PeterMP

Given those districts are largely GOP in terms of the House and state governments, I think very few. Enough of them are showing up to vote GOP for the house and state representatives. That people would show up to vote for the House and in state elections and not vote for President or Senate seems unlikely. I'm pretty sure if the GOP felt like that abolishing the EC would help them by brining out more votes in national elections, they'd be all over it.

I think @tshile has been pretty clear he's worried about the future. Right now, there might not be a big issues where that's happening but that doesn't mean in 20 years there won't be. But I think you can see an area of concern now in terms of climate change actions and land preservation/water management. There was a lot of water management post-WWII where a lot of dams were built and land was gained that has been used for farming and agriculture where those dams are not being changed or torn down, and it has people living in those areas concerned. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/interactive/2023/klamath-river-dam-removal/ But New Orleans floods and it's we're going to rebuild. Much of the NY and NJ coast line get destroyed and it is we are going to rebuild and even do things like build a sea wall for Staten Island. There's no sense that part of the solution to mitigating climate change is depopulating costal regions along the east coast and allow areas that were historically water ways (much of Boston and NYC are built on old landfill), wet lands, and flood plains become what they were and instead in a lot of cases we're doing more building right up against the water. My mom lives in rural MD. They've lived there since I was young. She lives 200 yards from a small stream. Over time there have been nothing but more and more restrictions on what can be done with the land while building and infrastructure in the more populated parts of the state get bigger and things like the Baltimore Inner Harbor were redone and "revitalized". If you care about the bay bringing people into that area and even into Camden Yards with the traffic and associated pollution doesn't make much sense.

I don't know why it would be any more chaoitc. But the bigger thing is that more congressional districts likely changes political climate. Actually knowing more of your constituents and your constituents actually knowing you would become more feasible and voting would be based more on those personal interactions/knowledge and less on the platform of the national party or what people see in tv commercials.

China is different because it is on the security council. That pretty much prevents any UN resolution from passing. The other conflicts haven't been going on to nearly the same extent for nearly as long. But there are UN resolutions that cover them. For example, there has been a UN investigation of what is happening in Ethiopia that went on for several years and ended partly because Ethiopia made some promises (which I don't think they've actually followed through on) in exchange for some money from the EU. So the west ended the pressure for the investigation. The same is not happening with respect to Israel and the Palestinians because the US won't allow it. We are not okaying the creation of a UN investigative force to go into Israel/Gaza and investigate atrocities or other war crimes committed by either side.

We have some idea of how well people read over time. There's data going back to the early 1970s on reading level by 12th graders, and it isn't like there was/has been a big fall off. (The lines are really pretty steady. https://www.winginstitute.org/have-naep-reading-scores924 And basic/general literacy rates have gone up. ) I'd generally agree that there really haven't been any real studies done. But the context of your first post wasn't an indication of a lack of information on the effect.

Doing good studies in education, especially at the level of tracking long(er) term out comes, is hard and there is really minimal support for it. Getting a grant to track out comes of people over any real time is extremely difficult. Really, we know very little about how to teach people for longer term retention, or the impact on different teaching approaches on larger society. There's very few studies that track how well did people really learn a specific topic based on different teaching approaches where they look at the impact more than a month or 2 later. In terms of larger societal impact, there has been some work done on things like early childhood education (i.e. head start), but beyond that essentially nothing. (In the context of this conversation, Head Start was dismissed for a period of time as useless because much of the education gains achieved through head start are lost by middle school. Later studies suggest that head start has larger longer terms impacts that reach into adulthood even if as kids through middle school the kids don't do better in school. In the context of homogenous vs. heterogenous classrooms, there's been essentially nothing done at that level.)

I think you are over playing the effects of the 3 cues reading system for the vast majority of kids. My kids are part of the 3 cues reading programs, and they read fine today. And have none of the problems you are suggesting. Something can be not the ideal way to teach kids to read, be used, and not be the worse thing to ever happen to a kid. Also, the idea of using 3 cues was because some kids were struggling to read and are based on older ideas. Even when I learned to read, teachers talked about using context clues. It isn't like everybody reads ideally under one method and schools went out of their way to introduce a new method that didn't work for anybody.

So this would seem to require that we do some tracking over the longer term to look out comes beyond what you can see at school. It seems that would require knowing things like what jobs people end up in. To my knowledge, that hasn't been done. But I doubt it would change much very much. We don't have an issue with too few people getting advanced degrees in science/math in most fields where having the extra background in high school matters. We have too many in most fields. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03439-x That there are people out there losing interest in science/math that then would go onto need that science/math and impact society is unlikely. If you are the sort of person that is losing interest because you aren't being pushed in your middle school classes, my guess is that you don't actually have the curiosity/drive/motivation to push science forward to any great extent. In my experience, people that can really push forward science aren't going to lose interest being in a heterogenous classroom through middle school. And to my knowledge, nobody is talking about killing things like AP programs at high school levels. My kids have gone to heterogenous schools, but been pulled out for some classes through the years so they are in advanced science/math classes. My oldest daughter is a senior in high school taking classes like AP Calc II and AP Comp. Sci. She's planning on going to college to be a nurse. The resources put into getting her to where she is in terms of science/math have almost certainly been a waste. It's great she knows what an integral is, but she's almost certainly never going to use it. From my perspective and in my experience, we're massively over educating many people for very little upside. And realistically, I could have told you at 12 she didn't have have the intellectual curiosity to be really successful in science. Realistically, we do the same thing at the college level. Most of the people I went to college with don't use their upper level math today (e.g. diffi q). Maybe at the very high end nationally, it might make sense to pull out the top and get them into advanced schools/programs. But for every school system/district to have such a program, I doubt it makes any sense. That Seattle has 3 high schools worth of people that getting them advanced high school education by pulling them away from high schools that are closer to them and putting them into special programs and schools seems very unlikely to me. My guess is if you put the vast majority of those people in a heterogenous high school that have AP classes, the final out come doesn't really change. There might be some exceptions, but there are likely exceptions the other way too (i.e. people that got stuck in a lower class/school that if exposed to high ability students would be able to make the transition to more advanced subjects). I could be wrong and absolutely would support longer term studies on different teaching and educational approaches. But given what we know that's my take currently.

I'm not sure that the 3 cueing system is about selling books (though I don't think many schools actually have books any more). No matter how kids are being taught to read schools are going to have buy content/material. I don't think we need to go to that level to explain the what has happened with the 3 cueing. People sometimes strongly believe they are right without much evidence. In terms of homogenous vs. heterogenous classrooms/schools, why do you think they aren't raising the floor? And also, does it matter if they don't raise the floor if they also don't hurt high achieving students? If you can keep kids together and not hurt the top, why pull out the top? Just like 3 Cueing, shouldn't people that want to create a special system with special schools for high end students have to show some benefit to them? (The research on the effect of heterogenous classes on the low ability students is mixed. Some studies find no effect, some find a positive effect, and some actually find they hurt the low end student. But they almost all universally find no impact on high end students. You seem to be arguing for the continuation of a policy that there is little evidence that it is beneficial to anybody and might hurt low end students. e.g. In this study, low ability kids did worse when they weren't mixed with other kids. That is low ability kids did better when they were mixed with better students. But there was no impact on high ability kids. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1747938X18301039 "Between- or within-class homogeneous ability grouping had a small negative effect on low-ability students, but no effect on others." Heterogenous classrooms (not pulling out the top into a special classroom/school) isn't a magic bullet to pulling up the floor, but in some cases it seems to help. And I don't think there's really any evidence that it actually ever hurts the top.)

Jokic is a better player because he's a better defensive player because he's taller, and it isn't particularly close. Luka is an okay but not very good defensive player. To be as good as a player as Jokic, Luka would also have to be one of the top defensive guards which he isn't. In terms of things like defensive FG%, he's at best a middle of the pack guard.

Just to add on, this includes Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico. If you are a ship that isn't 100% American coming from Asia, you can't stop in Hawaii drop some things off, pick some things up, and then continue on to a port in CA. And vice versa, you can't leave CA, go to Hawaii drop somethings off and continue onto Asia. It is estimated that the Jones act costs the Hawaii and Alaska alone over a billion dollars a year.

Retirement for most people is really mostly a post-WWII thing. Pre-WWII there were a lot of 3 generation house holds where there were multiple generations living if not in the same house then the same property. There are a couple of issues. We have issues with income/wealth inequality. But we also have issues with people thinking the post-WWII world/economy should be the norm. And I'm not sure that's the case. You can't ignore that much of the develop world was a destroyed and a generation+ of young workers were decimated in WWI and then again in WWII.

Not to derail, but are basic childcare costs really still that expensive? My kids are old enough that they started day care before "there's an ap for that", and we do pretty well so we're willing to pay for good day care (My kids' day care very much taught them how to read, their address, how to write letters, etc.). But when they were a little older, we got stuck in a situation where my wife and I both had to work late one night a week for a semester and neither could be home until 7:00 one night a week. We were okay with them coming home from school and being home alone for an hour or 2, but not comfortable with leaving them home alone until 7:00. We looked at sending them back to where they had been in day care when they were younger. And they were going to charge us a bunch of money, and we were still going to have somebody take them from 6-7 because the day care closed at 6. (And my oldest daughter really didn't want to go back. I think there was one boy that was still going there that was her age, but all of her other friends were out of day care.) We were able to use some ap where people were rated to find somebody to come to our home, get them off the bus, and stay with them until one of us got home. She wasn't very good, never did much with them, and most days spent most of her time on her cell phone. Nominally, she made sure they did their homework (she didn't check it or anything), and sometimes she'd take them to the library, a park, or something. But there was an adult in the house, and it cost us much less than it would have to send them back to where they had gone to day care (and really, she probably made more money then most of the workers there so it seemed to benefit everybody at that level). But that ability to look at an ap, see somebody's experiences, and the ratings they got from previous people, then interview them, and really then negotiate what you'd pay them, really seemed like it had the potential to bring down basic child care costs. The person we'd brought on had been on the ap for like 3 years, had worked for several people, had reasonably good ratings, so you felt pretty comfortable that you weren't bringing in drug addict or a psycho. When my kids first stated in day care, doing something like that wasn't so feasible. I can see where it would still be hard to get somebody in regularly that would do the things the day care we used did (e.g. teach them how to read), but it seems like aps like that to do basic childcare should have brought the costs down pretty significantly.

The implication that we can't recognize that all humans aren't the same and don't share the same belief systems without being part of or there being the existence of a cult seems dumb and impractical to me.

Good news. Strictly speaking I don't think either group really wants or is capable of true genocide. Neither group has the ability (and I doubt the desire) to kill in large numbers people that live outside of the surrounding region. Jewish and Palestinians that are living in the US and Europe are safe (mostly, we might see something like the Indians appear to have been doing with Sikh leaders internationally and other violence but not at the level of a genocide). Israel is a nuclear state. Even if Palestinians do actually desire the destruction of the Israel, it is something far beyond what the Palestinians and neighboring Muslim states can achieve without a nuclear response that would destroy them. So the Palestinians/Arab states would have to be much more poweful then they are now and willing to risk their own destruction. That if the status quo continues that in the future you'll see an Israel that encompasses the totality of Palestine and that the vast majority of Palestinians are forced to leave the area and/or forced into refugee camps seems a likely scenario.

I don't think you have to pull the NT into this. Antisemitism appears to predate Christianity. Whatever the existing dominant religion/belief system is it is going to be used to attack minority groups. Jewish or other because of the universal human tendency to "other" out groups.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/oregon-drug-decriminalization-failed/677678/ "Measure 110 did not reduce Oregon’s drug problems. The drug-overdose-death rate increased by 43 percent in 2021, its first year of implementation—and then kept rising. The latest CDC data show that in the 12 months ending in September 2023, deaths by overdose grew by 41.6 percent, versus 2.1 percent nationwide. No other state saw a higher rise in deaths. Only one state, Vermont, ranks higher in its rate of illicit drug use." "Neither did decriminalization produce a flood of help-seeking. The replacement for criminal penalties, a $100 ticket for drug possession with the fine waived if the individual called a toll-free number for a health assessment, with the aim of encouraging treatment, failed completely. More than 95 percent of people ignored the ticket, for which—in keeping with the spirit of Measure 110—there was no consequence. The cost of the hotline worked out to about $7,000 per completed phone call, according to The Economist. These realities, as well as associated disorder such as open-air drug markets and a sharp rise in violent crime—while such crime was falling nationally—led Oregonians to rethink their drug policy." "We were not surprised that a trivial pressure to seek treatment was ineffective. Fentanyl and meth addiction are not like depression, chronic pain, or cancer, conditions for which people are typically motivated to seek treatment. Even as it destroys a person’s life, addictive drug use by definition feels good in the short term, and most addicted people resist or are ambivalent about giving that up. Withdrawal, meanwhile, is wrenchingly difficult. As a result, most addicted people who come to treatment do so not spontaneously but through pressure from family, friends, employers, health professionals, and, yes, the law." "Branding Measure 110 as a rebuke to the War on Drugs made no sense, because Oregon had never fought such a war. In 1973, it became the first state to decriminalize possession of marijuana. When federal and state mandatory-minimum sentences for drug crimes flowered in the ’80s and ’90s, Oregon went the other way, making it impossible for someone to go to prison for simple drug possession. Overall, the state had the country’s lowest rate of imprisonment for nonviolent crimes. Short local-jail sentences for drug possession were permitted, but diversion programs, including drug courts and community supervision with drug testing, were widely used. However, after Measure 110 was passed and the threat of jail time eliminated, the flow of people into these programs slowed." "But the lessons from Oregon’s troubles should not be overdrawn. One thing Measure 110 got right, at least in principle, is that Oregon’s addiction-treatment system was grossly underfunded, with access to care frequently ranking at the bottom of national indicators. The mechanism that the measure created to manage new spending was clumsy and didn’t work well, but the new law acknowledges the problem and provides extensive new funding for immediate needs, including detox facilities, sobering centers, treatment facilities, and the staff to support those services." (Complete legalization is likely to not solve problems and if anything lead to more problems. Complete legalization minimizes incentives for addicts to get help which minimally doesn't diminish the number of addicts and likely increases it. And then addicts bring a set of problems to society as they tend to make bad decisions when high and when they need to feed their addiction. The effort should be minimize addicts/addiction which likely will acquire some punishment for some users, especially non-addict users. And some sort of system to protect addicts and society from addicts that can't get and stay clean on their own. If you think about addiction has a mental health issue/disease if you have somebody with significant schizophrenia that can't be treated or won't stay on drugs that treat their schizophrenia, you can't just have them walking around. Some system has to be in place to make sure they are okay and not harming themselves or others.)

I'm going to put this here. It ties into a conversation from another thread, but probably better suited for here. “We have to eliminate fossil fuel use, for 1.5°C, at a global level, we have to eliminate all fossil fuel use by 2040 at the very latest.” If you believe that (and I've got no reason to think it isn't true) and believe the 1.5 C limit is the key, then 2 things are clear: 1. There is no way we can electrify our economy fast enough to maintain what it currently is. We cannot build the infrastructure needed to generate and deliver electricity at the scope needed to keep our economy what it is by 2040. And even if we could, our methods of producing, storing, and delivering electricity aren't nearly efficient enough to support the same economy. 2. There is 0 reason to be putting any resources into developing new fossil fuel production. We should halt the opening of any new mines, drilling, and exploration immediately and put those resources into something else. And realistically, this was true before Biden was President. If there is going to be 0 use of fossil fuels by 2040, no new fossil fuel development methods that have happened while Biden has been President have been worth it.

Can you please point to the agreement in place that backed up this permanent cease fire? The Oslo accords was the last serious agreement and everybody agrees that prior to the Oct. attacks that they were dead as both sides had violated them, and Hamas wasn't even part of that agreement. Understanding something doesn't mean that it is right or that you defend it. Do you also understand Palestinian anger at Israeli for their continued expansion of settlements even when it means using violence to take land from Palestinians? Are you going to understand future Palestinian attacks because Israelis are preventing aid from reaching innocent Palestinians now? (Did Hamas really create the crisis or have Palestinians in Gaza been in a crisis for generations now? (That yes has gotten worse since Oct.))

At some point in time practically, we have to "give up". If you have to get from a to b by some time, at some time you have to stop working on the best way to get to b and start moving to b. And resources and time put into the best way to get to b can/should be used to get to b. Reducing consumption is going to require time, money, and resources, including fossil fuels (e.g. building more green buildings is going to require things that require fossil fuels). Time, money, and fossil fuels spent on finding some new technology that allows us to just advance forward under the current socioeconomic system could be used to help in that transition. Mitigating is going to require time, money, and resources, including fossil fuels (e.g. @Corcaigh talked earlier in this thread about building reservoirs, which are likely going to require heavy machines that use fossil fuels). (I will admit that above I pointed out the two options as extremes and separate, but you can at least try to split the difference. Reduce consumption in some cases and mitigate in others (and even reduce production by electrifying and decarbonizing along the way).) We're to the point that we can't keep hoping something is coming along that sort of allows us to keep doing what we've been doing and fixes the problem. We have to select a path/plan and have to put time, money, and resources into it. (Realistically, what is going to happen is we aren't going to pick a plan/path. The GOP doesn't care and too many Dems are going to stick their heads in the sand and think that some how something will happen to fix the problem without hard choices and changes (which seems to be your case), and we'll more less end up with a mitigation process in a piecemeal manner. Which will be the worse and most costly (in terms of money and human lives) path. And many people will look back and say, ha climate change wasn't so bad without understanding the true costs that were/are being paid. We'll get to b but it will be too late, but many people will then look around and say, hey we made it. That wasn't too bad. Without realizing in actuality we paid huge costs for being too late and not doing enough soon enough in an organized manner to plan for being late.)

It certainly seems in this case that the invention that has come from the necessity has not been sufficient.

@Renegade7 No country in the world has the ability to maintain their economy based on their current electric grid or current ability to produce and distribute electricity. Improving grids and electrical production to the point they can will require huge amounts of raw materials, manufacturing, and work which all require fossil fuels. Before you get to the point in time that nuclear energy can prevent climate change, you will have used too many fossil fuels for it to matter. Building nuclear power plants generates a ton of fossil fuels. The only hope of ever doing anything about climate change without large socioeconomic changes required finding some sort of transitional fuel that could heavily use the existing fossil fuel infrastructure, and then could be used to build a more electric based economy (if necessary). And it is too late for that. I don't know if we could have ever found such a fuel/technology. But if there was something that could have been used, we didn't put enough money into finding it soon enough. In terms of climate change, today we have 2 options: 1. Deal with it by having a pretty massive reduction in our energy consumption and the associated socioeconomic changes that will have to come with it. Longer term, after electrification can be carried out, then maybe you can let it adjust back to something more resembling where we are now. But that's longer term. 2. Deal with it by letting it happen and do what we can to mitigate the effects of it. Nuclear never was or could be the solution to climate change without massive socioeconomic changes. It at best had to be the 2nd or 3rd thing after you transitioned to something else. **EDIT** And as @CousinsCowgirl84 graphic nicely points out nuclear is the most expensive way we currently generate electricity and that doesn't even include the long term costs of storage of waste and costs when there are melt downs. So even if you had some sort of magic way to electrify the global economy without using fossil fuels, the costs of energy would still have to go up which almost certainly then require socioeconomic changes.

I wouldn't go as to say there is no pollution. Leaks of radioactivity from nuclear power plants do happen. They tend to be of low amounts of not very dangerous isotopes, but there have been cases where low amounts of them have leaked undetected for years. https://www.ap.org/press-releases/2012/part-ii-ap-impact-tritium-leaks-found-at-many-nuke-sites I don't know of any reported cases where tritium has made it into ground drinking water, but that certainly is a possibility and would be dangerous. And then you have cases where there's a melt down, and I'd certainly call leaked radioactivity in those cases pollution. Worrying about natural gas running out seems unnecessary to me. All of the plants we'd build any time soon would be decommissioned and aged out by the time that happens. In terms of climate change, unless we are committed to stopping the production of fossil fuels, including natural gas and having at least several other countries do the same, worrying about using it seems a bit ridiculous. When we can get ourselves, Canada, and the Nordic countries to talk about capping production of fossil fuels, then worrying about using it might make sense. But even Democrats are bragging about how fossil fuel production is up under Biden.

We can build a small natural gas power plant designed to be run during peak demand (they are called peakers) on preexisting sites in 2 years or even less after approval. A new full sized natural gas called Guernsey Power Station was built on a new site in OH in 7 years (approved in 2016 came online in 2023), and they even had issues where they didn't build for a year and the pandemic. I think that's generally considered a bad case scenario today for such a thing. Some of the newer ones that are hybrid natural gas/alternative energy take longer, but even then I think they expect to go from approval to functional in less than 10 years. I don't think there really is such a thing as a cookie cutter nuclear plant. They don't get built often enough, and they depend on the site (where is the water coming from). Also the newer ones are supposed to be safer and last longer which if you are going to be waiting and are talking about nuclear makes sense to wait. Putting up because it is faster that isn't as safe could be a costly decision with nuclear power.

And index funds generally cost less. Even if you are in a managed asset and they are beating the market, are they doing by enough to off set the fees you are paying them?