azertyfun

General anesthesia is very hard to get right, and requires a dedicated specialist with years of experience monitoring you at all times and even then people occasionally die from it.

When I get surgery from an alien veterinarian, IDC what it is I'll stick to local anesthesia.

Wait wait wait wait, where does this idea come from that the German people weren't to blame for Nazism? They were to blame. They were blamed. Their country was partitioned, their army was dismantled, their families were torn apart, and they endeavored to teach future generations what they did wrong. It did not even remotely make up for their nation's crimes against humanity, but they were "lambasted".

Do not weaponize history to justify your own apathy. These lessons were paid in blood. Yet new blood is being shed, and every American who does not fight against the regime is responsible. Yes, it's an unfair ask; no-one wants to live through troubled times. But you are living in them so stop cowering behind historical wrongs to feel better about your inaction.

"yet"

Just as a thought exercise, can you fathom and put into words a hypothetical breaking point that would wake people up to the madness around them?

Because here's my prediction: the regime will commit atrocity after atrocity, each one somehow more monstrous than the last, and nothing will happen, because your first paragraph will still be true. They will start wars and nothing will happen because your first paragraph will still be true. Then suddenly WWIII will happen and the regime will be unstoppable. Then, some manner of nuclear exchange, potentially marking the end of human civilization, because all fascist regimes end up destroying themselves -- too bad this one has the power to take the entire fucking world down with it.

If you are right that Americans won't fight for decency now (and I think you are), then all hope is lost. All historical precedent says that we are past the point of no return and you've forfeited your - and quite possibly humanity's - future.

Extra bonus: their vetting process doesn't involve a willingness to fuck patients over for extra cash.

Funny when here in Belgium, the government put a couple decades ago a cap on the number of doctors who were allowed to graduate medical school (numerus clausus). The goal is to reduce the number of doctors to pay for (with the support of existing doctors who want less competition).

The predictable result of artificial scarcity? I live a major city and if I want an appointment with any specialist it's a 6+ months delay or a 1-2 months if you can justify a daytrip to Brussels. This is having real tangible impacts on quality of care.

Obviously I would not trade my healthcare system for the American one but let's not pretend that money and greed aren't factors.

I am not saying it did not sell. That's the one thing it did really well. But it's hardly a hot take to say success is not a measure of quality. Plenty of mainstream slop out there. HP is slop. It's not offensively bad, but it's certainly not good.

Over 6+ books it's really sub-par writing to have a character who does not really grow because they already did not have any internal flaws or conflicts. The upside is that it's really hard to hate a blank slate MC and you don't risk writing yourself into a corner. I'm sure this is no small part of why there is so much HP fanfic specifically -- it's hard to write those characters badly as they lack so much depth!

Tons of things did the HP formula better, with well developed characters, good worldbuilding, good plot, good themes, yada yada. e.g. The Magicians (only saw the show) or Misfits&Magic. And in all of those the protags face strong personal hardships and are drastically different people by the end. Yeah, it's hard, but that's what storytellers do.

The EPI is not a German governing body. It is a partnership of banks who decided to implement Wero. All of them had to work to support it in addition to their existing systems, though it is not exceptionally hard because it's just a frontend for SEPA. If Spanish banks want to provide Wero to their customers then they'll join the EPI and have the same say as everyone else. But again, it's just fucking QR codes that translate to "make an instant SEPA mandate to send X € to Y IBAN" so I don't understand what there is to be scared of on a technical level.

I don't understand the point of fragmenting the Eurozone for the sake of fragmenting the Eurozone. Integration is in the long run more complex, expensive, and less user-friendly than standardization. What is so good about competing solutions that they should not eventually be replaced by a common digital payment system?

Wero is not "something the banks don't control". It's a SEPA-based standard, implemented by the participating banks. It originated with Dutch/Belgian technology and banking markets and Germany and France joined because their sorry asses didn't have anything better so it's a pure upgrade for them.

EuroPA is trying to work with fragmented markets, Wero is trying to establish a new standard. I fail to see EuroPA as anything other than a stepping stone to an eventually unified standard. Having a single currency but noeasy and practical way of spending it in a Austrian or Spanish online shop without going through American banks is an absolutely bonkers situation.

I already used it in Belgium though...? "Pushed by Germany" is a bold statement when the technology comes from iDeal/Bancontact which are Dutch and Belgian respectively and France is also a very large economy in the mix. Don't forget about Luxembourg as well. Benelux+FR+DE is hardly an ignorable market. France is already abandoning its existing solution for Wero. That's always been the plan.

Do you care to source your claims? My understanding both the EuroPA and EPI are a private agreement between banks, but only the latter has received explicit backing from the European Commission. The EuroPA does not seem nearly as ambitious and only seeks to streamline existing national SEPA-based online payments (unclear to me what that means exactly in practice), which is a nice short-term vision for sovereignty but probably not where the EU will want to be 5 or 10 years from now. The big selling point of Wero is that you can be shown a QR code and use it to pay easily and instantly with extremely low fees, regardless of your bank.

Harry Potter has no true self to discover. From the first to the last page of this pile of rags he is a wizarding Mary Sue with near-infinite privilege and the personality of an oyster. The story opens with "yer a wizard" in the first 50 pages and that's the end of his character arc. From then on he's a mere vessel for the reader to experience the world and the author to move the plot along.

.... As a matter of fact, what even is the biggest character arc in that story? I don't remember much, but Neville and Hermione have a glowup and Harry's uncle dies or something? And the weasleys open a shop? I certainly don't recall anything that lends credence to the idea that Rowling even believes that either individual people or societies are capable of profound change. The story begins and ends basically in the exact same place except the characters are 10ish years older.

There are ways to do good, approachable, clickable science communication without resorting to lies, ommission, or exaggeration which is futurism.com's whole schtick. There's so much happening in science that doesn't get covered by these low-quality sensationalist outlets because a misleading headline about petri dish cancer or mouse Alzheimer's gets more clicks and requires far less research than an article about whatever interesting advancements actually happened in science this week.

Except the Trials where that precedent was supposedly established actually allowed a great many people to escape conviction using that exact defense, then the prosecution subsequently gave up on the trials altogether. The Nuremberg trials were a travesty of justice, not because the Allies set up kangaroo courts, but because in an attempt to avoid such accusations and through unbelievable prosecutorial incompetence they let almost every Nazi who was still alive run free.

What I'm getting at is, don't expect justice to magically administer itself.

Americans loooooooooooooooove pointing out at their population density as a thought-terminating cliché although it's very rarely relevant to any discussion.

The size of your continent does not influence the size of your metro areas, dipshits. LA isn't the way it is because Wyoming is empty, LA is the way it is because a bunch of dumbasses decided that local mass transit and terraced housing should be outlawed and bulldozed in order to fuck over African-Americans communities.