CharonY

Oh, is it Games of Thrones thing? I was totally confused about the couple last posts.

Well, and the quality of his builders. If that one went wrong, there wasn't much to do about it. Jackie Chan famously replicated many of Buster Keaton's stunts, including the falling wall. IIRC it looked less massive, but I think it clipped his shoulders. And perhaps some of the worst injuries he suffered (either of them) were from seemingly simple stunts. Just to get back on-topic, I think that the idea of an Overton window is a bit outdated. I think ultimately the idea of the window requires a common set of standards that are broadly used. But the internet has fractured this consensus, and I think it mostly coincided with Trumpism. This is not to say that MAGA gleefully adds to the fracturing gleefully, but I just don't think that they are the cause. Rather they are using the changing system. This, incidentally is what worries me the most. I do think that surprisingly MAGA has figured out the new world. It is run on emotions, rather than facts. It is based on occupying attention rather than than paying attention to real issues. Meanwhile, the folks how are not on the crazy train still hold onto concepts that likely are not working as they used to anymore. And I suspect that this is at least one of the reasons why folks get increasingly attracted to the lunatic right. What I am curious about is then whether a new consensus is formed when the issues start hitting them personally and directly rather than in the abstract, or affecting folks they don't care about. Because there might be a consensus to be had around selfishness. Which is sad in an Ayn Rand way, but I am not sure whether we even got that.

Interestingly, the former conservative premier Harper has claimed that Carney is taking unjustified credit for the handling of the financial crisis, as the credit should have gone to the Finance Minister. But a Flaherty staffer has a different opinion: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/harper-carney-financial-crisis-1.7473091 That actually sounds pretty positive to me as a whole, as it suggests that Carney has worked well with folks on the individual level. Carney will be surrounded by a lot of politicians, so being the guy with the ideas could also do good things (hopefully).

To count social media as learning is a bit of a oxymoron. I am moderately certain that the latter shapes perception but not by information, but which political or other bubble they see themselves in. Especially the political dimension should be considered. In the US, the spread of acceptance for nuclear power is lower than for other power sources, but it shifts depending on how the question is phrased. For example, left-leaning folks are more accepting of nuclear power when couched in terms of carbon emission and global warming and supplementing renewable energy (rather than replacing).

! Moderator Note There is nothing to discuss here. This is not a place for personal grievances.

Especially the billionaires who, after losing the GPD of a country is still the richest person on Earth. I just don't get why folks worship him or even think that he is one of them.

I think one somewhat interesting aspect is that Carney's strengths, are to a large degree also his weaknesses. For example, it is a benefit that he can distance himself somewhat from the Liberals, and considering the general anti-establishment and anti-politician attitude, him running as an outsider could be beneficial. Conversely, it means he is less plugged into politics and is likely less experienced at campaigning. His role in central banks (and his general education and career) gives him some insights into financial matters, but then he could be considered part of the financial elite, as MigL mentioned.

*groan* Didn't Trump say at some point that he wasn't MAGA? Probably not entirely helpful...

For some reasons I am not surprised that a company led by a convicted felon whose organizations and business have been found to commit fraud, is in fact fraudulent.

And from what I read, he doesn't even have the practical job experience of a real lawyer or even salesman. What struck me was how (in my mind) ineffective his response to the Trump threats were. The substantial part were not different than what Trudeau said, which would arguably be fine, though not great. But the rest was really just a call to cut taxes and some grievances regarding the outgoing Canadian government. I suspect he needed to play to its base but I think it is part why the polls are swinging so wildly. It looks to me that he would be pretty much a center pick. The question then to me is how much of a center Canada still has. Looking at the polls, it looks on average still healthier than the US situation, but I cannot keep wondering whether that is just a transient phase.

Well, that argument is typically not in good faith and the way they address it is the current attempt to look into it and to gather better data. This, in a nutshell is what the conservative war against education is all about. Validating their ideology, reality be damned. And it is sad because it took such a long time for health systems to even acknowledge that this type of analyses are needed. Now the US is throwing them out gleefully. Even if the administrations changes, it will take a long while to rebuild that knowledge. Not only that. The issue is that because these are somewhat new concepts, there are still disagreement what the best policies are in the first place. Moreover, most attempts are targeted patchworks to plug obvious issues, but it is not clear how a systemic change would even look like (and much less how to get there). It is one of the big systemic issues and most folks are careful not tear things down too much (as what the current administrations is doing). Again, this is usually not a good-faith situation. Certain white men feel discriminated because the power is starting to swing away from them. But they obviously want to keep sitting on top and need to find ways to justify it. No one really wants to get scrutinized whether they really deserve their position in society. It is easier just to scrutinize the others. I mean, that is the "normal" situation. Experiences of violence comes from those around you. But event hat is being weaponized. The big talk about violence in communities of color is often amplified and the implicit suggestion is that this is not happening in white communities. It is sadly very common practice to project negative attributes to others. Even in academia it is fairly common, where students (but also faculty) often assume that international students are big cheaters in contrast to nationals. Now, the issue is that there is an implicit moral judgement there without understanding underpinning factors (e.g., they got caught easier due to language issues, they are more likely to fail and have therefore more incentives to cheat, which also applies to low-scoring national students and so on). The funny bit is that during the pandemic and the use of remote teaching, we basically saw that blatant cheating (including literal copy/pasting of wrong answers) is all over the place and was likely just better hidden among nationals.

I have my doubts- the polarization of politics, at least in terms of public perception seems to be pretty bad in Canada. Also some conservatives have some affinity to Trump. Among conservative voters Trump sits at a net favourable of 33% according to a recent Angus poll. It is not very high, but represents some of the staunchest conservative voter sections. But again, the conservatives have effectively campaigned (though the official campaigns have not started yet) on a staunch anti-liberal, and anti-woke platform. A reversal would be difficult for them to pull off. At least for now, a conservative minority government looks like the most likely outcome. I am not sure about capitulating, but his current issue especially for moderate voters I think is that he basically has aligned himself somewhat with the right-wing internet populism including: - adopting "anti-woke" rhetoric - joining podcasts of far right media and internet personality - supporting the convoy protests during the pandemic And probably a number of other things that I have not read about (am not really that plugged in, potentially the Canadians here can provide a different angle or an overall better perspective). With regard to the volatility of the polling take a look at the vote and seat projections. CPC are the conservatives and LPC the liberals (source: https://338canada.com/)

I think the fact that he has expertise will make him attractive to quite a few folks. But there are some challenges, because of his tenure at the Bank of England. To some degree some folks see him as an outsider. At the same time it is also a bit of and advantages as that creates at least some distance to Trudeau. But at least it makes it harder to challenge him on merit,(plus he is a white man), especially as his primary opponent is a lifelong politician, from what I recall. Edit: I should also add that Musk also endorsed the Con leader (likely out of principle) so that benefit rapidly turned sour, independent of expertise. But again, projections suggest that the election could be close, but with a higher likelihood of a conservative win. So it is possible that Carney won't actually be able to do anything about Trump. Edit2: I should probably add context: there will be new elections in Canada, and there is a high chance that snap elections will be called the moment the parliament reconvenes. So, the ability of Carney to do things before a new election will be limited.

This quote does not indicate that one should have the right to swing freely. I.e. it does not address the freedom part. It really indicates that there must be limits, and just highlights one area, in this case if it causes harms. It does not say that other than doing harm you are or should be allowed to do whatever you want. I think the only school of thought that has that kind of ideal is Libertarianism, which takes freedom as the baseline and then limits it based on principles such as harm. Other philosophies follow different principles with more or less specific basic rights and limitations thereof.

Another very important point that I think has not been mentioned here is the role of DEI to identify inequity in the population. One example we discussed in a different context is maternal death rates. As a whole, the USA has one of the highest maternal death rates among high-income countries. Something like 24/100,000 compared to, say around 6.5/100,000 in the UK or 3.2/100,000 in Germany. Now, if you look at the data more closely, you can see that the high death rates are more than double in black compared to white women. Pre-pandemic the rate was about 37.3 for black women (per 100,000), 11.8 for Hispanic and 14.9 for White. During the pandemic there was a general increase, but for black women the rate was 69.3 (1.9x increase), 18.2 for Hispanic (1.5x increase) and 19.1 for White (1.3x increase). Thus, by collecting this more detailed data it is apparent that the health structures in the USA are especially weak for black women and is way better at supporting health for white women. The next step is of course to identify weaknesses and ways to address them. By stopping DEI and related initiatives, the government is blinding itself to this information and money injected into the system will likely disproportionately flow into areas serving white women (even if there is a simple equal distribution) where the health benefits will be the least. In other words DEI is a system that allows us to go beyond simple narratives and helps us to figure out disparities and address them. It does not mean that all initiatives are successful or even helpful, but the idea of being "woke" in this context merely means that we are collecting and looking at data rather than substituting them with ideology.

Potentially. And this is also the reason why quite a few Canadians might be inclined to vote for the Liberals, despite the fact that Trudeau was wildly unpopular, up until Trump got into office and started fights with everyone. Carney was especially known for helping Canada to navigate through the financial crisis 2008. That being said, it is still more likely that the Conservatives are going to win. Before Trump the Cons were on an easy path towards the absolute majority. And it wasn't even close, the seat projection was something like 237 seats vs 35 at the largest margin. Now it is around 156:143. That being said, a economy student would (should) realize that what Trump is doing is not economically wise. But I think for quite a few moderates, the economic bona fides is what makes favour Carney over the Conservative leader (v). But again, the anti-Liberal sentiments run deep, especially in the Prairies. I think the part of the left who were thinking of switching to Cons are rethinking that, now that the alignment of Poilievre with the far-right personalities (including support for the trucker convoys during the pandemic, interview with Peterson and other right wing social media personalities) is getting more uncomfortable with the right-wing in the USA making active threats against Canada.

In other words, folks in position of authority. Also the same being afraid of losing that position to folks who are not like them. Weird that.

One of the reasons for strange procurement in government is because they want tons of oversight and do not trust public servant to make judgement calls. The market understands and reacts to these constraints by basically skimming off the top. An issue with things like ghost employees (i.e. non-existent folks on payroll) is that they exist both in private and public sector. And there is the narrative that the public sector is always worse than the private, but in many cases that is not true or data is missing. But what the DOGE folks don't understand are a) the need critical/essential services b) how governments work and c) the fact that they are too effing inept to be able to make judgement calls.

On top of that, they have paused all NIH funding and are cutting all contracts that somehow in their syphilitic mind involves DEI (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00703-1). In cases where the activities are not related to DEI, but contain DEI-related words (who knows that that means as their search words also included for example "woman"). Ultimately they want to control language and how folks are allowed to think about things. This also demonstrates why they were so afraid of pronouns or related language. They were just projecting and thought that the progressives wanted to do the same. I actually think they do, but not deeply. They were made more afraid of immigrants, women, trans folks and whatever they could come up with, so that they eventually thought that fascism is a fair trade for security. Note that Trumps supporters here and elsewhere keep mentioning that that someone (usually the left or the elites) made them do it. Thereby, they can reject any accountability in the resulting consequences. It is pretty much textbook and incredibly well documented. But then, who reads nowadays anymore?

It got more diverse because of DEI. Prior to their efforts to increase diversity it was (as most other places) white male dominated and the efforts of the female scientist at work there was often overlooked or diminished. Especially in leadership positions, NASA is known to be less successful in increasing representation of women and minorities compared to some other agencies. To paraphrase Ginsburg, throwing out DEI when it has worked (to whatever degree) and is continuing to work to stop discrimination is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

There are many, my general suggestion is to look for so-called reviews, i.e. articles that summarize past articles. A good exercise is to look for a few recent ones and then a few about a decade back. Understanding what has changed in that time frame should be helpful. In this area, the important aspects would be a potential change in long-term effects and especially association with cancer that are likely going to add more info.

I think red 3 was banned recently. In many areas I don't think that this is true as a whole, it depends on the specific article and the authors. Generally speaking, older studies have a better chance to be validated or invalidated. What you would do is to see which papers are citing the study and what their (updated) conclusions are. It is less of an issue in the field of toxicology (for the most part). But in other areas I have noticed that in newer papers folks only cite within the last 5 to maybe 10 years. These are often younger researchers and in more than one (or a dozen) occasions, I found that they kept re-inventing the wheel, because they were not aware of older findings where the same effect was already shown.

I actually thought that Apollo was lower, for some reason (maybe saw unadjusted values).. Very interesting.

Just to highlight the highly, incredibly intelligent decision-making and power takeover process: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/us/politics/trump-musk-doge-power.html

As mentioned above, the mission is different. It is like asking why yachts are so expensive. Kayaks were around for around 4000 years.