Come to the Netherlands and those people are exactly the people biking. The elderly have more mobility and health this way, a cargo bike is a very popular second car replacement, for groceries and kids.
And it's not like maintaining a car is cheap and such a good deal for the poor.
But yes, suburbs make a car required for most people outside of Europe, but we have to start somewhere.
I have good experience with FocusMate. It allows you to schedule specifc time and a specific duration. My form of procastination is to never start, but i show up to appointments, so just starting my day with this, gets the ball rolling.
Some of the innovation indeed happens at the edges of what we know, and we learn as human species collectively. But most innovation is about combining multiple fields, and cross pollinate new ideas.
Especially in the business world, where there is no unsolved problem, everything has been seen before, and most of us are just paid to get to the solution fastest. Applying knowledge from other fields, can be a great benefit.
Separation of private mobile 24/7 and office mobile during office hours.
Office mobile is also abandoned when you switch jobs, so can we freely shared because the responsibilities won't follow you
There is so much wrong with this. Let's start with the apparent numbers you are accepting. Millions of Americans will die directly from infections, millions will need life support, and an additional ten million will die as a direct consequence of an overwhelmed health care system.
With those numbers it's hard to imagine a family not hit with these enormous consequences, where you seem to gloss over.
Secondary, the virus has no will of it's own, it will just randomly mutate, and if a stronger variant appears it will do so, if there are vaccins or not.
However, you are advocating to roll the dice millions time more, just because there was already a very small chance this gets worse, and you think that is a good idea?
This is a great summary and would also explain the tendency to want to meet in response to a thought out document.
The author has wrestled with the topic long enough to write out a specific document.
The receiver of the document has not yet spent this time, and needs to understand broad outlines.
Besides this, if there is a meeting of equals, they might bring something to the table, the author hasn't thought about, or did but dismissed it for undocumented reasons. Let alone the buy in factor of a shared product vs 'you go build this, off you go'
I hate meetings for looking busy, but a 20 minute conversation can bring a week of work to actually implement the decision.
There is not really a 'european' government. There is a political body, which is setting some wider rules in the union, but only in areas which have been transferred by national governments.
However, there is a tendency of these national governments to introduce laws on that level, and then turn around to their citizens and tell them 'Bruxelles told us to do this'.
There are certainly some stupid laws on that level, especially in the area of tech. But most of the complaints (these laws are conflicting!) are just a meme.
In general is the support for the EU a majority [1] and the UK only succesfully 'won' the referendum to leave, and are now seeing the difference the EU has made in daily life.
The quotes research is a bit older, I am certain the Covid response and the fallout from Brexit has improved the support for the European union.
The EU is about the internal market, but having an internal market means it's about standards. There should be no technical difference between products from Denmark or Spain.
These rules are developed by the commision, but approved by national governments, which are then 'translated' into national laws.
In some areas the rules are very specific and detailed (eg chemicals) but in others the national governments are still in control (like protected titles such as baristers).
In the end is the motivation money. If you think your usb-c chargers are better than other countries, you would like to force apple to move to USB-C chargers. So it's a big economical incentive, and having countries on board like Germany, Scandinavia or the netherlands, makes the EU more suspicious of large companies, it's in their culture ;).
US has a more liberal policy where they make mistakes very costly, if you can succesfully bring a claim to the responsible party. The european mindset just tries to forbid things (Things aren't allowed if they aren't proven safe, instead of only things proven unsafe being forbidden)
But if the contract states there are no competing customers, and talks about 4 different sites, I'd say most bases should have been covered.
Az then turning around, and using three of these sites exclusively for UK production (since it was 'first') kinda defeats that.
Then there is indeed a difference in contract law, where the UK is far more focused on the letter of the contract, while European law is more about 'what could have been done'.
In the middle of a pandemic there isn't much we can do against pharmaceuticals. In the mean while has Az delivered more than Moderna until now.
So, we should take what we can. Only thing we could blame the EC on is that we should not have based our strategy of vaccinating out on such an unreliable, inexperienced partner with a complicated biological process.
Looking back and keeping the Pfizer vaccin European would have been less naive, but we would have started these vaccins wars.
Will be interesting what the long term consequences are of having UK and US vaccinated two months sooner.
I don't think Europe will forget this.
The argument from EU side is that EU money was also spend across those four sites needed to produce.
There was expectation of shared cost and shared resources.
Az committed they had no competing contracts, and if any would happen they would be brought up for resolution.
So it seems the exclusivity has been claimed twice, both in cost as in rewards. Furthermore on the 8th of December UK taskforce said the first shots were from the continent, so the resources were shared after all, but apparently only one way?
About the vaccin buy-in, I never heard that story, but I might be one-sided here.
I listened from the Brexit side of the media and the final argument was officially 'they did not receive the email (three times)'
The unofficial assumption was that the UK wanted to prove something on their own.
This time it worked out, both from securing the vaccins and delivering them. (Good on them, less people dying is a good thing in my book)
But the different risk appetite I imagine hard to replicate to the continent, see the German advise for az vaccins above 65.
You're right the expected pre production did not happen, and we can talk all year about what happened. And the UK, approving it sooner, but also in a worse situation, could dip in first.
The way forward is to find a fair balance in sharing these resources again, until the issues are solved.
Maybe by vaccination degree of the vulnerable, maybe by population size, maybe recognising the UK ordered about 2 dosis per capita, and the EU only 1.
I heard AZ offered 39 million in q1 and the commission not yet being satisfied. But if we're talking numbers, we can get some way out.
I just hope the export ban threat or the article 16 hasn't damaged too much.
But yes, suburbs make a car required for most people outside of Europe, but we have to start somewhere.