Fluoride has two major differences that would complicate such a study: First, fluoride is a natural component of lots of drinking water (often at levels far higher than artificial fluoridation creates), while lead contamination in drinking water is rare and usually human-caused. Second, lead is known to be bad for one's health in any amount, while fluoride is only known to cause IQ drops above a certain dose.
> This systematic review and meta-analysis found inverse associations and a dose-response association between fluoride measurements in urine and drinking water and children’s IQ across the large multicountry epidemiological literature. There were limited data and uncertainty in the dose-response association between fluoride exposure and children’s IQ when fluoride exposure was estimated by drinking water alone at concentrations less than 1.5 mg/L.
It seems to me that your main mistake here is assuming that parties like the US Democratic Party, the UK Labour Party, the Canadian Liberal Party, etc. are left-wing. They aren't. They've been practicing "Third Way" politics for decades now, and there's very little left-wing about their proposals. IMO this is the source of a lot of public discontent with these parties: They don't offer a true alternative, just a diet version of the same policies that largely harm the public.
> Was Bill Clinton "right wing" because of his free trade politics (eg NAFTA)?
Yes! This is the point. Who benefited from Clinton's economic policies? It certainly wasn't the employees of the companies who offshored production because they were incentivized to by NAFTA. By capitulating to the right on economic issues and trying to differentiate only on the basis of social issues, the Democratic Party ceded its strongest argument: That turbo-capitalist (as you put it) economic policy only benefits corporations and the wealthy, and harms labor and the country as a whole. Democrats as a party cannot credibly make that argument anymore, because they're fully complicit. A few politicians carry lonely torches for actual left-wing politics (e.g. Bernie Sanders), but for the most part, there's close to zero power behind left wing ideas today.
Broadly, left-wing politics favors making money and power more diffuse and is suspicious of hierarchy, right-wing politics favors making money and power more concentrated and embraces hierarchy. Politics is, of course, messy and not everything fits neatly into this framework (and people have idiosyncratic opinions sometimes), but that's how I view it in broad strokes. What about you?
> Broadly, left-wing politics favors making money and power more diffuse and is suspicious of hierarchy
How do you "make money more diffuse"?
I would agree that the hierarchy thing is broadly correct, and many use this definition, but I find it unsatisfactory, as it does not move me in any way. "Yeah hierarchy is so cool man" said no one ever.
Taking left-wing ideology at face value is a mistake, what is interesting is the underlying psychology. The stated goals and how it plays out in practise are never aligned, thus the "real communism has never been tried" meme. If you are attached to leftism or simply never delved deeper into political philosophy, these definitions might offend you, but they are psychologically correct:
"The bugman pretends to be motivated by compassion, but is instead motivated by a titanic hatred of the well-turned-out and beautiful." [BAP]
"Communism is when ugly deformed freaks make it illegal to be normal then rob and/or kill all successful people out of petty resentment and cruelty. The ideology is all just window dressing." [Mystery Grove]
> I would agree that the hierarchy thing is broadly correct, and many use this definition, but I find it unsatisfactory, as it does not move me in any way. "Yeah hierarchy is so cool man" said no one ever.
And yet, the two quotes you put forth as "psychologically correct" both use hierarchies as assumed priors. In the first, a hierarchy between "the well-turned-out and beautiful" and everyone else, and in the second, a hierarchy between "ugly deformed freaks" and "normal [people]". Do you feel that these are useful distinctions to make when setting public policy?
> Taking left-wing ideology at face value is a mistake
Taking any ideology at face value is a mistake. Words are cheap; it's easy to say one thing and do another, especially when political parties control entire media ecosystems due to the consolidation of media companies that the root comment of this thread was discussing. Is the Chinese Communist Party communist in any meaningful sense? Does it serve to weaken or reinforce hierarchies? Does it seek to empower its constituents, or consolidate power for the benefit of the few?
> How do you "make money more diffuse"?
There are tons of ways to do this, some better, some worse, and I think it's out of scope to go through them all. We do at least have a direct measurement of this one, though, called the Gini coefficient.
> Taking any ideology at face value is a mistake. Words are cheap; it's easy to say one thing and do another, especially when political parties control entire media ecosystems due to the consolidation of media companies that the root comment of this thread was discussing. Is the Chinese Communist Party communist in any meaningful sense? Does it serve to weaken or reinforce hierarchies? Does it seek to empower its constituents, or consolidate power for the benefit of the few?
I agree. This is why studying history is important.
> [...] Gini coefficient
So, equality. How did that work out for checks notes every single time it was tried, ever.
> "Yeah hierarchy is so cool man" said no one ever.
Perhaps not in those exact words. I'd argue that an implicit desire for hierarchy pervades a lot of right-wing thought. E.g. wanting a strong leader, a harsh penalty system, and traditional paternalistic social stratification.
Isn't that the whole point? SimCity and all its sequels and imitators present a very simplified set of tools and mechanics. Those tools and mechanics are more than the sum of their parts: They entertain, they teach, they advance a political opinion (Jeff Braun has been explicit about this[0]) and yes, they simulate, albeit very simplistically. The intersection of those things and the tradeoffs that are required in all simulations (which all reside on a spectrum of toy to faithful representation) are interesting. IMO it's (ironically) too simplistic to say that SimCity is a mere game and thus unworthy of thinking more deeply about, and I suggest that you're taking that "world in a machine" marketing phrase a bit too literally.
Heat pumps are much more common in warm areas than cold ones, because the difference between an A/C and a heat pump is really just the ability to reverse the refrigerant flow, and they're very efficient at heating in mildly cold weather. I grew up in Florida, and pretty much every house there had a heat pump even thirty years ago, with electric resistive heating that kicks in when ambient temperatures drop below 40F or so. Where heat pumps don't work so well is when ambient temperatures are very cold, which is why adoption in northern states has been much slower.
EDIT: My grandparents' house had a thermostat that looked like this: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/uqsAAOSwTVlbyNN9/s-l1200.jpg They would call very cold (for Florida) weather "blue light weather", because the blue "aux heat" light would turn on on their thermostat, indicating that the system had switched from the heat pump to the resistive heat strips.
My sister just got a heat pump installed in her new house in Poland, where temperatures occasionally drop to 0 Fahrenheit. I wouldn't say they only work in "mildly cold weather" - as per new EU policy heat pumps will be one of the few legal heat sources, even in countries such as Sweden.
Modern heat pumps can work in very cold weather, but they're much less efficient, which is reflected in their COP numbers. In my house in Chicago, we have a hybrid system--the heat pump works down to 20F or so, and we have a natural gas furnace for colder times. Natural gas is very cheap here, so this is the most cost-effective solution at the moment. I'm very eager to electrify and remove my dependence on natural gas, but I think it will be at least a few more years unless there's some breakthrough in cold-weather heat pump efficiency, or an enduring spike in natural gas prices--last time I did the math, the breakeven point for electrification here is around a COP of 4, which no heat pump can do at typical Chicago winter temperatures.
If I were building a brand new house, I probably would do it 100% electric. But most people here already have natural gas furnaces, and when they reach end-of-life they're usually replaced with another natural gas furnace. Hybrid systems like mine are catching on, but it will be a while before 100% electric is commonplace here.
I consider a winter where the coldest it gets is 0F a mild winter. The important thing isn't average or normal it is the worst case. I've personally seen -25F here in the last 10 years - it was only one time and lasted about a week, but that means the HVAC system needs to work down to at least -25F just in case.
I don't know what the climate is like in Poland. Maybe 0F is as cold as you ever get and you are okay. Maybe your system will work to -20F even though you haven't tested it. But your might have a system like mine that while it can deliver heat at 0F, it is sized such that below 30F it can't deliver enough heat (I have the backup system for those colder days)
> The benefits of the current system are enormous, incomprehensibly enormous.
Sure. What are the drawbacks? Where are the opportunities for improvement?
Also, you provided a list of things we enjoy today that you're presumably attributing to capitalism. But clean water and roads are usually provided by governments, and electricity and garbage collection (in the US) are generally in a weird liminal space where it's usually corporations but they're heavily regulated (and there's usually some political corruption at the interface between the corporations and the regulators). Our modern food distribution system is a marvel, but it depends on the exploitation of a poorly paid underclass of often undocumented migrant workers to do much of the farm labor. And video games are nice, although some corporations are trying to turn video games into weird casinos (see: lootboxes).
Claiming that the status quo is great and critics are being merely self-interested is deliberately turning a blind eye to the many drawbacks, flaws, and areas that can be improved with the current system. "We have clean water now; DO YOU HATE CLEAN WATER?!" is a disingenuous, bad faith argument. It's the "We should improve society somewhat" comic.
The status quo is that the quality of life for nearly everyone in the planet is improving faster than it ever has before in history and the rate of the improvement is accelerating as well.
I am living in a country which currently has a “socialist” government who have made a big show recently of implementing anti-capitalist policies to stick it to the greedy rich. We do not have clean water. I need to buy bottled water for drinking/cooking. The situation is getting worse as these policies come into effect. The government can’t do shit without someone to pay for it.
This is a fantasy land where you take your pick of attributes from different countries and pretend you can have all the things you want without giving anything up and all the money is going to come from other people.
The situation is like the anti-vaxers living in a protected bubble while simultaneously blaming it for all their problems.
Whether it was perfect or not, there are only a few words/phrases that allow an aircraft to cross the hold short bars at an airport with an active control tower. "Cross", "line up and wait", and "cleared for takeoff" are pretty much it. Runway incursions are very dangerous, as this incident shows, and pilots must be very sure they have clearance before entering a runway. If anything is ambiguous in an instruction, pilots are trained to ask ATC for confirmation before proceeding.
It's also possible that there was more ATC communication that was not recorded. LiveATC comes from feeds provided by volunteers, whose receivers may be some distance from the airport and which may not receive signals 100% reliably. The investigators will have access to the official recordings made by JCAB (the Japanese aviation authorities).
Point was that if the taxi clearance didn't include "hold (short of 34R)" it might be seen as contributing factor in line with ICAO[1] or FAA recommendations.
Also quite terrifying that, given all the equipment at Haneda and according to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NbVdIoJsHY, around 2:45, with taxi lights fully visible at 2:53, the DH8 was lined up on the runway for more than a minute before being run over by the A350.
But as you say, preliminary report should already have a clear timeline of the tower tapes.
> and pilots must be very sure they have clearance before entering a runway
The word "clearance" is used uniquely in the context of landing and departing exactly to avoid mistakes and has to be repeated again by the aircraft before ATC confirms.
The terms "cleared to land" and "cleared for takeoff" are extremely specific (a regulation written in blood like many aviation rules), but "cross runway" and "line up and wait" also give permission for aircraft to enter the runway.
The word "cleared" is often used for IFR clearance delivery as well which gives you permission to navigate via a planned route to a particular point, so it's much more common than just takeoffs and landings.
True in terms of phraseology (i.e. the actual word is not used in voice ATC communications), but all ATC instructions are generally referred to as clearances.
Is "line up and wait" really the new approved terminology? Way back when I was a PP student, it was "taxi into position runway XX and hold. Acknowledge hold."
Line up and wait sounds like something you tell preschoolers to do :-)
"position and hold" was the old phraseology in the US. It changed to "line up and wait" on 2010/09/30 to match ICAO standards and because "hold (on the runway)" might be confused with "hold short (of a runway/taxiway), or "hold position (wherever you are now)".
I do love how we try so hard to disambiguate language. Especially hard when working across languages too. And it shows how badly things can go if left to fuzzy language protocols.
"Line up and wait" is, historically, the ICAO phraseology, which the FAA adopted (and ditched the "taxi into position and talk for thirty more seconds and block comms" phrase). The phrase adoption went into effect Oct 2010 in the States.
The “line up” in this case refers to an instruction given to a single airplane to position itself on the runway in preparation for departure (as in “line up with the departure runway heading”).
It is not “hey, multiple airplanes get yourself into a queue on the runway”.
There can be multiple aircraft on the runway at multiple times, so long as there's no conflicting operations.
It's used quite regularly at any moderately busy airport to reduce delays.
Examples where I've seen/heard it used in ATC comms:
Aircraft departing in sequence. eg A, then B. So: "Flight A (already lined up on runway 35L), cleared for takeoff runway 35L." (some short time later while Flight A is still in the process of taking off) "Flight B, runway 35L line up and wait"
Aircraft departing after an arrival. eg "Flight A cleared to land, 35L", and right as flight A has crossed the threshold: "Flight B, runway 35L line up and wait"
Also, as mentioned by others, when there are other movements to cross a runway between departures. eg "Flight A, at Foxtrot 5, cross Runway 35L. Flight B, runway 35L line up and wait"
Line up and wait will be used after the preceding departure has started their takeoff roll, so the following aircraft can be ready to take off once the required spacing is achieved.
It could also be used while other aircraft/vehicles are crossing the runway at other intersections.
Maybe not with big airliners. It's common for small planes to be told to line up and wait while the current aircraft (also usually another small aircraft) is in the midst of taking off.
Conversely, I've worked on backend, data processing-type applications for most of my career, much of it in Java but some (especially recently) in Python, and the GIL is a huge limiting factor for writing efficient, readable Python code. I've had to write very annoying Python code using the multiprocessing library to get around the GIL, and ultimately it works, but it's ugly and clunky and overall just a pain. And remember, I've written a lot of Java code, so I have a high tolerance for pain! But the JVM's concurrency abstractions are actually kind of a joy to use, even if Java the language isn't. Python is the opposite, so if they can shed the GIL and make multithreading viable in Python without forking new processes, that would be a huge win.
> With a handful of exceptions, single-engine prop planes are only certified to run on 100-octane leaded gasoline.
This was true up until last year, when G100UL was approved as a drop-in replacement for 100LL. It does require a STC and the associated paperwork, but this is apparently pro forma and quite cheap, and doesn't require any modification to the aircraft apart from some placards. The problem, of course, is that G100UL isn't really available anywhere yet, while 100LL is still ubiquitous.
The problem is, reading the methodology can only give you a negative signal or a null signal. If the methodology looks good, that still doesn't speak to the correctness of the study's conclusion, for exactly this reason:
> Frankly, I'd expect industry to simply discard studies that don't support their product (null or negative result) and publish the studies that do promote their products.
There could have been a hundred attempts at this study before, all with a negative result, and none of them got published because they didn't have the result industry wanted. We simply don't know. But theoretically, this is something peer review should be able to fix: Researchers without industry support should be able to get the same results if they run the same methodology. Until then, being skeptical of the result seen, even if the methodology is sound, is completely reasonable.
All of the responses to my comment just explain the issue with having a single study available on a topic. You have the same exact issues with independent grants and researchers who want to uncover some real results and not just waste their time with null results, or they want continued funding.
You could level this criticism at any study much simpler. "Oh, the researchers just wanted this to be true." Why even bother singling out industry interest?
It's why meta-analyses are at the top of the evidence hierarchy: they look at multiple studies from varied sources.
But I'd still like to know how much industry funded research converges with non-industry-funded findings. Else you're doing the equivalent of dismissing, say, observational research even though it converges with RCTs 60%+ of the time which I think definitely takes some wind out of the sails of the "observational research is BS" knee-jerk.
You might find this meta-analysis interesting: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/... Part of that conclusion (note that water fluoridation in the US is recommended to a level of 0.7 mg/L):
> This systematic review and meta-analysis found inverse associations and a dose-response association between fluoride measurements in urine and drinking water and children’s IQ across the large multicountry epidemiological literature. There were limited data and uncertainty in the dose-response association between fluoride exposure and children’s IQ when fluoride exposure was estimated by drinking water alone at concentrations less than 1.5 mg/L.