Links - 7th November 2017 (2)

Having It All—and Hating It - "Some women prioritize career. Others prioritize their kids. It's those who try to juggle both who often feel they aren’t succeeding at either... many women admitted that part of what they liked about attempting to juggle it all is the sense of engineering their own destiny in every avenue. As the nonprofit lawyer put it: “I could ask [my husband] to make more of the doctors’ appointments, but I kind of want the control. I like getting the kids on the bus every day. I love the routine. The fact is, I call a lot of the shots.”"
The Second Shift and Emotional Labour are very often voluntary

Stop Calling Women Nags — How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality - "What I wanted was for him to ask friends on Facebook for a recommendation, call four or five more services, do the emotional labor I would have done if the job had fallen to me... It was obvious that the box was in the way, that it needed to be put back. It would have been easy for him to just reach up and put it away, but instead he had stepped around it, willfully ignoring it for two days. It was up to me to tell him that he should put away something he got out in the first place. “That’s the point,” I said, now in tears, “I don’t want to have to ask”... I don't want to micromanage housework. I want a partner with equal initiative... I’ll admit that I probably enjoy certain types of emotional labor far more than my husband, like planning our meals and vacations"
Addendum: Basically a lot of "emotional labour" is women voluntarily caring about things that don't need to be cared about, then blaming men for not caring about them

Smart People Are More Likely to Stereotype - "people who performed better on a test of pattern detection—a measure of cognitive ability—were also quicker to form and apply stereotypes... while smart people learn and apply stereotypes more eagerly, they also unlearn those stereotypes quickly in the face of new information... white people with better verbal abilities were less likely to be prejudiced against blacks, more likely to acknowledge racial discrimination, and more likely to support racial equality in principle. But they didn’t put their money where their mouths were: Compared to the less verbally skilled white people, the more eloquent whites were less likely to support school-busing programs or affirmative action."
Smart people don't fall for the base rate fallacy
And smart people don't support feel-good measures that hurt people they're meant to help

Meet The Hotel Founder Who Made His Fortune In Singapore's Red-Light District - "In 1995, he opened his first Hotel 81, using the unit number of his home at the time. "Because I no study, I cannot put Shangri-La. I don't know how to spell," he laughs with self-deprecation. "Hotel 81? I know how to write.""

The story of how a worm turned... into a bringer of medical miracles - "Their blood, say French researchers, has an extraordinary ability to load up with life-giving oxygen. Harnessing it for human needs could transform medicine, providing a blood substitute that could save lives, speed recovery after surgery and help transplant patients, they say"

Singapore flagged as a city to avoid for software engineers - "According to a study on the top countries for software developers, it was found that Singapore developers are paid $440.74 (US$324) on average, leading it to be ranked at the bottom of the top cities list at number 20."

Criminal serving his sentence with monks pleads to be sent back to prison... because monastery life is too hard - "A convicted criminal who was serving out his sentence in a monastery has escaped for the second time and asked to be sent back to prison because life was too tough."

The polygamous town facing genetic disaster - "Since inbreeding tends to uncover “recessive” mutations that would normally remain in hiding, studying these communities has helped scientists to identify many disease-causing genes. That’s because genetic information is useless on its own. To be meaningful to medical research, it must be linked to information about disease. In fact, more human disease genes have been discovered in Utah – with its Mormon history – than any other place in the world."

"Science refuses to take root in Muslim countries" Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy - "Shia Iran and Sunni Turkey are somewhat better off in scientific terms. Their social cultures are relatively more advanced and secular. Iran has a pre-Islamic history of which they are very proud – perhaps too proud. Still, one feels an intellectual depth in Iranian society that is absent from Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Arab countries. Remarkably, even in Khomeini’s time there was no attempt to create a specifically Islamic science unlike in Pakistan under Zia-ul-Haq... I had had an acrimonious public debate with a senior director of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), Bashiruddin Mahmood, who wrote a paper saying that jinns – the invisible creatures that Allah made out of fire just as He made man out of clay – could be captured and used to solve Pakistan’s electricity problem. I called it nonsense, and he accused me of being an enemy of Islam... University and college admissions should be based on a student’s ability to pass a test that is on science itself and requires them to solve problems at different levels of complexity. I would take away the 20 extra points that are granted to those who have memorised the Quran"

Why Women's Restroom Line Is Longer Than Men's - "A unisex approach (with two stalls to one urinal) would allow men to use urinals and both genders to use bathroom stalls—and it would reduce overall wait times by a whopping 63 percent."
Or you could train women to use urinals

Fish & Co. thanks NSmen for blood, sweat & tears with discounts on weekdays only - "It’s only valid from Monday to Thursday, and on Fridays till 5pm."

Oregon couple loses custody of children for low IQ scores - "Domestic abuse and neglect were not factors in the custody case."
The fetish for "protecting" children strikes again

Fruit Juice Vs. Soda? Both Beverages Pack In Sugar, Health Risks - "on average, fruit juice has a fructose concentration of about 45.5 grams per liter, only a bit less than the average of 50 grams per liter for sodas. The sneakiest — and sweetest — juice is Minute Maid 100 percent apple, with nearly 66 grams of fructose per liter. That's more than the 62.5 grams per liter in Coca-Cola and the 61 grams per liter in Dr Pepper... if we're getting fructose from whole fruit, that's a different story. The fructose in whole fruit comes with fiber, which slows down and reduces the absorption of the sugar in the body, "serving as a sort of antidote to the negative effects of fructose metabolism"... Goran recommends diluting juice you buy at the store with 50 percent water."

Doritos Roulette Tortilla Chips | Doritos UK - "Doritos Roulette brings an exciting twist to your favourite snack. Most of the Doritos in the pack are the delicious Tangy Cheese flavour that you love, but one chip in every handful is so spicy it may bring you to tears. WARNING: Some of these chips are ultra spicy"

On neoconitis - "The Muslim Council of Britain dismissed the finding by a thinktank, the Policy Exchange, that anti-semitic and anti-western hate literature was on sale at a quarter of UK mosques as another of the: "transparent attempts to try and delegitimise popular mainstream Islamic institutions in the UK and replace them with those who are subservient to neo-conservative aims."... The left is vulnerable to neoconitis because it takes its cue from what it is against rather than what it is for. In conversation with the Polish anti-Stalinist dissident Adam Michnik in 1993, the liberal philosopher Jurgen Habermas admitted "he had avoided any fundamental confrontation with Stalinism". Why, asked Michnik? He did not want "applause from the wrong side" replied Habermas. You have to read that twice, and then think about the enormities of Stalinism, to realise just how appalling it is. But Habermas was only expressing a piece of liberal-left common sense."

British teacher locked up in China for "not being friend of country" made to watch Nicolas Cage films - "Bobby Silby spent 10 days in a detention centre in Beijing - where he had to watch propaganda videos or films starring Nicolas Cage - for "not being a friend of China" after he publicly criticised the country... He was stopped at Beijing Airport while catching a connecting flight back to the UK after a family holiday in the Philippines"

China’s ageing solar panels are going to be a big environmental problem - "China’s solar power plants are mostly located in poor, remote regions such as the Gobi in Inner Mongolia, while the majority of recycling industries are in developed areas along the Pacific coast. Transporting these bulky panels over long distances could be very costly, Tian said. Another cost comes from separating and purifying the waste materials, an industrial process that not only requires plenty of labour and electricity input, but also chemicals such as acids that could cause harm to the environment. “If a recycling plant carries out every step by the book to achieve low pollutant emission, their products can end up being more expensive than new raw materials,” he said."

The Danger of Progressives’ Inhumanity to the Humanities - WSJ - "Literary study ought to be concerned with the search for meaning and value in life. The humanities teach wisdom—or at least exercise the faculty that leads to that elusive end. Without wisdom, so-called progress can lead to corruption and devastation. When the humanities desert their mission and seek to ally themselves with progress, they become dangerous adjuncts to ideological agendas. Students come to feel there is a definitive, “virtuous” reading of an event or a text; they excoriate great authors of the past for not abiding by the standards of the present; they come to see the world as divided into victims and oppressors. They create a climate that arouses opposition from those who feel excluded or demeaned by such thinking but who lack the humanistic training to do more than lash out"

P&G Cuts More Than $100 Million in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads - WSJ - "The company targeted ads that could wind up on sites with fake traffic from software known as “bots,” or those with objectionable content."

Asian Students Still Idolize Western Professors - WSJ - "Potential clients told our local partner, “Why should I pay American prices for one Chinese and one Indian?” Many of them expected an American professor to be a white male... Asian executives and students want to be taught by whites, and to study with whites in class. They express disappointment when they perceive there are too many Asians in both faculty and student ranks... where does this cult of white-male superiority originate? Dismissing it as a mere colonial hangover is too simplistic. Western colonialism disappeared from Asia more than a half-century ago, and some Asian countries that exhibit these values and behaviors—for instance China, Japan and Korea—were not colonized by whites... I speculate that this adulation reflects a continued deep-seated Asian sense of inferiority to the West in one area where Western hegemony remains unchallenged—the realm of ideas. This explains why elite Asian students prefer to attend second- and third-tier Western universities, or their satellite campuses in Asia, even as Asian universities climb the global rankings... all else being equal, both whites and Asians will choose a white person over an Asian for a leadership position in different U.S. occupational contexts, including universities and corporations. Interestingly, this anti-Asian bias disappears if the Asian in question is not stereotypically Asian and behaves like a prototypical Westerner in being gregarious, extroverted and articulate."
Maybe this just shows that Asians like gregarious, extroverted and articulate instructors

How Having Kids Changes Parents' Sense of Empathy - "when people are stressed, past research has found, they’re more likely to feel a stronger sense of “groupiness” and to help only others who are close to them"

What Isn’t for Sale? - "When we decide that certain goods may be bought and sold, we decide, at least implicitly, that it is appropriate to treat them as commodities, as instruments of profit and use. But not all goods are properly valued in this way. The most obvious example is human beings. Slavery was appalling because it treated human beings as a commodity, to be bought and sold at auction. Such treatment fails to value human beings as persons, worthy of dignity and respect; it sees them as instruments of gain and objects of use."
Among other things this is an argument against libertarianism

The Color of Crime - "The evidence suggests that if there is police racial bias in arrests it is negligible. Victim and witness surveys show that police arrest violent criminals in close proportion to the rates at which criminals of different races commit violent crimes... There are dramatic race differences in crime rates. Asians have the lowest rates, followed by whites, and then Hispanics. Blacks have notably high crime rates. This pattern holds true for virtually all crime categories and for virtually all age groups... In 2013, of the approximately 660,000 crimes of interracial violence that involved blacks and whites, blacks were the perpetrators 85 percent of the time. This meant a black person was 27 times more likely to attack a white person than vice versa. A Hispanic was eight times more likely to attack a white person than vice versa... In 2015, police killings of blacks accounted for approximately 4 percent of homicides of blacks. Police killings of unarmed blacks accounted for approximately 0.6 percent of homicides of blacks. The overwhelming majority of black homicide victims (93 percent from 1980 to 2008) were killed by blacks."
Black lives only matter in certain circumstances

Iran performed over 1,000 gender reassignment operations in four years - "Iran carries out more gender reassignment operations than any other country in the world besides Thailand. Under the current Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the state has begun providing grants of £2,250 ( € 2,766 US$ 3,625) for operations and further funding for hormone therapy. It is also provides loans of up to £2,750 ( € 3,380 US$ 4,429) to allow those undergoing surgery to start their own businesses."

Firefox 57 Could Break Add-Ons So Much, Some Devs Won't Bother Fixing Them - "WebExtensions are great for adding functionality to the browser, and without a doubt are versatile and easy to use. However, manipulation of the browser window's interface and functionality will be extremely limited by definition, and even if it wasn't, the implementation of such abilities is nearly impossible to achieve in WebExtensions."

Xi to PLA: Be ready to fight those who offend China - "Chinese President Xi Jinping yesterday ordered troops to prepare for battle and defeat "all enemies that dare to offend" their country as he presided over a massive military parade to mark 90 years of the founding of the People's Liberation Army. It was the first time China marked Army Day with a military parade since the communist revolution in 1949. Nearly half of the 600 pieces of hardware on show at the Zhurihe Training Base in Inner Mongolia had never been paraded in public before."
China's peaceful rise

Health benefits of the Mediterranean diet are confirmed, but just for the upper class - "No actual benefits were observed for the less advantaged groups... "Given a comparable adherence to the Mediterranean diet, the most advantaged groups were more likely to report a larger number of indices of high quality diet as opposed to people with low socioeconomic status -- explains Licia Iacoviello, head of the Laboratory of nutritional and molecular Epidemiology at the Department -- For example, within those reporting an optimal adherence to the Mediterranean diet (as measured by a score comprising fruits and nuts, vegetables, legumes, cereals, fish, fats, meat, dairy products and alcohol intake) people with high income or higher educational level consumed products richer in antioxidants and polyphenols, and had a greater diversity in fruit and vegetables choice. We have also found a socioeconomic gradient in the consumption of whole-grain products and in the preferred cooking methods"

Zhang Wumao: Chinese blogger forced to apologise for revealing essay - "Zhang, who has lived in China’s massive capital since moving there as a 25-year-old in 2006, used his essay to take aim at everything. The enormous size of the crowded city. The unfriendliness of its residents. Its overwhelmed infrastructure and real estate market. And the central, stinging message of the essay — which has been translated to English as “Beijing Has 20 Million People Pretending to Live There” — was that the city was on a quest to become one of the world’s great metropolises but that was coming at the expense of its soul."

It's Time Indian Filmmakers Told Their Own Stories Instead Of Getting Upset At The 'Dunkirk' Whitewash - "Nolan was not the only one who forgot the desis at Dunkirk. So did many desis themselves. The history of the Indians who fought that war has found scant mention in India's own films and popular books. Shrabani Basu's 'For King and Another Country' about Indian soldiers in World War I is a notable exception. We have the budget these days to make grand Bollywood films about all kinds of heroes. There is no reason India needs to wait patiently to be included in Christopher Nolan's telling of Dunkirk or be grateful for a fleeting appearance as the turbaned man who dies within ten minutes. Indians have the resources to tell that story themselves, to control their own narrative."
Comment: "1800 Asian Indians in an operation involving 300,000 men. That's 0.6%. They would not have been distributed among the evacuees, but would have formed up as units. 3 companies on a beach with more than 500 companies waiting for evacuation. I think it would have been patronizing if the film had gone out of its way to show them."

Why the lack of Indian and African faces in Dunkirk matters | Sunny Singh
Comments: "the film is consistent with the historical proportion of the British Expeditionary Force that were non-white. The author concedes there are non-white faces in crowd scenes, but is unhappy because these soldiers are fleeing and not fighting. It seems the director can't win TBH."
"Where are the Belgians? The generous southcoast Englanders who gave up their boats and time? Only one or two are featured, but there were hundreds! Where were the Brummie accents? Why only Southern and northern? See, we can all pinpoint grievances to suit our agenda."
"If anything, this film is racist against destroyers. There were 49 off the coast of Dunkirk, and yet we only see one. A clear case of little boats-washing."
"I was wondering when we were going to get an article like this - you could almost set your watch by it."
"Next up will be Hadley or someone saying there should have been more front line female soldiers."

Dunkirk Feminist Review: Women Absent — Why? - "Feminists have a habit of obsessively dividing the world into teams — us, them. Ideas and even facts get considered in the light of whether they are good for Team Woman or not. Instead of seeing men and women as close collaborators in the human project, feminists often suppose that the sexes are rivals, opponents. This is sheer tribalism. Bonner looks at Dunkirk and is irritated that men like the film. She sees it as a celebration of manly courage and bravado, or at least manly endurance and grit, and this repulses her. Feminism means constant maintenance of an imaginary set of scales, and she fears Dunkirk adds weight to the masculine side, tipping the culture away from women. If Dunkirk — “Christopher Nolan’s new directorial gift to men,” she calls it — shows men at their best, it must therefore be bad for women."

Big Issue: "No women or 'people of colour'" - are Dunkirk's critics for real? - ""It annoys me because it makes it sound like women are complaining about everything, and they're not. I want equality but I'm not expecting it in a film about World War Two. I don't want someone fighting a battle on my behalf, especially one that doesn't exist." Ian is of similar opinion. "Why is a war film a celebration of maleness?" he asks. "As a man, I don't consider war something to celebrate. People aren't going to see this film to get a testosterone boost, they're going to remember the bravery of others. It's a stupid thing to say. Would that critic say visiting the war cemeteries of World War One was a celebration of maleness? Presumably she would. "I think it's them who should take a look at themselves because all they are trying to do is make a name for themselves off the back of other people's deaths.""