Links - 11th March 2020 (2)

The CBC wants to cancel Baby Yoda - The Post Millennial - "In a year of spectacularly horrible hot takes, the CBC managed to produce the most cringeworthy, nonsensical think piece yet—“The phantom menace: When Baby Yoda memes go bad.” This isn’t their original title. They originally went with “It’s time to cancel Baby Yoda.”... Veronica Shepard argues that Baby Yoda is problematic because the memes that have sprung up featuring his likeness do not necessarily reflect Disney’s intentions for the character. She claims there are “unmeasurable risks companies are taking by handing over their brands to unknown creators.” Basically, she’s calling for Disney to grab hold of the social media verse and shut down the memes because the memes are both annoying to her personally and don’t honour the integrity of the brand"

Why Child Care Is So Expensive - The Atlantic - "In the United States, per-child spending doubled from the 1970s to the 2000s, according to a 2013 paper by Sabino Kornich of the University of Sydney and Frank Furstenberg of the University of Pennsylvania. Parents spent more on education, toys, and games. But nothing grew faster than per-child spending on child care, which increased by a factor of 21—or approximately 2,000 percent—in those 40 years... The 1970s and ’80s—the two decades when the female labor participation rate grew the fastest—also saw the greatest acceleration in child-care spending, according to Kornich and Furstenberg. Raising young children is work—and it always has been work—but the rise of dual-earner households has forced more families to recognize this work with their wallets... The average cost of a full-time child-care program in the U.S. is now $16,000 a year—and more, in some states, than tuition at a flagship university... The industry is highly regulated, perhaps reasonably so, given the vulnerability of the clientele—which is the second key driver of child-care costs. As Jordan Weissmann has reported in The Atlantic, states with strict labor laws tend to have the most expensive facilities... Other costs include insurance to cover damage to the property and worker injuries, as well as legal fees to deal with inevitable parent lawsuits.  Finally, there’s the real estate. The most expensive child-care facilities tend to be situated near high-income neighborhoods or in commercial districts, where the rents are high. And they can’t downsize in a pinch, because most states require them to have ample square footage for each kid. The state of American child care might be defensible if it were expensive and high-quality—or if it were crummy but cheap.  Instead, the U.S. has the worst of both worlds... In 2015, the Council of Economic Advisers wrote that every $1 spent on early-childhood education results in roughly $8.60 of societal benefits, “about half of which comes from increased earnings for children when they grow up.”... building a high-quality national caretaking workforce will take years, and shoddy national day care might be worse than the alternative.An analysis of Quebec’s effort to expand access to cheap child care, for example, found mixed results. Its programs succeeded in raising the labor-force participation rate of mothers without breaking the bank for taxpayers. But young Canadians who were eligible for the program experienced, as teenagers, “a significant worsening in self-reported health and in life satisfaction” relative to Canadians from other provinces. So, did the Quebec child-care experiment “work”? Yes, for parents and public financing. Perhaps not for the kids."

Europe, Not America, Is the Home of the Free Market - The Atlantic - "When I arrived in the United States from France in 1999, I felt like I was entering the land of free markets. Nearly everything—from laptops to internet service to plane tickets—was cheaper here than in Europe.Twenty years later, this is no longer the case. Internet service, cellphone plans, and plane tickets are now much cheaper in Europe and Asia than in the United States, and the price differences are staggering... In 1999, the United States had free and competitive markets in many industries that, in Europe, were dominated by oligopolies. Today the opposite is true. French households can typically choose among five or more internet-service providers; American households are lucky if they have a choice between two, and many have only one. The American airline industry has become fully oligopolistic; profits per passenger mile are now about twice as high as in Europe, where low-cost airlines compete aggressively with incumbents. This is in part because the rest of the world was inspired by the United States and caught up, and in part because the United States became complacent and fell behind. In the late 1990s, legally incorporating a business in France took 15 administrative steps and 53 days; in 2016, it took only four days. Over the same period, however, the entry delay in the United States went up from four days to six days... The irony is that the free-market ideas and business models that benefit European consumers today were inspired by American regulations circa 1990. Meanwhile, in industry after industry in the United States—the country that invented antitrust laws—incumbent companies have increased their market power by acquiring nascent competitors, heavily lobbying regulators, and lavishly spending on campaign contributions... [EU] politicians were more worried about the regulator being captured by the other country than they were attracted by the opportunity to capture the regulator themselves. French (or German) politicians might not like a strong and independent antitrust regulator within their own borders, but they like even less the idea of Germany (or France) exerting political influence over the EU’s antitrust regulator. As a result, if they are to agree on any supranational institution, it will have a bias toward more independence... A central argument of the Chicago school of antitrust—whose laissez-faire approach was influential in persuading American regulators to take a more hands-off attitude toward mergers—is that monopoly power is transient because high profits attract new competitors. If profits rise in one industry and fall in another, one would expect more entry of new firms in the former than in the latter. This used to be true—until the late 1990s. Since about 2000, however, high profits have persisted, rather than attracting new competitors to the American market. This suggests a shift from an economy where entry acted as a fundamental rebalancing mechanism to one where high profits mostly reflect large barriers to entry. The Chicago school took free entry for granted and underestimated the many ways in which large firms can keep new rivals out... In my research on monopolization in the American economy, I estimate that the basket of goods and services consumed by a typical household in 2018 cost 5 to 10 percent more than it would have had competition remained as healthy as it was in 2000. Competitive prices would directly save at least $300 a month per household, translating to a nationwide annual household savings of about $600 billion... Monopoly profits do not translate into increased investment. Instead, just as economic theory predicts, they flow into dividends and share buybacks... Taxes cannot solve all of America’s problems. Taxes can redistribute. Competition can redistribute, but it can also grow the pie."

Miley Cyrus' split with Liam Hemsworth isn't just celebrity gossip — it's a blow to the patriarchy - "Over the past week, an assortment of trending stories — from Jeffrey Epstein to the Dayton and El Paso mass shooters, to Miley Cyrus’s separation and Julianne Hough’s declaration that she’s “not straight” — together have laid bare the strictures of an American patriarchy on the edge of a nervous breakdown. As the status quo, heterosexuality is just not working... Men need heterosexuality to maintain their societal dominance over women. Women, on the other hand, are increasingly realizing not only that they don’t need heterosexuality, but that it also is often the bedrock of their global oppression... This is a far cry from the type of freedom espoused by those on the right, for whom freedom, as I wrote in an earlier article on how misogyny is the driver of mass shootings in America, is conflated with domination... “A feminist critique of compulsory heterosexual orientation for women is long overdue,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her 1980 feminist classic “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” It looks like this critique has finally arrived in the mainstream"
???
Did NBC publish this as part of a MRA plot to make feminists look batshit crazy?
Apparently it is a myth that feminists are lesbians

Quokka Selfies: What's the Deal With That Cute Australian Critter? - "Until recently, many people outside of Australia had never heard of thequokka, a Muppet-cute (despite its beady eyes and rat's tail) marsupial with an irresistible smile."

Matt Walsh on Twitter - "Leftists circa 2005: "Just let us live how we want. We aren't hurting you."
Leftists today: "Publicly renounce biological science or we will rip you to shreds and ruin your life.""
The "myth" of the slippery slope

The Yaboiposting - Posts - "To all the women who get annoyed when their kindness gets misinterpreted as romantic interest, it’s nothing personal. Kindness from strangers is so rare, we think overly nice men want to bang us too"

Boris Johnson: 'Sharia law in the UK is absolutely unacceptable' - "That is unacceptable to me. Everybody must be equal under the law, and everybody must obey the same law. That is absolutely cast-iron"
Proof of Tory Islamophobia!

Stangle: Impossible burgers are made of what? - " The impossible whopper has 10 grams of usable protein and the whopper has 22 grams of usable protein. So you would have to eat two and a quarter impossible whoppers to get the same protein in one whopper. Now, let’s compare the estrogen hormone in an impossible whopper to the whopper made from hormone implanted beef. The impossible whopper has 44 mg of estrogen and the whopper has 2.5 ng of estrogen. Now let me refresh your metric system. There are 1 million nanograms (ng) in one milligram (mg). That means an impossible whopper has 18 million times as much estrogen as a regular whopper. Just six glasses of soy milk per day has enough estrogen to grow boobs on a male. That’s the equivalent of eating four impossible whoppers per day. You would have to eat 880 pounds of beef from an implanted steer to equal the amount of estrogen in one birth control pill... What’s funny about the impossible whopper being a GMO is that the people most likely to eat it are the ones most likely to be against GMO’s."

Nonprofit director slams ‘self-inflicted wound’ of ‘identity politics’ in English after liberal arts majors found to make less money - "“The liberal arts—taught with rigor—can make a vitally important contribution to a student’s education,” Johnathan Pidluzny, ACTA’s director of academic affairs, told Campus Reform. However, “ACTA is very concerned about the politicization of humanities disciplines,” Pidluzny explained. “One of the reasons for collapsing enrollments in majors like history is that fewer historians are teaching the meaningful, ‘big picture’ courses—the kind that cultivate real understanding of the American democracy and Western civilization.” Instead, he says that many humanities departments are failing to cultivate “even basic numeracy and literacy” in their students, making them undesirable to employers.  “The English major was once a guarantor of effective, formal writing skills and the ability to comprehend and analyze the complex thoughts found within centuries of brilliant and challenging poetry and prose,” the director of academic affairs told Campus Reform, discussing one such major. “Its decline into the epiphenomena of popular culture and identity politics is a self-inflicted wound that has rocked its credibility.”"

Is Majoring in English Worth It? - WSJ - "In a ranking of 162 college majors by median income and unemployment rate, English majors landed among the bottom dwellers, at 132. At $47,800 in median income, they did better than those in drama ($35,500) or fine arts ($37,000), but they earned less than half as much as someone who majored in, say, electrical engineering ($99,000). Alas, even if your undergrad is happy with his English major now, other studies say he will come to regret it. In June, a Payscale survey of 250,000 college grads reported 1 in 5 with a humanities degree as saying that, next to their student loans, their choice of major was their biggest educational regret. A 2017 MarketWatch story was blunt: It called English “the most regretted college major in America.”... Colleges sell themselves as a ticket to upward mobility, without providing the data students and parents need to weigh college costs against expected benefits. Humanities students have it even worse, because the watering down of the curriculum has diminished the value of degrees such as English or history... “When you spend $100,000 or more for something, you are entitled to know the probable value of what you are getting”... 48 of 52 top schools (as ranked by U.S. News & World Report) allow English majors to graduate without ever having taken a course on Shakespeare. In the past ACTA has also highlighted studies showing that the average grad, even those from prestigious flagship universities, shows little or no improvement in critical thinking for having gone to college.Here the much-maligned English degree is simply a proxy for what is wrong with college today. It isn’t that STEM subjects are the only majors worth anything. It’s that the humanities have disproportionately been infected by political correctness and the malignant influence of Herbert Marcuse, father of the “repressive tolerance” so prevalent on campuses these days... college grads who “strongly agree” they were challenged academically are 2.4 times more likely to say their degree was worth the cost.  So why have the sciences kept their integrity while the humanities haven’t? Mr. Pidluzny suggests it’s because the costs of a dumbed-down STEM degree can be both more obvious and more consequential.  “The university can’t get away with not teaching engineering students differential equations because we’d then have collapsing bridges all over the place”"

Why Kids Can’t Write - The New York Times - "Focusing on the fundamentals of grammar is one approach to teaching writing. But it’s by no means the dominant one. Many educators are concerned less with sentence-level mechanics than with helping students draw inspiration from their own lives and from literature... Ms. Wanzer led the students in a freewrite, a popular English class strategy of writing without stopping or judging. First, she read aloud from “Bird by Bird,” Anne Lamott’s 1995 classic on how to write with voice. “You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind,” the memoirist writes. “Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.”... even when Ms. Wanzer encounters juniors and seniors whose essays are filled with incomplete sentences — not an uncommon occurrence — she limits the time she spends covering dull topics like subject-verb agreement. “You hope that by exposing them to great writing, they’ll start to hear what’s going on.” Three-quarters of both 12th and 8th graders lack proficiency in writing, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. And 40 percent of those who took the ACT writing exam in the high school class of 2016 lacked the reading and writing skills necessary to complete successfully a college-level English composition class, according to the company’s data... So-called process writing, like the lesson Lyse experienced in Long Island, emphasizes activities like brainstorming, freewriting, journaling about one’s personal experiences and peer-to-peer revision. Adherents worry that focusing too much on grammar or citing sources will stifle the writerly voice and prevent children from falling in love with writing as an activity. That ideology goes back to the 1930s, when progressive educators began to shift the writing curriculum away from penmanship and spelling and toward diary entries and personal letters as a psychologically liberating activity. Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, this movement took on the language of civil rights, with teachers striving to empower nonwhite and poor children by encouraging them to narrate their own lived experiences... “Freewriting, hoping that children will learn or gain a love of writing, hasn’t worked,” Dr. Hochman told the teachers, many of whom work in low-income neighborhoods. She doesn’t believe that children learn to write well through plumbing their own experiences in a journal, and she applauds the fact that the Common Core asks students to do more writing about what they’ve read, and less about their own lives. “I call it a move away from child-centered writing,” she said approvingly, and away from what she considers facile assignments, like writing a poem “about a particular something they may have observed 10 minutes ago out of the window.”... she appreciates Dr. Hochman’s explicit and technical approach. She thought it would free her students’ voices, not constrain them. At her school, 100 percent of students come from low-income families. “When we try to do creative and journal writing,” she said, “students don’t have the tools to put their ideas on paper.”"
Identity politics means writing classes and English lessons don't actually teach you how to write or the English language respectively

Online Courses Are Harming the Students Who Need the Most Help - The New York Times - "the growth of online education is hurting a critical group: the less proficient students who are precisely those most in need of skilled classroom teachers. Online courses can be broken down into several categories, and some are more effective than others.  In “blended” courses, for example, students don’t do their work only online: They also spend time in a classroom with a flesh-and-blood teacher. Research suggests that students — at nearly all levels of achievement — do just as well in these blended classes as they do in traditional classrooms. In this model, online resources supplement traditional instruction but don’t replace it.  In the fully online model, on the other hand, a student may never be in the same room with an instructor. This category is the main problem. It is where less proficient students tend to run into trouble. After all, taking a class without a teacher requires high levels of self-motivation, self-regulation and organization... Online courses have many real benefits, of course. They can help high achievers in need of more advanced coursework than their districts provide through other means... The weakest students are hurt most by the online format."
This doesn't make libertarians happy, since it means their fantasy of children learning on their own online/through videos at low cost instead of in a government-subsidised classroom and learning more than they ever would in a traditional school remains just that - a fantasy (even if they assume most kids are disciplined enough to do so)