The final rule followed a period of public comment during which some opponents took exception to the government’s telling people what to do in the privacy of their own homes.
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U.S. Will Ban Smoking in Public Housing Nationwide - The New York Times - 0 views
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In New York, there was also concern about whether police officers would be involved in enforcing the rule; that will not be the case, Housing Authority officials said.
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“Public housing will go smoke-free and remain smoke-free, and, because of that,” he said, “so many folks are going to live healthier lives and have a better shot at reaching their dreams because they have good health.”
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Banning smoking in public housing is still a controversial issue because it touch on whether we have the freedom to decide what we do at home. I think this issue shows that how our freedom is limited in this society. To what extent can we have our own privacy is still a debatable question because we all have a different understanding on how we are related to other people in this society. Or even do we really have privacy? As social animals, we are meant to stay in groups. Also, the last statement of this article sound like a logical fallacy because having a good health and having a better shot at reaching dreams don't really have that much direct relation. I think it is just a small factor. --Sissi (12/1/2016)
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Coping with Chaos in the White House - Medium - 0 views
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I am not a professional and this is not a diagnosis. My post is not intended to persuade anyone or provide a comprehensive description of NPD. I am speaking purely from decades of dealing with NPD and sharing strategies that were helpful for me in coping and predicting behavior.
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Here are a few things to keep in mind:
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1) It’s not curable and it’s barely treatable. He is who he is. There is no getting better, or learning, or adapting. He’s not going to “rise to the occasion” for more than maybe a couple hours. So just put that out of your mind.
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2) He will say whatever feels most comfortable or good to him at any given time. He will lie a lot, and say totally different things to different people. Stop being surprised by this. While it’s important to pretend “good faith” and remind him of promises, as Bernie Sanders and others are doing, that’s for his supporters, so *they* can see the inconsistency as it comes. He won’t care. So if you’re trying to reconcile or analyze his words, don’t. It’s 100% not worth your time. Only pay attention to and address his actions.
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3) You can influence him by making him feel good. There are already people like Bannon who appear ready to use him for their own ends. The GOP is excited to try. Watch them, not him.
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4) Entitlement is a key aspect of the disorder. As we are already seeing, he will likely not observe traditional boundaries of the office. He has already stated that rules don’t apply to him. This particular attribute has huge implications for the presidency and it will be important for everyone who can to hold him to the same standards as previous presidents.
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5) We should expect that he only cares about himself and those he views as extensions of himself, like his children. (People with NPD often can’t understand others as fully human or distinct.) He desires accumulation of wealth and power because it fills a hole.
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He will have no qualms *at all* about stealing everything he can from the country, and he’ll be happy to help others do so, if they make him feel good. He won’t view it as stealing but rather as something he’s entitled to do. This is likely the only thing he will intentionally accomplish.
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6) It’s very, very confusing for non-disordered people to experience a disordered person with NPD. While often intelligent, charismatic and charming, they do not reliably observe social conventions or demonstrate basic human empathy. It’s very common for non-disordered people to lower their own expectations and try to normalize the behavior. DO NOT DO THIS
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7) People with NPD often recruit helpers, referred to in the literature as “enablers” when they allow or cover for bad behavior and “flying monkeys” when they perpetrate bad behavior
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8) People with NPD often foster competition for sport in people they control. Expect lots of chaos, firings and recriminations. He will probably behave worst toward those closest to him, but that doesn’t mean (obviously) that his actions won’t have consequences for the rest of us. He will punish enemies.
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9) Gaslighting — where someone tries to convince you that the reality you’ve experienced isn’t true — is real and torturous. He will gaslight, his followers will gaslight.
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Learn the signs and find ways to stay focused on what you know to be true. Note: it is typically not helpful to argue with people who are attempting to gaslight. You will only confuse yourself. Just walk away.
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10) Whenever possible, do not focus on the narcissist or give him attention. Unfortunately we can’t and shouldn’t ignore the president, but don’t circulate his tweets or laugh at him — you are enabling him and getting his word out.
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What's the Best Music to Listen to While Working? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Worse yet is the possibility that the constant soundtrack is poisoning my writing, with the lyrics somehow weaving into and scrambling my thoughts before they ever hit the keyboard. I try to tune it out, but after all, I’m still, I’m still an animal!
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It turns out the best thing to listen to, for most office workers, is nothing.
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An early study called “Music—an aid to productivity,” appropriately found that music could be just that. But the study subjects in that experiment were doing rote factory work, examining metal parts on conveyor belts.
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The boost in productivity the researchers noticed happened because the music simply made the task less boring and kept the workers alert. This also helps explain later studies finding that music helped surgeons perform better.
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When silence and music were put head to head in more cognitively complex tests, people did better in silence.
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The more engaging the music is, the worse it is for concentration.
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But lyric-free music is less distracting, and some of the people whose performance was improved may have come up with subconscious mental hacks to avoid getting sidetracked by music.
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The reason this doesn’t work for most people, Levitin said, is most people can’t pay attention to very much at once. Lyrics can soak up precious attention, as can flashing lights or a really bad smell.
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So, I asked Levitin, if listening to music while working is so bad, why do so many of us do it? Simple: We like it, and we can’t tell it’s messing us up.
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It's surprising to see that not all music can improve our work quality. Many people always ask for some music while they are going their work, but they don't know that this could mess up their work and concentration. This reminds me of the attention blindness that we have. We are incapable of multi-tasking. The experiment mentioned in this article is also very interesting because it reflects how we interpret the result based on our favor. Even the conclusion we draw from the science evidences could be wrong. This is an example of the sound argument but invalid conclusion. --Sissi (12/10/2016)
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The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump - The New Yorker - 0 views
www.newyorker.com/...ous-acceptance-of-donald-trump
political culture crisis culture trump lies authoritarian American idea dictator
shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 16
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“Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, / As, to be hated, needs but to be seen,” the poet Alexander Pope wrote, in lines that were once, as they said back in the day, imprinted on the mind of every schoolboy. Pope continued, “Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, / we first endure, then pity, then embrace.
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The three-part process by which the gross becomes the taken for granted has been on matchlessly grim view this past week in the ascent of Donald Trump.
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under any label Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United States—the order that has made it, in fact, the great and plural country that it already is.
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He announces his enmity to America by word and action every day. It is articulated in his insistence on the rightness of torture and the acceptable murder of noncombatants. It is self-evident in the threats he makes daily to destroy his political enemies, made only worse by the frivolity and transience of the tone of those threats. He makes his enmity to American values clear when he suggests that the Presidency holds absolute power, through which he will be able to end opposition—whether by questioning the ownership of newspapers or talking about changing libel laws or threatening to take away F.C.C. licenses
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To say “Well, he would not really have the power to accomplish that” is to misunderstand the nature of thin-skinned authoritarians in power. They do not arrive in office and discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their power as large as they can.
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If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump.
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we do appear to be getting, in place of the once famous Big Lie of the nineteen-thirties, a sordid blizzard of lies. The Big Lie was fit for a time of processionals and nighttime rallies, and films that featured them. The blizzard of lies is made for Twitter and the quick hit of an impulse culture. Trump’s lies arrive with such rapidity that before one can be refuted a new one comes to take its place.
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The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power.
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The right thing to do, for everyone who believes in liberal democracy, is to gather around and work to defeat him on Election Day. Instead, we seem to be either engaged in parochial feuding or caught by habits of tribal hatred so ingrained that they have become impossible to escape even at moments of maximum danger.
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Hitler wasn’t Hitler—until he was. At each step of the way, the shock was tempered by acceptance. It depended on conservatives pretending he wasn’t so bad, compared with the Communists, while at the same time the militant left decided that their real enemies were the moderate leftists, who were really indistinguishable from the Nazis.
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Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins
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The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal. Ask Argentinians or Chileans or Venezuelans or Russians or Italians—or Germans.
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The national psyche never gets over learning that its institutions are that fragile and their ability to resist a dictator that weak.
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Most Americans believe Donald Trump is incapable of dealing with an international crisis - 1 views
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A majority of Americans lack confidence in Donald Trump's ability to handle an international crisis, according to a new poll. It also found 47 per cent doubted his ability to use military force wisely. Ahead of the President-elect's inauguration on 20 January, 44 per cent believed him to be incapable of averting major scandals during his time in office. I thought that this was interesting because despite many people's doubts, he was still elected president.
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shared by Javier E on 28 Jun 16
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The Anger Wave That May Just Wipe Out Laissez-Faire Economics - The New York Times - 1 views
www.nytimes.com/...t-laissez-faire-economics.html
market fundamentalism populism theory economics crisis
shared by Javier E on 28 Jun 16
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few would have guessed that the economic order built upon Mr. Reagan’s and Mrs. Thatcher’s common faith in unfettered global markets (and largely accepted by their more liberal successors Bill Clinton and Tony Blair) would be brought down by right-wing populists riding the anger of a working class that has been cast aside in the globalized economy that the two leaders trumpeted 40 years ago.
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The so-called Brexit vote was driven by an inchoate sense among older white workers with modest education that they have been passed over, condemned by forces beyond their control to an uncertain job for little pay in a world where their livelihoods are challenged not just by cheap Asian workers halfway around the world, but closer to home by waves of immigrants of different faiths and skin tones.
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It is the same frustration that has buoyed proto-fascist political parties across Europe. It is the same anger fueling the candidacy of Mr. Trump in the United States.
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Mr. Trump, the bombastic businessman who’s never held office, and Mr. Johnson, the former journalist turned mayor of London, might not put it this way, since they continue to cling to a conservative mantle. But they are riding a revolt of the working class against a 40-year-long project of the political right and its corporate backers that has dominated policy making in the English-speaking world for a generation.
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The British political scientist Andrew Gamble at the University of Cambridge has argued that Western capitalism has experienced two transformational crises since the end of the 19th century. The first, brought about by the Depression of the 1930s, ended an era in which governments bowed to the gospel of the gold standard and were expected to butt out of the battles between labor and capital, letting markets function on their own, whatever the consequences
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Mr. Keynes’s views ultimately prevailed, though, providing the basis for a new post-World War II orthodoxy favoring active government intervention in the economy and a robust welfare state. But that era ended when skyrocketing oil prices and economic mismanagement in the 1970s brought about a combination of inflation and unemployment that fatally undermined people’s trust in the state.
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The Keynesian era ended when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan rode onto the scene with a version of capitalism based on tax cuts, privatization and deregulation that helped revive their engines of growth but led the workers of the world to the deeply frustrating, increasingly unequal economy of today.
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After the Brexit vote, Lawrence Summers, former Treasury secretary under President Clinton and one of President Obama’s top economic advisers at the nadir of the Great Recession, laid out an argument for what he called “responsible nationalism,” which focused squarely on the interests of domestic workers.
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Instead of negotiating more agreements to ease business across borders, governments would focus on deals to improve labor and environmental standards internationally. They might cut deals to prevent cross-border tax evasion.
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There is, however, little evidence that the world’s leaders will go down that path. Despite the case for economic stimulus, austerity still rules across much of the West. In Europe, most governments have imposed stringent budget cuts — ensuring that all but the strongest economies would stall. In the United States, political polarization has brought fiscal policy — spending and taxes — to a standstill.
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How 'Concept Creep' Made Americans So Sensitive to Harm - The Atlantic - 0 views
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How did American culture arrive at these moments? A new research paper by Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, offers as useful a framework for understanding what’s going on as any I’ve seen. In “Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,”
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concepts like abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice, “now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before,”expanded meanings that reflect “an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm.”
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“they also have potentially damaging ramifications for society and psychology that cannot be ignored.”
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He calls these expansions of meaning “concept creep.”
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critics may hold concept creep responsible for damaging cultural trends, he writes, “such as supposed cultures of fear, therapy, and victimhood, the shifts I present have some positive implications.”
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Concept creep is inevitable and vital if society is to make good use of new information. But why has the direction of concept creep, across so many different concepts, trended toward greater sensitivity to harm as opposed to lesser sensitivity?
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The concept of abuse expanded too far.
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Classically, psychological investigations recognized two forms of child abuse, physical and sexual, Haslam writes. In more recent decades, however, the concept of abuse has witnessed “horizontal creep” as new forms of abuse were recognized or studied. For example, “emotional abuse” was added as a new subtype of abuse. Neglect, traditionally a separate category, came to be seen as a type of abuse, too.
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Meanwhile, the concept of abuse underwent “vertical creep.” That is, the behavior seen as qualifying for a given kind of abuse became steadily less extreme. Some now regard any spanking as physical abuse. Within psychology, “the boundary of neglect is indistinct,” Haslam writes. “As a consequence, the concept of neglect can become over-inclusive, identifying behavior as negligent that is substantially milder or more subtle than other forms of abuse. This is not to deny that some forms of neglect are profoundly damaging, merely to argue that the concept’s boundaries are sufficiently vague and elastic to encompass forms that are not severe.”
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How did a working-class mom get arrested, lose her fast food job, and temporarily lose custody of her 9-year-old for letting the child play alone at a nearby park?
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One concerns the field of psychology and its incentives. “It could be argued that just as successful species increase their territory, invading and adapting to new habitats, successful concepts and disciplines also expand their range into new semantic niches,” he theorizes. “Concepts that successfully attract the attention of researchers and practitioners are more likely to be applied in new ways and new contexts than those that do not.”
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Concept creep can be necessary or needless. It can align concepts more or less closely with underlying realities. It can change society for better or worse. Yet many who push for more sensitivy to harm seem unaware of how oversensitivty can do harm.
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The other theory posits an ideological explanation. “Psychology has played a role in the liberal agenda of sensitivity to harm and responsiveness to the harmed,” he writes “and its increased focus on negative phenomena—harms such as abuse, addiction, bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, and trauma—has been symptomatic of the success of that social agenda.”
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Jonathan Haidt, who believes it has gone too far, offers a fourth theory. “If an increasingly left-leaning academy is staffed by people who are increasingly hostile to conservatives, then we can expect that their concepts will shift, via motivated scholarship, in ways that will help them and their allies (e.g., university administrators) to prosecute and condemn conservatives,
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While Haslam and Haidt appear to have meaningfully different beliefs about why concept creep arose within academic psychology and spread throughout society, they were in sufficient agreement about its dangers to co-author a Guardian op-ed on the subject.
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It focuses on how greater sensitivity to harm has affected college campuses.
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“Of course young people need to be protected from some kinds of harm, but overprotection is harmful, too, for it causes fragility and hinders the development of resilience,” they wrote. “As Nasim Taleb pointed out in his book Antifragile, muscles need resistance to develop, bones need stress and shock to strengthen and the growing immune system needs to be exposed to pathogens in order to function. Similarly, he noted, children are by nature anti-fragile – they get stronger when they learn to recover from setbacks, failures and challenges to their cherished ideas.”
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police officers fearing harm from dogs kill them by the hundreds or perhaps thousands every year in what the DOJ calls an epidemic.
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After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration and many Americans grew increasingly sensitive to harms, real and imagined, from terrorism
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Dick Cheney declared, “If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response.” The invasion of Iraq was predicated, in part, on the idea that 9/11 “changed everything,”
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Before 9/11, the notion of torturing prisoners was verboten. After the Bush Administration’s torture was made public, popular debate focused on mythical “ticking time bomb” scenarios, in which a whole city would be obliterated but for torture. Now Donald Trump suggests that torture should be used more generally against terrorists. Torture is, as well, an instance in which people within the field of psychology pushed concept creep in the direction of less sensitivity to harm,
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Haslam endorses two theories
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there are many reasons to be concerned about excessive sensitivity to harm:
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'Naked Statistics' by Charles Wheelan - Review - NYTimes.com - 2 views
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Whether you are healthy, moribund or traversing the stages of decrepitude in between, every morsel of medical advice you receive is pure conjecture — educated guesswork perhaps, but guesswork nonetheless. Your health care provider and your favorite columnist are both mere croupiers, enablers for your health gambling habit.
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Staying well is all about probability and risk. So is the interpretation of medical tests, and so are all treatments for all illnesses, dire and trivial alike. Health has nothing in common with the laws of physics and everything in common with lottery cards, mutual funds and tomorrow’s weather forecast.
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Are you impressed with studies showing that people who take Vitamin X or perform Exercise Y live longer? Remember, correlation does not imply causation. Do you obsess over studies claiming to show that various dietary patterns cause cancer? In fact, Mr. Wheelan points out, this kind of research examines not so much how diet affects the likelihood of cancer as how getting cancer affects people’s memory of what they used to eat.
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the rest comes from his multiple real world examples illustrating exactly why even the most reluctant mathophobe is well advised to achieve a personal understanding of the statistical underpinnings of life, whether that individual is watching football on the couch, picking a school for the children or jiggling anxiously in a hospital admitting office.
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And while we’re talking about bias, let’s not forget publication bias: studies that show a drug works get published, but those showing a drug does nothing tend to disappear.
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The same trade-off applies to the interpretation of medical tests. Unproven disease screens are likely to do little but feed lots of costly, anxiety-producing garbage into your medical record.
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An interesting article/review of a book that compares statistics and human health. Interestingly enough, it shows that statistics and studies about health are often taken to be true and misinterpreted because we want them to be true, and we want to believe that some minor change in our lifestyles may somehow prevent us from getting cancer, for example. More info about the book from the publisher: http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=24713
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Are search engines and the Internet hurting human memory? - Slate Magazine - 2 views
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are we losing the power to retain knowledge? The short answer is: No. Machines aren’t ruining our memory. Advertisement The longer answer: It’s much, much weirder than that!
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we’ve begun to fit the machines into an age-old technique we evolved thousands of years ago—“transactive memory.” That’s the art of storing information in the people around us.
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frankly, our brains have always been terrible at remembering details. We’re good at retaining the gist of the information we encounter. But the niggly, specific facts? Not so much.
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subjects read several sentences. When he tested them 40 minutes later, they could generally remember the sentences word for word. Four days later, though, they were useless at recalling the specific phrasing of the sentences—but still very good at describing the meaning of them.
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When you’re an expert in a subject, you can retain new factoids on your favorite topic easily. This only works for the subjects you’re truly passionate about, though
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They were, in a sense, Googling each other.
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Wegner noticed that spouses often divide up memory tasks. The husband knows the in-laws' birthdays and where the spare light bulbs are kept; the wife knows the bank account numbers and how to program the TiVo
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Together, they know a lot. Separately, less so.
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Wegner suspected this division of labor takes place because we have pretty good "metamemory." We're aware of our mental strengths and limits, and we're good at intuiting the memory abilities of others.
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We share the work of remembering, Wegner argued, because it makes us collectively smarter
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The groups that scored highest on a test of their transactive memory—in other words, the groups where members most relied on each other to recall information—performed better than those who didn't use transactive memory. Transactive groups don’t just remember better: They also analyze problems more deeply, too, developing a better grasp of underlying principles.
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Transactive memory works best when you have a sense of how your partners' minds work—where they're strong, where they're weak, where their biases lie. I can judge that for people close to me. But it's harder with digital tools, particularly search engines
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"the thinking processes of the intimate dyad."
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And as it turns out, this is what we’re doing with Google and Evernote and our other digital tools. We’re treating them like crazily memorious friends who are usually ready at hand. Our “intimate dyad” now includes a silicon brain.
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When Sparrow tested the students, the people who knew the computer had saved the information were less likely to personally recall the info than the ones who were told the trivia wouldn't be saved. In other words, if we know a digital tool is going to remember a fact, we're slightly less likely to remember it ourselves
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believing that one won't have access to the information in the future enhances memory for the information itself, whereas believing the information was saved externally enhances memory for the fact that the information could be accessed.
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Just as we learn through transactive memory who knows what in our families and offices, we are learning what the computer 'knows' and when we should attend to where we have stored information in our computer-based memories,
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We’ve stored a huge chunk of what we “know” in people around us for eons. But we rarely recognize this because, well, we prefer our false self-image as isolated, Cartesian brains
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We’re dumber and less cognitively nimble if we're not around other people—and, now, other machines.
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When humans spew information at us unbidden, it's boorish. When machines do it, it’s enticing.
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Though you might assume search engines are mostly used to answer questions, some research has found that up to 40 percent of all queries are acts of remembering. We're trying to refresh the details of something we've previously encountered.
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So humanity has always relied on coping devices to handle the details for us. We’ve long stored knowledge in books, paper, Post-it notes
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We need to develop literacy in these tools the way we teach kids how to spell and write; we need to be skeptical about search firms’ claims of being “impartial” referees of information
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And on an individual level, it’s still important to slowly study and deeply retain things, not least because creative thought—those breakthrough ahas—come from deep and often unconscious rumination, your brain mulling over the stuff it has onboard.
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you can stop worrying about your iPhone moving your memory outside your head. It moved out a long time ago—yet it’s still all around you.
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Senior Trump appointee fired after critical comments - 0 views
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WASHINGTON -- A senior Trump administration official was fired following criticism in a private speech of President Donald Trump's policies and his inner circle of advisers. Craig Deare, whom Trump appointed a month ago to head the National Security Council's Western Hemisphere division, was on Friday escorted out of the Executive Office Building, where he worked in Washington.
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White House Pushes 'Alternative Facts.' Here Are the Real Ones. - The New York Times - 0 views
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Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Trump, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that the White House had put forth “alternative facts” to ones reported by the news media about the size of Mr. Trump’s inauguration crowd.
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In leveling this attack, the president and Mr. Spicer made a series of false statements.Here are the facts.In a speech at the C.I.A. on Saturday, Mr. Trump said the news media had constructed a feud between him and the intelligence community. “They sort of made it sound like I had a ‘feud’ with the intelligence community,” he said. “It is exactly the opposite, and they understand that, too.”In fact, Mr. Trump repeatedly criticized the intelligence agencies during his transition to office and has questioned their conclusion that Russia meddled in the election to aid his candidacy. He called their assessment “ridiculous” and suggested that it had been politically motivated.
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Mr. Trump said of his inauguration crowd, “It looked honestly like a million and a half people, whatever it was, it was, but it went all the way back to the Washington Monument.”Aerial photographs clearly show that the crowd did not stretch to the Washington Monument. An analysis by The New York Times, comparing photographs from Friday to ones taken of Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, showed that Mr. Trump’s crowd was significantly smaller and less than the 1.5 million people he claimed. An expert hired by The Times found that Mr. Trump’s crowd on the National Mall was about a third of the size of Mr. Obama’s in 2009.
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Speaking later on Saturday in the White House briefing room, Mr. Spicer amplified Mr. Trump’s false claims. “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe,” he said.There is no evidence to support this claim. Not only was Mr. Trump’s inauguration crowd far smaller than Mr. Obama’s in 2009, but he also drew fewer television viewers in the United States (30.6 million) than Mr. Obama did in 2009 (38 million) and Ronald Reagan did in 1981 (42 million), Nielsen reported. Figures for online viewership were not available.
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Mr. Spicer said that Washington’s Metro system had greater ridership on Friday than it did for Mr. Obama’s 2013 inauguration. “We know that 420,000 people used the D.C. Metro public transit yesterday, which actually compares to 317,000 that used it for President Obama’s last inaugural,” Mr. Spicer said.Neither number is correct, according to the transit system, which reported 570,557 entries into the rail system on Friday, compared with 782,000 on Inauguration Day in 2013.
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Economists Have Been Demoted in Washington. That's a Bad Idea. - The New York Times - 0 views
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Economists Have Been Demoted in Washington. That’s a Bad Idea.
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Academic economists have received a demotion. The Trump administration has been filling out its cabinet and, unlike in the Obama administration, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers will not be part of it.
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Yes, academics fret about what their peers think, just as other people do. In this case, it’s a good thing. It is important to have someone in the cabinet who is more interested in protecting academic integrity than in protecting business interests or the president’s image.
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Why coal-fired power handouts would be an attack on climate and common sense | Environm... - 0 views
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The coal industry knows that to stop runaway climate change all coal-powered generators need to close Australia joined 174 countries and the European Union in 2015, signing the Paris agreement. In doing so, Australia agreed to do its part in keeping the global temperature rise “well below” 2C.
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According to data from the Office of the Chief Economist, the demand for coal-generated electricity has dropped by more than 15% in the past eight years.
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Coal is now the most expensive form of new power. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the cost of energy from a new coal power plant would be $134-$203/MWh. That’s more expensive than wind, solar or highly efficient combined-cycle gas (costing $61-$118/MWh, $78-$140/MWh and $74-$90/MWh, respectively).
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The only people who still think we need the old-fashioned sort of “baseload power” that coal provides – power that is always running regardless of whether you need it – are those in the coal industry.
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This claim seems a bit extreme, saying that the only people still interested in coal are in the coal industry. It might be true, but I also feel as if some people do not think of where their power source comes from.
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In the short term, that can be gas. But, in the longer term, to stop runaway climate change, that service will need to be supplied by renewable sources such as battery storage, hydro, solar thermal with storage or geothermal.
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“As the world’s largest coal exporter, we have a vested interest in showing that we can provide both lower emissions and reliable baseload power with state-of-the-art, clean, coal-fired technology.”
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This article is really interesting because I think it goes to show that there is still some side of the global warming/climate change argument that is making progress. As we learned today, it is important to walk that middle line between over-skepticism and gullibility. Here people recognize that coal emissions are bad, and countries are taking a stand to try and lower that. It does make me wonder though what the future with coal holds, and if one day, we really will resort to renewable energy. It seems increasingly important. One more interesting thing I found was the use of the graphs to support the information, for graphs used to seem to me something people trust, but now I realize we have survival instincts associated even with data, and I wonder if some people would remark this as "fake news."
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The deep emotions behind stand-up comedy - 0 views
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CNN's "The History of Comedy" airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET/PT. Find uncensored episodes of this original series on CNNGo . "A comedian walks into a psychologist's office. The psychologist says, 'lie down and tell me everything you know.' " The punch line: "I haven't been able to get an appointment since.
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Tesla Passes Ford in Market Value as Investors Bet on the Future - The New York Times - 0 views
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But there is one exception. Tesla, the electric-vehicle upstart, continues to surge.
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“Investors want something that is going to go up in orders of magnitude in six months to six years, and Tesla is that story,” said Karl Brauer, a senior editor at Kelley Blue Book. “Nobody thinks Ford or G.M. is going to do that.”
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Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, has shattered the conventional wisdom that automakers should be viewed as a stable, reliable investment. Instead, he promotes his California-based company as a dynamic vehicle for growth, despite the risks and challenges ahead of it.
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But neither automaker has convinced Wall Street that it has shed its boom-or-bust reputation tied to broader economic cycles, or is at the forefront of new technology being developed for self-driving vehicles and electric cars.
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“It’s almost like Tesla is positioned in people’s minds as an energy storage company that happens to put most of its batteries on wheels,” said Andrew Stewart, chief investment officer at Exchange Capital Management, an investment firm in Ann Arbor, Mich.
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While Tesla may enjoy the favor of investors, it still faces some daunting hurdles to reach its goals.
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In my research on Tesla, I found it very interesting that Tesla never has advertisement spreading out like Ford, Motor or other motor companies do. Yet, it is very popular and well-known. How does Tesla manage to be known by the public if they don't have any advertisement and their target costumers are the elites? One of the reason I found online about its propaganda strategy is its skill on giving stock holder confidence. Thus their stock price is always positive and healthy. By generating new ideas, Tesla is able to stay on the headline of the newspaper. When I saw this news, my first reaction is that it's Tesla again and give me a very positive image on the future of Tesla. This new way of propaganda is directly related to the new form of economics in the society so I found it very interesting. --Sissi (4/4/2017)
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What's at Stake in a Health Bill That Slashes the Safety Net - The New York Times - 0 views
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It is startling to realize just how much the social safety net expanded during Barack Obama’s presidency. In 2016, means-tested entitlements like Medicaid and food stamps absorbed 3.8 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, almost a full percentage point more than in 2008
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Public social spending writ large — including health care, pensions, unemployment insurance, poverty alleviation and the like — reached 19.3 percent of G.D.P.
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Government in the United States still spends less than most of its peers across the industrialized world to support the general welfare of its citizens.
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Last week, President Trump’s sketch of a budget underscored how little interest he has in the nation’s social insurance programs — proposing to shift $54 billion next year to the military
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Republicans in the House plan to vote this week to undo the Affordable Care Act. That law was Mr. Obama’s singular contribution toward an American welfare state, the biggest expansion of the nation’s safety net in half a century.
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Welfare reform did hurt many poor people by converting antipoverty funds into block grants to the states. But it was accompanied by a big increase in the earned-income tax credit, the nation’s most effective antipoverty tool today.
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“No other Congress or administration has ever put forward a plan with the intention of having fewer people covered.”
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Under the House Republican plan, 24 million more Americans will lack health insurance by 2026, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
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Millions of Americans — poor ones, mainly — will use much less health care. They will make fewer outpatient visits, have fewer mammograms and cholesterol checks.
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In any event, public health insurance will take a big hit.
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Who knows where this retrenchment takes the country? Maybe attaching a work requirement to Medicaid, as conservatives propose, will prod the poor to get a job. Or perhaps it will just cut more people from Medicaid’s rolls. Further up the income ladder, losing a job will become more costly when it means losing health insurance, too.
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Might depression and mental health problems destabilize families, feeding down into the health, education and well-being of the next generation?
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Yet it is worth remembering that among advanced nations, the United States is a laggard in life expectancy and has one of the highest infant mortality rates.
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If American history provides any sort of guidance, it is that continuing to shred the social safety net will definitely make things worse.
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Directing spending away from American people and their access to healthcare is a definite possibility for Trump. It will be interesting to see the effect this has on the healthcare market and the American people. This article says it will probably hurt many poor people and decrease their health.
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Anti-vaccine activists, 9/11 deniers, and Google's social search. - Slate Magazine - 1 views
www.slate.com/...e_s_social_search_.single.html
internet online science skepticism closure lying deceit search
shared by Javier E on 27 Jan 12
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democratization of information-gathering—when accompanied by smart institutional and technological arrangements—has been tremendously useful, giving us Wikipedia and Twitter. But it has also spawned thousands of sites that undermine scientific consensus, overturn well-established facts, and promote conspiracy theories
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Meanwhile, the move toward social search may further insulate regular visitors to such sites; discovering even more links found by their equally paranoid friends will hardly enlighten them.
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Initially, the Internet helped them find and recruit like-minded individuals and promote events and petitions favorable to their causes. However, as so much of our public life has shifted online, they have branched out into manipulating search engines, editing Wikipedia entries, harassing scientists who oppose whatever pet theory they happen to believe in, and amassing digitized scraps of "evidence" that they proudly present to potential recruits.
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The Vaccine article contains a number of important insights. First, the anti-vaccination cohort likes to move the goal posts: As scientists debunked the link between autism and mercury (once present in some childhood inoculations but now found mainly in certain flu vaccines), most activists dropped their mercury theory and point instead to aluminum or said that kids received “too many too soon.”
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Second, it isn't clear whether scientists can "discredit" the movement's false claims at all: Its members are skeptical of what scientists have to say—not least because they suspect hidden connections between academia and pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the vaccines.
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mere exposure to the current state of the scientific consensus will not sway hard-core opponents of vaccination. They are too vested in upholding their contrarian theories; some have consulting and speaking gigs to lose while others simply enjoy a sense of belonging to a community, no matter how kooky
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attempts to influence communities that embrace pseudoscience or conspiracy theories by having independent experts or, worse, government workers join them—the much-debated antidote of “cognitive infiltration” proposed by Cass Sunstein (who now heads the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the White House)—w
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perhaps, it's time to accept that many of these communities aren't going to lose core members regardless of how much science or evidence is poured on them. Instead, resources should go into thwarting their growth by targeting their potential—rather than existent—members.
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Given that censorship of search engines is not an appealing or even particularly viable option, what can be done to ensure that users are made aware that all the pseudoscientific advice they are likely to encounter may not be backed by science?
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One is to train our browsers to flag information that may be suspicious or disputed. Thus, every time a claim like "vaccination leads to autism" appears in our browser, that sentence woul
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The second—and not necessarily mutually exclusive—option is to nudge search engines to take more responsibility for their index and exercise a heavier curatorial control in presenting search results for issues like "global warming" or "vaccination." Google already has a list of search queries that send most traffic to sites that trade in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories; why not treat them differently than normal queries? Thus, whenever users are presented with search results that are likely to send them to sites run by pseudoscientists or conspiracy theorists, Google may simply display a huge red banner asking users to exercise caution and check a previously generated list of authoritative resources before making up their minds.
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In more than a dozen countries Google already does something similar for users who are searching for terms like "ways to die" or "suicidal thoughts" by placing a prominent red note urging them to call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.
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Austrian Law Student Faces Down Facebook - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The plan put forward by Viviane Reding, the European justice commissioner, would give E.U. residents the right to opt out more easily of standard data collection practices used by businesses like Facebook. It would also compel companies to expunge all personal data, permanently, at a consumer’s request. Both elements have the potential to hamper the data-harvesting engine that is at the heart of Facebook’s advertising-driven business, and of its value.
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Mr. Schrems appeared on Facebook’s radar last June when he filed a complaint against the company with the Irish regulator, the office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, in Port Arlington, Ireland. He alleged 22 violations of European law. Mr. Schrems filed the grievance after using a provision of Irish law to obtain from Facebook a copy of all of the information the company had been keeping on him. Facebook sent Mr. Schrems a computer disc containing 1,222 pages of information.
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The disc, Mr. Schrems said, showed that Facebook was routinely collecting data that he had never consented to give, like his physical location, which he assumes was determined from his computer’s unique address identifiers, which can be traced geographically. Facebook was also retaining data he had deleted, Mr. Schrems said.
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Fixing Medicare - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Medicare is nothing less than a lifeline for 49 million older and disabled Americans. It helps pay for care in a wide range of settings, including hospitals, nursing homes, outpatient clinics, doctors’ offices, hospices and at home, as well as for prescription drugs. It is also hugely costly. The federal government spent about $477 billion in net Medicare outlays in fiscal year 2011 — 13 percent of its total spending. By 2021, it is projected to spend $864 billion — or 16 percent of the total — according to figures derived by the Kaiser Family Foundation. That rate of growth is not sustainable indefinitely.
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There are three key drivers of Medicare spending: the spiraling cost of all health care as new technologies and treatments are developed; much greater use of medical services by the typical beneficiary; and an aging population. By 2020, the number of enrollees will increase to 64 million.
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The only way to make Medicare sustainable is to have it grow at the same rate as the economy that provides the tax base to support it. In recent years, Medicare spending has been growing faster than gross domestic product, by roughly 1.7 to 2 percentage points.
