Headline: UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’ UN Sustainable Development Goals. May 6, 2019
Excerpt: Current global response insufficient; ‘Transformative changes’ needed to restore and protect nature; Opposition from vested interests can be overcome for public good
Moral outrage makes ends absolute: This must stop! That must happen! No ifs, ands, or buts…. Governing wisely is about setting priorities, a process that assumes scarcity: the principle that valued ends require scarce resources with alternative uses.
Quick to label and condemn, today’s paranoids seem to have a quasi-religious concept of irredeemable souls - souls that must be cast out of society because nothing good comes from commerce with the devil.
According to the Social Security Administration, 3.1 million undocumented immigrants paid Social Security taxes in 2010, about half the undocumented workers in the country at the time….
According to the above quote, bigotry, addiction, and violence are responsible for rising social instability. So how are bigotry, addiction, and violence trending?
Think about it: around 10% of non-elderly Americans are uninsured. That’s almost 28 million people. But US healthcare costs could be 25% lower if the above reforms were implemented. Then the US would have a healthcare system where everyone is covered and everyone’s paying less.
The problem: chronic homelessness, defined as being without housing for at least a year. It’s estimated that almost a third of the homeless are chronically homeless.
The mission: Figure out a way to house the roughly 10,000 chronically homeless in the San Francisco Bay Area.
A possible solution: …
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.”