Is climate change driven by human activity? Do males have a natural advantage in sports? Do vaccines cause autism? Does rent control make housing more available?
The major political tribes are full of BS, because politics mostly isn't driven by disagreements about facts but by conflicting material interests. Partisans believe whats convenient.
> Do males have a natural advantage in sports? Do vaccines cause autism?
I won't argue about the other two, BUT.
We have facts for contact sports and for speed and strength sports, we've had these facts for millenia.
For the vaccine one, we also have facts. You're more likely to win the lottery than to get autism from them. I think they're probably the same odds as dying from a potted plant falling on your head while walking but anti vaxxers don't seem to be wearing helmets everywhere, that's so weird...
I don't think any of these are ambiguous. My point is that sometimes right wingers take the nonsense position and sometimes left wingers take the nonsense position. Neither side reliably follows the evidence or "believes the science" so glib lines like "reality has a liberal bias" are shallow and silly.
The point of the phrase "reality has a liberal bias" is not "liberals never take a nonsense position", it's "more of the facts that liberals [just as tribalistically] believe in happen to also be true, when compared to conservatives".
That something like this might happen is not surprising. If you have two political groups and you assign both beliefs from a bag in a purely random process, odds are that one of the groups will end up with more true beliefs than the other, through no virtue of their own but through pure chance.
How do you distinguish partisans from actual knowledge? The Steve Bannon philosophy of flood the zone with shit so it all looks the same seems to have killed public discourse IMO. It is easy to label everyone as partisans.
To your questions, the best explanations for climate change are human causes (and with very considerable evidence).
Women have higher pain tolerances and greater natural buoyancy, they are greatly advantaged at long distance cold water swimming. Many other sports require physical size and/or strength - so it does depend. Vaccines have no evidence of _causing_ autism, and the big paper that made that claim was retracted. I don't know about rent control and do not know what data exists.
Yeah, the answer of, yes, and here is all the evidence just doesn't seem to fly. I feel that trolling and trolls, and science illiteracy just have simply won the day.
For a bit of context: people who were hit by the New Year's earthquake in Japan were living on small rice ball rations until aid could get to them. This is partly because Japan's 2.5 decades of economic consternation has forced the country to make hard choices about where investment goes - mostly to the dense major metropolitan areas, with their higher ROI, and not to the more rural ones that were affected by the natural disaster (hence, also, the long remediation process in Fukushima).
By way of comparison, much-less-dense America will find itself in trouble if it turns out that we're facing anything remotely similar in our weird will-it-won't-it stagflation.
The Strong Towns project has a ton of information about the looming insolvency of many American municipalities, and how infrastructure and aid - as in, water pipes and food access - are in the crosshairs just so that the whole shebang doesn't blow. Ironically, starvation may be back on the menu.
This is a weird take. Historically Japan has overinvested in rural infrastructure, because the ruling LDP's support base is rural, rural votes carry disproportionate weight, and when there's nothing going on economically construction is the best way to funnel money in.
In addition, Japan is exceptionally well prepared for disasters, probably better than any other country in the world. Those plans are regularly battle tested because it also has a lot of disasters. Yes, it took a while to get aid out, but that's because the tsunami wiped all coastal roads, railroads, airports etc, and AFAIK hunger was not an actual problem for survivors.
I'm not an expert, so I defer anyone who can present information contrary to my statements. That said, it would seem that "well-prepared" and "the tsunami wiped out all links" are contradictory. IIRC, many buildings and pieces of infrastructure were not up to anti-earthquake/fire/tsunami regulations due in part to their age. A quick check turns up an NHK article claiming that Ishikawa Prefecture's disaster preparedness plans were deemed insufficient by experts. https://web.archive.org/web/20240201140804/https://www3.nhk....
Additionally, I recall several documentaries and news reports that referenced the difficulty of delivering aid, including food, and the lack of preparedness for the extended period of dislocation.
In any case, I think it would actually be scarier to find that the conditions present after the recent earthquake were to be found in a country considered well-prepared for such disasters. Combined with the collective experience following Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, we as Americans might be, for lack of a better term, f*cked.
Japan is incredibly mountainous, of course the transport links are near the coasts because that's the flat part where people actually live. There are sea walls etc built to guard coastal towns, but the size of the tsunami overwhelmed them and at that point you're screwed.
And yes, many buildings are out of code, because Japanese earthquake standards are continually strengthened and virtually anything built more than 20 years ago will not meet the newest set. This is also a big reason why the Japanese prefer to buy new houses.
Of course the disaster could have been handled better, and eg the design of the Fukushima nuclear reactors was particularly bad, but (IMHO) they still did a better job this time than with the Kobe earthquake, where the Yakuza had to step in to help because the government was caught flat-footed by a disaster happening in the "wrong" place.
The Strong Towns project cherry picks data to push a biased narrative. If looming insolvency of many American municipalities was a serious problem, then we would see that reflected in their bond yields and bond insurance rates. That isn't happening. Some cities in economically depressed areas will go bankrupt but nationwide the vast majority will muddle through and patch their infrastructure well enough to keep it working.
The actual numbers are surprising though.
1. Most of the decrease in the middle class was driven by MC people moving to the upper class
So
2. The ratio of lower class to upper class is actually lower than in the 70s.
Interesting point I never considered. Is the cut off for UC really just 1 million dollars in net worth? Seems implausible given house prices in places like California. Is essentially every home owner UC?
It's popular with middle class suburban families. So, snobs (who don't realize that's what they are) like to sneer at it to demonstrate their sophistication.
Can data be reviewed retroactively to track someone that wasn't a suspect at the time the image was captured. E.g., "we now suspect john doe was involved in a series pf bank robberies. Tell me everywhere his car allowed up in the last 30 days."
Call me old fashioned, but I think the constant monitoring of citizen's movements is bad even (especially?) when the state does it. If we're going to live in 1984, the involvement of corporations seems like the least of our troubles.
Good on you though, for actually going after this information and sharing it with your community. People absolutely have the right to know if they're being subjected to this.
Entirely depends on your definition of utility. For some of us it's a simple binary function: "will it get me from home to work in less than X minutes"
Is climate change driven by human activity? Do males have a natural advantage in sports? Do vaccines cause autism? Does rent control make housing more available?
The major political tribes are full of BS, because politics mostly isn't driven by disagreements about facts but by conflicting material interests. Partisans believe whats convenient.