What this probably leads to is scientists losing their jobs or their willingness to work in the US. Under the current president their only option seems to be to move to another country where they can do their work and discuss their findings in public. Science with a political filter is no longer science but only politics with the illusion of factual justification...
EPA Science Under Scrutiny by Trump Political Staff
111–120 of 211 posts
Re: EPA Science Under Scrutiny by Trump Political Staff
#112All of these changes that Trump is making in his first week are making me wonder: what's the population limit, really, for a well functioning democracy? I'm no historian, but didn't the United States go around saying how great democracy is? I don't know about you, but to me it definitely feels like it doesn't work quite as intended. As for the article at hand, all I can offer is this" Trump's blatant distrust for cli…
> what's the population limit, really, for a well functioning democracy? I think that's the wrong question but it leads us to the corrective answer. The founders provided us with a Bill of Rights, a constitution, separation of powers, and democratic processes for 2 of the 3 branches. Of these, the first two scale to as large a number as you wish. We need to start insisting on a robust interpretation of our civil righ…
Not so. Until the early 1900's, the interpretation of the Bill of Rights was strictly on the behavior of the federal government.
Re: EPA Science Under Scrutiny by Trump Political Staff
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are you even talking about? 1. I completely understand that coal miners are literally losing their jobs. 2. I understand that Trump was voted in by coal miners. 3. I didn't mention Clinton, like, at all.
> I understand that Trump was voted in by coal miners. Yes, tens and tens of millions of Americans work in coal mines. No.
Yeah, I have the feeling that people view from Wyoming to West Virginia as one giant smoking pit crawling with Uruk Hai Trump voters.
Re: EPA Science Under Scrutiny by Trump Political Staff
#114What this probably leads to is scientists losing their jobs or their willingness to work in the US. Under the current president their only option seems to be to move to another country where they can do their work and discuss their findings in public. Science with a political filter is no longer science but only politics with the illusion of factual justification...
Which is also very sad for the families of those scientists :(
Re: EPA Science Under Scrutiny by Trump Political Staff
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
The United States can't be a functioning democracy not because of it's size but because our actual political rules are awful. The electoral college, built in gerrymandering, weak restrictions on lobbying, the rules of our democracy are immensely undeomocratic when compared to other first world nations.
It's also difficult to get consensus when you have several large demographic groups with radically different cultures. To take the South as but one example, the average African-American lives in a world that is completely different than your average white Southerner. The interaction on political, social and even geographic levels is extremely limited. They may as well live in different countries. Then there's regions…
This is related to an observation I've made before.
Name any country that's been as functional as the United States has been, given our size, and especially given the enormous amount of diversity we have?
We've been doing the grinding, painful and hard work of real national diversity, at scale, for hundreds of years.
We've gotten it wrong a lot; we're still getting a lot of it wrong.
But here we are, perhaps the most vibrant, large population in the world. We have a lot of problems...more problems now than we had 10 or 15 years ago.
But damn it, looking back, it's really an amazing thing we've accomplished.
Trump seems to be, more than anything, an agent of chaos. I suspect his presidency will harm us. But we've handling a lot worse in the past, from within and from without.
Indeed, I like to think that the beautiful and painful results of our centuries long diversity have made us exceptionally strong.
Re: EPA Science Under Scrutiny by Trump Political Staff
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
But how is it any more fair to let three large metro areas override the preferences of most of the rest of the country?
That isn't the alternative. The alternative is to let the sum of each equal individual vote determine the outcome. Metro areas don't vote. Neither do farms. People vote. Just like most of us presumably agree that gender, ethnicity, etc. shouldn't affect the impact your vote has, I don't think that the amount of land you own or the population density of the area you live in should affect the impact of your vote.
You need to review your Constitutional history. The Constitution mandates that the president is elected by the states, via electors who are selected in each state "in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct." It's not a direct popular vote and never has been.
Re: EPA Science Under Scrutiny by Trump Political Staff
#117All of these changes that Trump is making in his first week are making me wonder: what's the population limit, really, for a well functioning democracy? I'm no historian, but didn't the United States go around saying how great democracy is? I don't know about you, but to me it definitely feels like it doesn't work quite as intended. As for the article at hand, all I can offer is this" Trump's blatant distrust for cli…
I'm just curious, what are the absolute best articles/papers that prove the following: 1) Climate change (meaning the planet is warming). 2) Climate change is man made and causing the planet to warm.
Well there's this meta study of about 12000 papers on the subject http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/0240... which finds that roughly 97% of the published literature support that conclusion.
Re: EPA Science Under Scrutiny by Trump Political Staff
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's worth noting that 3 million more people voted for Hillary. I wouldn't chalk this one up to a design issue, rather implementation (in this case, weighting votes by geographic region). We've submitted a patch and are waiting for enough reviewers to approve: http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/
This is a silly argument. Trump and Clinton competed for the electoral college, not the popular vote. Which means that Trump spent a lot of time campaigning for one electoral vote in Maine and almost none in courting millions of people in California and New York. It's impossible to say what the outcome would have been if the popular vote would have mattered, because both campaigns would be run totally differently.
Actually, no it's not. The electoral college was setup in 1787. What it has to do with politics two centuries later in the age of the internet seems out of date. Yet it's the rules we live by, not the rules we like.
Since 2000, it's clear that voter majorities have been underrepresented in presidential elections. And as we claim to be the world's largest democracy, we have been, in fact, the world's largest republic.
Re: EPA Science Under Scrutiny by Trump Political Staff
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm just curious, what are the absolute best articles/papers that prove the following: 1) Climate change (meaning the planet is warming). 2) Climate change is man made and causing the planet to warm.
Well there's this meta study of about 12000 papers on the subject http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/0240... which finds that roughly 97% of the published literature support that conclusion.
I am more interested in a single paper which really proves either point, or at least presents compelling evidence. Im sure there are a bunch out there, so id like to read some of them.
Re: EPA Science Under Scrutiny by Trump Political Staff
#120It feels like such a strange time to be alive. Even if you disagree with the concept of man-made climate change the distortion of scientific studies seems like something that everybody can agree is wrong. So much of science is funded by govt grants. The idea that everything must conform to the view of the current administration or it is not worth funding seems dangerous and economically limiting.
Except the manipulation is mostly in the other direction. For example, data sets from NASA suddenly changed on year showing increased in temperatures where previously there had been none. The current administration would argue that they're unpoliticizing science. If you're going to manipulate the data to help your side you can't complain when the other side does it. Unfortunately, the chance to have an honest discussion about the climate was destroyed by those climate zealots "hiding the decline".