consume.)

So Work From Home and telework are probably going to be permanent, between the economics of office space costs & the very real risk/expectation that there will be more lockdowns. At least if we're already shifted to WFM/telework, it's possible that there will be less economic harm...

Generally, when the state has done well in regulating businesses, it's done so by listening to those with actual and extensive personal experience with the practicalities of the work environment. There's OSHA regs that require electricians to use metal ladders, which is all well and good right up until that wooden ladder is safety equipment as you're having to work on a live system.

Requiring they give employees the option of telework where feasible would not be bad, but they do have a point that small improvements in air quality in exchange for significant impacts on the ability of the lower-income workers to survive is not a desirable exchange. Unless, of course, you want to ensure the working poor reasonably conclude that you care more about woo-woo environmentalism than their ability to survive? (And no, UBI won't fix that. That would require a stable post-scarcity economy be already established. We're more likely to get some sort of neo-feudalism.)

Something not mention, too, is that people will just flat-out leave the area because if you can work from home 60% of the time the odds are reasonably good you can enough of your job as telework to just go somewhere cheaper to live. Businesses can even cut labor costs by hiring people from places with lower costs of living, who don't need to be paid as much.

'Nobody is crying' because most people know pretty much nothing about the body's clock cycles that is accurate. Sleep medicine is one of the places where you will find people who are very much on the ball; neuro and biopsych are also good because the mechanisms are very much their field. Short version is, your body uses the sun as a timeserv, and expects a morning ping barring things like blindness and the genetic equivalent of a broken script. Depending on various factors, not getting that ping close enough to when it's 'due' can do everything from nothing (you just are naturally freerunning) to raging insanity (you are set for equatorial living but opted to shack up with Santa).

And a lot of them don't let you save a cart if you're thinking you don't necessarily want to buy now--that you might want to wait and see if they still have it tomorrow but don't want to have to wade through the site to find it again. (Even just a 'dump cart to wishlist' with or without alerts if it goes on sale or clearance would be nice there.)

Honestly, I'd say it depends a lot on how the paid accounts for E2E access works. You can get a lot of privacy by being a small fish in a vast ocean, especially if you take advantage of some languages being incredibly friendly to obfuscation.

But if you want E2E for free, there's options out there. Zoom's not where I'd go to discuss things of incredibly dubious legality no matter what it offers in the way of E2E, not when I could go elsewhere easily enough and get a free throwaway account on some obscure server. XMPP has E2E capability, even if it's not part of the standard.

And, well, to be blunt? It's Zoom. If you want privacy, beyond what you might get from the sheer size of the traffic there, you're in the wrongest place.

Honestly I think we have to get rid of it somehow because it is being abused and was definitely written by people who didn't know the internet.

Personally, I would favor having it so the degree to which the site owners are liable is solidly linked to the extent to which they themselves exercise any sort of editorial control: If they are going to exercise editorial powers, they should get the responsibilities that go with it. The safe harbor should only protect them to the extent to which they (don't) control user-provided content, making it firmly linked to how much they attempt to exercise control. Anything else is a hazard to society that shouldn't be ignored merely because the megacorps are favoring you today. And yes, we should think of letting private companies run the public square in cyberpunk terms. If nothing else, that should discourage complacency in monitoring them.

It's not just the demographers who should be worried, all of the safety nets are designed with the assumption that there will be more young people than old people and more people working than collecting. Top-heavy demographic pyramids are not good when your safety net is a Ponzy scheme.

That said, the schools should definitely be refunding the various fees charged for things that could not be provided and should only ever charge them for students who at least in theory have reasonable access to those amenities. Services that you are not provided are services for which you should not be required to pay.

I live in a major metro area that has poor cell reception in significant areas. It seems to be due to geography but I have been in wilderness and gotten better and more consistent reception. I am currently sitting well within city limits with barely a bar...and my phone was chosen because it gets bars when many others have zilch.

Some areas are just naturally hostile to the 'MUST answer phone instantly!' sort of micromanagement of telework.

"The entire population of a community" is an acceptable way to get a random sample. You don't have to choose your individuals randomly to get a random sample...and using as much of a population as you can manage allows you to get a much more accurate picture of the actual rates of severe illness and deaths because you can just use that community's already-known numbers. Plus, random sampling is meant to give you an approximation of an entire population--which is why you can afford to relax on the random aspect the closer your sample gets to the entire population.

This is the sort of thing you have to know about if you start working with populations where, for reasons ranging from the entirely practical to ethical, the most basic form of getting a random sample is untenable. Biomedical is often heavy on the 2nd, because it is generally agreed to be unethical to deny treatment.