The cruelty is hard to comprehend

Texas gets very hot in the summer, with temperatures rising well over triple digits and making manual outdoor labor not just uncomfortable but downright dangerous. As a result, some municipalities such as Dallas and Austin have passed ordinances that require employers to give a 10-minute water break every four hours. That seems to me to be nowhere close to enough but even that is too much for the governor Greg Abbott who has signed into law a measure passed by the Republican legislature that bans local governments from enforcing such ordinances.

The measure, which will take effect later this year, will nullify ordinances enacted by Austin and Dallas that mandate 10-minute breaks for construction workers every four hours. It also prevents any other local governments from passing similar worker protections.

Just days after Greg Abbott, the governor, ratified the law, officials said a 35-year-old utility lineman working to restore power in Marshall, Texas, died after experiencing symptoms of heat illness. The heat index – which takes into account both the temperature and humidity – was 100F (37C) while he was working.

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Life in zero gravity

Gravity is weird. It is the oldest of the four fundamental forces that we have been able to describe and yet what it is remains mysterious. When Isaac Newton first introduced his theory of gravity and the idea that objects with mass attract each other, he was accused by some critics of introducing a form of mysticism into science by postulating non-contact forces that could act instantaneously over empty space.

Einstein’s theory of general relativity brought in more sophisticated ideas by replacing instantaneous action-at-a-distance between two masses by saying that one mass distorts that space around it and that the distortion spreads through space at the speed of light and that the second mass responds accordingly when that distortion reaches it, thus removing the instantaneous action-at-a-distance problem. His Principle of Equivalence also showed that we cannot distinguish between being in a uniform gravitational field and being subjected to a constant acceleration. When we are in free fall, we are effectively weightless. The catch is that at some point, very quickly, we hit the ground.

Gravity is a ubiquitous force. We cannot shield ourselves from it. All this makes it hard for Earthbound people like us to imagine what life might be like in the absence of gravity. Now with space travel, we see astronauts in space stations in gravity-free situations. It should be noted that that he Earth’s gravitational field at the orbital height of the space station is about 90% of what we feel on Earth. But because they are in free-fall as the station orbits the Earth, they are effectively in zero-gravity (or more accurately microgravity) fields for a long time as long as they are in orbit. This has given us some idea of what life might be like in such an environment but there are still surprises. Part of the surprise is due to the fact that many forces that on Earth are small compared to the Earth’s gravitational field and are swamped by it, become significant when in zero gravity but many people do not realize this.

Take for example, a recent story about a video of Chinese astronauts (they refer to them as taikonauts) that had a glass of water. Since many people expect that in zero gravity water must float in the air in the shape of a sphere, this raised suspicions that the video had not been shot in space. But they are wrong because they ignored how important adhesive forces become in the absence of gravity.
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Amazon under fire from the FTC and Bernie Sanders

One of the best appointments that Joe Biden made is that of Lina Khan to head the Federal Trade Commission. She is a vigorous enforcer of anti-trust laws and unfair trade practices and the FTC has just announced a new lawsuit against the company for unfair practices after winning another lawsuit.

The FTC, the US agency charged with consumer protection, filed a federal lawsuit in Seattle, where Amazon is headquartered, alleging that the tech behemoth “ knowingly duped millions of consumers into unknowingly enrolling in Amazon Prime” through a secret project internally called “Iliad”.

The lawsuit marks the first time the agency has brought Amazon to court since its chair, Lina Khan, took the helm in 2021. Khan, a former antitrust scholar, has been widely expected to take a harder line on tech firms that have for years enjoyed unabated growth and little regulation.

In its complaint, the FTC said Amazon used “manipulative, coercive or deceptive user-interface designs known as ‘dark patterns’ to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically renewing Prime subscriptions”.

It said the option to purchase items on Amazon without subscribing to Prime was more difficult in many cases. It also said that consumers were sometimes presented with a button to complete their transactions – which did not clearly state it would also enroll them into Prime.
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Why do some people litter?

It annoys me when I see people throw things out of their car windows or when I see things like plastic bottles and containers strewn on sidewalks. Litter makes the environment ugly. It does not take much effort to not litter. You just keep the waste item until you reach a trash can. So why do people casually toss things away in public places, even sometimes when there is a trash can nearby? Some researchers are studying why people litter as part of an effort to reduce the practice, and find that there are multiple reasons why people do it.

In 2011, a study in Environment and Behavior observed people littering in public places. The researchers went to 130 outdoor, public locations in 10 U.S. states and watched almost 10,000 people as they went about their business.

When the researchers first arrived at a site, they were tasked with evaluating the area’s cleanliness and the availability of garbage bins. Of the 130 sites, 91 percent had at least one trash can. Only two sites didn’t have any visible litter.
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The rival platforms for 2024 take shape

The conventional political wisdom seems to have gelled as far as the 2024 presidential elections are concerned. It says that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) will win the Republican nomination but lose to Joe Biden in the general election. If by some chance SSAT drops out of the race (and the only thing that I think of that might cause that to happen is if he dies or is otherwise incapacitated), then whoever takes the nomination has a better chance of defeating Biden. The problem is that if one looks at past elections, conventional wisdom this far out from the election has proven to be extremely unreliable as a predictor of winners and losers.

But what the election is going to be about in terms of policies is a little easier to predict. SSAT seems to be running on a platform of personal grievance, that he is an utterly wronged man who deserves to be elected as president so that he can wreak vengeance on everyone who has worked against him, which by now is a pretty comprehensive list of federal and state governments, the justice system, and those within and outside the Republican party who have had the temerity to criticize him.

His recent speeches following his arraignment on federal charges painted a very dark picture of the state of the country and warned that if he loses in 2024, the country will be destroyed and taken over by evil forces. He paints himself as a messiah, the only one who can save the country. His competitors for the nomination have had no choice but to echo his alarmism but distinguish themselves from him by claiming that he is going to lose and that they have a better chance of winning and saving the country.
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When victims of bigotry are bigoted towards others

While I am generally optimistic about humanity’s capacity to do the right thing in general and over long time scales, one thing that I have been disillusioned by over shorter time scales is how people who have been subjected to discrimination and persecution when they are are in the minority, discriminate against other minorities when they gain political power. You would think that their own experience of being treated badly would make them feel empathy for other discriminated minority groups. But not so. One sees this switching from being the victim of discrimination to the perpetrators in many different contexts, be it religion, ethnicity, or nationality.

One recent example is that of the city of Hamtramck, Michigan where Muslims, who are often discriminated against in the US, became the dominant group in the city council. Now they have turned against the LGBTQ+ community, banning the pride flag on city properties.
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Searching for the invisible

Dark matter and dark energy have proven to be remarkably elusive, resisting all efforts so far to be directly detected. The best evidence we have for their existence is indirect, through gravitational effects that we have ascribed to their presence. The problem is that the gravitational force is both very weak (the weakest of the four fundamental forces) while at the same time, in the presence of huge masses like the Earth, stars, or galaxies, its effects are also large, dwarfing the effects of other forces. But such indirect evidence for the existence of fundamental particles is never satisfying because scientific history has examples where that has led us astray. So the search goes on, with the construction of evermore sensitive detectors that we hope will finally provide convincing direct evidence.

One of the latest efforts is to send detectors into space.
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Bye, bye Boris (again!)

Boris Johnson resigned from the UK parliament before the release of a report that would say that he had violated norms by lying to the House of Commons. Such an action would trigger a 90-day suspension and Johnson clearly did not want to face that ignominy so he quit.

Boris Johnson deliberately misled parliament over Partygate and was part of a campaign to abuse and intimidate MPs investigating him, a long-awaited report by the privileges committee has found.

In an unprecedented move, the cross-party group said he “closed his mind to the truth” and would have faced a 90-day suspension from the Commons had he not quit in rage at its conclusions last week.

Johnson was also found to have knowingly misled the committee itself, breached Commons rules by partially leaking its findings last Friday, and undermined the democratic processes of parliament.

As a result, it was recommended Johnson be banned from getting the pass granted to ex-MPs that allows them privileged access to the Westminster estate.

Johnson was originally set to face a suspension from parliament of 20 days – enough to trigger a recall petition that would have probably led to a byelection. But the committee said his blistering attempts to intimidate it last Friday would have increased the punishment to 90 days.

Two MPs on the committee – one Labour and the other from the SNP – had pushed for Johnson to be expelled from parliament. But the final report and punishment was signed off unanimously by all seven members.

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