HFO-1234yf, a climate-friendly alternative refrigerant for car air conditioning systems touted by environmental activists, may instead be a greater problem than the products they insisted was causing pollution.
Each year when air conditioners are needed, California has to ask EPA for permission to violate federal emissions standards and burn enough natural gas to keep the brown-outs that nearly got Governor Gavin Newsom recalled from happening again.
There are lots of stories about the poor in America, and have been for decades. Smart demographers know that, like racism, if everyone is talking about The Poor, it's almost eliminated.One of the giant cracks in the communist dictatorship called the USSR last century was when the television program "60 Minutes" had a segment on poverty in America. It was designed to tug at the heartstrings of those with more money. The USSR ran it for their citizens but it actually backfired. Being in 'poverty' in America meant having a television and more living space than anyone not an elite in the Soviet Union had.
If you tell me an old white person in America opposes nuclear power, I can tell you how they vote. I can also tell you with alarming accuracy what they think about lots of science, like food and medicine. They think natural gas is why climate change happens.The reality is that climate change happened due to...them. Democrats gutted nuclear energy in America 30 years ago. Democrats cheered when Senator John Kerry and President Bill Clinton declared that any nuclear energy research could be a nuclear bomb. This was the capstone of a 30-year effort to undermine nuclear power in America, with politicians, their supporters, and allies in corporate media invoking the Precautionary Principle and saying any risk was too much.
It will be up to science history to try and gain insight into the reasons the federal government engaged in "Reefer Madness" narratives about marijuana, and then backed off that yet did the same to smoking cessation and harm reduction tools like vaping.
Online supplement marketers prey on consumers by exploiting the margins of President Bill Clinton's 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which exempts supplements from FDA oversight if they state in fine print, "This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease" right after making claims that read like they replace medicine.
There is populist rhetoric about Buy Local but what few in the public realize is that the definition is subjective. Restaurants in Manhattan often claim they buy local, but in the fine print it reads 'when available', and they don't tell you when it was not locally available, and local to them may be up to 500 miles away.
Only a few years ago, American colleges used a "secret sauce" of race in admissions that voided test scores and replaced those with arbitrary demographic selection. Due to such clear racism, and despite being a minority with less than 5 percent of the population, Asians were least likely to be admitted to elite colleges if the alternatives were a more-favored minority with lower scores or qualifications. Asians were even less likely to be admitted than white students.
Once upon a time, young Baby Boomers ridiculed television programs that showed married couples in separate beds. They used terms like 'prudish' and 'Victorian' and 'repressed.'Actually, those shows were representative of culture for most of human history. Humans have rarely shared a bed with a spouse or relative if they had a choice. Only in the 1950s did sharing a bed in larger rooms in larger houses become common. By the 1980s, California took the concept of a King-Sized bed (invented in 1890 to sleep 15) and marketed it for wealthy elites on the coasts; a California King, 7 feet long.
Artificial Intelligence - AI - isn't really AI at all, which may be why it has been so disappointing to companies that aren't trying to sell you a new leaf blower. Instead of doing something practical, like the dishes or laundry so you have more time to do art or music, AI is doing music and art for you.Basically, it's an over-hyped grift.
Is glyphosate damaging essential microbes in soil? A multi-year study sought to answer the question using real-world conditions.Glyphosate (e.g Roundup) is the most popular weedkiller in the world, and that has made it a target for some disreputable competitors, primarily those in the organic food segment, who promote their own chemicals as alternatives. Their chemicals, they claim, don't harm soil but glyphosate does.
Most people who try a diet don't succeed in keeping weight off long-term and that is trumpeted as a huge failure of dieting by people who, wait for it, are often selling a competing diet.The health truth is that even if you fail, you improved your health. Claims that people whose weight go up and down are dying earlier are just the same bad epidemiology that has journalists lamenting that International Agency for Research on Cancer activists claim pickle juice and aloe vera cause cancer.(1)
You're not a Frank-people because you eat Doritos, despite what people writing lifestyle/diet books and New York Times journalists who gush over them want you to believe.Such claims are pure food populism by rich white people for rich white people. It's not science, it's instead not even right enough to be wrong.
