Are countries within the EU sovereign, or is the EU sovereign? This is a sincere question. I googled for the official answer, which is that member countries are sovereign, but in terms of realpolitik?
> Are countries within the EU sovereign, or is the EU sovereign?
They’re both sovereign. When a king signs a treaty binding them in some way, they give up some sovereignty. But they don’t usually cease being sovereign.
The EU can punish or withhold benefits at will from misbehaving states. Sovereignty isn't the issue when you are locked onto the teat with superglue; if the cow witholds that precious milk you will starve, sovereign or not.
Man, I broadly agree with you about this type of person, but it makes me cringe that you say "this creature" and use the dog metaphor. He sucks but he's a human.
You are, of course, under no obligation to capitulate to my discomfort, but I figured it was worth commenting.
Sure they are human and their actions are part of human behaviour. Having said that I don't hold with language policing so I just use the terms which best describe their behaviour without trying to tie myself into knots about who might be offended by my word choice. If they dislike being talked about in this way they can just cease behaving in ways which make people talk about them in this way. Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.
Rote learning isn't the be-all-end-all of education, but it's actually very important. You can't think anything interesting without knowing stuff to think about. Facts are important. Memorization is important.
The problem comes when rote learning actually is the be-all-end-all. Too many Asian students experience rote learning without any focus on actual learning. Our job used to be regurgitating paragraphs from textbooks, exactly as they were, into our exam papers. In classrooms, we were told that war happened in year X, but there was no discussion and analysis as to actual reasons, the milieu at the time, and the understanding and takeaway from that piece of history.
Facts and memorization are important, but they need to be in service to actual learning and understanding.
More of "because you are a continuous chemical reaction that started 4 billion years ago". A bunch of legacy crap gets left around from the time before higher order thought when the brain - muscle interactivity was just based on feelings.
If we had all those animals, especially those around the time of the cambrian explosion to experiment on as they developed it would probably make more sense in the 'but it does' department. This is also why your math teacher wants you to show your work.
There's a stronger case for world hunger being bottlenecked than healthcare. World hunger is a logistics problem now, but no amount of money lets you print doctors.
You can't just throw money at the world hunger problem, it will end up in some warlord's coffers. Hunger still exists because it is politically useful to keep people hungry.
With a little bit of lag time (school) we could have a metric fuckton of doctors. We have a metric fuckton of shitty lawyers. Doctors are artificially gated in the US
What’s the joke? “What do you call the person who graduated last in their class from med school? A doctor.”
The optimal amount of bad doctors is not zero. But there is a point of "ChatGPT does a better job than this man does, and we're talking GPT-4o, not GPT-5 Pro". In which case we have a problem.
I don't know what wealth distribution means in this context, or why it's relevant at all, but food grows fast and doctors take like 20 years to grow no matter how much money you throw at it or where you get the money. And the context above was more specifically "fully pay health care costs" which is a comical fantasy the moment you try to actually define what that means, because the limit is not the price.
Changing the entire paradigm of medical care would be possible with enough money. There's no logical reason it takes 20 years to become a doctor. The fact that it does severely hampers both the quantity and quality of doctors. Becoming a doctor is much less about knowledge and intelligence than it is about attrition resistance. Loads of capable students disregard medical careers each year for more rapidly attainable positions. In many cases these are the MOST capable students because they recognize the problems with pursuing medical degrees.
Certainly the most skilled and advanced in the medical field will need significant schooling but there needs to be a major reform in healthcare training. One that produces more knowledgeable and skilled professionals and not a glut of questionably competent nurse practitioners.
The school system needs an Official™ medical justification to grant your kid extra accommodations for whatever his behavioral issues are. They are less interested in whether he "actually" has autism than in a rubber stamp that gives them more options for managing him. Which might indeed be a good thing for your son! It's hard to say without being closer to the situation.
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