You are kinda right, but you are probably old.
I am old too, and I think the same way.
My coworkers, though, happily share and watch very long videos at work, about anything.
Those guy probably would like videos on slashdot, and it may be a good idea to try and lure them here.
We are a nice community, but new people is a good thing.

You do make sense, but I don't agree.

It would be interesting to have some kind of rating system for the internet. I would like something like sites rating their content with some kind of header, so you can do client filtering more easily. You could just use sites rating, and have a grey/blacklist of sites that misrepresent their content. As an example, I don't care whether my kids see tits, but I would like to filter some of the violence they see in children oriented content.

Identifying actual users is very expensive, but most importantly, opens the door to track everything everyone sees, with a strong identity, like if all your browsing activity went through Facebook. We just don't want that to happen, it's spooky, and very dangerous,

I was to the US, and experienced that too. I crossed a bridge, and got from New York State, into New Jersey State. No checkpoint! Awesome!!

Slashdot probably has more uses for a marketing agency than trying to sell stuff to engineers.
I would use primarily it as a research lab. You have a great community of dedicated people who will contribute valuable content.
You can just let it live, gather valuable information, and play your experiments there. Do they contribute more when headlines are more sensationalist? Do they react to unfair moderation? How many ads will they put up with before complaining?
Also... can this be used to leverage engineers as "influencers" ? I don't mean slashvertisements, I mean well planned manipulation.

Cities are man-made, complex, and they are way less fragile than a human body, or a brain.

The food pyramid recommends I eat most of my calories from cereals and other carbohydrates.
There is no scientific evidence that carbohydrates need to be most of your diet, calorie-wise.
You might need a very small amount of them, to jump start your day, maybe, but no reason to fill half your plate with them.

A diet of only protein and veggies is a lot better for me. I am overweight, but I do lose weight if I diet, I just cut as many carbs as possible, add as many veggies as possible, make sure all meal have enough protein, and not care about fats. If I add exercise, I can lose 2-4 pounds a week. I managed to lose over 40 pounds that way. Gained half that over several years of bad diet, no exercise.

Before that strategy, I tried several times low calorie, "balanced" diet, with exercise, I might lose 2 pounds in a month. My doctor says that carbs are bad specially when you are fat, and many fat people benefit from cutting carbs.

Also, most importantly, there's a psychological side to this. Eating is not something yo decide to do, it's more like an addiction. Some foods make you more likely to keep your diet. That's very important. Losing weight can be an test on discipline, but it's much better if some technique is found that helps you lose weight _without_ discipline. That would help more people.

A crying baby can be incredibly soothing to some of us, when we realize it's actually not our kid that is crying. (shamelessly stolen from some twitter guy, but true)

This is not a debate contest. I'm just complaining about the article, which is stupid and tries to ridicule people having reasonable doubts about something that is indeed dangerous..

Is this better?

"Then you need to prove [or at least estimate] the herd effect [for this vaccine] is very useful. [Meaning that it's strong enough, for this particular disease and this particular vaccine, and this particular population, to justify the investment of making people get the vaccines and its enforcement.]"

The whole article is an ad hominen .
The piece tries to sell vaccines by calling anyone against _this_ particular vaccine an Anti-Vaxxer, and saying that rejecting this vaccine is is Anti-Vax nonsense.

It's not nonsense. Vaccines can be very risky. The first thing you have to do is doubt them.

Then they need to be proven safe. They can be sold then.

Then they need to be proven effective. You might want to use them then.

Then they need to be proven beneficial to the people as a whole, as opposed to the same money used on the next best. Then you can have governments pay for it.

Then you need to prove the herd effect is very useful. Then you can have the government ask everybody to use it.

You can pay someone to worry about that for you.
It's pretty easy to move to a hosted Drupal service, so you don't have to worry about these issues, and get a nice SLA so you can complain to someone to make your site work for you.

The web is a spooky place. It's becoming harder and harder to keep your web business online, without a serious team dedicated to secure it.

"Open Source" doesn't mean that it will run cheaply. In some cases it means just the opposite.
Also, it doesn't mean "easy". You don't have to pay for licenses, but you still need to do your homework at understanding whether a specific tool suits your use case, at a reasonable cost/effort.

Drupal is very good if you need to do something hard, like integrate with different applications, build your own modules, or you have a large number of documents, something like that. They use it at my city government, and they do great stuff, they handle a lot of data, a lot of traffic, a lot of services provided to citizens, looking great.

If you want something easy, you need something easy, like wordpress, or something hosted. It's quite cheap and easy to run. Just need the right tool.

You said the same as the parent.
Poor kids can get an education, but it's much harder for them than it is for rich kids.

About correlation between poverty and parents perceived value of education, well, I can't think clearly on a empty stomach, can you?

Magnetic stripe cards provide no security themselves. They are good enough for now, but card makers and some customers want something with a bit more security. Chip cards provide reasonably good encryption, and are much harder to clone.

Phones, on the other hand, are used for payment a lot right now. They are used when you pay for Uber, or when you buy apps, or when I pay my rent with a bank transfer using my phone's web browser + a coordinate card. Plus, it's usually with you, so it's convenient, that is also important.

So this is a blog, but with payments. We are back in the nineties.

That's not how democracy works.
You can't just take people that only lived under a dictatorship, send them to vote, and then say that they are responsible for the outcome.

I live in a country with a long tradition of democracy (not in the seventies) and strong political parties. Of course I am responsible for the guys in office.

In Irak, they are only partially resposible for whatever came out of the polls. More responsible are the guys who killed the dictator with the supposed intention to replace him with something better. That seldom works. What happened was exactly what was feared by those who opposed military action.

I think this is the most probable outcome when you just destroy a government from the outside, democratic or otherwise. It has some characteristics in common to what happened in Central America when the US used to throw more of their their weight around. Chaos and mayhem. Extremists thrive in that environment, for fun or for profit.