Because your statement is misleading. Some countries are are using it more frequently than the US, but Germany and the UK prescribe it much less. Italy had the highest prescription rates, but are no longer using it. While France prescribed it more often than the US but are also stopping.
Lastly, the argument of "if countries outside the US are prescribing it, it must work" is just nonsensical. Doctors prescribing a drug is not evidence a drug works.
Considering Star wars media continues to print money for Disney, and core Star wars consumers were appalled at the franchise before the acquisition (prequels), that's not the best example.
In theory that sounds nice but as far as trusting a company with my privacy/data, a Chinese backed social network is probably one of the only entities I would trust less than Facebook.
This has been painfully obvious for the duration of this administration, nevermind just recently.
The danger is that at some point an administration would be so adept at this that it's not painfully obvious. In theory, at the very least the electorate is informed enough at this point that they can consider this information when voting. Admittedly, that's pretty optimistic take on the US electorate however. An educated, well informed public is necessary for a successful democracy, and America's problems with education are well documented.
The dawning realization that there are very little to no checks or balances on the executive branch has not led to calls for reform, it has not led to calls to ratchet back power in the executive branch at all.
Just the opposite, it seems like both Democrats and Republicans top priority seems to be seizing and expanding their own power. Nothing else matters, they just want this newfound freedom to operate in the margins for themselves. All the messaging is about how the other side is evil and THIS election is the most important of our lifetimes, you absolutely have to vote for our team and not the truly evil other team.
The first competent authoritarian demagogue is going to do much more damage than this administration. Nobody seems to care at all about the side effects, they just want their team to stay in power or get back in power.
Sounds very similar to the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" theory of why non-millionaires let millionaires do pretty much whatever, except in this case it would be "temporarily embarrassed party in power".
A cold comfort is that there's no real selective pressure to become more adept at it: fool at least half the population (for certain values of half) most of the time, and you don't need anything else.
In some ways, it being grotesque is part of the appeal. Being subtle about it takes away the domination politics aspect of it, and what's the point of politics if it's not to hear the wailing of your enemies underfoot?
Aha! You’re presuming people have a choice between “dirty» and “clean». It’s a lot more muddied than that and people will weigh their priorities accordingly and cast their votes.
> I speculate that previous administrations have been just as corrupt, but much better at hiding it.
This is just the perennial "both sides" argument and I don't buy it. The excuse is that "everybody does it and so we need to cheat to keep up at all" and although I'm sure president Trump believes it's true, it's just another example of the distorted reality of the current administration.
There is major republican control over all three branches of government and the president isn't actually inept, but look at how hard it is for him to get away with blatant corruption. The fact of the matter is that (at least for now) there are apolitical people in government who are willing to stand up to abuse of power and they typically do so. There's enough of them that I don't believe in some conspiracy that "all politicians have been committing crimes and everybody know it". That's just a political argument with no grounding.
tl;dr The number of abuses of power from the current administration isn't because they're worse at hiding it. It's because the president cheats more and has been doing it his entire life even before the presidency.
Nothing in your comment argues against the claim that all (both) parties are irredeemably corrupt though. You're just arguing that Trump is worse.
I do agree with the latter statement, but I completely understand why so many people just went 'fuck it' and voted for him. The Democrats are a nasty bunch too.
EDIT: if you're on a sinking ship, and one party argues in favor of arranging the deck chairs in a certain way and tut-tuts about suboptimal ways, and another party says (or is forced to say) "fuck it, arranging deck chairs is stupid.", would you not agree with the latter? Of course it's unfortunate when this is followed up with "let us buy new expensive deck chairs from this friend of mine", but that's not an issue when the media focuses on the arrangement of deck chairs.
I also feel trapped between two bad choices. My point wasn't that the political left is a shining example of purity. It was that the corruption of the current administration so far exceeds anything that came before that saying "well the other side does all of this too" is dishonest. It sounds like we agree on that.
What we disagree on is how we get out of it and and after four years of "burn the ship down" politics, what I've learned is that I'm one of the idiots on the ship. I'm told that the economy is doing well, but I've only seen tax breaks for the richest Americans and my wallet doesn't feel any heavier. My friend's small business was denied a PPE loan during the ongoing financial crisis while Trump's friends are able to get them without an issue. My feeling is that the current party might be saying "arranging deck chairs is stupid", but they're going behind my back anyways and arranging them for their friends and political allies.
I had the same thought, which made me think how little we know about the ecosystems on earth, which made me think it's even more important to protect the environment. We destroy things before we even know they exist.
I get conflicting thoughts about this. Sometimes I feel we must have killed countless deep sea dwelling species without ever seeing them. Then sometimes I'm amazed by the resilience and scale of the ocean and wonder if somehow, very few species have gone extinct because of us.
The sheer biomass we've removed from the ocean is staggering though, and the cascading effect on the deep sea ecosystems must be immense. There is so much less food to fall down there now.
In my experience most people use them interchangeably with no distinction between them. The only time I've seen anyone show disdain for one term vs another is here on HN.
I've never cared what people refer to me as, and I've never seen anyone voice a preference for it among people I've interacted with.
I call myself a Software Engineer, because pretty much every job title I've had has used that term.
The article talked a lot about their new dark mode feature, how they wouldn't have been able to implement it in their old tech stack, and how they were able to reduce their CSS size while adding a dark mode.
But is dark mode all that important? Even as a developer I don't care at all about FB having a dark mode, did they really need to rewrite their entire site to implement features no one cares about? Also, for a photo and video sharing site, is CSS size really important? I just loaded the page and it loaded 13.2mb worth of data while making 249 requests. Thanks for cutting down your 400kb CSS file though I guess.
"I don't care about this feature" !== "nobody cares about this feature." I feel like this is a fallacy a lot of programmers (myself included) tend to fall into, but it's a dangerous trap.
That's not what the article said. It was highlighting how despite some hospitals being overrun, these field hospitals still went unused because there were no plans in place to utilize them.
We didn't flatten the curve enough to make these hospitals useless. We simply didn't use them despite needing them.
That's a gracious reading. If there had been an absolute need for more beds, plans would have been developed to make use of the space.
Instead, it might imply hospitals were dealing with increased load, perhaps needing more beds than they had but not so much of an increased load to justify implementing and following a plan to use these facilities.
Did we read the same article? It praised the actions of building the hospitals, while stating what you said in that it shows we weren't as prepared as we should be for a pandemic.
>we kept the infections low enough that we didn't need to use it.
The article specifically said the hospitals were needed despite being unused. The problem was existing hospitals didn't have policies in place to use them, so instead doctors were treating patients in overrun hallways while these beds lay empty.
Lastly, the argument of "if countries outside the US are prescribing it, it must work" is just nonsensical. Doctors prescribing a drug is not evidence a drug works.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.statista.com/chart/amp/2141...