Links - 7th November 2017 (1)

Woman who claims to be mum of ITE slasher says victim had 'no guts' - "In one profanity-laced post, the woman defended her son's actions and criticised the 19-year-old for not having the courage to fight her son. This post was apparently in response to Twitter users who slammed her son's behaviour."

Working at sex shops in Singapore: Dealing with erotic needs and strange questions - "For Francis, he said he “learned the hard way” not to greet repeat customers with “Nice to see you again” because they “might be bringing their other partner”. “There was a couple in an open relationship who entered the shop and I realised how it could have gone wrong,” he said."

Naked and proud: Why some Singaporean women are still posing for 'nude' photos - "When asked whether they had any concerns about how their photos are used, Violin and Amanda were both nonchalant about men possibly getting sexual gratification from the pictures. Violin said laughingly, “It’s not really a bad thing, is it? At least I know I’m being fantasised about and can help them [the photographers] for such purposes.” Amanda views it in a more altruistic way. She said, “If by posing for photos, I can help prevent them from doing anything bad to other girls, I’m okay with [collectors using the photos for sexual gratification].”... “Why should I be scared of people finding out about the photos, when I post all these pictures on my social media myself?” Violin said."

Which Job Do You Need to Afford Both a Home And a Car in Singapore? - "60% of the top 100 jobs in Singapore don't pay enough for a person to be able to afford both a home and a car. According to ValuePenguin's analysis, a person needs to make at least S$6,400 per month to afford getting a housing loan and an auto loan while not sacrificing their other expenditures... This finding really puts into perspective what it means to live in the most expensive city in the world. In fact, the cost of owning just an average home and an average car can be prohibitively expensive for vast majority of the population"

Holiday sex with HIV hookers - ""Australians are not good," Lily says, sitting on the floor of a small room in Sanur surrounded by cheap glamour photos taken of her in a bikini. The young ones are always "mabuk", she explains, using the Indonesian word for drunk. And they are often rough... "Some of the guys think they are picking up a girl. They think it's a natural attraction in a bar" says Emily Rowe, the Australian project co-ordinator at the Kerti Praja Foundation, an HIV clinic in Denpasar. "Some will be with them for one night. Some will be with them for a week and think they're having a relationship. "But these are sex workers." According to the foundation's statistics, one in four of these girls in Kuta is HIV-positive."

The Weight of a Magazine for Sex Workers - ""If there was going to be a story on the 6:00 news about prostitution, there would be some shots of prostitutes, but they weren't going to actually talk to them. They weren't going to ask them a question. And if they were, they weren't going to give the answer weight and credibility in a way that they might if they were asking a question to someone in another sector. In pop culture, they were not people with opinions and ideas and a story of their own to tell. It was less about words or tone and more about just a lack of humanity"... They told Time Out New York at the time that $pread was “not intended to arouse, but people are aroused by all kinds of things, so maybe someone will be turned on by sex workers fighting for social justice.’... Our content was definitely tilting toward choice: letting the feminists who are reading this know that sex workers are autonomous humans who make decisions, who you can’t just dismiss as victims.”

The Ethics of Killing Baby Hitler - "The basic moral question—could you kill one infant to save millions of lives?—is essentially a more dramatic version of the trolley problem... I strongly doubt that Hitler’s nonexistence would have prevented World War II or the Holocaust... focusing on Hitler’s direct responsibility for the Holocaust blinds us to more disturbing truths about the early 20th century. His absence from history would not remove the underlying political ideologies or social movements that fueled his ascendancy... The Bush administration naively claimed that toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003 would produce a vibrant liberal democracy in the largely illiberal Middle East. Instead it brought about regional instability, ethnic cleansing, civil war, and ISIS... Removing Hitler from history would gamble with one irrefutable truth: He lost."
Or just play Red Alert

Why has everyone forgotten about male suffrage? - "Tim Samuels apologised for trespassing on feminism’s most hallowed ground and said: “We men have not had to fight tooth and nail for our votes”. No doubt, everybody would go along with that. Everybody in this country is taught from infancy that the Suffragettes had to wrest votes for women from a brutal male establishment that was protecting the monopoly exercised by all men. My daughters learned that lesson at primary school before they had even been introduced to the cardinal beliefs of the world’s leading religions. As is so often the case with the feminist catechism however, everybody - including Mr Samuels - is looking at history with one eye. As a matter of fact, men did have to fight before all men could get the vote. And men’s fight was not conducted in debating halls, demonstrations and salons, nor even from the relative safety of the prison cell. Before all British men were allowed to vote, poor young men had to be wounded in millions and to die in hundreds of thousands in a war from which all women were exempted solely by reason of their gender... There is a reason why our view of this history is as biased, one-sided and prejudiced as the account of the Eighth Route Army that was taught to Chinese children under Mao. The reason is that the whole truth is extremely inconvenient. It conflicts with the dominant feminist narrative which portrays women as the victims of repressive men, from whom liberation and progress had to be wrested by militant uprising. The true history of votes for women, however, is not a story of sex war but of a continuous progress of electoral reform over a century from 1832-1928 in which women’s suffrage was only one element"
In other words, men got the vote for fighting in the War. Women got the vote for existing. This is called patriarchy

The Typical College Student Is Not Who You Think It Is - "Of the twenty million or so students in the US, only about one in ten lives on a campus. The remaining eighteen million—the ones who don’t have the grades for Swarthmore, or tens of thousands of dollars in free cash flow, or four years free of adult responsibility—are relying on education after high school not as a voyage of self-discovery but as a way to acquire training and a certificate of hireability. Though the landscape of higher education in the U.S., spread across forty-six hundred institutions, hosts considerable variation, a few commonalities emerge: the bulk of students today are in their mid-20s or older, enrolled at a community or commuter school, and working towards a degree they will take too long to complete. One in three won’t complete, ever. Of the rest, two in three will leave in debt. The median member of this new student majority is just keeping her head above water financially."

Can a Roommate's Genes Influence Your Health? - "black mice housed with gray mice healed better than black mice housed with other black mice, but the researchers weren't sure why. Gray mice were less anxious when they were housed with black mice than when they are housed with gray mice. No type of mouse had universally positive or negative effects on its cage mates across all traits"

How Much Ambition Can a Marriage Sustain? - "While nearly all of our highest achievers paired off with men who had comparable degrees, once they became parents ultimately only one person in the couple ended up with a classically successful career. The other spouse opted to stay home with the children, or to have a career with flexible hours that enabled them to be the primary caregiver"
Or, the economics of the family

A Counterproductive Immigration Order - "German chancellor Angela Merkel’s August 2015 order to fling open Germany’s doors is the proximate cause of the de-democratization of Poland since September 2015, of the rise of Marine LePen in France, of the surge in support for Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and—I would argue—of Britain’s vote to depart the European Union. The surge of border crossers from Central America into the United States in 2014, and Barack Obama’s executive amnesties, likewise strengthened Donald Trump. It’s understandable why people in the poor world would seek to relocate. It’s predictable that people in the destination nations would resist. Interpreting these indelible conflicts through the absurdly inapt analogy of German and Austrian Jews literally fleeing for their lives will lead to systematically erroneous conclusions... Liberalism and nationhood grew up together in the 19th century, mutually dependent. In the 21st century, they have grown apart—or more exactly, liberalism has recoiled from nationhood. The result has not been to abolish nationality, but to discredit liberalism. When liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals won’t do."

The Curse of Econ 101 - "people on both sides of the debate can cite papers supporting their position, and reviews of the academic research disagree on what conclusions to draw. David Neumark and William Wascher, economists who have long argued against the minimum wage, reviewed more than one hundred empirical papers in 2006. Although the studies had a wide range of results, they concluded that the “preponderance of the evidence” indicated that a higher minimum wage does increase unemployment. On the other hand, two recent meta-studies (which pool together the results of multiple analyses) have found that increasing the minimum wage does not have a significant impact on employment. In the past several years, a new round of sophisticated analyses comparing changes in employment levels between neighboring counties also found “strong earnings effects and no employment effects of minimum wage increases.” (That is, the number of jobs stays the same and workers make more money.) Not surprisingly, Neumark and Wascher have contested this approach. The profession as a whole is divided on the topic: When the University of Chicago Booth School of Business asked a panel of prominent economists in 2013 whether increasing the minimum wage to $9 would “make it noticeably harder for low-skilled workers to find employment,” the responses were split down the middle... Justin Wolfers and Jan Zilinsky identified several reasons why higher wages boost productivity: They motivate people to work harder, they attract higher-skilled workers, and they reduce employee turnover, lowering hiring and training costs, among other things. If fewer people quit their jobs, that also reduces the number of people who are out of work at any one time because they’re looking for something better. A higher minimum wage motivates more people to enter the labor force, raising both employment and output. Finally, higher pay increases workers’ buying power. Because poor people spend a relatively large proportion of their income, a higher minimum wage can boost overall economic activity and stimulate economic growth, creating more jobs. All of these factors vastly complicate the two-dimensional diagram taught in Economics 101 and help explain why a higher minimum wage does not necessarily throw people out of work... The economists polled in the 2013 Chicago Booth study thought that increasing the minimum wage would be a good idea because its potential impact on employment would be outweighed by the benefits to people who were still able to find jobs... Nevertheless, when the topic reaches the national stage, it is economism’s facile punch line that gets delivered, along with its all-purpose dismissal: people who want a higher minimum wage just don’t understand economics (although, by that standard, several Nobel Prize winners don’t understand economics)"

Life as a Fake Beauty Queen in Small-Town China - "I was hired to cruise around Dalian in a fake gold Mercedes golf cart with five other girls for three days, in an effort to lure potential buyers into investing in a miniature replica of Versailles. A printed guide to the event offered fictitious backstories in Chinese about each contestant, and her purpose there. We wore dresses whose colors the organizers must have thought somehow corresponded to our countries of origin. As Miss America, I strangely, and perhaps unpatriotically, wore a teal-tinged baby blue. Pageants like these typically serve as glittery infomercials for the cities where they take place—“Visit Ordos, or Dunhuang, or Dalian, or Chengdu: wealthy enough to import foreign pageant queens!”... These pageants echo China’s larger affair with Western knockoffs. In the city of Wuxi, an entire street is lined with stores like H&N, Sffcccks Coffee, and Zare, while fake Apple stores have been shut down in the city of Kunming. Attractive Caucasian men are paid generously (sometimes up to $1,000 a week) to lend validity to new businesses by posing for store openings and ribbon-cutting ceremonies"

President Obama Has Earned Our Disapproval - "here's what I find alarming: Confronted with a president who 1) spied on every American; 2) covered up torture; 3) continued a War on Drugs ruinous to minorities and whole foreign nations; 4) killed hundreds of innocents in drone strikes; 5) waged war illegally and killed an American citizen without due process (while suppressing the legal reasoning used to do so); 6) let high-ranking national-security officials break the law with impunity; and 7) persecuted whistleblowers—confronted with all of those transgressions, more than four in 10 Americans still approve of the job Obama is doing. And most of them are loyal Democrats. Partisanship and tribalism are overriding the moral compass of too many liberals, who ought to be furious with Obama. National-security policies he unilaterally pursued will be harming the U.S., its moral standing, and its most vulnerable citizens for years if not decades to come, especially since Democrats are poised to make civil illibertarian Hillary Clinton their party's next leader."

The Left-Right Political Spectrum Is Bogus - "The basic set of distinctions on both sides rests on the idea that state and corporation, or political and economic power, can be pulled apart and set against each other. This is, I propose, obviously false, because hierarchies tend to coincide. Let's call that PHC, or Principle of Hierarchical Coincidence. A corollary of PHC is that resources flow toward political power, and political power flows toward resources; or, the power of state and of capital typically appear in conjunction and are mutually reinforcing"

All the Ways Your Wi-Fi Router Can Spy on You - "Several recent experiments have focused on using Wi-Fi signals to identify people, either based on their body shape or the specific way they tend to move. Earlier this month, a group of computer-science researchers at Northwestern Polytechnical University in China posted a paper to an online archive of scientific research, detailing a system that can accurately identify humans as they walk through a door nine times out of ten."

Why Andrew Hacker Is Wrong About 'The Math Myth' - "A political scientist recently argued that teaching people anything beyond arithmetic is useless, and that requiring algebra in high school drives the country’s dropout rates... I had actually been using abstract math, like algebra and geometry, all my adult life. So much for the trope that such math was useless outside the classroom... it wasn’t until Algebra II that I was taught the equation for compound interest. Understanding how exponential growth works has helped me decide on everything from which credit card to choose to realizing a variable-rate mortgage is a terrible idea. I have watched friends lose their homes to such mortgages, and in too many cases, it was the math that intimidated them"

The Six Main Stories, As Identified by a Computer - "1. Rags to Riches (rise)
2. Riches to Rags (fall)
3. Man in a Hole (fall then rise)
4. Icarus (rise then fall)
5. Cinderella (rise then fall then rise)
6. Oedipus (fall then rise then fall)"

The Evolution of Bitchiness - "women tend to haze each other simply for looking promiscuous. The clinical term for the womens’ bitchiness is “indirect aggression"— essentially, aggression we don’t want to get caught for... Psychologists Roy Baumeister and Jean Twenge have also theorized that women, not men, are largely the ones who suppress each others’ sexualities, in part through this sort of indirect aggression. “The evidence favors the view that women have worked to stifle each other’s sexuality because sex is a limited resource that women use to negotiate with men, and scarcity gives women an advantage”... women, “are threatened by, disapprove of, and punish women who appear and/or act promiscuous,” regardless of their weight."
i.e. this is why women dislike sluts, porn and prostitutes