npts2020

I have been a vegetarian since 1980. The first 10 years was a pretty strict macrobiotic diet but I have slipped to eating cheese and yogurt and even, once in a great while (maybe once or twice a year), fish or seafood. The reason I became a vegetarian has far more to do with things like sustainability, health and boycotting certain corporate entities than any concern for the animals being eaten. I also live with 3 cats, all of which were feral, caught, neutered and brought indoors. Would it have been better, instead, to just leave them alone or shoot them?

IMO one of your problems is trying to make it a tree when it is more like a web with many disciplines being overlapping and interconnected, even ones not obviously so. For example, is cosmology physics or philosophy since there is both physics and metaphysics involved in the discussion? I think the hardest thing will be to make it easily usable so anyone can find what they are looking for.

Why would we want to? I thought that was the whole point of AI, to be a replacement to do things so we don't have to.

Thing is, you have a whole propaganda network obfuscating relative merits (or not) of the current regime and its former incarnation, not so much with Tweed and others involved back then.

So why is DEI responsible in LA? Pretty sure you can have bad government without DEI. Ever hear of Tammany Hall?

I have read this entire thread and still don't understand the difference between the slavery of the Jews and the slavery of Africans other than the amount of pigments in their epidermis and that some book claims one group is more deserving than another. Can you elaborate?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewage_treatment "Increasingly, people use treated or even untreated sewage for irrigation to produce crops. Cities provide lucrative markets for fresh produce, so are attractive to farmers. Because agriculture has to compete for increasingly scarce water resources with industry and municipal users, there is often no alternative for farmers but to use water polluted with sewage directly to water their crops. There can be significant health hazards related to using water loaded with pathogens in this way. The World Health Organization developed guidelines for safe use of wastewater in 2006.[61] They advocate a 'multiple-barrier' approach to wastewater use, where farmers are encouraged to adopt various risk-reducing behaviors. These include ceasing irrigation a few days before harvesting to allow pathogens to die off in the sunlight, applying water carefully so it does not contaminate leaves likely to be eaten raw, cleaning vegetables with disinfectant or allowing fecal sludge used in farming to dry before being used as a human manure.[62]" While it is recommended that raw sewage not be used for crops, the WHO still has guidelines for doing so because in some places it is not practical to treat it first.

It may have been more obvious but these guys seem to think wealth inequality was never greater than in modern America. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/aracheology-wealth-inequality-180968072/ Maybe because there is much more "wealth" to distribute today?

One of the problems in the US is that there are 50+ systems for voting (every state and territory controls its own elections and some states even allow precincts to make up their own rules). I live in Pennsylvania and a recount wouldn't have helped anything in 2000 because there was no paper ballot, just the voting machine which presumably would give the same result every time. The Green Party sued the state over the issue and actually won so now there are paper ballots that are counted by machine, including mail-in ballots. Pa. is one of something like 7 states to not allow any processing of mail-in ballots before polls open on Election Day which can sometimes lead to substantial delays in calling the outcomes of close votes.

Depends on how you write and approach things. Look at science, for example, there is more written than any current human could ever hope to absorb but I don't see by what criteria you could ever call science "static" or unable to "evolve".

Me either but I watch C-Span almost every day and the amount of ignorance and hatred (pretty astounding IMO) on display by callers is not encouraging when one would think these are people who actually bother to follow Congress.

That was "The Prisoner" in the US, great show with a lot of social commentary. The Lotus he drove was pretty nice, too, if you like cars.

Is this guy the best guitarist ever?

If you can think of any way of making the above statement in bold any clearer, I am all for that clarification, so help me out. Apparently, the "/" means something other than the and-or I always thought it meant. I don't know if there is a realistic solution to give advice about. It all comes down to education and access to factual information. Maybe make education more like entertainment? I don't expect that. This is why there might not be a realistic solution. The rest exactly describes a sector of the lazy/inept people to which I am referring. Everyone on Earth is given 164 hours every week and the struggle to "succeed" is real but I have noticed little difference in the political awareness between friends who work all the time and those who seemingly don't work at all. If anything, the busier ones seem to have better knowledge of the candidates and issues so lack of time probably isn't the reason. IMO it has more to do with interests and seemingly few people are interested in politics until they can see it directly affects them. The problem is, voting is politics and when you do it without bothering to make yourself informed, you are entering an auto race without first having learned to drive. I wholeheartedly agree that process of educating ones self is not easy or necessarily exciting but it is something that every voter needs to do. I am not claiming that all or even a majority of voters fit into the lazy/inept category I mention but will assert it is a large enough plurality to have significant effects on elections. Agreed, except I am pretty sure I stated that the lazy/inept was a generalization and why. I assure you that I am not wealthy and wasn't aware that there was an ongoing narrative from the upper class about people being lazy/inept about educating themselves for voting. If you are talking about something other than that, you are bringing up subjects I have never mentioned in this thread.

I am the one who claimed those voters are too lazy/inept to educate themselves about the issues (and candidates) prior to voting and have not seen anything written here to change my mind. My interest is mostly academic but also practical as I have advised a couple different local campaigns about voter registration, ballot access etc. The topic of most interest for me is why the above seems to be true and if there is any practical way to change things to have a better informed electorate. If I have "hammered down" on anyone, I apologize, but I will push back against mischaracterization of what I have written.

Call it whatever you like but unlike your meme I never claimed it had anything to do with being smarter or less smart than anyone. Do you think that someday you can debate without twisting my words or claiming I wrote or inferred things never written explicitly? Here I had thought the discussion was about voters being lazy/inept about finding out about the issues the are voting on and had nothing to do with work habits or social grace...

Believe whatever you like but I have not seen a single shred of evidence that contradicts anything I have written, whereas I have explained why I view a plurality of the electorate as being inept/lazy.

When the highest rated demographic in the study has substantially less than a 50-50 chance of knowing about common news stories, I would find it highly surprising if those same people were any better informed about relevant issues.

Ok, besides my personal experience, check this study out. from the article "The study found the most conversant voters tend to fall into the 50-70 age group, with wealthy, educated white men over the age of 47 being the best informed. The least-informed voters were young, low-income minority women. The average minority female voter age 47 or less with a below-median income had a 30% probability of knowing a typical news story. By contrast, the average white male voter age 48 or older with an above-median income had a 44% probability of knowing the same story."

I am not sure where one would go to get such "facts". What I do know is that almost nobody I talk with knows much factually correct about any of the topics under discussion by the candidates. Don't think I claimed this was applicable only to Trump voters... See above where the generalization comes from.

Maybe but I haven't noticed much empathy on this forum for Trump supporters either. I have not claimed to be more deserving than anyone of anything. What I would claim is to be better informed about most of the current political issues than the average person.

True, and they matter to me but it seems pretty obvious to me that the people here are a minority of those bothering to cast ballots in this most recent election.

I don't believe I have ever made any statements about "ALL people", especially in relation to how they think. The statement about being lazy/inept was a generalization (If you don't know, generalizations are necessary when making sociological statements about large groups of people) made to explain the apparent contradiction between what we all seem to agree being logical action and the actual action of voters in the recent electoral competition.

Allow me to put the words in context of the ongoing discussion, then.

Facts don't matter when people are too lazy/inept to distinguish fact from fiction or don't really care about them. So you don't think the well over 40 years of being an elected official prior to being President should have any bearing on how I might predict him to act in the future? Protections for unions began being eroded from the beginning of any such protections and took a quantum leap during the Reagan administration, beginning with the firing of all of the air traffic controllers. The Intercept/Common Dreams talks about PATCO in relation to several of the strikes happening near the beginning of the Biden Administration here. Can you find me a single instance prior to running for re-election to President where Mr Biden has supported a striking union? I think we will have to just disagree about how much Biden (and Democratic leadership) support unions. I say it is mostly lip service for votes when the actions (NAFTA, the Biden Administration not allowing rail workers to strike etc) have frequently run directly counter to the interests of the unions they expect to support them. This isn't just my opinion but that of the vast majority of the pro-union people I talk with who have any knowledge whatsoever about the subject. Here is an article more friendly to your point of view that gives Biden an A- on support of unions in relation to Presidents since FDR but it notes that the record generally since the 1940's has mostly been pretty abysmal. (It also mentions the rail strike I cited above)