Links - 18th June 2019 (1)

A Free-Trade Democrat in the Trump White House (Ep. 371) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "According to William Cohan, who’s written a definitive history of the firm, “Goldman determined never to do business with Trump and conveyed that message to its new recruits.” Keep in mind this is the same Goldman Sachs that until recently was happy to do bond deals with the government of Venezuela...
The Joint Committee on Taxation projects the new tax law will be very generous to the very wealthy. But Cohn — who is himself very, very wealthy — he argues with that perception. Indeed, some of the new provisions hurt high earners: a lower cap on the the mortgage-interest deduction and a new $10,000 cap on the State and Local Tax Deduction, or SALT, which is especially punitive to high earners living in high-tax states — states, by the way, that did not vote for Trump in 2016.
COHN: There was a very big tech company in California I was at two weeks ago, where all the senior management was bitching at me because how much their taxes are going up. I said, “Please tell Nancy Pelosi, because she was the first one that came out and said this was a tax cut for the rich.” Well, it was not a tax cut for the rich in San Francisco and it was not a tax cut for the rich in New York City or in Illinois...
DUBNER: Big question: it’s been a while now, too early for big macro results, but how do you think your tax plan is working so far?
COHN: I’m glad you say that, that it’s too early, because it’s amazing how everyone wants to take a 10-year tax plan and judge it after one year. We talked about increasing economic growth by one percent. And I think in essence we did that in the first year. We went from sort of two to sub-two percent to three and just below three-percent growth. We finally have real wage growth, wage growth in excess of inflation in the United States. It’s still not as high as we’d like to see it. We’re seeing job creation. We’re seeing movement in the labor force. And I do think that we’ve seen that disposable income in the system... The one thing the president and I completely, 100 percent agree upon is the Chinese stealing of intellectual property, the forced technology transfer into China, the market access for businesses into China."
How to get Democrats to oppose tax hikes

Why You Shouldn’t Open a Restaurant (Ep. 347 Update) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "DUBNER: So I understand that you’ve also, in the midst of all this, put yourself and the restaurant in the middle of a MAGA controversy. You tweeted, in response to public events in D.C., you tweeted, “It hasn’t happened yet, but if you come to my restaurant wearing a MAGA cap, you aren’t getting served. Same as if you come in wearing a swastika, white hood, or any other symbol of intolerance and hate.” So, that’s what you tweeted. What happened next?
LÓPEZ-ALT: What happened next was — well, nothing for a few days and then it got picked up by some newspapers and then went around national news. And that’s when trouble happened. It was a mistake on a number of fronts for me to say that. The first one and the one that I was really concerned about was, it was a mistake the way I treated my staff and my partners, because that’s my personal Twitter account. It was something I said off the cuff and I never talked to my partners about it. And I realized afterwards that I just put my partners and especially my staff in a really tough position. Because now there’s all this anger being directed at them, and they had nothing to do with it. It was just me shooting off my mouth. The other thing I want to say is that people very fairly read that as an attack on individuals, and as an attack on themselves after reading it, an attack on Republicans. And I can understand why it was read that way. And all I can say is that in my head it was really not about individuals. It is about the symbol, the symbol of the hat. I very admittedly live in a liberal bubble, I live in the Bay Area."

Disney says its more than $400 million Vice investment is now worthless - "Just a few years ago, big media companies were falling over themselves to bet on Vice Media. Disney made the biggest bet, by putting more than $400 million into the swashbuckling digital publisher.Now, Disney says all of the money it put into Vice has been incinerated: In investor filings Wednesday, Disney said it no longer thinks it will ever get any return on the investment it made in Vice — a company that at one point was supposedly worth $5.7 billion...
Investors have decided that high-flying publishers that once confidently explained that they’d created a new media paradigm are now worth very little ... or even less.
Here’s a partial roll call familiar to some of you:
Mic, which raised more than $60 million, sold for less than $5 million late last year.
Mashable, which was valued at about $250 million in 2016, sold for less than $50 million in 2017.
The properties formerly known as Gawker Media, plus the Onion and other sites, just sold for a price that’s likely well below $50 million; Univision, the TV conglomerate which sold them off, had paid $135 million for the Gawker sites alone in 2016."

Galactic War Report – Episode 150: A Celebration! from SWCC – Radio Free Tatooine - "'We've done Jedi Knight Revan and his companions. We've done Darth Revan and his companions. I should say Revan 's companions. We're not allowed to gender... Jedi Knight Revan's and Revan's companions. And Darth Revan'...
'It's fun writing marquee material when you can't gender anything at all'"
How politically correctness stultifies language

CIA 'Ninja bomb' replaces explosives with six long blades - "The US apparently has a unique approach to minimizing bystander casualties from drone strikes: replace the warhead with old-fashioned knives."

Black students reluctant to apply to Cambridge University 'due to lack of Afro-Caribbean hairdressers' - "Black students are failing to apply to Cambridge because there is a lack of Afro-Caribbean hairdressers in the city, the university’s pro-vice-Chancellor has said... “We have been doing some quite detailed research, particularly with black students, particularly in London, looking at obstacles to applying to Cambridge and thinking about Cambridge. And number three on the list was hairdressers,” he said... Naomi Kellman, founder of Target Oxbridge, a programme to assist black students with Oxford and Cambridge applications, said the question about hairdressers "comes up really frequently".“If you are from a majority group you assume you will be catered for, anywhere in the country can manage your hair," she said. "But if you have afro hair, the expertise is needed. Things that are really basic and simple become quite a big challenge.”As well as asking about the academic demands of courses at Oxbridge, black students are also concerned about what kind of food and night life will be on offer, Ms Kellman said.Cambridge has a number of hairdressers including the Afro European Beauty Centre, which says on its website it specialises in "Afro and European hair care for both men and women".However, Dr Tony Sewell, CEO of Generating Genius, a charity that encourages youngsters from underrepresented backgrounds to pursue STEM subjects, said a lack of hairdressers is not the reason why black students are put off from applying."It may be another lame excuse - kids need to get more resilient and get with it," he said. "As a minority, you will have to be confronting a situation where you are the only one. You have to face that and learn how to adapt to that. That’s the key issue.""

Fast-food chain Yoshinoya to sell beef bowl without rice - "Japanese fast-food restaurant operator Yoshinoya Holdings Co said it will start selling on Thursday a bowl of beef on vegetables, instead of the usual steamed rice, responding to requests from health-conscious people."

The Hole in the Wall Project and the Power of Self-Organized Learning - "In early 1999, some colleagues and I sunk a computer into the opening of a wall near our office in Kalkaji, New Delhi. The area was located in an expansive slum, with desperately poor people struggling to survive. The screen was visible from the street, and the PC was available to anyone who passed by. The computer had online access and a number of programs that could be used, but no instructions were given for its use.What happened next astonished us. Children came running out of the nearest slum and glued themselves to the computer. They couldn't get enough. They began to click and explore. They began to learn how to use this strange thing. A few hours later, a visibly surprised Vivek said the children were actually surfing the Web."
Apparently they didn't surf porn

Juncker regrets not intervening in Brexit referendum campaign
Great way to encourage "populism" and anti-EU sentiment

Jean-Claude Juncker lashes out at 'stupid nationalists' on eve of European elections - "Some polls project that populists may become the most powerful group in the parliament following this week's elections in all 28 EU nations, resulting in a lasting impact on the future of the bloc and the continent at large. "These populist, nationalists, stupid nationalists, they are in love with their own countries," Juncker told CNN in his Brussels office."
Apparently it is a bad thing to love your own country. Presumably it is good to love the EU

Elton John: 'I am a European – not a stupid, imperialist English idiot' - "Elton John has said he is ashamed of the UK over its voting for and handling of Brexit.While performing on Wednesday in Verona on his last ever world tour, Farewell Yellow Brick Road, he said: “I’m ashamed of my country for what it has done. It’s torn people apart … I am sick to death of politicians, especially British politicians. I am sick to death of Brexit. I am a European. I am not a stupid, colonial, imperialist English idiot.”"
Strange how he doesn't recognise that modern Europe was literally founded on white supremacy and imperialism, through the legacy of colonialism
So much for the myth that liberals hate their countries

Brexit news: Investment in Britain booms and beats France and Germany combined - "As global confidence grows in Britain, we retained our position as the top destination in Europe for foreign direct investment. The country managed to attract £1.48 trillion of inwards investment stocks in 2018, which is more than Europe’s next biggest economies – Germany and France. This leaves Britain the third-largest investment hub in the world, behind the United States and China. Berlin managed to only attract £739billion and Paris just £649bn as both capitals struggle to establish themselves.Over the past year the value of inward stock into the UK increased by 21 percent, compared to just one percent in Germany and a six percent fall in France.
Strange, Brexit was supposed to leave the UK a barren wasteland

Britain is in ‘pretty good shape’ for No Deal Brexit, Whitehall chief says — just months after his doomsday warning - "BRITAIN is in “pretty good shape” for a No Deal Brexit, the country’s top mandarin has declared — just months after he gave a doomsday warning.Sir Mark Sedwill said preparations for the UK crashing out of the EU without an agreement were among the “most impressive pieces of cross-government work” he had seen."

Vyktor Kratek - Hard to feel bad for this. She got that enrichment... - "A changing culture isn't bad"
"immigrants have a better work ethic"
"I hate white people"
"We need them"
"Diversity is necessary for growth"
"Mollie Tibbetts' suspected murderer identified as 24-year-old Christian Rivera, in US illegally."

Illegal Immigrants and Crime – Assessing the Evidence - "Michelangelo Landgrave, a doctoral student in political science at the University of California, Riverside, and I released a paper today that estimates that illegal immigrant incarceration rates are about half those of native-born Americans in 2017... The Texas research is consistent with the finding that crime along the Mexican border is much lower than in the rest of the country, homicide rates in Mexican states bordering the United States are not correlated with homicide rates here, El Paso’s border fence did not lower crime, Texas criminal conviction rates remain low (but not as low) when recidivism is factored in, and that police clearance rates are not lower in states with many illegal immigrants – which means that they don’t escape conviction by leaving the country after committing crimes."

Paul Ooi on Twitter - "Did you eat in public last month? It was Lent, also a fasting month. Did you respect the others?
You don’t need to actually. Because a fast is a private matter between God and yourself"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Danelaw - "[On hairstyles] That’s exactly the way the Normans are represented on the Bayeux tapestry of Scandinavian origins. But that's how you can tell straight off a Norman from an Anglo Saxon. Actually hairstyles probably distinguished classes in society more than they distinguished different ethnic groups, just as a woman of the rank of a married woman would have her hair covered. Whereas an unmarried virgin would have a hair long and open. Likewise, long hair was for the male elite...
We also know that in places like York, the Vikings cooperated with the church or the church cooperated with the Vikings, they had to find a way of living together. And they did and already by 958, we have an Archbishop of Canterbury whose father was a Viking, basically. So, but the question of how quickly the Vikings became Christian is very interesting one, which I don't think we know the full answer to. I think it varied enormously. I think there's quite a lot of evidence that they did become Christian, but in their own way, and that's where the sculpture comes in, that they kind of wanted a Christian cross, like the Guthred Cross with bits of Norse mythology on it. Not just I think to say that they've given up the old religion for the Christian. I think some people have argued, I think it's probably going a bit too far. But some people have even argued that some of the sculpture represents a kind of hybrid religion...
Although most of the Danelaws in the East of England, and it's called the Danelaw, people just assume that they're all Danes. And we have quite a lot of evidence for people come from the Irish Sea region, into the eastern part of England. And once you've got connections with the Irish Sea region, you have connections with the North Atlantic islands. There's even one of the settlers of Iceland is said to have come from England. So I think they're plugged into a larger world, and not just that kind of North Sea."