Would those obese people be better off with bad cholesterol, blood pressure, etc.? It seems like you're trying to avoid outright saying we should just let fat people die as an example to everyone else.
It's an interesting topic because I've heard a South African joke that every American has a pharmacy in their house (talking about over the counter meds in that case) so I guess it's a common perception around the world. It's funny because most Americans have the opposite view (except regarding mental health medicine for some reason), if I had to summarize the attitude it's essentially "I hate being sick and I've got shit to do".
Can you expand on your point about American pharmaceudical consumption? It reeks of the naturalist fallacy but I realize you were mainly mentioning it as part of a broader statement so I'd like to hear more.
For Corona it's hard to say because it's unlikely someone would move to my neighborhood in such a situation (we're not ritzy but there's low-income areas that are 3/4 the price a 30 minute drive away). In general all evictions are the same because there's a ton of regulations in the state about what I can ask and what I can use as a reason to reject an applicant. If you're persuing a zero risk strategy then you get whatever is volunteered during a call to confirm their previous address and what's provided in a background check. The catch is that you can be persued legally for saying something that can be demonstrated to have resulted in an unfair rejection, so the safest strategy is to simply volunteer nothing while hoping the other party has a gabby manager. In parallel, California is really landlord hostile. That's not totally bad because we have the leverage but it means for example that even if I reject a tenant they could in theory sue me if I couldn't adequately demonstrate the rejection was part of a consistent policy (which is hard to do for a pandemic scenario). That's sort of a longshot situation but California judges also tend to side with tenants when they can so as a small landlord for whom court is expensive it's safer to have a policy towards evictions that is agnostic to the specifics.
California will charge you no matter what normally. The logistics vary by region a little and to some extent you can claim losses as a business expense but in the covid era the end result is still that the grace period for paying rent is more generous than the graces I get for paying property taxes. I do get some amount of relief but that relief isn't comprehensive to the point that I wouldn't be ahead if I evicted someone who had completely lost all work and was unlikely to find new work for half a year. Hopefully more aid will come but the state government is still in denial about the whole situation around covid (I strongly suspect our infection rate is radically higher than reported) so I'm not gambling it'll be soon.
As a small-time landlord, it's more complicated than that because the dynamic changes based on neighborhood and city. Filling is not a challenge for me specifically because I'm in California in one of the major cities, the reality of the locale is that there's always /somebody/ seeking (I suspect this is the case in most big cities) and while I try to help my tenants by being a little laxer than some owners I still have to pay property tax if nothing else (this is more complicated currently but it's still a presence). I'm also not some mega complex with a war chest though, I'm eight units with a revenue of 120k. Thankfully so far none of my tenants have been totally shut out from their work, there's been a few months some needed extra time but they've all managed to spring back.
I didn't know! Thanks! But is permanent blindness actually a moral hazard if you're using that blindness to create an immediate opportunity to shoot the subject? I'm not a soldier so I might be way off but I'm assuming being totally blind for even a few seconds is a massive handicap in an engagement.
I think it's much more likely that the desirable properties of crypto-currencies will be baked into government issued psudo-coins that retain the desirable parts of bitcoin while discarding the inconvenient parts. The only people who hate on fiat money are people who don't understand why backed currencies suck or why it would be bad if every country used the same currency. What doesn't suck though is money that essentially tracks itself and baking that self-tracking feature into an existing fiat currency via some kind of pseudo-coin would make regulatory enforcement wildly easier without the downsides of a backed currency.
Not trying to nitpick but I had trouble following some of your wording. What would the international incident be over if it happened during a fight? I get that blinding civilians by accident during a training exercise could blow up but blinding targets with a high powered laser doesn't seem that different from using flash grenades when storming a building. I was also unsure because you mentioned it happening during a fight and it seems like if you can already lock onto a target to fire a laser into their eyes it'd be more efficient to skip blinding them and just shoot or bombard them.
I kind of see it but it still seems like a stretch since lots of companies take legal action against governments for a variety of reasons. At face value the company is airing a legitimate concern/grievance and they're using the EU's own courts to explore the legitimacy of that grievance so it's not like they're subverting the rule of law somehow.