The framers made the electoral college system to reduce the impact of populous states and raise the impact of less populous states so everyone gets an equal voice. Without it, you would get heavily populated states like New York and California dictating policy for the rest of the country.
And what we now have is low population states thwarting the will of the majority due to their numbers in the senate. It’s a major power imbalance. Every time a Democrat is elected President Texas legislators threaten to secede. At some point California and others will also start threatening this unless the power structure is rebalanced.
> And what we now have is low population states thwarting the will of the majority due to their numbers in the senate. It’s a major power imbalance. Every time a Democrat is elected President Texas legislators threaten to secede. At some point California and others will also start threatening this unless the power structure is rebalanced
What part of by design do you not understand?
And if anything, it's a great system because it makes people like you seethe at being thwarted for nonsense policies.
You are really grasping at straws here. This is an instance where applying Occam’s Razor applies. At any rate, whatever the causes it is still the case that there are regional differences in life expectancy.
The U.S. Constitution is a document that forms the basis of governance and at its heart is an anti-democratic sentiment. The writers of Constitution did not want a monarch or a democratic nation. They wanted power in more hands than occurred in England but not too many more hands.
What we have today, 200+ years later, is a system in which North Dakota’s 800,000 residents get 2 senators and 1 representative and Washington, D.C.’s residents get none. A representative from California represents around 50% more people than one from North Dakota. There are major structural power imbalances in the U.S. that someday will have to be dealt with.
We have crazy things like one senator preventing hundreds of people from being promoted in the Military. The system needs a rewrite (along with the rules of the Senate).
I acknowledged that it was by design. Obviously I’m aware of this fact. The design isn’t working anymore. What worked back then doesn’t now. There are major power imbalances in the political structure of the U.S. Such imbalances can never go on too long. At some point there will need to be a restructuring. That can be either by force or peacefully.
I wrote that the Senate rules need to be adjusted. Senate tradition is part of the political structure of how the U.S. government works at the federal level. It’s not just the Constitution that needs a rewrite.
Your claim that this is why the U.S. is a coast to coast nation isn’t supported by history. You need to demonstrate that in the absence of the system of government created by our founders that there wouldn’t be a coast to coast nation where the U.S. is. There are lots of examples of expansive empires being created from a collection of smaller states that don’t involve systems of governance that the U.S. has.
Ending your post with “church of science” makes you appear to be extreme. It appears to me that you are an extremist and are lashing out because you feel this research is an attack on you personally. It is best to judge research as dispassionately as possible.
How do you know this? It sounds plausible and may seem intuitively obvious but many intuitively obvious 'facts' have turned out to be wrong.
It is good to be skeptical of an individual piece of research. The objections to a piece of research ought to be about how the authors went did their research. Or critique their specific methodology or their use of statistics. Critique their conclusion by showing it doesn't follow from their reported findings.
What one should not do, which is what the person I responded to seems to have done, is say that research in this area is likely to be contaminated by too much bias and thus disregard it. That is an intellectually lazy response and fraught with too much bias on the part of the person in engaging in such reasoning.
There is a negative impact to eating beef in the form of negative externalities. Humans are excessive in just about everything. We consume excessive amounts of materials and this consumption has the price of polluting the whole world.
If we produced exactly what we consume then there would still be massive amounts of waste. There would still be pollution on a global scale and still be toxic chemicals pumped into the environment. There would still be a mass extinction level event that is caused by humans.
It’s odd to me that you don’t like the phrasing “America is using…” and want it to read “The Southwest portion of America…”. Millions of people live in the Southwest and it is part of America.
It’s not a problem for just the Southwest. It’s a problem for the whole country. Massive amounts of food derive from the use of groundwater in the U.S. and we can’t just shift production easily. This would cause huge disruptions in the food supply and for the economy. It requires federal solutions. It’s a problem for America.
We exports huge amounts of grain. The groundwater we're depleting isn't for our own use, it's to feed other countries.
I don't see why this requires a federal solution. Those states own/control their own water. If they want to use it all up, that's their problem. It's all going to get used up eventually.
The states do not control their own water, because rivers (and aquifers) cross state boundaries.
The states have formed various compacts, under the supervision of the federal government, the detail how water will be shared among them. These cover, for example, the Colorado, Rio Grande and Pecos rivers.
And if Kansas drains the Oglalla aquifer, that severely screws the other 4 or 5 states that draw from it.
We exports huge amounts of grain. The groundwater we're depleting isn't for our own use, it's to feed other countries.
Which is why it is a federal issue since the federal government controls interstate trade. Thus it’s accurate to say that America is depleting its aquifers. Which is the point of my response to you.
That you think states control their own water suggests you don’t understand the issue. For instance, one state can’t just put a dam on river and declare all of the water theirs and not allow distribution of it to other states.
This is how progress is made. It starts out with observations and looking for clues and links. What the study shows is that these chemicals have decidedly not shown to be safe and therefore ought not be used. Further study is warranted and if the number of correlations increase substantially then we will have learned something new. If no new correlations are found then we have learned something new in this case too.
What you are objecting to is the precautionary principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle. It is used by many if not most agencies dealing with foodstuff, environmental protection, drugs, workplace hazards, etc.
"Not shown to be safe" is about the weakest claim that you could make.
> Absolutely not. And the fact that people think that kind of thing after reading sensationalized articles like this causes real problems.
Are you trying to say that this study did show these chemicals to be safe, or were they not shown to be safe? Believing the first would be a real problem.
I suspect the confusion is over the difference between "not shown to be safe" and "shown not to be safe". The former is saying that "we haven't yet determined for sure that they're safe", and the latter states "we've concluded for sure that they are not safe". It's unfortunately super easy to misread one for the other despite their very different meanings; I had to re-read the original sentence twice before being sure that I read it correctly.
Funny you should say that, because I managed a water show in Macau. The 17 million liter, 10m deep pool had hydraulically actuated lifts in it, and we went from normal hydraulic fluid to vegetable oil for leak and contamination issues. The vegetable oil hydraulic fluid had issues, so we switched to a PEG-based fluid. Toxicity reports were great. I had over 400 technical dives in the pool servicing equipment. When we switched over, the performers were concerned about the PEG-based fluid. Some claimed they had a rash after a small leak (5 gallons in a 5m gallon pool). Others joined in on the fear and I had to address the technicalities to a mostly lay audience. I asked them to check their body moisturizers and hair conditioners they all used before and after each show. One of the top half of the ingredients were PEGs. I am not saying someone couldn't have a sensitivity to PEGs, but in this case it seemed like fear over rationality when they were putting more ppm of PEG on their bodies via their care products than they could have been exposed to in the pool.
I think they should be banned because it makes no sense to me to extensively use chemicals that have not been shown to have a reasonable chance of being safe. Why extensively use something about which we know very little what the environmental effects are?
No. What you wrote is completely wrong. Besides, it would be better for the environment and humanity if we did not progress so fast in the area of releasing massive amounts of toxic chemicals and detritus.
This already happens in high-risk areas with the likes of the FDA requiring approval for drugs, since they are more likely to be immediately and/or grossly harmful as a direct result. We don't have evidence that many of these chemicals or even microplastics are directly responsible for any long-term physiological effects (but we know for certain that they exist and are being ingested and distributed throughout the body), so it's not like people are dropping dead from (mis)use of forever chemicals.
The first link is "High exposure to perfluorinated compounds in drinking water and thyroid disease" but the conclusion in the abstract is
> In total, 16,150 individuals had ever been exposed. The hazard ratios did not indicate any excess risk of hyperthyroidism among those with contaminated water. For hypothyroidism, the risk of being prescribed medication was significantly increased among women with exposure during the mid part of the study period (but not men). However, the association with period of exposure was non-monotonic, so the significance is considered to be a chance finding. Our research was limited by the relatively simple exposure assessment.
The second one as well
> No association between serum PFAS and fecal zonulin was found. In conclusion, the present study found no consistent evidence to support PFAS exposure as a risk factor for IBD.
> Why extensively use something about which we know very little what the environmental effects are?
Because burning jet fuel in an enclosed interior ship space while hundreds of miles from land is a bigger and more immediate threat?
It makes sense to phase out dangerous chemicals wherever we can, but sometimes their use is a chemical imperative because there are no equivalent alternatives.
The X-37 reportedly uses hypergolic nitrogen-tetroxide + hydrazine fuel, which means everyone wears spacesuits around it on the ground. But it solves an engineering challenge that more mundane fuel mixes don't. Ergo, they use something toxic and dangerous.
Musk is one of the only individuals in the world that actively tries to solve real problems. And people hate him for it. Musk gives Ukraine Star Link terminals and access. The idea that he is league w Putin and his ideas is intellectually dishonest and betrays any kind of objective view.
Musk is one of the only individuals in the world that actively tries to solve real problems. And people hate him for it.
This is a delusional belief. Virtually no one hates him for solving problems and there a lot of people trying to solve real problems. People dislike him due to his treatment of employees and his treatment of his kids and his incessant hyperbolic claims that are false.
I've got friends who are social workers who solve real problems every day of the week. They aren't generally hated for it, though there are exceptions, like when a parent ends up losing custody due to child abuse.
Did you not think of any social workers because they aren't rich enough for you to notice them, or because you think the problems they solve aren't real enough?
I agree. Feet on the ground social workers go unnoticed and are agents of real help where is is needed. I should have said among high profile figures Musk is unique in his honest effort to save humanity.
Except the article doesn't say "he is [in] league w Putin"--it does say he repeated talking points that are Russian talking points. Even Reid Hoffman, whose comments gave rise to the article in the first place, isn't really saying that; he seems to be saying that Musk is just mistaken, not that he is in active cahoots with Putin.
The article brings in a number of facts surrounding Musk's statements and involvement w/r/t Russia and Ukraine, such as the Star Link stuff you reference. Unless the article genuflects to him and pretends like none of the other facts it mentions exist, you think it's biased?
> Musk is one of the only individuals in the world that actively tries to solve real problems.
Even assuming this is true (though it is a daft and cultish claim), that doesn't mean that he is above criticism.
> And people hate him for it.
You seem to be confused or simply disingenuous (my bet is the latter); people hate him because he's an arrogant man-child who has done things like used his fame to repeatedly call some guy a pedo, and who actively supports a political party that recently launched an insurrection in an attempt to overturn an election, among other acts of malfeasance. Even if you agree with his politics such as his views on things like Covid-19 and what he considers to be "free speech", don't go around pretending like people hate him because he "actively tries to solve real problems".
What fabrications? Nobody in this thread defending him has identified anything the article has gotten wrong; you guys are basically just offended and triggered that it's reporting facts that don't look good for Musk.
I see you edited your comment and changed educated to uneducated. It’s petty of you to not acknowledge this important change in your response to me. I quoted your original statement and it’s obvious why I think you had that belief. It’s intellectually dishonest to feign ignorance of why I thought you had that belief.
Mine was the second comment and you had not responded to the first comment when I made my post. As Crzy demonstrates it was not an obvious error. Anti-intellectualism is quite common in the U.S.
Joost Meerloo, in The Rape of the Mind, noted that the ones most susceptible to some methods of interrogation or propaganda were often those trained to withstand it.
Perhaps it's a false sense of security, or the dunning-kruger effect.
According to Wikipedia about the book you mentioned:
Meerloo writes that freedom and democracy depend in part on education for mental freedom—helping children and adults to think for themselves and to see the essentials of a problem—helping them to understand concepts, not merely to memorize facts.
He specifically mentions education being necessary to guard against brian washing.
That isn’t quite what Dunning-Kruger is about. People with less competence tend to overestimate their abilities more than people with higher competence. For example, a person with ability 3 out of 10 might say their skill is a 5 whilst a person with ability 9 out of 10 might say their skill is a 10.
Where was the overestimation of one’s abilities in the comment made by Crzy?
The alleged fact that people trained to resist propaganda are more susceptible to it is only an instance of Dunning-Kruger if said people overestimate their abilities in this area greater than people with a higher ability to resist propaganda. That wasn’t established.
To observe this phenomenon, Dunning and Kruger gave students tests of grammar, logical reasoning, and humor. The psychologists found that those who scored in the bottom 25% tended to overestimate their ability and test score. Most predicted their scores to be above the 60th percentile.
On the other hand, those who overperformed -- those in the top 25% of the students -- also incorrectly assessed their final result. Most of these students estimated their scores to be in the 70th- to 75th-percentile range. But most actually scored above the 87th percentile. While this is also not a realistic self-assessment, the researchers found that this group was competent enough to understand how they got a higher score, unlike the low performers. In other words, the gap between perceived and actual performance is smaller.
It sounds great in principle. What will happen is that there will be schools that only fairly well off people can go afford. The poor will be stuck with schools that cost exactly what the voucher is worth and will be bare bones. The public schools will be left with those who, for a variety of reasons, can’t get to a voucher school and those who are too unruly or otherwise “defective”. This will have bad long term consequences.
Until public schools get rid of the delusion that putting troublemakers/educationally challenged kids into a class of average to highly capable kids will pull the troublemakers upwards escaping public schools is a worthy goal for most middle income families. Talk to any middle school teacher, in a class of 20 people there are 3-4 people that slow everything down for the other 16 and there is no feasible way of disciplining/getting rid of them.
Not sure how applicable this is to the U.S, this is the case in a lot of Western Europe.
This is the case in the US, too. They do exactly this, and instead of bringing anyone up, it brings everyone down. Most exasperated by the fact that teachers and schools have zero recourse in those situations.
My public school tenure was an absolute nightmare. For my kid's sake, I'll never live in another place that does 'socioeconomic bussing.'
In theory, integration sounds nice. In reality, schools don't get enough funding/resources/teachers to make this work. Integration has failed/is just a money saver for politicians. It's time we said this out loud instead of pretending otherwise.
This is the case for most everything though. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. It plays out in larger society as well, on both ends. You have a few billionaires doing outsized damage destroying society through marketing / antisocial business practices and on the other end you have the 1000 people that commit 40% of crime in Atlanta.
https://www.11alive.com/article/news/crime/1000-crime-atlant...
In some USA school districts there are "gifted and talented" programs to put high performers into their own curriculum tracks with similar peers. More parents would flee public schools without these segregation programs.
In practice, students don't cost the same. eg a special ed student will cost 10x more than a student in a general ed or gifted program.
So I think in practice they end up subsidizing the cheap-to-educate kid's private school education, while expensive students stay in public schools (which makes the private school voucher amount go up while decreasing the quality of public school instruction for the majority of students). Kind of a vicious cycle.
> special ed student will cost 10x more than a student in a general ed or gifted program
Special Ed students and the staff supporting them are subsidized and paid for by the US Dept of Education.
When you have an Autism Specialist or a Special Education teacher, the school district will go to the US DoE to get the SpED staff's salary comped.
This makes sense because of how expensive special education is, yet how critical of a social function it has.
My mom is a Special Education Teacher and she's always been funded by the Federal DoE.
The issue is "tracking" is very expensive and a bit of a political landline, so plenty of less academically included students end up in AVID track or Low Severity Special Education classes - neither of which are subsidized by the DoE.
School Boards don't want to deal with the expensive and politically suidical option of saying some kids are dumber than others, so this is the backdoor solution they use. Also, by tracking that means you have to hire 2x the number of teachers, while still having the same budget, and local voters don't want to see a 2x increase in Sales Tax and/or property taxes.
The Individuals with Disability Education Act requires the federal government to cover up to 40% of the cost of educating students with special needs.
If you've ever had a an internet plan that promises you speeds of "up to" $FOO, you can probably guess how IDEA goes down in practice. In my state (California), the Feds reimburse about 10% of the cost, which leaves the state and local governments on the hook for the rest. In practice the allocation is also weird for the federal money, since it doesn't take into account that students have different needs with drastically different costs (e.g. an IEP for a kid with shitty handwriting vs a kid on Home & Hospital who has personalized 1:1 instruction+care all day)
My mom is a special educator here in the Bay Area, and has done this at both low income districts as well as high income districts here. The funding is well prioritized.
There is a huge disparity across some k-12 school districts in terms of resources and accompanying culture regarding education. There are lots of k-12 schools that are not bare bones.
Look at higher education and we can see a wide disparity between the different types of institutions. What will happen with vouchers is a Corinthian Collegeing of k-12 in certain low income districts.
How is that different from the status quo? It seems likely that more students will end up going to private schools because of this subsidy, and some public schools will have to shrink, but why is that bad?
The status quo is that 10% of k-12 students to go private school. Most private school have a religious affiliation. That may or may not matter to you. It does matter to me.
What we see in higher education are two types of private schools. One type are nonprofit and one type are profit. The for profit schools tend to be predatory have much worse outcomes than the public schools or nonprofit ones. The nonprofit ones tend to fall into two categories. The ones with nice endowments are exclusive and very good. We will see this happen with k-12 with vouchers.
From a school’s perspective a voucher is exactly as if a student got a student loan in that amount. Those who think federally backed loans are a problem in higher education ought to be opposed to vouchers for k-12.
> - There are many non-religious private schools like magnets and charters.
Magnet schools are public schools in the US that draw from multiple schools and usually have a particular focus (arts & languages, STEM, etc.). The main limiter on magnet school attendance is their capacity. I ended up in one in HS with a capacity of 1500 students, for a city with over 1 million people at the time (not sure the number of HS aged people). It cost nothing extra to attend, you had to apply and interview to get in and the public school bus system took care of getting everyone to the school no matter where they lived in the county.
EDIT: And I had to double check because I've only recently lived in an area with charter schools and have no kids yet so didn't really care much, but they're also technically public schools in the US. They are publicly funded and have no tuition costs to attend.
Most private k-12 schools are religiously affiliated.
Do you have this much concern for the poor when it comes to funding public transportation, healthcare, childcare, pre-school, school lunch, and dental care?
- Mississippi is richer than Germany and France without progressive social policies. Since you are questioning my motives, do you have a concern for the poor yourself?
Mississippi is not richer than Germany in the ways that truly matter. It is hard for Americans to comprehend but money is not the end all be all of being human. Life expectancy is greater in Germany. Worker conditions are better in Germany. Germans have far more vacation time. The infrastructure and way the cities are built are such that one doesn’t need a car. That expense is not taken into account when looking at income statistics. German healthcare doesn’t leave one bankrupt if you get a major illness or disease. Higher education is cheaper. Life is better in Germany than in Mississippi.
Having a few more dollars doesn’t make up for these discrepancies.
> Mississippi is richer than Germany and France without progressive social policies.
By what measure? Using GDP Mississippi appears to have a GDP of around $100 billion. France and Germany both have GDPs in the trillions. Normalized by population, both are still larger than Mississippi.
Mississippi: $105 billion / 2.95 million = $34.90k/person
France : $2.958 trillion / 67.75 million = $43.66k
Germany : $4.26 trillion / 83.2 million = $52.2k
Apparently my source for MS was older (and I mistyped it anyways when calculating, but wouldn't have changed it much compared to using the 2022/2023 numbers). Updating to the 2022 numbers brings it to $47k and 2023 brings it to $48.7k.
Because it’s funneling public funds into private hands. Funds that would previously have gone to the public schools. Now the public schools are worse and the private schools are elites only but also subsidized.
The price of keeping public schools the way they are is trashing the future of many bright but poor kids who have no choice but to waste their time in what seems to be a mix of a kindergarten and a corrections facility.
The price of failing the not bright kids is we end up with a mob of undereducated people who are unable to function as contributing healthy adults in today's modern society.
It's a hard problem, but I can't fault people who believe public schools should focus on not failing the bottom section rather than accelerating the top achievers.
>The price of failing the not bright kids is we end up with a mob of undereducated people who are unable to function as contributing healthy adults in today's modern society.
This is already the case though. I grew up in a “low income” area and whenever I visit my parents I see people I went to Highschool with walking around in the streets.
Something’s got to change but unfortunately I do not have the answer. Hopefully AI will save us all.
I wish people would think as much about the poor when it came time to fund job programs, healthcare, childcare, food stamps, universal pre-school, raising the minimum wage, increasing public transportation, and improving working conditions.
What bothers me about this right here is that at one time or another one of these was heralded as THE solution that would alleviate poverty. Why is it always food stamps, minimum wage, and ubi? I thought minimum wage would have solved/alleviated the food problem. It seems to me that there is a general failure to acknowledge the big picture. Being impoverished means lack of resources. I say pick one general solution, either ubi or negative income tax, and let the poor choose what they need. It does a real disservice to the poor to always be for every policy that is notionally meant to help them. It seems disingenuous and not very well thought out. As Eminem famously said,”these goddamn foodstamps won’t buy diapers”.
The people most in favor of school vouchers in the U.S. are mostly conservatives who oppose programs for poor people in almost all other contexts. When it comes to school vouchers though they act, disingenuously in my opinion, as if concern for the poor is what really matters to them in this issue. School vouchers, ultimately, are a way for religious conservatives to have the public pay for the religious indoctrination of their kids.
My comment was an attempt to point out this hypocrisy.
What will happen if people continue to vacate urban areas as major metro districts remain stuck in their current messes. School choice is rapidly becoming a life and death matter for cities as school districts continue to flounder. My city, Memphis, Tennessee is currently in danger of a death spiral, largely due to collapse of its school system.
Why continue to mandate a failing system, when many private options are both accessible and successful? Why prevent or restrict, lower middle income students from going to higher quality schools?
Yes, the market will probably end up that way, but the poor still get a choice. They're not stuck with the one-size-fits-all system that the public school system often provides.
And what we now have is low population states thwarting the will of the majority due to their numbers in the senate. It’s a major power imbalance. Every time a Democrat is elected President Texas legislators threaten to secede. At some point California and others will also start threatening this unless the power structure is rebalanced.