There is nothing uniquely American about extreme aggression towards people holding differing views. Although the current state of American society isn't great it can get so so much worse. A couple of examples.
Several hundred thousand to maybe a few million people were killed, often at the hands of angry mobs, for not being the right kind of communist, for not being communist enough or for just not being friends with the right people. A person could be accused by someone who didn't like them with zero evidence of any wrongdoing and still the victim would lose their home, all of the belongings and potentially their life. This lasted from the mid 60 until the mid 70s.
>Religious minorities do not have the right to practice their religion. Non-Muslim propagation is banned, and conversion from Islam to another religion is punishable by death
After Martin Luther printed his Ninty-Five Theses, Europe promptly lost its collective shit across the board. My European History is a bit rusty but a cursory glance at the Wikipedia topic should give a good idea of how much chaos the ability to spread ideas quickly and widely created.
We're talking years and years of civil war and strife. All because people who were once separated and thought they were alone found out they were not. If we use this as a barometer, we're in for some stormy seas.
>teenagers are handed an electronic doll to care for for a day or two
Not surprised this had the opposite effect. It completely misses what is, in my opinion, one of the most dramatic aspects of being a parent. It doesn't end until you die.
Many parents have a baby that destroys the parent's sleep schedule for so long that it feels like it will never end. Then there is worrying about your child reaching important feeling development milestones, worrying about your child's ability to make friends and to survive bullies, where will they go to school? "how can those shoes be too small? We just bought them!" etc etc. A child is a never ending stream of things to worry about.
Any bozo who has been provided with the most basic baby care instruction can take care of a baby for 48 hours. Simply knowing that there is a fixed period in time at which it is over makes it manageable.
You are thinking of the problem in a sciencey, evidence based way. In particular for illiterate, uneducated people there is often a huge weight given to superstition and traditional/existing ways of doing things even in the face of evidence.
It is a surprisingly hard nut to crack, sometimes even among literate educated people. If it weren't a lot of religious extremism and bigotry would not exist.
Of course it would be simpler and easier but who is going to pay for it?
Cambodia is a nation of around 15 million people and a large proportion of them are affected by iron deficiency. You are talking about trying to get skillets/ingots into the hands of hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions.
Even cutting the cost of each item by $1 reduces the overall cost to either the organization(s) running the program or the poor people of Cambodia by hundreds of thousands of dollars. The organizations running this program and the poor of Cambodia aren't sitting on an infinite pot of money.
The economic upsides from improved public health outcomes make it seem like a textbook case for foreign aid - it's easy enough to quantify the cost of the iron deficiency. Admittedly I'm thinking in autocratic terms rather than about the need for buy-in and all the other factors.
Sure, but the iron fish option is cheaper and just as effective. With the money they're saving but using ingots instead of whole skillets, they can solve other problems too.
>So a company pays a higher cost - but only has to deal with one contract, which saves them effort elsewhere.
They have fewer contracts at any given time but also the contracts can last longer.
If I directly hire people to clean an office, when they don't want to do it anymore I need to find other people to do it. Selecting people, negotiating, getting payments set up with accounting etc. Its a distraction from more important stuff so I want to do this as rarely as possible.
If I hire a company/agency/middleman they can replace people without me having to even be aware its happening. At the point "keep the office clean" is essentially solved. Its possible I will never need to think about office cleaning ever again and I can get on with running my business.
Machines replace lots of humans meaning the permanent disappearance of a large number of jobs.
Wages fall as competition for the available jobs increases.
Social services are slashed to reduce government expenditure.
Those still able to find work cling to their job despite falling salaries virtually until death for fear of having to join the vast sea of unemployed people struggling to survive.
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I am not necessarily suggesting that this is probable however mass unemployment due to automation and people working well into old age are in no way mutually exclusive.
In developing countries you are generally dealing with a user pays medical system. So they don't care if you require extensive medical care as you pay for it.
>But I guess it's easy to erroneously conflate Apple's device security with iCloud security.
You might be overthinking it. I get the feeling that many people think of "online" as some sort of magical place where they are shielded from the consequences of their own behavior.
1) The Cultural Revolution (China) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
Several hundred thousand to maybe a few million people were killed, often at the hands of angry mobs, for not being the right kind of communist, for not being communist enough or for just not being friends with the right people. A person could be accused by someone who didn't like them with zero evidence of any wrongdoing and still the victim would lose their home, all of the belongings and potentially their life. This lasted from the mid 60 until the mid 70s.
2) Something current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Saudi_Arabia
>Religious minorities do not have the right to practice their religion. Non-Muslim propagation is banned, and conversion from Islam to another religion is punishable by death