People buying essentials on credit has been around for a very long time.
Longer than most think.
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
-Sixteen Tons, Tennessee Ernie Ford
Are they a university for research and learning or a tax-haven for investments^W gambling.
"Harvard is a hedge fund with classrooms" - Scott Galloway
Cursive is not generally less movement in the 2d plane of the paper
The problem is that the most-often taught English cursive style is bad. Spencerian cursive _is_ faster than block letters, because it allows you to smoothly move the pen. It's also slanted because slanted movements are faster than straight up/down lines.
A few things to note...
Over the past couple of decades, more and more roles within the British healthcare system have become able to prescribe - pharmacists (as noted in the summary), nurse prescribers, physicians associates (who technically should be under the supervision of a GP, but the way the NHS has that set up its very much a "PA prescribes, GP actually has little say")...
The role of doctors in the British healthcare system is being diminished and replaced by lower paid, lower trained positions, and GPs are particularly hard hit by it - which is why GPs are retiring or moving overseas at record rates, far beyond the ability for the current GP training schemes to replace them.
The UK is actively doctor hostile these days, and British doctors do not want to be part of it any more.
It's not just in Britain. All across the West, there's a shortage of native-born doctors. The expense and hassle of getting an MD is bad enough. Then you also have the modern stresses of being an MD (which in America, includes a highly litigious culture where doctors have to get maddeningly expensive malpractice insurance). The workload is huge, and the money is only good for the hyper-specialists now. The home-grown family doctor is an endangered species in the US, and we're addressing it in two ways: handing doctor duties to those lower on the chain, and importing doctors from the third world. Every single new doctor at my not-large Southern US hospital in the past three years has come from 3 places: India, Pakistan, or East Africa. This of course, robs those areas of badly needed doctors. And it doesn't really matter if your system is private or nationalized. Look at the ranks of doctors that staff your local services. You'll see similarities everywhere in the West: there's fewer of them, and they tend to come from overseas.
There was an educational movement just after 2000 where for some reason teachers decided that rote learning was bad, so the activists within the ranks of teachers went through and got rid of everything that was strictly memorization and practice-based. This included everything from phonics to flash cards and of course cursive. In fact I think keyboarding was also a victim. My kids didn't take any of these things in school (we're in Ontario, Canada). Their handwriting is awful.
The best schools always included a mix of techniques in teaching. You had "drill 'till it kills" in math, THEN you had logic and reasoning exercises. You had memorization of names and dates, THEN you had deep discussions of historical events. A good education includes both rote and discussion, and always has.
How to watch republicans piss away taxpayer money on utterly useless crap, trying to get back to a past that time forgot...
Oh FFS. There are lots of knowledge that isn't "practical" yet is valuable to our culture. You people piss and moan about children not being properly educated, but when someone suggests that things like cursive writing and other finer points of civilization should continue to be taught, you scoff with bullshit like this.
My mother's generation had mandatory classes in Latin during high school in the early 1960's. As a culture, we're the poorer for having dropped those kinds of requirements. There's a reason the finer schools still require them. I'm all for more of a focus on the practical for kids... more shop classes, more practical math (loans and interest, basic accounting, etc), but to suggest that we should chuck all of the finer points of culture into the trash because it's "trying to get back to a past that time forgot" is complete and utter horseshit.
Green energy requires oil based plastics and oil based chemicals
Not really. Plastics require hydrocarbons that can be sourced from anything, including coal or wood. Oil is just the most convenient source, but it's certainly not the only one.
And anyway, only 6% of oil is used for plastic production. Even increasing the demand for plastics won't materially affect oil consumption. Fossil hydrocarbons are also used as a feedstock for other industrial processes (fertilizer production mainly), but adding up all these uses accounts for just about 15% of global production.
Actually most of those house are now occupied. The "train stations to nowhere", supposedly an indicator of the imminent collapse of their economy, are now surrounded by industries and towns.
No they're not. You're exaggerating. The majority of these developments are still empty. China's declining birth rates coupled with the increased mortality from COVID have thrown in a monkey wrench into their planning. Up to 80 million units are still empty, with slim prospects for ever being bought or even used as social housing. Most of them are just crumbling ruins at this point. Even where people have moved in (often with heavy government subsidies, essentially turning units into an eastern Section 8 housing project), occupancy is still under 10%. They simply built too many units, and there aren't enough people to live in them. Some developments are being reclaimed for agriculture, with farmers grazing livestock and plowing fields on the strips of land between crumbing concrete structures.
...order to induce R&D, but the side effect is a glut of cars and mass collapsing of brands. Chinese citizens got dicked by a tator, who treats them like guinea pigs.
There is no "glut of cars". China still has a lot of unmet internal demand. The problem is that EVs are becoming a commodity in China now. So all the business models designed to exploit high-margin expensive products are becoming obsolete.
Dealerships are suffering the most, there is simply no margin for them to exist anymore, so they're doing all kinds of tricks to make sure they appear to be useful to carmakers. The double whammy is the fast depreciation of EVs. Just like with computers in the 90-s, people know that in 3 years a new EV will be better in all regards. So why waste money on expensive value-add services provided by dealerships?
Is there a viable path to citizenship from that?
You can get permanent residence easily, this gives you access to the all-important Chinese ID card and all the rights of residents. Including an ability to register a business. Naturalization is possible and technically you don't need anything special for it, but it's exceedingly rare. You also need to renounce your other citizenship(s) for that.
China is now becoming a popular emigration destination for Russian scientists. It's now very hard for them to emigrate to Europe/US, but China is easy. It's also helpful if the emigrants still want to visit Russia from time to time.
AI is bullshit and vastly overrated.
Well, it's not really AI in any sense of the honest term; it's not a self aware machine. AI has become a marketing term for servers running a bunch of fancy scripts that produce dialogue that can pass for human speech fairly well. BUT... AI is a game changer economically because those fancy scripts are already killing jobs, jobs that won't be replaced by something else. So in that sense, AI isn't "bullshit". It's an extinction level event for entire classes of formerly human work. And the economic and social and political crisis that it will create has clearly already began.
But as someone who was homeschooled, what are you going to do when you kids eventually have to interact with the shitshow that is the real world?
This presupposes that they don't get plenty of "real world" while they're homeschooling. As if they're in some hermetically sealed environment where bad things never touch them. When we homeschooled ours, one of my wife's single friends objected, asking us "what about socialization?". Well, what about it? There's still plenty of it with friends and family, church, and play. And when they're young adults, they're better able to deal with the scum of the world than a pre-teen or teenager thrown into the cage match that is modern public schools where you can't get to them. School is supposed to be about education, not be a Thunderdome where the weak are weeded out for the coming apocalypse. Whatever my sons missed in public schools, they're far better off not being in a concrete box where some hulking delinquent 3 to 4 years older than all his class peers is punching teachers or pulling a gun on students.
The problem today is that China and pretty much undermine any country's economy by subsidizing their domestic production.
No, they don't. The competition in China is cut-throat and the exported cars are not any cheaper than the ones in China. That's really all there is to it.
Not according to Kim Kardashian.
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
