I love this idea in principle, but when our school ran something similar to connect grad students who didn't have the opportunity to socialize due to covid remote work, I got a feeling some of them just showed up for the free coffee (we did free coffee chats instead of meals) and just weren't that interested in the social aspect.
On the issue of bias - I'm not confident that paid news is necessarily less biased than news that relies on clicks and ads. Two potential issues:
1) A news agency might be further incentived to publish biased, "echo-chamber" type of news if they are more effective at convincing readers to pay.
2) Detailed news with in-depth research and thorough analysis is expensive to produce, so news agencies that produce such material, if they were to rely on subscriptions, need to charge appropriately expensive fees. This means only a select group of people can afford this news. To generate more revenue, such a quality news sources are incentived to cater content to this limited audience set. Over time this can make quality news inaccessible and even irrelevant to most of the public.
I can't comment on China and other fields, but in the US for AI and robotics, in which I do research / publish in, there is definitely a growing trend of an over-emphasis on novelty research that disregards reproducibility in favor of "wow" factors and fancy demo videos. A lot of highly cited research papers/labs tend to be the most heavily promoted ones (on Twitter, in the press, etc), and they're not necessarily impactful/useful for the rest of the field.
won't big players like FB benefit from this? It seems more likely that people would port data from smaller networks to bigger ones than the other way around.
A PhD is not only about solving some specific problem. It is more about learning how to solve problems, and more importantly, choosing what problems to solve.
Having a PhD should mean that the person is capable of making consistent progress in ill-defined problems without much external support. Of course not all PhDs can do this, and you don't need a PhD to gain these skills, but they correlate strongly enough that it makes sense to just filter some jobs by whether or not someone has a PhD.
I understand that the scope and scale of the technology transfer agreements may be unreasonable, but surely these foreign companies aren't "forced" to oblige? I'm not sure if it's on China that many companies find it more profitable to have access to the Chinese market than to hold on to their IPs.