These days companies frequently buy back shares because they can do that without having to pay taxes for that. 

It seems to me like many of those business conglomerates are privately held. The stock market seems to prefer if businesses parts that have no synergy with the main business get sold off. 

On the stock market it's easy for capital owners to diversify their assets. When companies are privately held building such business conglomerates might be the way to diversify.

Survival vs self-expression: Survival values prioritize security over liberty. Those with survival values tend to be more homophobic, uninterested in political action, distrustful of outsiders, and less happy. As people transition from industrial to knowledge societies, their sense of agency increases and they move towards self-expression values. 

To me, the empiric status of that claim feels quite unclear. Is that your personal opinion? Is it a general pattern for which there's existing data?
 

Most companies don't threaten their employees with physical violence. According to another Boeing whistleblower Sam Salehpour, that seems to happen at Boeing.

Being a defense contractor, I would expect Boeing corporate to have better relationships with the kind of people you would hire for such a task than corporations. 

Poisoning someone with MRSA infection seems possible but if that's what happened it's capabilities that are not easily available. If such a thing would happen in another case, people would likely speak about nation-state capabilities. 

The cancer must develop neoantigens that are sufficiently distinct from human surface proteins and consistent across the cancer.

This is not necessarily true. There are some proteins that get produced by embryos and not by adult humans. Sometimes cancer mutates in a way that those proteins get produced by cancer cells.

While the vaccines that target a single of those embryo proteins did not do enough in clinical trials, I don't see a reason why we should completely ignore those proteins. 

Cancer cells must be isolated and have their surface proteins characterized.

Given that cancer cells engage in necrososis much more than regular cells you don't need to isolate cancer cells to get the DNA of cancer. ctDNA can in theory be used to sequence the cancer. Using ctDNA might even be better because it gives you a better idea of whether a mutation is present in most of the cancer cells or only the section from which you removed cells. 

Individualized cancer vaccines are not yet practical

Moderna has just put an individualized cancer vaccine into a phase III trial after positive results from a phase 2b trial:

Hirawat was referring to Moderna and Merck’s December announcement of positive results from a 157-patient phase 2b trial dubbed KEYNOTE-942. The pair said a combination of their personalized mRNA cancer vaccine, coded mRNA-4157 or V940, and the PD-1 inhibitor Keytruda slashed the risk of tumor recurrence or death by 44% compared with Keytruda alone when used as an adjuvant therapy in stage 3/4 melanoma following complete surgical resection.

Do you think that trial is a bad idea?

The question of what kind of sun exposure leads to visible skin aging is an empiric one. Saying "We err on the cautious side and assume that an arbitrary value of 0.5 SED could be regarded as an acceptable daily erythemal exposure" does not imply that there's no visible skin aging under that arbitrary value. 

The linked post suggests that your assumptions about memory are wrong:

Interestingly, I asked her for two 2-digit numbers again toward the end of that hour, having no memory that I had already done this. She told me that she had already given me two numbers, and asked whether I wanted the same numbers again. I said yes (so I could compare my performance). The second time, I was able to do the multiplication pretty quickly without needing to ask for the numbers to be repeated.

He had training effects from multiplying the two numbers despite not having a memory of the first time he multiplied them. 

This is a narrow objection to the IMO hyperbolic focus on government assault risks.

Whether or not you face government assault risks depends on what you do. Most people don't face government assault risks. Some people engage in work or activism that results in them having government assault risks.

The Chinese government has strategic goals and most people are unimportant to those. Some people however work on topics like AI policy in which the Chinese government has an interest. 

Politico wrote, "Perhaps the most pressing concern is around the Chinese government’s potential access to troves of data from TikTok’s millions of users." The concern that TikTok supposedly is spyware is frequently made in discussions about why it should be banned.

If the main issue is content moderation decisions, the best way to deal with it would be to legislate transparency around content moderation decisions and require TikTok to outsource the moderation decisions to some US contractor.