Indeed they could ban anyone they choose, except for perhaps protected classes under discrimination laws but that's not the point. This is the problem with privately owned websites masquerading as public spaces. With real public spaces we've legislated what the owner of the space (read: government) is allowed to do to people there, and a different set of rules for private spaces.

Oh c'mon, it's plain to see there's spoiled brats on both sides.

Most of what you're talking about seems to be a straight up service for the person(s) submitting the article, so I don't see any obvious reason why the onus isn't on them for the costs.

If you want to make sure your paper has been proofread and has a professional typesetting, then you pay. If you want people to peer review, then you pay. If you want your article featured in prestigious journal in your field, then you pay.

All of this is an up front cost, and only needs to be paid once. Afterwards you have a .pdf that literally anyone can host, or indeed can use something like DAT/IPFS/Bittorrent to help share the burden of keeping it on the web.

$2000 per article doesn't sound like a huge cost, I would expect the cost of doing the actual research to be much higher than that and in return the researchers would save on subscriptions and per-paper fees used to create it in the first place.

Exactly, this is about their Azure cloud platform and not really anything else. There's a whole bunch of features you need to write .Net services to use, and being able to run them on Azure+Linux fits in with their current strategy.

What would the bots even do? Medium is weighing where an individual subscribers fees go according to articles that individual subscriber 'clapped'.

Why not just do something completely different? Well FXOS is based upon Android and these guys don't seem want anything to do with Android. I wish them the best of luck but getting decent mainline hardware support out of modern phones is a serious undertaking, there's a reason why all recent efforts (firefox os, ubuntu touch, sailifsh os) use various hacks to re-use the android based drivers.

This is what puzzles me, conventional wisdom states that printing money like that should result in skyrocketing inflation, which obviously didn't happen and many countries doing it are still fighting deflation.

So what gives? Are tax havens really sequestering that much supply from the market? Is the money printed not making it into the general supply and just padding bank profits?

This is what happens when you place private companies at the center of what we now consider to be public spaces. We have rules restricting what governments can do, but those same rules often don't apply to private companies who can and will do whatever they feel like.

Indeed. The various races were created out of isolation and time, and as a species we are a whole lot less isolated from each other now than we used to be. Inevitably we will merge into a singular race unless you want to arbitrarily restrict peoples freedoms to preserve 'racial purity' whatever that means.

On the plus side, technology that can meaningfully decarbonise the atmosphere on earth would be great for terraforming the atmosphere on Mars. We would still need to get a large quantity of Nitrogen from somewhere, hopefully the ammonia on Phobos and Deimos can help there.

I have been wondering whether or not its actually due to their level of expertise being the optimal point on the Dunning-Kruger curve.

True expertise takes a long time to gain, and if you're on the downward slope you realise how much you don't know and delay making decisions. Executives need to be confident making decisions with incomplete information, and to do that effectively they need to be at the Dunning-Kruger peak.

Except that isn't western military doctrine, which has decided that killing people is not the most effective way to eliminate their ability to wage war. Wounding the enemy such that they cannot continue to fight, and causes otherwise able soldiers to come to their aid and remove themselves from battle is a more effective strategy.

Not quite, some central authority might suggest its a good idea but it's ultimately up to the miners to decide to follow through. This is what happened with TheDAO and not everyone agreed and so now we have Ethereum Classic fork as well.

This is ultimately how blockchains work, its up to the miners to agree what the 'current state' of the chain is and they can change their mind at any time.

Almost all western nations face the same fate, in response Denmark started placing adverts to try and encourage people to have more children, and oddly enough it actually appears to have worked.

I am not American, and I get the whole constitution issue, but why aren't kids taught about gun safety? In your constitution it says you have this right, so why not give them the knowledge to exercise that right without accidentally shooting each other?

This would include being taught about proper storage of guns, and encouragement to have a gun safe and separate ammo store .etc

Maybe you can't change the constitution around the right to bare arms, but you should make an attempt to change the culture around guns, how you treat them, how you keep them, and under what circumstances you should start waving them around.

Yeah and it would be great if unicorns existed too. The reason for the 600+ distros is that there is an increasing level of overhead the more people are involved in a project, especially if those people are volunteers.

Now, get those people who are introverts to self select themselves and you can see why the OSS landscape is the way it is. Volunteer hackers want to write code, and not manage projects, and they're usually quite opinionated about the way-things-should-be and so its a lot easier to fork and get things done rather than coordinate with others.