Links - 17th March 2011

"First there is a time when we believe everything, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again - and, moreover, give reasons why we believe." - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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Use a Mac, they never have problems. Right? Right?!

What Does An iPhone With a Bullet Hole Look Like? - "A controversial new photography show from artist Michael Tompert features high-res photographs of destroyed Apple products — iPhones with bullet holes, iPads melted by blowtorches and iPods run over by a train — and it’s all to make you question your obsession with gadgetry... the idea came to him after seeing his two children fight over their iPod Christmas presents. Fed up, Tompert says he grabbed one of the devices and smashed it on the ground. “They were kind of stunned""

NUS: Employment Rate1 and Gross Monthly Salary of Graduates By Bachelors Degree, 2009

More safeguards to be introduced to curb gambling addiction if needed Dr Balakrishnan - "He added that there is also a need for Singaporeans to be more self reliant. Mr Goh said: "How many of you followed the latest tragic events in Japan with the tsunami...and then put into context our floods in Singapore against that kind of disaster. "I am not saying we shouldn't do anything about the flood. But the amount of noise you made with just sporadic flood compared to the Japanese. I saw them on TV. Very stoic looking. You don't see them crying. This has happened, just get on, that's the kind of spirit you want to have and you call it nation building.""
We should be like the Japanese in other ways, like throwing out one of the world's longest-ruling parties and having ministers resign to take responsibility

19-Year-Old Is Charged in Hamster's Death - "After a nine-month hunt for a suspect they described as evasive and uncooperative, law enforcement agents from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals arrested Monique Smith, 19, along Knickerbocker Avenue in Bushwick. She was charged with aggravated cruelty to animals — a felony that carries a sentence of up to two years in prison — along with two misdemeanors, torturing animals and endangering the welfare of a child... Animal cruelty laws apply equally to creatures large and small, said Joseph Pentangelo, assistant director of humane law enforcement for the society"
One comment: "Really, to an ant? A flea? How about a Cockroach? Joseph, are you being misquoted?"
"Wouldn’t this make anyone that uses a mousetrap a felon?"
"I’m assuming they’ll jump on the factory farming industry next… and the millions of Americans who eat meat – right? Just to be consistent."
"Send these PETA/animal welfare people to Sierra Leone, where they can learn what real cruelty is and maybe decide to spend their useless lives doing good that actually matters…"
"This kind of thing is one of the major reasons I moved out of the US, so my son would not be raised with the possibility of having his life destroyed for a mistake"

The Economics Of Prostitution - "Wives, in truth, are superior to whores in the economist's sense of being a good whose consumption increases as income rises--like fine wine. This may explain why prostitution is less common in wealthier countries... according to data assembled from a wide variety of times and places, ranging from mid-15th-century France to Malaysia of the late 1990s, prostitutes make more money--in some cases, a lot more money--than do working girls who, well, work for a living. This held true even for places where prostitution is legal and relatively safe. In short, streetwalkers aren't necessarily being paid more for their increased risk of going to jail or the hospital... 'prostitution must pay better than other jobs to compensate for the opportunity cost of forgone-marriage market earnings'... 'This begs the question of why married men go to prostitutes (rather than buying from their wives, who presumably will be low-cost providers, considering that they can sell nonreproductive sex without compromising their marriage)'... the economic analysis of marriage explains one age-old phenomenon: gold digging"

McKinsey & Company - Clouds, big data, and smart assets: Ten tech-enabled business trends to watch - ""Consider the results of a recent McKinsey Quarterly survey of global executives on the impact of participatory Web 2.0 technologies (such as social networks, wikis, and microblogs) on management and performance. The survey found that deploying these technologies to create networked organisations that foster innovative collaboration among employees, customers, and business partners is highly correlated with market share gains. "That is just one example of how these trends transcend technology and provide a map of the terrain for creating value and competing effectively in these challenging and uncertain times""

Why being up close with poverty can bring positive benefits - "When I was 18, I worked for six months with street children in Medellin, the second biggest city in Colombia. I was meant to be helping them but, predictably, did very little of concrete value. I spent most of my time being ridiculed for my bad Spanish and having my clothes stolen... The anti-poverty industry is a multibillion-dollar money spinner... The longer you stay in the anti-poverty business, the less likely you are to know anyone who is poor"

Gender discrimination must end for Singapore to flourish, says AWARE - "Gender discrimination still exists in Singapore today. This, it said, was the unanimous view of about 200 participants at the Women's Choices, Women's Lives: Shaping the Next 25 Years conference... this discrimination must be eradicated and gender equity achieved if... the challenges of the low fertility rate and the ageing population are to be tackled effectively. It is pushing for a quota of 30 per cent to be set for women in Parliament... [It] also recommends that gender studies be added to the core curriculum for all students, and in the Civil Service"
You know AWARE has really lost the plot when they call for compulsory gender studies classes; you know what else reduces fertility? Educating women

What do you do after you make a ZILLION dollars? - "1.) The One-Year Rule. Don’t change your lifestyle at all for at least one year.
2.) The No-Friends Rule. Don’t lend money to old friends. Don’t be so quick to make new friends. Once you make money, everyone will approach you about new investments you can make. Or people will want to borrow money from you.
3.) Don’t Invest.
4.) The 2% Rule. If you really feel that Google is going to $5,000 per share and you have to buy some stock at $500, don’t put more than 2% of your money into it.
5.) The Good Health Rule. Believe it or not, your health is now at risk if you just came into sudden wealth.
6.) Try Not To Burn Out."

www.dumpert.nl - Nieuw! De TietPlakkerT
An easy trick to get support with some sticky tape. NSFW

Letting your mind wander is a major cause of unhappiness - "Our minds are wandering about 46.9 percent of the time in any given activity, and the mind-wandering rate was at least 30% for all but one activity. Thankfully, the only activity that generally got people's undivided attention was making love. That was also one of the activities that made people happiest, along with exercising and conversing with others... Only 4.6% of a person's happiness could be attributed to what they were doing, but 10.8% of it was caused by what they were thinking about at the time, and people consistently reported being happiest when their minds were on what they were doing"
Dreamers are unhappier than people who focus on the present

China wants extra compensation for Christchurch quake victims - "The Chinese Embassy has asked the Government to give special compensation to Chinese families who lost children in last month's Christchurch earthquake... Mr Lei said there was a very notable difference between Chinese families and other foreign families, which needed to be taken into consideration when providing compensation to families who lost their only child"
Simply, China is a piece of shit. Whose fault is it that they only have one child?

Rethinking Nuclear Power - "If xenophobia had not killed nuclear power in the United States in the late 1970's, there's a good chance that we'd have all been driving electric cars for the past 20 years; and uncounted billions of tons of carbon dioxide would never been sucked out of the ground, burned in power plants, and exhausted into our atmosphere... Three Mile Island can (and should) be characterized as a shining example of how well the safety systems work, even in the face of human error and old-fashioned reactor design... Chernobyl-type disasters are not possible in most reactors around the world. Only a very few Generation I designs are still in use, all in the former Soviet Union, and all have been retrofitted with improvements intended to prevent this type of accident... How do the dangers of nuclear energy compare to the dangers of fossil fuel energy? A report in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that some 50,000-100,000 Americans die each year from lung cancer caused by particulate air pollution, the biggest cause of which is coal-burning power plants in the midwest and east. Even taking the maximum predicted death toll from Chernobyl, we would need a Chernobyl-sized accident every three weeks to make nuclear power as deadly as coal and oil already is... the plants we're designing now produce less waste than ever... Lobbying against future cleaner plants won't make the existing waste go away"

All the Aggregation That’s Fit to Aggregate - "My putative status as the 50th most important person on Planet Earth derives in part from a belief that the editor of an important newspaper does not merely harvest the initiative of hard-working journalists but personally directs a vast, global conspiracy. I don’t. But then, I would say that, wouldn’t I?... Some once-serious news outlets give pride of place not to stories they think important but to stories that are “trending” on Twitter — the “American Idol”-ization of news. And we have bestowed our highest honor — market valuation — not on those who labor over the making of original journalism but on aggregation... “Aggregation”... too often it amounts to taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material. In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model. The queen of aggregation is, of course, Arianna Huffington, who has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come... if everybody is an aggregator, nobody will be left to make real stuff to aggregate"