IMHO they get right what most "old media" are getting wrong: The Economist isn't trying to compete with new media at what new media does best.

I don't need a magazine for opinion pieces, I have blogs for that; I don't need my local newspaper to tell me about Lady Gaga's new acting career, I don't need a magazine to tell me what's new and cool in fashion or music, and I certainly don't need CNN to tell me what's trending on twitter.

Give it up. You can't compete with the masses for that type of content. What I can't get from blogs and twitter is quality journalism: investigation, inside scoops, quality political analysis, etc.

When traditional media realizes that this is the domain where they excel, they will be just fine. Instead of cutting down on their investigative journalism departments, slash the entertainment reporters, slash opinion and talking heads. Cut your content in half, cut your staff, stop wasting resources on a hopeless battle, and focus on the one thing no blog or YouTube channel can do... give me concise, focused, quality journalism.

1. Pick the top three offenders (not in the same industry).

2. For each offender, find their cash cow, or top 3 most profitable products.

3. Make a concerted effort to boycott those products, and those products alone, indefinitely. Make some real damage.

The purpose here is to make an example out of someone. Build morale among protesters that if well organized, they can be effective.

First scenario: One million US/Canadian citizens sporadically decide to buy from company Y instead of company X... nobody notices.

Second scenario: Company Z suddenly loses 100,000 customers for their core product... I'll bet you someone notices.

> "He was a whiz with formulas and I think [his aim was] to construct those near counter-examples to Fermat's last theorem. So he developed a theory to find these near misses, without recognizing that the machine he was building, those formulas that he was writing down, would be useful for anyone, ever, in the future."

I trust GNU zip, but can I trust MiniKeePass? Can I trust iZip?

I've been playing it for a few days now, and it's such a joy to work with. So many great forward-thinking libraries: (Reactive, Compose), excellent, readable code quality even down to the language implementation from very smart people...

If the language stack of the future looks something like Rust for systems, Julia for applications, and Elm for UI, I'll be a pretty happy developer :)

Also interesting if each story had a 'stats' page with some numbers so it's not so much a black box.

Paradigm-shifting discoveries tend to come from unexpected, unexplored territory. By taking away funding from "useless" pursuits (like pure maths, arts, theoretical researchers) and focussing solely on the bottom line (i.e: what matters, what is profitable), we make advances in a given field less likely, not more.

Reminds me of the Louie bit where David Lynch instructs Louie to "Be funny: 3... 2... 1... Go". -- That's not how things work. Achieving that level of mastery of his craft is 90% non-funny related activities (life experiences, personality, self-reflection etc.), and 10% actually focusing on "being funny" in itself.

What if the key to longevity comes from a cancer researcher, what the techniques needed come from an applied mathematician researching complex systems? What if the technology required to even model the problem in order to ask the right question is developed by computer scientists modelling data in a completely different field of research? There's just no way to know.

I don't think, in this case, it's a "let's not waste resources" argument being made. The GP post wasn't saying "Hey, cancer! AIDS! Lazy non-cancer/non-AIDS scientists!" but rather, "Fixing aging will give us the time and resources we need to do everything else."

In other words, investing in a cure for aging will pay huge dividends in other areas of research. It's like earning $0/yr going to college for four years so you can get $100+k/yr for the next 60, instead of $50k/yr.