Because it's pleasant. I don't know why people drive if they don't absolutely have to when it's so dangerous, I don't know why people live in cities when the pollution causes so many health problems, I don't know why people keep hanging out with other people when so many turn out to be reprehensible, etc. The answer is, because life is not about living the longest in the most austere manner possible.
People drive because they need to get home for shelter, or get to work, etc. People live in cities because that's where the higher paying jobs are, again for survival, also given that one can use air purifiers at home and wear a mask outdoors. It is irresponsible to accept risk without reward.
In many developing countries, alcohol risks being contaminated with methanol which is extremely deadly. I wouldn't consider taking such an unnecessary risk to feel pleasant. Knowing everything I know, I would feel more scared than pleasant.
It's not odd; it's the burden of being aware and not ignorant. Of course I take pleasure in several things that won't give me cancer. I also realize that true pleasure comes only after labor and pain. In contrast, alcohol is the kind of pleasure that is followed by pain.
I have a relative who drank regularly. He now has a bad case of gout because of his drinking.
Two others got diabetes from all the unhealthy food they ate while drinking, and died from it.
A coworker who drank regularly got brain cancer and died from it.
An ex-friend long ago basically killed someone drinking and driving.
Most humans don't learn from the dead but they should.
And in addition to proprioception, we can sense hunger, thirst, tiredness, time, temperature, balance, our own movements, pain, pressure, and maybe even itching. It's just that "we have discovered a seventeenth sense" has less glamour to it
A company the size of Facebook has far more than enough resources to know that different ads have different requirements, if only legal ones, because moral ones seem hopelessly quaint. I, a know-nothing engineer not working in HR or advertisement, would have raised a question to Product asking whether job ads had to be excepted from the regular optimisations and advertised equally to everyone. Why didn't Facebook think about it? The answer is they did, they just chose to ignore it because money is more important, or at least the perception of choosing money over morals or legality.
It's not important on its own, it just slowly erodes the feeling we live in a society, the reminding that everyone plays a role, even a little one. It lets one get out of their social bubble ever so little, and appreciate that the world is full of people with a life just as rich as their own, which is easily forgotten. I can cook well, I go to the restaurant to be in society; impersonal chains and now impersonal service reduce the experience to functional feeding and are of no interest to me.
The important difference here is that nearly all of those countries both border those where the conflicts are and are ethnically and culturally similar to the conflicted regions. This is not true for western Europe (which is where most of these migrants want to go) which neither borders any of the conflicted regions nor is (or, locally, was) culturally similar to them. The exception to this in the list you quoted is Poland which does have a border with a country at war - Ukraine.
If war breaks out in Finland there will be a swell of Finnish refugees entering Sweden and Norway but I do not foresee them flying halfway across the globe to request asylum in Afghanistan even if that country were to be flourishing then. Why, then, is the opposite seen as normal?
The claim was that "Somehow [Europe] are morally and financially responsible of every failed society".
Which is demonstrably false, since Europe has fewer refugees than African, South American or Middle Eastern countries, in absolute numbers and percentage of population and financial resources.
Your claim that "countries both border those where the conflicts are and are ethnically and culturally similar to the conflicted regions" is similarly coarse and clueless, like a Chinese person saying Spain and Finland are ethnically and culturally similar because both are Western.
You also seem to have forgotten to switch back to your sockpuppet account.
Which sockpuppet account would that be? Please point it out by name - you said it, now you prove it. An inquiring mind - and possibly more than one - wants to know.
My whole shtick here on this forum is that I just say what I think without worrying over whatever 'karma' hits I might get. Given that no sockpuppets are needed when you follow that approach I'm really curious to learn I seem to have some so, educate us.
The answer to that question depends on who you ask. If you ask it to the electorate the answer is a more and more resounding 'yes, now, please'. If you ask it to the majority of politicians the answer ranges from "we can not, we're bound by international treaties" to "you're a racist/fascist/*-phobe for asking such questions'. There are a few politicians who have made it their motto to outdo each-other in calling for more stringent border policies and those politicians get a lot of votes but they mostly end up being sidelined through what is euphemistically dubbed a 'cordon sanitaire'. If one of them ends up having some power eventually the result is nearly always the same: they do no do what they have been promising all those years, pointing left and right for their reasons for not fulfilling their promises.
In theory the political systems we have here in western Europe which are based around forming coalition governments should allow for reaching compromises between the 'open borders' factions and the opposing 'our nation comes first' factions. In reality things often don't work that way due to the practice of shunning those parties which claim to want to act on the calls for more stringent migration policies, labelling them 'far-right/racist/xenophobic' and turning them into pariahs. The proponents of this practice do not seem to realise all they achieve is more polarisation and further radicalisation on all sides of the spectrum and that a single large event could end up giving power to one of those radicalised factions whether that be in their envisioned 'nazi takeover' style or along the lines of the premise of Houellebecq's 'Soumission' which foresees islamic law being implemented in France. A more likely outcome is for more countries to drop out of the EU to create local blocks like the Visegrad countries and the Nordic countries.
Refugees per capita is a more interesting metric to look at though, it wouldn't change the sadness of it all but as a metric it's much more relevant than just total amounts.
I don’t have my spreadsheet at hand, but obviously no one overtly pretend to be a Nazi among MEP. I’m not aware of the arcanes, but it seems to me that it’s part of their obligations, and some MEPs were actually already sanctioned over this.
If a mafia boss orders a hit, he is no less guilty than the one who pulls the trigger. If a CEO orders vital funds to be withheld from those who are entitled to them, knowing many will die, he is similarly guilty of murder. The mafia boss can be sent to jail, the CEO won't. The corporate veil may keep you pristine inside the cynical circles of power, but all the people see is impunity. When murderers act with impunity, what redress is there but counter-violence?
It is unfortunate, but many people have lost hope the system can change, so revolution is getting more likely, and revolutions are seldom peaceful.
The CEO of a healthcare insurer is not involved in "withholding" funds. At best, he sets up policies that distribute a limited amount of funds among millions of claimants who are all in need of help to some degree, but he does that job poorly. If this juvenile logic is applied further, aren't you guilty of the same crime? There are people in need of life-saving drugs and treatments, yet you're just sitting behind your computer withholding funds.
This sounds like airlines saying they have a right to bump people who paid for a ticket because the airlines couldn't figure out a business model that earned them an acceptable amounts of money without doing it. UHC does that, except instead of denying you the seat you paid for, they deny you care you paid for, and you suffer and die.
The problem is the conclusion that we must allow this so that their business economics can be sound, so that they can continue to exist. We should instead conclude that being horrible to people is bad, and any business model that requires it should not exist.
Brian saw a company that he knew ahead of time was horrible to people, that he knew ahead of time decided that many of their customers must die, and indeed this was critical to the company's economics and business model, and thought, 'You know what? I want to be a part of that. I like that so much that I want to be the one in charge of it.'
Why that job, instead of the millions of others? Well, we can take a gue$$. He had to make his nut, no matter who he hurt along the way, right?
Meanwhile, as an arguably less-horrible person, I see a job posting for startups that use AI to scan terminal cancer patient records for timely funeral business leads in exchange for offering crypto credits that can be applied towards a coupon for palliative care AI chat or whatever, or makes drones and AI systems for tracking and identifying government critics for later persecution, and I have to click 'next' because my soul is worth more than the salary. What a fuckin' chump I am.
1/ There is no "distribute a limited amount of funds". There is even less a "distribute a limited amount of funds after shareholder profit and massive executive paychecks". Customers have bought coverage; if the company overissued policies, they make a loss, or they go bankrupt and their own insurers cover the existing claims. Anything else is privatised profit and socialised losses, which even a callous teenager just blown away by their first glimpse at Ayn Rand should find objectionable.
2/ I carefully said "entitled to" to avoid a debate about personal responsibility and limit the conversation to "paid for a life-saving service they did not receive", which everyone will agree is wrong.
3/ If you think the CEO did not issue orders to make it as difficult to claim as possible, and drag the process as much as possible, you are a fool.
Denying help to a human is one thing. Denying them help after they paid for the help so you can buy a yacht another thing entirely.
I am very skeptical of this report, not because I think the numbers are wrong, but because their presentation seems as skewed as it can be.
4% of cancers are attributable to alcohol [1]. That's borderline negligible in the grand scheme of things. How do they manage to attribute half of that to light alcohol consumption? No clue. No quantification of the risk either, which is nowadays nearly always a reason to summarily discard the information, as alarmism reigns. Tidbits like "steadily increasing incidence rate", technically true but deliberately misleading in context as it's entirely expected since Europe keeps getting older, Eastern countries' life expectancies match the West's, road safety improves, people are more aware of nutrition, etc.
Taken together, this screams more of the "never do anything that might potentially maybe harm your health" approach to medicine than an actual solid case.
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