To get standard blood exams (cortisol, insulin, triglycerids, HDL/LDL) reimbursed in France/Spain/Germany/Romania you only need a doctor note (and not even that if you test for STD).
Of course if you need specialized blood tests that need spectrometry or dna analysis or any expensive analysis you need a specialist appointment and that takes longer, but bureaucracy is the only way to make sure no one abuse the system. In worst case scenario, if the doctor thinks you should have priority, you will get it. And sometimes they are wrong. But it's a choice made to reduce overall cost, to avoid abuse.
RT2012 is the reason my uncle installed a reversible heatpump to replace the cheap electric radiator in the house he renovated, so i'm not sure it's really forbidden. But yes, RT2012 make building new houses more expensive, and you don't want to add a AC unit to that. Especially since most areas expressly forbid visible heatpump from the streets, so you have the added cost of having to hide them (In France, we basically have a big HoA in each city, it's called PLU and the mayor get to choose the color scheme and maximum height of your house, the maximum height of your trees and if you get to have AC or not).
I dislike sentences like 'you still have to wait months for an exam or years for surgery'. Depends on the exam or surgery.
- Blood test: wait time (after your 12 hour fast) is likely 15-30minutes in most of Europe (even eastern Europe. I should know, I do one every 3 month).
- pet-scan/x-ray: at most a few hours if your area is truly underserved, in my experience, less than an hour (but I needed it 4 times, so it might be small sample size).
Specialists will make you wait for sure if it doesn't sound life-threatening for deeper exams, and especially exams that requires surgery, but the only example I have on hand is my mother's boyfriend who got his in less than two weeks, and his cancer removal surgery was planned within 3 months after the tumor biopsy (you need to change your diet at least a month before surgery to prevent complications and improve healing, so the true delay caused by wait time is ~2 month). They also explicitly said that if his cancer was more aggressive they would have given him a month to prepare according to my mom.
But yes, in Europe especially, convenience surgery can take a year (my intern lips and teeth took 17 months) (and you pay a bit out of pocket), when in the US you can be done within days.
The main issue described in all that writing is that studios are risk-averse and won't take any narrative risks. I heavily dislike recent marvel movies, but avengers endgame first movie made a bold choice, and that was the first blockbuster I enjoyed the story of in a long time (I dislike the dedramatization though, so I still think it's a below average movie).
Also, I think narrative is not the main issue with recent blockbusters. Their issues is dedramatization and impersonal stakes, which makes them weaker than movies from 20-30 years ago. I think A24 studio and the Daniels showed you can be goofy and fun while still making the audience care and even cry a bit, so this is probably a skill issue.
I'm in internal tooling for blue and network teams, 70% of my code is generated and I have the same experience as your. The two 'new' hires (1 year into the job, so not so new) however are probably in the same boat as GP, but they just don't see the work we have to put to rewrite their AI-generated issues into something legible and useful, or read their AI-generated PRs filled with duplicated/dead code.
Honestly, the biggest improvement AI have brought me is the complete end of my imposter syndrome. People say comparison is the thief of joy,but in my case, previously invisible devs getting more visibility, suddenly pushing new code every week at the same pace as me but clearly without any understanding any of the underlying issues did wonder to my self esteem. I still consider myself among the worst of my group, but my group evolved from 'all devs I know' to 'the competents', which is very nice.
Pardons are useful in a single specific way. As the laws cannot be changed retroactively (this would be against the principles of democracy), you need something to handle the case where a law was too strict or too dumb and is rescinded. In my country, pardons are mostly issued by judges, and presidential pardons are also reviewed by judges (and always transformed into 'commutation of sentence' instead of full pardon, so that the person is still guilty)
Means of production are created from human labor and natural resources. Money and debt are a good way to allocate those resources in a more or less "fair" way across time, and markets are a good way to allocate both resources, money and debt across places (that what they were created for at first).
But they are not the only way, you can go back to a more autarkical model for the rural population, or to a more directed economy like during WW2, or a mix of both. Also, if i want to be exact, i don't think China is totally capitalist yet anyway, you still have rural villages that does not allocate all resources through the market.
> But subsidizing with what? They don't have a magic money tree.
They do though. The advantage of state capitalism is that at anytime you can switch from a fully capitalist economy, where the market is everywhere save the family cell, to a statist economy where the state decides what goes where, to anything in between. If the CCP says 'retirement won't be paid in RMB but in foodstuffs for everyone, and the funds are reappropriated', they kill their debt.
Japanese data shows the opposite, unless you think they weren't a closed country in the 80s. In fact, Japan has been my counterpoint to anybody claiming the housing crisis was caused by immigration.
I don't think that's true. The Khomeini clan do rely on IRGC to remain in power somewhat, but it also has strong influence towards the civilian government, and the OPA it ran on the Mullah at the start of the war, getting a non-mullah elected supreme leader at a very cheap price prove they rely on more than their central militia. A lot of the clans who supported the Shah during the original coup also seems to support the regime, which makes the north stable. The western part of the country, despite insurgents/independence groups, seems to have reported their hatred of S.Hussein towards the US (to be fair, the chemical weapons Hussein used to bomb their village were from the US), which means they might choose to fight the US rather than the regime.
Imho the regime was made stronger because of this war. It was really a bad moment to strike. Khomeini had a cancer, and waiting for his death and the succession crisis that would have ensued would have been a better choice. Now the regime is stronger than ever.
Although my real thoughts is that this strength the Khomeini project is temporary, in the sense that the only reason the regime lasted this long before was because the power was shared. If they keep pushing for more control, without sharing, they will end up loosing everything.
> If you're afraid of industrial espionage, Chinese companies may be a risk
Read about GE and Alstom and how the US government (under Obama) forced the sell at a discount, without a true GE financial audit.
No, experience tell if you're a foreign company owner, you risk less allying with the CCP than with the US. At worst with the CCP you'll lose your IP, with the US you will get arrested and be forced to 'sell' (I.E. you'll get overpriced stocks)
Some of these were very good decisions imho, from someone who spent two months in Chineese rural area around ~2019.
- Tutoring platforms were a plague on Chineese youth that increased the weight of their already _very_ heavy load (tbh, i think and education reform might have been preferable, this is a stopgap, but at least it is something).
- Ant group was offering predatory consumption loans to rural China, which to me felt a lot like the "revolver credits" that plagued my country in the 80s and 90s and pushed to many to suicide (the surname cam from their english name, "revolving credit", and because my countryside had a lot of hunting rifle available to whomever). Considering how rural china is mistreaded by Chineese state and general government (and imho this is a real weakness in China politics), having this group by a huge fine for their practice and a general debt forgivness was great. Curtailing Ant's power is also good.
- Stopping consolidation is a great way to keep a market free.
- Crypto companies: mining diverted power from villages who couldn't compete on purchasing power to mining wharehouses in some state. The ban is great for the rural population at least. Also, if that can curtail the birth of Chineese cryptobros, great for the mental health of the country.
Last night, or rather this morning, the temperature reached it's lowest at 5 AM: 28C. When I woke up two hours later we had 33, and when I started working at 9, 38. The thermometer then reached 43 at noon, where it it still stuck 4 hours 45 minutes later, despite the rising humidity (I live by the sea), making the humidex reach 51. The temperature won't be below 34 before midnight, and might be below 30 at 5AM tomorrow morning.
Of course if you need specialized blood tests that need spectrometry or dna analysis or any expensive analysis you need a specialist appointment and that takes longer, but bureaucracy is the only way to make sure no one abuse the system. In worst case scenario, if the doctor thinks you should have priority, you will get it. And sometimes they are wrong. But it's a choice made to reduce overall cost, to avoid abuse.