It a way science is very similar to free speech. Its can be very harmful when misused, but generally the answer to bad science is not LESS science, but BETTER science.
The proper role of the education system of any given country, and a good predictor of its success, is how well it teaches us to evaluate the difference.
HUMAN RESOURCE MACHINE is pretty good, though about 1/2 through, the challenges started to seem like my actual day job. Definitely would recommend for kids interested in picking up programming.
Is there a distinction being made between the quantum computer being impossible, and it being impossible without a future breakthrough in engineering or physics?
If it really is exponentially more difficult to correct for noise as the number of qubits increases, then it will be impossible to build a useful quantum computer. We may not be able to say whether it's impossible after 24 qubits, or after 29, or after 32, etc., but we may be able to know that it's impossible to build anything useful, if someone can rigorously mathematically prove this.
On the other hand if nobody can provide a mathematical proof that it's impossible, it could just be engineering. Then again, "just engineering" doesn't prove a useful quantum computer may require practically impossible configurations (i.e., having to be in the middle of a sphere of lead dozens of miles in radius cooled to near absolute-zero is not necessarily impossible, but isn't something we're going to build anytime soon), or that we simply won't be able to figure out the requisite configurations.
Alternatively, this guy will prove to be wrong and someone will just build a quantum computer with a couple hundred qubits, at which point we may have enough data to observationally draw the curve rather than via math and the simplifications required to make it tractable, and maybe it'll be fine.
But the top tax rate has been steadily declining since the Eisenhower administration. This tax bill furthers that decline. Over that period we've seen an increase in inequality. Are they correlated?
I'm not sure the bit about what share of income tax is paid by the wealthy is meaningful here, outside of right wing think tank PR releases (your linked site is funded by the Koch Brothers btw. Just a heads up).
If you believe lobbying is a flaw. I'll play devil's advocate to that.
China has to routinely purge extraordinary numbers of people from their political system (tens of thousands), because most of their corruption occurs behind closed doors, shadow dealings, hidden bribes, and so on. Is that better or worse than instead having a strictly defined system of public lobbying? For emphasis I'll point out that the US lobbying system is extremely tightly regulated, there are very well defined laws for it, they will put you in prison if you break those laws.
Systems without US-style open lobbying are not lacking in common corruption, there has always been plenty of that in nations such as Japan, France, Italy, Spain, England, South Korea, China, Russia, Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, Greece, Poland, South Africa, Indonesia, India, etc.
The world is flooded with political corruption practically everywhere, with most of that world not utilizing a system like US lobbying. It'd be easy to say that one would rather eg AT&T not try to influence politics at all, that's wildly unrealistic as it pertains to human nature and history. So is it better to have a public system that AT&T lobbies in, such that you know where they're lobbying and for how much. And if so, is there a better version of that than the US system (and what would that be).
But your experience is just anecdotal yes? You (and frankly me as well) have a resistance to the FB addiction, but the numbers of people on the platform are staggering and cannot be ignored.
And China has their own version of FB, what will that be used for in the hands of a totalitarian government?
Staggering numbers, yes, but what percentage of its users suffer from a sort of social media addiction? Or are even active beyond checking in now and then.
With all the resources at their disposal, they could perhaps bring in a professional editorial staff to rank each news source based on some unbiased (ahem) and transparent criteria like # of sources for a story, past accuracy, level of bias, etc. Still let people click and post whatever but apply an easily visible and understandable "news" score.
The proper role of the education system of any given country, and a good predictor of its success, is how well it teaches us to evaluate the difference.