Links - 18th March 2020

Why would a woman marry her dog? - "What would move a woman to marry her dog, even symbolically? Before the ceremony, Hoad, 49, told This Morning that after four failed engagements, 220 dates and a range of unsatisfactory experiences in the search for love – men concealing wives, men her age pursuing younger women – she had given up on the male of her species... we “needed to start by caring less about what kinds of relationships other people choose to have, and how they live their lives. If they are not harming us, why should it matter?”"
If all the traffic is coming in your direction, maybe you're going the wrong way
So much for the myth of the slippery slope

Robby Starbuck on Twitter - "One big thing I’ve noticed living in the south for 6 months (Tennessee): The amount of charity work being done is off the charts compared to Los Angeles. Every business, every school, every person is doing something for someone in need and they don’t virtue signal about it.
There’s such a huge mindset shift in the south versus Los Angeles. What you find most often in LA is a "What can you do for me” attitude and in the south you most often find a "What can I do for you" attitude. That’s one of the things I love most about Tennessee."
"Same thing in the Midwest. When the Missouri river flooded this April, it literally wiped out a small town next to us. The town I live in is still collecting helping out people that were displaced. Churches and volunteers provided 3 meals a day for over 4 months."

Being Classically Liberal - Posts - "I know this is one of those super anecdotal stories... but here it goes.
>Japanese girl touring the U.S..
>Be hot outside. So she buys a baseball cap to wear. It is red.
>As she is outside, a man, in a car, throws garbage at her and tells her to go to Hell, she is bigot, she hates brown people, et cetera.
>TFW she is confused as fuck and I explain to her what happened.
"American politics is awful.""

As cash-burning era ends and investors seek profits, startups are in for tougher ride - "On the back of a more uncertain global economy, a maturing startup landscape and cautionary tales of high-profile closures such as bike-sharing startups oBike and Ofo, venture capitalists and industry observers say investors are turning cautious. They also cite as examples the financial woes faced by property technology startup WeWork and local grocery delivery firm Honestbee."

Is U.S. Republic or Democracy? Why Some Conservatives Pick a Side - Bloomberg - "One of this age’s great crank ideas, that the U.S. is a “republic” and not a “democracy,” is gaining so much ground that people in Michigan are trying to rewrite textbooks to get rid of the term “democracy.” And the discussion is such a mess that a New York Times article about the fight manages to get it wrong. The truth is actually simple: For all practical purposes, and in most contexts, “republic” and “democracy” are synonyms. The big difference is that the first comes from Latin and the latter from Greek. To say that the U.S. is a republic, not a democracy, is like claiming to eat beef and pork but not cows and pigs... opposing the idea of democracy can be a step toward opposing the reality of democracy, at a time when voting and other structures of formal equality are at risk... The fight over language long predates the U.S. itself. Here’s how the confusion started: For centuries, European (and eventually American) proponents of popular government looked to the ancient Roman republic for inspiration. It’s not that they actually wanted to create a new Rome, but they viewed that era as a symbol of long-lasting non-autocratic government. So the American revolutionaries called what they were creating a republic, even though it really had nothing to do with the actual institutions of Rome. There was no equivalent of Roman consuls or tribunes or a Roman-style Senate. The Founding Fathers did, however, take the names of famous Romans as pen names, and they called the upper chamber of Congress a Senate, and there’s a Tiber Creek in Washington.   Since Rome was popular, they used Latin words. So James Madison in Federalist 10 described the good version of popular rule, which employs a “scheme of representation,” as a republic, whereas bad government -- “democracy” -- doesn’t have the same feature. In fact, the classical world never really had the concept of representation. Madison’s vocabulary, which he shared with other 18th century proponents of popular rule, was just a mild form of propaganda... In the 19th century, Athens became popular, and so politicians such as Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln started calling popular rule “democracy.” As with Rome, they weren’t actually imitating Athens; they just were associating their goals with a popular civilization... When Madison said the U.S. was a republic and not a democracy he meant (in today’s vocabulary) that it was a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. Given that all modern democracies employ a “scheme of representation,” that’s an unimportant distinction today. But questions about what counts as a democracy – what it means to have popular government – are highly important, and contested, right now

Austin Locke on Twitter - "I’m pretending to be a hot girl on tinder so I can match with my roomate and tell him Im coming over so he’ll clean the apartment"

Pakistan: Your moustache or your life - "Impeccably trimmed to 30 inches, Mr Afridi spends 30 minutes a day washing, combing, oiling and twirling his facial hair into two arches that reach to his forehead, defying gravity...  For centuries, a luxuriant moustache has been a sign of virility and authority on the Indian sub-continent.  But in Pakistan, Islamist militants try to enforce religious doctrine that a moustache must be trimmed, if not shaved off.  So Mr Afridi went from celebrity to prisoner of Lashkar-e-Islam, a militant group based in Khyber on the Afghan border.  First the group demanded protection money of $500 a month. When he refused, four gunmen turned up at his house in 2009.  He said they held him prisoner for a month in a cave and only released him when he agreed to cut it off.  "I was scared they would kill me, so that's why I sacrificed my moustache," he said.  He fled to safety in Peshawar. But he grew his facial hair back and in 2012 the threats resumed: telephone calls from people threatening to slit his throat...  His only concession is the holy Muslim fasting month, when a free-standing moustache interferes with his daily ablutions so he tucks it behind his ears.  It costs $150 a month to maintain - more than a Pakistani teacher can earn - although he gets a moustache bursary of $50 from the home district in the lawless tribal belt he was forced to flee.  The Khyber administration pays anything from $10 to $60 a month to men with particularly eye-catching moustaches as a symbolic gesture of appreciation for the bravery and virility traditionally associated with such facial hair.  Afridi has a hair dryer, bars of soap, shampoo, an alleged German oil from Dubai whose label he has ripped off so no one knows its alchemy, a mirror and an old bottle of homemade coconut oil...  "Sometimes my family tell me 'cut it, it would be better if you lived with us.' I can leave my family, I can leave Pakistan, but I can never cut my moustache again," he said.  So his dream is to find political asylum or represent Pakistan at an international competition, if only he can get a visa.  "I'm trying to move my family abroad. To America, Canada, Britain or even to Dubai but I need asylum"... "I don't like smoking. I'm not fond of snuff, or drinking. This is the only choice in my life. I'd even sacrifice food, but not the moustache. It's my life. It's not part of my life. It is my life.""

High-Seas Rescues May Make EU's Illegal Immigration Problem Worse - Bloomberg - "Giovanni Mastrobuoni, one of Europe’s preeminent economists of crime based at the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, worked with Claudio Deiana and Vikram Maheshri to look at how people smugglers change their behavior in response to relief efforts in the Mediterranean Sea. Their findings: When such criminals anticipate there’s a greater chance their human cargo will be rescued, they react by using cheaper and less secure boats. As a result, the number of crossings increases — on craft more vulnerable to accidents — making it mission impossible for rescue crews to reduce the number of deaths. This conclusion will be clearly unpalatable for those, especially on the left, who believe European governments have a moral duty to provide assistance at sea to crossing migrants... To test their hypothesis, they built a new data set, where they overlaid sea conditions from 2009-2017 on top of the number of irregular migrants arriving daily in Italy along the so-called “central route;” the tally of deaths in the central Mediterranean Sea; and logs of search and rescue activity. From 2013-2017, they were also able to add information on the types of vessels used.When search and rescue operations were in place, they found that the number of crossings fell more quickly during stormy weather. This suggests that traffickers do indeed shift from more seaworthy wooden boats to cheaper inflatable rafts, which don’t take to the sea when the weather is rough. The record on the type of boats used, which is admittedly patchy, also confirms the trend toward using less expensive craft.Adding in the sea conditions data is a neat trick because it helps rule out other human-driven impacts on migration patterns like political instability. The study is far more sophisticated than many others, which simply do a straight correlation between search and rescue operations and sea crossings. It’s one of those classic cases in economics where you have to take a convoluted path to prove causality."
People respond to incentives. Being kind just means you're being more cruel

Trump stock market rally is far outpacing past US presidents - "The S&P 500 has returned more than 50% since Trump was elected, more than double the 23% average market return of presidents three years into their term... Markets were also helped by one of the tightest labor markets in history, with the unemployment rate currently at 3.5%, its lowest since 1969. And since Americans were working, they were also spending... Consumers also held strong amid a messy bond market, when shorter-term bond yields rose above long-term yields, causing the yield curve to invert, a phenomenon known to precede recessions. The curve has since steepened and is no longer inverted."
Thanks, Obama. Of course the moment anything bad happens it's all Trump's fault

The Case for the Empire - "The deep lesson of Star Wars is that the Empire is good...  The Senate moves so slowly that it is powerless to stop aggression between member states. In The Phantom Menace a supra-planetary alliance, the Trade Federation (think of it as OPEC to the Galactic Republic's United Nations), invades a planet and all the Senate can agree to do is call for an investigation.Like the United Nations, the Republic has no armed forces of its own, but instead relies on a group of warriors, the Jedi knights, to "keep the peace." The Jedi, while autonomous, often work in tandem with the Senate, trying to smooth over quarrels and avoid conflicts. But the Jedi number only in the thousands--they cannot protect everyone.What's more, it's not clear that they should be "protecting" anyone. The Jedi are Lucas's great heroes, full of Zen wisdom and righteous power. They encourage people to "use the Force"--the mystical energy which is the source of their power--but the truth, revealed in The Phantom Menace, is that the Force isn't available to the rabble. The Force comes from midi-chlorians, tiny symbiotic organisms in people's blood, like mitochondria. The Force, it turns out, is an inherited, genetic trait. If you don't have the blood, you don't get the Force. Which makes the Jedi not a democratic militia, but a royalist Swiss guard.And an arrogant royalist Swiss guard, at that. With one or two notable exceptions, the Jedi we meet in Star Wars are full of themselves. They ignore the counsel of others (often with terrible consequences), and seem honestly to believe that they are at the center of the universe. When the chief Jedi record-keeper is asked in Attack of the Clones about a planet she has never heard of, she replies that if it's not in the Jedi archives, it doesn't exist. (The planet in question does exist, again, with terrible consequences.) In Attack of the Clones, a mysterious figure, Count Dooku, leads a separatist movement of planets that want to secede from the Republic. Dooku promises these confederates smaller government, unlimited free trade, and an "absolute commitment to capitalism." Dooku's motives are suspect--it's not clear whether or not he believes in these causes. However, there's no reason to doubt the motives of the other separatists--they seem genuinely to want to make a fresh start with a government that isn't bloated and dysfunctional.The Republic, of course, is eager to quash these separatists, but they never make a compelling case--or any case, for that matter--as to why, if they are such a freedom-loving regime, these planets should not be allowed to check out of the Republic and take control of their own destinies...
Make no mistake, as emperor, Palpatine is a dictator--but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet. It's a dictatorship people can do business with. They collect taxes and patrol the skies. They try to stop organized crime (in the form of the smuggling rings run by the Hutts). The Empire has virtually no effect on the daily life of the average, law-abiding citizen.  Also, unlike the divine-right Jedi, the Empire is a meritocracy... the Empire is not committing random acts of terror. It is engaged in a fight for the survival of its regime against a violent group of rebels who are committed to its destruction...  In all of the time we spend observing the Rebel Alliance, we never hear of their governing strategy or their plans for a post-Imperial universe. All we see are plots and fighting. Their victory over the Empire doesn't liberate the galaxy--it turns the galaxy into Somalia writ large: dominated by local warlords who are answerable to no one"