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Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Links - 26th June 2018 (2)

Chinese blogger is detained after offering free sex at a hotel - "The woman, identified as 19-year-old Miss Ye, has been arrested by local police on suspicion of advertising about prostitution... she was forced to checkout her room at 10pm as numerous people knocked on her door... Miss Ye admitted to the police that she had intentionally posted the message online to attract followers... The woman has been given a 15-day detention and a 500 yuan (£57) fine in accordance with the criminal law of the People's Republic of China."

Leftists Celebrated My Friend's Death and Made His Grieving Mother Cancel the Funeral - "It looks that they’re now taking their cues from the Westboro Baptist Church, celebrating deaths of people who don’t share their bizarre dogma. Perhaps they can picket the next funeral so we can all get a good, hard look at them."

According To Science, Husbands Stress Their Wives Twice As Much As Their Kids Do – Here’s Why - "For 46 percent of the 7,000 US mothers that were questioned, husbands were noted as a larger source of stress than dealing with the children... the feeling of a spouse being a bigger stress source also applies to lesbian couples. Single moms reported the highest stress levels of all. Therapist Hal Runkel isn’t surprised by the results of the survey and stresses that communication is always of the utmost importance.
“Marriage is a more difficult relationship than parenting,” he said."
If husbands are a bigger source of stress than children, single moms (with no husbands) should be happier than moms with a husband. And lesbians (who have no man) shouldn't complain either. Maybe this shows that women like to blame other people/their partners (who are usually men) for their problems
If an article claims that "science says" something or "according to science", something is true, it's probably rubbish


Anger over MasterChef Singapore on Channel 8 – an overcooked reaction? - "It is a known fact that Channel 8 programmes appeal to a larger audience and can attract more sponsorship (=$$$). This is not a public education programme that has to be in all four official languages. This is a profit-making, commercial-based decision. How many of us watch Channel 5 at home every night? Hands up lor. A Chinese programme organiser asking for a possible contestant’s fluency in Mandarin is logical. You go eat mala hotpot the shop owners will also ask you how high a spiciness level you can tahan right? The staff is not going to chase you out of the shop just because you say 小辣 (or the lowest level of spiciness). It’s mainly to help the kitchen staff to prepare the hotpot accordingly. In any case, the organisers not only ask applicants for their fluency in Mandarin, they also ask about applicant’s fluency in other languages, their marital status, spouse’s occupation, the number of children you have … why nobody kpkb and ask how are these relevant to cooking leh?... By the way, who is to say that being Chinese = can speak Mandarin? And a non-Chinese = someone who cannot speak Mandarin?... We have seen many cooking shows on Channel 8 that featured Chinese chefs or participants who can barely string sentences of proper Chinese together. Many simply do show and tell lor. And just nod and smile when the hosts banter with them, or simply spoke and responded in English. I don’t see why we can’t try doing that for MasterChef Singapore. Chill guys, no one is stopping us all from entering this kitchen."
When capital comes from stoking grievances...

Taiwan Announces Ban on All Plastic Bags, Straws, and Utensils
Yet another feel-good bourgeois gesture that will just make people's lives worse. Of course, this will hurt poor people the most; we're told that they have no time, have little mental capacity after dealing with the tasks of everyday life since they face so much stress, are unable to cook etc, so having to bring around their own utensils and bags will just make their lives even worse

Frantic 999 call of posh Oxford uni girl's lover as she stabbed him with a bread knife in coke and alcohol-fuelled frenzy - "Mark Brooks, of the Mankind Initiative charity for male abuse violence victims, blasted the judge’s leniency. He said: “The comments are unacceptable and out of touch. “This is a clear case of severe domestic abuse against a man and the sympathy should be with him. “The judge seems to think that domestic abuse, when it is committed by a woman against a man, is not as serious as it rightly is when it is the other way round. This is wrong.” OTHER women who have not had the benefit of a posh education have been jailed for knife attacks similar to Lavinia Woodward’s"

Sysadmin left finger on power button for an hour to avert SAP outage - "They got as far as Windows NT's "You can now power off your computer" dialog, at which point Jeremy asked his colleague to push the power button of said server. Which he did … but on the wrong server. And not just any wrong server, but a server running SAP. In production, natch. At this point the nature of that power button became critical, because its design meant that so long as it was not released, the juice would flow. And thankfully Jeremy's mate had pressed the button, but not released it. The next hour of their lives was interesting. Jeremy's co-worker was left unable to move while the IT team scrambled, "getting everybody to log off from SAP and getting approval for emergency downtime. Then waiting for the SAP admins to shut down the server gracefully, before J could finally release the switch.""

Professor Raymond Gosling, DNA scientist - obituary - "Later attention would focus on Wilkins’s colleague at King’s, Rosalind Franklin, who suffered as a result of the male chauvinism of the 1950s and died too soon to win a share in the Nobel prize. It was her skill in X-ray crystallography that led to “Photograph 51”, the image that gave Crick and Watson the decisive clue to the dimensions and angles of the DNA molecule that led the Cambridge pair to make their famous model of the double helix. There is no doubt that Rosalind Franklin’s role was important, but her posthumously acquired status as a feminist icon obscured the fact that it was actually Gosling who took the vital X-ray photographs which proved to be the key in unlocking the puzzle. A graduate student at the time, it was he, supervised by Maurice Wilkins, who in 1950 first took an X-ray photograph of a DNA fibre – the picture that inspired the young James Watson when he saw it presented by Wilkins at a conference in Naples. The more famous “Photograph 51” was taken in May 1952 and is usually described as Rosalind Franklin’s. That, too, however, was taken by Gosling... Self-effacing to a fault, Gosling never expressed any resentment at the way his role had been overlooked... he always saw life through the prism of science: his children were instructed to use a “mono molecular structure” of toothpaste (i.e. not too much) when brushing their teeth, and a laboratory was set up in the garage of the family home in Kent... For many years he took his family on an annual summer holiday to a nudist colony in the dunes outside Bordeaux, where he was once spotted discussing the finer points of rowing with an (unnamed) house master at Radley and his wife, all of them stark naked."
Another feminist myth punctured

The hate at the heart of identity politics - "That Ms Bergdorf, a trans-woman and sometime model, poses as a promoter of tolerance and diversity and yet at the same time sanctions hatred or at least disdain for large sections of society has got some people scratching their heads... (Literally everything you need to know about the Corbynised Labour Party and its trading of class politics for identity politics is contained in the fact that it wanted advice about equality from someone who thinks the white man on methadone who lives in a skip enjoys ‘white privilege’.)... Hatred, demonisation and the treatment of large swathes of society as backward are key elements of the politics of identity. It is not an accident that many identitarians hold extremely intolerant views of certain social groups. They are not going ‘off-script’ when they casually write off white people or straight people or Christians as dickheads, supremacists, ignorant, evil, etc. Rather, such a callous painting of ordinary people as ‘problematic’, as creatures to be wary of, is central to this politics that relies for its very survival on the idea that minority groups are victimised and thus require help and flattery from those in authority. For in order to sustain this beneficial status as ‘victim group’, identitarians must continually construct a fantasy army of victimisers... Witness how gay-rights groups now scour for evidence of homophobic hatred. So desperate are they to prove, against the evidence of everyday experience, that gays suffer horrible prejudice in 21st-century Britain that they have taken to flagging up schoolkids’ use of the word ‘gay’ as an insult to bolster their claim to victim status... They need this; it guarantees their funding; it grants them access to the sainted circle of threatened groups requiring special resources... Or witness how victim feminists treat everything from a whistle in the street to a sexist tweet as proof that they suffer ‘structural oppression’. Many of these feminists come from well-off backgrounds, were privately educated, and have incredibly relaxing jobs in the media and politics, and yet they must debase themselves by trawling for evidence of misogynistic hatred because this sustains their self-flattering, self-deluded status as victim. Trans activists are the worst on this front. Victimology is so central to their identity that they have come to view midwives saying ‘it’s a boy!’ or abortion charities using the word ‘women’ as evidence that society is a transphobic conspiracy and this will make young trans people kill themselves... So highly prized is the title of victim that there is now a creepy competition both among identity groups and within identity groups. Feminists and trans-women bicker over who suffers the most. Bisexuals rage against homosexuals for ignoring ‘biphobia’. Muslim campaigners bristle if they feel too much attention is paid to anti-Semitism. And then within groups, new sects are always breaking off, believing they will fare better in the game of victimhood if they go it alone. Witness how ‘white gay men’ are now slammed by black homosexuals. Or how white trans-women are damned as ‘more privileged’ than black trans-women. Black Muslims agitate against Asian Muslims. ‘The black Muslim experience is completely different to… the Asian one’, wrote one recently. And of course he means it is worse. This is the nasty racial, sexual and religious fragmentation unleashed by a politics that celebrates and rewards those who claim to suffer: a competitive victimhood in which solidarity is not only difficult, but impossible. What does this elitist coveting of the prize of victim status do to public life? It poisons it. It encourages suspicion, hatred. As identity politics becomes the main form of politics, so we the public are increasingly ruled over by a political, campaigning and media class that thinks we are foul; that thinks we are racist, transphobic, Islamophobic, stupid, dangerous... They spread panic about prejudicial hatred among the public, but in truth it is they who hate us. It is they who demonise Christians, the elderly, ageing feminists, certain gays, white people, working-class people, and anyone else whose views might be held up as proof that certain minority groups still suffer ‘structural oppression’. Identity politics is the midwife of misanthropy"

The keto diet, explained - "children and adults whose epilepsy doesn’t respond to medications seem to experience a pretty large reduction in seizures when following a ketogenic diet... When you look at head-to-head studies comparing low-carb diets to other kinds of diets, weight loss on a very low-carb diet can be a little more dramatic in the short term, but by the one-year mark, all diets perform equally miserably... there’s some evidence they’re effective for appetite control... The researchers did not find evidence of big benefits regarding energy expenditure or fat loss after switching to a low-carb diet... For diabetes specifically, keto may be helpful — but the “reversal” claim is overblown... the body’s ability to tolerate carbohydrates can decrease after following a low-carb, high-fat diet... “There’s not a single historic traditionally living human population that was in chronic nutritional ketosis,” Guyenet pointed out. Even the Inuit, who mainly subsisted on fatty whale, seals, and fish, were not in chronic ketosis because they developed genetic mutations that prevented them from overproducing ketones."

Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself - "Before starting any task, I asked myself whether it would help my case for promotion. If the answer was no, I didn’t do it. My quality bar for code dropped from, “Will we be able to maintain this for the next 5 years?” to, “Can this last until I’m promoted?” I didn’t file or fix any bugs unless they risked my project’s launch. I wriggled out of all responsibilities for maintenance work. I stopped volunteering for campus recruiting events. I went from conducting one or two interviews per week to zero."

Dorm Living for Professionals Comes to San Francisco - The New York Times - "Starcity residents get a bedroom of 130 square feet to 220 square feet. Many of the buildings will feature some units with a private bath for a higher rent. But Jon Dishotsky, Starcity’s co-founder and chief executive, said a ratio of one bathroom for every two to three bedrooms makes the most sense for large-scale affordability. The average one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco rents for $3,300 a month, but Starcity rooms go for $1,400 to $2,400 a month fully furnished, with utilities and Wi-Fi included... “I’ve run a household; I’ve done the bills; I’ve mowed the yard, and I don’t want to be responsible again,” Ms. Shiver said. “I want to paint and learn how to make ramen noodles. And when we run out of tinfoil, there’s just more tinfoil.” The Starcity community manager (a.k.a. the building manager) is extremely involved in household affairs, dropping off care packages when someone is sick and organizing birthday parties. If tenants sign up for premium services, Starcity will do their laundry for $40 a month, clean rooms for $130 a week and even arrange for dog day care. For many residents, the arrangement does not feel temporary... “This afternoon we’re going to the Exploratorium,” she said, referring to the science museum located at Pier 15."

Not the Worst Hotel in the World, Perhaps, but ‘the World Is Very Big’ - The New York Times - "The Grand Hotel in the Kosovar capital of Pristina is regularly reviled in internet reviews. Here’s a sample: “disgusting,” “a ruin” and “an absolute horror. Probably the worst I have ever been at.”"

Hand Grenades and Gang Violence Rattle Sweden’s Middle Class - The New York Times - "Weapons from a faraway, long-ago war are flowing into immigrant neighborhoods here, puncturing Swedes’ sense of confidence and security. The country’s murder rate remains low, by American standards, and violent crime is stable or dropping in many places. But gang-related assaults and shootings are becoming more frequent, and the number of neighborhoods categorized by the police as “marred by crime, social unrest and insecurity” is rising. Crime and immigration are certain to be key issues in September’s general election, alongside the traditional debates over education and health care. Part of the reason is that Sweden’s gang violence, long contained within low-income suburbs, has begun to spill out. In large cities, hospitals report armed confrontations in emergency rooms, and school administrators say threats and weapons have become commonplace. Last week two men from Uppsala, both in their 20s, were arrested on charges of throwing grenades at the home of a bank employee who investigates fraud cases... Mr. Borisho had sought asylum in Sweden to escape a war. He knew what a grenade sounded like. As a commando in a Lebanese militia, he had handled grenades, and remembered the strict protocols he complied with, locking up the weapons for safe keeping the minute he returned to camp. That a grenade should be found on the sidewalk outside a kebab shop, a few steps from an elementary school, was difficult for him to take in. “Now, when I think of the future, I am afraid,” he said. “I am afraid for Europe.”... The police are struggling to gather information in immigrant neighborhoods, and clearance rates for gun homicide cases have fallen steadily since the 1990s... Peter Springare, 61, a veteran police officer in Orebro, published a furious Facebook post saying violent crimes he was investigating were committed by immigrants from “Iraq, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Somalia, Syria again, Somalia, unknown country, unknown country, Sweden.” It was shared more than 20,000 times; Mr. Springare has since been investigated twice by state prosecutors, once for inciting racial hatred, though neither resulted in charges... In Sweden the street price of a hand grenade is 100 kroner, or $12.50... “Crime is increasing and increasing, and they aren’t doing anything about it,” Mr. Garrido said. “It’s denial. Swedes are very good people and they want to change the world. They want the rest of the world to be like Sweden. And the reality is that it’s completely different.”"
Fake news from a right wing extremist rag

Laura Starkey's answer to Why do people wear makeup? - Quora - "Studies have shown that men and women alike tend to find women more attractive during the period in their menstrual cycle when they're ovulating and most susceptible to fertilization. During this period their skin looks at its best: tight and supple, moisturized, less blemished, smoother in complexion, and in general giving off the appearance of a healthy, vital "glow." Hormones during pregnancy make use of this same mechanism (hence the pregnant woman "glow"), presumably to keep the woman's mate loyal. Moisturizers, serums, primers, foundations, powders, correctors, and concealers are all tools used to create the impression of even, moisturized, healthy, and youthful skin in its sexual prime... Women have paler skin on average than men (within their racial/ethnic profile), a sexual dimorphism possibly resulting from the fact that lighter skin may encourage the vitamin-D absorption necessary for a healthy pregnancy, and that darker skin indicates a higher sperm count and possibly higher testosterone levels in men. There are also studies which show a female's skin to be slightly lighter during ovulation (as you may have gathered by now, indications of ovulation are always extremely in a woman's aesthetic favor.) Lighter skin is also somewhat correlated with youth, as skin darkens and blemishes with age. So, we unconsciously (or consciously) note the tendency towards paleness as being both more feminine and more youthful... flushed lips and cheeks indicate that a woman is in good health, since bloodless skin and lips are a classic sign of illness and age. Children in particular have very red lips, which along with healthy pink cheeks indicate youth. A healthy flush also indicates that a woman may be ovulating, or even that she possesses higher estrogen levels on average- higher estrogen always being a good thing where fertility is concerned. Flushing also indicates a degree of sexual arousal, since blood rushes to both lips and cheeks during sex (and naturally, any indication of sexual arousal in a woman will be equated with attractiveness. )"
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