Many people recognize that, generally speaking, there is enough wealth to go around, so to speak. This has been the case for a long time.

The issue has been, what is the mechanism/process by which to actually distribute that wealth? There are essentially 2 ways to do so. One is to distribute the wealth more equitably before taxation, through higher wages. The other is to "re"distribute wealth more equitably after it's been initially distributed, which is through taxation and then a program to distribute the taxed income.

Distributing it more fairly from the get-go seems better to most people; it's harder for a right-winger to argue against fair pay than it is to argue against giving people "free" money. But making pay more fair to begin with can be difficult, largely because of our globalized economy. As it is, with each country having its own laws about unions, pay, etc, it's hard to make things "too fair" in one society, because that society has to compete with workers in other societies who are paid far less. This keeps wages across the world low.

As I see it, having world-wide standards around wages/compensation/resource allocation would be a way to avoid the issue of the race to the bottom. However, actually implementing world-wide standards seems like a Herculean task. If we do ever get there, though, then perhaps people will be more inclined to have kids, knowing that they would not be economically hamstrung by doing so.

"If there is livestock on the land, you almost certainly can't grow crops on it."

Cattle ranchers in the Amazon would like to have a word with you:

https://www.theguardian.com/en...

https://wwf.panda.org/discover...

"The amount of misinformation here on this topic is staggering." I'll agree with you there.

I'm sure that the farm bill and subsidies have nothing to do with the economic aspect.

Also note that the large areas of the Amazon being deforested are mostly being used to raise cattle or grow soy to feed animals like cattle. Also note that the midwest has no mountains but lots of cattle.

"Vegan and Vegetarian diets lead to malnutrition unless you heavily supplement"

The only vitamin vegans NEED to supplement is B12. Other things are a decent idea, like vitamin D and iron, but it's not just vegetarians/vegans who would be wise to supplement these. Most people don't get enough of them.

"Human beings are designed to eat meat."

Correction - human beings evolved eating meat. That doesn't mean we were DESIGNED that way - that's just what worked in our environment. It could well be that what provides ideal functioning of the human body involves no meat at all. In fact, vegetarians and vegans are typically healthier than their omnivorous counterparts. For example, https://nutritionfacts.org/201... .

Look into vegetarian/vegan bodybuilding if you're all about protein. Not hard to find, there are scores of ripped dudes who haven't eaten meat in years/decades. Check out the dude from the Misfits for example.

Every time Slashdot posts an article describing the negative environmental impacts of eating meat, I see dozens of people rise up and rationalize eating meat. "Not, the study is flawed because it's looking at the wrong information," "The study didn't factor in X," etc.

At the end of the day, basic biology shows that there is considerable entropy as you move up trophic levels. It takes much more calories and water to produce meat than to produce plants. It also takes considerably more land, much of the time farmable land.

It doesn't matter if the cows were pastured and not fed corn/grain. It's still massively more resource-intensive, end of story. And to create the amount of beef that is sold in the world today would require tons of more farmland than is in use today, because pasture-raising cows requires much more land per cow than factory farming.

Many people may love the taste of meat, but that won't change reality. Eating meat on a regular basis really is one of the least environmentally-friendly things most people do, and eating less or none of it would help reduce one's environmental footprint. The cows would surely appreciate not being slaughtered unnecessarily, as well.

It's noteworthy that most people on this thread are either trying to dispute that animal agriculture is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions or are offended that anyone might try to "reduce their quality of life" by having them eat less or no meat, or in some cases both.

Sure, meat tastes good, is very ingrained in most cultures, and offers a lot of nutrients. But it's not as if one isolated study has concluded that it's a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions; many have.

The objection so many commenters on here have is the cultural one, whether or not they want to admit it. They simply like the taste of meat, and they like the culture of which both it and they are part of, and they don't want to give that up. Plain and simple.

If people cared to make personal efforts to live more sustainably, they would eat little to no meat. Surely if people cared about other sentient creatures which think and feel pain, they wouldn't eat any meat (save maybe bugs).

Most people here are admitting that selfishness is driving their decision, and the decisions of others, to not abstain from meat. Of course selfishness is in general what is driving up climate change, or at least a refusal to reduce it, but this is one where in some ways it would be incredibly easy to change, but many people refuse. It is noteworthy, though, that younger generations are eating vegetarian and vegan diets at higher rates than their parents and grandparents, at least in the US.

This actually explains language acquisition rather nicely, at least the learning of what words mean.

Have you ever read A Clockwork Orange? I only read the first 20 pages or so, but right away I was faced with made-up words whose meaning I didn't know. So I guessed at what these words meant based on context. Then some of the words would come up again a little later, and I would be able to see if my original guess still made sense or needed to be changed based on the new context.

I would say that this is how many people approach words in their own native language. Sure, I can say astrophysics and understand the gist of what someone means when they say it, but could I give you an accurate definition without looking it up? Nope.

Many words we use and "understand" probably fall on a spectrum of intimacy/understanding; some we have heard of and vaguely know what they are, while others we know quite well and could give an accurate definition of. But even those in the former category are still words we can use accurately, at least most of the time.

In other words, you don't have to have a perfect understanding and conception of a word to use it. Just a good-enough understanding, like my two-year-old who complained about "these fucking shoes" when struggling to put them on ;)

This has little to do with people learning to be self-sufficient. Self-sufficiency is a myth. Everyone gets where they are with tons of help from other people, whether it's their parents investing time, attention, love, food, shelter, and education in their kids. Or whether it's workers signing up to work for a small business and bring someone's vision to fruition.

Americans have been misled to believe that the problem is that people don't work hard enough, don't manage their money well enough, don't do enough for themselves - basically that all of these poor individuals are poor by some choice or another.

Again, that couldn't be more wrong. We are completely interdependent whether we want to admit it or not. The sooner we realize that and invest in one another, the better off we will all be.

You know who pays the price for poverty? All of us.

We pay for it in the form of increased crime. We pay for it in greater numbers of traffic accidents caused by people who are sleep-deprived because they work insane hours to try to pay the bills. We pay for it in the form of fewer kids pursuing vocational training or college because their parents can't afford to pay for this kind of education. We pay for it in more emergency room visits because people can't afford to see a doctor on a regular basis to get preventative care.

I could go on and on and on.

One of America's greatest problems today is that the artificial scarcity of money among our poorest causes a litany of ripple effects. It's not that they don't want to work hard or contribute to society, but that society isn't setup to accept and reward their contributions.

We routinely fail to invest in each other, in the poorest among us. And those investments/seeds gone unsewn result in poor outcomes down the line.

Until we see each other as worthy of investing our tax dollars in, we will continue to pay the price on the other end.

What helps students succeed?

Many posters here are rightfully concerned that the standard being suggested in California to lower expectations and push back advanced math concepts will only reduce the number of students learning those concepts.

But something I've seen missing from the discussion is what leads students to succeed or fail in school in general. If we're really so concerned about the level of student achievement in America, we have to consider the families they grow up in. That is to say, when students live in households where their parents struggle financially, those students are much more likely to struggle academically. There are countless studies showing this (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2528798/, https://www.educationnext.org/...).

From the latter source, "the Coleman Report had concluded that “schools are remarkably similar in the effect they have on the achievement of their pupils when the socio-economic background of the students is taken into account.” Or, as one sociologist supposedly put it to the scholar-politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Have you heard what Coleman is finding? It’s all family.”"

If we're serious about having a well-educated country in which Americans can meaningfully compete with people in other countries, we MUST do something to reduce poverty and make it easier for parents to spend time with their kids and take greater interest in their school work. Whether that be through affordable housing, higher minimum wages, higher unionization rates (what Nordic countries have instead of government-mandated minimum wages), higher tax rebates for the poor/middle class, etc - whatever means you prefer to get us there, we need to enact something to actually support families.

You can lament all you want about other factors, but lifting up and supporting families financially is a necessary component of improving educational outcomes, full stop.

I see many people here talking about the low death rate among kids who come down with COVID. That is true, and it's great that it is quite low.

What I see far, far less discussion of is what long-term effects kids may experience from getting infected. The rate of that is hard to say, but might be between 1.8% and 14%. (https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/08/long-covid-19-rare-children-study-says, https://www.bmj.com/content/37...).

What I think parents need to consider is this: their kids will probably end up being exposed to virus that causes COVID at some point. Thus, are there greater risks to their kids' health from getting COVID or from getting a COVID vaccine? For instance, "The risk of myocarditis is significantly higher after coronavirus infection itself, compared to vaccination." (https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories/how-do-we-know-covid-19-vaccine-safe-kids) That's just one health complication to think about, but of course there are many other ways that COVID might affect health in the medium to long term.

I don't know for certain, but from everything I've seen, a child is probably more likely to experience negative medium to long term effects from getting COVID than from getting vaccinated. I don't think the vaccine should be mandatory, but I think if parents are able to look objectively at the risks of infection versus the risks of vaccination, vaccination seems a lot less risky.

Your comments do not follow. There are plenty of ways to preserve food safely which don't require artificial preservatives. Chief among them being salt, which not surprisingly was incredibly valuable in the past for this very reason. Contrary to what some doctors and medical associations say, salt/sodium isn't inherently harmful, and quite the contrary, is a necessary nutrient. People who consume too little sodium are actually more likely to suffer cardiovascular disease than people who consume more of it:

"Higher rates of death and cardiovascular disease were seen among those with high sodium intake, defined as higher than 6,000 mg a day. But the researchers also saw high rates among those with low sodium intake, defined as less than 3,000 mg a day. The sweet spot was between 3,000 and 6,000, or where most Americans are now." (https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/sodium-studies-blur-picture-heart-healthy-201408157366)

Point being we don't need artificial additives to our food to keep it safe to consume, even for long periods of time.

It's almost as if our bodies have a tendency to react poorly to artificial substances that our ancestors' bodies weren't exposed to.

It's almost as if we should be very careful about what plastics/artificial colors/artificial flavors/artificial preservatives are put into our bodies. And maybe, just maybe, we should have stricter regulations about what we allow food companies to put into food and how they're allowed to package it.

I am just a layperson interested in the gut microbiome, and have seen very interesting connections between it and autism. I just encountered this article (https://www.jillcarnahan.com/2021/03/30/understanding-the-link-between-autism-and-the-microbiome/) which not only describes the altered gut microbiome of people with autism, but also how the microbiome of mothers play a role in shaping their children's neurology and microbiome.

There is much more to be understood, but it would seem that certain bacterial strains offer protective benefits by modulating the nervous system in beneficial ways. Similarly, other strains may be harmful by producing neurotoxins that negatively impact the nervous system and brain development/activity.

My semi-educated guess is that the diet of mothers and their children, as well as antibiotics, may be playing roles in autism.

All of this is to say that, while we should be looking at any promising area to help prevent and treat autism, the gut microbiome may be the most promising of all, as it is something that we have the power to alter through diet, bacterial transplants, and administration of probiotics.

The sad part about misinformation about vaccines causing autism is that it hides the true causes. From everything I've read and watched, one of the most meaningful connections scientists have made with autism is the gut microbiome. Which is to say, it seems very possible that the cause of autism is a lack of good gut bacteria allowing bad bacteria to flourish. Some bad bacteria seem to produce toxins, which then make their way to the brain and damage it/alter the way it functions.

I believe it's something like 80-90% of people who are autistic also suffer from gastro-intestinal issues.

With a steady increase in c-sections, many babies never pass through the birth canal. Passage through this canal exposes babies to many beneficial strains of bacteria, colonating their body with these strains. Failure to pass through this canal means these babies may lack many of these beneficial strains.

Furthermore, antibiotic usage in the US has steadily increased, and antibiotics are often prescribed in cases where they're really not necessary. This may contribute to kids not having the good bacteria that humans have traditionally had.

All of which is to say that if the public understood this connection, there would be more impetus to fund further research into the connection. Perhaps if we start giving all kids probiotics from birth through the first few years of their lives, we can ensure their guts are colonized with beneficial bacteria, and avoid setting up their body to be host to bad bacteria which might be contributing to or causing conditions like autism.