The Dream Job That Wasn’t - "The concept of the dream job still persists, likely because so many of us are working in what the late David Graeber called “bullshit jobs,” or are simply not employed at all. Finding your dream job is a seductive idea: the do-gooder, Protestant version of the FIRE movement—rather than trying to escape work, why not try loving it instead? It’s a relatable impulse, but I imagine most dream jobs are more like running a lighthouse bed-and-breakfast for 40 paying guests than a paid vacation. Andrew Smith, who has worked as an interpretive ranger at Glacier National Park for four summers, told me that he loves his job, which mostly involves mediating between park visitors and the park itself. There are clear perks to being a park ranger—getting to know a natural site day in and day out is a kind of intimate experience that tourists don’t get to experience. Smith lives in park housing and is happy that he spends his days mainly outdoors, the dream of many metro-locked middle-managers, even if much of it involves dealing with frustrated tourists who can’t find parking at a popular trailhead. But Smith told me that he still sees his job very much as work, with all the precarity that often comes with it. “Doing what you love as work is not the same as doing it as a hobby,” Smith said. “Going on a hike in uniform is just a fundamentally different experience than going out on my day off and enjoying the park that way.” Because Smith, like most national park employees, is a seasonal worker (right now he’s not employed by the park), his employment and benefits, while good during the park season, are unstable. Smith told me that some people leave park service when they turn 26 and can no longer stay on their parents’ health insurance. In the off-season, Smith works as a substitute teacher. Unless he lands a rare permanent park job, he can’t see it as a long-term career. Caroline Lange, a cookbook recipe tester, feels similarly lucky that she loves what she does. “My friend says it’s like a rom-com job, which I think is really accurate,” Lange said. “You don’t even realize it exists until you meet someone who does it.” But testing recipes isn’t quite like living in a Nancy Meyers film—Lange said that the majority of her job isn’t actually cooking, but schlepping groceries. It’s more physically demanding than people realize (she’s on her feet for much of the day), and since the gigs are freelance, Lange has no paid sick days and is insured on the most basic state exchange plan, which comes with an enormous deductible... the widespread notion of finding meaning in work is a fairly new one... Unsurprisingly, it’s an invention of bosses—the idea that work isn’t supposed to suck changed in the 1970s, experts told Lepore, when “managers began informing workers that they should expect to discover life’s purpose in work.”... the message around loving what you do can be warped to circumstance: People who work in low-income industries like care work, fields dominated by women of color and immigrant workers, are often exploited in part because they are supposed to love what they do. The language of “family,” often weakly invoked in startup culture, is literalized in fields like home health care, where the work is life-giving and incredibly intimate. This can be the frame—duty, family—through which poor wages and other workplace abuses are ignored... A common mantra among park rangers is, “You get paid in sunrises and sunsets.” The implication is that if you’re working your dream, you’ll take any conditions that come with it. Smith told me that he hates that saying. “The sunrises and sunsets are beautiful, but they don’t put food on the table”... If a dream job is like any other job, then isn’t making all jobs better the dream?"
Ironically, written by a freelance writer. Writing is a dream job of many
This ignores the fact that non-pecuniary benefits are a form of compensation
How to Pick a Job That Will Actually Make You Happy - The Atlantic - "To be happy at work, you don’t have to hold a fascinating job that represents the pinnacle of your educational achievement or the most prestigious use of your “potential,” and you don’t have to make a lot of money. What matters is not so much the “what” of a job, but more the “who” and the “why”: Job satisfaction comes from people, values, and a sense of accomplishment. No doubt a substantial chunk of the job-satisfaction percentage is due to the fact that having any job at all makes people happier. Unemployment is one of the biggest sources of unhappiness people can face... a one-percentage-point increase in unemployment lowers national well-being by more than five times as much as a one-point increase in the inflation rate. When one has a job, the factors that most affect satisfaction have little to do with the line of work. First, there are the uncontrollable variables: One study in the Journal of Applied Psychology of identical twins reared apart found that about 30 percent of job satisfaction is genetic. Then, there are the practical variables: Economists have found that wage increases raise job satisfaction, but only in the short term. The effect decays quickly as time passes. In all careers, regular wage increases are better for happiness than infrequent, larger raises. Some of the squishiest aspects of a job are also the ones that make it most rewarding: the values held by your company and your co-workers. Research has shown, for example, that all over the world job satisfaction depends on a sense of accomplishment, recognition for a job well done, and work-life balance. Teamwork, too, has a strong influence in collectivist cultures, but less so in individualist ones. The late Harvard psychologist Richard Hackman found that job satisfaction was strongly, inversely tied to leader-centricity: In one of his studies, musicians who worked in symphony orchestras, where many conductors rule with an iron fist, were 21 percent less satisfied with their growth opportunities than players in leaderless string quartets... a 2012 study on Iranian nurses found that the happiest ones believed their work was “a divine profession and a tool by which they could gain spiritual pleasure and satisfaction.” Many of my colleagues feel the same way about the vocation of higher education, and as the late philosopher Michael Novak wrote, that sense of a calling can be found in business as well. Researchers who have looked for clear relationships between job satisfaction and the actual type of job one holds have overwhelmingly struck out. CareerBliss, a company dedicated to helping people find greater happiness at work, has published survey results of the “happiest jobs” and the “unhappiest jobs,” as rated by those who hold them. Its most recent rankings, from 2018, show the happiest jobs to be quite disparate: teaching assistant, quality-assurance analyst, net developer, marketing specialist. The unhappiest jobs are similarly grab-baggy, and fairly unrelated to education and income: accountant, security guard, cashier, supervisor... Whatever job they end up in, finding a sense of accomplishment within it is crucial for job satisfaction. It helps to set goals in one’s work, such as increasing skills or responsibility. Some goals lead to more happiness than others, however. While pay increases push up satisfaction temporarily, money as a career goal does not. Volumes of research show that pursuing extrinsic rewards for work, such as money, actually hurts your interest in that work. For real satisfaction, you should pursue intrinsic goals—two in particular. The first is earned success. You can think of it as the opposite of learned helplessness, a term coined by the psychologist Martin Seligman to denote the resignation that people experience when they repeatedly endure unpleasant situations beyond their control. Earned success instead gives you a sense of accomplishment (which Seligman has shown is a source of happiness, and which strongly predicts happiness at work) and professional efficacy (the idea that you are effective in your job, which pushes up commitment to your occupation, also a good measure of job satisfaction)... The second goal worth pursuing at work is service to others—the sense that your job is making the world a better place. That doesn’t mean you need to volunteer or work for a charity to be happy (my own research has shown that nonprofit work is not more inherently satisfying than working for a for-profit or for the government). On the contrary, you can find service in almost any job. One of my students made this point better than I can, in an op-ed he wrote to explain why he had forgone jobs in his field of academic study to become a waiter in Barcelona. As he put it in Spanish, his customers “are all important and equal. They are the same at the table and must be the same in the eyes of the waiter … It’s great to be able to serve the politician on the front page of the newspaper just as well as the kid browsing the news while waiting for his girlfriend.”"
Leftists keep demanding increased wages and are deluded into thinking they'll make people happy. Of course their solution to falling satisfaction is to jack up wages even more
Opinion | After Working at Google, I’ll Never Let Myself Love a Job Again - The New York Times - "At least four other women said that he’d made them uncomfortable, in addition to two senior engineers who already made it clear that they wouldn’t work with him. As soon as my complaint with H.R. was filed, Google went from being a great workplace to being any other company: It would protect itself first. I’d structured my life around my job — exactly what they wanted me to do — but that only made the fallout worse when I learned that the workplace that I cherished considered me just an employee, one of many and disposable... Like most of my colleagues, I’d built my life around the company. It could so easily be taken away. People on leave weren’t supposed to enter the office — where I went to the gym and had my entire social life... When I didn’t get a promotion, some of my stock grants ran out and so I effectively took a big pay cut. Nevertheless, I wanted to stay at Google. I still believed, despite everything, that Google was the best company in the world. Now I see that my judgment was clouded, but after years of idolizing my workplace, I couldn’t imagine life beyond its walls... After I quit, I promised myself to never love a job again. Not in the way I loved Google. Not with the devotion businesses wish to inspire when they provide for employees’ most basic needs like food and health care and belonging. No publicly traded company is a family. I fell for the fantasy that it could be. So I took a role at a firm to which I felt no emotional attachment. I like my colleagues, but I’ve never met them in person. I found my own doctor; I cook my own food. My manager is 26 — too young for me to expect any parental warmth from him. When people ask me how I feel about my new position, I shrug: It’s a job."
Wokewashing hits again
The perils of loving your job, or treating it as a family
Bizarre Japanese job ad looking for someone to fly from Okinawa to Tokyo twice a day to deliver onigiri - "the job has oddly specific requirements for the delivery person, which includes purchasing a pork and egg onigiri from a specific store, and then delivering it."
What is butter chicken? Isn't it curry? | South China Morning Post - "For Raghav Jaggi, however, this aromatic staple is more than a taste of home – it’s his family’s legacy. His grandfather, Kundan Lal Jaggi, dedicated his life to tandoori cuisine and is one of three Punjabi Hindu refugees celebrated for inventing butter chicken... there’s no denying the dish has helped popularise Indian cuisine globally... a busload of refugees came late to the restaurant in search of a meal, but there were only a few dry tandoori chickens left. “There were truckloads of refugees coming into the area, and at that time you never refused food to anyone”... Kundan Lal Jaggi decided to create a simple sauce of cream, tomatoes and a few spices infused with the smoky tandoori chicken, “so that people could use the naan and dip it into the gravy if they were not able to get a bite of chicken”. “It was rich enough to give them enough [sustenance] to survive another day, and it was totally by chance. Everyone loved the dish so much they asked for it again the next day. And the day after, the same thing happened,” Jaggi says. It was so popular, it was made a permanent fixture on the menu and became one of the dishes that defined the restaurant... Jaggi says his grandfather invented a number of dishes at Moti Mahal that are still enjoyed today, including dal makhani, which has also found global fame... Mitra still remembers the first time he tried butter chicken as a 12-year-old. It was the first time he had eaten meat, and “the smokiness, the texture and flavour was something totally unique”. “It was a turning point in my life. I said, ‘I am not going to eat vegetables any more’... Last year, Jaggi and his childhood friend Amit Bagga opened Daryaganj, a new restaurant chain in Delhi, as a tribute to his grandfather’s legacy and named after the area where Kundan Lal Jaggi opened his first restaurant. Their four venues celebrate north Indian cuisine – including butter chicken – using Kundan Lal Jaggi’s original recipes. Unsurprisingly, butter chicken and dal makhani make up 43 per cent of all orders.”
Danger's Deliverance - "Challenging young people incrementally, and exposing them to dangers, can make them stronger and more resilient, or as Nassim Taleb says: anti-fragile. Sports — without the participation trophies — offers modest hardship, both physical and emotional (when losing). Nations like Spain, Italy, and France, where drinking wine with meals is standard, were ranked as the least risky by the World Health Organization. And “resilience [drug and alcohol] education” trains young adults to make their own decisions than do inanely authoritarian “just say no” type efforts... The saving power in nuclear weapons is in preventing similarly horrendous invasions in the future. Since their invention in 1945, the number of deaths in battle has declined 95 percent globally. After India and Pakistan got the bomb the number of battle deaths also declined 95 percent. There’s no mystery why. Nations with nuclear weapons pointed at each other exercise greater restraint. They fight skirmishes not full-scale wars. As such, the best part of a nuclear-armed North Korea and Iran means the U.S. won’t replicate the idiocy of its invasion of Iraq. But won’t more nations with nuclear weapons increase the chance that a weapon will be used in the future? The opposite appears to be the case. The closest humankind came to nuclear war was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1961 — 16 years after the invention of the bomb. Since then, nations have put in place numerous safeguards to prevent against the accidental, unauthorized, and irrational use of a nuclear bomb. As a result, the number of close calls relating to the fearful technology has declined significantly over the last 50 years, even as the number of nations with the bomb doubled, from five to 10... In her 1966 book, Purity and Danger, the anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that our underlying belief systems, or ideologies, unconsciously determine what we believe is dangerous. We fear what we hate, and vice versa. In the late 1960s, environmentalists influenced by the misanthropic 19th century economist, Thomas Malthus, feared that the cheap energy provided by nuclear plants would result in overpopulation and overconsumption. These fears were intertwined and inseparable from fears of the bomb. Anti-nuclear groups began a concerted fear-mongering campaign, which aroused latent fears of radiation and nuclear weapons within the population, and tied them to an ideological vision of a non-nuclear world. The success of anti-nuclear campaigning was greatly aided by a generational shift in attitudes toward danger in general."
Chinese Words Aren't Magical Keys to National Plans - "Imagine that you are cornered at a party when the topic of race comes up. Your interlocutor tells you that, in the English language, “race” can refer to both a competition wherein one tries to outrun the others and a visually identifiable group of people sharing common ancestry. It is no wonder that racism has been such an intractable issue in the Anglosphere; the very word embodies a sense of competition among different peoples. You quickly spot a friend on the other side of the room because you understand using a literal reading of a vocabulary item to explain the origins, evolution, and persistence of racism in the Anglosphere is completely ridiculous. For Chinese speakers, however, this is a frustratingly common experience. The sheer novelty and exoticism of a character-based Eastern language to most English readers mean these spurious dissections of Chinese words can easily be passed off as impressive sociolinguistic insight. The nature of characters themselves, and the common but wrong idea that they’re pictographs, makes this tempting. But most characters in Chinese consist of two—or more—elements: a semantic component that relates to the meaning of the word and a phonetic one that indicates how it sounds. That phonetic component has no relationship to its meaning. The word for “mother,” for instance, contains “horse” because the word for horse is ma and so (pronounced slightly differently) is the word for mother... None of this stops glib foreign analysts from making grand declarations about the meaning of Chinese words based on entirely false linguistic premises with a heavy splash of Orientalism. I just call it phrenology for words... English draws heavily from foreign words in the construction of neologisms. Thus, we have “telephone,” the combination of the Greek words for “far” and “sound,” instead of the Chinese 电话, literally “electric” plus “speech.”... People seem to assume that since the two morphemes 电 and 话 are common words encountered in normal context (unlike tele and phone), then Chinese people surely must be reading them literally. But that is not how people parse language, unless you’re the kind of person who refuses to hire a babysitter for fear of crushing your precious child. Take the word for “compatriot,” 同胞, used by mainland Chinese (in a way sometimes considered rather patronizing) to refer to Taiwanese people. The word is literally the combination of “same” and “placenta, womb.” On this basis, Conal Boyce of Century College argues in the peer-reviewed Journal of Political Risk that the term constitutes “further evidence of a psychic illness that is built into the very bedrock of the culture, so that all Chinese are joined at the hip by a shared Same‑Womb fetish that underpins their We‑Chinese fixation.” Another common example is for “safety” or “security,” 安全. The word is composed of the characters for “peace” and “total, complete.” David Shambaugh in his book China Goes Global: The Partial Power translates the term as “complete tranquility,” which helps us understand why China apparently views security “in more comprehensive terms” than others. The very concept and word rendered in Chinese, he writes, say “more about China’s internal order than external threats to security,” somehow. The word, pronounced anquan in Standard Mandarin, also exists in both Japanese, read as anzen, and Korean, anjeon, but Shambaugh doesn’t extend the anecdote outside Chinese borders. By far the most popular target of Chinese word phrenology is the word for crisis, 危机. There is an entire Wikipedia entry on the Chinese word for crisis, in fact, because dating back to at least John F. Kennedy, Westerners have loved to awe at the fact that the two constituent characters are “danger” plus “opportunity.” This is technically true in the same sense that the opposite of pro-gress is Con-gress: It’s a selective interpretation of morphemes divorced from actual etymology and is best left for a fortune cookie or motivational horoscope. Phrenology for words further echoes the once fashionable Sapir-Whorf view of language and thought. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, first formulated in the 1920s, posited that the contours of human languages specifically shape speakers’ ability to perceive and understand the world around them. In other words, how you speak and how you think are inextricably linked. Word phrenologists take this one step further: How the people speak and how a state acts are inextricably linked. In a bold Substack letter, Bruno Maçaes, a former Portuguese official who writes frequently about China but does not read Chinese, argues that Chinese words “operate without the dualistic divide between empirical reality and a transcendental realm of language.”"
Also headlined: "Why Do Analysts Keep Talking Nonsense About Chinese Words?"
This is related to the etymological fallacy
Innovation Almost Bankrupted LEGO - Until It Rebuilt with a Better Blueprint - "LEGO had created an innovative culture that seemingly would have been the envy of any firm. “LEGO followed all the advice of the experts,” said Robertson. “And yet it almost went bankrupt.” Robertson’s forthcoming book, Brick by Brick: How LEGO Reinvented Its Innovation System and Conquered the Toy Industry, was the basis for the seminar titled, “Learning From Failure in Innovation.” The LEGO story, according to Robertson, lies at the heart of why companies should not blindly follow the typical mantras of innovation. Management and evaluation must be at the heart of any innovation strategy, he noted, and although it is generally not good for a firm to remain stagnant, the reality is that unbridled innovation in the vein of LEGO may not be the answer, either." "If you don't disrupt yourself, someone else will"
Tasha Kheiriddin: O'Toole gets last laugh over progressives' tempest in a beer can - "Losing your lunch over O’Toole’s lame tweet when the government of the day is mired in multiple military sex scandals is disingenuous to the extreme. It is far more eye-rolling to see Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s staff deflect questions on the Vance affair than to see O’Toole mugging for the camera with a beer."
Conrad Black: Erin O'Toole's tacit support for COVID policy has been a grievous mistake - "the Conservatives [are] the most unsuccessful principal political party in any important country in the world... Our politicians are never more contemptible than when jointly celebrating the solidarity of their governments in the imposition of ghastly misconceived policy... Canada had the worst record of any advanced country in protecting its elderly from COVID. And everyone knew a year ago that the survival rate in the whole population was approximately 98 per cent and over 99 percent for those in good health below the age of 65. Yet we have persisted with these insane lockdowns and intensified them in recent days... the Trudeau government’s pretense to protecting our future by subsidizing endless sustainable energy boondoggles and making war on Canada’s oil and gas industry and the provinces where it chiefly operates, and on not lifting a purposeful finger to become petroleum self-sufficient and to pursue our potential as a petroleum exporter... the third thunderbolt that should be hurled in the face of this incompetent regime is Justin Trudeau’s claim that for 400 years Canada has been engaged in cultural genocide against the indigenous peoples. This is an almost complete falsehood. There have been many mistakes, there is much to be done and reparations will have to be made. But this government is responsible for encouraging a political ambience in which the distinguished founder of our country, John A. Macdonald, has been repeatedly likened to Adolf Hitler and other monstrous criminals of world history and Canadians have, through their elected leader, groveled and abased ourselves with the incessant confession of genocidal acts. It is a blood libel on all non-indigenous Canadians and the author of it is unfit to be the head of the country’s government. Instead of mounting this counter-offensive, (as Macdonald, Brian Mulroney, and even John Diefenbaker would have done), the Conservatives have allowed the liberals to make the running, have implicitly approved their goals, and then tried the most unpromising form of catch-up sport by claiming that they, the Conservatives, could do a better job of achieving Liberal goals than the Liberals could. This is essentially how the Conservatives have lost 24 of the last 36 federal elections since the rise of Wilfrid Laurier in 1896, (compared to 13 losses in 25 elections since 1929 by the British Labour Party and for the U.S. Democrats, 24 of the 41 elections since the first Republican victory in 1860-just 16 Republican to 15 Democrat since 1900). Canada’s Conservatives have been astonishingly unsuccessful, and they are at it again."
Carson Jerema: Why Erin O'Toole's strategy to move to the centre should be abandoned - "The Conservatives’ third defeat at the hands of Justin Trudeau and the Liberals should be considered a rebuke of the party’s strategy to tack hard towards the so-called centre. It definitely shouldn’t mean that the party should try even harder to moderate itself, as leader Erin O’Toole suggested in his concession speech . Instead, the lesson the Conservatives should learn from this loss is that they’d be better off selling their own ideas to voters, rather than watered-down Liberal, or even NDP, policies... these are not policies designed to attract workers, but to attract union bosses. And in that regard, they failed to generate a single endorsement from labour groups, which instead backed either the NDP or the Liberals. Union groups even called O’Toole “ dangerous .”... Centre-right parties are often branded as misers for wanting to shrink the size of government, but rather than ditch their principles, they should reframe them as being better for average people. Yes, deregulation and tax cuts benefit corporate owners and managers, but they also benefit people who those owners and managers might employ. The more businesses that are freed from government shackles, the more options there are for workers."
Jamil Jivani: Erin O'Toole privileged liberal elites over his own conservative base - "Column after column, and talking head after talking head, insisted that the Conservative Party of Canada could win, if only conservatives would better appeal to liberal elites by mirroring their positions on social issues while doing nothing to challenge the increasing power of foreign corporations in our country, such as the big tech firms. Under Erin O’Toole’s leadership, the ivory tower commentariat got their way. And they’ve been proven wrong. In the 2021 election, their strategy failed in many parts of Canada, including the Greater Toronto Area where it was supposed to be most effective. And now, with O’Toole no longer the leader, we’ve seen their strategy can’t even unite a caucus."
Meme - Barbaric Red: "I have a confession. When my hubby gets stuck on a part of a video game for a long period of time I will look up the solution on my phone and then give him vague suggestions to push him in the right direction.. I've been doing this for 6 years.."
The Story Behind That Dinosaur Spider-Man Meme - "Sauron tells Spider-Man his intentions, and is asked: "You can rewrite DNA on the fly, and you're using it to turn people into dinosaurs? But with tech like that, you could cure cancer." Sauron now infamously responds that the charge may be true. But Sauron doesn't want to cure cancer: "I want to turn people into dinosaurs.""
Meme - "What are y'all going to do once communism is achieved"
"Building gardens, teaching classes on my farm, creating organizing spaces, and cultivating resources for my community. So basically what I'm planning to do anyway but without fighting capitalism."
"YOUR farm?"
Are Computers Already Smarter Than Humans?
Google's new artificial intelligence bot thinks gay people are bad
Single in Denmark? Prepare for birthday spice attacks - "young unmarried Danes have been taunted with the prospect of a life of singledom by being showered with spices on milestone birthdays. A single male is a Pebersvend while an unmarried woman is referred to as a Pebermø or a ‘pepper-maiden’. “When you turn 25, you get cinnamon-d,” says The Viking: “I got doused in the stuff by my friends, from the moment I woke up in the morning. I tried to wash it off but every time I got out of the shower, they’d just attack again. So I went outside. But they tied me to a lamppost and gave me swimming goggles to wear and threw more of the stuff at me. Then we all went and got drunk.”... “Then when you hit 30, if you’re still not married, you’re upgraded.” “Ooh!” “To pepper.” “Oh.” “I had water thrown on me and then pepper, to help it stick. Head to toe. But sometimes people use eggs for this. Helps with adhesion.”... “If you’re unmarried at 30, you can also expect to be given at least one peppermill as a gift. And your friends build a big sculpture of a peppermill for you, usually out of oilcans. Though these often end up looking less like a spice grinder and more like genitalia.” “Why?” I ask, baffled. He shrugs and offers me the age-old explanation for Denmark’s stranger customs: “Tradition.”"
BMA head says forcing GPs to do more face-to-face appointments is 'harassment' and 'discrimination' - "Creating “league tables” to force GPs to provide more face-to-face appointments is “harassment, discrimination, [and] victimisation,” the BMA Council Chair said. A new £250 million support package for general practice was announced by the Government this week, including plans to publish league tables showing how many in-person consultations GPs held. The worst-performing practices will be “named and shamed” and denied access to the new fund... Dr Chaand Nagpaul, the British Medical Association’s council chair, said on Sunday that if practices were employees the treatment would amount to “harassment, discrimination, victimisation"."
Weaponising anti-discrimination and workplace safety laws because you don't want to do your job and reveal if you meet your KPIs is a novel tactic. Hopefully the public are outraged.
Student would not have died if he’d seen GP face-to-face, family says - "A law student described as “caring, charismatic and funny” would not have died if he had been seen face-to-face by a GP, say his family. David Nash, mature student and musician 26, had four remote consultations with doctors and nurses at a Leeds GP practice over a 19-day period before his death on 4 November 2020. None of the clinicians spotted that he had developed mastoiditis in his ear which caused a brain abscess, sparking meningitis"
Lucky there was no "harassment"
Trudeau Minister Bill Blair's team endorses ban on criminal background checks - "the unemployment rate for convicted felons lies at around 50 percent... Blair believes these universal background checks are discriminatory, following in the path of provinces like BC, Ontario and Quebec... Canada's leading guns right didn't take too kindly to this news: "we're now in clown country, where Canadian employers have no right to know if they’re hiring violent criminals." They "protect violent offenders," she added. "But when it comes to legal gun owners, they background check us every day.""
And when they did that in the US, young black men suffered
A YouTuber bet a physicist $10,000 that a wind-powered vehicle could travel twice as fast as the wind itself – and won - "Blackbird is so counterintuitive, in fact, that less than a week after Muller released his video (below), Alexander Kusenko, a professor of physics at UCLA, emailed to inform him that it had to be wrong. A vehicle like that would break the laws of physics, Kusenko said."
"If you disagree with a scientist about science, you are wrong"
'There are quite many SIA girls in KTVs': Singapore hostess spills the beans on ins and outs of industry - "these girls are treated as prized commodities by both KTV owners and patrons alike. For one, the Singapore Girl doesn't share the same waiting area as the other hostesses. "Inside the KTV, there are two waiting areas. One is for 'normal' Singaporean girls and the other one is all for the 'SIA stewardess'. They'll be very clear about this," Amy said. She went on to mention that the "SIA girls" have "rates that are usually higher than normal Singaporean girls." With the premium rates come higher expectations. Amy added: "If the customer chooses an 'SIA stewardess', that means she'd have to maintain her standards. Similar to what she usually does as an air stewardess." On top of that, the "SIA girl" is also expected to hold her liquor better than other KTV hostesses... Ladies working in KTV lounges come from a plethora of countries including Singapore, but the Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese girls aged between 18 and 40 form the bulk of hostesses in the KTVs here... She has also seen a rise in the number of local hostesses at one particular KTV lounge as of late, adding: "Since the beginning of this year, the number of Singaporean hostesses has grown from zero to over 100." This spike in numbers could be due to the lure of high earnings in a short period of time, she suggested. A hostess can make between $300 and $500 per night from drinking with customers for three to four hours, but things do get physical in the rooms. Depending on the customer's behaviour, a hostess' acceptance of his advances may range "from kissing to hugging, maybe touching each other to stripping," Amy shared. A hostess' earnings for the night can go up to $1,000 if she "wants to go further to earn the extra tips" by offering "discreet services" outside KTVs. Another method of stacking money fast is for a hostess to be a butterfly within the KTV lounge. This means that they will try to go to as many rooms and entertain as many customers as possible in one night. Amy said: "The butterfly is usually done by the foreign hostesses. Usually, the local hostesses are more conservative and prefer to sit in the same room for the whole night." As for Amy herself, she told AsiaOne that she has two children to take care of at home. That's why the single mum felt that "being a hostess is a good job [for her] because the timings are flexible and the working hours are shorter."... While they usually spend at least $800 at a KTV lounge, Amy has seen instances where customers spend up to $7,000 to book one of the bigger rooms for the night. Given how expensive a night out at the KTV is, it's no surprise that regular patrons are "bosses of companies or entrepreneurs running their own businesses." Visiting the KTVs offers customers an escape from reality, Amy suggested. "They probably don't have a very good relationship at home and they tend to seek happiness in the KTVs.""
Far-left firebrands who led Lambeth Council at time of child abuse scandal - "More than 700 child abuse victims in the care of a notorious hard-Left council were 'pawns in a toxic power game' local leaders were having with Margaret Thatcher's Government in the 1980s, a damning inquiry has found. Frequent and vicious abuse by paedophiles was allowed to go on while the leaders of Lambeth Council in South London were more focused on opposing the ruling Conservatives - with the children treated as 'worthless'... While nationally-known Labour leaders such as Ted Knight and Linda Bellos postured against the Government and condemned racism, social workers treated children with 'callous disregard' and allowed paedophiles free rein... It told how 'bullying, intimidation, racism and sexism thrived within Lambeth Council', all of which was set within a context of corruption and financial mismanagement which permeated much of the council's operations. The report said senior council officials who tried to rein in corruption were threatened - and levels of intimidation against staff deepened when one official who resisted corruption was murdered in a crime that went unsolved."
Full stop is 'intimidating' to young people who interpret it as a sign of anger, linguists say - "The study involved 126 undergraduates and the researchers found that text messages ending in the most final of punctuation marks – eg 'lol.', 'let's go to Nando's.', 'send nudes.' – were perceived as being less sincere. Unusually, texts ending in an exclamation point – 'lmao!', 'just a cheeky one!', 'what body part even is that? I hope it's your arm!' – are deemed heartfelt or more profound."
Chinese-Made Smartphones Are Secretly Stealing Money From People Around The World - "Preinstalled malware on low-cost Chinese phones has stolen data and money from some of the world's poorest people... Mxolosi’s Tecno W2 was infected with xHelper and Triada, malware that secretly downloaded apps and attempted to subscribe him to paid services without his knowledge... Michael Kwet, a visiting fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School who received his doctorate in South Africa, called the idea of Chinese-made phones extracting data and money from people living in poverty “digital colonialism.”... Mxolosi said he had no idea which company made his phone. He was surprised and disappointed to hear it was a Chinese company. “Oh god. That means the Chinese are just ripping us off left, right, and center,” he said, comparing his malware-riddled smartphone to designer knockoffs made in China that flood South Africa. “We are getting [counterfeit versions] of clothing that are made in the US. They come in and make them with bad quality.”"
France vows to deport family of Muslim girl 'beaten for dating a Christian' - "France's interior minister has vowed to deport the family of a Bosnian Muslim girl who was allegedly beaten and had her head shaved for dating a Christian. The 17-year-old was left with a broken rib and multiple bruises after the attack in Besançon, 70 miles north of Geneva... A survey by Pew Research in 2015 found that just 15 per cent of Bosnian Muslims would be comfortable with their son or daughter marrying a Christian"
Islamophobia!