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.
The principle of requiring healthcare staff to get the vaccine is already established. Most countries in Europe already do this. This is not the same thing as requiring all employees to be fired if they fail to have a medical procedure that the President deems necessary. Your point, however, is totally anti-science: 500 years ago, would you ask for someone to be fired because they didn't use the appropriate amount of leeches? It is amazing that the people who go on about this kind of thing don't understand basic elements of what science is.
So your employer is allowed to sterilise employees with disabilities? Perhaps only those employees with mental illness? If you question whether this is realistic, this happened in the US 70 years ago, and the very same principle was used to sterilise disabled people en masse. The ends do not justify the means, this is ubermensch ideology (only those who can rise above morality and do things that others are unwilling to do will possess the future...it is madness, it is something that hasn't existed in politics since the 30s...and, to be clear, it existed in the US too).
The ruling that you mention was also used to sterilize disabled people. It is funny that you mention Nazi Germany...they did that there too. But, of course, everyone else is just overreacting, the ends justify the means, only people of true vision can break free of the rules that limit others, the ubermensch has appeared, hail.
And yes, there are medical exemptions, there are religious exemptions, there are lots of exemptions because, again, it is fairly obvious that the state forcing people to have medical procedures is not a good idea. Trying to say that you have suffered so much already (please, pathetic) so the vaccine is fine is one of the weakest arguments. That can be used to justify anything if you just tell people how hard your life is. You have no moral compass. Something is a good idea or not.
It always seemed very tiring to me: work out who the person is, work out what political allegiance they have, and then decide to agree or disagree with them/potentially having to reorder or reinterpret X or Y to make it all fit.
Regardless of that: if I am someone who believes that vaccines do not work (and btw, in the context of American politics...this does not seem a wild conspiracy, you see the same level of nonsense distributed by people on the left too) then am I likely to be convinced by the govt attempting to rescind support from me? No. If anything, that suggests to me that I am probably correct.
In other words, the point of removing unemployment insurance is to hurt people who disagree with me...this is not smart (and again, an ironic position to take from people who view themselves as very liberal and open...next-level stuff).
No, I am not. People are paying for the medical resources they use. Nice try though (I would learn more about social policy, the point of social policy is that it is for everyone, not people who agree to a medical procedure, not people who have political views you agree with...this is why the US doesn't have a welfare state, because people believe money will go to people "who aren't like them").
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.
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).