, - The Associated Press/The New York Times
Stephan: Republican governance literally takes years off your life. Average life expectancy for a woman in Japan is 85 years. For a woman in Red value Kentucky or West Virginia about 75 years. For middle-aged White male Trump supporters ... well, here's the sad story.
Middle-aged White male Trump supporters and a few female friends
Credit: Dame Magazine
WASHINGTON — Middle-age white Americans with limited education are increasingly dying younger, on average, than other middle-age U.S. adults, a trend driven by their dwindling economic opportunities, research by two Princeton University economists has found.
The economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, argue in a paper released Thursday that the loss of steady middle-income jobs for those with high school degrees or less has triggered broad problems for this group. They are more likely than their college-educated counterparts, for example, to be unemployed, unmarried or afflicted with poor health.
“This is a story of the collapse of the white working class,” Deaton said in an interview. “The labor market has very much turned against them.”
Those dynamics helped fuel the rise of President Donald Trump, who won widespread support among whites with only a high school degree. Yet Deaton said his policies are unlikely to reverse these […]
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Amina Khan, Science Writer - Los Angeles Times
Stephan: Most of what was considered settled science about dinosaurs has been tossed out over the past few years, and here is an even more dramatic recalibration.
Kulindadromeus is a small bipedal ornithischian dinosaur that is now part of the new grouping Ornithoscelida. The new group places it close to theropods, the ancestors of living birds.
Credit: Pascal Godefroid
The dinosaur family tree may need to be radically rewritten — and even uprooted and replanted elsewhere, a new analysis of about 75 different species shows.
The findings, published in the journal Nature, hint that dinosaurs may have originated in the northern hemisphere rather than the southern, and could upend an understanding of dinosaur evolution that has gone largely unchallenged for some 130 years.
“We might all have to rearrange our mental furniture,” Kevin Padian, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology who was not involved in the study, wrote in a commentary.
To figure out the family tree of long-extinct animals with fossilized bones, scientists have to carefully study their shared features to see which ancient species were related, and what their common ancestors looked like. It’s tricky and painstaking work, especially since similar physical features can sometimes emerge independently in two different […]
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Thursday, March 23rd, 2017
Sarah Lazare, Staff Writer - Alternet
Stephan: The American Gulag is and should be an embarrassment to every American. But this business of imprisoning young children is simply a yard too far. As with so much that is going on in our government today, I just wonder at the moral depravity of people who for salaries are willing to do something like this.
Credit: Maria Sotomayor
For more than 600 days and two Christmas holidays, Marlene and her seven-year-old son Antonio have languished in indefinite detention at Pennsylvania’s “Berks Family Residential Center,” a glorified term for an immigrant prison. Her child has been granted Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS), which the U.S. government says is supposed to “help foreign children in the United States who have been abused, abandoned, or neglected.” But instead of sanctuary, or even a fair hearing, Marlene and her son face open-ended incarceration and “expedited removal” orders, compounding the trauma they endured when they were forced to flee their home in El Salvador under threat of gang violence.
“My son always asks me when we are going to be able to get out of here and be with our aunts and uncles,” Marlene told AlterNet over the phone from Berks, using pseudonyms for herself and her child in order to protect their privacy. “It’s a really hard thing psychologically for him to be here. It’s not easy for a boy of seven […]
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Thursday, March 23rd, 2017
Kevin Loria, - Business Insider
Stephan: One of the greatest of the Marijuana myths is that if it were legal kids would be using it in hugely elevated numbers. Here's actual data.
Credit: AP /Jeff Chiu
In every state that’s considered legalizing marijuana for recreational use, one major question inevitably comes up. If marijuana is legal, are kids going to start using it more?
New data from the Washington State Healthy Youth Survey helps provide an answer to that question. The results from the 2016 survey, which was taken by more than 230,000 students, reveal that marijuana usage rates for 8th, 10th, and 12th graders have remained basically unchanged for the past decade.
Washington voters decided to legalize recreational marijuana use in 2012 and marijuana shops opened in 2014, yet the number of kids in those grades who reported marijuana use in the past 30 days remained steady throughout that time. In 2016, 6% of 8th graders reported past month use, 17% of 10th graders reported the same, and 26% of 12th graders said they used marijuana in the past 30 days.
Stores don’t seem to make pot any easier for kids to buy either, with 8th and 12th graders saying cannabis was […]
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Thursday, March 23rd, 2017
Kyle Field , - Clean Technica
Stephan: Big oil and all its cousins are not going to die easily, and they own both the Congress and a number of state legislatures. So of course they are doing what they know best: they are trying to rig the laws to cripple the conversion out of the carbon age.
It won't work, the trend is against them.
a lot filled with electric vehicles
Credit: BMW
With the early introduction of affordable, long-range EVs like the Chevy Bolt (with 238 miles of range) and the Tesla Model 3 (slated to move into production in July with 200+ miles of range), 2017 is expected to see banner sales of electric vehicles.
However, the transition to EVs also represents a drastic change from long-established global business models that have grown accustomed to generating billions of dollars of profit each year from the legacy automobile industry and the fossil fuels they consume.
While the fossil fuel industry has resisted EVs over the years, the war is only beginning. As the Tesla Model 3 production ramp up hits its stride and the Early Adopters give way to the Early Majority in the EV adoption curve, Big Oil will start to feel the pain as gasoline consumption drops and erodes demand of an already unstable commodity.
With these changes on the horizon, 2017 is shaping up to be a big year for Big Oil in the fight against EVs, and it […]
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