It will be just a different world. Maybe not for humans (and certain aquatic life), but there are a lot of ways and life will find a way. If not now, then — sooner or later.
I "love" computer language criticisms, even though I don't believe neither that the perfect language can exist nor that a language can fit all the needs.
Anyhow, here I didn't get what's wrong with some of the "issue". For example: you can't get the address of a literal, but you can take the address of a variable. This isn't surprising. And about arrays/slices/maps, append and make: it seems to me fairly logical if you don't disregard what they are. (If I've got the issue, and I am not sure about the exact point.)
> trying to minimise the maximum number of people infected at a time (to ensure that healthcare is still available to everybody that needs it).
It is so, at least in Italy. Basically they told us the reason of these measure is to spread the cases over a larger time frame... but nobody has said it's to reduce the number of cases.
What if it gives the survivors the strength to resist or fight back something else? If we think about it, human (and not human) very ancient history must be full of these interactions, and our evolution is a consequence also of this kind of thing. Only recently we know how to "protect" ourselves. But if we are in the what-if domain... what if letting it go make us a biologically better being? What if it by chance will give us the protection against some kind of tumor? What if its overall effect, not counting the deaths, is positive and not negative like making us infertile?
What if....
We can't know. But we'll see one side of the coin when we'll have defeated this threat. (Which is not an existential threat, anyway, i.e. it won't make us go extinct)
Isn't it just a content container? I mean, saying "I avoid medium" sounds like saying "I avoid wordpress" or "I avoid blogspot", speaking of content quality and not look&feel. About this one, I'm logged in, so I have to suppose your % (25% and 10%) don't apply to the logged-in case, also because as soon as I scroll down, all those frills disappears and there's only the text.
The wording “X causes Y” is slippery. Saying “X increases the probability of Y”, is another thing. Thinking about smoke, with “smoke causes cancer” I expect every smoker to have cancer. It isn't so. If the effect of X on the probability that Y occurs is too much small, maybe it's just that we haven't enough statistical data (yet) to see it. Then, even if the effect could be statistically seen, telco companies could always say that it's safer than driving a car… Or a new business for body-cellphones shields could be made… Or, more likely, some people will pay more attention at to where they put their cellphones.
I suspected it was a tactic, too. I've simply complied, giving the number and then removing it (as I did for another account). Not an issue since these accounts were explicitly related, so I didn't care if Twitter could connect them through my number. Anyway, the “cheating” behaviour (pretending it's optional and then requiring it to unlock an account allegedly violating their rule) upset me too.
And the fact you see assault, and a law teaches you that it is so, instead of just scolding, is a cultural bias (sort of) and a point in favor of not living in US - or similar countries - for anyone born and grown up where these deceptive concepts are absent and hopefully not carved in a law.
Once common sense would have been enough: do you scolded my child? Why? What's happened? ... Ha, ok, my son did something wrong... and so on...
Usually it's not that hard.
Instead, a society rambling towards paranoia and driven by fear (especially this), makes a citizen feel the urge to "look at" a greater power, the Great Protector, to "protect" him/her even from an unexistant menace - or to seek revenge.
In the story we are commenting, the first thing I have noticed and blamed was the following: the mother surrenders to the request of the son who wants to go with her to the store. There, she makes the first mistake: the son had to stay at home with the grandma.
«From the police POV, a child was left alone in a vehicle that was later driven off by someone else».
No "someone else", but the very same woman: leaving the car, returning back to the car. The same woman, not someone else. Unless the good samaritan has deceptively shown just the last part and told the police he (or she) saw a different person leaving the car with the child inside.
The issue here is not car theft, driving license not matching the car owner, or whatever. It was instead a good samaritan evaluating as criminal/dangerous the fact that a mom left his son alone in the car for few minutes. And decided (when she came back) to call the police to...? Check if the child was fine? Whatever.
It takes few minutes to check if the car was stolen and/or the owner knows that someone else is driving it.
«Because the person in the video doesn't match the description of the registered owner of the car as recorded on their driving license. Think about it.»
First, you have to arrive to the cops checking for that. Before that, you must imagine the "good" samaritan, who hasn't seen any driving license and knows nothing about the minivan, speculating about who was that woman leaving and then coming back to the minivan.
But it's not the reason he or she has called the police and the police, at the moment they reached the house of the parents of the woman, they knew the latter was none but the daughter of the owner of the minivan.
Case closed... Except for the charge of having contributed to the delinquency of a minor. By the way, the good samaritan can be charged of the same crime since the video proved that, since even if he could have "caught" the criminal mom in the instant he was starting her criminal act and thus he could have "saved" the child, he preferred keep filming... so, if there was an actual crime, it would have been too late.