Labor laws in the US are designed for companies to skirt around the spirit of the law to satisfy the letter of the law. Probably to prevent rioting in the street from making people realize they haven't won the change they thought. Case in point, certain benefits that kick in at 40 hours to you know help people out.
Companies responded by saying awe shucks, guess we will only schedule you 39 hours and if you want more you have to work another job. Oh and the law only cares about hours done at one job so doesn't matter if you are working 120 hour weeks you only get part time benefits.
>"The judge frames the red light camera scheme as a revenue generating scheme, not a public safety measure."
In my own experience, when they took down the red light cameras in my area now people are not afraid to run red lights ~2 to ~3 seconds after it's red. See this kind of thing on a regular basis. Every now and then there's a serious accident.
The objective evidence indicates that accidents tend to go up after red light cameras go up, generally because the operators lower the yellow light time to increase fees.
This states that there are many variables they were not able to control for, such as the yellow light timing, as I previously mentioned. Warning signs were another major factor. There doesn't appear to be enough investigation into the protected left issue.
This is pretty damning, in my opinion. AKA we did some cheap analysis on a small dataset, without confidence or effect size, and just agree with the people running the programs.
"The intent of the multivariate regression analysis was to confirm the direction of the
effect, not to establish effects with statistical significance or to assess the size of the
effect. To undertake analyses for these purer purposes would have required a
substantially larger database, much more precision in the estimate of economic effect at
each site, and more accurate specification and measurement of the independent variables.
For the purposes of this current investigation, it suffices that both the univariate and
multivariate analyses are reasonably in accord with the perceptions that are commonly
held by those involved in red-light-camera programs."
Sometimes an intersection simply has bad luck, draws more accidents than anything about it would cause. Put a camera there, you'll see an "improvement".
One might argue the intersection itself is the problem and should be redesigned, as well as adjoining roadways feeding into the offending intersection.
If it's consistently high something needs fixing. But accidents are random, there will always be some intersections that by pure chance have more accidents. Put cameras on those, presto, cameras "work".
Let's make a hypothetical city with 10 intersections, all absolutely identical. Watch until you have seen 20 accidents. Do you really think there will be exactly 2 accidents per intersection??
Select the intersection that gets the most accidents, declare it dangerous.
Case A: stick a camera on it. Case B: do nothing. Watch another 20 accidents.
In both cases you expect to see fewer accidents at the intersection as the original number was just chance. But if you're trying to prove cameras work...
> generally because the operators lower the yellow light time to increase fees
I'm skeptical of this claim because the red light camera operators are usually contracted by municipalities. They don't have any direct control over the light cycles.
(Yes, obviously they can be in cahoots with the municipality, but I would be surprised if that was common and not the exception)
That I couldn’t say. It at least provides a model. Most city or county governments have some influence over their traffic engineering or streets staff as far as high level planning concerns.
I feel like when these tickets are struck down it's still smart to send notices to the homes of the cars doing this in more of a shaming way - even if the fine itself isn't legal. I suspect it would increase safety a small amount just by doing that.
No, I don't remember anything about oil prices during Bidens term; no one bitched about gas prices or put stickers of his face on gas pumps or anything like that. Oh wait... that's all we heard about.
ChatGPT : "tell me about China use of coal energy"
"China is by far the largest consumer and producer of coal in the world. Coal has historically been the backbone of China’s rapid industrialization and still plays a dominant role in its energy system."
- ~55–60% of China’s electricity comes from coal (varies slightly year to year).
- China consumes more coal than the rest of the world combined.
- Annual consumption: roughly 4–4.5 billion tons per year.
- China produces about 50% of global coal output
The west suffers while China does whatever it wants, at a Grand Scale.
Yes, China consumes a lot of coal. But they are trying to consume less. You cannot ask a developing country to go back on its merging into the first world by consuming less energy or investing in more expensive sources only. We westerners are here because we grew on cheap and dirty energy, what moral ground do we have to ask them to stop growing?
Coal was almost 100% of China energy consumption only 15 years ago, with a bit of hydro. Today they are very aggressively shifting towards anything but coal, as you found in ChatGPT, to less than 60% of coal in the mix. For comparison, the US is almost at the same point today than 15 years ago, only significantly replaced coal with more gas. A country that is consuming about the same amount of energy since 2000, while China consumes 5x.
I will answer this question honestly. I used to be friends with a group of PhD students work worked in labs. Every week I heard their complaints. One relayed a story in which a Chinese lab mate / co-worker was refusing to following their boss (PI) directions or request, and shared secret results with another Chinese student in a competing lab.
- Their boss (the PI) had asked the Chinese student to train other labmates on some specific testing methods, they refused.
- The Chinese PhD student would simply ignore the PI emails.
- Then magically their study results end up leaked to another Chinese PhD candidate.
Chinese PhD types can 'buy' their way into labs. They have so much money no one wants to turn them away. Only the government can force it.
Most people have no idea what day-to-day life is actually like in PhD life / labs. It's a lot less "science" and way more "human drama" than you could imagine.
Fun fact : there are poor people in America who need help. Some of which served in the military, or they come from families which several people served in the military. Do these people not come first?
Despite popular belief, it is not the job of the US Tax Payer to feed the impoverished world. How many billions have been sent to Africa? People need to make their own countries great instead of waiting for more Gibs from the USA.
> Despite popular belief, it is not the job of the US Tax Payer to feed the impoverished world.
This is an overly simplified perspective. Work at this scale requires impressive logistics and commitments that are haphazardly "rug-pulled" can have catastrophic consequences, regardless of whose "job" it is.
When I was looking at being a bone marrow donor, they talk about this. The process for such donation is involved, including minor surgical procedures for the donor. But they talk about autonomy and consent, and one of the topics is this (paraphrasing): Do I have the right to change my mind about donation at any time?
The answer: while you always maintain the legal right to withdraw consent, at a certain point in the process, the recipients existing bone marrow is destroyed in preparation for your donation. At that point, there may be considered a moral obligation to continue the donation, as without your donation, the recipient will die, due to the destruction in preparation.
> How many billions have been sent to Africa?
Speaking for myself, I'd rather continue sending billions to Africa than contributing ~1.5% of Israel's GDP in foreign assistance to it.
If you are curious, the number #1 beneficiary of USAID is Ukraine, by far, and just behind #2 is Israel.
Sounds more like foreign influence than actual survival help. Maybe USAID even funded wars, and caused more death and chaos, who knows. Difficult to predict what's next. Perhaps it will be good because countries will adapt and shine, instead of having local dictators surviving on these aids, etc.
Also, there is a thing about people depending on you:
I am feeding birds during winter, so at some point they depend on my food. Should have I had started feeding them at all or not ?
If I didn't feed them, technically less birds would have died because they would never had a chance to live...
Except Israel is an economically sound and undamaged country who has the upper hand against its enemies and Ukraine has been invaded and is the underdog of in this war ?
It doesn't look that weird to me that humanitarian assistance would go to people who need it the most ? Do Israelis currently need heaters not to die from the cold after their energy system has been destroyed ?
It's as if helping populations in need would buy you goodwill and popularity. Crazy to thing about it. I don't see how program trying to contain the spread of AIDS or preventing people to die from the cold is "funding" war. Not sure what you are on about. People will not adapt and shine, they will die or be more miserable, or revolt and probably be crushed. Civil war is always an option too.
But your bird comment tells me you just don't care. You should have started with that.
The comments above mine were blaming USAID saying that it caused more damage because it existed and made people became dependent on it, and (in their logic) that it would have been better if it did not exist.
If you look above you can see the whole concept “people die because of USAID”. It’s not my concept.
I am showing with the bird analogy how this is absurd. That you always have the choice to feed the birds or not.
At the end, it’s still a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” type of dilemma, like all important political interactions.
Nobody knows if the long-term impact will be positive or negative. It can push countries to take care of their population, to have new coalitions of countries (what if China double-down and offer more aid ?), etc.
Pretty much unknown. I hope it will eventually work out for the innocents who are victims of politicians who are in comfy places.
The comment above you made a much more apt analogy with being bone marrow donor.
In your logic, you should have never "fed the birds" to start with but the people giving birth to children in f** up places are not going. "Mmmm I may wait for having that child on whether humanitarian aid will come" or "The likelihood of civi war is big in my country, I will wait for a safer period". They just have the child. Also those people may want to live too since they are already alive.
So just like for birds, not feeding them because it would create a population that cannot sustain itself would mean having lots of birds dying.
Also I like to live in a world where some humans are not considered as birds.
> Nobody knows if the long-term impact will be positive or negative. It can push countries to take care of their population, to have new coalitions of countries (what if China double-down and offer more aid ?), etc.
Sure but that's besides the point the whole point of the parent was introducing the complexity of, once you have given some aid, you are responsible for the deaths you caused if you pull it out too quickly for the recipients to adapt. As others have said it's not like the US have coordinated themselves and given time to have other countries to share that load more evenly. Also it seems with administration, a lot of the time, cruelty is the point: Showing your base you are hurting their preferred target instead of actually being efficient. An example of that would be the handling of illegal immigration. A big spectacle but a needlessly cruel and inefficient one.
Not to republicans who have repeatedly voted down measures to take care of people getting straight up cancer from abysmal practices during the middle east wars that they started.
Those same republicans also voted down support for the aid workers of 9/11 dealing with absurd health issues from all the dust.
Literal heros and innocent victims, but republicans don't want to spend pennies on them.
I hope such egotistical zero sum thinking leads to the economic isolation of the US. 4chan Fun fact: You and only can make america great again, amirite. Who needs steady deficit funding when you have freedom.
What help for these Americans did the Republicans put forward and approve along with these cuts? All I saw was a cut to the affordability of healthcare for those people. Did I miss some help that is coming that they didn't have before the USAID cuts?
>We don’t (didn’t) do it because it’s our job, we do (did) it because it’s the right thing to do.
We didn't do it because it's the right thing to do, we did it for soft power, to spread our political and cultural influence and have leverage against those governments to serve our interests. Nations are not moral actors.
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