US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8141

On July 21 2017 00:40 Sermokala wrote:
I wouldn't buy for a second that britian didn't have some interest in supporting the south to divide the united states and keep it from being a world power. That they knew how poor the position the south was in makes me belive that they didn't want to piss off the states if they supported the south and the south lost anyway.

The civil war was about slavery. that the Souths economy was dependent on slavery and had been dependent on slavery from the birth of the union. That they didn't like that the north was now able to ignore the souths wish's with the immigration from European nations is only tangential to that they didn't have the power anymore to keep slavery. The states rights argument was only to serve their ability and argument to keep slaves. The civil war was about slavery. It was going to happen from the start of the nation and everyone knew it was coming.

On July 21 2017 00:48 Mohdoo wrote:


Great news indeed. These types who try to prevent speeches from taking place are a disgrace.

On July 21 2017 01:00 KwarK wrote:

Somewhat contextual. If the speech is a call for action to rid society of the degenerates and sodomites, followed by a quick lesson on how to properly tie a noose, then I think doing anything short of violence is extremely noble. If the speech is someone bitching about immigrants then I'm much more offended by the presumption that a protester has the right to decide which ideas I should be allowed to expose myself to than I am by the ideas themselves.

Non violent protest certainly has its place, but so does the authorities clearing the non violent protesters away.

Campaign groups are suing the Environmental Protection Agency in a bid to force it to clamp down on industrial air pollution in Texas.

Lawsuits set to be filed in Washington DC on Thursday allege that the federal regulator is allowing the nation’s leading oil- and gas-producing state to get away with issuing weak and opaque permits that do little or nothing to halt excessive emissions.

The legal filings cite allegedly lax pollution control permits for five plants and refineries, four near Houston and one near Dallas.

“EPA knows that Texas issues unenforceable permits with illegal loopholes that render useless some of the most basic pollution control requirements of federal and state law,” Gabriel Clark-Leach, an attorney for one of the plaintiffs, the Environmental Integrity Project, said in a statement. “EPA’s unwillingness to object to faulty state permits deprives the public of health protections guaranteed by the law.”

The EPA did not respond to a request for comment. Environmental groups are stepping up their pressure at a time when there is widespread skepticism about the agency’s willingness and ability to carry out its mission given the Trump administration’s desire to slash its budget and the intention of the EPA’s industry-friendly head, Scott Pruitt, to roll back numerous regulations.

The Republican-controlled US House of Representatives voted on Tuesday for an eight-year delay in the implementation of ozone pollution standards issued by the EPA during the Obama administration. The bill, which now goes to the Senate, was sponsored by a Republican from Texas.

State officials have questioned whether it is worth spending large amounts to reduce smog. The toxicology director for the state regulator, the Texas commission on environmental quality (TCEQ), told the Texas Tribune in 2014 that he had not “seen the data that says lowering ozone will produce a health benefit. In fact, I’ve seen data that shows it might have a negative health benefit.”

The Environmental Integrity Project and Environment Texas issued a report on 7 July claiming that the TCEQ imposed fines on about 3% of 24,839 unauthorised air pollution incidents from 2011 to 2016.

Using figures from state records of self-reported incidents, the analysis found that more than 500m pounds of air pollution was released during industrial malfunctions and maintenance, with $13.5m in fines levied. Last year, the report noted, there were 3,720 unauthorised pollution events which have so far led to only 20 penalties.

In response, the TCEQ said in a statement that it “complies with all of the requirements of both the State and Federal Clean Air Act. Texas does not allow industries to release excess amounts of air pollution when equipment breaks down and when facilities undergo maintenance work. Rather, TCEQ is required by law to evaluate emissions events that exceed a reportable quantity and requires facilities to minimize emissions from maintenance activities and upset events (malfunctions)”.

Under Texas rules, companies can avoid sanctions for “non-excessive”, “unavoidable” emissions reported in line with state guidelines. Critics say the rules amount to a loophole that hands companies a license to pollute with impunity and that infrequent, modest fines give them little incentive to upgrade their equipment or put more robust safety standards in place.

“Houston-area residents suffer preventable asthma attacks and heart attacks associated with the illegal air pollution from these refineries and plants. It is long overdue for both EPA and the state of Texas to get more serious about protecting public health,” Bakeyah Nelson, executive director of Air Alliance Houston, a clean air advocacy group, said in a statement.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on Thursday that he has received verbal approval from the "government" to build a "Hyperloop" connecting New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

Musk also said a trip between New York and Washington, D.C., which now takes roughly three hours by train, would last only 29 minutes.

Musk didn’t specify which government agency gave him the verbal approval.

The Department of Transportation did not immediately return The Hill’s request for comment.

Musk's SpaceX, which notes that it is not affiliated with any Hyperloop companies, although it has hosted Hyperloop competitions, referred The Hill to the Boring Company.

That company, which was born out of Musk’s frustration with traffic, aims to create tunnels to reduce car congestion. On its website, the Boring Company says that such tunnels “would also make Hyperloop adoption viable.”

The Boring Company did not immediately return The Hill’s request for comment.

Musk first released a white paper for the Hyperloop project in 2013, saying at the time that he was too busy between his work at Tesla and SpaceX to take on the project himself. The white paper has spawned other Hyperloop companies not affiliated with Musk, such as Hyperloop One.

On July 21 2017 01:18 Mohdoo wrote:


I agree with your hypothetical. But types like Ann Coulter etc shouldn't be stopped from speaking.

On July 21 2017 01:38 KwarK wrote:
I can't imagine the hyperloop ever becoming a thing. It'll suffer the fate of Concorde, a solution to a problem that never had the commercial incentive to be solved.

On July 20 2017 23:59 mozoku wrote:

No offense, but that's the same thing as what I said:

Negative results are those without a significant effect, or those where the journal doesn't care about the significant effect. Nobody does a study hypothesizing "Men make more than women" for that reason.


At that point, the "negative studies" are acting effectively as time-backwards failed replications though, which I did point out. The fact that academic journal publish a lot of research that fails attempted replication is no secret.

While we're on the topic, you have a lot more faith in meta-studies as I do. It's well-known that researchers can pretty reliably produce "significant" results from effects with a true effect size of zero.Source (among many others)

In a topic as politicized as the wage gap, it's almost certain that there's a lot of p-hacking, garden of forking paths, favorable data coding, sample selection, etc. going on to prod the data to say what the researcher wanted to find in the first place. It's well-known these things are abused whenever there are studies on other politicized topics. A meta-study is only as good as the studies it's aggregating.

I'm not saying that meta-studies are useless or shouldn't be done, but they aren't a silver bullet. When done properly, they can be very valuable. The upshot is that you should never really trust a study (meta- or otherwise) unless until you read and understand how it was done. And even then, you should probably wait for replications (maybe not if it the study methodology was pre-registered). The journal publication threshold (including peer review) isn't a reliable indicator of quality on its own.

Another factor (which is not really journals or academics' fault) is that the media tends to report novel findings ("Women found to get paid less than men"), but rarely report failed replications (backwards-time or not). Which leads to the public getting a distorted picture where controversial and counter-intuitive claims are reported to have a lot more evidence supporting them than there is in reality.

This is a horrible mess and hurts society in a bunch of ways. Academia badly needs reforming.


Agreed here, and that's another common criticism of not publishing negative results.

Are you an academic? I could see why academics (presumably the community you spend a lot of time in) complain more about your last paragraph (it directly affects them), and less about the issue in my posts (it doesn't really affect them, and talking about it could potentially invalidate their work).

Overall, I don't think were very far apart in what we said. So I'm a little confused on how you started with "This actually isn't true at all. That isn't what people mean when they criticize journals for not publishing negative results."

On July 21 2017 01:35 Plansix wrote:

Although I agree in principle, I also respect that it is a hard sell to police officers to risk bodily harm for conflict chaser like Coulter. She actively courts this type of response and national coverage being canceled brings. I would not be surprised if she never really planned to speak and simply wanted to cancel the talk due to safety concerns.

On July 21 2017 01:49 Azuzu wrote:


It seems like a bad time to invest in any new transportation infrastructure before self driving cars roll out. It'll be enough of a shakeup that predicting what our needs will be 10+ years from now is extremely difficult.

The U.S. Navy recently test fired the world’s first operational and deployed laser weapons from a warship in the Persian Gulf. According to CNN, the world’s first active laser weapons system was fired from the Austin-class amphibious transport dock USS Ponce. The laser successfully destroyed an unnamed aerial vehicle (UAV) and moving surface targets.

The new weapon releases photons—elementary particles which transmit light—at the speed of light silently hitting their target and burning it to a temperature of thousands of degrees. Unlike depicted in movies such as Star Wars, the laser beam, essentially a narrow beam of focused light, is entirely invisible.

“It operates in an invisible part of the electromagnetic spectrum so you don’t see the beam, it doesn’t make any sound, it’s completely silent and it’s incredibly effective at what it does,” Lieutenant Cale Hughes, the laser weapons system officer aboard the USS Ponce told CNN.

Lasers are primarily intended for short-range defense (one to five miles) against aircraft, drones, and small boats. Second-generation laser weapons systems are currently under development intended to take on faster targets such as incoming ballistic missiles.

During previous tests, lasers have taken out cruise missiles, mortars and other projectiles, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.

The $40 million weapons system requires a crew of three and a supply of electricity (generated from its own small generator) to operate. The 30-kilowatt, laser weapon, installed aboard the USS Ponce already in 2014, is extremely accurate and can be scaled depending on the target.

“I can aim that at any particular spot on a target, and disable and destroy as necessary,” said the commanding officer of the USS Ponce, Captain Christopher Wells. “It reduces collateral damage — I no longer have to worry about rounds that may go beyond the target and potentially hurt or damage things that I don’t want to hurt or damage.”

“It is more precise than a bullet,” Wells added. “It’s not a niche weapon system like some other weapons that we have throughout the military where it’s only good against air contacts, or it’s only good against surface targets, or it’s only good against, you know, ground-based targets — in this case this is a very versatile weapon, it can be used against a variety of targets.”

Unlike a traditional gun, a laser never runs out of bullets given that it has an infinite magazine as long as it is connected to a power source. Furthermore, in comparison to missile-based defensive systems firing a laser is cheap. “It’s about a dollar a shot,” according to Hughes. The SM-6, the U.S. Navy’s latest missile interceptor designed to engage the most advanced anti-ship cruise missiles, comes in at around $4 million per shot.

The downside of laser weapons systems is that they consume a lot of energy on the one hand, and that they have difficulties penetrating dust, haze, and smoke on the other hand, which makes it difficult to effectively operate them under adverse weather conditions. Possible counter-measure against laser weapons include fitting aircraft, boats and drones, with anti-laser coating or laser-deflecting mirrors. It should also be noted that an international agreement prohibits the targeting of human beings with laser weapons of any type.

On July 21 2017 01:56 Falling wrote:

Maybe. But success in shutting down speakers through protest breeds success. So if the university and police aren't willing to throw out people that shut down speech, this will get worse not better. If you look at the Charles Murray protest, for instance, the guy got one sentence out. "This is going to be a real anti-climax. Um. I have thought..." And then a good portion of the audience stands up and starts reading from a preprepared diatribe followed by chanting. It's not like they were protesting the content of his speech that day. He didn't even get that far to reveal his what his message actually was. "But your message is hatred." So, job well done, I guess?

On July 21 2017 02:15 Kickboxer wrote:
Same goes for "punching nazis". Now that's a retarded idea if I ever heard one. Max level othering + endorsement of violence.

On July 21 2017 02:13 Kickboxer wrote:
I don't understand why there needs to be a bar for free speech. I don't see any benefit for that on the level of the complete society, in no situation. Even if someone advocates genocide or whatever, you send your smartest people in there and calmly defeat them in a public debate, then post it on youtube so the general population can understand why they are wrong. Should be especially easy if their views are preposterous.

Yelling at people for speaking their own version of truth makes no sense. They will only hate you more and vice versa.

The new weapon releases photons—elementary particles which transmit light—at the speed of light