Links - 7th September 2017 (2)

Millennials eat up savings by dining out too much, study shows - "The average millennial drinks more coffee and spends more on coffee per year than saving for retirement"

Short-term effect of eggs on satiety in overweight and obese subjects. - "Compared to an isocaloric, equal weight bagel-based breakfast, the egg-breakfast induced greater satiety and significantly reduced short-term food intake. The potential role of a routine egg breakfast in producing a sustained caloric deficit and consequent weight loss, should be determined."

'How do wookiees breed?': the big Star Wars questions answered - "These associations with dark energy lead Tong to draw an uncomfortable conclusion: “This does suggest that the Force is naturally ‘dark’.” So there you have it. Proof at last. The dark side is more powerful...
“A woman becomes a princess by virtue of her birth,” she says. “It’s not something that she gains by ascending to the throne or by marrying someone, so in that sense it’s not something that can be taken away.” Throughout history, men and women have retained titles even when their ruling house has been usurped or abolished. There’s also the propaganda value. “It can rally support,” says Wood. “It pays to have a princess on your side, it lends your cause a certain classiness.” So did Death Star despot Grand Moff Tarkin mess up by terrorising Leia rather than wooing her? “It was a golden opportunity. A shotgun wedding on the Death Star might have been a way to subdue the threat of Alderaan without blowing it up.”...
Thousands of jobs were created and maintained by the Death Star, and its destruction would create decades of extreme poverty. The rebels simply did not account for that in their attack, on both occasions.”

Amsterdam's sex workers: the unlikely victims of gentrification - "The only people who didn’t get land, money or new opportunities were the women working in the windows – the very people Project 1012’s anti-trafficking initiative was supposed to benefit. While there have been numerous prosecutions of human traffickers around Amsterdam, only a dozen or so have fallen within the project’s remit, yet more than 100 windows have been closed. It suggests that a crackdown on crime or the safety of the sex workers was merely a convenient excuse... There is palpable resentment among the red-light district’s sex workers that the government used the issue of human trafficking to buy up some of the area’s most valuable buildings. Women such as Dana who have been trafficked are left wondering why the business owners who allegedly trafficked them are being offered massive payoffs. Dutch organisations working with the victims of human trafficking have condemned the project for making vulnerable women less easy to reach. Meanwhile, residents such as Majoor and Felicia are watching an area they love being parcelled up and sold off, along with its sense of community."

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Hannah Arendt - "[On coming to the USA] She had to smoke outside, which for a European intellectual was just like the worst thing that could possibly happen... it was very socially conformist, so you have to smoke outside, you have to behave yourself... there was a political freedom in America which she felt really wasn't there in Europe...
[On Communism] The adherents can't even experience their own experiences... She has this fantastic example from the 30s, from the Stalinist trials, where a man is arrested and accused of being a saboteur, a factory saboteur. And he says: the Party is always right. I don't think I was a saboteur, but the Party is always right, and if the Party says I was a saboteur, I must be a saboteur...
I first read it on holiday. It's like a thriller. It's 500 pages but it's really gripping, it's full of historical detail...
She makes a very sharp and robust distinction between the doer and the deeds... there's nothing banal about the deeds - they were monstrous and wicked...
'I do not mean by banal commonplace'. She meant specifically as Roberts really suggested that it wasn't rooted, rooted in some evil motivation, some satanic greatness. It was an absence. In a sense she can be seen as part of a Platonic tradition of thinking about evil as a privation, as an absence of goodness"
Post-Marxism is inspired by Marxism in more than one way

The life of Keynes and a trip to Ancient Greece | Podcast | History Extra - "I get infuriated with modern theatre. A lot of Greek tragedy have been put on in these days and I'm all in favor of that. But it's all patronizingly homogenized to speak to the modern world. And they change all the terms of reference to make Antigone into a feminist tract you know. And you think: what an absolute waste of time and space. The interesting thing about the Greeks is what *they* thought about things. To turn i into something which is homogenized for the modern world is to lose everything the Greeks were saying. So when you go into a Greek theater and find they say: this is very relevant and modern political world and we are going, we are going to produce it in modern political terms, just walk straight out. It won't be worth listening to or attending to... Plato on laws: properly educated people he'd say. Well if they got a proper education they will have to work out things for themselves. If their education is valueless as Plato goes on they'll spend their whole life making rule after rule and then trying to improve them in the hope that they'll hit upon a successful formula. They'll live like the ill who lack discipline to go and give up a way of life that is bad for them. All the treatments get them nowhere yet they live in hope that their next recommended medicine will restore them to health and detest those who suggest that until they put an end to their lifestyle no amount of medicine or surgery will do them any good at all. And he conclude, Plato concludes that it's the mark of a badly governed society to need rafts of legislation about everything. Such lawmakers he goes on in a wonderful image quote are unaware of the fact that they are slashing away at a kind of hydra. You remember the hydra, the many headed monster which grew two heads for every one chopped off. Now that, you know that speaks to the modern world and you find that across classical literature...
I have talked, and this is our fault, blithely about Greeks but the Greeks were not one person, one people. The Greeks lived in city states - Athens, Corinth, Thebes - each city state with its own laws, its own money, its own customs, its own habits, its own dialect. A completely independent minded people and this is something which I think is, people misunderstand. When we talk about Greeks normally we just mean Athenians... Very important thing is not to regard myths as sacred texts. They're just stories about gods and heroes that were significant for Greeks. There were no such things as sacred scriptures as our Bible or the Koran for example. They didn't have them. Religion was a matter of carrying out age old rituals. Sometimes mystics explained those rituals but they didn't do more than that. The job of priests was not to preach, was not to talk about sin, right, wrong, morality or human rights. It was to be in charge of ritual and make sure certain rituals were carried out properly... the great feature of ancient Greek thought is its independence. Greek society was not controlled by priests. The Greeks acknowledged gods they worshipped gods through ritual but they demanded the world be humanly understandable"

Episode 12: Questions and Answers (1) by The History of Singapore - "According to Wikipedia it was a French navigator Jules Dumont d'Urville who in eighteen twenty six proposed the terms of Malaysia, Micronesia and Melanesia to distinguish them from the existing term of Polynesia. So he described Malaysia as an area commonly known as the East Indies, right. So when talking about Malaysia he actually meant of course everything that we today call Indonesia along with the Malay Peninsula and Philippines, the Southern Philippines. In eighteen fifty it was the English ethnologist George Samuel Windsor Earl writing in the journal of the Indian archipelago in Eastern Asia who proposed naming the islands of Southeast Asia as Malayanesia or Indonesia, favoring the former. So the British, when they wanted to refer collectively to all the indigenous people of the archipelago who lived under their rule and spoke the common language of Bahasa used the term Malaysian and this is the term you'll see in the census. It says Malays and Malaysians for example in all the pre-war censuses. And indeed this term is actually could have been used elsewhere to refer to the archipelago. The Philippines for example after independence had this debate where they said should we retain the name of our country because of course it refers to a Spanish king, King Philip the second. So we should call it something more geographically accurate. And since we are part of the Malay archipelago maybe we should call ourselves Malaysia. So the Philippines could have been called Malaysia...
[On states vs nations] It's different from nation in the sense that one is a belief and the other has a legal definition. And of course the greatest force of the twentieth century is this belief that we can create states, right? A legal definition in which all the members are also members of a nation. Which is a belief. So that is a nation-state in which all the members of the state also have the same national identity. That is a very recent invention in human history. Right? It's a very recent thing to believe that all members of the state should subscribe to, should have the same national identity... Before the rise of nationalism empires could exist because people didn't see anything unnatural about having a huge state that included many different nations... In the twentieth century a state must have all its people subscribe to the same nation. So now there is the Chinese nation even though of course north and south and west China have traditionally very different cultures. Likewise the Indian nation even though north south east west Indians are all very very different from each other... this idea has taken hold such that people today assume a state and a nation must be the same thing. But who gets to decide national identity? If we say that a state exists because all its members are members of a certain nation then what about people who don't belong to that nation? And so it enables the discrimination by the state against people who are not part of the nation, who do not fit the definition of national identity"

Failed at life? Blame a foreigner. : pics
Comments: "My sister and two foreigners applied for the same job. Guess what, one of them got it. He didn't have her competence, but his salary is subsidised by the government (I live in Sweden). But she should blame herself for this failure? Really? You know what, in a way it's right to not blame the foreigner. I mean, free money, free apartment, free welfare, his actions makes sense for him. The blame belongs to the goverment. It is they who allowed this."
"What does this actually accomplish? To people who already hate UKIP it just confirms their beliefs. But to someone who supports UKIP it just further cements the idea of a condescending "liberal elite" telling them what to think. You don't change someone's mind by calling them a failure or a racist and dismissing their argument outright, you actually have to listen and have a rational discussion."
"Failed at life? Blame the cis white patriarchy!"
"Didn't get the election result you wanted? Blame the poor! It's so much easier than sympathizing with your struggling countrymen."
"I'm successful and still want limits to and control over immigration. Does every leftist argument have to center around opponents being stupid and xenophobic?"
"[Baby Boomers were] promptly dismantling labor unions under Reagan in the 50's and 60's"
"I love the H-1B crisis on reddit. H-1B's are abused to get cheap labor in the IT industry. With many redditors being liberal IT workers, they have to admit that foreign labor can damage their country. It's the ultimate hypocrisy checker. This is coming from an IT worker btw, it's fun to watch liberals eat their hat and admit conservatives are right about something."

Nigerian airstrike mistakenly bombs refugee camp, killing dozens
Luckily they're not Israel. Or the United States

MPs don't need to wear ties in House of Commons, says Speaker - "A similar debate is also happening in the French parliament, where many new leftwing MPs turned up for the new session without ties. Jean Luc Mélénchon, leader of the Insoumise party, compared his open-collared followers to the Sans Culottes, the working class of the French Revolution: “We’ve had the Sans Culottes, now we have the Sans Cravates,” he said... In 2014 another hot and bothered Tory MP, Henry Smith, tweeted “Can we please, even if just today, wear shorts instead of suits in the Commons? Struggling with the hot air, externally (and internally)!” On the hottest days, when the Palace of Westminster’s primitive air conditioning system is showing its limitations, male MPs have often looked enviously at their bare-armed female colleagues. Many women have interpreted the “equivalent level of formality” guidance as an unofficial uniform of brightly coloured jackets and dresses, in loyal party colours for special occasions. Some have been rebuked for wearing slogan T-shirts... Bercow, recently reappointed to the position he has held since 2010, has been something of a dress code reformist himself, choosing to wear a jacket, collar and tie under his black gown; the full splendorous Speaker’s uniform, last regularly worn by Bernard Weatherill in the early 1990s, consisted of tights, knee breeches, long black waistcoat, linen collar, cuffs and neck band, and a long wig."

Religious identity strongest in Muslims, Protestants - "Religion is important to their identity, and Muslims and Protestant Christians are the two religious groups that are most affected by and most disapproving when friends or family members of the same faith give up their religious beliefs. They also feel more strongly than their Buddhist, Hindu, Catholic and other counterparts about moral issues such as homosexual sex, sex before marriage, adoption of children by gay couples and gambling... About two-thirds of Muslims and 44 per cent of Protestants said religion was very important to their sense of identity — significantly higher numbers than those of other faiths. About 69 per cent of Muslims and half the Protestants said they disapproved of family members of their faith giving up their religious beliefs, compared with 20 per cent of Buddhists and 31 per cent of Hindus, for example... greater religiosity among Muslims here was observed a few decades ago and coincided with increased global Muslim piety. Many Muslims in Malaysia and the region also take their religion very seriously and this is increasingly so, he noted. As for Protestants, the dominant form of Protestant Christianity here is of a “conservative variety where there is an emphasis on doing the right thing”. Many Singaporean Protestants are first-generation Christians and “you expect converts to be a lot more fervent about their faith, especially since they made a choice to embrace the religion”, Dr Mathew said"

Here comes 'Uncle' with his free vegetables in Choa Chu Kang - "not everyone approves of Mr Cheu's practice. One resident, who declined to be named, said it would be better if the vegetables were given to a charity. And some stallholders at the wholesale centre refuse to give him their leftovers, Mr Cheu said. "They would rather throw away their leftovers," he said. He explained that he does not want the publicity because of an encounter sometime in the 1990s, when the authorities swooped in after a resident complained that he was selling vegetables illegally at the void deck of a block."
This is why we can't have nice things

Susie Burrell: Eating more carbs could aid in weight loss - "'An inability to lose weight, despite eating a low carb diet is a clear sign that your total carbohydrate intake is too low, especially if you exercise regularly'... The expert recommends eating 20-30 grams of carbs within an hour or so before you do a high intensity work out. 'As a general rule of thumb, intakes of less than 80-100 grams of carbohydrates each day, for someone exercising regularly is too low and as such may be the reason you are not getting the shifts on the scales you are hoping for,' she said. She explained that a diet that includes carbohydrates is what helps your body burn fat as it needs glucose to burn when you exercise. Another aspect of not eating enough carbs that will make it more difficult to lose weight is that your metabolic rate will slow down."
Maybe this is why my friend's colleagues on the low carb diet were recommended not to exercise by a dietician

Pink Slips at Disney. But First, Training Foreign Replacements. - NYTimes.com - "about 250 Disney employees were told in late October that they would be laid off. Many of their jobs were transferred to immigrants on temporary visas for highly skilled technical workers, who were brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India. Over the next three months, some Disney employees were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had lost... the layoffs at Disney and at other companies, including the Southern California Edison power utility, are raising new questions about how businesses and outsourcing companies are using the temporary visas, known as H-1B, to place immigrants in technology jobs in the United States... Many American companies use H-1B visas to bring in small numbers of foreigners for openings demanding specialized skills, according to official reports. But for years, most top recipients of the visas have been outsourcing or consulting firms based in India, or their American subsidiaries, which import workers for large contracts to take over entire in-house technology units — and to cut costs. The immigrants are employees of the outsourcing companies... Former employees said many immigrants who arrived were younger technicians with limited data skills who did not speak English fluently and had to be instructed in the basics of the work."

CNN 'aired a fake National Enquirer cover in Trump story' - "The network's website broke its own protocol by printing a story with only one source about possible ties between Russia and Anthony Scaramucci, one of Trump's transition team"

How Russian Journalists Dealt With Fake News - "Russian state TV often broadcast segments of completely fake news—such as stories on Russian military operations against the U.S., he said. These events are then discussed on TV as if they happened. Part of the problem, he said, is that independent media organizations like his are “competing against a state-owned industry funded to the tune of $1.5 billion a year.”... Russian media, in general, and its propaganda arms like RT, he said, repeat a well-tuned message. That message: “Russia and its client states are never to blame for anything. The collective West ... is to blame for everything. And if there’s incontrovertible evidence that Russia is indeed to blame for something, let’s please look the other way because there’s Guantanamo, and there are human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia, etc. etc.” Eventually, Timchenko said, both the public and the media buy that message. “After 10 years dealing with such an agenda,” she said, “I see this is the view of many, many journalists and editors.”