I guess we're ready to blame anything but work hours, no one has time to take care of kids anymore. The correlation between industrialization and falling birth rates has long been established, but it's just shrugged off as a "that's just the way it is" rather than taking a serious look at the 8-hour work day.
It's mostly just about getting the data out of the news cycle. If you don't have new data on the oceans warming then there's no news story, so less pressure on Big Oil to greenwash their industry.
Then stop using the roads and everything else that tax money paid for. If you keep using things that's been paid for using taxes the government will only feel more entitled to collect it.
Since very few types of plastic are actually recyclable most of it ends up being burned despite being separately collected, so I don't think you can simply discount the recycled plastic from the plastic waste being produced.
Japan burns about half of its collected plastic via thermal recycling (recovering the energy) and recycles about a third into new products.
The key point is that Japan recycles 85% of its plastic waste, which is excellent compared with a country like the US that recycles about 10%. And, the per capita plastic use in the US is far more than in Japan.
This whole point pops up on the internet so frequently because tourists go to Japan and see lots of individually packaged items in supermarkets and convenience stores. Yes, there is room for improvement there, but overall the situation is not as bad as many countries and probably doesn't deserve the attention it gets.
Are we really so sure that reducing working hours can't, itself, lead to improved economic health? Such as by increasing distribution of income flows, and increasing time available for economic consumption?
One of the greatest tricks of the modern era in the US has been to convince everyone that making the slice of pie bigger for the richest people is necessary to grow the economy.
In fact, we now know, with a fairly high degree of certainty, that it can.
There have been numerous experiments with four-day work weeks or six-hour work days that have almost uniformly shown increases in overall productivity.
Not just productivity per hour at work. Overall productivity.
The resistance to this is clearly not based in financial concerns, but rather in control, and classism.
1. Not everyone is spending all their "spending money" every month, and 2. more free time allows people to get more value for their money (e.g. by comparing more alternative options).
I learned what a crossover cable was as a teenager because I was in an electronics store buying an ethernet cable and I picked the cool-looking black-and-red cable. Then the guy behind the counter told me that the cool-looking cable I picked is a special cable and instead handed me a boring grey cable. :(
This is not public scrutiny though, that comes from the public and their institutions. This is simply a nation meddling in the internal affairs of other nations.
It’s not so innocent and pure are you are trying to portray. The average person cares more about important issues like immigration, jobs, economy .. not self appointed experts trying to regulate software companies about things that don’t have material impact on their lives ..
Im a big fan of democracy. It's made me fabulously wealthy compared to the third world one party socialist system (until early 2000s) I grew up under ... my point isn't that the US knows better than Dutch voters. It's that I doubt the average Dutch person (and by average I literally mean the 99%) gives a flying f*K about whether Google Cloud is the right place to store data or whether AWS is a monopoly. Most people care about housing, jobs, wages, immigration, crime, healthcare, and the cost of living ... the reason these bureaucrates can spend so much time meddling in tech is precisely because most people aren't paying attention. I'd like to see the same regulatory energy directed at the problems ordinary people actually talk about at the dinner table ..
You may not have complete immunity beyond 10 years though, so the recommendation is that you get a booster every 10 years.
But I don't see your point? Are you arguing that the COVID vaccine grants immunity for much longer than advertised? That seems unlikely given the mutation rate of coronaviruses.
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