According to the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, there are roughly 28,200 homeless people in the California’s nine-county Bay Area, which includes San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose. Extrapolating from previous research, I’m guessing about a third of these individuals are chronically homeless, defined as being without housing for at least a year. This is a tough bunch to help: between mental illness, physical disability, substance abuse, lack of social skills, a fierce independent streak, and/or neurocognitive disorganization, the chronically homeless are often unable to live normal, productive lives. No, most of these folks can’t “just get a job”.
…For instance, in a recent survey, even though just 36% of Republican or Republican-Leaning Millennials endorsed “Earth is warming mostly due to human activity”, 83-87% of the same group supported expansion of renewables and 60% wanted the government to do more to protect animals and habitat (Pew Research 2019). So here are some environmental causes the skeptics might be interested in: …
While not a skeptic myself, I do think it’s a waste of time to focus on whether or not people believe in anthropogenic climate-change. Find common ground and go with it.
Leniency is called for when an individual is at low-risk for reoffending and there is no need to “make an example” of the person to deter others from engaging in the same criminal behavior.
Prospective employers often use course grades and GPA as a proxy for likely job performance. Grades reflect self-control and conscientious more than intelligence. Self-control and conscientiousness predict an ability to persist on tasks and complete projects. Employers like that.
In its original Founding-Father sense, happiness was akin to felicity, a kind of well-being that comes from living a purposeful and productive life. Today we would call that sense of well-being flourishing. …So what does a government need to do to create conditions conducive to flourishing? Put differently, what does a government need to do to increase the sense of control and self-efficacy of its citizens, allowing them to pursue purposeful and productive lives?
Basically, “cost-burdened” means paying more than 30% of household income on housing expenses. What the above chart tells us is that the cost of housing is a burden for most households with incomes under $30,000 a year. About a quarter of US households earn less than $30,000 a year.
“How on earth could young people, whose wages are flat…dare question the larger economic forces in their lives?!” - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. …So, what’s happening with wages? I have a source for that: the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, which tracks wage trends in the US. Here’s a recent Atlanta Fed chart on wage growth by income quartile over the past 20 years:
“In conclusion, capitalism is a fun and efficient way to consolidate all the world's resources in the control of a tiny group of massively rich individuals at the expense of everyone else.” - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
It’s hard to wrap one’s head around the idea of being a machine with free will. It would be easier if we expanded our understanding of machine and shrank our notion of free will.
My takeaway from these survey results is that how we feel about disparities in income and wealth has a lot to do with how much we think ...people have control over their circumstances...luck figures in life outcomes ...the rules of the game are fair ...people deserve what they get…
Per the above chart, about a third of US asylum-seekers in 2017 were from three small countries: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. This is especially the case for “defensive” asylum-seekers - that is, those who are defending themselves in immigration court, because they were denied asylum by an immigration official, caught trying to cross the border illegally, or for some other reason.
The net effect of all these asylum applications is system overwhelm. Over a year ago, the USCIS had already declared a huge backlog of asylum cases. To quote a January 31, 2018 USCIS news release:
“The agency currently faces a crisis-level backlog of 311,000 pending asylum cases as of Jan. 21, 2018, making the asylum system increasingly vulnerable to fraud and abuse. This backlog has grown by more than 1750 percent over the last five years, and the rate of new asylum applications has more than tripled.”
Back in 1964, Historian Richard Hofstadter wrote the now-classic “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” for Harper’s Magazine. According to Hofstadter, this style of mind was characterized by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy”…Hofstadter goes on:
“Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish….”
The rest of us rely on mental shortcuts to arrive at our opinions on climate change - mostly to do with trust and perceived plausibility. In other words, how we feel/think about climate change depends in large part on whom we trust or don’t trust, as well as what information, explanations, and opinions fit with our understanding of how the world works. This is not an irrational way for non-scientists to approach a subject as complex as climate change.
But we could do better. We could live the words “science is real”…
Most Americans have accepted that the climate is changing as a result of human activity. If pressed for a reason, many will refer to the scientific consensus that such is the case. Some will refer to a 97% consensus.
Not that these survey results are implausible. Plenty of peer-reviewed studies have revealed today’s millionaires to be frugal, hard-working, and mostly from middle-class backgrounds. They buy boring cars. They’re diligent savers. This is not new information - twenty years ago academics Thomas Stanley and William Danko found that 80% of US millionaires were first-generation rich. That is, they did not inherit their wealth.
Some in the medical community take a “wait and see” approach to the disease of climate change. They’re aware of computer models predicting a dangerous worsening of the patient’s condition but note that other models are not nearly so gloomy. These doctors point out that most treatments carry their own risks, so it’s best just to monitor the patient closely for the time being…However, most in the medical community acknowledge the patient will probably get worse without some sort of intervention. But many physicians aren’t convinced the prognosis is dire without aggressive treatment and so opt for a conservative approach to managing the patient’s condition. …Yet other doctors are convinced that without aggressive measures this climate change disease will inevitably progress to painful debilitation and possible death.
Overfishing, destructive fishing practices, coral harvesting and mining, sewage, sedimentation, pollution, elevated sea surface temperatures and ocean acidification are all stressors. Less stress and greater resilience to stress increase the likelihood of coral reefs living beyond the Anthropocene.
This year’s Green New Deal (GND) repeats the claim that “global warming at or above 2 degrees Celsius beyond preindustrialized levels will cause…a loss of more than 99 percent of all coral reefs on Earth”. The GND references an October 2018 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I reviewed the IPCC report’s references and this is what I found…