Links - 21st May 2010

"If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no-one dares criticize it." - Pierre Gallois

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Ezra Klein - Why do Harvard kids head to Wall Street? An interview with an ex-Wall Street recruit. - "The impression of the Ivy-to-Wall Street pipeline is that it's all about the money. You're saying that it's actually more that Wall Street has constructed a very intelligent recruiting program that speaks to the anxieties of the students and makes them an offer that there's almost no reason to refuse... A lot of people decide to sacrifice much more time than they normally would because the money is so good, and then they believe they deserve extremely high pay because they're giving up so much time. It's not malicious. But there are a lot of unhappy people who end up in that situation... just like it's wrong for the banker to say they work harder than everyone else and deserve more, it's also dangerous to paint bankers as evil. Lloyd Blankfein isn't out to screw the world. Wall Street's problems are more systemic"

Bruni 'kept Queen waiting while she had sex with Sarkozy' - "Bruni, whose past lovers include Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, shared her sexlife secrets with the US President Barack Obama's wife at a meeting in America, the book says."

How to Use Twitter for Marketing and PR

Keeping up is getting us down - "THE MOST astonishing revelations in Michael Moore's "Sicko" have nothing to do with healthcare. They're about vacation time. French vacation time, to be precise... "The United States is the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation... out of 10 full-time American employees, and more than six out of 10 part-time employees, get no vacation. And even among workers with paid vacation benefits, the average number of days enjoyed is a mere 12... The average American man today works 100 more hours a year than he did in the 1970s... This would all be fine if it were what we wanted. But that doesn't seem to be the case... the U.S. economy has set its incentives up so as to systematically underemphasize leisure and overemphasize consumption. Much of what we purchase are called "positional goods"... it's really just a classic failure of collective action"
The most insightful part of this for me was how individual freedom can lead to a worse average outcome. Thus, restricting people's choices can make most (even all?) people better off.

What It's Like To Stand Inside an Imploding Stadium

YouTube - Cat gives a cardiac massage to his injured girlfriend

'Leaving Malaysia a necessity' - "When I fist arrived in Australia in 2007, the job recruitment agent told me that I am are highly skilled and a lot of people will be lining up to hire me. This was just the opposite of what I was told in Malaysia, where people only looked at my weakness and looked for ways to put me down and exploit me the maximum that they could... unless Malaysia is hit by a real tsunami which in turn makes Malaysians think that God created all human equal, then I don't want to be part of a racist country called Malaysia"

How to Make a Girl Show Her Tits on Chatroulette.com

Why Moms Cheat on Their Man the Day After Mother's Day - "Their biggest day of the year for female signups is the day after Valentine's Day, and their third-biggest day is the day after New Year's. Why are holidays like these such turning points for women? Noel Biderman, president and founder of AshleyMadison.com, says, "Because they have expectations -- expectations that their partnership will be celebrated and even romanticized -- but that is often not what transpires ....""

Dog-owners 'lead healthier lives' - "Dog owners tended to have lower blood pressure and cholesterol... an important reason for the improved health of dog-owners was not just the exercise received while taking it for walks, but the opportunity for social contact with other dog-owners"

Videos Posted by MediaCorp Channel 5: THE NOOSE Season 3 Taxi Drivers Learn French EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW - "Taxi Drivers Learn French: With so many condominiums and housing projects adopting French/European sounding names, taxi companies are sending their drivers to learn French to better serve customers."

What it feels like to marry a money addict - "What distinguishes rich bankers or lawyers from you and me is not that they have more money, but that they have less love. What the vastly successful give up for the sake of their bonuses is a basic quality of life and the warmth of authentic relationships... Imagine choosing, year after year, to go to networking drinks, rather than going home to see your child or for supper with friends; to remain chronically sleep-deprived so you’re always the first person at your desk; to choose every single friend you see on the grounds that he or she is a “contact” who can be cultivated for use in future transactions... The vocabulary of friendship and even of love is at last eroded by the subtext, which is always money"
Marry a man poorer than you

Who is Responsible? An Interview With Fred Halliday - "The key issue is not: Is the U.S. intervening? Nor: What are the U.S.’s motives? The key issue is will that intervention plausibly help those people or not?... What Bill [Warren] argued, against dependency theory, and against facile nativism and facile anti-imperialism, was that... historically, capitalism and imperialism had played a progressive role in transforming the world, in creating new classes, in spreading new ideas, in colonizing the Americas. And that imperialism has played a contradictory role, that not everything it did has been bad. It fought fascism in the Second World War, for example. So the mere fact that imperialism was involved in the Kosovo intervention is not a reason to condemn the intervention—you have to have other criteria. It’s not that one is in favor of imperialism, but we have to problematize the issue of imperialism... I feel much happier with a copy of the U.N.D.P. Human Development Report than with the New Left Review... Solidarity should not be taken at face value... In so much “solidarity” work these days, people don't want to know what's actually going on in Third World countries"

Naturopathy and Organic Foods - "The fact is that no matter where you go, or what you decide to eat, your food will contain chemicals, additives, preservatives, and colors. There is no reason to believe that the chemicals that we add to our food are any more harmful or beneficial than those that are naturally occurring. Nature was not designed for human consumption, and there are some nasty things out there that, despite being all-natural, you would not want to eat."

Why are British women's breasts getting bigger? - "The average British bra size has jumped from 34B to 36D... obesity alone doesn't explain the jump in cup size, nor the biggest growth area in bra sales: smaller back size and bigger cup size... there are more slimmer women with larger boobs than ever before. Women are happy about this. Men are happy about this. But no one seems happy to explain why this is happening... As an article entitled "Brassieres: an engineering miracle" from the February 1964 issue of Science and Mechanics journal states: "The challenge of enclosing and supporting a semi-solid mass of variable volume and shape, plus its adjacent mirror image, involves a design effort comparable to that of building a bridge or a cantilevered skyscraper"... there are 31 components in a bra with a DD+ cup, 10 more than are required for smaller sizes"

Rethinking Your (disposable) Coffee Cup - "The scorned Styrofoam cup is in fact the most environmentally friendly choice of disposable cup!"

Why I deleted my facebook account - "Once upon a time I was a happy facebook user. But that was before the dark times, before the Empire... No-one really understands facebook's privacy policy anymore. It has grown in size by nearly 600% since 2005 and now contains more words than the US constitution. That factoid is part of an excellent New York Times article which also points out that there are now 170 different options within the privacy settings"

10 Reasons To Delete Your Facebook Account - "10. Facebook's Terms Of Service are completely one-sided.
9. Facebook's CEO has a documented history of unethical behavior.
8. Facebook has flat out declared war on privacy.
7. Facebook is pulling a classic bait-and-switch.
6. Facebook is a bully.
5. Even your private data is shared with applications.
4. Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trusted.
3. Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account.
2. Facebook doesn't (really) support the Open Web.
1. The Facebook application itself sucks."

DNA tests open way to entitlement claims - "Alan Moldawer's adopted twins, Matt and Andrew, had always thought of themselves as white. But when it came time for them to apply to college last year, Moldawer thought it might be worth investigating the origins of their slightly tan-tinted skin, with a new DNA kit that he had heard could determine genetic ancestry. The results, designating the boys 9 percent Native American and 11 percent northern African, arrived too late for the admissions process. But Moldawer, a business executive in Silver Spring, Maryland, says they could be useful in obtaining financial aid... Prospective employees with white skin are using the tests to apply as minority candidates, while some with black skin are citing their European ancestry in claiming inheritance rights. One Christian is using the test to claim Jewish genetic ancestry and to demand Israeli citizenship, and Americans of every shade are staking a DNA claim to Native American scholarships, health services and casino money."
Ahh, Affirmative Action and Race-Based Rights!

Teachers' motivation to teach national education in Singapore: a self-determination theory approach - "15.6% of the teachers belonged to a “high amotivation” cluster, 38.0% formed a “high externally regulated” cluster, 19.9% made up a cluster labelled as “low externally regulated”, and the rest (26.5%) had an “intrinsically regulated” profile"

Pork test to bust cheats - "Scientists in mainly Muslim Kazakhstan have come up with an instant test for the presence of pork in food... "It's no secret that some chefs cheat and add pork to beef to make the dish cheaper""

Mogul Saban buys back Power Rangers from Disney - "Media mogul Haim Saban is buying back the fist-pumping, multicolored superheroes known as the Power Rangers from the Walt Disney Co., hoping to launch the enduring franchise into a higher orbit... he's got a distribution deal to show new and old episodes on Viacom Inc.'s Nickelodeon and Nicktoons cable channels. There are also plans to bring a Power Rangers movie back to theaters for the first time in more than a decade... Disney had been scaling back the presence of the Power Rangers, who tend to get in a lot of fights"
It's Morphin' Time!!! And Jonathan Tzachor's producing Season 18

BARRY NORMAN: Why does Hollywood ALWAYS cast English actors as villains?
Too bad they're white too, or they can complain about racism