I didn’t know what other countries recommended for the Covid vaccination so I asked perplexity what the other g10 countries do for their policy.
It seems like all g10 nations have risk-based recommendations and none for everyone in the general population.
I find it hard to get clear reporting on this to differentiate what’s uniquely “against the science” vs just the US changing to match the rest of the world.
For Germany there is a General Recommendation by the Stiko(Standing Comitee on Vaccination).
there is an PDF that sums it up: https://www.rki.de/EN/Topics/Infectious-diseases/Immunisatio... on Page 7.
These Vaccinations are also covered by the Insurances.
I’d stopped using it because its answers usually didn’t help, but I’ve not used Perplexity Pro recently. Is its main value just finding surface level info on websites quickly? Do you also use google.com/ai or similar as a fallback often or does it do a good enough job?
Are men "leaving their children and working all day"? Should we not pay them to stay home?
This view is either fully gendered or assumes that all families are made up of two people and one person's wages should support a family. Neither are the conversation on this table.
The conversation on this table is:
Our current economy, in nearly every state and for every metro requires more than minimum wage to rent not own, an apt and live, not save for the future. Childcare has gone up 30% in the last few years alone and wages, as you have likely experienced, have not.
We cannot continue to expect people with choices to have children given this economic situation.
Trust me. You want people to continue having children, and you'd prefer them to be positive additions to society, for your own well-being in old age.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear initially. The point is that women should not stay home. Yes, this is “fully gendered” because reality is fully gendered. Far and away the majority of childcare is performed by women. Always has been. Always will be.
The emphasis on jobs over children as where we want women’s energy, time, and attention to go is what is being demonstrated by this policy. We will pay you to leave your children with others. We will not pay you to take care of your children.
Why anybody thinks this will result in more children being born is beyond me. Sure, it might make it “easier” in some sense to have children, but what it teaches is job > children, and that is going to result in people learning to deprioritize children. As intended.
"We want women's energy and time" seems to indicate "not women" want women's energy in time.
If you will not pay "women" to take care of "their children" rather than, say..."the future of society" or "our children" then women will not have a child.
And that is exactly what you're seeing happen. Women worked in all times. Every single time period you can think of. Population is dropping because
a/ we have rights as women and are outstripping men on every measurable term within just a couple generations of access
b/men are not stepping up to create something more equitable
Men have been offered the chance to step up and change the current (and yes its current, not a "natural state" of affairs) dynamic.
The idea that you're striking on is defining my life for me and quite frankly, with your benefit in first position.
> Childcare has gone up 30% in the last few years alone and wages, as you have likely experienced, have not.
This is a major statement, and I don't think it's fully qualified.
Why have childcare expenses imcreased by 30% in the past few years? There should be an arbitrage opportunity if costs have stayed fixed. If costs have increased, is it due to general economic pressures or increased regulatory burden? If the former, wages should catch up (and flooding the market with additional labor likely will exert downward pressue market wages). If the latter, then why on earth are we passing such nonsense regulation?
In either case, moving out of a major metro is always an option.
According to a quick google and the census:
|| Approximately 3 in 4 Americans (or about 86%) live in a metropolitan statistical area (MSA), with the percentage of the U.S. population in these areas reaching an all-time high. As of 2024, nearly 294 million people—or about 86% of the total population—resided in a metro area, a trend that continues to grow.
If we think the wage differential will keep up in less populated areas, that is no longer occurring either. We do not live in a perfect capitalist system and many trades, activities and services are given benefits and protections for a variety of reasons.
There are other places - outside of the US - that have provided this tax credit. Its not shameful to learn from other countries and adopt things that are going well and are beneficial both to the freedom of people and the economy.
Getting all children early education, which has been shown to have huge effects later on in academic performance (better) and criminality (less).
Let's say college is optional for the individual, as the child/teen decides.
Why is primary/middle/secondary school free and public, but daycare/preschool not? The child can't decide for itself, and there is data showing that having early education benefits everyone.
Does this provide education or care? Being in childcare in and of itself is not correlated with better outcomes. Only high-quality care produces such results, and greater hours in non-family-member childcare results in long-term negative outcomes in for example impulsivity and risk-taking, regardless of the quality of the care.
Exactly. If the incentive was to take care of children, the money would go with the child whether they are taken care of by a stay at home or someone the state can tax income from.
100%. This is also why it makes sense to have money move with the child regardless of whether they’re in public schools or home schooled or at a private school.
If I'm already benefiting from a new boiler, I don't need another new boiler just to get the $5000 tax credit. This is silly. There are benefits to being a working parent vs a stay at home parent and if you have access to stay at home care you simply don't need it.
This is like getting mad that my workplace offers pet insurance when I have no pets so I demand the money anyway. Or demanding a trophy for not participating in a competitive sport.
Morality is self-interest. Piracy isn't immoral because they aren't staked in the impacted industries. Eating meat isn't immoral because it's in their self-interest to keep doing it. What is immoral are things that would impact them, like if I stole their property, or if I take credit for their code at work, or if I ate their dog. Morality is easy to understand when you realize everyone is a hypocrite who uses their large brains to construct post hoc justifications, not unlike LLM confabulations. You can't argue against it because you'll get yet another confabulation conveniently aligned with self-interest. We don't even realize we're doing it. It's so baked into our neurology.
Don’t forget that piracy allows for front ends that actually want to make the user happy and have good UX.
I use Plex and it shows what I’m currently watching first. So continuing to a new episode is easy. If I sub to 50 episodes they just show up on my first line. Hulu makes me scroll down a few rows to continue watching.
It also shows cast and crew and other movies with the same.
Prime Video keeps starting the wrong episode when I click on "Continue Watching". That's infuriating in particular because that often makes me watch advertising 2-3 times: When starting, when clicking into the middle of the episode to confirm I indeed have watched it already and then again when switching to the correct episode.
It blows my mind what slow momentum Amazon has for a company with such vast resources. Kindle, for example, lacks so many features to enhance the reading experience. Jailbreaking my kindle and installing KOReader was a game changer.
They just don't care enough. User experience only needs to be "good enough", mostly determined by the question of users will tend to terminate the subscription without the feature or with the bug.
It's reportedly alright - the resolution mechanic seems a little fiddly with varying pools of dice for everything. The lore is pretty interesting though and I think a lot of the point of that series of games was reading up on that.
I ran a long running campaign, it is pretty fun. The game books were obviously written by artists and no mathematician was involved, some of the rules are very broken (may have been fixed in later revisions).
The magic system is very fun and gives players complete freedom to come up with spells on the fly. The tl;dr is there aren't pre-made spells, you have spheres you have learned, and you can combine those spheres of magic however you want. So if someone has matter and life, reaching into someone's chest and pulling out their still beating heart would be a perfectly fine thing for a brand new character to be able to do. (Of course magic has downsides, reality doesn't like being bent and it will snap back with violent force is coerced too hard!)
The books are laid out horribly, there isn't a single set of tables to refer to, you have to post it note bookmark everything. Picking up and playing the rules are really simple, the number of dots you have in attributes + skill is how many d10 dice you get to roll for a check. 8+ is a success, and you can reroll 10s. 90% of the game is as simple as that, but then there are like 5 pages of rules for grappling including basically a complete breakdown of wrestling moves and gaining position, but feel free to just ignore those.
It seems like all g10 nations have risk-based recommendations and none for everyone in the general population.
I find it hard to get clear reporting on this to differentiate what’s uniquely “against the science” vs just the US changing to match the rest of the world.
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