Phi for All

I personally would NOT want the average parent weighing in on public education, or at least more than they're able to via representative government. Many of those parents want to drain the public coffers by removing their tax contributions to spend on private schools. Public education is supposed to be taking something that everyone benefits from and investing in it via non-profit processes to reduce costs, provide a tangible benefit to citizens, and provide a standardized curriculum to make sure we all start on the same page. Giving every parent the right of refusal for the knowledge their children receive from public education seems almost criminal to me. I see a LOT of potential for abuse by treating children as products and their parents as customers. How about we treat the children as young humans who need to be exposed to accumulated human knowledge, and less like some kind of profit potential? We're talking about PUBLIC schooling, where the focus should be on teaching rather than making a profit. The school isn't a factory, the students aren't the product, the parents aren't the customers. Public schooling is a contract between you, your child, and the government, who have promised to provide an education that allows people to participate in their own societies at the level they choose.

It's about US$10,000 per pound to bring a payload into space, a finger weighs about 1/3 pound, so it's about $3333 vs the cost of dry ice.

In your OP, you start with one circle, then you ask about two circles. In the above explanation, there's only one circle. Why are you inventing a "general" circle?

Thank you for the suggestion.

! Moderator Note Can you show some evidence to support this? It's not really an acceptable observation to base a discussion on if others disagree.

! Moderator Note Very good. We've established that ChatGPT is NOT a good tool for science discussion. Can we continue to discuss the concept you mention in your OP, or is it dependent on the linguistic AI?

The orangeness happens when you Cheeto penly because you're rash.

Intestinal imbalance issues. Improper injections. Intensive indictments.

Infections, inflammation, and irritants.

! Moderator Note Moved from The Sandbox (which is for practicing LaTex) to The Lounge.

If such an assumption exists, it's probably focused on sudden change, which is almost never good for any species, but especially humans who usually invest quite a bit on their environments. I'm wondering why blame is so important in climate change. It's not like laying the blame at the right feet compels anyone to do anything. Big polluters don't want to be sued, of course, but paying to clean up spills hasn't bankrupted the oil industry. So the obvious reason is that reducing our petrol consumption is Job #1 for climate changers, and hurts one of the most profitable industries in the world, one that has artificially propped themselves up as our premier source of fuel for over a hundred years.

Whenever someone starts talking in absolutes about climate change, I become suspicious they've worked their whole lives in the oil industry, or some other area that pollutes heavily. Otherwise I'm at a loss to explain why we can't "fix anything" unless we prove it was "all man made", and that the destruction of many habitats is offset by supposed "benefits" of destroying other habitats. Warming a previously frozen environment is still going to fundamentally change what can survive there, and you're assuming it's always going to be better. That's not good science. Then tell me how the number of humans compromises that more than the way we treat our environments? Again, it's not the populations, it's our cavalier attitudes towards other species. Change that and perhaps more humans can work greater good.

But it's NOT a fact. The population problem is more likely a distribution/disparity problem. We have the resources for 8B people if we were smarter about their use. The US could support another 25% larger population, based on our food exports alone. If the US were as heavily populated as Europe, we'd have a billion people. We've allowed our greedy capitalism and our oil dependence (among other dirty habits) to determine how our populations design their infrastructure, and we've been observing the decay of that system for quite a while. Climate change is far from an hypothesis these days with all the data we've accumulated. The modeling uses sound methodology, like NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland survey, to show the effects we're feeling. And population just isn't as much of a factor in climate change. It's not the number of humans on the planet, it's what those humans are doing that's more important. Lower fertility actually increases consumption as parents invest more for each child. I think you assume the future is all about more people doing exactly what they're doing now, and it seems obvious to me that some major changes are on the horizon for us no matter how many humans we have.

! Moderator Note Our rules state that discussion can't require anybody to watch videos. Apparently the name of the compound is there for YOU to watch, so please watch again and if you have questions about it, open another thread WITHOUT the video. This thread is closed.

He's a book-banning kidnapper from The Hate State, and wants to be our president. Out of two evils, the jury is still out whether he's the lesser. If he wins in 2024, he wants to have the letters C, R, and T removed from all the alphabet soup.

Because there are no stock photos of the Governor of Florida ordering from a fast-food drive through. He's on a strict diet of unborn babies and the tears of reasoning humans.

! Moderator Note We're a science DISCUSSION forum, not a blog or a wiki site. We also don't allow advertising here, so if you're going to stick a link in to a commercial site later, you'll just be banned as a spammer. Is there some part of your OP you'd like to discuss with the other members?

Can you give us a link or quote to evaluate?

Sure, partly because hundreds of millions of dollars are backing this effort to control an uncontrollable form of media. The RESTRICT Act that's being proposed as a response supposedly protects us from foreign interference, but it will also let the .gov remove anything they don't like under the guise of national security. Only US companies like Facebook will prosper. It's basically like the laws we have that restrict imports on sugar to favor US growers. And the language seems so broad that it can be applied to almost anything they want to stifle. I find it curious that government intervention has so much bipartisan support on an issue involving social media, but having the .gov tell us we have to wear masks to actually save lives meets with bipartisan howls of objection. I've watched much of that congressional hearing, and I've read the reactions from politicians and heard their lame interpretations in enough different sources now that I find their support for this bill suspicious and full of bad faith.

We need some points for discussion. Is this still about that video in your OP? I don't watch videos like that because it seems like they're just made to increase views rather than inform or teach. Can you add some clarity here? Your title implies some physics being applied, but your last post is more like redefining language and terms. I'm not sure at all what you want to talk about.

You have a cynical outlook on what you think is social media, which is making you narrow-minded about how you define it. The dictionary definitions fit this site perfectly. We publish content and share ideas and personal messages over the internet. Most platforms have to suffer a few fools, but I consider myself lucky to have found you lot. Not all social media is like the worst of them.

It's not about wishing to be younger; it's about not wanting to turn into a cynical, narrow-minded old white guy. For me, it's a different way to connect to people I'd never meet otherwise. SFN has been the majority of my social media experience for almost 20 years, and I really value the relationships and what they've taught me. I appreciate the intellectual level here a great deal, and especially the civility. And what I found on TikTok was similar, with the majority of the experience being positive and instructional. I don't follow many scientists there, since I still don't like video for mainstream science, but I follow a really broad range of folks, mostly for perspectives I'm not exposed to much in daily life. To me, it's a voice for those who're supposed to have speech free from government suppression. Security is a concern for all the social media platforms, and needs to be applied across the board. So no, it doesn't make me feel younger, but it's great connecting and supporting others who are more interested in positivity than in peeing on the parades of others and making fun of them. I don't know what this means, but to clarify my comment, the way the committee members kept interrupting with weird comments made me think they weren't interested in getting real answers, which suggests they've been fed these talking points, a standard tactic of lobbying groups.

Facebook spent billions on Reels, which is short video format, and instead of pouring even more money into it, which appears to have worked with YouTube, Zuckerberg chose to spend that money lobbying and smearing the competition instead. One of my favorite TikTok stories is about a woman who'd lived with chronic illness for over a decade, and her doctors weren't sure what exactly was wrong with her, but had her on some expensive medications that only helped a bit. She joined TikTok for other reasons, but ended up posting videos about her daily struggles. Eventually she realized the app was pushing videos about Lyme disease from other creators, and she wondered why. When she watched their content, she recognized her own symptoms. She got a different doctor who confirmed the diagnosis and treated her successfully. The platform also challenges what Americans see and hear about themselves. This morning I watched a journalist from India talking about the US Department of State releasing the latest Human Rights Report, where the US evaluates every other country in the world so we can determine how much foreign aid to give them. We don't list ourselves, of course, since we aren't giving ourselves foreign aid, but we do judge others using criteria we ourselves would fail. US citizens are pretty blind to how much our rights are trampled on. This kind of looking in the mirror isn't very popular with conservatives, who think our children would feel bad about themselves if they knew half the appalling things we as a society have done in the past and continue to do today.

In my experience, the algorithm feeds you more of what you engage with, so I'm unsure how to respond when someone says TikTok is feeding their teen butt chugging vodka videos. Could it be that Chinese culture itself pushes their teens to be interested in science and math, and American culture pushes our teens towards substance abuse, guns, and hating different people?

The CEO of TikTok appeared before Congress yesterday to defend his platform, which has over 150M US users. https://www.reuters.com/technology/tiktok-ceo-face-tough-questions-support-us-ban-grows-2023-03-23/ Democrats and Republicans seemed equally out for blood, and equally unqualified to fairly judge the popular app. Meta and Facebook hired an outside firm for a smear campaign against TikTok, and to me it looks like the committee members have all received lobbying funds from the Big Tech firms to incentivize banning this pesky competitor. Some of the questions asked were phenomenally stupid ("Does TikTok access the home wi-fi network?" asked Rep Richard Hudson from NC), and showed that the legislators were fear-mongering and had no idea what they were talking about. Compared to Twitter and Facebook, TikTok (in my experience) seems more upbeat and positive. The younger generations are embracing it and turning away from the other platforms. To me, it seems like the Big Tech companies want to (ab)use the government to squash an upcoming competitor and blame it on political reasoning. It seems to me they hate that this newcomer is taking away market share and most of their future products/customers. I've had the app for several months and enjoy it, so I'm pretty biased in favor of keeping it. Does anyone think TikTok should be banned in the US?