"The big problems are made up of all of those individual decisions. "

That is why big problems should not be left up to individual decisions. It has to be a structural change that is basically mandated, or made so tempting, that everyone goes along with it.

Either way the main driver of big changes will never be individuals voluntarily changing their ways, without either mandates or incentives.

The software that runs Wikipedia is open source. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download
Or another alternative that claims to be able to migrate confluence data is https://bluespice.com/buy/prices/configure-your-price/ , but it isn't that much cheaper.

We are going to move from the server version to the data center version. It is a little more expensive, but we can keep the installation onsite.

There are groups out there trying to make the study of this phenomenon more rigorous and scientific.

See Avi Loeb's group, from Harvard University - https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/home

Citation? Every pilot that has come forward reporting these things, has answered that same assertion you made, in the negative. We don't experiments on our aviators while they conduct training exercises, according to the interviews I've heard. It would be way too dangerous.

I don't know about the history of experiments on ground troops/other areas of the military. I'm just reciting what the naval pilots have said on the record.

There are multiple instances of multiple pilots seeing the same thing with their eyes, while their radar sees it also, along with FLIR, along with some of the newest most advanced sensors on at least 2 different naval vessels. All at once. Not separate instances.

Of course these things need to be analyzed more in depth. But the last 70's years of just 'move along, nothing to see here' is not going to cut it anymore. When you have even 60 minutes doing segments with 2 pilots, radar operators, and others involved, all saying we don't know what the heck these things are, it is worth investigating.

And it isn't just pop culture docs, and a few pilots. This is the official, as now required by law, unclassified UAP report by the DNI - https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Unclassified-2022-Annual-Report-UAP.pdf

Hundreds of unexplained sightings in restricted air space. I don't care if they are weather affects, illusions, software glitches, etc. But it has never made sense to me that pilots have been reporting these things for darn near a century in sensitive, restricted airspace, and our government is just like, "whatever".

I hope you are right that these are just black projects. Because according to Navy pilots, these objects (tracked visually, by radar, and by FLIR from multiple sources) can drop from 50,000 feet to sea level in less than a second, and can make turns and accelerate well in excess of g forces that would shred a human apart, or a plane apart using our currently known manufacturing techniques.

What that means, if true, is that our black projects have basically discovered something that no scientist on the planet thinks is possible. Anti gravity, inertial dampening, close to unlimited energy/power, etc. That means that basically in 50 years, we should be living in a Startrek-like world.

Or, you know, we haven't discovered a set of brand new physics, and these things, that have been seen for 1000's of years, are really unknown objects, that are not made by us. And I suspect our government is just as baffled by them as the general public is.

But it won't. One leader can't change it. It would require Congress, the courts, and years/decades of legal wrangling. So stop pretending nuclear is a short term option.

Consumer demand isn't infinite. If the price for X is too high, they stop buying. The producer can either stop making that product, or lower the price.

Producers of products try to sell their product for the maximum amount the market will accept. If you can get away selling shoes for 1000% markup, why wouldn't you?

Sure, Nike could pass any tax along to its customers, but they will have less and less customers the more they do so.

In an ideal world, there would be maximum competition for every single product, keeping the cost as low as possible. But we don't live in that ideal world, and many products have little competition. Using the shoe example again, you'd think that with Adidas, Nike, hundreds of brands, etc, they would drive each other's costs down, and a par of Nike's would cost 10 bucks. But none of those companies is competing on price at all. They compete on 'coolness' and brand market, and have little to no incentive to compete on cost.

If you were making websites 20 years ago, then you must remember how much of a pain it was to take into account different browsers, right? How much of a pain it was to take into account different screen sizes and device resolutions? How accessibility for disabled people was either entirely ignored, or just a second thought after the site was done?

Using something like jQuery for DOM manipulation (created in 2006, extremely stable) and/or Foundation (created in 2012, widespread use along with the competitor Bootstrap) for responsive design and accessibility features, solves way more problems then it introduces.

And what happens when its time to re-brand? You want to manually edit tons of CSS to change the feel of a site? Using something like SASS/SCSS you can use variables in CSS and and manage many tiny css files devoted to specific features, and then combine then into one compressed css file when you deploy.

I haven't done a lot of front-end work in the last decade, but I work with the team that does, and the things they do easily, that would have taken me/my team weeks way back then, is pretty astonishing.

It leaves a lot of time for the more important things, like usability studies, user experience, audience evaluation, finding out if the site actually accomplished what you wanted it to.... rather than spending weeks or months hand coding css/js to display properly across all browsers and displays.

Almost all of Europe has universal healthcare, and is bordered by less rich countries, who are in turn bordered by even less rich countries.

They seem to manage just fine being mashed together over there, with countries often having multiple borders with multiple countries.

You are saying the richest country on the planet can't provide something that every single other modern western industrialized nation can provide?

Not to mention we already pay for every single illegal immigrant who has a healthcare issue in our emergency rooms. Which is the most expensive way to treat someone, which drives healthcare costs up for all of us.

The anti-vax movement didn't pick up steam on its own. Like a lot of the misinformation about all sorts of things lately, it is being systematically perpetuated by hostile foreign governments.

See https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304567

Google 'russian anti-vax'. Racial divides, climate change 'debates', 'fake news'. Anything that is unhealthy and disruptive to western democracies is being actively pushed and inflamed by Russia.

"there's a strong resurgence in conspiracy theories in general. It's social media spreading...."

Social media is the tool. But a lot of the rise in conspiracies, "everything is fake news", anti-vax, anti-science, etc, can be directly laid at the feet of Russia. They are very effectively hijacking social media and pushing about every harmful narrative they can to try to weaken and destabilize western democracies.

https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304567

I don't know how to make this happen, but we've got to find a way to counter misinformation faster in social media. And/or prevent hostile governments from being able to use it altogether. But that would likely be a game of whack'a'mole, so I'm not sure how to counter it.

[quote]So why is the anti-vaxxer movement so heavily tied in many countries to the especially affluent, highly educated? [/quote]

Russia. Search for 'russia antivax'. Like messing with US politics, Russia is pushing dozens of unhealthy narratives at western democracies, seeking to weaken and destabilize them.

https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304567

Every single US intelligence agency has stated that the interference was targeted, significant, and way more intrusive than in prior elections.

I don't think you can evaluate the effect it had based on dollars spent alone.

Every single US intelligence agency has explicitly defined the ways in which Russia is 'meddling'. The head of Homeland Security has given several interviews in which the meddling was described in details.