Apart from weather, a big issue outside the USA is also car infrastructure. The US is extremely car centric with large, straight, easy-to-maneuver roads everywhere. Here in Germany, it's different. We have rather narrow, chaotic roads, unclear signage, "right car has right of way" traffic rules which sometimes get resolved via hand signs, no jaywalking laws, etc.
I am still hoping for fewer cars on the road overall. The car itself is inefficient and hopefully on its way out.
The first few are single family villas, the last four are multi family housing complexes.
For some reason, people in Europe back in the 60s believed that creating dense housing only units with no sense of scale, long commutes and walks and 100% car dependence was the way forward.
That experiment backfired almost everywhere. Some of these homes, both in Eastern and Western Europe are well connected via public transport, integrate commercial and residential zones and are fairly nice to live in. Most, however, are simply unhealthy for both the planet and the residents.
It's great to live in dense places; but its benefits are countered by huge, empty plazas that take 15 minutes to cross if I just want to walk to the next corner store.
You're right. It's a societal, imagined instability.
In the US, if you lose your job, you're "between jobs". In Germany, you're "arbeitslos" (jobless), which some people use as an insult. There are entire TV channels that make fun of jobless people - think TLC type shows, but strictly about poverty and joblessness.
Just because many privately owned apps are bad, does not mean the concept of apps is bad. If the government in theory can offer a "secure" open source channel for me to do my business with them without having to go there or pay for postage, why not use it?
And why do we still believe that paper docs are secure? Someone needs to look at them and can just as easily "lose" them, too.
>At the extreme, if it is bad enough, they can start their own.
That is not a realistic proposition, either. People are as forced to use private services as they are forced to use government ones. There might be a competitor, but even that does not necessarily provide cheaper or better service or products.
Honestly? It's little more than the better pay for me. I'm generally a conscious person with politics based on empathy and equality, and I have the same thoughts you have, but I have never worked in the public sector due to low salaries compared to the private sector.
I don't lie to myself, either. What I create is not making the world a better place by much at all. I'm making industry software that helps create products. Nothing more, nothing less. I steer clear of miltech or creating software for police or secret services, but apart from that, all it does is create value for some shareholders somewhere while pumping out products that are probably unnecessary and wasteful.
It's an interior conflict that does not go away, and I won't say I have resolved any of it for me. I know that I'm not contributing to saving the world, and it sucks. But I'm also not really in a position to change that. Furthermore, I'm not in a field where governments usually look for talent, and I do enjoy the freedom of creating my own systems with the architecture I prefer and not being constrained by the tight requirements of gov systems.
The little purpose I do find is in creating quality software that kind of makes stuff more efficient and by extension, helps progress towards a more sustainable future with less manual labor. But, in a way, that's what everyone on Earth does, so it's not much.
Wait, so you're saying that people would crash into you if you drove the speed limit?
I'm a very calm driver and regularly drive at or sometimes below the speed limit if visibility or other factors don't allow higher speeds. People do slow down and I never felt in danger - granted, this is usually at around 40 km/h instead of the limit of 50 km/h, but I can't imagine people are so careless they'd "run you off the road" if you weren't speeding.
People are rightly skepctical if the same group of doctors continues to publish studies that support their opinion, while all other studies contradict their results.
Well, they received 350k dollars in donations in 2020 alone.
I've also heard that they offer "consulting" to governments, such as in Brazil or India. Both used Ivermectin in their "Covid Kits". Didn't really work out, though.
>He made multiple recommendations some of which got adopted as standard of care (ivermectin wasn't adopted)
Shouldn't that show you that he might just be wrong on this one? If he was right, why wouldn't it be adopted?
>Then again, there are also studies designed to undermine the evidence for off label treatments, such as the one about HCQ that was retracted from the Lancet.
Man, aren't people tired of reposting the same things?
This was only shown in a petri dish at very high concentrations. You could say the same about a number of chemicals which we also would not survive in that concentration.
I do not understand why people want Ivermectin to work so badly.
>No problem, the locations are just metadata! Your files are still there, sitting in π - they're never going away, are they?