How Do You Cure a Compassion Crisis? (Ep. 444) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "TRZECIAK: So, approximately one-third of patients that go through the experience of critical illness in an I.C.U. end up making diagnostic criteria for P.T.S.D. at 30 days. Even if you just come to the E.R. with a life-threatening medical emergency, 25 percent of those patients end up making diagnostic criteria for P.T.S.D. at 30 days.
Here’s the hypothesis Brian Roberts wanted to explore: that treating E.R. and I.C.U. patients with more compassion might decrease the prevalence of P.T.S.D.
TRZECIAK: And what he found was that more compassion from the patient’s perspective was associated with lower development of P.T.S.D. at 30 days...
Compassion actually takes almost no time. Like, less than a minute. There was a randomized controlled trial from Johns Hopkins in a cancer population, and the primary outcome measure was anxiety. If you have cancer or somebody close to you has, you know that anxiety is pretty important. And what they found is that the compassionate care had a significantly better effect on the patient’s anxiety level. But what was most striking is that it only took 40 seconds for the intervention. And we found five other studies which show that it is less than a minute. And some people would argue there should be no time dimension at all. Because it doesn’t take any extra time to treat somebody with compassion...
MAZZARELLI: So, compassion increased revenue and decreased costs.
How can compassion increase revenues?
MAZZARELLI: There’s patients who will pay more for that. We have data about hospitals that have higher margins that have better patient experience...
TRZECIAK: There is consistent evidence that when you care deeply for patients, and they know that, they’re more likely to take their medicine. And non-adherence to medical therapy in the U.S. alone accounts for somewhere between $100 and $280 billion of avoidable downstream healthcare costs.
MAZZARELLI: And if compassion is something that can help people be more adherent, even capturing a fraction of that could decrease costs in the healthcare system, which is approaching 19 percent of the G.D.P. That’s one way it can decrease costs. Another way is in studies where there’s really patient-centered care, the proportion of patients who were referred to specialists was 59 percent lower while those who underwent diagnostic testing was 84 percent lower...
TRZECIAK: So, there’s a whole section of the book dedicated to the data on quality of care. And we’ve found associations in the data between more caring and fewer errors...
Last year, the National Academy of Medicine published a report putting the rate of physician burnout in the U.S. between 40 and 54 percent. That’s roughly double the burnout rate among workers in other fields, even “after controlling for hours and other factors.” It’s also estimated that the rate of physician suicide is double that of the general population — between 300 and 400 doctors each year... It’s estimated that 44 percent of medical students suffer from burnout before they even make it to their residency.
RIESS: I talk to medical students and residents all the time. And they say, “When I chose this as a profession, I thought I’d be spending most of the time with patients.” But the average resident spends about 12 minutes a day with their patient. And the rest of the time is all work done through the computer...
Compassion is not a one-way street. Its benefits accrue not only to patients, they argue, but to doctors and nurses as well. Compassion, in other words, will heal the healers. Several studies have linked compassion or empathy to lower levels of burnout. It’s really hard for studies like that to prove causation, but researchers have documented physiological benefits of dispensing compassion. Sometimes it’s called “the helper’s high,” driven perhaps by a spike in endorphins. Dispensing compassion can also activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which produces a calming effect. Compassion — the thing that doctors need to show — is the very thing that doctors need. That, at least, is the argument put forth by Trzeciak and Mazzarelli...
TRZECIAK: You also realize that you can get better at compassion — it can be taught, it can be learned — and you have to be very intentional in practicing it every day... it’s not something that I say. Oftentimes it’s something that I don’t say. It’s just being present. I practice critical care and there are a lot of times when the outcome is not something that can be changed. And sometimes you just need to sit with people and their suffering. “You’re not going to go through this alone.” “I am here with you.”
The Downside of Disgust - Freakonomics - "Disgust doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it has ramifications.
CURTIS: So, people who are very high on the disgust scale often have comorbidities with other sorts of neuroticisms. So, we found, for example, that people who were high on disgust are also high on sex disgust and that makes it very hard to make a lasting bond in a relationship... I kept coming up with these lists of things that people all around the world found disgusting. And it was a motley collection of things. I couldn’t figure out what connected that all together. But then a colleague asked me to explain the cause of a strange parasitic disease. And I looked it up in a book about communicable diseases. And suddenly I realized all these things that people found disgusting were sitting in the index to this book. And I’m going, hang on, vomit. People find that disgusting. It makes you sick. Fallen hairs. People find that disgusting. Well, it’s a cause of ringworm. Food that’s gone off. That can cause typhoid, can cause diarrheal diseases. And the more I looked into it, the more I realized that there was a very obvious pattern here, that the things that everyone around the world seemed to regard as disgusting, they were all things that might harbor parasites and pathogens and so might make us sick. Being an evolutionarily-minded sort of person, I saw that this was basically an adaptation — something we have in our brain to make us behave in ways that avoid us getting sick...
It turns out there are different categories of things that might make us sick that we find disgusting... There’s disgust about hygiene. There’s disgust related to certain types of animals and insects. There’s disgust related to sex. Disgust related to people who are atypical in their appearance — deformed or “not normal” tends to unfortunately evoke a sense of disgust. If you meet somebody with a lesion, with an infected wound, people do tend to find that disgusting. Types of food, particularly food that smells funny or has gone off. Those are the six disgust categories...
I’ve got a collection of the words from all over the world, and it’s quite surprising how many use this onomatopoeic “blech” or “ick” or “ugh” — it does seem to be almost a universal language. It’s to do with the gorge rising. It’s to do with this idea that your body is preparing itself for the ingestion of something that might make it sick...
DUBNER: You’ve noted that people are much less disgusted by the notion of eating rotten food when they’re very hungry. Also, that people are less disgusted by certain sexual matters when they’re aroused. So, how malleable is our disgust system?
CURTIS: Our motives compete for our attention at every moment. And the one which is the strongest is the one that’s going to win... if it’s a long time since you’ve had a shag, you’re going to be much more likely to be attracted by the somewhat smelly, greasy hunk who’s proposing himself to you than if you had a good one the day before. So, it’s not your level of disgust that’s going up and down. It’s the trade-off that you’re making that’s going up and down. If you haven’t eaten for weeks, the sandwich that has got mold on it — you might scrape the mold off, but you’re going to eat it...
What we find repugnant in one era may be standard in another. This concept holds not just for what we eat but what we believe, how we behave. Slavery, for instance, was for centuries treated like a standard business practice. On the other hand, consider life insurance. Until the middle of the 19th century, it was considered, as the sociologist Viviana Zelizer once wrote, “a profanation, which transformed the sacred event of death into a vulgar commodity.”
Let’s Be Blunt: Marijuana Is a Boon for Older Workers (Ep. 459) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "MACLEAN: Broadly, following a medical marijuana law, we found that implementation leads to reductions in self reports of chronic pain, and improved the probability of reporting very good or excellent health. We also saw that individuals were better able to work — that is, they were better able to engage in paid employment — following a medical marijuana law. So we saw increases in the probability of working full-time. We saw increases in the number of hours worked. But what we didn’t see is changes in the probability of working. We weren’t seeing folks being drawn into the labor market or perhaps returning from retirement. But amongst those who remained employed, we were seeing that they were more likely to work full-time, and they worked more hours per week.
So this suggests that older workers are significantly more able to work if they have access to medical marijuana. The next couple studies Maclean and her co-authors did looked at workers’ compensation claims...
MACLEAN: We found that there was a reduction in workers’ compensation claiming of about 7 percent... We found that the effects were concentrated amongst the older adults, where we saw about a 13 percent reduction in the probability of receiving workers’ compensation income. Amongst the younger adults we didn’t find any statistically significant evidence that there were changes in workers’ compensation income receipt.
The researchers then did the same analysis for states that did and did not legalize recreational marijuana. Now they found even larger declines in workers-comp. claims among older workers...
MACLEAN: There’s a really interesting discussion to be had, this tradeoff that the employer may face in terms of drug testing when it comes into the space of marijuana. If you think about the different drugs, things like cocaine or other perhaps harder drugs than marijuana, many of those harder drugs or alcohol will leave the system much faster than marijuana will. Marijuana can remain in the system for weeks or perhaps even a month. So if you’re thinking about drug testing, there’s this sort of perverse incentive. You could incentivize workers to shift towards substances that leave the body more quickly, which may not be desirable. I’ve only heard this discussion amongst employers. I myself have not seen any evidence. But I do think it’s an interesting question, and highlights the difficulty with having these legalized substances...
You can think about marijuana and opioids as being substitutes, therapeutic substitutes. And in a variety of studies based on a range of different populations, we do see that when you legalize marijuana recreationally, medically, too, we see reductions, sometimes quite large, in terms of opioid-related mortality. And we see across Medicaid populations, Medicare populations, private insurance, we see reductions in opioid prescriptions...
DUBNER: So given what you’ve been learning about marijuana generally, would your recommendation be that legalization of medical and even recreational marijuana is, on balance, good policy?
MACLEAN: I would be supportive of it, yes... I’m thinking about adult legalization. Now, I’m not so naive that if you say 21 is the age that no one under 21 is going to use the drug. So I think that is true. As I said earlier, no policy decision is easy. You have to think about both the costs and benefits. What we have to think about is what is best for society. We look right now and we see people being incarcerated for many, many years for marijuana use, for marijuana sales. I have to think about that alongside some of these other costs that you have mentioned if we were to legalize. If you look at public support, it has been trending upwards over time...
DUBNER: You found that people who drink alcohol tend to exercise more than people who don’t drink alcohol... I have a doctor friend who tells me that her most serious patients, the ones who have the most serious conditions, are ones who drink a lot — which is not surprising, because we know that alcohol consumption has a lot of health deficits — and, she said, the ones who don’t drink at all. She said her abstainers have a lot of conditions. Now, again, I wondered about that. Could it be that they abstain because they’ve had conditions and they’re concerned?"
This Is Your Brain on Pollution - Freakonomics - "HEBLICH: In cities in the Western Hemisphere, winds blow from the west to the east, and you might observe that in a lot of these cities, east sides are more deprived.
Deprived meaning: lower-income. There are of course exceptions, but the general rule is that the east side of many cities in the western hemisphere are poorer than the west side...
HEBLICH: After coal smoke came in, we see a re-sorting of poor households into the east side. We have data from 1817, which is before coal smoke was a main fuel for industrialization. And we find that in 1817, in the wind direction where coal smoke would blow to, doesn’t have an effect...
LA NAUZE: I had been reading the literature on the effects of air pollution on productivity, but also other behaviors — for example, crime — and knowing that a leading hypothesis for those effects was really this cognitive impact. So, there’s a literature showing that the test scores of high school students is negatively impacted by exposure to particulate matter. But we didn’t, at that stage, have much evidence for the cognitive effects in adults. And that makes sense, because we don’t regularly sit high school exams every year as adults.
There was one piece of evidence for the cognitive effects of pollution on adults. It came from a paper that analyzed baseball umpires...
LA NAUZE: They are able to compare the quality of umpires’ decisions on days of high-pollution exposure and low-pollution exposure.
And they did find that umpires made more mistakes when they were in a place that had a high pollution level on that day...
GREENSTONE: I stumbled upon an example from China... the Huai River winter heating policy. It dates back to when China was much less wealthy. And there just weren’t enough resources to provide winter heating for everybody. So they did something quite arbitrary and capricious; they drew a line across the middle of the country, and that line followed the Huai River... And they said, “Okay, if you live north of that line, where it’s colder, we’re going to install central heating systems. We’re going to give you free coal. So that’s in the north. In the south, the policy was, “Guys, you’re out of luck, no heating.”... If you were born just to the north of the river, those people — they were the intended beneficiary of this policy — on average, they’re living about three years less than people born just to the south. And that was such a striking finding that — at least to me — that I thought, “Wow.” I hadn’t realized quite how devastating air pollution was, even though I’ve been working on it."
The Tapeworm That Helps Ants Live Absurdly Long Lives - The Atlantic - "They are Temnothorax ants, and their elixirs of life are the tapeworms that teem within their bellies—parasites that paradoxically prolong the life of their host at a strange and terrible cost. A few such life-lengthening partnerships have been documented between microbes and insects such as wasps, beetles, and mosquitoes. But what these ants experience is more extreme than anything that’s come before, says Susanne Foitzik, an entomologist at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, in Germany, who studies the ants and their tapeworms. Infected Temnothorax ants live at least three times longer than their siblings, and perhaps much more, she and her colleagues report in a study published today in Royal Society Open Science. No one is yet sure when the insects’ longevity tops out, but the answer is probably in excess of a decade, approaching or even matching that of ant queens, who can survive up to 20 years... despite their old age, the ants’ bodies still bore the hallmarks of youth. They were difficult to distinguish from uninfected nurses, who are usually the most juvenile members of the colony’s working class. The tapeworm-laden ants didn’t just outlive their siblings, the team found. They were coddled while they did it. They spent their days lounging in their nest, performing none of the tasks expected of workers. They were groomed, fed, and carried by their siblings, often receiving more attention than even the queen—unheard of in a typical ant society—and gave absolutely nothing in return... The uninfected workers in parasitized colonies, they realized, were laboring harder. Strained by the additional burden of their wormed-up nestmates, they seemed to be shunting care away from their queen. They were dying sooner than they might have if the colonies had remained parasite-free. At the community level, the ants were exhibiting signs of stress, and the parasite’s true tax was, at last, starting to show... ants who spend all their time lazing around the house make for easy prey; hosts who are pampered and long-lived have a high chance of surviving until they’re eaten. The worm’s most ingenious move might play out in some ants’ final moments, as they trade their natural fear of intruders for a dollop of ennui. When Foitzik and her students crack open infected Temnothorax colonies, the parasitized workers do little more than stare expectantly skyward. “Everyone else is just taking the larvae and running,” Foitzik said. “The infected workers are just like, Oh, what’s going on?”"
Mass Effect Legendary Edition mod puts butt shots back into the game - "The modder who took out the gratuitous butt shots from Mass Effect 2 and 3 has now put them back in. It’s a comedic twist that has brought a long-running video game drama full circle. Scottina123, whose mod published last winter discreetly removed all the close-up shots of Miranda’s butt from the original Mass Effect series, now offers a mod that puts all the butt shots back into Mass Effect Legendary Edition. In the development of Legendary Edition, BioWare’s developers subtly acknowledged some of their questionable camera choices in the original games and changed the scenes for the remastered release."
Enterprising Girl Scout Sells Cookies Outside Marijuana Clinic - "If there's a merit badge for business savvy, 13-year-old Girl Scout Danielle Lei might well deserve one. Danielle, who set up her table of Girl Scout cookies outside The Green Cross medical marijuana dispensary in San Francisco earlier this week, sold a whopping 117 boxes in a single day. She appears to have tapped into a niche market fueled by the drug's well-known propensity to stimulate appetite."
Empathy Is Tearing Us Apart | WIRED - "APSR—one of the alpha journals in political science—published a study which found that “empathic concern does not reduce partisan animosity in the electorate and in some respects even exacerbates it.”... their findings are in many ways consistent with conclusions reached by other scholars in recent years. But the view of empathy that’s emerging from this growing body of work hasn’t much trickled down to the public... high-empathy people view the out group more unfavorably (relative to their own group) than low-empathy people; and that they may even take more delight in the suffering of some out-group members
People who love empathy get very upset whenever I produce the research
Frozen pizza did more for people than the washing machine! - "The Plough
The S-bend
Flushing toilets had previously foundered on the problem of smell: the pipe that connects the toilet to the sewer will also let odours waft back up — unless you can create some kind of airtight seal
Banks
TV Dinners
Conventional wisdom says that the washing machine has done more than any other invention to change people’s home lives. But conventional wisdom is forgetting about the frozen pizza. A washing machine is clean and efficient, and removes work that was always drudgery. But all the research data proves it didn’t save a lot of time, because before the washing machine we didn’t wash our clothes very often. When it took all day to wash and dry a few shirts, people would use replaceable collars and cuffs to hide the grime. But we cannot skip many meals in the way we can skip the laundry. We might be willing to stink, but we were never willing to starve. Fifty years ago, many married women spent two or three hours a day preparing food, compared with the 45 minutes they spend today (although that is still much more than men, who spend just 15 minutes a day). The reason for this shift is because of a radical change in the way the food we eat is prepared. And the symbol of this change is the introduction, in 1954, of the TV dinner. Presented in a space-age aluminium tray, and made so that the meat and vegetables all require the same cooking time, the ‘frozen turkey tray TV dinner’ was developed by bacteriologist Betty Cronin, who worked for a food processing company looking for ways to keep profitable after the business of supplying rations to U.S. troops had dried up. Today we have not just the TV dinner but also chopped salad in bags, sliced bread, grated cheese, jars of pasta sauce, and chicken that comes plucked, gutted and full of sage and onion stuffing mix. Each innovation would seem bizarre to the older generation, but I’ve never plucked a chicken, and perhaps my children will never have to chop their own salads.
Containers
Department Stores"
A Thief Dines Out, Hoping Later to Eat In - The New York Times - "Every now and then, Gangaram Mahes slips on his best donated clothes and lives the high life. He strolls to a nice restaurant, sips a fine aperitif, savors a $50 meal and finishes with hot black coffee. The waiters call him sir, but Mr. Mahes could not dig a dollar from his pocket for a bus ride to heaven. He is a thief who never runs, a criminal who picks his teeth as the police close in. To be arrested, to go home to a cell at Rikers Island, is his plan when he unfolds his napkin. Homeless off and on for several years, he steals dinner from the restaurants because he wants the courts to return him to a place in New York where he is guaranteed three meals a day and a clean bed. In a prison system filled with repeat offenders, the 36-year-old Mr. Mahes is a serial diner. He has committed the same crime at least 31 times, according to his prison record, always pleads guilty and never urges his lawyer to bargain for a reduced sentence. In his eyes, he is just tunneling inside again, with a knife and fork... It is life in a cage, sometimes violent, often demeaning, but to Mr. Mahes it is better than drifting from shelter to shelter or living in cardboard boxes. There is order to prison, and you always dine on time, he said... In the past two years, he has seldom been free more than a few days before enjoying an illegal entree. He has patronized the American Festival Cafe and the Taj Mahal in Manhattan, and Tony Roma's in two boroughs. He chooses restaurants that are not too cheap, not too expensive. If a restaurant is too pretentious, it might not seat him. If it is too cheap, he might not be arrested for stealing its food. "If they really wanted to punish him," said Ms. Swarns, "they would stand outside Rikers and say, 'You go away.' " Instead, Mr. Mahes does 90 days for stealing fish. It costs taxpayers $162 a day to feed, clothe and house Mr. Mahes at Rikers Island. His 90-day sentence will cost them $14,580, to punish him for refusing to pay the $51.31 check. In five years he has cost them more than $250,000... Ms. Thompson said Mr. Mahes was not snatching bread crusts to keep from starving. "One of his meals cost $100""
Of course, if any restaurant recognised him and denied him service, at least today he could claim "racism" and get rich, and never need to do this again
Commentary: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a timely reminder of hard truths for Singapore - "Though rare, one hears arguments that Singapore should moderate our all-out pursuit of economic growth, or rethink the length of National Service, from time to time these days. As Mr Putin has shown, such sentiments can be dangerous."
Everything is used to justify NS. Even terrorism, which is dealt with by intelligence, special forces and policing, is used to justify NS. When you beg the question, you can argue anything.
I saw someone mocking criticism of Singapore's high defence spending, because Ukraine. I suggested that Ukraine meant that Singapore's defence budget needed to be doubled. But of course, given status quo bias this was dismissed
Australian citizen trapped in Israel since 2013 banned from leaving the country until 31 December 9999 - "An Australian citizen has been barred from leaving Israel, trapping him in the country for almost 8000 years after his Israeli wife filed a divorce case against him. Noam Huppert, 44, has been ordered by a court to either pay more than $3m in future child support payments or he is barred from leaving the country until 31 December 9999... “Since 2013, I am locked in Israel,” he said, adding that he is one of the Australian citizens who have been “persecuted by the Israeli ‘justice’ system only because they were married to Israeli women”... “If you’re planning on moving to Israel and starting a family there, you need to understand that the family laws are draconian and excessively discriminatory against men – that there are good chances that you will be treated as a criminal and relegated to the role of visitor (slash) ATM”"
Opinion | Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals. Discuss. - The New York Times - "Two similarly titled papers with markedly disparate conclusions illustrate the range of disagreement on this subject. “Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?” by Jaime Napier of N.Y.U. in Abu Dhabi and John Jost of N.Y.U., and “Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals, but Why?” by Barry R. Schlenker and John Chambers, both of the University of Florida, and Bonnie Le of the University of Rochester... Napier and Jost contend that their determinations are “consistent with system justification theory, which posits that viewing the status quo (with its attendant degree of inequality) as fair and legitimate serves a palliative function.” One of Napier and Jost’s studies “suggests that conservatism provides an emotional buffer against the negative hedonic impact of inequality in society.” In addition, they argue that rising levels of inequality have “exacerbated the happiness gap between liberals and conservatives, apparently because conservatives (more than liberals) possess an ideological buffer.” A very different view of conservatives and the political right emerges in Schlenker, Chambers and Le’s paper:
'Conservatives score higher than liberals on personality and attitude measures that are traditionally associated with positive adjustment and mental health, including personal agency, positive outlook, transcendent moral beliefs, and generalized belief in fairness. These constructs, in turn, can account for why conservatives are happier than liberals and have declined less in happiness in recent decades.'
In contrast to Napier and Jost’s “view that conservatives are generally fearful, low in self-esteem, and rationalize away social inequality,” Schlenker, Chambers and Le argue:
'Conservatives are more satisfied with their lives, in general and in specific domains (e.g., marriage, job, residence), report better mental health and fewer mental and emotional problems, and view social justice in ways that are consistent with binding moral foundations, such as by emphasizing personal agency and equity.'
Liberals, Schlenker and his co-authors agree,
'have become less happy over the last several decades, but this decline is associated with increasingly secular attitudes and actions (e.g., less religiosity, less likelihood of being married, and perhaps lessened belief in personal agency)... Conservatives generally score higher on internal control as well as the Protestant Work Ethic, which emphasizes the inherent meaningfulness and value of work and the strong linkage between one’s efforts and outcomes, and is positively associated with achievement. Liberals, on the other hand, are more likely to see outcomes as due to factors beyond one’s personal control, including luck and properties of the social system... Perceptions of internal control, self-efficacy, and the engagement in meaningful work are strongly related to life satisfaction. These differences in personal agency could, in and of themselves, explain much of the happiness gap.'
So too, in their view, does the liberal inclination to view morality in relative, as opposed to absolutist, terms, have consequences:
'A relativist moral code more readily permits people to excuse or justify failures to do the ‘‘right’’ thing. When moral codes lack clarity and promote flexibility, people may come to feel a sense of normlessness — a lack of purpose in life — and alienation. Further, if people believe there are acceptable excuses and justifications for morally questionable acts, they are more likely to engage in those acts, which in turn can create problems and unhappiness.'...
Newman argued that since “family ties and a strong sense of community and connectedness are key ingredients for a meaningful life,” it is possible that “if liberal agendas and ideologies inhibit social bonds and connections, it could lower people’s sense of meaning and purpose.”...
Wojcik, Ditto and four colleagues argue in “Conservatives Report, but Liberals Display, Greater Happiness” that “research suggesting that political conservatives are happier than political liberals is fully mediated by conservatives’ self-enhancing style of self-report.” Using what they call “behavioral measures,” the authors found that
'relative to conservatives, liberals more frequently used positive emotional language in their speech and smiled more intensely and genuinely in photographs. Our results were consistent across large samples of online survey takers, U.S. politicians, Twitter users, and Linked-In users.'"
Of course, the cope will be that conservatives are happy because they don't recognise the injustice of the world
Alessandra on Twitter - "Wikipedia defines Glenn Greenwald as a “far-right American journalist”. So anyone who disobeys progressive orthodoxy in any capacity, irrespective of their contributions to the Left, is now automatically defined as “far-right”."
Nobody should trust Wikipedia, says man who invented Wikipedia - "Larry Sanger, the man who co-founded Wikipedia, has cautioned that the website can’t always be trusted to give people the truth. He said it can give a “reliably establishment point of view on pretty much everything.”... He said it (Wikipedia) “seems to assume that there is only one legitimate defensible version of the truth on any controversial question. That’s not how Wikipedia used to be.”... “Very little of that can be found in Wikipedia. What little can be found is extremely biased and reads like a defence counsel’s brief, really”... He cautioned that “Wikipedia is known now by everyone to have a lot of influence in the world. So there’s a very big, nasty, complex game being played behind the scenes to make the article say what somebody wants them to say.”"
Glenn Greenwald on Twitter - "Ironically, I've been working for the last couple of months researching the manipulation and weaponization of Wikipedia by liberal editors. It's become useless except as an instrument of coercion and punishment for deviating from left-liberal dogma."
North Las Vegas Mayor switches from Democrat to Republican - "North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee has announced that he is switching his political affiliation from Democrat to Republican, citing a shift toward socialism."
The Real American Pie - "As an icon of the American way, apple pie is a johnny-come-lately, a usurper, a pale pretender to its pastry throne. The phrase as American as apple pie is of 20th-century origin and didn’t attain wide currency until the 1940s. Perhaps not coincidentally, the 40s are also when mince pie went into eclipse as our defining national dish. But to its 19th- and early-20th-century admirers, mince pie was “unquestionably the monarch of pies,” “the great American viand,” “an American institution” and “as American as the Red Indians.” It was the food expatriates longed for while sojourning abroad. Acquiring an appreciation for it was proof that an immigrant was becoming assimilated. It was the indispensable comfort dish dispatched to American expeditionary forces in World War I to reinforce their morale with the taste of home. “Mince pie is mince pie,” as an editorialist for the Washington Post put it in 1907. “There is no other pie to take its place. Custard pie is good and so is apple pie, but neither has the uplifting power and the soothing, gratifying flavor possessed by mince pie when served hot, with a crisp brown crust.” Moreover, unlike apple pie or anything else on the American menu before or since, mince pie dominated in multiple categories. It was beloved as an entree, as dessert, and, in parts of New England, as breakfast. And although more popular in winter than summer, and absolutely mandatory at Thanksgiving and Christmas, mince pie was eaten year round, unconfined to the holiday ghetto it now shares with iffy ritual foods like eggnog, green bean casserole, and marshmallow candied yams. Most remarkably, mince pie achieved and maintained its hegemony despite the fact that everyone—including those who loved it—agreed that it reliably caused indigestion, provoked nightmares, and commonly afflicted the overindulgent with disordered thinking, hallucinations, and sometimes death... The mince pie we speak of here bears only passing resemblance to present-day mincemeat pie, that gooey vegetarian article sitting next to the store-bought gingerbread men at office holiday parties. The mincemeat savored by our forebears was made with actual meat (beef, typically, or sometimes venison), flavored with substantial quantities of booze (usually brandy but sometimes rum and/or Madeira)... Several New England colonies likewise had laws against mince (and Christmas). Yet the dish somehow survived suppression, and as Puritan theocracy waned and a relative pluralism bloomed, it thrived. In an age before refrigeration, making mince was a useful way of preserving meat, and doubtless it provided a nice change from dried beef and salt pork. And preserve mince definitely did, thanks primarily to its gooey, concentrated sugars (which, as in jellies and preserves, keep bacteria at bay by sucking the moisture out of their bodies) and redolent spices (also powerful antibacterial agents). Among their many other amazing attributes, mince pies were said to remain “good” almost indefinitely... When the 18th Amendment went into effect in 1919, the national liquor and catering interests began lobbying and lawyering hard to create a loophole in the Dry Law that would exempt the culinary arts... mince itself could be retooled as a camouflaged liquor-delivery medium: In 1919 the Chicago Tribune reported that the average alcohol content of canned mince samples on display at a trade show for the hotel business had spiked to 14.12 percent, offering a far more efficient buzz than legal near beer, with its measly .5 percent... The family resemblance of old-fashioned mince to modern mincemeat is unmistakable, but the real deal is stronger and yet more subtle, miles deeper, and yields an infinitely more complex concert of flavors. The crazy taste is accompanied by a hot, fatty mouth feel that’s almost obscenely pleasing. It takes some getting used to, I will allow, but by my third slice I was pretty much hooked."
Are people in Kazakhstan really happier than in Japan? - Nikkei Asia - "Why do people in very poor countries say that they are happy but leave at the earliest opportunity? The answer lies in hedonic adaptation... Subjective indicators like "happiness" risk giving intellectual cover for governments to perform poorly. They can say, "Yes, our people are poor, but at least they are happy." When King Wangchuk declared happiness to be more important than income, the average Bhutanese was living on just $1 per day... A person earning $20,000 a year in India will report high levels of happiness since they are better off than the vast majority of Indians. On the other hand, an American making $60,000 will be less happy because many other Americans are also doing the same. Objectively, however, the average American has a far higher standard of living than even upper-class Indians... If governments really want to promote the well-being of their people, targeting happiness metrics is the wrong way to go about it. Instead, they must do the hard work of building institutions that provide people with the maximum freedom to pursue happiness on their own terms."
The canary resuscitator - "Canaries were used in mines from the late 1800s to detect gases, such as carbon monoxide. The gas is deadly to humans and canaries alike in large quantities, but canaries are much more sensitive to small amounts of the gas, and so will react more quickly than humans... The circular door would be kept open and had a grill to prevent the canary escaping. Once the canary showed signs of carbon monoxide poisoning the door would be closed and a valve opened, allowing oxygen from the tank on top to be released and revive the canary. The miners would then be expected to evacuate the danger area. So why is this my favourite object in our collections? Firstly, while I don’t advocate the use of animals in testing dangerous conditions, I am pleased that Haldane spared a thought for the canaries themselves and worked to make their job as non-lethal as possible. My impression from hearing about canaries in coal mines was that they were expected to die to warn people, so when I came across this object it was a huge relief (though my research on the topic has found less thoughtful cages). I’ve even read that many miners cared deeply for their canary companions, and some disliked the advent of electronic sensors in the mid-1980s because it meant they would lose this companionship"
