I'm old enough to remember when cell phones were primarily used for voice calls. Sometimes you'd hear yourself when you were trying to talk to someone, and it was infuriating. You'd have to hang up and call back, if the call was going to go on any length of time.
This is also a problem that exists within countries. My RSS feed is littered with Canadian independent (national) news agencies not defining what municipality article headlines relate to. E.g. "Mayor pushes back against province on xyz issue". Okay, that might be huge news for Timmins Ontario , but maybe BAU for Toronto. Even skimming the lead paragraph doesn't define the city often.
*Editting with a point: Perhaps everyone assumes a local audience.
Good luck. Americans won't even differentiate Washington State and Washington D.C. Even the AP guidelines say that "Washington" is ubiquitous shorthand for "Washington D.C." and recommends against shortening it to "D.C."
The most hilarious thing is that I learned recently that when they applied to be a state, the people from WA requested to be the state of Columbia. But a Kentucky rep said that would be too easily confused with the District of Columbia, and Congress changed it to Washington.
Americans do! If you are west of the Rockies, Washington resolves to the west. If you are east, it’s DC, and you have to say “you know, where Nirvana is from.”
Don’t get me started on east coast dumdums pronouncing Oregon as “Orry-gone.”
There were over 1000 protests over the weekend. The one I went to in Surprise, AZ had almost 1000 people, in a fairly conservative area with mostly older, white demographics. I think the tide is turning.
Serious question from a clueless european here, who should they vote for?
To us on the outside, getting filtered news that trickles down, it just seems like there are no candidates. One is 79 and one is 83, where are all the young politicians? Why does the media choose to only emphasize a few of them at the time?
If you're talking age, the US just had a 60 year old run in the last election and the party that complained to no end about the elderly running for office still voted for the 80 year old. Next election, the other frontrunner is currently 58.
We had a strong 38 year old candidate in 2020 but the South collectively still doesn't like gay people enough to have him win the primary.
> We had a strong 38 year old candidate in 2020 but the South collectively still doesn't like gay people enough to have him win the primary.
That 38 year old, along with the rest of the center left candidates, all dropped out to ensure the 70 year old candidate could beat the other 70 year old candidate. "The South" had nothing to do with it.
Incorrect. Buttigieg won #1 and #2 delegates in the first two primaries of Iowa and New Hampshire. It was only at the fourth primary, South Carolina, when Biden won 6x the votes, that the Buttigieg campaign dropped realizing they had no chance because of underperformance in only the South.
US elections happen in two stages, a "primary" where each party decides their candidate and then the "general" where the final winner is decided. It sounds like you may only be getting news about general elections (and may have missed the news where the 83 year old ended up getting swapped out).
The 83 year old dropped out before the election took place. Kamala Harris is 61. No spring chicken, but at least not old enough that she should've retired years ago.
The two-party system will always leave you with suboptimal choices when it comes to casting your vote, but the alternative to Trump was two decades younger.
There are plenty of young politicians. Their parties deliberately keep them out of power. Political power in the united states gets strangely concentrated by our 2 party system in a way that tends to ossify policy and promote more ring-wing versions of both parties.
Biden was no longer a candidate even by the time the last election happened.
Look to Mamdani. Note that the real election there was in the primary. If you squint a bit, the US electoral system looks like the French one. There's two rounds of voting, and in the first one you get to pick who is the crook that will be put up against the fascist in the final round.
It's going to be boring and time consuming, but people have to use the levers they do have available to do internal Democrat party politics if they want to improve the situation.
If there's one thing both parties agree with, it's that you can't ever vote for a third party because that's effectively voting for the other major candidate. So the problem of not having more than 2 choices perpetuates indefinitely.
> If there's one thing both parties agree with, it's that you can't ever vote for a third party
Actually, both major parties (not always at the same time) have a long track record of working very hard to promote voting for third-party candidates, doing things like funneling funds covertly (or simply nudging donors) to fund their efforts, assigning party activists to support third-party efforts, etc.
Of course, they exclusively do this for third parties whose appeal is, or is expected to be, mainly to people whos preference, if choices were limited to the major parties, would be for the other major party.
Because it's not just rhetoric, as long as the electoral system isn't reformed to change this, getting people to vote for a minor party instead of your opponent like demoralizing them and getting them to stay home, or disenfranchising them (two other things the major parties have been known to try to do to populations likely to vote for their opponents otherwise) is a lot easier and exactly half as useful, per voter, as getting them to switch to you from the other major party.
That only works if the message of the third party is more appealing to those voters. And so the major party also pays attention to which third party messages from those who would support them are getting through and changes.
It is also helped because many of the people who are insiders in the major party are secretly voting for the third party when the majority of primary voters (who are rarely well informed) force someone they don't like on the party. They can't do anything this time, but they can send a message to each other where they failed.
> That only works if the message of the third party is more appealing to those voters.
It actually works just as well if the third party fails to attract the voters with its message but provides a reason not to vote for the targeted major party candidate that would not work as well if the messenger was the major party using the third party as a stalking horse. Because discouraging voters that would otherwise vote for the other party has the exact same effect on the outcome as moving them to a minor party.
Whichever choice has the least favour is malleable. Right now, by switching up their candidates and policies, the democrats can't do any worse than they're already doing, which is losing. If the democrats next time, then the republicans will have 4 years with nothing to lose.
It's worth noting that Renee Good was shot because she was protesting after she happened upon ICE operating in her city. More than just weekend protests are happening. Few people in any of the blue sanctuary cities ICE is terrorizing actually want ICE to be there and those who don't frequently make themselves heard, sometimes resulting in their tragic end.
Yes, some protests happen when it's convenient for the protesters. That does not invalidate their protests, nor any others with a similar message. It does not weaken the message nor the movement.
> If you compare this to what is happening in Iran, US citizens are docile.
This is still moot. Even if they appear such (even if they are such) it does not diminish the validity nor righteousness of their message.
> A "peaceful protest" is an oxymoron.
This is false by a plain understanding of the words. A "protest" is an expression against something. "Peaceful" means nonviolent. Obviously expressions can be nonviolent.
I think the problem is just how big the US is. People outside of the US really don't understand this. For instance, I'm about 2300 miles from DC, also known as 3700 km. It just not logistically possible for me to march on the capital. I do what I can locally, a lot of us do, but with everything so spread out, it is hard to make an impact.
> For the 57 trials (2189 participants) comparing exercise with no treatment or a control intervention, the pooled SMD for depressive symptoms at the end of treatment was −0.67 (95% confidence interval (CI) −0.82 to −0.52; low‐certainty evidence), showing that exercise may result in a reduction in depressive symptoms. When we included only the seven trials (447 participants) with adequate allocation concealment, intention‐to‐treat analysis and blinded outcome assessment, the pooled SMD was smaller (SMD −0.46, 95% CI −0.88 to −0.04). Pooled data from the nine trials (405 participants) with long‐term follow‐up provided very uncertain evidence about the effect of exercise on depressive symptoms (SMD −0.53, 95% CI −1.11 to 0.06; very low certainty evidence).
Like, what does -0.67 really mean in this context. I read the study and it is not really explained. Maybe I'm too dumb to get it, though.
It's a standardized mean difference, which I believe can roughly be interpreted as: "treated groups had 0.67 stddev lower depression score than control groups."
That's a pretty substantial improvement - consider someone who's more depressed than 75% of the population becoming completely average. (Because the 75th percentile is about 0.67stddev above the median.)
You cannot say if this is a substantial change or not, because you need to know by how much the groups actually differ on average, i.e. you need the unstandardized effect size, expressed as a mean difference in the scale sum scores, or as an actual percentage of symptoms reduced, or etc. In general, there are monstrous issues with standardized mean differences, even setting aside the interpretability issues [1-3].
Good point. Would it be roughly accurate to say: "consider someone who's more depressed than 75% of the *study treated* population becoming completely average *among the study treated population*"?
Nope, you can't say how many people return to average from standardized effect sizes. I wish we had a standardized effect size that was more useful and actually meant something. Cohen actually proposed something called a U3 statistic that told us the percent overlap of two distributions, but that still doesn't tell us anything meaningful about practical significance.
You can't make decisions / determine clinical value from standardized effect sizes sadly, so when I see studies like this, my assumption is unfortunately that the researchers care only about publishing, and not about making their findings useful :(
It means nothing, standardized effect sizes have no clinical meaning here, they are purely statistical. To measure if these kinds of changes matter, you need to determine the Minimal (Clinically) Important Difference [1-2]. I.e. can clinicians (or patients) even notice the observed statistical difference.
In practice, this is a change of about 3-5 points on most 20+ item rating scales, or a relative reduction of 20-30% of the total (sum) score of the scale [1-2]. Unfortunately, anti-depressants are under or just barely reach this threshold [3-4], and so should be widely to be considered ineffective or only borderline effective, on average. Of course this is complicated by the fact that some people get worse on these treatments, and some people experience dramatic improvements, but, still, the point is, depression is extremely hard to treat.
Unfortunately, this also means that if exercise is only nearly as effective as therapy for depression, it may mean that the benefits of exercise are not actually really clinically observable, if measured properly and not just based on arbitrary statistical significance.
EDIT: There is less data on MCIDs for therapy, but at least one review suggests therapy effects can be in the 10+ point range [5]. But the way the exercise study is presented, with standardized effect sizes, we have no idea if the results matter at all [6].
[2] Masson, S. C., & Tejani, A. M. (2013). Minimum clinically important differences identified for commonly used depression rating scales. Journal of clinical epidemiology, 66(7), 805-807. [https://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(13)00056-5/fullt...]
[5] Cuijpers, P., Karyotaki, E., Weitz, E., Andersson, G., Hollon, S. D., & van Straten, A. (2014). The effects of psychotherapies for major depression in adults on remission, recovery and improvement: a meta-analysis. Journal of affective disorders, 159, 118–126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2014.02.026 [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24679399/]
[6] Pogrow, S. (2019). How Effect Size (Practical Significance) Misleads Clinical Practice: The Case for Switching to Practical Benefit to Assess Applied Research Findings. The American Statistician, 73(sup1), 223–234. https://doi.org/10.1080/00031305.2018.1549101
Ah!, though the hen of the woods must be all carbs then, as it didn't leave me hungry
and, it occurs to me that in certain tests, fungus might be smarter than chickens, something something, maze/logic tests of mycelium.
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