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Weekend Reads 9/26/15

Why Did the Democratic and Republican Parties Switch Platforms?

During the 1860s, Republicans, who dominated northern states, orchestrated an ambitious expansion of federal power, helping to fund the transcontinental railroad, the state university system and the settlement of the West by homesteaders, and instating a national currency and protective tariff. Democrats, who dominated the South, opposed these measures.

People Are More Likely to Cheat at the End

The task was to flip a coin a handful of times and, each time, to simply guess which side it would land on. So hundreds of people at their home computers duly dug a quarter from their pockets and flipped. Each time, they marked whether they had guessed right or wrong. And each time they got it right, they won a small cash prize.

The experimenters told people explicitly not to cheat. But of course, since people were performing the study in private, there was no way to catch anyone red-handed. It was, on the other hand, possible to detect cheating in aggregate.

Climate Change No Longer a Distant or Abstract Threat (It's Here)

The world's poorest and most vulnerable people are already being impacted by water scarcity, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, loss of agricultural lands and ecosystems, forest fires, floods and intensified extreme events such as hurricanes and typhoons. The annual losses from natural disasters now average U.S. $250 billion to U.S. $300billion. If business as usual continues, half of the world's population could be living in areas of high water stress by 2030 as global temperatures shoot beyond the agreed goal of below 2-degrees Celsius (above pre-industrial levels).

Republicans are going all out to sabotage a global climate deal

Be careful what you wish for, deniers! As Jonathan Chait points out, “The exact sequence Obama tried to bring about has, in fact, happened. China has done the thing conservatives insisted it would never do.”

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