The recent NCAA conference kerfuffle proves money was only part of the problem, though. While there certainly have been declines in state support and endowment revenue, they’ve also spent decades prioritizing things like sports, facilities, and coaches over research and academic programs. And we can’t even justify it by claiming that Universities need to prioritize revenue-generating entities to support non-revenue generating entities, because sports lose a stupid amount of money each year. They’ve lost track of what Universities are supposed to be doing, which is education, and they’re doing it in a way that keeps them trapped in a financial doom loop.

Yep. Page 30 in the referenced study.

Yes, but the lede is why. They don’t really get to anything resembling a resolution until something like 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through the article. Even now I’m still unsure whether the 500k excess deaths were rabies infections or due to tainted water. They never got around to providing much clarity on that front. The paper only goes so far as to say a) more rabies vaccines were sold, b) people saw more dogs, c) fecal counts in water went up, and d) DO in water went down. But that comes with two huge caveats:

1. Feral dog data were collected after the ban and “do not allow us to reject that feral dog populations were already higher in the high-vulture suitability districts even before the collapse of vulture populations.”

2. Fecal coliform also has human origins. And the uptick in fecal counts (along with the decline in DO) was in areas where more people live.

Correlation between excess human deaths and vulture decline wasn’t actually teased out into any kind of causation, and the best they could do was link death upticks with spatially isolated poisoning nodes. Urban areas had a more pronounced effect, but urban areas have a lot of other factors that can cause death, and none of those factors were controlled for, or really even mentioned in section 6.2 or the conclusion. Overall the paper is crappy because the study is quite poor, so I guess the author did the best they could with a study that tried to do far too much with far too little data.

Blech. The opening to the article isn’t any better, and they clearly buried the lede to keep you scrolling. Here’s the gist:

1. Vultures eat cattle carcasses.

2. Anti-inflammatory cattle medicine Diclofenac is toxic to birds.

3. Price of Diclofenac falls in 1994, becomes widely used.

4. 95% of vultures in India die over 1990s and 2000s.

5. Diclofenac banned in 2006.

6. Rotting livestock carcasses, no longer picked to the bones by vultures, polluted waterways and fed an increase in feral dogs and rabies.

7. Districts with no vultures saw uptick in human deaths. Districts with vultures saw no uptick. About 500,000 excess deaths across India.

What a fucking terrible article.

Lol, yep. Oh you spray lots of stuff that’s designed to kill bugs? I think it might be killing lots of bugs!

Fascinating, as I had no idea it could start to happen this quickly. This really helps explain how regional dialects like the Carolina Brogue emerged in isolated parts of the country/world.

Well if the CEO of Blackstone doesn’t like it, then SIGN ME THE FUCK UP.

He’s also the guy who’s singlehandedly responsible for CRT turning into the right’s new boogeyman.

There could be bones, as stated in the video.

It is quite literally impossible for bones to survive 87 years at the bottom of the ocean. The commenter said:

could there still be signs of bodies after all this time? like bones?

The answer is an unequivocal “no.” Even the ones from Nikumaroro which were referenced in the video which you quoted, disappeared decades ago. There could absolutely, positively not be bones at this site, because bones at the bottom of the ocean are completely broken down within a few years. I responded with detail because you were clearly mistaken.

If it’s true that the bones found on Gardner Island “are almost certainly” from Earhart and/or Noonan, I find it highly unlikely that they could have landed at Gardner, and then the plane be swept all the way from there to Howland, while remaining so intact the whole way.

Keep in mind that the scientists who claim the bones are hers simply performed updated forensic osteology methods against the bone measurements and body measurements extrapolated from physical records and photographs. They said:

The bones are consistent with Earhart in all respects we know or can reasonably infer. Her height is entirely consistent with the bones. The skull measurements are at least suggestive of female. But most convincing is the similarity of the bone lengths to the reconstructed lengths of Earhart’s bones. Likelihood ratios of 84–154 would not qualify as a positive identification by the criteria of modern forensic practice, where likelihood ratios are often millions or more. They do qualify as what is often called the preponderance of the evidence, that is, it is more likely than not the Nikumaroro bones were (or are, if they still exist) those of Amelia Earhart. If the bones do not belong to Amelia Earhart, then they are from someone very similar to her. And, as we have seen, a random individual has a very low probability of possessing that degree of similarity.

This is certainly a good estimate, and the methodology tracks, but a) the actual bones cannot be measured/studied further, b) it’s possible the bones were from a female of her same size, c) no other corroborating evidence is possible. They did a DNA analysis of some bones they found in the Tarawa archives in 2019(ish) which they thought might be the long lost bones, but tests concluded that they were not. So in this case I think it’s safe to say these bones have a high probability of being hers, but not to extrapolate that because those bones were hers, other theories must be ruled out. It’s suggestive that the bones were hers, but not proof that any other hypothesis should be confirmed or rejected.

No, it said, “Gillespie’s organization, the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, has also claimed that it found forensic evidence, including bones on the island, that were likely Earhart’s.” That’s an entirely different group than Deep Sea Vision, who conducted the deep sea exploration that’s highlighted by the article.

And the study that made the claim back in 2018 said the bones, “have more similarity to Earhart than to 99 percent of individuals in a large reference sample.” That was based on documented measurements of the bones, rather than the bones themselves, which have long since been lost. “Most certainly”, in this case, should be taken with a huge grain of salt.

Echoing what BudgieMania said, think of companies like Peloton and Zoom, or even Amazon. In the peak of the pandemic they grew like crazy, and they hired staff like there was no tomorrow. Tech firms of all kinds outpaced the rest of the economy because everything went digital almost overnight, and people stuck at home completely transformed their consumption patterns. Turns out there was a tomorrow, and after things settled down, life returned to normal, and folks started returning to offices, demand for some of those digital products fell back to Earth. Also what feels like the bottom dropping out to employees is actually a significant net uptick in job creation. That certainly doesn’t help the folks currently out of work (my partner is actually one of them), but it’s much more of a right-sizing than a down-sizing, all things considered.

Everyone in a boardroom is typically a university educated economist.

What evidence do you have of this? It is absolutely not my experience that any board members have training in economics, let alone all of them. More often than not I see business administration, political science, or some other liberal arts degree.

The CEO of Mcdonalds didnt go to a culinary school.

He didn’t get an economics degree either. He has an MBA from Harvard.

Whatever the fuck you do in the comfort of your own basement is your business, chief.

How many different ways can I tell you guys that a doomsday clock is the most ludicrous and flatly ineffective tool for communicating the stresses we’re facing in the 21st century? Do you need me to send you a telegram? Maybe a passenger pigeon? I can have it written in the sky by a biplane if that’ll help. Maybe in another language? Hieroglyphics perhaps?

My dude, I studied this. I have two graduate degrees in these subjects. I’m no stranger to the very real problems we’re facing as a global species, and in fact I’ve dedicated my entire career to fighting environmental degradation, often at the expense of my family, my finances, and my health.

A DOOMSDAY CLOCK IS STUPID AND HASN’T HELPED ME OR ANY OF MY COLLEAGUES AT ANY POINT IN OUR ENTIRE PROFESSIONAL CAREERS.

God fucking damn y’all are dense.

The clock is supposed to be about impending doom.

Which I’ve already clarified is ridiculous and unhelpful even if a crisis deserves our utmost attention. That’s on both a pragmatic and a psychological level. If you want a long series of continuous eye rolls, by all means continue telling people the sky is literally falling.

Slow moving disasters can include many things and I used climate change as an example. But there are many others.

None of which include global annihilation as even a remote possibility.

Disease, blight and even an asteroid if it’s big enough.

Do you think telling people we’re seconds from an asteroid hitting will help them do literally anything? What if you tell them that every single day for 40 years? Do you think it’ll help them more in 40 years than it does today?

Since you completely avoided meaningfully responding to literally anything I just wrote and fell back on repeating yourself as if I somehow don’t understand English, I’ll bow out here. Enjoy your masturbatory doom fetish.

I have a graduate degree in climate policy and have worked in the environmental field for almost 15 years. We do not have a high chance of self-ceasing thanks to climate change, and I implore you to stop framing it that way. That kind of language is absolutely and unequivocally unhelpful when it comes to communicating the challenges we face. The fact that laypeople have spent decades saying climate change is going to “destroy the planet” or “kill us all” is exactly the kind of problem I’m talking about. It breeds paralysis because it’s something that you can’t possibly conjure a constructive response to address. If literal Armageddon is coming, then the solution isn’t to try to stop it, the solution is to live your life as best you can, while you can.

Do we face significant challenges as a result of climate change? Absolutely. Is some kind of global food crisis and/or localized famine likely? Absolutely. Will storms and sea level changes displace entire communities of people and worsen an already bad immigration crisis across the globe? Absolutely. Will infrastructure suffer and become increasingly expensive to maintain and adapt? Absolutely. Will changes stress local ecosystems such that extinctions become more likely? Absolutely. Will governments struggle to meaningfully respond when the public purse is constantly stressed by increasingly expensive natural disasters? Absolutely. Will some people die of heat stress, starvation, drowning, etc? Absolutely. Will we “self-cease” as a result?

NO.

So then given that I don’t accept your premise that global annihilation is in any way relevant to climate change, and given that the threat of nuclear Armageddon is something the individual is completely powerless to address, I’d like to counter that a “Doomsday” anything that constantly creeps closer and closer to an imaginary red line, is a completely fucking stupid way to communicate the challenges we face.

Let me put it to you this way: if someone told you an asteroid was going to hit the Earth 90 seconds from now, would you try to stop it? Or would you call your friends and family and tell them you love them?

I agree, to be perfectly honest. I imagine the folks who initially came up with this clock thought it was a good idea, but at this point it’s just a cartoonish shadow of what it was supposed to be. We can only be minutes/seconds from total annihilation for so many years before people shrug and completely lose interest. It’s like listening to a Mayan cultist talk about what’s coming in 2012, or a Christian fundamentalist talk about the coming rapture. It also ignores basic psychology, in that even if you accept the gravity of the clock’s meaning, you’re still left utterly powerless to do anything about it, all while thinking…“ok, so what now?”

Removed: rule 1

Keep it civil, please.