161–170 of 211 posts
Have we never considered this scenario before? Has there ever been an attempt to establish independent agencies, not subject to the whims of the White House? (IIRC, maybe the CIA or the FBI are independent agencies?)
All 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.
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
(Better hurry before it gets taken down…)
Or look at the IPCC's Synthesis Report:
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/AR5_SYR_FI...
All 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…
The democracy is nominally functioning "by design" and by that I mean the law is still being followed. I'm convinced there are spiritually two Americas here and I'm not sure the founding fathers could have forseen that. There are slow-motion economic wars happening. They are happening at a global level between China and the US and they are happening at a national level in the US between the red and blue states. I don…
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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.
Not a paper, but this NASA site is pretty good: http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ (Better hurry before it gets taken down…) Or look at the IPCC's Synthesis Report: https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/AR5_SYR_FI...
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-wo...
(Always press down arrow to get the next page)
To understand why people are obsessed with "just around a degree" of observed change, see this xkcd comics to get an idea how fast the change is compared to what we know (and we, be sure, do!) about the past:
It 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.
It 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.
If you or anybody else cannot imagine succumbing to this sort of blind rejection of scientific studies and would like to experience it firsthand, consider your attitude towards research into the relationship between race and IQ.
Does FOIA cover previously released studies that have been revoked "pending review"?
Maybe, but I don't think FOIA will last long, to be honest, given the steps the current administration has taken in the first 5 days.
It's very unlikely Trump will beat his predecessor in that regard.
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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.
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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…
It started as a series of colonies that could have agreed to disagree. It grew through lucky aquisition: Florida from the Spanish, Alaska from the Russians, Louisiana from the French, Texas and California from Mexico. It split up, the Confederate States left, and was unified at great risk and even greater cost. If any one of those things hadn't happened the very concept of America would be fundamentally different.
It's also a country flanked by two relatively agreeable nations, Canada and Mexico, so there's little risk of armed conflict. This gives the country disproportionate control over its home turf. Even regional powers like Germany still have to answer to their neighbours, squabbles have gotten ugly and expensive.
It was also extremely lucky to have such a ridiculous abundance of natural resources. With perhaps the exception of Canada, and to a degree Russia no other country in the world has massive reserves of fresh water, prime agricultural land, lumber, fish, coal, copper, iron, oil, nuclear fuel, and a long list of other things. Name a resource and the US probably has it in a massive quantity. I don't think most Americans realize how blessed their country is.
It's amazing how much political cohesion you can have when resources are abundant, cheap, and there's no reason to fight over them. This could change as fresh water becomes more scarce and states start to bicker over who gets what. When there's not enough to go around things could get very, very ugly and America's entire character could change.
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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.
The jury is the total community of the scientists who devoted their lives to learn as much as possible about the topics they judge.
If you ask "as a beginner" you should first learn about the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect
If it's too hard for you to grasp how it functions, imagine that you cover yourself with the invisible plastic bag. The bag won't produce any heat but it would prevent the heat from your body to dissipate as it would otherwise, effectively warming you up. The same way function the greenhauses. CO2 has that effect for Earth, known since 1824 and elaborated since.