Links - 1st April 2019 (2)

Equal pay: Asda loses appeal in court case - "Supermarket giant Asda has lost an appeal in the latest development in a long-running legal dispute with staff over equal pay.The decision means that lower paid shop staff, who are mostly women, can compare themselves with higher paid warehouse workers, who are mostly men."
Equal pay for unewual work. Maybe CEOs must be paid the same as cashiers

Buzzfeed is Being Accused of Laying Off Mostly POC and LGBT Employees
Comments: "They're being laid-off because they're not qualified for their jobs, because they were hired solely on the basis of "diversity"...and, yes, hiring unqualified people IS a problem."
"They were most likely laid off because the identity politics sections they produced content for didn't generate enough revenue to cover the salaries of the employees impacted."
"Well, if you hire mostly LGBT and POC, it is obvious you will end up firing mostly LGBT and POC people. It is like claiming Univision is firing Hispanics when most of their employees are Hispanics."
"Considering a substantial portion (over 300 Million dollars) of Buzzfeed's revenue last year came from an unpaid teenager, there's certainly an argument to be made that they should just lay off all their staff members."

Activating Christian religious concepts increases intolerance of ambiguity and judgment certainty - "How does living in a society in which one is frequently exposed to reminders of its Christian foundations shape one's basic cognitions and behaviors? Following contextual priming logic, being exposed to Christian religious content should render associated norms accessible. One prototypical Christian norm is the reliance on dichotomous moral categories such as right vs. wrong (virtuous vs. sinful). If Christian primes indeed activate this normative structure, it should manifest itself in an increased ambiguity intolerance. We tested this reasoning in five studies. Specifically, we demonstrated that semantically activating Christian concepts increases self-reported ambiguity intolerance (Study 1), preference for a non-ambiguous (vs. ambiguous) visual stimulus (Study 2), as well as judgment certainty as means to reduce experienced ambiguity (Studies 3a & 3b)"
No wonder Christians keep bashing postmodernism

Man discovers GF acting in porno while watching it with his friends - "A man was in for the shock of his life when the porn video he was watching turned out to star his beloved girlfriend, Xiao Nan.The Chinese man recounted his shocking experience on a Wechat post, as EBC reports.When his girlfriend left for Japan, he thought she should be busy focusing on her studies, among other things"

Word of the Year 2018, an episode from Merriam-Webster on Spotify - "We just in this conversation mentioned the words true and right and fair... the Anglo-Saxon words we have in English cover a lot of this territory, but justice isn't one of those. Justice came from the Norman conquerors who brought their system of laws over and it's that word system... the system of laws that was imposed upon the Anglo-Saxon people in England. And it gives us all the other words of the legal system: judge, jury, arraignment, indictment. All of them come from the same language at the same time, that is to say in the centuries immediately after the Norman conquest. This system of laws was superimposed upon whatever was already existing in England. And it's just interesting to think that unlike so many other pairs of ideas that we have with a kind of Anglo-Saxon word and a Latin word like motherly and maternal... or kingly and royal. They're kind of semantically identical but they have slightly different usages. In this case we don't have a semantic twin to justice. Justice is an idea that came kind of with the word. And I think that's amazing, this idea of righteousness that is associated with laws and by which we can have redress and redemption. That is sort of new and it's kind of interesting to me that we don't have an Old English word for that thing. We have law, of course, but we don't have justice. Those are slightly different ideas"

Japan's deputy PM blames women for nation's falling population - "Japan’s gaffe-prone deputy prime minister, Taro Aso, has been forced to retract remarks that appeared to blame women who do not have children for problems associated with the country’s low birthrate and ageing population."
Aren't we told that if there's no gender equality, women will protest by not having kids?

When even the pros don’t understand Canada’s income tax system, you know there’s a problem - "One clue that things are out of whack with our tax system comes from the army of people required to police it. The Canada Revenue Agency has 40,000 employees. By contrast, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service makes do with just twice as many staffers in a country with 10 times the population. Do the math, or have your accountant do it for you, and it appears the average IRS employee is five times as productive as the typical CRA worker... Our current tax code baffles even the people responsible for enforcing it. In a recent study, the Auditor General of Canada found the CRA's call centres gave wrong information to callers nearly a third of the time. Taxpayers required unusual stamina to get even that error-prone advice. Nearly two-thirds of calls to CRA call centres were never answered, either because of high call volumes or because callers hung up when attempting to navigate the CRA's automated-service maze."

Yazidi women who escaped ISIS now facing threats, harassment in Canada - "Women and girls who survived rape and abuse at the hands of ISIS in Iraq are now reportedly being targeted with threats and harassment in Canada"

What Caused the 2016 Chicago Homicide Spike? An Empirical Examination of the 'ACLU Effect' and the Role of Stop and Frisks in Preventing Gun Violence - "This article provides empirical evidence that the reduction in stop and frisks by the Chicago Police Department beginning around December 2015 was responsible for the homicide spike that started immediately thereafter. The sharp decline in the number of stop and frisks is a strong candidate for the causal factor, particularly since the timing of the homicide spike so perfectly coincides with the spike. Regression analysis of the homicide spike and related shooting crimes identifies the stop and frisk variable as the likely cause. The results are highly statistically significant and robust over a large number of alternative specifications. And a qualitative review for possible “omitted variables” in the regression equations fails to identify any other plausible candidates that fit the data as well as the decline in stop and frisks. Our regression equations permit quantification of the costs of the decline in stop and frisks. Because of fewer stop and frisks in 2016, it appears that (conservatively calculating) approximately 239 additional victims were killed and 1129 additional shootings occurred in that year alone. And these tremendous costs are not evenly distributed, but rather are concentrated among Chicago’s African-American and Hispanic communities"
Being against 'racism' is bad for 'minorities'

Stop pretending you're outraged by what Liam Neeson said. - "he said that about 40 years ago, he wanted to kill a black person because they raped a friend of his. He said that for a week afterwards, he walked the streets with a cosh (a crowbar-like object), hoping that a person of color would antagonize him...
he:
1. admits to truly horrific behavior 40 years ago
2. admits to questioning his horrific behavior
3. admits that he was wrong for his behavior. But of course, #2 and #3 aren’t the stories that you’re seeing in your social media feeds... I honestly think that this is a mixture of laziness and willful ignorance. It’s not all that different from #SmirkGate which I recently wrote about... Isn’t this precisely the type of behavior we want to see? Someone who is thinking about their own thinking, then admitting that they were wrong? We can’t call for people to change, then harangue them for changing. If we do this, no one will take us seriously, and we end up being like a snake that has turned into a circle and is devouring itself... I’m in the ‘viral news’ biz to some extent, so I feel like I understand why some publishers choose to go down the outrage porn rabbit hole. It makes for great business, you’ll get a lot of clicks on your content, make a lot of money, and in a week or so, people will completely forget all about it and you’re off the hook. I mean, look at the “yuge” BuzzFeed story a couple weeks ago Trump… You know, the one that the Mueller team itself said “nuh uh” to. Nobody is really talking about that anymore, and most consumers of online content don’t particularly care... If we stop rewarding poor behavior from publishers, they will be forced to change how they cover stories. If they don’t change, they will die. Either way, the world will be a better place."
The left has been an ouroboros for a long time

Sarah Haider on Twitter: "Unfortunate lessons from Liam Neeson debacle: (thread?)" - "If you are human enough to have made a mistake, do not also be stupid enough to share the mistake with the outside world. Do not expect circumstance, evolution in character, or contrition to save you from the fury of the mob.
Tips on surviving unscathed: 1. Be perfectly woke (even according to behavioral standards not yet set, the future too will come for you). If you fail to reach this standard, not to worry. What really matters is *managing appearances*. Wokeness is a performance, above all.
Tip 2: Do everything possible to erase evidence of bad behavior, hope no offense archaeologist comes to dig through your past. Delete, delete, delete! Erase the memory even from your own mind: You’ve only ever been faultless. As such, you can feel righteous in hunting others
Lastly, point fingers at others as much as possible – every minute the mob’s attention is diverted to another witch is a minute you can breathe easy. Be sure to never try to intervene in an unjust attack, lest you become the target of suspicion yourself.
Whether the woke crowd wants these to be the lessons we learn from this is irrelevant: This is what will come out. Not more correct behavior, not more honesty, but more cover-ups, more hypocrisy, more witch-hunts. Is this what justice looks like?"

Close grade gap for black students or face fines, ministers warn universities - "Universities will face sanctions including fines unless they address the attainment gap between black and white students, the Government has warned.Ministers are today releasing data showing that white students are around a third more likely than black students to get a good grade in their degrees.The new Race Disparity Audit shows that only 56 per cent of black students achieve a 2:1 or first, compared with 80 per cent of their white peers."
This is a great way to increase discrimination against black people, since then people will know that black people's grades are unreliable