It is hard to find an explanation for this other than Germany has been co-opted by Russia. Ukraine has been separated from the herd and will surely fall. Putin will be on Germany's border by the end of the decade.
But the problem is that expertise is used to shut down debate...that is the reason why it is controversial.
People do not disbelieve experts because they think they are experts themselves. They disbelieve experts because the argument today is: I am an expert, I am right, if you disagree with me you are likely a danger to other people.
What has changed is the attitude of "experts" to other people. And I say "experts" because it is also increasingly common for people who have expertise in one subject to claim that they have expertise in another subject, and use that authority to elevate their claims beyond contention.
It isn't about scepticism or some kind of re-interpretation of scientific truth...it is one group of people attempting to use their authority to force through their view of what society should be like. If you want to see what the looks like, China is led by "experts"...it isn't pretty. I think Covid has brought this to the fore because you have scientific "experts" ruling on societal and political issues, not because people necessarily disbelieve those claims (ofc, experts and politicians are very clear to make this unclear...they want you to believe that the people who oppose them are lunatics, they aren't, they are rarely people who deny Covid is occurring or deny vaccines work...they just have different political views which suggest different solutions to those problems...there are no experts in politics, that is why we have voting, "experts" today are attempting to shut down debate, shut down politics, and would shut down voting if given the chance).
Also, another big issue is that experts undermine themselves. I can only speak to what is happening in the UK but experts here have made predictions that were fairly consistently untrue - https://data.spectator.co.uk/category/sage-scenarios - people did not disbelieve these predictions at the start, they disbelieve them now because the evidence is clear: the predictions are consistently wrong, and consistently used to justify a political decision that the "experts" want (one that has massive externalities in areas that the "experts" don't know about...paragraph 3 again). This happens, no-one can predict the future, no-one can predict the course of a pandemic 100%...but the problem is that the "experts" are saying: we can predict this, we are correct all the time...again, this is something totally different. Again, what has changed is the experts, not the people.
Economic policy has had a huge role in that. If you are wealthy, you can borrow money for free, you can pay no taxes, and you can invest your free money at 10%+...oh, and the govt will bail you out if it goes wrong.
I worked in equity research at a financial adviser, I am not anti-markets at all (although am probably towards the left of things, for economics more than anything...substantial inequality is not sustainable economically) but the reason why the US doesn't have downward mobility is because rich people do not need skills. You need money to get rich, not skills.
If you look at other countries with similar economic models, for example the UK, you see much higher downward mobility. Again, the simple reason for that is less buoyant financial markets (and btw, UK property has gone through the roof and wealthier individuals in the UK own proportionally more property...the US is really, really out there). The only place that is really comparable are explicitly corporatist states like Germany and China...and the former has (tbf, fairly weak) mechanisms to guarantee a certain living standard.
I don't really understand the US system at all. The welfare state is Bezos and Musk's space projects. And people wonder why their fellow citizens are struggling? You are rich, but you live in a society where many other people are suffering...that isn't wealth.
Investment management is a classic example of this. CFA has a low pass rate (it isn't that hard really, tens of thousands of people do the exam in India and China so that impacts the pass rate), most people do it but, ofc, the really useful knowledge can't be tested...picking a stock isn't like passing a exam. And worse, you get lots of people who pass the exam, acquire false sense of confidence, and then make mistakes (or don't ever move beyond the "parrot" level of intelligence).
I think maths is another one, as conventionally taught. I hated maths at school because it was largely sitting down in a room, doing the same thing over and over again like a computer...quite reasonably, I asked myself whether this was a productive use of my time. As an adult, I have taught myself everything again, it was far more enjoyable and useful because I actually took the time to understand the concepts (and no, none of the stuff I did at school was useful, it was just mindless computation).
I don't necessarily think exams are a bad idea but they don't produce knowledge, experience, or real expertise. They are often misused (as is certification, I knew a guy who worked as a fund manager and was a senior member of the CFA for ethics and standards...he stole from employees regularly).
Ah, I can see you are real expert. I look after two elderly people, probably the biggest problem that they have is with applications that change state based on how you touch it. Even something as simple as picking up a call in Android is totally unintuitive (if anything, Android has got worse...tbh, I barely understand the incantations that one has to perform to do things on there now). Another big one is hidden menus, they don't understand that you have to click the burger for this hidden menu or that an arrow on the button means you can click through (Apple is actually better in how they structure menus).
I understand why these products have been designed this way but I don't think the people who make them understand how badly they are designed for some people. I am a web dev and, imo, a lot of this comes from ways to make your app "look cool" on mobile. Add some buttons, make your app a bit longer vertically...it isn't the end of the world.
I will say though, they find tablets far easier than computers. Tablets present a very simple interface of things to do. Computers seem more complicated (ironically, you see this with kids today even young adults in their early 20s...they have no idea how computers actually work, and often don't understand anything beyond...click this, and app opens). Both hate phones, they can use them but they feel uncomfortable using them.
On the OP, you just have to take stuff over. If you are paying bills or whatever, you should just do it yourself. It will save you time.
France weighs very heavily. With Germany, they led the move earlier this year for the investment deal with China. The decision was made to become reliant on China, and the pandemic significantly worsened this dependency because China's faster recovery essentially mitigated the economic effect of the pandemic.
But it was a choice. Germany's politics appears to have been totally compromised at the highest level by Russia and China (Scholz seems to have been hand-picked by China, his positions on China couldn't be more worrying regardless of what he has said in the past month). France is moving in the same direction, although it is hard to separate this from the profound weakness of Macron.
There is no equivalence with the US either. The French position (and German) position on Iran makes no sense, it is the equivalent of: pretend the problem doesn't exist, and it won't exist (again, with policy being led by business interests). The interests of the US overlap totally with the EU, the US has been funding European defence for decades to the tune of tens of trillions but, of course, France and Germany will continue to nuzzle up to Iran, China, and Russia because they waved their chequebook in front of exporters in economically weak regions.
The only saving grace has been the EU which has effectively counterbalanced France and Germany in these areas (they stopped the investment deal with China). But, again, the policy positions of France and Germany are incomprehensible. It is not that France is insignificant but that their policy is totally at odds with the US and the EU. The reason they aren't opposing China is because there is a strong desire to support China.
> The French position (and German) position on Iran makes no sense, it is the equivalent of: pretend the problem doesn't exist, and it won't exist (again, with policy being led by business interests).
We had contracts in Iran and had to break them because US warned of retaliation. We are weaker and had to back off.
The US obsession with Iran (driven by religious organizations), instead of staying with the US, was broadcasted to all countries which had to show their vassal position.
We did not like it, as you can imagine.
> The interests of the US overlap totally with the EU,
in Iran?
> the US has been funding European defence for decades to the tune of tens of trillions but, of course, France and Germany will continue to nuzzle up to Iran, China, and Russia because they waved their chequebook in front of exporters in economically weak regions.
Ah - here you are right. And the normal reaction of the US should have been "since you support our enemy, we are withdrawing from NATO and the money we pour into Europe". But then so many US military companies would loose contracts (less production) so this is obviously not the right thing to do.
The US is a bully, and proud to be one. We do not like to be bullied but are the small child in th eplayground so we suffer in silence, hoping that oone day we will be able to respond (a day that will not come)
adding to your metaphor, US is afraid that China that has been both a bully and a weaker bullied child, now has grown up almost to the point where they can be the biggest bully around. The same applies to Iran with their nuclear program.
EU itself is not really a bully, but most EU members are, and always were.
So Isn't it's a smart thing to do for EU to make other bullies to fight each other?
I don't think it is only about being personable. That is obviously very important but it is as much about being able to insert yourself into someone else's life and help them. You meet someone, they have a problem, and you can say: "Oh, I know X or Y". That is very big, being a connector to lots of people with skills is the same as having those skills yourself.
But I agree totally. Most of my family worked in the public sector, I had no idea about any of this stuff until I started trying to get a job. And some of the people who I grew up with who were totally incompetent but were sociable/well-connected ended up doing very well (I went to a private school, so my sample is quite interesting: I know a guy who was very smart, went to college, trained in law at the top law school in my country, worked hard, but couldn't get it together ended up becoming a chef...meanwhile a guy who got straight Ds, scraped into uni, did no work whilst there is working as a PM at a top fund manager...they don't teach you this part of life in school).
On the OP: college isn't real life, it isn't anything like real life at all because you don't need to be an expert or have knowledge to extract economic value (and that isn't a bad thing at all). As someone who went to private school and saw a decent amount of privilege, it didn't helped kids who came from poorer backgrounds. These kids went to college (which probably would have happened anyway, they are smart) but most (not all tbf) struggled in the real world because they had poor social skills. I have a long list of utterly mediocre human beings who are punching well above their weight in life (and tbf, this is a bad thing...the guy I mention above shouldn't be managing anyone else's money...not to be harsh, he just shouldn't), and a list of one or two people who came from a poorer background and got out. I think that is down to a combination of socialization, understanding business, and nepotism (I wouldn't overestimate the latter, all of the people who punch above their weight had the ability to walk into a room and make another person feel like they had known them forever).
The BMJ, ironically, is prone to publishing articles that make unverified claims without making clear rather significant conflicts of interest.
Infamously, they published a largely spurious article which claimed that UK govt cuts had killed hundreds of thousands of people, they failed to make clear several aspects of the data that didn't support their conclusion which ofc was that doctors should get more money, they also failed to mention that one of the authors ran a company selling stuff to the NHS that was linked to the conclusions or that the lead author of the paper had no statistical training.
Unfortunately, life is like this. Doctors would prefer that people just listen to them, they are very serious people after all, we should believe everything they say. Most fact-checking services in the UK have a ludicrously political bent, they pick whatever facts and sources support their argument. In practice, they are just attempting to stop all debate about a topic. Life is messy, people will have different opinions even if they acknowledge the same facts, proof is often messy and unclear (if you look at some of the forecasts for Covid this year, just ludicrously wrong and all errors in the same direction...we need criticism, we need debate...afaik, only one publication has actually highlighted all these forecasters who dominate the media making consistently bad forecasts...where are the fact-checkers now? Too busy hunting down shadows on Twitter.). Deal with life as it is, not life as you wish it was (again, doctors in the UK are more guilty than anyone in civil society of this error, their lobbying/political power is immense, their view is: might makes right).
Twitter got popped left and right by journos and this was despite the platform being a huge source of revenue for the media, and the owner's politics.
The week they go public, the stories will start getting published about the content on there, the weak moderation (community moderation...lol), journos sending emails to companies asking whether they like their ads appearing along X or Y figure, etc.
The line that Huffman has taken before on this stuff (basically live and let live) works if you are private. It will go down extremely badly after the IPO.
Sorry. Reddit is already dead.
(Btw, I have no idea why this is...it makes no logical sense because being a public company changes nothing. But the media seems to understand that they can print something, that thing can potentially move the stock, and then they can bounce management into doing something).
To be fair to reddit, their combo of admin + community moderation has improved a lot in the past 5 years or so.
Remember /r/TheDonald? Or /r/jailbait? /r/coontown?
I mean, yes, it's a very low bar, but they deserve some commendation for making an effort that, I feel, paid off.
As far as being popped by journos, I feel like reddit has been on the radar for quite a while, and fared well under fire. Take /r/HermanCainAward, which got some pretty negative (and, I feel, misguided) press. The sub is not only still there, it's (quite sadly) thriving. (Sadly because nobody should receive that "award", but given quite a surplus of qualified recipients, something like that sub serves a purpose. Everyone there will be happy the day the sub stops being active because of lack of submissions, but alas, that day is yet to come).
So after catching flack, /r/HermanCainAward told people to cross out faces and names if they are not a public figure - and that seems to work fine with everyone. Like, the journos are not vultures: they picked on that sub, and the outcome was that it improved. When people are civil to each other, the journos don't a hot scathing article to print.
Getting popped by journos can be a good thing. Maybe some of them will write a hit piece on how waiting for 7 seconds for a text page to load is shameful in 2021.
