Deconstructing the tax cut hoax

I got into a discussion recently with a wealthy Republican supporter about the tax bill. He was arguing that it would benefit everyone by pointing to Republican talking points that focus on the average value of the tax cuts. I tried to tell him that when a distribution is not roughly symmetric about the average value (also called the mean) but is skewed, then the average value is not an accurate reflection of the situation. Since he is a physician, I was surprised to discover that he did not seem to know the difference between the mean and the median.
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‘Every votes counts’ is not a meaningless slogan

There is a seeming paradox when it comes to voting. Sometimes people decide not to vote for whatever reason, perhaps even laziness, rationalizing their decision by arguing that a single vote will not sway an election. And that is of course true in the sense that almost all major elections are decided by more than one vote and hence no one’s particular vote will be the decider. The reason to vote is because if enough people on one side of an issue or candidate thought and acted that same way, the other side would win. So even if the eventual margin of victory is more than one vote, each person’s vote matters and hence the frequent exhortation ‘every vote counts’.
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Back to the future: Is a gravel road coming to your neighborhood?

In the November 2017 issue of Harper’s magazine, Dala Maharidge recounts a story.

In the summer of 1919, the U.S. Army wanted to see if it was possible to move tanks and trucks from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco, a distance of 3,251 miles. More than half the route was dirt track. Slowed by sand and “gumbo mud,” the convoy managed an average speed of 6.07 miles per hour. The journey took two months. A young lieutenant colonel named Dwight D. Eisenhower was on the mission; it made him a lifelong advocate for good roads.

After Eisenhower became president, he signed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which established funding for what became known as the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Thus began decades of work on the 42,000-mile system, which was declared finished only on October 14, 1992, with the completion of a section of I-70 in the Colorado Rockies.

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American kleptocracy

In addition to benefiting the wealthy in general, the Republican tax proposal that passed today in the House of Representatives by a margin of 227-203 and will be passed by the senate later today personally enriches Donald Trump and legislators who voted for it. The graphic below (via Karoli Kuns) shows how a last minute provision will personally benefit 14 Republican senators, the biggest beneficiary being Bob Corker who switched to voting in favor of the bill after this provision was inserted.
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How children learn science

One of the things that any teacher soon realizes is that students come into your class with all manner of theoretical structures in their minds, even if they have never formally studied that topic or even consciously thought about it. People create these structures in order to successfully navigate the world and as long as it works to answer their immediate problems, the fact that it is wildly off from what the scientific community believes is not a hindrance to their adoption.
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Young Earth creationist argumentative strategy

I came across this interesting blog post by someone named Jaybird (whose gender is not specified and I will refer to as a ‘he’) who had been a young-Earth creationist. He was taught that it was vitally important to defend the idea of a young Earth because that was based on a biblical chronology and if that was taken as metaphorical, then that would open the floodgates for thinking that everything, even the resurrection of Jesus, as metaphorical, and that would be the end of everything. He describes the rhetorical tricks that he was taught to enable people like him to defend that position and get the better of their more-scientifically-minded critics.
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Incompetent Trump nominee withdraws

Recall Matthew Petersen, nominated by Donald Trump for a lifetime appointment as a federal judge who at a hearing last week was unable to answer a single question about the law that was posed to him by Louisiana senator John Kennedy, a very conservative Republican. Well, it appears that after being at the receiving end of a storm of ridicule, he has withdrawn his name from consideration.
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Stealing a car that has wireless entry

I have not quite understood what the benefits are of wireless car entry and ignition. You still have to carry the key with you to enable the system to work, so the only advantage seems to be that you do not have to take it out of your pocket, which seems like a very minor benefit. However, I had a female friend who said she really liked it because she uses a handbag and finding and fishing a key out of it is not as simple as with a trouser pocket.
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