And in optics, the “real” portion of a material’s refractive index represents scattered light and the “imaginary” part represents absorbed light.

For every person who has heard about it, there are many more who have not. It’s important to have these conversations so that we as a society can make decisions about what we value; only when a critical mass of individuals have awareness can we work together toward common goals.

There are numerous ways cancelling shows and removing them from the platform saves streaming services money, including not having to pay residuals and the ability to write off production costs as a loss on taxes. And, like others have pointed out, streaming services are historically driven by subscription fees instead of ads, and many viewers tend to binge watch shows rather than watch nightly throughout a full season. So all combined, the profit motive tends to push services toward many new short series suitable for binge watching that will keep people subscribed, but that can be quickly cut and taken as a loss.

This Marketplace article provides some other reasons, too.

Why, as an American, do I have to navigate an internet full of pop ups designed to make sites GDPR compliant?

In academia, promotion, tenure, funding, and pretty much everything someone needs to keep their job is tied to publishing in peer-reviewed journals. If I self publish I won’t keep my job. If a university ran a website for publishing, they would have to reimplement the peer review process, and often there may be ~a dozen people worldwide qualified to review a particular paper so it’s not just that others from within the university could review work. If a university is implementing all that, they have basically become a publisher and likely have costs they’ll want to try and recoup and could foreseeably implement a fee to publish.

Don’t get me wrong - the journals have a predatory and exclusive model that should be dismantled. But until we fix promotion, tenure, and funding pathways in academia that have enabled the publishers to become what they are there will always be these problems – any other system that pops up will not get widely used because academics will be disincentivized from using it (as discussed in some other comments here).