Links - 9th February 2020 (2)

Online Cesspool Got You Down? You Can Clean It Up, For a Price - The New York Times - "The image of the internet as an egalitarian free-for-all — a place where no amount of money could buy you a superior experience, and where no lack of money could condemn you to an inferior one — persisted for years. Unlike the rest of consumer culture, the internet seemed immune to class division. Bill Gates used the same apps, visited the same websites and logged into the same social networks as the guy who mowed Bill Gates’s lawn — at least in theory, anyway. And now? Well, check your credit-card statement. Today’s internet is full of premium subscriptions, walled gardens and virtual V.I.P. rooms, all of which promise a cleaner, more pleasant experience than their free counterparts. The pay walls have been rebuilt, and the artists no longer work for tips. Hundreds of millions of people shell out for Netflix accounts, Patreon podcasts, Twitch streams, Spotify and news subscriptions. The average American spent more than $1,300 on digital media last year. Even Hulu pulled the plug on its free tier in 2016... Billions of people still use the free internet every day, of course. But it feels increasingly like wading into a sludge pit of algorithmically promoted misinformation, privacy-invading apps and subpar user experiences... “I think it’s becoming clear what things that are allegedly free actually cost,” Libin told me. Many of the internet’s cornerstone services, he added, “just seem to be more and more slimy and exploitative, and I think that people realize that.”... Class division has even come to virtual goods. A study by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England found that Fortnite character skins — they’re like costumes for your avatar — have become a source of social cachet for young kids. Poorer kids who use the free, default skin inside the game report being bullied by their peers who can afford to buy rarer ones... Google has taken out a patent on a system that would allow advertisers to subsidize passengers’ rides to their businesses. Start-ups have developed tools that would allow advertisers to suggest detours midride. (“There is an Outback Steakhouse 1.2 miles away from your destination. Would you like to stop there in exchange for a free ride today?”)"

Opinion | Are Liberals Against Marriage? - The New York Times - "While marital fertility fell in the 1970s after the baby boom ran its course, the baby bust of the last 10 years hasn’t affected married couples, whose fertility rate has stayed level or very modestly increased. So while it’s important to debate questions like how the cost of child care affects childbearing decisions within marriages, the question of why marriage has declined so precipitously in the first place still looms over the fertility discussion. And with it comes a longstanding liberal-versus-conservative disagreement about how much to emphasize economic trends versus cultural transformations — or, more tersely, neoliberalism versus cultural liberalism — to explaining the waning of wedlock... [from] the 1960s through the 1980s, there was a clear liberal-led attack on the institutional form of marriage... This assault was undertaken in a spirit of social optimism... the emerging progressivism seems hostile not only to anything tainted by conservative religion or gender essentialism but to any idea of sexual or reproductive normativity, period, outside a bureaucratically supervised definition of “consent.” And it’s therefore disinclined to regard lifelong monogamy as anything more than one choice among many, one script to play with or abandon, one way of being whose decline should not necessarily be mourned, and whose still-outsize cultural power probably requires further deconstruction to be anything more than a patriarchal holdover, a prison and a trap. The combination of forces that have produced this ideological shift is somewhat murky — it follows a general turn leftward on social issues after the early 2000s, a further weakening of traditional religion, the cultural ripples from Obergefell v. Hodges, the increasing political polarization of the sexes and, of course, the so-called Great Awokening. But it does not feel like a coincidence that the new phase tracks with the recent decline in childbearing... Certainly the new phase of liberalism is increasing the political polarization of both marital practice and marital beliefs"

Maybe I am a backward European man, but the burkini SI Swimsuit Issue is really not working for me - "If the purpose of these photos is the kind of winking titillation that became redundant with the advent of internet pornography, I am not titillated. And I don’t want to pretend that I am... maybe it is my cultural background, but the hijab and the burka signal whatever is the opposite of sexy. It makes me think of separate gender swimming pools, of housebound Saudi women asking their male guardian for written permission to visit a doctor. It’s just jarring and odd. If the purpose is, as the Kenya-born Somali-American Aden claims, to show off that “modestly dressed” women can be “beautiful” then it seems to me a little insincere to stretch the definition of modesty to posing in an edition of a magazine designed to be ogled by men.But like many secular 21st-century men, I do not judge women’s virtue by their “modesty,” so that’s really none of my business. It does seem a little weird to have that quality celebrated in a post-feminist society, but I guess that’s cultural relativism for you. If, however, the purpose of the picture is to get clicks for an otherwise moribund print publication and to show that it has “moved with the times” then OK"

City of Richfield Scrubs Robbery Post from Police FB Page in Apparent ‘Politically Correct’ Move - "The City of Richfield Police Department gave themselves a well-deserved pat on the back and boasted on social media in early October about three gas station robbery suspects that had been apprehended and subsequently charged. That is until city administrators apparently deemed the post to be politically incorrect with bad “optics” and took it down two days later... An unidentified Richfield page administrator replied that they “removed the post due to complaint(s).”The RPD Facebook page administrator refused to give any further information about who had complained about the post or about the nature of the complaints which led to its removal. Since it seemed unusual that there would be complaints about robbery suspects being arrested and charged, a data practices information request was submitted to RPD to learn the nature and source of the complaints, as well as to learn who was responsible for removing the post. Additionally, the Alpha News researcher subsequently called Richfield Police Chief Jay Henthorne to inquire about what led to the removal.In the Oct. 14 telephone conversation, Chief Henthorne tried to explain that the “social media team along with our city administration pulled it” because they were looking at different options for posting in the future “with possibly not using pictures.” When pressed about the report of complaints received, Chief Henthorne indicated that the concern about the post had come from inside the city administration, not from an outside source. He stated further that the post was taken down at the direction of “city administration” following an “internal discussion”... Another piece of documentation received, below, is what appears to be a portion of an email or text conversation between two unidentified City of Richfield staff, employees or officials on Sat., Oct. 12, that requests that the “FB picture of the robbery suspect” be taken down because “the optics are not great right now.”... the removal of the post appears to have been directly motivated by one or more people within the City of Richfield who were more worried about the “optics” of the post than letting the public know about a dangerous, repeat offender."

Why English 'discounts' are not OK in France - "The word may have a French root, but that has cut no ice with French language guardians the Academie français, who are not at all happy about discounts... the Academie said there was “no need” to use ‘discount’ to describe the “ancient practice” of reducing store prices, as there are multiple French words to choose from, like rabais, compte, remise or réduction... In fact, the Academie stated, the English word discount is even "borrowed from the ancient French word desconte, or descompte,” which could be found in the very first edition of the Academie’s dictionary, defined as “what one can take from or reduce on a sum that one pays.”"

'Adulting' is hard. UC Berkeley has a class for that - Los Angeles Times - "he is learning to create and stick to a personal budget, build a resume and apply for jobs and navigate romantic relationships in a time when online interactions are eclipsing face-to-face encounters... Adulting classes for college students and postgrads have swelled in popularity in recent years, in part because many high schools have largely abandoned “life skills” courses such as home economics, which were created to help students navigate the path to adulthood. That trend, combined with armies of hovering parents who emphasize academic achievement to the exclusion of almost everything else, has resulted in university classrooms filled with students who scored a 5 on their AP Physics test, but struggle to plan for a week’s worth of groceries and meals... More than 200 students filled out applications explaining why they wanted to take the 12-week course. The women accepted fewer than half who applied... Students enrolled in “Intro to Baking” learn to make bread, cakes, pastries and other confections “without setting you or your roommates on fire”"
If business school is bad because it's non-academic, why is this good?

Is 3-D Printing the Future of Terrorism? - WSJ - "On Oct. 9, a gunman tried to massacre worshipers on Yom Kippur at a synagogue in Halle, Germany, and crossed a new threshold: It was the first time a terrorist perpetrated a deadly attack with homemade weapons using 3-D-printed components—including a 3-D-printed gun... his primary aim was to “prove the viability of improvised weapons”—and inspire like-minded extremists to research, develop and deploy 3-D-printer technology as a new tool of terror... By live streaming the attack, he deliberately demonstrated the shortcomings of these weapons in hopes that the next killer would improve on them. ICSR reports some 2,200 people watched the video of the Halle attack in real time."

A Low-Fare Loophole for International Travelers - WSJ - "Usually a carrier must be from a country on one end of a route or the other to secure government approvals to make the trip. U.S. airlines can’t pick up passengers in Canada and fly them nonstop to France. Nor can an Asian airline like Singapore compete directly on trans-Atlantic routes against U.S. and European airlines... Some airlines are allowed to carry customers between two non-native countries, usually when a fuel stop is involved. It’s called the fifth freedom. Established with an international treaty in 1944, the nine aviation freedoms lay out what commercial airlines can and can’t do throughout the world.Though long-range planes have eliminated the need for many fuel stops, fifth-freedom flights continue to thrive. Even low-cost startups are taking the fifth: AirAsia X, a Malaysian carrier, and Scoot, a Singaporean airline, both fly to Honolulu with a stop in Osaka, Japan, so they can tap into robust Japan-Hawaii traffic. Flights between Honolulu and Osaka start as low as $280 round trip... U.S. airlines accused Emirates and Etihad, both based in the United Arab Emirates, of receiving government subsidies resulting in unfair competition, and asked the U.S. State Department to renegotiate the U.S. aviation treaty with the U.A.E. The state-owned airlines deny receiving government subsidies. The dispute ended earlier this year with the U.A.E. airlines agreeing to publish annual financial statements consistent with internationally recognized accounting standards"

Are All Democrats Socialist? Don’t Believe the Hype - WSJ - "Right-leaning media like to lavish the lion’s share of coverage on the radicals of the Democratic Party—to paint the entirety of their opposition as out-of-step cry-bully socialists. But the left-leaning media bear responsibility as well. The same journalists who decry “alternative facts” seize on every Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar tidbit with Gollum-like zeal.Yet it’s not clear that the social-media warriors they’ve elevated to pop-star status are the least bit representative of the party. As Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota told Politico: “Suddenly an entire party is being branded by the perspectives of two of its members, who represent 1% of the caucus.” The rest of the Democratic freshmen are less visible not only due to clickbait bias but because they are busy creating legislation or holding town halls in their districts—that is, doing their jobs. In the midterms, the gains that won the Democrats a majority were driven by quieter pragmatists in suburban and exurban districts... “No Democrat in a majority-making competitive district ran even one ad on free college, a federal jobs guarantee, expanding Social Security, or a passing a nationwide $15 . . . minimum wage.” Yet many Americans remain worried that the Democrats are readying to Make America Unrecognizable, and the party shares some of the blame. They’ve hardly shouted themselves hoarse decrying socialism and have let it hinder the pragmatic idealists among them. If Democrats want the privilege of governing, they need to assert more effectively the values that center the party in every sense of the word... Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s overreaching Green New Deal was dealt a devastating blow by the Senate, falling on a 57-0 procedural vote. This dead end certainly was noticed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Despite Republicans’ hysterical depiction of Mrs. Pelosi as a horsewoman of the San Franciscopocalypse, she has increasingly held the reasonable middle. Recall her dismissive comments on the “green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is.” More recently she mused, “While there are people who have a large number of Twitter followers, what’s important is that we have large numbers of votes on the floor of the house.”"

The King: Henry V On Film | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "One interesting element they do include in the film that bizarrely does have historical truth is the fact that the Dauphin of France sent Henry the Fifth tennis balls to mock him and sort of goad him into fighting. That is true. The Dauphin of France really did or perhaps his father Charles V, sent tennis balls and also a reference to soft cushions. They said, here you go. Why don't you lounge on your soft cushions and play tennis balls because you're this young getabout [sp?] prince, you're not a real King...
I think that Agincourt is sometimes held up as this like well we've been brilliant in the past, we’ll be brilliant in the future, which interestingly was a problem in the 15th century. Led to the collapse of the Hundred Years War by the English because they were so convinced after Agincourt and a later battle, the Battle of Verneuil that the English would just be able to turn things around in a single battle, that they stopped funding the war, they stopped supporting the garrisons in France. And then they were completely astonished when everything fell apart. So that sense of kind of like national complacency, I think is still an issue"