"Secret Science Reform Act": When Any "State-Hate" Reform Will Do?
I've been writing about my headaches with Vermont Agency of Natural Resources. All nice people. I wish they knew the 30 people at GPR were nice people. It would be nice if they would have visited Good Point Recycling during the past 36 months. That may have made it easier for them to explain why a Vermont company with a lower bid, 30 employees, R2-certified, no landfilling of CRT glass, and $488,000 less expensive, warranted a change in procurement.
For the record, while the state's selection of Casella is something we object to, competition is not. We simply want to run an Independent Opt-Out plan, so that if Vermont districts and entities WANT to use Good Point, they can.
However, Cathy Jamieson and her 2 staff are tilting the playing field AFTER they chose Casella Waste Systems, to make sure the horse (CWST) they bet on wins. Whether or not the bidder selection was proper, the state is cheating against the Manufacturer Independent Plan.
Among citizens and recycling clients, there's a lot of fatigue with the story. "I'm e-wasted out", a client told me. Vermonters tend to be strong and well educated environmentalists. VPIRG is well funded. The "Green Mountain State" is a Green mountain state. Most people will attribute an angry regulated business owner to some kind of Republican Fox News related profit-motivated decision to expose the environment to risk.You know, risk perception. Here's a link:
In social interactions, the perception of how risky our decisions are depends on how we anticipate other people's behaviors. We used electroencephalography to study the neurobiology of perception of social risk, in subjects playing the role of proposers in an iterated ultimatum game in pairs. Based on statistical modeling, we used the previous behaviors of both players to separate high-risk [HR] offers from low-risk [LR] offers. The HR offers present higher rejection probability and higher entropy (variability of possible outcome) than the LR offers. Rejections of LR offers elicited both a stronger mediofrontal negativity and a higher prefrontal theta activity than rejections of HR offers. Moreover, prior to feedback, HR offers generated a drop in alpha activity in an extended network. Interestingly, trial-by-trial variation in alpha activity in the medial prefrontal, posterior temporal, and inferior pariental cortex was specifically modulated by risk and, together with theta activity in the prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortex, predicted the proposer's subsequent behavior. Our results provide evidence that alpha and theta oscillations are sensitive to social risk and underlie a fine-tuning regulation of social decisions.
(Wow, how's that for a dollup of obfuscation? If you can't follow it, however, you cannot understand or defuse "state hate")
Risk is a statistic, a perception, something to be weighed in scientific method. It's also deeply rooted in our hippocampus, mitigated by the reasoning in the cerebral cortex. How regulators (who tend to be risk averse) interact with entrepreneurs (with the opposite tendencies, relatively speaking) offers a case study for how democracy is breaking down,how libertarians and social conservatives and liberals are getting whipped around in circles. Here is a national news story (Fox News) on a law proposed by GOP
Republican lawmakers in the House are pushing legislation that would prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from proposing new regulations based on science that is not transparent or not reproducible. The Secret Science Reform Act, introduced Thursday by Rep. David Schweikert, R-Ariz., would bar the agency from proposing or finalizing rules without first disclosing all "scientific and technical information" relied on to support its proposed action.
