The problem with Youtube being a near-monopoly is that there isn't a suitable alternative. Most of the content I'd search for isn't on other platforms, and most of the channels I'm subscribed to don't publish to other platforms.

I'm probably going to get a Nebula subscription, though.

Running Youtube isn't free, and I'd happily pay to avoid the adverts. It's £13 a month, though - £156 per year! That's obviously a huge multiple of the money they could have got from advertisers for the ads they show me. If they charged more like a pound or a dollar a month, a lot more people would be shelling out instead of waiting for an upgraded ad-blocker.

Firefox still can't synchronise search plugins, though. The bug is 14 years old! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...

I think most people would agree it's an important feature. It's odd that it still hasn't been done.

There isn't going to be an absolute answer to a question like this. We have to balance the risks. Yes, you're absolutely right we should be minimalist, and we should err on the side of caution. Simply deciding to allow intolerance is an intolerable risk, though, as anyone knows who just watched Donald Trump use lies and comspiracy theories to nearly put an end to the modern world's oldest democracy.

Karl Popper was right about tolerance. There's a paradox: if we want a tolerant society, we have to be intolerant of intolerance. We've seen why many times and in many places: if we allow people to preach intolerance, eventually the tolerant people get sidelined and we end up losing our democratic republic. We should be careful and limited in our approach, but we have to insist that there's no place for people to preach hate, whether it's on the street or on the web.

It depends whether you think it's the government's job to take action to protect the public. The fact is that the more we mix the more people die. More than 2000 people are dying every day in the USA at the moment, and that number is rising fast. If we want that to stop, then we need the government to take action.

Let's imagine that the threat was invaders with rifles, rather than a virus. How many people do you think would be protesting at the government's occupation of the beaches?

I found an article that explains it all in much more detail than I can. You're right to be skeptical of and random guy on the internet like me. Don't trust me, trust the medical profession:
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo...

That's true - there's more than one thing going on. Italy is more locked down than China at the moment, though, and their cases are skyrocketing. According to those in the know (and I'm sorry, I can't find the source where I read this), the difference is in the tracking, tracing, and quarantining, rather than in the effectiveness of the lockdown. The smartphone app is part of how they've done that.

We need the QR code stuff. What's the point of knowing who's infected if we don't use that info to decide who's allowed out in public? I'm as scared about the privacy implications as anyone else, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and these are desperate times.

That's what China has been doing, and that's one of the main reasons they've successfully reduced the number of new cases. Testing, contact tracing, and quarantining - that's what works.

Great. Can we have the same facility for Android, too?