cykotic

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

My stance has nothing to do with the study.

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.

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.

What makes it trash journalism? Is it false? Is Musk beyond criticism in this area?

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.

In this age of anti-intellectualism amongst certain political groups in the U.S. it wasn’t too foolish to think “educated” was the intended word.

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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.

From webmd.com https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/dunning-kruger-effect-wh... :

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.

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It's primarily the educated who fall for nonsense arguments and don't see how they are being misled and used.

Are you able to justify this belief with anything more concrete than selective memory of anecdotal encounters?

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.

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.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cgc/private-schoo...

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wouldn't it be better from a public policy point of view to ban the use of PFAS (and other such chemicals) until they demonstrate that it is safe?

Most are one hit wonders. Most research mathematicians end up having at most 1 or 2 Ph.D. students. Most publish minor extensions of known results. The greats have an insight and end up doing a lot in that one minor area. Very few people have more than a couple of truly remarkable theorems.