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I've always wondered...

I've always wondered if there has ever been a calculation to account for the population increase (~2 billion people) in the last 20 or so years with respect to climate change/global warming. Given that people give off their own body heat and exhale carbon dioxide, it seems to me that it's a reasonable question to ask when we talk about how to help slow/reverse climate issues. For example, if people just existing turn out to be a large factor to global warming, carbon capture may be a much more effective approach to controlling global warming than other avenues we have taken. What do you think?

Does a reasonable proponent of the proposed 2023 Israeli judicial reforms deserve airtime as a BP guest?

I was wondering if BP would consider hosting a reasonable, relatively sympathetic guest arguing in favor of the proposed Israeli judicial reforms. I have no individual connection to Israel myself and grew up in a boilerplate liberal boomer household, but just asked a close friend about getting information regarding the actual substance of the reforms. (ChatGPT was useless and many of the indexed articles I followed were short on details of the substance of the reforms.) In response, my friend quickly provided these urls. Now granted, this site (https://en.kohelet.org.il/) appears to have a blatant ideological slant. But that still doesn't mean the arguments being made themselves can't be brought to light in the spirit of full transparency: https://en.kohelet.org.il/publication/qa-on-the-judicial-reform https://en.kohelet.org.il/publication/why-judicial-reform-is-essential https://en.kohelet.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/%D7%98%D7%91%D7%9C%D7%AA-%D7%A1%D7%9E%D7%9B%D7%95%D7%99%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%A9%D7%9C%D7%A7%D7%97%D7%94-%D7%9C%D7%A2%D7%A6%D7%9E%D7%94-%D7%9E%D7%A2%D7%A8%D7%9B%D7%AA-%D7%94%D7%9E%D7%A9%D7%A4%D7%98-%D7%91%D7%92%D7%A8%D7%A1%D7%AA-%D7%90%D7%A0%D7%92%D7%9C%D7%99%D7%AA-1024x919.png Just wondering if there might be a reasonable counter to the narrative that the reforms are simply consolidating power within the executive, at the expense of the judiciary, and removing a check in the balance of power in the process (which sounds really scary).

Rogan's take on Sam Seder's PBD appearance

What are your thoughts on Rogan's terrible take on Sam Seder arguing for a 90% marginal tax rate? Rogan calls him an absolute dork, and frames the concept as ridiculous. I've been a huge Rogan fan for decades, but this actually pissed me off, and I'm not even a Seder fan. I actually never saw him talk prior to watching him on the PBD podcast. In the same podcast he sites some statistics from somewhere claiming 90% of women who don't have children will eventually regret it. How the hell would anyone know that? Watching Joe regress into a Fox News grandpa is seriously depressing.

Did the stimulus checks go to the states?

I'm doing a data mining work up regarding inflation. In the course of my discovery, I took a hard look at California and noticed it is in its first 2 years of negative population growth ever (and some serious earners relocated). This spells a certain amount of doom (I would think) for tax collections right as they're announcing large amounts of disbursements (see UnusualWhales for those announcements). I next migrated over to their tax collections data and it goes as follows 2020 - $50B, 2021 - $60B, 2022 - $70B! WOW! 20% INCREASE IN TAX COLLECTIONS in the midst of a pandemic! (This is coming from fred data, i'm new here and don't want to post URLs) I decided to check out my home state (Pennsylvania) also up 20% in 2021 compared to 2020 ($12B, $10B respectively). My question is; did the federal stimulus disbursements settle a lot of back taxes owed to the states? Are collections that latent that we simply aren't seeing the states get hit yet? Did a reallocation in spending from WFH boost other sectors? How did shutting the economy down boost the tax revenues of states? Or am I just an idiot...(quite possible)

Capitulation to base

is ron desantis’s lack of traction amongst the R base the strongest evidence yet of the R’s being scared of their base while D’s looking at theirs with derision? its no secret that establishment R’s have had it out for DT since he came on the scene, but even a bad copy of him (desantis) is being met with resistance, while dems always say they like real left policies but they get party appointed pete and kamala types as their only choices every time.