Suicide and Trumpism

http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=4561


Why is it colder at a higher altitude when technically it is closer to the sun?
Question Date: 2014-08-23

Answer 1:

This is a great question, but the answer is a little complicated, so you have to help me out.
First, we have to understand air pressure. A lot of people think that air has no weight. This is not true. Air is matter and it has mass. “Mass” is a fancy way of saying “stuff.” We measure the mass by weighing it.
Picture yourself standing by the foot of a mountain. There is a column of air on you that goes all the way up into the end of our atmosphere. It is pushing down on you, but you don’t notice it. (If we swapped in water for air, you would.) Now picture yourself on the top of the mountain. The column of air is shorter now, so it weighs less. It is putting less pressure on you. Got that? More air pressure down by sea level, less on the top of the mountain.

Pressure squishes things down so that they take up less space. “Volume” is a fancy way of saying “space.” The same amount of air is squashed into a smaller space down at sea level. On top of the mountain, it is more spread out.
Heat is energy, not stuff (matter). We can’t see heat. We measure it as temperature.
This part is tricky, so help me out by grabbing a piece of paper, a ruler, a pencil, and a red crayon or marker.

1. Draw a square with the pencil. Make the square about 2 inches on each side.
2. Now use the red crayon or marker to draw 20 lines from the top to the bottom of the square, partly filling it in.
3. Next to this, use the pencil to draw a second square that is about 3 inches on each side.
4. Now use the red crayon or marker to make 20 lines, each one 2 inches long, inside the big square.

In your drawing, the red lines are to show heat. You can see that a lot less of the big square is covered by red. If you were an ant walking around in the big square, you would touch a lot less heat.
When air is near sea level, air pressure squashes it into a small space, like your small square. When the air is high on the mountain, it spreads out. This is like your big square. The same amount of heat is now in a bigger space, so it is more spread out. So the air is colder on top of mountains because there is less air pressure.

Heat is not really red, and it’s not really lines. The picture that you drew helps you think about heat. Your picture is a model. Scientists use models to help themselves think about things and to communicate to other people.
Some places on land are actually below sea level. Do you think they are hotter or cooler than places at sea level?
If you like to think about this sort of question, you may want to study atmospheric science.
 
Oneuli said:
One thing I find interesting about conservatives is that the things they claim to want are so frequently things that are, in fact, better achieved in more liberal societies. For example, it's not places like Alabama that have good educational outcomes. It's places like Massachusetts, Canada, Scandinavia, etc. -- places known for liberalism. Similarly, productivity is generally higher in more liberal places. Similarly, things like teen pregnancy and violent crime tend to be lower in liberal regions than conservative ones. They basically want to roll out more broadly political approaches that tend to line up with failure.
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What’s interesting is how much/often liberals complain about income/wealth inequality yet then want the country to be like California where we have extreme wealth along with the highest poverty rate in the country. And look at our school system. In wealthy areas it is amazing. In other areas not so much. Again, not exactly a model that makes others envious.
 
Oneuli said:
Take a look at these two blocks of statistics:

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/population-health/us-states-ranked-by-suicide-rate.html
https://morningconsult.com/tracking-trump/

What's remarkable is how strongly correlated suicide rates are with Trump approval rates, at the state level. Specifically, there's a 58.4% positive correlation. Basically, the more suicidally depressed people are in a state, the more likely people in the state are to approve of Trump.

This is particularly interesting because it flies in the face of the normal trend for higher-latitude populations to have higher suicide rates (likely owing to circadian rhythm problems in places where there are huge imbalances between night and day in the Summer and Winter months, resulting in sleep irregularities and depression). Other things being equal, you'd expect lower suicide rates in the Deep South than in New England, just as you find lower suicide rates in southern European countries (Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal) than northern ones (Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland).

So, what's the reason for this correlation? Is there something about conservative politics that makes people suicidal (e.g., skimping on public assistance for mental health care)? Or something about being suicidal that makes people conservative (e.g., the attraction of hateful rhetoric to those who are emotionally frayed)? Or something separate that drives both things (e.g., a sense of being left behind, economically)? Why is it that there's such an enormous gap in suicide rates between places like NJ, NY, and MA (around 8/100k), and places like Montana, Alaska, and Wyoming (around 25/100k)?
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they are talking about more or less sun exposure


colder means more clouds and less sun

vite D comes from sun
 
cawacko said:
What’s interesting is how much/often liberals complain about income/wealth inequality yet then want the country to be like California where we have extreme wealth along with the highest poverty rate in the country. And look at our school system. In wealthy areas it is amazing. In other areas not so much. Again, not exactly a model that makes others envious.
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imagine if we could just keep all that fed money we have to send away
 
Oneuli said:
Of course there can. It's bizarre you'd imagine otherwise.
.
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OK. Let's talk about the positive correlation between counties that voted democrat in the 2016 election and the higher murder rates in those counties than those that voted for Trump?
https://www.foxnews.com/us/us-murders-concentrated-in-5-percent-of-counties
https://brilliantmaps.com/2016-county-election-map/

What do you suppose the reason for this is?
Murder is a much bigger problem in this country than suicide .
 
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anonymoose said:
OK. Let's talk about the positive correlation between counties that voted democrat in the 2016 election and the higher murder rates in those counties than those that voted for Trump?
https://www.foxnews.com/us/us-murders-concentrated-in-5-percent-of-counties
https://brilliantmaps.com/2016-county-election-map/

What do you suppose the reason for this is?
Murder is a much bigger problem than suicide in this country.
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Please call the suicide hotline it'll be such a help to you
 
Hello Oneuli,

Oneuli said:
Take a look at these two blocks of statistics:

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/population-health/us-states-ranked-by-suicide-rate.html
https://morningconsult.com/tracking-trump/

What's remarkable is how strongly correlated suicide rates are with Trump approval rates, at the state level. Specifically, there's a 58.4% positive correlation. Basically, the more suicidally depressed people are in a state, the more likely people in the state are to approve of Trump.

This is particularly interesting because it flies in the face of the normal trend for higher-latitude populations to have higher suicide rates (likely owing to circadian rhythm problems in places where there are huge imbalances between night and day in the Summer and Winter months, resulting in sleep irregularities and depression). Other things being equal, you'd expect lower suicide rates in the Deep South than in New England, just as you find lower suicide rates in southern European countries (Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal) than northern ones (Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland).

So, what's the reason for this correlation? Is there something about conservative politics that makes people suicidal (e.g., skimping on public assistance for mental health care)? Or something about being suicidal that makes people conservative (e.g., the attraction of hateful rhetoric to those who are emotionally frayed)? Or something separate that drives both things (e.g., a sense of being left behind, economically)? Why is it that there's such an enormous gap in suicide rates between places like NJ, NY, and MA (around 8/100k), and places like Montana, Alaska, and Wyoming (around 25/100k)?
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Very interesting!

Thanks for posting this.

One thing appears quite clear. A large proportion of Trump supporters are very angry, full of hatred.

People who cannot find happiness tend to commit suicide more than those who are happy.
 
Oneuli said:
If you look at our test scores, you'll see that many liberal areas do quite well. For example, Massachusetts has the best NAEP scores of any state pretty much every year, and on the international PISA test, they put up numbers that would be among the international elite:

https://www.boston25news.com/news/massachusetts-students-score-among-worlds-best/473550882

Unfortunately, the national numbers get weighed down a lot by terrible systems in conservative-led states like West Virginia and Mississippi.
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curious... but who runs those schools?
 
Oneuli said:
Take a look at these two blocks of statistics:

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/population-health/us-states-ranked-by-suicide-rate.html
https://morningconsult.com/tracking-trump/

What's remarkable is how strongly correlated suicide rates are with Trump approval rates, at the state level. Specifically, there's a 58.4% positive correlation. Basically, the more suicidally depressed people are in a state, the more likely people in the state are to approve of Trump.

This is particularly interesting because it flies in the face of the normal trend for higher-latitude populations to have higher suicide rates (likely owing to circadian rhythm problems in places where there are huge imbalances between night and day in the Summer and Winter months, resulting in sleep irregularities and depression). Other things being equal, you'd expect lower suicide rates in the Deep South than in New England, just as you find lower suicide rates in southern European countries (Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal) than northern ones (Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland).

So, what's the reason for this correlation? Is there something about conservative politics that makes people suicidal (e.g., skimping on public assistance for mental health care)? Or something about being suicidal that makes people conservative (e.g., the attraction of hateful rhetoric to those who are emotionally frayed)? Or something separate that drives both things (e.g., a sense of being left behind, economically)? Why is it that there's such an enormous gap in suicide rates between places like NJ, NY, and MA (around 8/100k), and places like Montana, Alaska, and Wyoming (around 25/100k)?
Click to expand...

A non-sequitur. Not even a strand of chewing gum connects the premises.
 
Superfreak said:
1) 58.4% correlation is not strong
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"Strong," in this case, is qualitative, since there's no agreed definition about where the threshold is where a correlation becomes a strong correlation. However, we can say it's a statistically significant correlation with that sample size. In fact, the Pearson threshold for statistical significance using a standard 0.05 significance level test with that sample size is about 0.276, whereas this was 0.584. So, the correlation here is well over twice as strong as it would have to be to be statistically significant. If, for partisan political reasons, you're uncomfortable calling such a strong correlation "strong," that's fine. It's just semantics, after all. But we can say, mathematically, that it's vastly stronger than it would need to be to convince a thinking person that there's more going on here than random variation.

2) No, it doesn't fly in the face of the higher latitude trend
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Yes, it does. That's easy enough to demonstrate, statistically. See here:

https://inkplant.com/code/state-latitudes-longitudes

Take the states by latitude, assign a 1 to the state with the lowest average latitude (Hawaii) and then one higher to each successive state, up through the highest for Alaska. Now do a coefficient of correlation between that data and Trump approval ratings by state. You wind up with a NEGATIVE correlation of 0.15756. In other words, there is a correlation between southerly latitudes and Trump support (albeit a weak correlation). Thus, other things being equal, we'd expect higher suicide rates in states where Trump's approval ratings are lower, just based on the usual trend of higher suicide rates at higher latitudes (e.g., Swedes killing themselves more often than Italians do). Yet, as we previously discussed, we have the opposite correlation here: higher suicide rates correlate strongly (or whatever adjective you prefer) with Trump approval rates, by state. Thus, the numbers I discussed fly in the face of the usual trends about latitudes and suicide.

Now, that's not to say latitudes play no role in the US. It appears they do. It's just that there's something else going on that correlates with Trump support. Thus, northerly states with low Trump approval, like Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Washington may have high suicide rates relative to more southerly states with low Trump approval (e.g., California, Hawaii, New Jersey), but they also have low suicide rates relative to northerly high-Trump-approval states (e.g., Montana, the Dakotas). The liberal far northern states wind up with about the same suicide rates as much more southerly conservative states like Arizona or South Carolina.

3) comparing northern US states to northern European countries is nonsensical as the vast majority of the US is of similar latitude to southern Europe.
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You misunderstood the argument. The point wasn't to compare European suicide rates relative to US ones, but to compare European rates relative to European ones -- that is, showing how higher-latitude European countries tend to have higher suicide rates than lower-latitude European countries. You can see the same patterns in Asia (e.g., worse suicide in Siberia than India), or elsewhere in North America (e.g., worse in Nanavut, Northwest Territories, and the Yukon than in Ontario, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia).
 
Superfreak said:
curious... but who runs those schools?
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School administrators.... and in places like Massachusetts where they have a lot of support from state leaders, they do a good job, while in places like Kentucky where they're effectively working at cross purposes with the state government, they don't.
 
cawacko said:
What’s interesting is how much/often liberals complain about income/wealth inequality yet then want the country to be like California where we have extreme wealth along with the highest poverty rate in the country.
Click to expand...

What's fascinating about conservatives is how they feel at liberty to make arguments that are based on assertions that are not only demonstrably wrong, but that everyone with even a little awareness of the world would instantly recognize as wildly off-base.

A good example would be the assertion that California has the highest poverty rate in the country. Needless to say, it's nowhere even close. That would be Mississippi, at 21.9%. In fact, conservative states have a near monopoly on high poverty rates in this country, with NM being the only high-poverty state that doesn't consistently vote Republican. The highest rates are MS, NM, LA, AL, KY, AR, GA, WV, TN, AZ, SC, TX, NC, OK, and FL.

I'm genuinely curious: Did you know that California didn't have the highest poverty rate when you claimed it did, and just hoped the rest of us would be too ignorant to know better and too lazy to look it up? Or did you not know, yet posted with a reckless disregard for the truth, even though checking your assertion would have taken literally five seconds with Google?
 
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Oneuli said:
What's fascinating about conservatives is how they feel at liberty to make arguments that are based on assertions that are not only demonstrably wrong, but that everyone with even a little awareness of the world would instantly recognize as wildly off-base.

A good example would be the assertion that California has the highest poverty rate in the country. Needless to say, it's nowhere even close. That would be Mississippi, at 21.9%. In fact, conservative states have a near monopoly on high poverty rates in this country, with NM being the only high-poverty state that doesn't consistently vote Republican. The highest rates are MS, NM, LA, AL, KY, AR, GA, WV, TN, AZ, SC, TX, NC, OK, and FL.
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Actually, California having the highest poverty rate has nothing to do with me being conservative. I’ve lived here for 35 years and I follow the news. There are many more articles showing we have the highest poverty rate of you want to see them.


https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/health-and-medicine/article218270905.html
 
cawacko said:
Actually, California having the highest poverty rate has nothing to do with me being conservative. I’ve lived here for 35 years and I follow the news. There are many more articles showing we have the highest poverty rate of you want to see them.
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"CA has a high poverty rate if you fudge the numbers, enter in a bunch of different variables, count anyone accepting any state support as in poverty, and only within the narrow prism I am trying to push"
 
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