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?
At least 329 million Americans will die over the next 100 years no matter what we do; that's 3.29 million per year on average. So far less than 800K people died from COVID19 in almost 2 years... That's 400K per year; ~12% of all deaths... OK, this is a very rough/approximate calculation but is it worth ruining people's lives and taking away people's freedoms over a slight increase in death rate? This isn't the black plague. Personally, I wouldn't accept any significant change in my lifestyle for anything less than 100% (2x) increase in my chance of death... So I won't even bat an eyelash over a 12% increase (and I'm in a not-at-risk group so it's probably way less for me); and especially if I have some control over the risk... Some smokers take on much bigger risks by continuing to smoke; the risk is worth it to them - Who are we to judge?
This pandemic has been blown out of proportion. The media emotional 'contagion' has had a bigger negative impact on people's lives than the actual virus. Did everyone suddenly forget the emotional 'contagion' study which Facebook did some years ago? https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17470161155795...
The result of that study was that people's emotions could be manipulated without their knowledge... How do we know that what we're dealing with now isn't just Facebook and the media putting the results of that study into practice? It sure looks that way. I can definitely feel myself being manipulated by the media and I suspect that others who are more suggestible than me are even more so and less likely to notice it...
Using your math, there have been 738k deaths in ~1.7 years, or roughly 434k deaths per year yielding 15%, or 1 out of 6 deaths.
I just want to point out that death is not the only bad outcome of Covid. Medical researchers are finding evidence of memory loss and brain fog, long term disability, and long recovery times. https://www.foxnews.com/health/covid-side-effects-could-incl...
Also, 2x chance of death is a pretty high threshold! (I don't mean any criticism, just surprise.)
But this all focuses on the role of an individual and not the on role of a community. Smokers don't just harm themselves; second-hand smoke harms other people. Indoor smoking bans are for communal health, they aren't primarily meant to impact the individual smokers, who just go outside. Similarly, Covid-19 harms others if they get infected, and it also harms people who have put off non-emergency surgeries when hospitals are overcrowded.
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Re: Emotional Contagion. If I remember correctly, the effects that were reported in the Facebook study were small, on the order of a change from 5.1 to 5.3 positive emotion words. (But it has been a while, so take that with a grain of salt.)
> How do we know that what we're dealing with now isn't just Facebook and the media putting the results of that study into practice?
This is an interesting question. Consider that lumping 'the media' together with Facebook means that most media outlets in every country (hundreds of thousands of people with their own agendas, political slants, biases, motivations, and who don't speak the same language) are now cooperating with one of the few companies widely credited with decimating newsroom web-traffic and by extension newsroom profits.
That's entirely untrue. Nuclear power plant designs used in France (and I think Germany?) participate in load following and can do so between 30-100% capacity at around 5%/min.
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 yes, suburbs make a car required for most people outside of Europe, but we have to start somewhere.