Tuesday, July 26, 2022

Grandpa Day:: he Western Drought Is Getting Weird Share

World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly


Out of water


'Manly should be embarrassed': Paul Kent SLAMS club for making 'marketing decision' over Rainbow jersey and 'forcing political views' on their players...as seven Sea Eagles will BOYCOTT match against Roosters in protest against jumper


THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED:  Study: Too little salt may worsen outcomes for common type of heart failure


The World Is Burning Once Again

The Atlantic – Climate change predictions for 2050 arrived way earlier – in 2022: “In September 2020, the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office published a hypothetical weather forecast for a mid-July day in the year 2050. Forty degrees Celsius in London. (That’s 104 degrees Fahrenheit.) Thirty-eight in Hull (100 degrees F). Thirty-nine in Birmingham (102 degrees F). These were preposterous numbers, never before seen in U.K. weather forecasts, much less felt in reality—until last week. On Friday, the Met Office published an actual forecast for Tuesday that, as several observers noted, looked scarily similar to its 2050 projections. And today, as predicted, the U.K. smashed its previous heat record, registering a provisional reading of 40.3 degrees C, or 104.5 degrees F, in a small village near the eastern coast. From speculative fiction to nonfiction in less than two years…”



The Western Drought Is Getting Weird Share - Gizmodo: “The western and southwestern U.S. is wilting under the biggest drought in 1,200 years — a megadrought. As of writing this, most of the country is experiencing drier-than-normal conditions, but things remain particularly severe from Texas to Washington state. Scientists have identified climate change as a significant contributing factor to the extent and severity of droughts in general. 

And one study pegged about 40% of the current dry conditions in the Southwest on human-caused climate shifts. We’re seeing the usual consequences of drought: water restrictions pop up, reservoirs hit record lows, wildfires spin out of control, and crops suffer. But the longer the West’s dry spell goes on, the more bizarre the drought-related stories get. Here are some of the oddest impacts happening or likely to happen so far…”


The Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn Law Dean Requests Faculty Senate Impose ‘Major Sanction’ Against Amy Wax:

Penn Logo (2022)Penn Law School Dean Ted Ruger requested that the Faculty Senate impose a “major sanction” against tenured Penn Law professor Amy Wax, an action that brings the University closer to potentially terminating the controversial academic.

In a 12-page report sent on June 23 to Faculty Senate Chair Vivian Gadsden, Ruger argued that Wax’s bigoted public statements and her behavior on campus and inside the classroom have violated multiple University standards for faculty, citing numerous student and faculty accounts of the conduct that he believes warrants disciplinary action. Ruger requested that the Faculty Senate convene a hearing board to conduct a full review of Wax’s conduct and ultimately impose a major sanction, in line with the University's policy for punishing tenured faculty members.

“Academic freedom for a tenured scholar is, and always has been, premised on a faculty member remaining fit to perform the minimal requirements of the job,” Ruger wrote in the letter. “However, Wax’s conduct demonstrates a ‘flagrant disregard of the standards, rules, or mission of the University.'”

University policy describes a major sanction as “termination; suspension; reduction in academic base salary; zero salary increases stipulated in advance for a period of four or more years.”

Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:


Wired: “Everyone from advertisers and marketers to government-backed hackers and spyware makers wants to identify and track users across the web. And while a staggering amount of infrastructure is already in place to do exactly that, the appetite for data and new tools to collect it has proved insatiable. 


FiveThirtyEight: “Americans are feeling uneasy, and it’s hard to blame them. The things they want to change — inflation, COVID-19 case numbers, rising violent crimein some cities — seem more and more intractable. There was one big, abrupt shift in American life at the end of June, when the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion. But that wasn’t a change most Americans wanted. This sense of dissatisfaction showed up in a recent poll from Gallup, which asked Americans how much confidence they have in various institutions. 

The survey found that since last June, when Gallup last asked this set of questions, Americans’ confidence in almost every institution has dropped. In the poll, which was conducted before the justices released their decision on abortion but after a draft of the opinion leaked, the biggest shifts were for the presidency, which saw a 15-percentage-point drop, and the Supreme Court, which saw an 11-point drop.

 But overall, the national mood is sour. Americans’ average confidence in 14 of the institutions that Gallup asked about was only at 27 percent — the lowest point since Gallup began the survey in 1979…”

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