I don't think you have any idea about the problems in 3rd world countries. There are many people below the poverty line and these canteens are a god send.
You must be against state sponsored healthcare too ?. Isn't that just taking taxes from healthy people and using it to treat ill people. In your words - corruption.
The US Civil War killed 620,000 people, and ruined the lives of many others. That's pretty freaking bad. On the upside, it freed about 3.9 million slaves, but really there should have been a less costly political solution to the slavery problem, as was found in every other country in the Americas at around the same time.
>"All civil wars are bad" produces logical contradictions such as both the rise and the fall of the Soviet Union were bad.
The fall of the Soviet Union didn't occasion a Civil War.
Life in jail is cheaper than the DP's process with all appeals, death row security etc.
Also awaiting a natural (slower, more decrepit, more meaningless and insignificant) passing is more punishment than a quick end.
Even more so for a rock-star fool like Manson.
It's possible nowadays with a bit of effort to create entirely new "facts" via a one-two shuffle between news sources and Wikipedia.
First, you publish an article on some news source, asserting the fact.
Then you update Wikipedia with that fact, citing your own article.
Other news sources check Wikipedia, find your new fact, and incorporate it into their own articles. Now you have a bunch of extra sources for your Wikipedia article.
Except that any reputable "news source" won't let random people post stories with made up facts - and Wikipedia editors will shoot down disreputable sources such as your personal own blog.
This is fine as far as flat Earthism goes, but flat Earthism is a ridiculous outlier even among ridiculous fringe theories.
By making your prototypical example of a dubious minority opinion the flat Earth theory, I think you risk falling into bad mental habits. If you go round thinking "people who disagree with me on subject X are just like flat Earthers" then you're doing both them and yourself a disservice -- yourself because no matter who you are it's certain that on some issues it's you who are wrong.
What I'm saying is that flat Earth is a bad example because it maps poorly onto just about any other real-world disagreement.
It's an extreme example, and therefore does invite a tendency to easily dismiss non-mainstream thought, but that's intentional within Wikipedia.
The 'how to reply' sections make it clear what most fringe theories try to rely on to convince editors, but Wikipedia is not a place for convincing - it is a catalog of what's currently, broadly accepted.
It intends to be what’s currently broadly accepted. It’s success in achieving that goal relies on a labor model that may or may not be well suited towards that end.
>Wikipedia is not a place for convincing - it is a catalog of what's currently, broadly accepted.
That's true, and it should be the case. But how do we distinguish between "that which is currently broadly accepted" and "that which is currently the leading theory but other theories are also quite widely accepted" and "that which is probably the leading theory, by a narrow margin, but then again might not be, because nobody does polls on this stuff, so we're basically just going by what wikipedia editors reckon"?
What, for instance, should we do if 80% of people believe theory A and 20% of people believe theory B? (Suppose this is one of those rare cases where we're fortunate enough to have actual polls).
You present both, as long the 20% one is actually represented by reliable sources, and then you balance the article appropriately. There're quite a few subjects on Wikipedia for which there is yet no scholarly consensus but different viewpoints exist.
Alternatively, it's a great example because it makes the points so obvious. It takes practice to recognize these ways of arguing and thinking, and learning to see the most obvious form first can be followed more easily by identifying subtler forms.
However, i fail to see what the big deal about it. I have yet to meet a flat earther irl, and i doubt they have great influence over our society.
They are a curiosity at best.
We have way more dangerous and widespread believes.
Like: did you know there is a way to cure malaria ? Cause i had malaria for years and everybody i knew, including my doctors and myself, believed it couldn't be cured.
And then i meet a guy from the pasteur institute (in france you can't get more serious than that, they are the nasa of biology) who told me that they had a perfectly fine protocol to kill the parasite in the liver for years. And using nothing more that regular malaron. So i went to the institute and indeed, they do.
Our society is working on a pile of false informations, obsolete data, incomplete thruths and lies. All with major consequences. It's human nature.
Flat earth it the least important of it. I'd say it's even a good thing cause it helps revealing very confused people or flaws in our educational system.
I have met one serious flat-earther (working as a QA engineer funnily enough) and I think they may be more common than you think. The person had clearly easily impressionable personality as well as a 'there must be someone behind this' sort of personality which as we've recently seen, is quite common in western society. Furthermore, he at least had an intellectual confidence to share this view ("I know this sounds ridiculous but you should check it out") and many might not. I guess what I mean is flat-earthism is just a symptom of something quite common.
When i lived in mali, a cab driver told me he wasn't afraid of aids cause it was well known you could be cured by making love to a virgin. There is no mysterious mechanism here. Just human nature.
From the WHO's "Guidelines for the treatment of malaria", third edition [1]:
"Radical cure. This term refers to both cure of blood-stage infection and prevention
of relapses by killing hypnozoites (in P. vivax and P. ovale infections only)." (p. 4)
"The objective of treating malaria caused by P. vivax and P. ovale is to cure both
blood-stage and liver-stage infections (called radical cure), thereby preventing
recrudescence and relapse, respectively." (p. 61)
"The recommended treatment for radical cure of P. ovale relapsing malaria is the same as that for P. vivax, i.e. ACT or chloroquine combined with primaquine (total dose, 3.5 mg base/kg bw). [...] P. malariae and P. knowlesi do not form hypnozoites and so do not require radical cure with primaquine." (p. 290)
There's nothing there about P. falciparum, the major malaria parasite, but my understanding is that that also doesn't have a hypnozoite stage.
A recent paper "Challenges for achieving safe and effective radical cure of Plasmodium vivax" [2] suggests that this approach is well-accepted, but not yet a slam-dunk in the field.
You won't, that's my point. Malaron is sold as a preventive drug, not a curratvie one. However, i can give you the contact of the tropical disease specialist that i saw, which in turn may give you more informations.
Not really, it's just a prototypical example of a fringe conspiracy that gets pushed and the lead of the essay explicitly notes that you're unlikely to come across them. The point is that the tactics of argument presented would be the same. It's all tied back to due weight.
The US is also a major outlier among the places you mentioned, in that it's still breeding at above-replacement rates. I wonder if the difficulty of getting a house/car that can comfortably accommodate multiple children is a big factor.
I think that's primarily down to the US population being generally younger than most other western countries, and probably to an extent the average age of first marriage in the US, which is pretty much the lowest in the developed world. It's likely mostly the age profile thing, though, and the difference will diminish over time.
The US house size thing is, I suspect, more down to a combination of regulation and consumer preference. There may be some aspect of available land, but it's not the biggest factor; sparsely populated European countries, like Ireland, mostly have houses about the average European size.
The US generally has lighter regulation around energy efficiency, and to some extend fire safety and various other things, than most European countries for house building. This reduces the per-sqm cost of building, making big houses more feasible.
But US consumers also seem to prefer a large house (often a pointlessly large house; see the 3-5000sqft McMansions which have oddities like multiple dining rooms to use up the surplus space) with a very long commute to basically anything, where you're totally dependent on a car, whereas this is less popular in most European countries; they exist to some extent (especially in rural areas), but are less appealing.
Ultimately, you don't need a big house or car to have kids. In fact, Americans were having more kids back when their houses and cars were smaller. The big car, in particular, is a fairly modern invention; minivans have only really been a thing since the late 80s, and the SUV is a creature of the late 90s.
I've often thought about the large size of houses in the United States. I'm sure the reasons are complex and various, but here are some of the drivers of large and "cheaply built" homes. I don't say "cheaply" derogatorily, but as a comparison in cost of underlying materials. The vast majority of single-family residences in the US are made with wood (as apposed to masonry). Most homes in the US that appear to be made of masonry are done so with a veneer layer only.
- When a homeowner sells their primary residence, they are allowed a tax exemption of up to $250,000, or twice that amount if married. Since the 1960s, inflation-adjusted prices have been on the rise, which means the potential for a large tax-free gain when you sell.
- Housing in the United States are massively subsidized by tax policy. Mortgage interest is a deduction to income when filing federal income tax. This means that a dollar spent on a mortgage payment is worth more than a dollar spent on something such as a vacation, a car or other non-deductible purchase.
- Americans tend to move much more frequently than Europeans. An American will live in, on average, 2 or 3 times as many residences than a European [1]. As such, I think there is less "attachment" to a particular structure. Because people anticipate living in or owning a residence for less than 10 years, it seems that size is prioritized over durability.
- In the United States, the quality of public schools is highly correlated to the income of the surrounding area [2]. Most communities with higher income households are full of neighborhoods have covenants that require homes of a minimum size that are legally enforceable through homeowner associations. Not surprisingly, individuals with resources take measures to ensure that their neighbors are their economic peers. Parents are generally willing to sacrifice a lot to ensure high quality education for their children, which means they are willing to spend a large percentage of their income on housing (if that's what it takes to gain access to good schools).
Full disclosure: I am an American but have traveled extensively throughout the world and have often wondered what drives the size of homes in the US.
None of this, except arguably the durability thing, really impacts the size, though, only the price (and a lot of those big houses are quite cheap). As a European (Irish; average new build is about 90sqm), what puzzles me is what’s attractive about the size, especially when you get to 3000sqft and over. It just seems like a lot of space that most families would have little use for, which needs maintenance (and presumably costs a fortune to heat and cool).
The cost of utilities in the US are relatively cheap - especially compared to many places in Europe. The cost of electricity in Ireland, for example, is more than triple what I pay in my state [1].
This also applies to gasoline / petrol. Much cheaper in the USA which makes living father from work less of an issue, which means cheaper and bigger lots are a viable option for living. Big, inexpensive parcels of land allow for bigger homes.
When people are incentivized by the government to spend money in housing and when the cost of building materials used are relatively cheap, and the cost of living in a home is modest, I suppose the proliferation of larger homes is not surprising.
The US is no longer breeding at above-replacement; we're now just slightly below.
However, to quote from the link below: “Yes, it’s below replacement level, but not dramatically so,” Dr. Brady said. “We have a high level of influx of immigrants that compensates for it.”
This could, of course, change if Trump ever builds the wall. :)
Now that you mentioned it.. Since japan's birth rate is decreasing year by year, it does make sense that home prices naturally decrease/depreciate. Simply less demand.
Are e-mail providers "multiple companies which must of necessity coordinate all their activities with each other"? Sure, but when you put it that way it sounds nefarious. The underlying idea here, if I understand it correctly, is to force Facebook into defining protocols for what they do - something closer to e-mail than the current Facebook model.
You could contract different lines out to different companies. I think Tokyo does this.
At the very least, though, you could contract out the running of the whole system to a company for five years a time and let different companies compete for the contract every five years.
This isn't a panacea, but it can sometimes help if the main problem is corruption-induced inefficiency as it seems to be for most major cities in the US.
You'd need some kind of long term planning guidance behind that though because anything beyond the most surface level changes or additions to the system is going to take longer than 5 years and what contracting company is going sink millions of dollars into a system they're only guaranteed to be running for the next couple years?
The MBTA in Boston does this with its commuter rail lines. Currently the contract is held by Keolis, before that, a consortium of companies led by Veolia Transportation. You can Google "MBTA commuter rail performance" to see how well that's worked out.
In the US, the price of unskilled labour has been deliberately driven down by decades of non-enforcement of immigration laws. Even a year after the election of a President who was supposed to deal with this issue there's been very little action.
In Australia we have control of our borders and the price of unskilled labour is more respectable.
It might just be my opinion bit I think that the individual right to refuse is never enough protection. Especially in employment where preying on people who can't afford to say no seems to be the norm.
The government taking your money and giving it to other people for votes isn't capitalism, it's corruption.