Malcolm X on White Liberals

There's a long quote that I've seen attributed to Malcolm X (Malik Shabazz) which I've been unable to find a source for. The closest I've found is a mid-2020 claim that it was from early 1963 (incidentally the page also quote mines Martin Luther King Jr to make it sound like he supported rioting)

The white liberal is the worst enemy to America, and the worst enemy to the black man. Let me explain what I mean by the white liberal.

In America there is no such thing as Democrat or Republican anymore. In America you have liberals and conservatives. The only people living in the past who think in terms of I’m a Democrat or Republican, is the American Negro. He’s the one that runs around bragging about party affiliation. He’s the one that sticks to the Democrat or sticks to the Republican.

But white people are divided into two groups, liberals and conservative. The Democrats who are conservative vote with the Republicans who are conservative. The Democrats who are liberal vote with the Republicans that are liberal. The white liberal aren’t white people who are for independence, who are moral and ethical in their thinking. They are just a faction of white people that are jockeying for power.

The same as the white conservative is a faction of white people that are jockeying for power. They are fighting each other for power and prestige, and the one that is the football in the game is the Negro, 20 million black people. A political football, a political pawn, an economic football, and economic pawn. A social football, a social pawn.

The liberal elements of whites are those who have perfected the art of selling themselves to the Negro as a friend of the Negro. Getting sympathy of the Negro, getting the allegiance of the Negro, and getting the mind of the Negro. Then the Negro sides with the white liberal, and the white liberal use the Negro against the white conservative. So that anything that the Negro does is never for his own good, never for his own advancement, never for his own progress, he’s only a pawn in the hands of the white liberal.

The worst enemy that the Negro have is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros, and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked, or deceived by the white liberal then Negros would get together and solve our own problems.

I only cite these things to show you that in America the history of the white liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems. Our problems will never be solved by the white man. The only way that our problem will be solved is when the black man wakes up, clean himself up, stand on his own feet and stop begging the white man, and take immediate steps to do for ourselves the things that we have been waiting on the white man to do for us. Once we do for self then we will be able to solve our own problems.

The white conservatives aren't friends of the Negro either, but they at least don't try to hide it. They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where he stands with them. But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling. The white liberals are more dangerous than the conservatives; they lure the Negro, and as the Negro runs from the growling wolf, he flees into the open jaws of the “smiling” fox. One is the wolf, the other is a fox. No matter what, they’ll both eat you."

One is tempted to say that it's just made up, but in researching its origins, I stumbled across a collection of his speeches, debates & interviews from 1960-1965 and the above looks like a creative writing exercise which expressed his views by paraphrasing & condensing things he actually said.

Here are the actual quotes that the above is inspired by (some of the repetitive content has been cut):

Harlem Freedom Rally (1960) 

We won’t follow any leader today who comes on the basis of political party. Both parties (Democrat and Republican) are controlled by the same people who have abused our rights, and who have deceived us with false promises every time an election rolls around

Open Mind Roundtable (October 15, 1961) 

Most of your white liberals who profess to love Negroes and who profess to be pushing for this integration thing, they themselves live as a rule in lily- white neighborhoods and sometimes they’re the first ones to put the FOR SALE sign on their door when a Negro who has fallen for this integration thing moves into their neighborhood. I think that it’s very hypocritical today for me as a black man and the white man to sit down with each other and profess that there is a great deal of love between us. I have to look at the white man as the son of the man who kidnapped my people and brought them here and enslaved them and he has to look at me as someone to whom he has done wrong. Always his guilt complex will have him on guard around me...

No, there’s no such thing as a sincere white liberal— listen I’m giving you my answer. You can hiss all night, that’s what the snake did in the Garden of Eden. Usually you’ll find, sir, that in any integrated group that the so-called Negro has, if you examine its composition, where the whites are concerned, they end up leading it, they end up ruling it, they end up controlling it.

Twenty Million Black People in a Political, Economic, and Mental Prison (January 23, 1963)

So, when these so-called Negroes who want integration try and force themselves into the white society, which doesn’t solve the problem—the Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us that that type of Negro is the one that creates the problem. And the type of white person who perpetuates the problem is the one who poses as a liberal and pretends that the Negro should be integrated, as long as he integrates someone else’s neighborhood. But all these whites that you see running around here talking about how liberal they are, and we believe everybody should have what they want and go where they want and do what they want, as soon as a Negro moves into that white liberal’s neighborhood, that white liberal is—well he moves out faster than the white bigot from Mississippi, Alabama, and from someplace else.

So we won’t solve the problem listening to that Uncle Tom Negro, and the problem won’t be solved listening to the so-called white liberal. The only time the problem is going to be solved is when a Black man can sit down like a Black man and a white man can sit down like a white man. And make no excuses whatsoever with each other in discussing the problem.

Alex Haley Interviews Malcolm X (May, 1963)

A man who tosses worms in the river isn’t necessarily a friend of the fish. All the fish who take him for a friend, who think the worm’s got no hook in it, usually end up in the frying pan. All these things dangled before us by the white liberal posing as a friend and benefactor have turned out to be nothing but bait to make us think we’re making progress. The Supreme Court decision has never been enforced. Desegregation has never taken place. The promises have never been fulfilled. We have received only tokens, substitutes, trickery and deceit.

The Old Negro and the New Negro (September, 1963)

Malcolm X: No, the South is no different from the North. Let me tell you the only difference. The white man in the South is a wolf. You know where he stands. When he opens his mouth and you see his teeth he looks vicious. Well, the only difference between the white man in the South and the white man in the North is that one is a wolf and this one is a fox. The fox will lynch you and you won’t even know you have been lynched. The fox will Jim Crow you and you don’t even know you’re Jim Crowed. And this is the basic difference between the southern white man and the northern white man.

Moderator: In other words, the northern white man is foxier than the southern white man.

Malcolm X: He is foxy. When he opens his mouth  and shows you his teeth you think he is smiling and when you look at a fox you think a fox is smiling, but actually the objective of the fox and the wolf is the same. They want to exploit you, they want to take advantage of you. Both are canine, both are dogs—there is no difference. Their methods might differ, but their objective is the same, and the southern white man and the northern white man are in the same category.

UC Berkeley (October 11, 1963)

We see masses of Black people who are thoroughly fed up with the deceit of the so-called white liberals, or the white so-called liberals. White liberals who have posed as our friends, white liberals who have been eager to point out what the white man in the South is doing to our people there, while they themselves are doing the same thing to us here in the North.

They have been making a great fuss over the South only to blind us to what is happening here in the North. And now that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad has opened the eyes of America’s 20 million Blacks, we can easily see that this white fox here in the North is even more cruel and more vicious than the white wolf in the South. The southern wolves always let you know where you stand. But these northern foxes pose as white liberals. They pose as your friend, as your benefactor, as your employer, as your landlord, as your neighborhood merchant, as your lawyer. They use integration for infiltration. They infiltrate all your organizations, and in this manner, by joining you, they strangle your militant efforts toward true freedom...

The worst housing conditions in America always exist in the so-called Negro community. Yet the white liberals, who own these run-down houses, force us to pay the highest rent... 

The real criminal is the white liberal, the political hypocrite. And it is these legal crooks who pose as our friends, force us into a life of crime, and then use us to spread the white man’s evil vices in our community among our own people...

When you tried to integrate the white community in search of better housing, the whites there fled to the suburbs. And the community that you thought would be integrated soon deteriorated into another all- Black slum. What happened to the liberal whites? Why did they flee? We thought that they were supposed to be our friends. And why did the neighborhood deteriorate only after our people moved in?

It is the tricky real estate agents posing as white liberal friends who encourage our people to force their way into white communities, and then they themselves sell these integrated houses at such high prices that our people again are forced to take in roomers to offset the high house notes. This creates in the new area the same overcrowded conditions, and the new community soon deteriorates into the same slum conditions from which we thought we had escaped. The only one who has benefited is the white real estate agent who poses as our friend, as a liberal, and who sells us the house in a community destined by his own greedy schemes to become nothing but a high-priced slum area... 

Can the whites vacate their jobs like they did their homes and their schools and move to the suburbs and create more jobs? No. Not without violence and bloodshed. The same white liberals who used to praise our people for their patient nonviolent approach have now become openly impatient and violent themselves in defense of their own jobs. Not only in the South but also in the North. Even here in the Bay Area...

Whenever you become fed up in this country with the white man’s brutality and you get set to take matters in your own hands in order to defend yourself and your people, the same government—and again I repeat, especially that Catholic administration in Washington, D.C.—tries to pacify our people with deceitful promises of tricky civil rights legislation that is never designed to be a true solution to our problem. Civil rights legislation will never solve our problems. The white liberals are nothing but political hypocrites who use our people as political footballs only to get bills passed that will increase their own power.

The present proposed civil rights legislation will give the present administration dictatorial powers and make America a legal police state, but still won’t solve the race problem. The present administration is only using civil rights as a political football to gain more legislation and power for itself. Our people are being used as pawns in the game of power politics by political hypocrites. They don’t want our people to listen to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad because they know he will make them—make us see them as they really are...

Question: Sir, you seem to interchange the term white liberal with hypocritical politician. I don’t believe this is true. I don’t believe that our white liberals are in office. They are, by the way, investigating—

Moderator: Do you have a question please?

Question: I just wondered why you interchanged these terms when they’re so evidently not interchangeable.

Malcolm X: Historically in America, the white liberal has been the one always supposedly who has the solution to the race problem. An example: the leading white liberal in American history was supposed to be Abraham Lincoln. He’s the one who has been dangled in front of our people as a God who brought us out of slavery into the promised land of freedom. Martin Luther King last year was begging President Kennedy to issue another Emancipation Proclamation. If the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln was authentic and produced the results that it was supposed to and if it had been sincere, it would have gotten results. Then Martin Luther King wouldn’t have to be begging for another proclamation of emancipation today.

And other times—the white liberals supposedly fought the Civil War to free the slaves, and our people are still slaves, still begging for freedom. Some more white liberals came along with the so-called Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and other amendments to the Constitution supposedly to solve our problem. The Constitution has been amended and the problem is still here. Nine white liberals on the Supreme Court bench came up with a desegregation decision in 1954 supposedly to desegregate the schools, and the schools haven’t been desegregated yet. Kennedy ran on a platform as a white liberal three years ago and said all he had to do was take out his fountain pen and put his name on some paper and our problem would be solved, and it was three years in office before he found where his fountain pen was, and the problem isn’t solved yet.

Columbia University (November 20, 1963)

Malcolm X: Most politicians don’t want to wake Negroes up. They want Negroes to register and stay asleep, so they can the Negro vote to their particular wagon. But you never hear any of the Negro leaders talking about waking the Negro up, make him intellectually and politically mature. They just say, “Get him to register.”And if he registers in the mental condition that he is now, any politician can come along and use him

So Mr. Muhammad says, “Wake up.” That is, “Think for yourself and then do whatever is good for yourself.” So the three candidates who are front running—I forget their names, but whoever they are it doesn’t make any difference to me. I would list them as foxes and wolves. Goldwater is a wolf. He lets you know where he stands. He doesn’t like Negroes. At least all of his pronouncements and behavior give Negroes the impression that he’s very vicious and dangerous, a wolf- type character. And as to the others...which one was it? 

Rockefeller.

Malcolm X: A fox. Foxes and wolves usually are of the same breed. They belong to the same family—I think it’s called canine. And the difference is that the wolf when he shows you his teeth, you know that he’s your enemy; and the fox, when he shows you his teeth, he appears to be smiling. But no matter which of them you go with, you end up in the dog house. And Negroes in New York State should probably be well acquainted with this because they have no more freedom, justice and equality here than they have anywhere else. The same thing is practiced in New York State as is practiced in Arizona and Mississippi. Only in New York it’s done in a more subtle manner. It’s done with a smile. It’s done in a friendly way. But all of the demonstrations that have been taking place here in New York City I think will well bear out what I’m saying. I make no distinction between a fox and a wolf other than distinction. One is a fox and the other is a wolf.

Question: How would you classify President Kennedy?

Malcolm X: Same. A fox. John F. That “F” stands for fox. He’s undoubtedly more foxier than any of the others because any time a man can become President and be in office three years and do as little for Negroes as he has done despite the fact that Negroes went for him 80% and he can still maintain the friendly image in the mind of Negroes, I’ll have to say he s the foxiest of the foxy.

Question: Out of these three candidates, whom would you vote for next year?

Malcolm X: I don’t think that if I was cornered by any fox or a wolf, that I would have to take a choice between either one. I don’t see any choice between a fox or a wolf. A fox is a fox and a wolf is a wolf—to me. Neither one is the lesser of two evils. Both of them are evil. And Negroes, when they become politically mature, I think will realize that you don’t have to throw the bullets out of your gun just because you have a gun. Likewise you should wait until you have a target and bring that target down. I think when Negroes become really mature, they won’t vote just because they can vote. Sometimes they’ll abstain. Ofttimes in a position (of abstaining?) is as effective in its results as an actual vote, as is proved in the UN. You have those who say “yes,” those who say “no,” and those who abstain. And those who abstain have just as much weight. And probably the most intelligent thing Negroes could do at this juncture would be to abstain and withhold their vote completely and make both the ox and the wolf fight it out among themselves...

You’ll notice that whenever Negroes attempt to set up an all-Negro anything, the Negro leaders of national stature knock it. Because, you see, Negroes of national stature aren’t really leaders of the Negro community, and they don’t go along with anything that’s really designed to solve the problem for the Negro community. They’re controlled their salaries are paid by what you call white liberals who are the most dangerous things in America, these things who call themselves white liberals. And so you’ll never find one of these nationally recognized Negroes going along with anything that’s all Negro or anything that’s all black because their own position stems from their ability to draw a paycheck, and they don’t feel that they can really draw a paycheck in any society that’s all black. They’re more interested in solving their own personal, individual problem than they are the masses of black people.

God’s Judgement of White America (December 4, 1963)

In this deceitful American game of power politics, the Negroes (i.e., the race problem, the integration and civil rights issues) are nothing but tools, used by one group of whites called Liberals against another group of whites called Conservatives, either to get into power or to remain in power. Among whites here in America, the political teams are no longer divided into Democrats and Republicans. The whites who are now struggling for control of the American political throne are divided into “liberal” and “conservative” camps. The white liberals from both parties cross party lines to work together toward the same goal, and white conservatives from both parties do likewise.

The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor; and by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political “football game” that is constantly raging between the white liberals and white conservatives.

Politically the American Negro is nothing but a football and the white liberals control this mentally dead ball through tricks of tokenism: false promises of integration and civil rights. In this profitable game of deceiving and exploiting the political politician of the American Negro, those white liberals have the willing cooperation of the Negro civil rights leaders. These “leaders” sell out our people for just a few crumbs of token recognition and token gains. These “leaders” are satisfied with token victories and token progress because they themselves are nothing but token leaders...

Think how the late President himself got into office by only scant margin which was “donated” to him by Negro voters, and think how many governors and other white politicians hold their seats (some by less than five thousand votes). Only then can you understand the importance of these white liberals place on their control of the Negro vote! The white liberals hate the Honorable Elijah Muhammad because they know their present position in the power structure stems form their ability to deceive and to exploit the Negro, politically as well as economically...

Once the Negro learns to think for himself, he will no longer allow the white liberal to use him as a helpless football in the white man’s crooked game of “power politics.”

Let us examine briefly some of the tricky strategy used by white liberals to harness and exploit the political energies of the Negro. The crooked politicians in Washington, D.C., purposely make a big noise over the proposed civil rights legislation. By blowing up the civil rights issue they skillfully add false importance to the Negro civil rights “leaders.” Once the image of these Negro civil rights “leaders” has been blown up way beyond its proper proportion, these same Negro civil rights “leaders” are then used by white liberals to influence and control the Negro voters, all for the benefit of the white politicians who pose as liberals, who pose as friends of the Negro.

The white conservatives aren’t friends of the Negro either, but they at least don’t try to hide it. They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where he stands with them. But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling. The white liberals are more dangerous than the conservatives; they lure the Negro, and as the Negro runs from the growling wolf, he flees into the open jaws of the “smiling” fox.

The job of the Negro civil rights leader is to make the Negro forget that the wolf and the fox both belong to the (same) family. Both are canines; and no matter which one of them the Negro places his trust in, he never ends up in the White House, but always in the dog house.

The white liberals control the Negro and the Negro vote by controlling the Negro civil rights leaders. As long as they control the Negro civil rights leaders, they can also control and contain the Negro’s struggle, and they can control the Negro’s so-called revolt. The Negro “revolution” is controlled by these foxy white liberals, by the government itself. But the black revolution is controlled only by God.

Harvard University (March 18, 1964)

Democrats, now after they’ve been in the White House awhile, use an alibi for not having kept their promise to the Negroes who voted for them. They say, “Well, we can’t get this passed or we can’t get that passed.” The present make-up of the Congress is 257 Democrats and only 177 Republicans. Now how can a party of Democrats that received practically the full support of the so-called Negroes of this country and control nearly two-thirds of the seats in Congress give the Negro an excuse for not getting some kind of legislation passed to solve the Negro problem? Where the senators are concerned, there are 67 Democrats and only 33 Republicans; yet these Democrats are going to try to pass the buck to the Republicans after the Negro has put the Democrats in office. Now I’m not siding with either Democrats or Republicans. I’m just pointing out the deceit on the part of both when it comes to dealing with the Negro. Although the Negro vote put the Democratic Party where it is, the Democratic Party gives the Negro nothing

Louis Lomax Interviews Malcolm X (April 3, 1964)

Lomax: Do you deny that Negroes are now getting the protection of the Federal Government; after all, both the President and the Attorney General have come to our aid.

Malcolm X: You never will get protection from the Federal Government. Just like King is asking Kennedy to go to Alabama to stand in a doorway, to put his body in a doorway. That’s like asking the fox to protect you from the wolf! The masses of black people can see this, and it is only the Negro leadership, the bourgeois, hand- picked, handful of Negroes who think that they’re going to get some kind of respect, recognition, or protection from the Government. The Government is responsible for what is happening to black people in this country. The President has power. You notice he didn’t send any troops into Birmingham to protect the Negroes when the dogs were biting the Negroes. The only time he sent troops into Birmingham was when the Negroes erupted, and then the President sent the troops in there, not to protect the Negroes, but to protect them white people down there from those erupting Negroes.

The Ballot or the Bullet (April 3, 1964)

When you take your case to Washington, D.C., you’re taking it to the criminal who’s responsible; it’s like running from the wolf to the fox. They’re all in cahoots together.

The Ballot or the Bullet (April 12, 1964)

Up here, in the North you have the same thing. The Democratic party don’t do it. They don’t do it that way. They got a think that they call gerrymandering. They maneuver you out of power. Even though you vote, they fix it so you’re voting for nobody; they’ve got you going and coming. In the South, they’re outright political wolves. In the North, they’re political foxes. A fox and a wolf are both canine, both belong to the dog family. Now you take your choice. You going to choose a Northern dog or a Southern dog? Because either dog you choose I guarantee you you’ll still be in the dog house. This is why I say it’s the ballot or the bullet. It’s liberty or it’s death. It’s freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody.

OAAU Founding Rally (June 28, 1964)

In essence what it is saying is instead of you and me running around here seeking allies in our struggle for freedom in the Irish neighborhood or the Jewish neighborhood or the Italian neighborhood, we need to seek some allies among people who look something like we do. It’s time now for you and me to stop running away from the wolf right into the arms of the fox, looking for some kind of help. That’s a drag.

Speech to Civil Rights Workers from Mississippi (Jan. 1, 1965)

Plus you got Lyndon B. Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, who professes to drool at the mouth over Negroes, to let you know where they stand before January 4. 23

On Afro-American History (January 24, 1965)

You never will get the solution from any white liberal. Let you and I sit down and discuss the problem, come up with what we feel the solution will be; and then if they want to help it, then let them help in their way, in a way that they can help. But don’t let them come and tell us how we should do to solve our problem. Those days are over, I can’t see that at all. If they want to help in their way, a way that they can help, good; but don’t come and join us and try and sit down and tell us how to solve our problem. They can’t do it, and they won’t. That’s like asking the fox to help you solve the problem confronting you and the wolf. He’ll tell you how to solve it all right, but I’ll guarantee you, you’ll have a worse problem afterwards—a foxy problem. He’ll give you a solution that will put you right in his clutches; and this is what the white liberal does.

Aside: he addressed his enemies a lot

A Downside of Compulsory Voting

Someone suggested to me that compulsory voting was a good idea so the population's wishes would be represented.

As an example, he pointed to how with Brexit, the young didn't want Brexit but the old voted more than the young, so the UK got Brexit (let's ignore the fact that at the time, a majority wanted it, so even with compulsory voting it likely would've gotten through).

In response, I pointed out that compulsory voting favored the status quo and didn't take into account intensity of preferences (as reflected in voting), and gave this example:

Person A, B, C, D and E go out to dinner

Person A loves Kang Kong (water spinach)
Person B hates Kang Kong but is lazy
Person C hates Kang Kong and is not lazy
Person D and E are indifferent

Scenario 1 (no compulsory voting):
Person A suggests eating Kang Kong for dinner and sets up a poll in WhatsApp about whether to eat Kang Kong, with Yes and No as the only options, and votes Yes
Person C votes No
Person B, D and E say nothing. Person B says nothing because he can't be bothered to go to WhatsApp and choose no. Person D and E say nothing because they don't care either way
Realising that there is no dominant option, someone suggests a different option, e.g. Pea Shoots (Dou Miao), which everyone likes. Everyone is happy

Scenario 2 (compulsory voting):
Person A suggests eating Kang Kong for dinner and sets up a poll in WhatsApp about whether to eat Kang Kong, with Yes and No as the only options, and votes Yes

Person B and C vote No

Person D and E vote yes because there are only two options (and Yes is before No, so it is easier to select)
Everyone ends up eating Kang Kong for dinner because a majority voted for Kang Kong. Person B and C are not happy

Single Men and Single Women in the US

Rising Share of U.S. Adults Are Living Without a Spouse or Partner

"The growth in unpartnered adults has been sharper among men than women. In 1990, men and women ages 25 to 54 were equally likely to be unpartnered (29% of each group). By 2019, 39% of men were unpartnered, compared with 36% of women."

This point of information from the Pew Research Center piqued my interest.

Despite thinking about it for a while, it still seemed odd to me - intuitively, the proportion of "single" men and women in a population should be almost the same (the study looks at "Unpartnered adults", who are "neither married nor living with an unmarried partner", but the articles on this refer to them as "singles").

I read a few articles on this phenomenon, but none identified this seeming puzzle.

So I dug into the data.

The first explanation might be that the proportion of females in the population has decreased. Assuming one man partners with one woman, fewer women would mean that more and more men would be unable to find partners (as in China, with the one child policy).

Yet the US Census Bureau's July 2022 data shows the percent of females at 50.5% was only slightly lower than in 2005 when it was 51.0%. The female:male sex ratio dropped from 1.04 to 1.02.

However, narrowing the analysis down to the population aged 25-54, in 2005 women were 50.49% of this age group but in 2021, they were 50.32% of it. So the female:male ratio only fell from 1.02 to 1.01.

Let us apply these numbers to a hypothetical population.

A representative group of 10,000 men and women aged 25-54 in 2005 would've had 5049 women and 4951 men. About 32% of each sex would've been unpartnered, so that's 1,616 women and 1,588 men. Meanwhile, a representative group of 10,000 men and women aged 25-54 in 2021 would've had 5032 women and 4968 men. About 1,812 women and 1,938 men would've been unpartnered. 196 more women were single in 2021 than in 2005, but 350 more men were - so 154 more men (almost 10% of the singles) were displaced than we would've expected if they would've, in a counterfactual situation, been dating these 196 women. Clearly something is going on.

One possibility is that now there're relatively more lesbians than gays. The oldest data on the gay and lesbian population in the US I could find was from 2011, where 1.1% of women were lesbian and 2.2% of men were gay, with 2.2% of women being bisexual and 1.4% of men being bi. Meanwhile, in 2020, 1.3% of women were lesbian and 2.5% of men were gay, with 4.3% of women being bisexual and 1.8% of men as bi. So we can see that while the relative gay and lesbian ratios are pretty similar between the years, there're now relatively more bisexual women. So bisexual women who are partnered with other women could be responsible for more men being single.

Another possibility is that more women are going for men older than 54. Using the median age of marriage as a proxy, the median age of marriage for women did rise from 26.3 in 2006-2010 to 28 years in 2015-2019, but the median age at first marriage for men also went up, from 28.1 in 2006-2010 to to 29.9 years in 2015-2019. So I doubt this is a real factor.

Yet another possibility is that more women are going for men younger than 25, but this is even more unlikely, especially since women generally prefer older men.

The last factor I could think of is that there are now more cases of multiple women living with one man. While polygamy is illegal in the US (for now), this doesn't stop polygynists since they could be "living with an unmarried partner". There is some evidence for this, with attitudes to it relaxing, but this does not distinguish between polygyny and polyandry. Plus, more men than women engage in non-monogamy. The young are more likely to do it than the old though (all these studies look at the relationship type, not living arrangements, but those would be correlated).

Covid Protests and Covid Restrictions

It is popular to claim that the rolling back of covid restrictions in various jurisdictions is unrelated to protests against them, and that governments "follow the science".

We already know that the latter is tosh, since for example shutting down beaches is still a thing 2 years into the pandemic even though we know that "outdoor transmission contributes very little to overall infection rates". We know that covid restrictions are political, so it would not be surprising for their lifting to be tied to politics as well, i.e. protests.

Let us look at what seems to be the biggest protest against covid restrictions to date - the Freedom Convoy to Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and covid restrictions in Ontario.

According to a timeline from the Toronto Star, the Freedom Convoy fundraiser started on January 14.

Just 2 days before, on January 12, the Ontario Liberals were still demanding mandatory covid vaccinations in schools

On January 20 Ontario announced a roadmap to reopening starting January 31, with capacity limits being lifted in indoor public settings by March 14 - but didn't say anything about vaccine passports.

On January 25, Premier Doug Ford said he couldn't see the mask mandate lifting anytime soon.

On January 27, GoFundMe released $1 million to the convoy and on January 28, it reached Ottawa.

Shortly thereafter, on February 14 - just 14 days after reopening had restarted, Ontario announced that measures were easing again on February 17. Then, a whole 2 weeks before capacity limits had been projected to be lifted in indoor public settings, not just had this been done on March 1, vaccine mandates too were done away with. All this despite Ford, just the previous month, claiming that there would be "21 days between each step to make sure we haven't moved too fast", and even that if they had to pause "between steps for a few extra days", they wouldn't "hesitate to do so", even if the classic phrase "out of an abundance of caution" has not been used (yet) this year.

And, less than 2 months after Doug Ford said he couldn't see the mask mandate lifting anytime soon, it too was gone on March 21.

Ontario had gone from (quasi-)lockdown and vaccine passports to not even a mask mandate in under 2 months - and ahead of schedule, generously violating prior proclamations about waiting for 21 days between steps.

Of course, ignoring all this, we are told that the restrictions were lifted because covid numbers were going in the right direction. But is this really true?

Recall that the roadmap to reopening was announced on January 20.

Yet, if you look at Ontario official hospitalisation numbers (since chief medical officer of health Dr. Kieran Moore called the hospitalisation rate "The most important metric that we're monitoring"), they didn't go down until January 27; even on the day of the announcement, both hospitalisations and ICU numbers were hovering around their peak.

Given the specified timeframe of 21 days between stages of reopening "to make sure we haven't moved too fast" (i.e. to make sure covid numbers were going in the right direction), even if you generously assume that they took a week to make decisions, that would imply that they would have needed to see falling hospitalisations for at least 14 days before deciding to lift more restrictions.

Even taking a more aggressive timeframe of 14 days of falling hospitalisations, the very earliest restrictions should have started to be lifted would have been February 10 - a whole 10 days before the actual reopening (and that assumes no lag between announcement and implementation).

So it's pretty clear that, at least in Ontario, the protests influenced reopening.

It is no coincidence that in England, when they announced they were lifting restrictions, covid hystericists cried bloody murder - since there had been no massive protests that they needed to pretend hadn't had any effect:

Boris Johnson announced on January 19 that Plan B measures would not be renewed, but by this time, covid hospitalisations in England had been gradually declining for 9 days.

And when Boris Johnson announced on February 21 that England was ending covid restrictions, he was condemned for being "reckless" - even as hospitalisations had been continuing to decline.

So if anything, England's relaxation of covid measures seems to have been more backed by the data than Ontario's.

So on the one hand, we can see in Ontario a relaxation of covid restrictions that was not supported by the numbers, whereas in England a similar removal restrictions was. Yet the latter was condemned while we are told that the former was justified by the "science" and was going to happen anyway. I wonder what could explain the difference in establishment reaction to both?

Addendum: One cope I've gotten in response to an earlier version of this essay is that Ontario was just sticking to its earlier announcement about reopening timelines. In October 2021, it had been announced that on March 28, the indoor mask mandate and vaccine passports were going to go away, so they were just sticking to the roadmap. Of course, this is a weak objection, since there was a one month (pseudo-)lockdown, which violated that very same roadmap.

Why Covid Hysteria will not end with Vaccines

27 COVID-19 cases at MINDSville@Napiri Adult Disability Home in Hougang

"The four cases added to Wednesday's case count were all fully vaccinated against COVID-19...

All 255 residents and employees at MINDSville@Napiri were tested. The facility serves a total of 112 residents, it said in a Facebook post on Wednesday night.

Of the 27 cases, 23 were asymptomatic and were discovered through proactive testing...

A total of 91 per cent of the staff members and residents at the home have also been vaccinated in February and March"

So:

The vaccines are more or less 100% effective at preventing hospitalisation and death.

Singapore is finding that fully vaccinated people are still getting infected (not just in this case, but also the airport and other places), and has a quasi lockdown because of that.

There're repeated moral panics over new variants.

Not everyone is willing and able to get vaccinated. Besides those who don't want to there's also the people with medical contraindications. In this case 91% of staff members and residents were vaccinated, which is above the highest estimated herd immunity thresholds for covid I've seen (60-70% - at least before it was concluded that we may never reach it).

So it looks like Singapore will be cut off from the world forever and undergo regular lockdowns. Probably other places which have been "successful" in controlling covid too will be doomed to the same fate.

Diet as Secular Religion: Keto (Low Carb)

In an age which some might describe as post-religious, the fact that many people exhibit religious fervour in secular pursuits such as politics or environmentalism makes it evident that religion fulfils visceral psychological needs for many.

Diet is yet another area where this phenomenon can be observed. I know that this sort of dietary fervour can be seen among clean eaters, vegans or even those who engage in calorie counting, but for a while I had a front seat view of the behavior of people on the keto diet and am best able to relate it (a few people on self-described low carb diets exhibited some of this behavior, but it was a lot more evident in those identifying as following the keto diet).

It was interesting observing their behavior.

Adherence to the doctrine was promoted as a way to be "healthy", and the more strict you were the more you were applauded. Indeed, it wasn't just viewed as a "diet", but marketed as a "way of eating", which is more transformative and permanent than a "diet".

Contrasts were drawn between adherents' old lives - a fallen state to which they would now never return - and their new ones - enlightened and superior. For example one used this very revealing language: "ketosis can change a person "forever!" I was given a second chance!" This curiously parallels Born Again Christians' testimonies of their lives before and after developing a relationship with Jesus, and the narrative of redemption.

There were all sorts of unscientific claims pushed about the benefits of keto. Many people claimed they didn't fall sick after adopting the diet. One person even went so far as to claim: "I thought keto is healthy eating as well. We are supposed to throw away all our medicines and prescriptions and not take any antibiotics/painkillers".

People kept asking if particular foods or products were "keto approved" (somehow they weren't able to think for themselves and follow simple rules, but felt the need to consult others, especially acknowledged authorities), and authorities would swoop down and make pronouncements, often with little or no logic (and they didn't react well to being contradicted).

Heretics (those who didn't fully adhere to the gospel) were more despised than infidels (those who ate normally) and got chided and mocked, even if infidels were looked down on as benighted; you were not supposed to have cheat days or even meals, since that would supposedly screw up your body and nullify your progress. And heretics who dared to openly challenge dubious claims were treated even more harshly.

There was an obsession with purity. People were obsessed with scrutinising food labels - even if there was 0g of sugar in a product, if they saw trace amounts of sugar in it, they would proclaim it to be forbidden. Given that even the strictest versions of keto allow you up to 20g of carbohydrates a day, it was clear that this was a secular version of religious purity laws - to Jews and Muslims, it doesn't matter how little pork is in a food product, since to them any amount contaminates the whole. One person was sick for a long time, and was angsting about how he was depressed about not recovering because that meant he would need to take cough syrup (which would have sugar in it). Another claimed that he didn't want to eat sugar anymore because it was too sweet - but would happily eat keto-approved sweetened foods.

Beyond sugar, some people went even further and counted fibre in their daily carb allowance (when the body doesn't digest it), since they wanted to get their carb intake as close to 0 as possible. To one particular individual, food couldn't even be cooked in the same container as carbohydrates: "If you are on a strict KETO diet, you don't just skip... you totally omit it.. the starch / carbo of the carrots already blend into the curry when cook, how to skip??" (again, note the parallel with Jewish and Muslim dietary purity laws).

There was an obsession with simplistic rules. Sugar as mentioned above is one of them, but in one low carb group someone was claiming that all vegetables that grew below ground were forbidden, and those that grew above ground were okay. I pointed out that jicama grew below ground but was very low in carbs, and a mod group proclaimed that no one was allowed to point that out since this would "confuse" people.

The list of bad foods which could prevent you from attaining purity was not limited to sugar or even food containing carbohydrates. For some reason lots of people had a vicious hatred of soy products and most vegetable oil (with the exception of coconut and often olive [I believe I saw some people claiming olive oil wasn't good either]). It was as if the more foods that could be thrown out of one's life, the better (as one would be even more pure).

Evangelism was part of the mentality. You were supposed to introduce keto to others so they could see its benefits. Some people even forced it on others, like their kids. One outstanding individual even put his dogs on keto, even though we know it is bad for them (New FDA Warning Cautions Against Grain-Free Dog Food - The Atlantic).


Related:

Diets Are a Lot Like Religion

"The more Levinovitz looked into it, the more parallels he discovered between religious and dietary beliefs, going as far back as the ancient Chinese texts that are his scholarly specialty. “Two thousand years ago, there were these Daoist monks who decided that if you avoided these five grains — and these were the staple crops of China, what the everyday person subsisted on — you’d live forever, you wouldn’t get any diseases,” Levinovitz said. These monks also came up with intricate recipes for nutritional supplements, which they then distributed with similarly spectacular promises of immortality. “I’m looking at this and I’m thinking, You know, this sounds a lot like the kinds of promises that modern, secular so-called diet gurus make to their followers”...

“When it came to diet and health, people were prone to irrationality and they were susceptible to promises that in other contexts perhaps they’d be more critical [of]”...

There’s something comforting about picking a plan out of the chaos and sticking with it.

Religion helps people make sense of a chaotic world: Suddenly, there is order, and there are instructions. All you have to do is follow them. “You have a certainty about the choices you make,” Levinovitz said. “That gives you a way to make decisions, and it makes for a comforting world.” Likewise, nutrition science is a chaotic discipline. Eggs are bad for you until they’re not; MSG is a dangerous food additive until it’s not. It’s understandable why people would pick a way of eating and then stick to their guns; it gives them some solid ground to stand on amid ever-shifting recommendations.

But what about when diets aren’t comforting? Many of them, after all, suggest worlds in which modern life is overflowing with toxins, even in safe-seeming foods — shouldn’t these beliefs be aversive rather than attractive? Not so, said Levinovitz. He used the Food Babe, the very popular food blogger who sees terrifying chemicals everywhere — and who is frequently wrong in her doomsaying — as an example. “One thing I realized — why would you want to live in a world filled with toxins? Why would you follow the Food Babe — isn’t that a terrifying world to live in?” Levinovitz said. You could easily make the same statement about religion: Why would you want to believe in a world where humans are inherently sinful creatures? The idea sounds upsetting from a nonreligious perspective. “But it’s not. It’s a comforting one … The only thing scarier than a world full of toxins is a world in which you don’t know what the toxins are.” If the choice is a nuanced, complicated understanding of the world that contains some uncertainty or a more clear-cut and sharply defined approach, the latter vision is often going to win out.

The idea that “past is paradise” is an alluring one.

Think of one of the most famous Biblical stories, the Garden of Eden. “We were all extremely happy and healthy — well, all two of us — and then we ate the wrong food … and we fell from grace,” Levinovitz said. The Eden story provides an apt narrative structure for “demonizing foods of modernity”... The narrative is easily applied to some of the major objections many people have about genetically engineered foods, too — the idea that using modern technology to alter the foods we eat is new and, subsequently, unnatural or something to be feared...

The vocabulary we use for food has strong undertones of morality.

Think of the words we use to talk about the things we eat: guilt, sinful, “cheat” days, designating foods as “good” or “bad” for you... Many people, he said, wrote about cheating or confessing in anguished terms. “I would literally see the word redeem,” he said. “It’s like, no, your diet is not your spouse — you don’t have to confess that you cheated on your diet. But I see people who come to believe that what you eat is so ethically charged, that they are like committing terrible sins” if they mess up. “It’s this idea that if you sin once it’s the end”...

Aligning yourself with a popular way of eating gives you a sense of belonging...

But there might be a straightforward way to untangle faith from fact when it comes to food...

The answer, appropriately, is itself inspired by a healthy-eating trend: It’s time to detox. “Don’t read anything about nutrition or health for 30 days,” Levinovitz suggested. Don’t visit the blogs, don’t click the headlines, don’t even read food labels. Instead, focus on preparing foods for yourself that make you feel good and that you enjoy. “People like to say that sugar is addictive — well, maybe health information is also addictive, in a very broad sense of the word.”"

How Grab can charge 30% of menu prices and food and beverage businesses can still hypothetically make more money despite a single digit profit margin

In this time of Singapore's Coronavirus Circuit Breaker (CCB), Grab's "exorbitant" fee of 30% of the order total are getting many people worked up.

Grab responded that the order total was not pure profit, and the majority of it went to the delivery rider and much of the rest went to pay various expenses. This got a snarky takedown (which I saw many people sharing), including the awful claim that customers tip deliver riders instead (Tipping is a terrible idea since you give workers an unpredictable income and let employers not take responsibility for paying them. Plus it's awkward for everyone).

I pointed out that Grab had provided actual numbers (original post), according to which of a total bill of $21.60 paid by a customer, only $1 would go to Grab.

After some extravagant handwaving about how these numbers could not be trusted (with no proof, of course), I was told that it was "literally contradictory" for food and beverage (F&B) merchants to typically have a low single digit margin at best but for them to be able to make money with food delivery services charging 10% or more of the sticker price as service fees.

So I came up with a worked example to illustrate how this could be.

For simplicity, let us assume a merchant's costs only consist of rent, labour and (food) ingredients. He does not engage in advertising, is not paying off any business loans and does not have utility bills to pay.

Let us consider the base scenario where Grab is not offering food delivery for a particular F&B merchant and serves dine in and take out customers.

His accounting looks like the following:

Rent: $500
Labour: $250
Ingredients: $200
Total Cost: $950
Revenue: $1,000
Customers: 100
Average Revenue Per Customer (ARPC): $10
Profit $: $50
Profit %: 5%

Now let us consider a scenario where Grab has entered the picture and is charging 30% of revenue in service fees.

For simplicity let us assume that there is no drop in business from pre-existing customers and he gets 50 new customers who pay the same to get his food delivered via Grab as they would pay dining at the establishment).

The F&B merchant's accounting now looks like this:

Rent: $500 (this does not change unless the business from Grab is so big that the merchant needs to move to new premises - which would be a good thing)
Labour: $300 (with more business, he now needs to hire more staff or pay them to work longer)
Ingredients: $300 (with more sales of food with Grab exposing him to new customers, ingredient costs naturally go up)
Total Cost: $1,100

Revenue from old customers: $1,000
Old customers: 100
ARPC for old customers: $10

Bill of new customers: $500
New customers: 50
Merchant revenue from new customers after Grab's 30% cut: $350
ARPC for new customers: $7

ARPC for all customers (after Grab's 30% cut): $9
Total Revenue: $1,500
Profit $: $400
Profit %: 26%

We can see that although Grab charges 30% of the sticker price in fees and the merchant's old profit margin was 5%, with Grab his profit dollars and margin have both risen.

The real problem with delivery is not the fees - but if offering food on delivery cannibalises a merchant's existing customers. Because then even if the same customers are paying the same price for their food, the merchant is earning less from them.

If merchants are afraid of cannibalisation, they can always choose not to offer their food on Grab. Or jack up the menu price for delivery by ~30% to cover the Grab cut. But then the prisoners' dilemma comes into play (your competitors can choose to offer their food on a delivery app, and eat into your business).


Related:

The Millennial Lifestyle Is About to Get More Expensive - The Atlantic

"If you wake up on a Casper mattress, work out with a Peloton before breakfast, Uber to your desk at a WeWork, order DoorDash for lunch, take a Lyft home, and get dinner through Postmates, you’ve interacted with seven companies that will collectively lose nearly $14 billion this year. If you use Lime scooters to bop around the city, download Wag to walk your dog, and sign up for Blue Apron to make a meal, that’s three more brands that have never recorded a dime in earnings, or have seen their valuations fall by more than 50 percent...

To maximize customer growth they have strategically—or at least “strategically”—throttled their prices, in effect providing a massive consumer subsidy. You might call it the Millennial Lifestyle Sponsorship, in which consumer tech companies, along with their venture-capital backers, help fund the daily habits of their disproportionately young and urban user base. With each Uber ride, WeWork membership, and hand-delivered dinner, the typical consumer has been getting a sweetheart deal...

The idea that companies like Uber and WeWork and DoorDash don’t make a profit might come as a shock to the many people who spend a fair amount of their take-home pay each month on ride-hailing, shared office space, or meal delivery...

For years, corporate promises rose as profits fell. What’s coming next is the promise-profit convergence. Talk of global conquest will abate. Prices will rise—for scooters, for Uber, for Lyft, for food delivery, and more. And the great consumer subsidy will get squeezed. Eating out and eating in, ride-hailing and office-sharing, all of it will get a little more expensive. It was a good deal while it lasted."

Explaining China Shill Psychology

China shills - who believe that China can do no wrong and the whole world is biased against it - are remarkably common and impervious to facts and logic.

Basically anything that makes China look good is reliable and true, and anything that makes China look bad is unreliable, fake news and a Western conspiracy to put China down. And anyone who says anything negative about China or the Communist Party (no matter what it is) is biased against China.

While one might not be surprised at China Chinese (aka PRCs) being China shills due to socialisation (some might say indoctrination), there's a remarkable number of non-China Chinese who are also on the bandwagon (in Singapore there are quite a few, possibly encouraged by the policy of multiracialism - this does not bode well for the future, as if China ever invades Singapore it will find a ready fifth column).

And while most of them are ethnic Chinese, there're some non-Chinese as well. To find China shills (from China, ethnic Chinese or neither), one could do worse than visit the amazingly delusional Facebook group Xi Jinping - China's Exceptional President, which elevates Xi's personality cult to heights unimaginable outside China.

How might we explain this phenomenon?

One possible explanation is that China shills are part of the 50 cent army, i.e. they are paid to praise the Communist Party of China (CCP). Yet, it is virtually certain that they aren't paid by the Party - if nothing else, they have real jobs which pay better; I used to know one who had several business ventures, for one. It is perhaps more scary that rather than being paid to trot out the party line, they actually sincerely believe it.

A key reason many China shills shill for China is that they are ethnic Chinese (Han).

Chinese Ethnicity and Chinese Nationality are conflated - not least at the CCP's behest, despite its lip service about China's minorities. And since Party, State and Country are similarly and increasingly conflated in China, this means that through transitivity, many ethnic Chinese identify with the Communist Party, especially with China's de facto repudiation of Zhou Enlai's declaration in Bandung that ethnic Chinese should be loyal to the nations in which they lived.

The slippage between the 2 major senses of "Chinese" (ethnicity and nationality), of course, did not start with the CCP; the term 汉奸 (han4 jian1 - literally Han traitor) is attested as far back as the Yuan Dynasty (which was Mongolian), and started to be applied to non-Han traitors in the Qing Dynasty (which ironically was Manchu).

As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (or one of his guests) points out in Morality in the 21st Century (sadly, I lost track of which episode), the trans issue is particularly fraught because it is about identity. And so it is here, with ethnic Chinese identifying with the Party.

While diasporas having affinity with their ancestral countries is by no means a phenomenon unique to the Chinese, the combination of the sheer size and extent of the Chinese diaspora as well as ethno-nationalism still being fashionable in the Sinosphere (indeed, actively promoted by the CCP) while it has gone out of fashion in others makes China shilling particularly relevant.

Beyond ethnicity, though, one also sees non-Chinese China shills. Barring trans-racialism, ethnic identity cannot be what motivates them. One must look to other causes (which can also explain ethnic Chinese China shilling).

It was suggested to me that Communist solidary was motivating some of the China shilling from tankies (aka Communists, or more formally "an apologist for the violence and crimes against humanity perpetrated by twentieth-century Marxist-Leninist regimes").

Yet, given how openly capitalist China's economy is I don't think this is a good explanation. This is also evident from the rhetoric of China shills, since they don't denounce those who disagree with the Party line as class enemies, bourgeois or Foreign Imperialists. Nor do they justify China's oppression of its own people as smashing dangerous counter-revolutionaries, or say that you need to break some eggs to make an omelette. Instead their strategy is to pretend that China doesn't oppress its own people since it is benevolent, and that allegations that it does are lies, slander and a CIA plot; their defence of the Regime is based on Chinese Nationalist lines rather than Communist ones.

Anti-Western sentiment is a better explanation. This is evident not least since China shills rage so much about how the West wants to put China down, or how Western media is biased against China. Unable to abide by a unipolar world, or even more so one where one civilisation is dominant (as with the End of History), China shills look towards China as an opponent for the West in general (and the US in particular), in response to various grievances (imagined or otherwise). For non-ethnic Chinese China shills (essentially, Westerners) this ties in to their oikophobia (the hatred of or aversion to the familiar. There're parallels here with how Russia, to a lesser extent, also invokes anti-Western sentiment to justify its troublemaking (or pretend that it's not happening).

The motivation of anti-Western sentiment also meshes well with China's rhetoric of a century of national humiliation and the positioning of China as the underdog, with people so insecure and sensitive that everything hurts their feelings and where an orgy is a diplomatic incident - as if a nuclear power with the largest standing army in the world could sensibly be considered an underdog (anti-Japanese sentiment comes into it sometimes too, with the constant dredging up of history to bludgeon people over the head with in the present).

Another explanation is the desire to hitch one's wagon to a star. With the rise of China, more people are motivated to become China shills to vicariously share in its success. In secondary school, I asked a classmate why so many people supported Manchester United. He said people liked champions (or winners). So too is it with China, as can be seen when China shills take pride in China's accomplishments (as if they had anything to do with it). I have been on the Internet for more than 2 decades and the recent swarm of China shills is unprecedented; it is no coincidence that this is correlated with China's rise (social media being more prominent of course makes them more visible, but even in the era of blogs China shills were more or less non-existent).

Yet another motivator for China shills is approval for authoritarianism. China has shown that being authoritarian is no barrier to success, and many China shills tout the merits of authoritarianism while bemoaning the flaws of democracy (while ignoring the downsides of the former and the advantages of the latter). If you believe that people are weak, stupid and/or foolish and need to be controlled since they cannot control themselves, your worldview meshes perfectly with Chinese totalitarianism.


Addendum:

Related:

The Marvelous Simplicity of China Shill Logic
Conflating Nation, Government and Race: China Shills
‘Born-Again’ Chinese: Singapore’s PRC apologists

Why Choping is inefficient and selfish - a model of Hawker Centre Queuing

Choping is a common Singaporean practice which involves placing a packet of tissue paper (or some other item) to reserve a seat in a hawker centre or food court while one queues for food.

With choping, one will have a guaranteed seat to return to when one gets one's food.

There is a currently an anti-chope movement which is upsetting a lot of Singaporeans, since choping is a common practice, arguably part of Singapore's culture.

And of course, since the movement is supported by Minister Grace Fu, it has also become a lightning rod for anti-PAP sentiment.

Yet, choping is a demonstrably inefficient and selfish method of seat allocation which privileges early comers, leaving the community as a whole worse off. It is like free parking - it's great if there're empty lots but if all the lots are occupied, you're going to waste a lot of time cruising around looking for parking.

While it is quite obvious that leaving seats unutilised (since no one can eat at a choped seat, or is supposed to anyway) is inefficient, but we can formalise a model to test our intuition.

For simplicity, assume a hawker centre with 10 seats with 10 arrivals every 10 minutes, a 10 minute waiting time at each stall and that everyone takes 10 minutes to eat. Assume that choping and moving from stall to seat and back are instantaneous (in reality since choping takes time choping will be even more inefficient).


Under a no chope system (i.e. no one can chope - you occupy a seat if it is empty):

T = 0 mins (start of scenario):
10 people are queuing, 0 eating

T = 10 mins:
10 people are queuing, 10 are eating

T = 20 mins:
10 people are queuing, 10 are eating. 10 have finished eating and have gone off

T = 30 mins:
10 people are queuing, 10 are eating. 20 have finished eating and have gone off

T = 40 mins:
10 people are queuing, 10 are eating. 30 have finished eating and have gone off


Under a 100% chope system (you need to reserve a seat before you go and queue and no one can use your seat while you are not around):

T = 0 mins (start of scenario):
10 people are queuing, 0 eating

T = 10 mins:
0 people are queuing, 10 are eating (assume we cannot chope if someone is already eating)

T = 20 mins:
10 people are queuing, 0 are eating. 10 have finished eating and have gone off

T = 30 mins:
0 people are queuing, 10 are eating. 10 have finished eating and have gone off

T = 40 mins:
10 people are queuing, 0 are eating. 20 have finished eating and have gone off

Within the first 40 minutes under a no chope system 1.5x as many people have finished eating and gone off as under a 100% chope system.

Some might object that this is unrealistic, but one can relax or modify the model's assumptions and see how the results change (though it probably also becomes more intractable, as you can see later).

Someone claimed that "If you tweak your assumptions, you will find that it doesnt work. The truth is there are more people than tables and chairs. In hawkers, food courts, trains even. It is not 10 eating to 10 chairs every 10 min. It is 20 persons to 17 chairs every 10min and people dont even finish their lunch in 10min so it will take longer".

So I reran my model:

Assume a hawker centre with 17 seats with 20 arrivals every 10 minutes, 10 minutes waiting time and 20 minutes eating time


Under a no chope system:

T = 0 mins (start of scenario)
20 people are queuing, 0 eating

T = 10 mins
20 people are queuing, 17 are eating, 3 are looking for a seat

T = 20 mins
20 people are queuing, 17 are eating, 3 (who arrived at T = 0) are looking for a seat and 20 (who arrived at T = 10) are looking for a seat

T = 30 mins
20 people are queuing, 17 are eating (3 who arrived at T = 0 and 14 who arrived at T = 10). 6 (who arrived at T = 10) are looking for a seat and 20 (who arrived at T = 20) are looking for a seat. 17 people have finished eating (all from T = 0)

T = 40 mins
20 people are queuing, 17 are eating (3 from T = 0 and 14 from T = 10). Looking for a seat: 6 (T = 10), 20 (T = 20), 20 (T = 30). 17 people have finished eating (all from T = 0)

T = 50 mins
20 people are queuing, 17 are eating (6 from T = 10, 11 from T = 20). Looking for a seat: 9 (T = 20), 20 (T = 30), 20 (T = 40). 34 people have finished eating (20 from T = 0, 14 from T = 10)

We can see that as T increases, the number of people looking for a seat keeps increasing.

In reality some people would go elsewhere or dapao (order takeaway), but let us keep this assumption in both scenarios so we can compare them.

Anyway, what we are interested in is how many people can eat at the hawker centre (since choping or not choping doesn't stop you from eating elsewhere or dapao-ing)


Under a 100% chope system:

T = 0 mins (start of scenario)
17 people are queuing (20 arrived but there were only 17 seat), 0 eating and 3 are waiting for a seat to chope

T = 10 mins
0 people are queuing (since you need to chope before queuing), 17 are eating, 3 (who arrived at T = 0) are waiting for a seat to chope. 20 (who arrived at T = 10) are waiting for a seat to chope.

T = 20 mins
0 people are queuing, 17 are eating, 3 (who arrived at T = 0) are looking for a seat. 40 (20 arriving at T = 10 and 20 arriving at T = 20) are waiting for a seat to chope

T = 30 mins
14 people (from T = 10) are queuing, 3 are eating (arrivals from T = 0). 17 people have finished eating (all from T = 0). 6 people (T = 10), 20 (T = 20) and 20 (T = 30) are waiting for a seat to chope.

T = 40 mins
17 people are eating (3 from T = 0 and 14 from T = 10). 17 people have finished eating (all from T = 0). 6 from T = 10, 20 each from T = 20, 30 and 40 are waiting for a seat to chope.

T = 50 mins
14 people are eating (all from T = 10). 20 people have finished eating (all from T = 0). 3 people are queuing (from T = 10). Waiting for a seat to chope - 3 from T = 10 and 20 each from T = 20, 30, 40 and 50

We see that the results are virtually identical - almost 1.5x as many people have finished eating after 50 mins under the no chope system than the 100% chope one, even in the modified model.

The reason is clear - choped seats can't be used to eat and are thus under utilised. If eating time were longer relative to queuing time choping would be less distortionary since the seats would be less under utilised (but choping would still be inefficient).


So far I've only seen 2 valid objections to the analysis above.

The first is that it is annoying to walk around with a tray.

Yet, one would need to weigh the annoyance or discomfort of this heavily to make choping preferable. Especially since under a no chope system, at peak capacity all seats are being used at the same time, people arrive at different times and hawker food is eaten in a relatively short period of time, so seats should be freed up quickly.

For example, in a hawker centre of 100 seats, if people take 10 minutes to finish eating and arrive at their seats in steady numbers at regular 1 minute intervals, one would expect 10 seats to become available every minute. Indeed, you might potentially find a seat sooner as you wouldn't be limited to your choped seat.

The other is that people like to eat in groups, and choping ensures the group can sit together (since a no chope system is optimised for individual eaters).

I will observe that I don't only see people in large groups eating and that individuals and pairs do it too. That aside, choping still privileges groups which come first over people who come later.

If eating together is such a desired outcome, groups can always order takeaway and eat in their office pantries (since groups at peak hour are typically from the office crowd).

Renson has suggested that choping allows people to easily visually gauge the filled capacity of a hawker centre, and if it is full one can dapao or go elsewhere. Yet, people eating at seats are more visible than tissue paper packets, so with choping one is actually likely to underestimate the hawker centre's capacity.

A 2017 Straits Times article on the phenomenon also notes that people sometimes chope more seats than they should - which makes choping even more inefficient and inconsiderate.


Realistically, though, people are not going to stop choping, so one just needs to manage within the current constraints.

Donald Low has a good sugestion - just sit at a choped place. If the person who choped it comes back, move. Assuming you don't run into unreasonable people this should work. Then again, it should also work with unreasonable people as they will either have their hands full or otherwise be too hungry to bother to beat you up for occupying their seat.

More broadly, Singaporeans seem, for some reason, not to like to share seats. I often ask to sit at an occupied table and most people say okay (unless they are in a group).

"Unpaid" care work / How hard is it to be a homemaker?

A common feminist complaint is that stay-at-home wives/mothers are do care work for free.

A reasonable critique is that this does not show up in GDP statistics, which undervalues the contribution of women in doing care work.

An unreasonable one is that they are being oppressed and exploited since they are unpaid.

Presumably, feminists think that stay-at-home wives/mothers live off air and water from public water coolers.

In reality, we know that even though stay-at-home wives/mothers do not get a formal salary, they are still receiving remuneration of a sort (otherwise they would be unable to survive). Typically this is in the form of having their bills paid by, and getting an allowance from their (male) partners/husbands. And this doesn't attract taxes!

A related issue is: how hard is it to be a homemaker?

While it is fashionable to claim that this is a very hard "job", further reflection will challenge this thought.

As a friend of mine comments, "it's true that houswives very free lor. my mum is always chasing all the kdramas".

More formally, a homemaker's home role can be seen as a combination of 2 roles performed by non-homemakers - the home role of working adults outside of work and that of a childcare worker (that a homemaker without children has an easy time of it is presumably uncontroversial).

The first role is not that hard, given that so many people do it already (on top of their day jobs).

Perhaps one might say that a homemaker has higher standards to live up to than a working adult. For example a homemaker might vacuum the floor every day rather than a working adult's weekly frequency. But these higher standards are not intrinsic to the role, but are rather self-imposed or socially-imposed.

As for the second role, I don't think people will claim that childcare workers have an extremely demanding job either.

Consider too that childcare workers have multiple children to care for, but a homemaker almost always has fewer (unless she is extremely fecund, but those are rare - for reference in Singapore from 1 January 2012 the minimum carer:child ratio for children aged 18-30 months is 1:8; in the OECD it is on average 1:7 at most).

Of course, a homemaker presumably puts more effort and soul than a childcare worker into taking care of his children, but he also typically has fewer to take care of. In addition, the implications of this for working parents are not something most people are comfortable with (this also ties into the point on higher standards).

Of course, it is not hard to be a homemaker in the sense that special skills or effort are not needed. That doesn't mean that it is not hard in the sense of being easy to bear. I think many people might not be able to be homemakers, as the role is potentially very boring and understimulating.

Citizens and Permanent Residents vs Foreigners

Apparently it's controversial that citizens/Permanent Residents should get benefits foreigners do not, or even to say so (I got blocked by someone I had never interacted with after raising that question, so I assume that was the reason).

One claim is that foreigners pay as much taxes as Citizens/Permanent Residents, so they should get the same benefits as them.

Yet, this misconstrues the nature of the relationship of a state with its citizens.

Some Singaporeans will bring up the usual canard of National Service to justify Singaporeans/Permanent Residents getting more benefits, yet one does not need to appeal to particularities of Singapore, since we can see that even in liberal, developed countries, citizens and permanent residents receive more benefits from foreigners.

I can think of at least 4 justifications for giving citizens and permanent residents more benefits than foreigners:

1) Permanence
2) Duration of past relationship
3) Kinship
4) Reciprocity in civic duty

1) Permanence

Foreigners are not assumed to be staying in the country permanently or even for the medium/long term, but citizens and permanent residents are.

This is also why in developed countries permanent residents get almost the same status as citizens - for example, generally being allowed to reside there permanently.

In most countries, foreigners who have been in the country for a while are allowed to apply for permanent residence, to signal that they want to enter into a more permanent relationship with the country. So foreigners are not discriminated against per se. This application may be conditional upon having/having have had a job, though, so permanence isn't the only justification (and we can also see this by how a country still has a relationship with citizens who are residing abroad permanently).

2) Duration of past relationship

Whereas the first point is about the future relationship between individuals and countries, this is about the historic one.

A foreigner typically has not been in, or had a relationship with, his host country for very long (if at all, for a new foreigner).

Yet citizens have had one (typically since birth) and permanent residents usually have had one for a period in the past too.

It is reasonable to have a closer relationship with someone with whom you have history than someone with whom you have little or none.

3) Kinship

One can think of the relationship a citizen has with his country as similar to that between that of a parent and an adult child.

Nations are imagined communities, after all. So besides the relationship one putatively has with one's other citizens, one also has a relationship with the state.

So just as we would not fault a parent for helping his adult child with a downpayment on his house but not a colleague, we wouldn't fault a country for treating citizens better than foreigners (even if the parent interacts a lot more with the colleague and indeed if his job depends on the colleague but not the child).

To a lesser extent, this applies to permanent residents (perhaps one could see it as a relationship between a parent and a child-in-law.

4) Reciprocity in civic duty

Interestingly, we can see that in jurisdictions with jury duty, if you are eligible to vote, you are eligible for jury duty too (this is not just limited to citizens - in the UK, Commonwealth citizens who can vote must do jury duty too).

Voting, too, is considered a duty (even if there might be no penalties if you don't do so).

So privileges also come with responsibilities - and these are not purely monetary.

From these 4 points, we can see that there is a reciprocal, enduring, historic relationship between a country and its citizens and permanent residents that goes beyond the payment of taxes and the bestowment of benefits.


Addendum: Naturally, citizens should also receive more benefits than permanent residents due to the reasons above.

Related posts:

How votes for all (including non-citizens) devalues the vote
Why giving the young more votes has implications you will not like

On the Warped Timeline in Game of Thrones

Some defenders of the show claim that the timeline isn’t actually warped because we cannot assume that events portrayed onscreen happen at the same time (e.g. Varys’s teleportation at the end of Season 6 from Meereen to Sunspear and back to join Dany is said to take longer than it appears onscreen).

Yet we can look at the timing of Jon Snow’s being summoned to Dragonstone and Ellaria and the Sand Snakes being ambushed and realise there is a big problem there.

Here is a possible timeline:

1) Dany occupies Dragonstone (T)

2) Dany sends a raven to Jon to summon him down, Dany sends Ellaria and the Sand Snakes to Dorne (T+1 days)

3) The raven flies to Jon (this should be fast) (T+1 - T+3 days at least)

4) Ellaria and the Sand Snakes leave for Dorne (T+5 days at most - the fleet was already offshore)

5) Jon leaves for Dragonstone (T+5 days at least given the need to summon a council, debate what to do etc)

6) Jon reaches White Harbour and gets on a boat (T+15 days at least given that it's 340 miles away and a horse can travel 32 miles a day - which might be generous given that Winter has come and they're in the North, see: Game of Thrones map shows how far distances are, What Is the Average Distance a Horse Can Travel in a Day?)

7) Ellaria and the Sand Snakes are ambushed by Euron (T+5+X days). X is the number of days they were ambushed after leaving Dragonstone.

7) One ship, surviving the battle with Euron, rushes back to Dragonstone to report the defeat to Dany (T+5+X+Y days). Y is the number of days between the ambush and their returning to Dragonstone.

Y must be less than X because they are rushing and because 1 ship can travel faster than a fleet. Some might say damaged ships are slower, but if it were damaged and thus slowed the odds are Euron's fleet would've destroyed it before it could've reported back.

8) Jon Snow arrives in Dragonstone (T+15+Z days), where Z is the number of days it takes to sail down from White Harbour. Dany hears of her fleet's defeat. We know that these occur at the same time because this is explicitly portrayed onscreen.

So we know T+15+Z has to equal T+5+X+Y, where Y is less than X.

With some algebra, we know that Z = X+Y-10. That is, Jon took as long to sail from White Harbor to Dragonstone as it took for Ellaria and friends to sail out and one ship to make it back - minus ten days.

Now consider that White Harbor is roughly as far from Dragonstone as Dragonstone is from Sunspear (Map), and that from in-show dialogue Ellaria and friends are a significant distance from Sunspear ("How can you drink this piss? When we reach Sunspear, I'll treat you to a Dornish red")

So even if we discount how the Shivering Sea (the one in the North Jon would've had to travel down for the first part of his voyage) is choppier than the Narrow Sea (Winter conditions, and Essos provides some shelter from the truly open ocean - it is called the Narrow Sea after all and there is regular trade across it), if you generously assume that Ellaria and friends were 2/3 of the way to Dorne, Z is unlikely to equal X+Y-10.

And without all our generous assumptions Jon’s speed seems even more amazing.

So show apologists seem to be grasping at straws when they say there is no time inconsistency in the TV series.

Age (or Schooling) and Intolerance

I think people become more intolerant as they age; in school you are forced to interact with people and learn new things. But as you age you're free to ensconce yourself in your ignorance and shut out or block dissenting voices and opinions.

Some might counter that there is always work to expose one to new and different ideas.

Yet, at work one generally engages with people on a more impersonal, professional level.

And in work the sort of ideas you engage with are generally potentially less scary or discomforting, especially ideologically.

Work is also more instrumental than school; you're typically trying to earn money and/or make a living, rather than think about deep issues.

People are also more guarded and less themselves at work; everyone self-censors.

Why are people so upset about the killing of Cecil the lion?

Gabriel Seah's answer to Why are people so upset about the killing of Cecil the lion? - Quora

Most anti-hunting sentiment is due to a combination of:

- romanticisation of charismatic megafauna
- thinly-disguised bashing of rich people
- generalised online misanthropy

The reaction to the killing of Cecil the Lion is no exception, and is similar to past reactions when Ian Gibson was trampled to death by an elephant (Game Hunter Trampled To Death By Elephant), Rebecca Francis killed a giraffe (This woman smiled after shooting a giraffe, and the Internet is outraged) and Kendall Jones posted pictures of herself smiling beside dead African game (Uproar over cheerleader’s ‘trophy hunts’ posted on Facebook).

Perhaps there was some slight increase in outrage due to the hunt being illegal and Cecil being famous, but really how many non-Zimbabweans had heard of Cecil before his killing, and why does legal hunting also upset people?

Let us look at some of the reasons typically given to justify outrage at this kind of hunting and hunter: conservation, animal cruelty and sportsmanship.

Conservation

Cecil was a member of the species Panthera leo, the African Lion, which is classified as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (Panthera leo (African Lion, Lion)).

That might sound worrying, but Gadus morhua (Atlantic Cod) is also Vulnerable (Gadus morhua (Atlantic Cod, Cod, Codling, Haberdine, Kil'din Cod)) and most people have no problems with eating it. Ditto with lots of other species of seafood (10 Fish You're Eating That Are Endangered Species).

The Giant Gippsland Earthworm - Endangered on the IUCN Red List (i.e. more endangered than the African lion) and the poster child of no conservation campaigns

Furthermore, hunting for sport can in many cases actually be *good* for threatened species.

Hunters  spend a lot of money, which stimulates local economies, and encourages  locals to conserve wildlife so hunters can come and shoot animals.

Indeed,  the legalisation of white rhino hunting in South Africa was responsible  for the population exploding from less than 100 to more than 11,000 (Can trophy hunting actually help conservation? - Conservation). Elephants in Zimbabwe have also benefited from hunting.

Animal cruelty

The vast majority of those against hunting for sport happily eat meat, and factory farming is far more cruel (Farm Animal Cruelty) - it's just that you don't see or imagine it, so it's out of sight, out of mind.

If  it's alright for countless animals to suffer their entire lives just to  give you some momentary pleasure from their meat, what is the suffering  of a few animals to give a hunter his own pleasure?

What is the moral difference between the pleasure of eating meat (which is not necessary for human survival) and the pleasure of hunting which makes the former acceptable but not the latter?

Hens in a cage. Battery hens live in these for an average of 18 months, almost 329 times as long as the 40 hours Cecil the lion took to die

Unsportsmanship-like behavior

This is a somewhat more interesting objection.

This  objection to hunting goes along the lines of it being "unfair" for  people armed with modern weaponry and other technology (and usually with  support staff) to go up against animals only equipped with teeth and  claws.

And thus it is not a sport.

One might question what fair play might involve.

Should the hunter arm himself with a rifle without scopes and/or night vision devices?
Should the hunter not camouflage himself?
Should the hunter arm himself with a spear - no firearms?
Should the hunter only use his bare hands?

Yet, hunted animals are physically stronger, probably faster and definitely better equipped with natural weapons than humans.

Just what should hunters do to give animals a sporting chance?

Similarly, is it sporting for athletes from developed countries,
- benefiting from nutrition and sport science
- who can afford to train full-time
- train at high altitudes to increase their red blood cell count
- using the latest aerodynamic bodysuits (Under Armour’s secret Olympic mission: Build a faster speedskating suit) and
- who have expensive personal trainers and coaches

to go up against athletes from developing countries who
- have day jobs
- train barefoot on dirt tracks
- are malnourished and
- compete in simple jerseys?

Really,  all this fuss about hunters being unsporting is moot since we don't get  upset when people are unsporting in other areas.

Did Lance Armstrong get death threats for being unsporting and doping?

Indeed,  it seems to me that the only ones getting death threats in those  instances were the ones who contributed to Armstrong's fall from grace (Is Lance Armstrong’s Fate Really Worth Making Death Threats?). So people were upset at those seeking to maintain the purity of the sport (such as it is) more than Armstrong, who broke the rules.

In other words, what upsets people isn't really that hunters are unsporting.

Romanticisation of charismatic megafauna

Rebecca Francis, who posed for a photo with a dead giraffe and got a barrage of death threats after Ricky Gervais condemned her (Huntress becomes 'the hunted' after barrage of death threats over kill selfies), noted that

the animals I have taken with a bow include: a 10 1/2 ft. brown bear,  black bear, shiras moose, alaskan moose,  dall sheep, stone sheep,  desert bighorn ram, rocky mountain bighorn ram, mule deer, whitetail  deer, elk, mountain goat, antelope, arapawa ram, kudu, zebra, black  wildebeest, giraffe, springbuck, blesbuck, lynx, badger, and squirrel
(Rebecca Francis giraffe photo causes storm - CNN.com)

Yet, it seems that what got the most attention was the giraffe, which is telling.

Gervais's tweet is also revealing:

What must've happened to you in your life to make you want to kill a beautiful animal & then lie next to it smiling?

At least some of the hate, then, comes from the animal being "beautiful".

Thinly-disguised bashing of rich people

The rich are one of the seemingly few groups that it is okay to hate nowadays, and it is clear from the subtext of many of the comments that this sentiment is present.

One clear example is the journalist Piers Morgan who said that,

I  will sell tickets for $50,000 to anyone who wants to come with me and  track down fat, greedy, selfish, murderous businessmen like Dr Palmer in  their natural habit.
(Piers:I’d love to hunt with Walter Palmer so I can stuff and mount him)

Nevermind that Palmer is not fat. Nor is he a businessman. And there doesn't seem to be any evidence that he is greedy, selfish or murderous (by definition you can't "murder" an animal).

He is a hunter, so he must be a corporate fatcat!

Similarly, the ban on fox hunting in England is at least as much about class as protecting foxes from cruelty (Fox hunts thrive in Britain, but class-tinged controversy won't go away).

Generalised online misanthropy

By now if you're not living under a rock you must have heard about at least one Internet witch hunt.

The glee expressed by many people as they fantasise about torturing Walter Palmer is really disturbing. For example:

Truly. I'd put a cross bow bolt through Walter Palmer then track him  from 40 hrs, shoot him, behead him, skin him and sleep peacefully.
(People Are Flooding This Dentist's Facebook After He Was Named As The Hunter Who Killed Cecil The Lion)

Even if they don't want to kill him, they certainly want him ruined.

Sharon Osbourne tweeted of her hope that he “loses his home, his  practice & his money” (before noting: “He has already lost his  soul”).
(Who's Really Killing the Lions of Zimbabwe?)

As a New York Times article observed,

Perhaps she had now come to understand that her shaming wasn’t really  about her at all. Social media is so perfectly designed to manipulate  our desire for approval, and that is what led to her undoing. Her  tormentors were instantly congratulated as they took Sacco down, bit by  bit, and so they continued to do so. Their motivation was much the same  as Sacco’s own — a bid for the attention of strangers — as she milled  about Heathrow, hoping to amuse people she couldn’t see
(How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life)

Basically, people are just looking for targets to bash and hate, especially in the Internet age where hating on people is something of a performance art.

Postscript

To some constituencies, Walter Palmer is a hero.

By shooting Cecil the Lion he saved  the lives of about 250 antelope Cecil would've eaten over his life.

Cecilia the Lion killing an antelope

As well as any cubs Cecil would've killed if he'd taken over a pride (Why killing infants can benefit animals).

Meanwhile, humans die all the time but this rarely attracts attention (People are upset over the reaction to the deaths of a human in Calais and a lion).