Links - 20th March 2020 (2)

Chia Suat Huang - "Watching budgeting videos on YouTube.These people have USD30k to USD80k debt - credit cards, personal loans, student loans - and they are planning their budgets using USD40 Erin Condren notebooks and buying stickers, washi, pens and highlighters to decorate their budgets.🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️SERIOUSLY?!"
And then they bitch about how capitalism is broken and the working class is being screwed

Americans confused as Filipino boyband tweets ‘Hello Negros’. Negros is an island in The Philippines. - "SB19 is the first Filipino idol group to debut under a Korean entertainment company... Negros is a province in The Philippines...
"Hello, Negros!"...
"its a little entitled to hear a westerner demand an asian boy band group to cater to YOUR cultural context."
"We don’t have to censor our language and places in our country just so you don’t get to be offended. Maybe educate yourself too."
"It's becoming too tiring nowadays that most of english speaking people expect us non-english people to cater and adjust to them. Why don't they take a look outside of their side of the world for a change.---"
Ignorance and offence culture strike again

SPANISH DINNER ENTERTAINMENT HARKS BACK TO MEDIEVAL TIMES - "The first two Medieval Times-styled shows were developed in Majorca and Benidorm, Spain, about 25 years ago, by Jose Montaner, who converted his farm into a barbecue restaurant catering to ever-increasing numbers of European tourists to Majorca.But when another barbecue opened on the island in the late 1960s, Montaner had to think up another angle to stay competitive. That`s when he decided to develop a medieval-themed, indoor-theater show, an idea he`d gotten from hearing his English patrons talk about their country`s popular medieval fairs. Montaner, who is the uncle of the Count of Perelada, based the show on his family`s own 11th Century traditions, when knights of Aragon, Navarre, Perelada and other kingdoms in northern Spain and southern France competed in jousting matches and tournament games. He relied on both family histories and classics for research, and Tino Brana, choreographer for the movie epic El Cid, also assisted with the show.  In 1983, the Spaniards took on the North American market with the construction of their first U.S. castle, a $3.8 million Medieval Times in Kissimmee, Fla., 15 minutes east of Walt Disney World"

“Hail Satan?” Tracks the Satanic Temple’s Strategic Trolling for Justice
For all liberals go on about "trolls", they approve of trolls who they agree with (see also: Flying Spaghetti Monster)

People Astounded To Learn How A Bot Is Stealing Everyone’s Art On Twitter, Decide To Trick It Into Getting A Lawsuit - "Twitter users have figured out how to troll art thieves, and it’s turned into a hilarious meme for a good cause. Artists on social media have long faced the problem of bootleg merch sites reprinting their work. A print-on-demand site snapping up a design that you spent days or weeks creating so they can have it automatically printed by order on t-shirts, mugs, stickers, and hats is instantaneous, and once your design is on this network of sites, it takes a legal game of whack-a-mole to get it removed. Recently, people on Twitter began to notice just how instantaneous and automatic it is. As a matter of fact, bots are doing it indiscriminately, observed Rob Schamberger, who paints official merch for WWE. When people reply to a tweet saying they want a design on a shirt, bots zero in on those keywords, and the image in the original tweet gets uploaded on print-on-demand sites... to turn this from an embarrassment into a disaster for sellers that thrive on art theft, Twitter users decided to bring in the big guns. Drawings of copyrighted characters, often behaving badly and urging their owner companies to take legal action (“pwease sue us daddy disney,”) proliferated. Other popular themes include support of Hong Kong’s protests against meddling by the Chinese government, and calls to look into China’s imprisonment of Uighur people in detention camps, all statements that could get print-on-demand sites based in China into legal hot water."

Shopify CEO says long hours aren't necessary for success - "Tobi Lutke, the founder and CEO of $48 billion e-commerce cloud-software company Shopify, has a message for you this holiday: You don't need to work 80 hours a week to be successful.And he's living proof, he explained in a Twitter thread on Thursday, the day after Christmas — in response to a debate over work-life balance and the 40-hour workweek sweeping the venture-capital and startup community on Twitter... he and his cofounders have grown this company from a profitable bootstrap to its multibillion-dollar status without him ever sleeping under his desk."I've never worked through a night. The only times I worked more than 40 hours in a week was when I had the burning desire to do so. I need 8ish hours of sleep a night. Same with everybody else, whether we admit it or not"... Shopify has had a spectacular few years... "I'm home at 5:30pm every evening. I don't travel on the weekend. I play video games alone, with my friends, and increasingly with my kids. My job is incredible, but it's also just a job. Family and personal health rank higher in my priority list"... He believes one reason Shopify grew without giving up work-life balance is that it's based in Ottawa, Canada, far from Silicon Valley and its worship of workaholism... His philosophy is: "For creative work, you can't cheat. My belief is that there are five creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that four of those are channeled into the company"... Instead of looking for the so-called "10x engineer" or the "rockstar" engineer — who are sometimes also known as brilliant jerks — he hires for people who can make great teams... In 2014, Stanford professor John Pencave published a now famous paper in which he described a productivity cliff when people work over 50 hours a week.Erin Reid, a professor at Boston University's Questrom School of Business, also published a study that said that managers could not differentiate between those who logged a true 80 hours a week and those who faked it."

Breitbart gets to keep using Shopify to sell its merchandise - "Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke said the Canadian e-commerce company won’t bow to pressure to kick the far-right Breitbart News site off its platform.He wrote in a Medium post Wednesday that he believes refusing to do business with the site would constitute a violation of free speech."

Political Compass Memes - Posts - "Authoritarian Left: bye men
Authoritarian Right: by men
Libertarian Left: bi men
Libertarian Right: buy men"

MAKE WOMEN WOMEN AGAIN - Posts - "men in commercials: Buff Mickey Mouse lifting weights
men in commercials if he has a wife: brainlet Wojak Mickey"
"Women’s amazing effect on men"

Russia's new £3million tank is the first in the world to have a flushable toilet on-board - "The three-man T-14 Armata has been promoted by the Kremlin as the most sophisticated armoured vehicle produced and will bring an end to operators having to relieve themselves in ammunition boxes that have been nicknamed by some soldiers, 'Putin's Poo Tins.' Soldiers can be on duty for days without stopping"

Race row after leading private schools turn down donor's £1m offer to help poor white boys - "Two leading private schools are at the centre of a race row after a philanthropist claimed they rejected scholarships of more than £1m for poor white boys.Dulwich College and Winchester College turned down Professor Sir Bryan Thwaites' offer to leave the funds in his will because they feared breaching anti-discrimination laws... Sir Byran, 96, attended both schools on scholarships and wanted to help disadvantaged white British boys because they perform worse at school than nearly every other ethnic group.Recent studies show they are less likely to attend university than their peers and they perform relatively poorly in exams.The row comes after the rap star Stormzy created Cambridge University scholarships to aid black British students exclusively. Sir Bryan said: "If Cambridge University can accept a much larger donation in support of black students, why cannot I do the same for underprivileged white British?"In my opinion [Winchester] would gain enormously by being seen to address what is the severe national problem of the underperforming white cohort in schools."Trevor Phillips, former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, described poor white boys as "today's educational left-behinds".Writing in the online magazine Standpoint, he added: "I've been asked to advise on whether it is acceptable to offer bursaries or scholarships to one minority group or another."Invariably, I have said yes; but donors remain nervous, and beneficiary institutions are routinely discouraged by their lawyers.""
White privilege!

State schools welcome £1.2m donation to help poor white boys after rejection from elite schools - "State school headteachers have said they would welcome a £1.2m donation – which two elite private schools rejected – to help disadvantaged white British pupils... A number of studies have shown white British children on free school meals struggle academically compared with those from other ethnic groups – which is why Sir Bryan made the specific offer... Leon Wilson, executive principal of state schools Hurlingham Academy and Lambeth Academy in London, told The Times: “You have lots of philanthropists who give away money for different ethnic groups such as black Caribbean boys. I can’t see why it should be a problem for white boys.“It is clear for everybody to see that white working-class boys are not doing well in every index: exclusion, attainment, they are lagging behind.”"

Why so many young women don't call themselves feminist - "Fewer than one in five young women would call themselves a feminist, polling in the UK and US suggests... A 2018 YouGov poll found that 34% of women in the UK said "yes" when asked whether they were a feminist, up from 27% in 2013.It's a similar picture in Europe, with fewer than half of men and women polled in five countries agreeing they were a feminist. This ranged from 8% of respondents in Germany, to 40% in Sweden.However, people do not appear to reject the term feminism because they are against gender equality or believe it has been achieved.The same study found that eight out of 10 people said men and women should be treated equally in every way, with many agreeing sexism is still an issue... The term feminist is less likely to appeal to working-class women, polls suggest. Almost one in three people from the top social grade ABC1 - those in managerial, administrative and professional occupations - called themselves a feminist in a 2018 poll. This compared with one in five from grades C2DE, which include manual workers, state pensioners, casual workers, and the unemployed.  But those from lower income backgrounds are just as likely to support equal rights... Research into the views of US millennials found 12% of Hispanic women, 21% of African American women, 23% of Asian women and 26% of white women identify as a feminist.
Hearteningly, in so many countries - even in feminist Sweden - most normal people reject this hateful ideology. Unfortunately the article doesn't explore this, just claiming there're misconceptions about feminism. But the media love feminism, so
US Asians having similar progressive views to whites (unlike other racial minorities) is indeed a form of "whiteness"

Why Movie Posters All Look the Same - "Blue and orange are a powerful combination because unlike other color pairings — red and green, pink and blue — they don’t conjure cultural associations that are already set in stone. They sit on opposite sides of the color wheel, evoking the two poles of hot and cold and explosive action. And don’t Hollywood ad makers know it.
Hollywood sends us another signal when it wants us to think “comedy.” In this compilation, French film scholar Christophe Curtois highlights the trend of a white background, which sets a light, friendly, and understated scene. Like a blank canvas, it leads our eye to the actors. We feel like we’ve seen the star couple leaning back to back before — because we have.
Are our movie posters getting darker? In 2012, software engineer Vijay Pandurangan proposed a theory posters have become both more dark and more blue over time. Using color data from 35,000 movie posters created from 1914 until now, his final image below shows that’s he’s right... Blue is the hue, and the proof is in the poster. One explanation for the posters’ shifting hues is that they reflect differences in the genres making waves at the box office. The popularity of action, thrillers, and sci-fi of the past decade may have led to a darker and more “masculine” palette.Some film theorists speculate that 9/11 and the economic downturn have led the public to crave grittier stories, since a sugarcoated world no longer feels real to them.  Compare the ’90s-era Batman and Bond movies — full of camp and comedy — to their gritty modern counterparts and you’ll see a distinct difference in style.Studios also want to quell fears that big-budget franchises like Spider-Man and Harry Potter might not appeal to an older audience. A dark color scheme lends an air of intensity and importance that can help hook that audience. However, this strategy isn’t working for everyone. It recently led Rolling Stone to lament, “Cheer Up, Guys: Why Are Our Action Heroes So Depressed?
If you need a little light after all that darkness, here’s a sunnier formula used for independent movies: the all-yellow poster"