It's always been this way - younger people tend to care less about voting

I could equally say it's always been this way because politicians and The Establishment have always been old.

My theory is at that age you're still so engrossed with exploring your environment, that you put little thought into shaping your environment.

My theory is that political parties run by older people tend to focus on the wishes of people just like them i.e. older people. Due to the party political whipping system, young people who investigate politics quickly realise they will be forced to vote in support of social policies they disagree with, making the career unattractive. This results in a downward spiral in which politicians ignore people unlike them, those people get turned off from politics, and thus the demographic makeup of the political elite can never self correct.

Which generation do you think politicians would listen to most?

You're reversed cause and effect. The fact that young people don't vote is because politicians don't listen to them. I think the first Obama campaign illustrated this nicely.

These are large percentages we're talking about here. Even in the older age brackets about a third of people are supporting Snowden so the fact that you fall into that category doesn't mean much.

I think it's more likely to be because people under 35 are the first generation that have no memory of the cold war. People born before about 1980 lived in a world where there was a very strong, clear delineation between us vs them and that divide was seen as an existential struggle between good and evil. Merely by being born into a certain country, you too could take part in an epic ideological struggle between right and wrong. It is perhaps not surprising that people who lived most of their life in such a world instinctively support a strong, authoritarian state and react badly to a "traitor who gave our national security secrets to the Russians" or whatever garbled version of the story they received via Fox News. There's definitely a clear and strong tendency in older populations to support our side regardless of what that side actually does, and things that seem to bring back old certainties strongly appeal to them. Hence the desperate need of the establishment to make "the terrorists" to new Big Evil.

Contrast to people under the age of 35 who don't remember the cold war and have never lived in a world where there were clearly defined conflicts between us/them or good/evil. Instead there has been a series of endless wars started by us against dramatically weaker foes, based on vague and uncompelling justifications, the results of which have mostly been bedlam. Older people love this because it's an attempt to bring back the old certainties they remember. It leaves young people cold because they don't care about the old certainties, as they never had them to begin with.

Combine all this with the fact that the average software developer is 30 years old and the average age of Congress is 57 ... nearly double their age .... you have set the stage for an epic showdown between the technology industry and the political establishment. Which is exactly what's happening.

Okay. Can I have a refund on my taxes which paid for the public school that I can no longer use? See how that works?

That sounds fair as long as you also pay a large excess tax that covers the host of setting up quarantine zones, emergency medical care and lifelong disability benefits when "Private School for anti-vaxxers" is inevitably swallowed by a full blown measles outbreak. The costs of this are likely to far, far outstrip the value of the school vouchers.

In practice though the amount of accounting that it'd take to make this kind of opt out system perfectly fair is so large that it'd be better to just force people to take the vaccines. I guess like many on this site I'm not a huge fan of governments forcing people to do things against their will, but there are cases where it's clearly the best path forward, like obeying speed limits, paying taxes .... and being vaccinated.

The issue is that making and cancelling orders on a market is not traditionally seen as financial fraud.

Could you link to those sources instead of only naming them? The only "fugitive banker" that I know of in Switzerland was Raoul Weil, and a quick Google search for the query [us fugitive bankers switzerland] only throws up that name as well, so I'm guessing you're misremembering the details of this particular story.

Raoul Weil is (a) not American, (b) had nothing to do with the financial crash and (c) did in fact get extradited to the USA accused of (effectively) not being an unpaid agent of the IRS .... where he was so convinced of his innocence he decided not to plea bargain, went to court, and achieved complete victory with jury deliberation of just over an hour. Raoul did not testify in his own defence and presented no witnesses, yet the case against him collapsed almost immediately as the primary witness had been given a sweetheart deal by US prosecutors and appeared to be lying on the witness stand. There was no evidence he knew anything about what bankers far below him in the organisation had been doing.

1. Why have vaccines and autism rates both grown exponentially in the last 25 years? (no, detection does not come close to answering)

Changes to the definition and protocols for diagnosing it account for the rate changes just fine.

Taking quotes out of context like that is just appalling

How is it out of context? Would you care to provide the missing context that makes her comments seem more reasonable? I picked that site because it was one of the first hits on Google for the phrase you claimed was "made up shit" - I have no idea who the person who made the video is. It just happens to contain her saying it.

"Women are being institutionally oppressed all the time, in nearly every facet of our lives" ..... I can't imagine why you think the statement is odd or unusual.

Because it's obviously false, highly inflammatory garbage that no rational person would ever say. Women are not being "institutionally oppressed" in any sense of the term, and this kind of nonsense is exactly why prominent feminists attract so much negative attention. The fact that some of them actually debate this idea just goes to show how disconnected from reality they have become.

Go back a few hundred years when women couldn't vote, couldn't work in many professions and were basically owned by their husbands. That was institutional oppression.

Here is a hint: there is feminist critique of every art form. If you don't like it, you don't have to read it or pay any attention to it.

I don't read it, which is why I had to search for the quote to see if your accusation that epyT-R was making things up was true. Obviously you don't read this stuff either, otherwise you wouldn't have made yourself look foolish by assuming that quoting Anita S's extremism was "making shit up".

I was responding to your post that read:

I doubt if anyone will get banned and be surprised about it

and I argued that people will be surprised because the policies will inevitably be arbitrary and rather biased. The surprising way the UK police enforce very very similar rules on Twitter users as Twitter now wants to enforce itself is highly relevant to that point.

You seem to think I said Twitter shouldn't be allowed to do this, or some other argument about ownership of private spaces. I didn't mention it, though.

This is an obvious straw man

No, a straw man would be where I claim you argued something you didn't, and then knocked down that non-argument. You straw manned me when you said "Twitter are allowed to do this regardless of what you think" - that's a response to something I never said. Obviously they're allowed to do it. The question is whether it's a good idea or not, and what the consequences will be.

I think the consequence is very likely to be that they tolerate abusive and threatening tweets if they come from particular kinds of people or support various kinds of political positions, and crack down hard on ideas and opinions they/the moderators don't like under the guise of fighting "abuse".

I'd say 99% of people I've met in my life can tell what hate speech is when they read it.

This is the "appeal to the reasonable man" approach. It's quite common in law. Basically punts the decision to a randomly selected judge who is just trusted to be reasonable.

The problem is that the people deciding what reasonable means are of course never a perfect cross section of society at large. In the UK there have been cases where e.g. someone posted to Facebook that he hated British soldiers and he hoped they would go to die and go to hell because of all the muslims they killed.

This was interpreted as being literal hate speech. He was arrested, charged with "a racially aggravated public order offense" and then found guilty of sending a "grossly offensive communication" and sentenced to community service. The police explained, "he didn’t make his point very well and that is why he has landed himself in bother".

Most likely this post would violate Twitters policies (if Twitter allowed such a long tweet).

Now what about posts like these? What about tweets that threaten "the terrorists" with death? Do you seriously think Twitter, an American company, is going to start shutting down these sorts of accounts? What about movie studios tweeting quotes from American Sniper to promote it?

I am seriously skeptical. Most likely it will be like every other attempt to do this I've seen - what is or isn't threatening or abusive will depend entirely on the world view of the people doing the moderation and how famous/politically connected the tweeters are. It won't ever attempt to be even handed.

Are you just making this shit up?

Why not Google it and find out? That's what I did - took 10 seconds. That is a quote from Anita Sarkeesian, in this video where she says (apparently without irony) that "Women are being institutionally oppressed all the time, in nearly every facet of our lives" followed by the quote about porno fantasy, which is apparently about the game Bayonetta.

You should spend some time reading the comments section of the Guardian before being so sure about this. The Guardian has a policy that you cannot post comments that insult or offend the journalists. Because, you know, that'd result in a hostile and threatening environment, or whatever.

The result is that comments which point out bias, or even factually inaccurate statements, have a habit of being rapidly deleted. Because implying that a journalist has an agenda or might not have done proper journalism could be offensive, you see! I've observed multiple times comments that would be +5 Insightful here on Slashdot being erased within minutes, thanks to their unbelievably vague and broad set of "community standards".

Or take a look at the totalitarian way the UK police are attempting to make Facebook and Twitter non-offensive. Someone posted on Facebook that they thought soldiers might (gasp) have personal moral culpability for signing up to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq and killing people. The mother of a soldier saw the post, was offended, reported it to the police and the guy ended up being sentenced to community service. Only because he repented his heresy of course. If he hadn't he'd have been tossed in jail. Now is the idea that soldiers are responsible for their actions really so offensive? Of course not! That was the core legal basis of the Nuremburg trials: "I was just following orders" is not a defence.

If Twitter decides that any threatening or harmful tweet is to be erased, half of Twitter could end up being thrown out. It's too bad their new CEO is on the warpath about this. People who received threatening tweets or whatever, could always just log off and stop seeing them.

The obvious problem is that we pay them so much more for drug busts than for traffic citations./i?

The problem is that we pay them EXTRA for drug busts: They're allowed to seize property that is "associated" with it (like the car it was in, or the money in the driver's and passengers' pockets, ...), convert the non-cash to cash at an auction, and split the swag among the officers, department, and other branches of government.

That's the same incentive structure that powered the Spanish Inquisition, and look how THAT turned out.

This has been snowballing since the passage of the RICO laws.