Yet democracy is also about giving each person a dignified voice in the decision-making processes in those institutions that guide and regulate their lives.
In my opinion, this is something that is slowly being taken away from us as civilians. Beside voting, which is still important but not guaranteed, people are almost never able to share their voice for a cause and actually see change as a result.
And yet 25 percent of all of America’s children live in poverty, and 42 percent of young brown brothers and sisters live in poverty, and 51 percent of young black brothers and sisters live in poverty in the richest nation in the history of the world.
Race and social class/income should not correlate with each other.
Problem people become indistinguishable and interchangeable, which means that only one of them has to be asked to find out what all the rest of them think.
This is the exact problem with racism, especially in America. People are so stuck on identifying and alienating a group solely from the history of one person. It is crucial to view many different perspectives to better understand the accurate history of a group of people rather than base it off of one person. This is also an issue with how history classes in the American school system are designed. We are mainly taught the views of prominent white figures and supremacists and not the views of minority groups in different time periods.
Then the mainstream media picked it up, which undoubtedly made many more people aware of the video than would have originally encountered it.
Positively, I feel that more people are recognizing what is fake news and what is not. It is evident in this current time period that there have been many edited videos surfacing on the web of Donald Trump and Joe Biden to portray them with some sort of disability, depending on your political views.
Most of this content is designed not to persuade people in any particular direction but to cause confusion, to overwhelm and to undermine trust in democratic institutions from the electoral system to journalism.
I agree and disagree with this statement. I feel that misinformation is used to persuade people in addition to cause confusion and overwhelm people. You want to make people believe something that is believable and have them share it with their friends as soon as the news is out.
But in 2016 several events made it broadly clear that darker forces had emerged: automation, microtargeting and coordination were fueling information campaigns designed to manipulate public opinion at scale.
Misinformation is definitely easier to spread in this day and age, especially with the advancement of technology. Essentially anyone can create a social profile and act as someone they're not just for the benefit of projecting misinformation.
Mr. Barnett remains optimistic about Mayflower’s progress
He may be optimistic, but he is not confident.
It’s going to create a lot of jobs
This is true. It will provide a way for low-income members of the military to participate in the sport and live affordably(?).
he believes it will be an economic boon for the area
How? One of the main issues in the ski industry is the priciness of the whole experience. It would be beneficial only to those who are financially able to participate in the sport.
boon
a thing that is helpful or beneficial
They thought the combined resort could relieve traffic congestion on local roads that lead to Deer Valley, which can currently be accessed only through Park City.
If Deer Valley already monitors the amount of skiers allowed on the mountain at one time, how will this "relieve traffic congestion" if there is none?
“It really is a concern about damaging the brand—the uncrowded, country-club feel of Deer Valley—by losing control of the traffic count on the hill,” said Mr. Clyde.
If Deer Valley doesn't approve, surely its homeowners and visitors won't either.
How would Deer Valley maintain its skier cap if thousands of additional people were allowed in through Mayflower? Would Deer Valley be able to continue its no-snowboarding policy?
I wonder this, too!
the resort is known for its snowboarding ban
Will the Mayflower Mountain Resort also exclude snowboarders?
Plus, although he says he is “not much of a skier myself,” Mr. Barnett says he was looking to diversify his holdings amid what he called “a knee-jerk anti-reaction to development” in New York.
Simply put, Barnett is doing this for the benefit of himself as a real-estate developer to branch out from just developing buildings in New York City.
The Military Installation Development Authority—an entity created by the state to promote the development of military land in Utah—was tapped to lead the process.
MIDA
stymie
prevent or hinder the progress of
members of the military could stay at low cost
Is this area highly populated with members of the military? Ski resorts are already quite expensive, so lowering the price to discount a military stay would be pushing it. Why don't they just continue to develop the land into an affordable place for members of the military?
A few miles outside Park City in Wasatch County, however, a swath of forested mountains remained undeveloped.
There are so many ski resorts already...why ruin the natural beauty of the forested mountains in the Wasatch?
Today there are no fewer than 11 ski resorts within an hour’s drive of the Salt Lake City airport.
Did Barnett consider his competition? Why does he think he can outdo any of the resorts already established such as Deer Valley?
most people don’t think it’s ever going to happen
no faith from people of interest
It’s been on the drawing board for 30 years or more
That is crazy! I can't believe it has taken over 30 years to develop this plan, and it is just now finally taking initiative.
100 of which will be available to the military at reduced costs
Why only 100? Are members of the military a target consumer?
audacious
showing a willingness to take surprisingly bold risks
Mayflower Mountain Resort
How will people feel about this name? There was backlash about Squaw Valley Resort in California, so will the term "Mayflower" be reconsidered before it is finalized?
But we have a decent chance to succeed, and that’s what we’re trying to do
As a developer, Gary Barnett needs to have more faith considering the amount of money he is putting toward this project.
It’s risky
Not confident?
the number of ski resorts across the country dropped to 476 the winter of 2018-2019 from 546 in the early 1990s
I had no idea about this, and I am curious as to why there has been a decrease in participation over the past 30 years.
Some owners in Deer Valley, known for its expense and its exclusivity, are less than thrilled about the idea that they should open their ski trails to a massive, and potentially less-exclusive, project next door.
This is very understandable. Many people choose to purchase a ski home or vacation in Deer Valley mainly for its exclusivity, so opening a public ski resort directly next door would take away from homebuyers experience, especially if it is significant to them.
portions of the land are polluted with mine tailings containing lead and arsenic
It will be good to clean this area up, but I am not sure that it is the best idea to fill the area with a ski resort while there has been a decline in snow sports participation.
Because of the direction of the arrows, the latter line appears shorter than the former, but in fact the two lines are the same length. Here’s the key: Even after we have measured the lines and found them to be equal, and have had the neurological basis of the illusion explained to us, we still perceive one line to be shorter than the other.
I have definitely seen this illusion before and ones that are similar. If humans had a similar mindset to illusions as they do with cognitive bias, there would need to be much more thought required to put into making a decision.
at a given time and among a certain population, an item has a market value that does not depend on whether one owns it or not
This is a very general study. I am interested to know the demographics and statistics of this particular pool of people. I feel like younger populations do not have a great sense of value, so they are more likely to value an item at a higher price than its worth. Contrarily, I feel like older populations have a better sense of value just simply based on experience.
The ikea effect, for instance, is defined as “the tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves.”
I had no idea about the IKEA effect until just now! This concept is interesting to me because I find that the furniture I have from IKEA or furniture that I have assembled myself is less valuable since I put it together. Quite honestly, it could break any time, but I choose to take that risk.
It’s true that studies have found that readers given text on a screen do worse on recall and comprehension tests than readers given the same text on paper.
I can see why this is. It's much more difficult to annotate on a screen, so I think people are more inclined to just not annotate at all.
Done badly (which is to say, done cynically), the Internet reduces us to mindless clickers, racing numbly to the bottom of a bottomless feed
I am definitely a victim of this. When reading an article online, I will almost always scroll all the way to the bottom right when the page loads to see how long the article is. I would never do that to a book, however; You can clearly see how long a book is, so there's no point in flipping through the pages. I wonder why this is. Digital technology is more beneficial in a way (in comparison to physical copies) because you can simply click on a word you aren't familiar with and learn the definition. Likewise, if you are even more curious about a topic brought up in a reading, you can quickly look up similar articles related to that topic
To read silently is to free your mind to reflect, to remember, to question and compare. The cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf calls this freedom “the secret gift of time to think”: When the reading brain becomes able to process written symbols automatically, the thinking brain, the I, has time to go beyond those symbols, to develop itself and the culture in which it lives.
Reading this little paragraph was super trippy to me because I did exactly what it says--how are our brains able to simply put words together to form sentences by deciphering symbols grouped together? Reading is a crazy concept!
The political scientist Scott Althaus has calculated that a voter with more knowledge of politics will, on balance, be less eager to go to war, less punitive about crime, more tolerant on social issues, less accepting of government control of the economy, and more willing to accept taxes in order to reduce the federal deficit. And Caplan calculates that a voter ignorant of economics will tend to be more pessimistic, more suspicious of market competition and of rises in productivity, and more wary of foreign trade and immigration.
I think this is something that more people need to hear: the importance of educating oneself in politics and the results.
Knowledge about politics, Brennan reports, is higher in people who have more education and higher income, live in the West, belong to the Republican Party, and are middle-aged; it’s lower among blacks and women.
Do people not see the issue here? I am curious to know who "made the rules" of what classes you must take and what knowledge you must have in order to graduate high school. I have a very deep interest in conspiracy theories, and I would not be shocked if we are in some sort of simulation or system. I honestly feel like the government does not want us to know certain information sometimes, and maybe part of it is what we should and should not know regarding politics.
“It would be bad if no one farmed,” he wrote, “but that does not imply that everyone should farm.”
I think this example Brennan uses is interesting because he is sort of saying that not everyone should vote (?), but some people should...So who is included in the population of people that Brennan thinks should vote?
The economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has made the case that democracies never have famines, and other scholars believe that they almost never go to war with one another, rarely murder their own populations, nearly always have peaceful transitions of government, and respect human rights more consistently than other regimes do.
This is interesting because the fact that this opinion of democracies comes from Amartya Sen, an economist and philosopher, makes me think that there is at least some sort of validity to this statement. I am assuming there was research put in to discover this finding if it does happen to be true.