Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 197 posts

Re: EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies

#141

Post by mothballed »

avmich wrote: post #134
mothballed wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I (willingly) don't pay my taxes someone will put me in a tiny cage, violently ("tax evasion"). If I don't fix my road, I just can't go anywhere, which obviously forces me to voluntarily fix it. If I don't voluntarily fix it, I'm stuck until someone comes along with a backhoe, and given only the tiniest % of people will purposefully sabotage their ability to go buy groceries, the burden of having to fix a neighbor…

So how the tragedy of commons problem is solved?

Your premise here is absurd. Let's suppose minimizing government is taken to the extreme and literally everything is privatized. Then there wouldn't even be a commons and everything would be privately owned. In no way shape or form does increasing the commons eliminate the tragedy of the commons.

Re: EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies

#142

Post by thisisit »

The current admin tries to portray themselves as "strong man" but have the thinnest of skins. It is likely the EPA bosses don't want any studies which oppose their agenda. Be it renewables or coal mining. Don't follow the science, follow the agenda.

Case in point - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBllzAb_vAk

Kevin Hall's study didn't find ultra processed foods being addictive like cocaine. It seemed to have rubbed the RFK MAHA agenda the wrong way.

Re: EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies

#143

Post by avmich »

thisisit wrote: post #128
Sammi wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because of the First Past The Post voting system that is used in the US, which means winner takes all. If you want to understand why the US seems so uniquely politically divided, then you will understand once you understand how FPTP voting works and how it inevitably leads to binary politics. Most countries have a voting system that leads to broader representation. US politics will always be black and white and…

FPTP is bad but other methods are similarly flawed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf7ws2DF-zk Keeping a democracy requires people to understand it as well. At least in US it seems they'd rather elect a dictator wannabe who clearly said he wanted to be dictator for a day than elect a woman.

Fortunately the US demonstrated they can elect racial minority president, so different gender president can happen too.

Re: EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies

#144

Post by rectang »

weberer wrote: post #116
cogman10 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something baked into the constitution from the beginning. The entire reason we have the senate is because the less populated slave states didn't want to get steam rolled by the the more populated northern free states. It was an anti-democracy measure to ensure low population regions get over-represented.

You have it backwards. It was mostly the smaller, Northern states like Delaware that were opposed to proportional representation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Compromise

It's perverse that the compromise isn't named for the states who were denying suffrage to enslaved people but who wanted to claim them as population for the purposes of representation.

Re: EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies

#145

Post by kjkjadksj »

notmyjob wrote: post #38
johnebgd wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great idea. Who pays for it?

California is what, the world’s sixth largest economy? But we (our political leadership broadly speaking) seem quite inept despite their abundant resources. Gotta to spend dollars on campaigning and gerrymandering instead, or you know losing 50 billion here and there to EDD fraud, or on high speed rail from Visalia to Modesto.

The hsr hyperbole is pretty tired at this point. Turns out when you build a train between LA and SF serving a region in between that will have 15 million people in 40 years is pragmatic.

Re: EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies

#146

Post by lelanthran »

andrewflnr wrote: post #135
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this has happened at times to all groups as well. Right now the conservatives are 'stuck' at least partially because of the cognitive dissonance required to elect and support the current admin. I think people on the left arguably did the same with various social justice initiatives. Things got crazier by the month for a while until people were genuinely afraid to speak, people were being cancelled for dubious…

Yeah, but part of what I'm seeing is exactly the left pulling their heads out of that mess, while the right is only digging in deeper, both on similar time scales.

> Yeah, but part of what I'm seeing is exactly the left pulling their heads out of that mess

I'm not seeing that; not yet anyway.

I expected to see that after the disastrous election that demonstrated just how fringe some of those vocal views were, but I did not.

Re: EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies

#147

Post by atmavatar »

avmich wrote: post #126
mothballed wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It never ceases to baffle my why Californians tend to opine towards a strong federal government when the documents authorizing it are structured such that California is virtually guaranteed to get the worst end of the deal. California has 12% of the population and 2% of the senators. Every time Californians urge to give the federal government more power, even for "good" things, the rules of the game virtually demand…

With senators that's by design. But there are also issues with representatives, and I'm not sure how it came to be and if it can be solved.

The problem with representatives happened as a result of the Reapportionment Act of 1929 [1], which capped the house at 435 members.

tl;dr: the Republican party recognized that demographic shifts were going to make them a permanent minority in the House, so they refused to re-apportion the number of house members after the 1920 census, then in 1929 decided to cap the number of representatives permanently.

The simple fix is to repeal the law and apportion seats properly, likely by significantly growing the size of the House.

However, in typical Democrat fashion, they never bothered repealing the act and re-apportioning properly once they had power to do so.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reapportionment_Act_of_1929

Re: EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies

#148

Post by rectang »

atmavatar wrote: post #147
avmich wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With senators that's by design. But there are also issues with representatives, and I'm not sure how it came to be and if it can be solved.

The problem with representatives happened as a result of the Reapportionment Act of 1929 [1], which capped the house at 435 members. tl;dr: the Republican party recognized that demographic shifts were going to make them a permanent minority in the House, so they refused to re-apportion the number of house members after the 1920 census, then in 1929 decided to cap the number of representatives permanently. The simple…

How robust would the reapportioned seats be against extreme political gerrymanders? It seems like packing and cracking would still work.

Re: EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies

#149

Post by amanaplanacanal »

mothballed wrote: post #113
cogman10 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bad idea. Let's start off with the first point "They are just easements on private property" That's what most public roads are. They are still owned by the public (the government) and maintained by the public (the government). Where I'm from, we have plenty of dirt and gravel roads just like this. Once every 10 years or so the county comes in and re-gravels them. They are mostly only ever used by private in…

Honestly I will just thank my lucky stars most people believe this fiction you present, because it's keeping the more libertarian areas cheap and without too many busybodies. It seems you've not heard of public access private easements or private trash service, and you haven't learned how to shoot a bear. I pay like $50/month in property taxes and that's basically exclusively for public school and college, which whil…

What works where you are probably wouldn't work for most people. I'm trying to imagine any city with no police or fire protection, public roads, public utilities, etc.

Re: EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies

#150

Post by notahacker »

mothballed wrote: post #139
notahacker wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You tried that with healthcare. Turns out lots of people want to buy it, it just costs a large multiple of what everyone else in the world pay because actually a bunch of private sector middlemen doing the same adminstrative roles the government does isn't automatically more efficient.

We did not try eliminating government from healthcare. In fact many of the high cost of private payments arise from regulation or a tragedy of the commons situation introduced by government (i.e. ER required to take everyone but with no answer how to pay).

Even if we just let the pesky poors die, the US healthcare system would still be more expensive on a per use basis than the rest of the world.

Now sure, the absolute amount spent would probably be lower if we just assumed that people that couldn't produce paperwork to prove they could fund their ER visit didn't deserve to live. If you prefer zero taxes and zero life expectancy for anyone unfortunate enough to need lifesaving treatment they can't afford, that's a perfectly valid preference. It's just intellectually dishonest to frame an argument that it's inefficient to let poor people live as an argument everyone would get more care if it wasn't for the pesky government paying for it.

Post reply on HN