Once inside, they befriend tattooed Yakuza and form the basis of a hilarious sitcom.

Recently I stumbled across this eyebrow-raising article. In Japan, a country with the world’s oldest average age, the number of senior citizens committing crimes is on the rise — primarily because they are lonely. It seems that socially disconnected seniors would prefer the stability and community of prison over the more metaphorical solitary confinement of their later years.

Boy, those grandkids must feel record-breaking levels of guilty.

Would you choose living the rest of your life effectively alone, or living the rest of your life in prison?

What could change your answer? Do you think you’d feel differently as you age?

Great, now everyone knows you’re a dog on the internet.

One of the greats when it comes to thinking about where technology meets humanity, Paul Ford writes in Businessweek that maybe we need a Digital Protection Agency, much like we have (or at least, used to have) an Environmental Protection Agency. He even lays out a few potential roles it could play:

Lots of helpful information, plenty of infographics, a way to track just how badly you’ve been screwed, and, ideally, some teeth—the DPA needs to be able to impose fines. I’m sure there’d be some fuss and opposition, but, come on. The giants have so much money it would hardly matter.

And that might barely scratch the surface of what we need, or will need in the years to come.

What regulations would help sort out the mess that’s become of the internet in the hands of the big power players?

What corporations would suffer the most if we did? What would the biggest benefits be?

What are the biggest changes, or sacrifices, we’d have to make to ensure they work?

By law, the pre-self-driving stage still requires nerds to sit nervously in driver seats, unsure what to do with their hands but excited to be part of “the future”.

Well, it happened. The first reported autonomous car crash fatality. Testing suspended, people freaking out. But… should they?

If I were a less lazy researcher, I would track down local newspapers calling for an end to automobiles in the 1890’s after those first killed a pedestrian. We could have a good chuckle at how short-sighted those hat-and-vest-wearing luddites were way back when, what with their trying to curb the inevitable advance of American car culture and all.

But let’s be honest (and check Wikipedia): “National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) 2016 data shows 37,461 people were killed in 34,436 motor vehicle crashes, an average of 102 per day.” And that’s now, before all that pesky safety stuff Nader fought for.

So people being killed by (shall we call them “driver-ful”?) cars — though widely considered terrible tragedies, is something we accept as part of the price we pay to have cars at all — something we mostly agree we mostly need.

What’s different about crashes without a driver that causes each incident to generate so much interest?

Is that going to change in the coming years as we get used to them being part of life?

Heroes they’re not. But when profits and progressive policies align… POW!

Tech companies come out against restrictive immigration laws. Disappointed CEOs abandon their seats on a national business council as the government walks away from climate accords. The normally corrupt NCAA moves a basketball tournament from a state looking to impose discriminatory bathroom laws.

More recently, large retailers have decided — of their own accord, without any law imposed upon them — to raise age minimums and stop selling military-style assault rifles. Even on a micro scale, after incidents like Charlottesville, employers have fired people after being notified of those employees’ hateful online speech.

To be fair, it’s not all rosy. Some businesses have fought for their right not to provide birth control as part of employee health insurance, or their right not to serve LGBT customers. And of course, there’s Citizens United.

But the trend does seem to be toward (most) companies coming down on the side of (mostly) progressive issues. In part, as this article reminds us, because:

Politics is competitive, but the competition is constrained—by time (e.g., elections only happen every two, four, or six years), by geography (e.g., the gerrymandering of districts), and by partisanship, in which every issue often boils down to “the other side is worse.” Many companies cannot rely on time, geography, or negative advertising to save them. Every week is a primary for a consumer brand; the global nature of business exposes companies to more rivals; and no company can thrive by making nothing and investing exclusively in hostile marketing. “Politicians assume they can wait out the outrage, but national companies have to respond to the immediacy of demand.”

So what role can corporations play in creating social change? Should they be doing this more, or less?

What issues are they best suited to affect? What issues do we want them to stay out of completely?

What pressures can people put on them to be better “citizens”?

The spikiest speech bubbles usually have the fewest strong points.

It’s a fascinating paradox: we live in a time with the easiest means to disseminate ideas that humans have ever had access to, and yet so much about the free exchange of ideas seems to be getting worse, not better. The supposed truisms simply aren’t holding up.

Many more of the most noble old ideas about free speech simply don’t compute in the age of social media. John Stuart Mill’s notion that a “marketplace of ideas” will elevate the truth is flatly belied by the virality of fake news. And the famous American saying that “the best cure for bad speech is more speech”—a paraphrase of Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis—loses all its meaning when speech is at once mass but also nonpublic. How do you respond to what you cannot see? How can you cure the effects of “bad” speech with more speech when you have no means to target the same audience that received the original message?

This article (the whole thing is illuminating) touches on what may be the single biggest obstacle to widespread progress in today’s world. In order for an exchange of ideas, we have to be willing and able to trade beyond our (self-imposed, largely digital/media-based) borders.

Since “more speech” alone doesn’t seem to be helping… what might actually help the best ideas win out?

What changes to how our biggest platforms operate could help achieve those goals?