BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Tuesday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "'If you're worried about a robot or some kind of artificial intelligence taking your job... according to the accounting firm PWC robots are likely to create more jobs than they eliminate... what types of jobs are most at risk from artificial intelligence and robots in general?'
'I think in general it's jobs that can be reduced to some sort of routine... Law. You can analyze a huge number of past cases using AI and then the lawyers can do more. They can come up with new types of arguments, they can tackle new types of cases. So as long as your skills are complementary to the machine, then you can actually gain from it, and you can gain higher productivity, higher wages and increased wealth. But if your skills are very easily substitutable by machines, by being more routine, and if you're not flexible enough to address, then it's a problem.'"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Are we heading for 'designer babies'? - "'It's not always so easy to determine where the line should be drawn [between therapy and enhancement]. Personally, I'm someone who is autistic. I was diagnosed when I was 12. And there are many social contexts in which that can be very disabling and there are others in which it can be something that's quite pleasant and a very important part of my identity'...
'Eugenics was about ideology, science is about science and about making life better for people. We can surely at this stage in our development as human beings distinguish between those two.'
'Well, eugenicists thought so too, we have to remember that eugenics-'
'But they were wrong and we know that now. That's the point, society has moved on. That's really my point.'
'Well, I think the issue is they thought they had moved on too. Eugenics was a mainstream science. It was recognized and celebrated in the highest of medical and government circles. I think we have to ask ourselves a question and I would ask you this, John, Why do we suddenly believe that we have it all figured out now, that we can decide for future generations, for all time of humanity, even as we recognize that we had been wrong and we have made grievous errors in every generation prior to now.'"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Margaret Hodge defends attack on Corbyn - "Jewish MPs and others in the party are angry because the leadership hasn't accepted the entire definition of anti-Semitism, which is written by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance."
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Trump visits Britain - "At the end of the day, you know the funny thing is, he sends those tweets out and then he's perfectly fine, he doesn't really have, hold a hostile feeling or anger...
'The giant Trump baby balloon'...
'Well, he'll think that it's about him. So it's probably a positive thing... he does find some of these things funny and interesting, and look, this is a man who has been involved in controversy for almost his entire life in public life and business life. So he's used to it... it gives him energy, all of this controversy, so he enjoys that.'...
He got elected... from the very notion from the voters in the US on the basis that he was going to upset this world order, he was gonna turn it upside down. He will go back and say, look at the amount of people at the protest against me because they don't like it when I put America first. They don't like it when I stand up for American jobs, they don't like it when I don't want to pay as much into the NATO pot as everybody else and I make them pay more. You know, this is a vote winner for him in one way or another. I think sometimes the best way to treat President Trump is to turn your back on him and ignores him"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Tuesday's business with Rob Young - "It's interesting, I think that EU fines are now listed as a regular business expense in Google's financial statements. Does that suggest that the fines, perhaps, aren't big enough?"
BBC World Service - The World This Week, Erdogan wins: but has he peaked? - "I think that the only event really that could do that is an economic crash. And it's long being talked about, it's long been speculated. There's on the horizon, there have been some economic problems. Inflation is already at 12 percent. The Turkish Lira has lost almost a fifth of its value this year against the dollar. And yet despite that, he won re-election. Now, people will tell you, well, it's because the ordinary people on the street don't yet feel the impact and if there is a real economic collapse, then potentially that is a thing that could begin to shake his support base. But what the government does is, it turns it into a narrative that this is a foreign plot to try to hijack President Erdogan and to destroy the country, and for a nation that is addicted to conspiracy theories, they buy that. A lot of people buy that. It would really need to be a massive financial crash for them to begin to doubt him... Turkey likes a strong man. Ataturk was one, Erdogan is another. And when you go to Erdogan rallies, there are posters of Erdogan beside a poster of Ataturk"
BBC World Service - The World This Week, The challenge to the EU - "At the town hall in Seoul, they've been shutting off the power on Friday evenings, to encourage the workers to go home"
BBC World Service - The World This Week, Trump points the way to NATO - "What we've seen here is the Trump method. You say exactly what you really believe, as he did apparently in the interview with the Sun newspaper about Britain and Brexit and Mrs May. And then when you have the next formal occasion, you moderate, you pull back a little bit and then you pronounce everything the greatest success in the world...
We forecast that by 2030, Asia will essentially have eradicated extreme poverty as a continent"
Ahh capitalism! Of course anti-capitalists will claim that it's really science and technology that did the job - despite Communist countries' poor performance despite prioritising science and technology
What the Mystery of the Tick-Borne Meat Allergy Could Reveal - The New York Times
This autistic student asked for a 'fist bump' and a selfie. He got two Title IX investigations. - "A “fist bump” and a selfie may have ended Marcus Knight’s educational career right as it started. The student, who has autism, cerebral palsy and a shunt to relieve fluid pressure on his brain, was not allowed to defend himself against allegations in two Title IX investigations"
Man injured after 'upskirting' camera explodes in his shoe
Obama administration approved $200G grant to group with Al Qaeda ties - "The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designated the Islamic Relief Agency in Khartoum in 2004 a terror-financing organization because of links to Usama bin Laden. But 10 years later, in March 2014, USAID awarded $723,405 to a charity called World Vision Inc., with $200,000 of those funds being directed to the Islamic Relief Agency"
Kuwaiti blogger slammed for 'racist' post says criticism is 'Islamophobic' - "The beauty blogger who sparked outrage after complaining about new laws giving migrant workers better rights has refused to apologise for her remarks, instead accusing her critics of attacking Islam, the hijab and Kuwait... Ms Qattan called the backlash to her comments a “foreign media campaign” designed to attack Islam, the hijab, Kuwait and the wider Gulf region."
New Extremist Political Movement Recklessly Engages In Civil Discourse - "The Southern Poverty Law Center says that it is currently tracking more than 2,300 extremist civility groups in the country, citing an alarmingly high rate of instances of open interactions at unprecedented levels of respectfulness. “It’s like they’re trying to set the clock back,” said extremism advocate Duncan Whitehead. “We thought the troubling days of people like G.K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw—two men with wildly opposing viewpoints yet a disturbing amount of respect for each other— were far behind us.” Liberal activist Danica Hartley says the movement is driven by “privilege.” “If you’re treating your neighbor with respect, you’re part of the problem,” she said. “Our party didn’t spend decades enraging and dividing people just to have groups like these reigniting the tired, dead philosophy of loving your neighbor.”"
Half a million South Koreans sign petition against immigration policy - "Nearly half a million South Koreans have signed a petition against their government’s refugee friendly migration policy. 520,000 people have signed a petition asking their government to “put Koreans before refugees” and are seeking to revoke the Yemenis refugee application. Hank Kim, owner of Core Travel Agency, has posed that people are worried about how immigrants have lived in Europe... “It has become really bad in recent weeks and it is all because Jeju introduced a program that enabled people from 186 countries to come here without a tourist visa.”... “We are not against all refugees. But we should not accept foreigners who try to exploit the policy as a means of seeking economic interests and dodging the draft in their countries""
Clearly, South Korea is the closest safe country to Yemen
Inside Germany’s first brothel to specialise in SEX DOLLS where randy punters claim to prefer romps with silicone models to real women - "Evelyn claims they are being used around 12 times a day for £70 a go and is planning to expand her female line-up. She said: “From those on benefits to judges. Seventy percent of men also come back."... Evelyn even claims wives are proving understanding of the bizarre fetish, with some “waiting outside in their car” while their man pops in for a sex doll session... France's sex doll brothel in Paris was recently saved from closure after campaigners claimed it fuels rape fantasies."
Deep-sea 'aliens' no one knew existed, unearthed in Singapore-Indonesia expedition
So cute I could eat it: The science behind 'cute aggression' - "They posit that the feeling is similar to nervous laughter or tears of joy, an attempt to regulate emotion by going in the opposite direction and thus bringing ourselves back down to a normal state"
Lamarck's bizarre theory of evolution may turn out to be right after all - "Before Charles Darwin, the leading evolutionary theorist was Jean-Baptise Lamarck, who believed organisms acquired traits over their lifetimes that they then passed onto their children. This theory has been roundly disproved...but in the case of roundworms, Lamarck was actually right... This isn't the first time scientists have found latter-day evidence for Lamarckism, but all previous findings have been deeply controversial in part because nobody could figure out a clear biological mechanism to explain them. Indeed, one of the most famous examples involves humans, as Dr. Rechavi explains:
"The classic example is the Dutch famine of World War II. Starving mothers who gave birth during the famine had children who were more susceptible to obesity and other metabolic disorders — and so were their grandchildren.""
Online trolls may be barred from being MP or councillor - "A joint analysis of tweets in the run-up to the election in 2017, by the University of Sheffield and BuzzFeed News. found that male Conservative candidates received the highest percentage of abuse on Twitter. Amnesty International had carried out a separate analysis of the accounts of 177 female MPs in the six months leading up to the election and found that Labour's Diane Abbott received almost half (45.1%) of all abusive tweets that were sent to female MPs."
That's one way to prevent your opponents from being elected
Funny how male Conservatives got the most abuse - when abuse is supposed to be racist, sexist etc
How The 'College-For-Everybody' Agenda Harms Both Students And The Economy - "Many in higher education worry continuously over the fact that only roughly half of students who enroll in college ever graduate, and that those who do graduate often take more than four years to do so. But few seek to go to the roots to attempt to discover the ultimate causes explaining these depressing statistics. One of the few who makes such an attempt is Charles Murray, whose contrarian explanation is, “Too many people are going to college.” Regardless of whether one agrees with its conclusions, Murray’s Real Education, published in 2008, has received far less attention than the gravity of its arguments merits. Real Education defends what he deems are four simple truths about education, but truths that cannot be said publicly without engendering the wrath of a culture fallen prey to what he labels “educational romanticism.” They are “(1) ability varies; (2) half of the children are below average; (3) too many people are going to college; and (4) America’s future depends on how we educate the academically gifted.”... the vision “that everyone should go to college”—like all well-intentioned projects suffering only tenuous connections to reality—asks “too much from those at the bottom, . . . the wrong things from those in the middle, . . . and too little from those at the top.”... Murray presents a higher-education system in which too many students are forced to spend too much time chasing their tails. His thesis that too many are going to college today goes no small distance toward explaining why roughly half of those who enroll in college fail to graduate. It goes a long way toward explaining why, of those who do graduate, 36 percent show little-to-no increase in the critical-thinking and writing skills that a degree is supposed to signify. It goes a long way toward explaining why, in the ‘60s, college students studied on average 24 hours a week, whereas today they spend only 14. Finally, it goes a long way toward explaining the rampant grade inflation perpetrated by universities eager to “accommodate” the masses of new students in college who can’t cope there. In the ‘60s, 15 percent of college grades nationwide were A’s. Today, that percentage has nearly tripled: 43 percent of all grades today are A’s. In fact an A is now the most common grade given in college."
L'origine de Bert
Wednesday, September 19, 2018
Leaving your shoes outside your HDB flat
It seems it's a HDB thing to not want to leave shoes outside because, among other things, people might steal them:
A: So sad.. My flat shoes at my corridor stole when I was about leaving home for work. Sighs
B: I'm not very civilized... So are my neighbours 😂 we trust each other
C: I had my old shoes stolen about 18 years ago. From that time onwards, I never leave my shoes or slippers outside.
D: The rain could make them wet
E: the more expensive shoes u should keep inside when its still new
but then i bought a new pair of sandals for $38
it got stolen that night lol
To be fair condos restrict access.
Only DBSS hdb have some type of restriction for access
F: I just don’t like leaving my shoes outside because I feel it’s so messy. Case in point we want to buy this neighbour of ours a shitty shoe rack because they just leave their shoes all over the floor outside their house
G: Why tempt people
H: Not just rain, the workers that wash the corridor will just spray everything
They try to remove stuff but if there is too much, it's also difficult for them to do their work
I: I always thought this was an urban legend
J: It's not. I had something of mine stolen before.
K: Had several slippers stolen before.
L: If you leave your shit outside, expect it to get stolen.
it happens in condo also. My neighbor sandals got stolen suspected delivery guy.
I: Some people in HDB flats have shoe racks in the hallway outside their home
M: My family had a few pairs of shoes thrown down the stairs by someone for fun. Not very fun for us. Especially when we could only find one side of the shoe.
A: So sad.. My flat shoes at my corridor stole when I was about leaving home for work. Sighs
B: I'm not very civilized... So are my neighbours 😂 we trust each other
C: I had my old shoes stolen about 18 years ago. From that time onwards, I never leave my shoes or slippers outside.
D: The rain could make them wet
E: the more expensive shoes u should keep inside when its still new
but then i bought a new pair of sandals for $38
it got stolen that night lol
To be fair condos restrict access.
Only DBSS hdb have some type of restriction for access
F: I just don’t like leaving my shoes outside because I feel it’s so messy. Case in point we want to buy this neighbour of ours a shitty shoe rack because they just leave their shoes all over the floor outside their house
G: Why tempt people
H: Not just rain, the workers that wash the corridor will just spray everything
They try to remove stuff but if there is too much, it's also difficult for them to do their work
I: I always thought this was an urban legend
J: It's not. I had something of mine stolen before.
K: Had several slippers stolen before.
L: If you leave your shit outside, expect it to get stolen.
it happens in condo also. My neighbor sandals got stolen suspected delivery guy.
I: Some people in HDB flats have shoe racks in the hallway outside their home
M: My family had a few pairs of shoes thrown down the stairs by someone for fun. Not very fun for us. Especially when we could only find one side of the shoe.
Post ID: 7357362123950956269
Links - 19th September 2018 (1)
OK, Abolish ICE. What Then? - "“The call to abolish ICE is, above all, a demand for the Democratic Party to begin seriously resisting an unbridled white-supremacist surveillance state that it had a hand in creating,” McElwee explained in The Nation in April. He called on progressives to “demand that deportation be taken not as the norm but rather as a disturbing indicator of authoritarianism.”... You get rid of ICE, you’re going to have a country that you’re going to be afraid to walk out of your house.” He also predicted that calls to abolish ICE would harm Democrats’ electoral chances in the November midterms, a possibility that some Democrats also feared. (One recent poll found that 54 percent of Americans support keeping the agency intact.) Concerns about abolishing ICE, both as a political strategy and a practical effort, extended beyond Republicans. Eric Holder, an attorney general for President Barack Obama, described the push as a “gift to Republicans.”... While immigration enforcement receives the most attention, it only accounts for a third of ICE’s budget, according to Saldana. “If you do abolish ICE, you’re abolishing the United States’ representation in immigration court, you’re abolishing the extraordinary work that investigative agents do on the Homeland Security Investigations side,” she said. “That’s the half of ICE that does investigative work, which is human trafficking, child exploitation, international crime, military-arms proliferation—all of that is under ICE.”"
If you oppose open borders you must be a white supremacist and authoritarian
The Sexual Revolution of 'Dungeons & Dragons' - "A newly released supplementary book, Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, even gives players the chance to play gender-fluid elves who worship a hermaphroditic elf god named Corellon Larethian. “It’s not just to show that they’re androgynous,” says Crawford. “These are elves who can magically decide whether they want to be male, or female, or neither each day. They are the blessed, viewed as modeling their god.” So not only is D&D encouraging players to create characters of all different types of sexual identity. It’s actually crafted a framework for them to do it. Being queer and gender-fluid is celebrated. You’re not an outcast on the fringes of the gender binary. You’re a hero blessed by a god... While never explicitly condemning women or LGBT individuals from playing, Gygax didn’t encourage it either. Early rules even specified that female characters had to be weaker than their male counterparts. That makes sense when you consider how gamers of this era were synonymous with outcasts and losers. They were proto-incels, if you will"
The cancer spreads
Canada’s new prostitution laws may not make sex work safer: research - "When Canada decided to tackle prostitution by adopting “end demand” laws, it was supposed to make sex work safer and healthier. But precisely the opposite has happened, according to new research presented at the International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam... Researchers from both Canada and France found that prosecuting men who buy sex instead of sex workers – known as the the Nordic model, or “end demand” approach – actually made life worse for sex workers by pushing the trade further into the shadows, making it more difficult to negotiate prices and condom use, and making it less likely that workers would access health services. “We still have a criminalization approach, all we’ve done is shift the target to the client,” said Elena Argento, a research associate with the Gender & Sexual Health Initiative of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. “This has made things worse, not better, for sex workers.”... “It doesn’t matter who you criminalize, it creates stigma.”... Ms. Argento said the fundamental flaw of “end demand” laws is they assume sex workers are victims and “conflate sex work with trafficking.” “Full decriminalization of sex work is critical to protecting the health and safety of sex workers,” she said. Influential organizations such as Amnesty International and UNAIDS also endorse decriminalization, saying it’s the best way to ensure the labour rights and human rights of sex workers are respected. However, New Zealand is the only country that has done so, making sex work and street solicitation legal in 2003."
When the intent is to make a moral stance, you don't care about the consequences. That is why feminism as a policy imperative is disastrous
Explosion In Sex Dolls Threatens Japanese Race With "Extinction" - "Taking it one step further are the "soshoku danshi," which translates to "grass-eating men" or "herbivore men" - a term coined by Japanese columnist Maki Fukasawa who describes these particular isolationists as having a "monk-like approach to life and relationships," which of course includes no sex.
Studies in Japan estimate that this class of men, normally in their 20s and 30s, account for around 60 per cent to 70 per cent of the male population...
If the nation drops birth policies now, says Whyte, “China will learn what many other countries have learned—that it is much more difficult to get people to have more babies” than to force them to stop having them."
The retiree behind the roof garden that brought back a kampung spirit - "
A unique signboard captures the open-hearted spirit that flourishes here. "Pick our herbs and spices for free," it invites everyone, even those who did none of the gardening."
Reality Show Fame Is More Lucrative Than an Oxford or Cambridge Education - "Contestants on British reality TV show Love Island out-earn graduates from the U.K.’s most prestigious universities... On average, those arriving at the Mediterranean villa in search of love, fame or fortune can expect to earn 1.1 million pounds ($1.4 million), outstripping the projected financial benefits of studying at either the University of Oxford or its counterpart in Cambridge, Frontier said. Oxbridge graduates are likely to earn about 815,000 pounds more over their lifetime than someone who does not attend university... more Britons applied to appear on the show than to study at Oxford and Cambridge, which top the Times Higher Education world university rankings.. Factoring in the debt accrued by those studying at university in the U.K., which the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates at average of 50,000 pounds, widens the disparity still further."
Personal shame, stigma and doing good: Incoming president of the National Council of Social Service Anita Fam goes On the Record - "“It’s so important to tell your kids that they are adopted,” says Ms Fam. “If they find out one day in a way they never expected to, it could be the most devastating thing. They need to be told that they were intentionally sought out and wanted by their adoptive parents. Then, one feels special because you’re being chosen as opposed to in another situation, where they might think about it in terms of having been given up by their biological parent.”... "many people have to have jobs to look after their families to support themselves and if you pay them very little, how are they going to live? And if the private sector is much more attractive, why would competent, qualified people come here? “If you have good quality people who are far more effective in the way they design their programmes, their service deliveries which are far more appropriate to the beneficiaries, you probably can do things in a shorter period of time, more efficiently. It’s actually a cost-benefit approach that we are looking at.""
Minnesota boys sue to join girls high school dance teams - "Two teenage boys sued the Minnesota State High School League on Wednesday, alleging it maintains unconstitutional rules that bar boys from joining girls' competitive high school dance teams... The suit argues the rules violate Title IX, the federal law that bars sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal funds."
Of course they could always rewrite Title IX to ban anti-female 'discrimination' only
Tai Sang shows how an octogenarian, single-branch bank can stop time and defy technology - "Total deposits from customers at the end of 2017 stood at HK$1 billion and total customer loans amounted to HK$168 million – not even enough to buy some of the more expensive properties in Hong Kong."
SMRT Feedback tracks down Person of Interest in Singhealth hack - "a command was made to delegate access control of Singhealth’s database named “SHHQ” from a senior officer in Singhealth to an employee of an IT Contractor. The IT contractor in the log is shown to be CTC Global Pte Ltd which is based in Singapore and a wholly-owned subsidiary of ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation, a Japanese technology firm. The employee is an outsourced IT Analyst based in Chennai, India."
Cost savings from outsourcing...
SMRT Feedback releases new evidence showing database queries targeting hospital VIPs - "while 1.5 million Singaporeans were illegally accessed and copied, the golden nugget is actually the VIPs and VVIPs receiving medical treatment in Singapore."
Has generation snowflake infiltrated Hong Kong’s mighty police force? - "“Criminals are not necessarily all bad guys – there are many objective factors behind a crime or reasons to be sympathetic. Likewise, not each and every cop is a good guy.” It was enough to cause deep offence among the sensitive souls tasked with protecting this city, and they fired off a letter of complaint and condemnation to the hapless minister."
Italy: Minister shows Mafia stance with swim in seized pool - "Italy’s interior minister has demonstrated his anti-Mafia priorities by diving into a swimming pool at a Tuscan villa that was confiscated from a mobster. Matteo Salvini then swam a lap in the pool as journalists watched... Referring to stripping mobsters of illicitly acquired wealth, Salvini said: “We must leave these gentlemen in their underwear.”"
BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Madhur Jaffrey: My Life in Five Dishes - "I started writing my cookbooks in the early 80s. The BBC actually hired me to do these programs, and they were considered educational programs. Nobody thought anybody was going to really cook with them, and I think they printed 30,000 books to begin with, not thinking they'd sell but they were gone after the first program. All those books were gone, so they realized that they had a population that was hungering for Indian food and they were making it themselves. There would be reports that all Manchester ran out of green coriander after I had made chicken with green coriander"
Podcast: Sherlock Forest and the Robin Hood myth - History Extra - "If you're gonna go hunting, you need more than just forest. In fact, forests in terms of woodland as we think about it, they're not great for hunting, you think low branches, you're riding, chasing a deer. you're just gonna go slap bang. So you need heathland, you need moorland, you need scrubland, you mean trees"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Emancipation of the Serfs - "The origins of serfdom lay in a process that took best part of 200 years really between the 15th and the 17th centuries, mid 15 and mid 17th centuries. And the logic there was driven partly by the need of the state to placate particular interest groups, because that 200 year period was a period of Muscovite territorial expansion. And so in a free market, the price of labor would have gone up and indeed it did go up. And the logical consequence of that was that peasants started running away from lords who couldn't pay them, to lords who could pay them more. And that was a problem for the state because the state needed the middle ranking landlords to officer the cavalry. And in order to officer the cavalry of course, they needed some labor force at home. So the idea was to restrict peasant movement in order to keep peasants tied to the middle ranking cavalry officers...
[On emancipation] We're talking millions of people, nothing like that had ever been attempted before. There were no precedents and no one had any conception of what the consequences might be. Catherine raised the issue, but it was made very clear to her by the nobles that her throne depended on leaving it well alone...
They weren't allowed to move... legal authority of them was transferred from the landlord to the commune, to the community, and they were all responsible for each other so people just couldn't take off. They still had to pay taxes. The community still had to pay all their due. They had to serve in the army. So in a sense, the bondage was transferred from the landlord to the commune. And that remained the same up until really after the 1905 Revolution...the landlord couldn't flog us anymore... exercise that power over us in the way that he had exercised the power of a slave owner if he chose to exercise it over them, that was gone. And that was indisputable change brought about by the emancipation. What they lost was access to woods, forests, meadows, which had been an integral part of their economy, and they now had to pay for that, which they were furious about because they thought this is ours...
This was a big psychological bow to the nobility. It had been the striking definition of nobility that you were allowed, and only nobles were allowed to own serfs"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Echolocation - "This is actually a nice experiment that you can do at home is you can demonstrate your moth defense mechanisms. All you need is a bunch of keys. Keys produce a lot of ultrasound when you dangle them and if you have an outside light that you have moths gathering around... you sneak up on your moth with a bunch of keys very, very carefully and then you take your keys and you jangle them very violently and what you'll see the moth doing is it will do a whole series of loops and dives, it might fly from the opposite direction. And sometimes they even just drop to the ground, and hide up in the grass...
What the horseshoe bats are doing is they lower the frequency of the call from call to call, in relation to the speed that they're flying so they're compensating for the Doppler Shift incurred by their flight speed. This means that the call they send out and the echo that they receive are on different frequencies, so they don't have this problem with self-deafening. They're separating the pulse and the echo in frequency rather than in time...
We kind of have this idea that echolocation somehow is difficult. Flight we know has evolved multiple times. Lots of animals climb up trees and chuck themselves out and glide. So the evolution to powered flight is probably not that difficult, but somehow the idea that echolocation is this Holy Grail, but we all echolocate to some extent, we perceive the space around us by the reflection of our own echoes. So you put somebody into an echo chamber that absorbs all sound around... really disorientating experience. Because everything, even the rustling of your clothing, you can't pick up the echoes. You have no idea how big the spaces is. Whereas you walk down a corridor, you pick up the sound of your own feet, your clothes, rustling. You know how big that space is. So all human beings will echolocate to some extent...
People have recently analyzed the sound clicks that echolocating humans make... Daniel Kish in America who rides bikes by using echolocation, et cetera, and the clicks that these humans are producing are round about three miliseconds long, which is about the same duration as are the calls of bats... ... the humans using these clicks are actually using the visual cortex in the brain, which we use to understand the world by sight to process the echoes. In the bats it's the auditory cortex"
If you oppose open borders you must be a white supremacist and authoritarian
The Sexual Revolution of 'Dungeons & Dragons' - "A newly released supplementary book, Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, even gives players the chance to play gender-fluid elves who worship a hermaphroditic elf god named Corellon Larethian. “It’s not just to show that they’re androgynous,” says Crawford. “These are elves who can magically decide whether they want to be male, or female, or neither each day. They are the blessed, viewed as modeling their god.” So not only is D&D encouraging players to create characters of all different types of sexual identity. It’s actually crafted a framework for them to do it. Being queer and gender-fluid is celebrated. You’re not an outcast on the fringes of the gender binary. You’re a hero blessed by a god... While never explicitly condemning women or LGBT individuals from playing, Gygax didn’t encourage it either. Early rules even specified that female characters had to be weaker than their male counterparts. That makes sense when you consider how gamers of this era were synonymous with outcasts and losers. They were proto-incels, if you will"
The cancer spreads
Canada’s new prostitution laws may not make sex work safer: research - "When Canada decided to tackle prostitution by adopting “end demand” laws, it was supposed to make sex work safer and healthier. But precisely the opposite has happened, according to new research presented at the International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam... Researchers from both Canada and France found that prosecuting men who buy sex instead of sex workers – known as the the Nordic model, or “end demand” approach – actually made life worse for sex workers by pushing the trade further into the shadows, making it more difficult to negotiate prices and condom use, and making it less likely that workers would access health services. “We still have a criminalization approach, all we’ve done is shift the target to the client,” said Elena Argento, a research associate with the Gender & Sexual Health Initiative of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. “This has made things worse, not better, for sex workers.”... “It doesn’t matter who you criminalize, it creates stigma.”... Ms. Argento said the fundamental flaw of “end demand” laws is they assume sex workers are victims and “conflate sex work with trafficking.” “Full decriminalization of sex work is critical to protecting the health and safety of sex workers,” she said. Influential organizations such as Amnesty International and UNAIDS also endorse decriminalization, saying it’s the best way to ensure the labour rights and human rights of sex workers are respected. However, New Zealand is the only country that has done so, making sex work and street solicitation legal in 2003."
When the intent is to make a moral stance, you don't care about the consequences. That is why feminism as a policy imperative is disastrous
Explosion In Sex Dolls Threatens Japanese Race With "Extinction" - "Taking it one step further are the "soshoku danshi," which translates to "grass-eating men" or "herbivore men" - a term coined by Japanese columnist Maki Fukasawa who describes these particular isolationists as having a "monk-like approach to life and relationships," which of course includes no sex.
Studies in Japan estimate that this class of men, normally in their 20s and 30s, account for around 60 per cent to 70 per cent of the male population...
If the nation drops birth policies now, says Whyte, “China will learn what many other countries have learned—that it is much more difficult to get people to have more babies” than to force them to stop having them."
The retiree behind the roof garden that brought back a kampung spirit - "
A unique signboard captures the open-hearted spirit that flourishes here. "Pick our herbs and spices for free," it invites everyone, even those who did none of the gardening."
Reality Show Fame Is More Lucrative Than an Oxford or Cambridge Education - "Contestants on British reality TV show Love Island out-earn graduates from the U.K.’s most prestigious universities... On average, those arriving at the Mediterranean villa in search of love, fame or fortune can expect to earn 1.1 million pounds ($1.4 million), outstripping the projected financial benefits of studying at either the University of Oxford or its counterpart in Cambridge, Frontier said. Oxbridge graduates are likely to earn about 815,000 pounds more over their lifetime than someone who does not attend university... more Britons applied to appear on the show than to study at Oxford and Cambridge, which top the Times Higher Education world university rankings.. Factoring in the debt accrued by those studying at university in the U.K., which the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates at average of 50,000 pounds, widens the disparity still further."
Personal shame, stigma and doing good: Incoming president of the National Council of Social Service Anita Fam goes On the Record - "“It’s so important to tell your kids that they are adopted,” says Ms Fam. “If they find out one day in a way they never expected to, it could be the most devastating thing. They need to be told that they were intentionally sought out and wanted by their adoptive parents. Then, one feels special because you’re being chosen as opposed to in another situation, where they might think about it in terms of having been given up by their biological parent.”... "many people have to have jobs to look after their families to support themselves and if you pay them very little, how are they going to live? And if the private sector is much more attractive, why would competent, qualified people come here? “If you have good quality people who are far more effective in the way they design their programmes, their service deliveries which are far more appropriate to the beneficiaries, you probably can do things in a shorter period of time, more efficiently. It’s actually a cost-benefit approach that we are looking at.""
Minnesota boys sue to join girls high school dance teams - "Two teenage boys sued the Minnesota State High School League on Wednesday, alleging it maintains unconstitutional rules that bar boys from joining girls' competitive high school dance teams... The suit argues the rules violate Title IX, the federal law that bars sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal funds."
Of course they could always rewrite Title IX to ban anti-female 'discrimination' only
Tai Sang shows how an octogenarian, single-branch bank can stop time and defy technology - "Total deposits from customers at the end of 2017 stood at HK$1 billion and total customer loans amounted to HK$168 million – not even enough to buy some of the more expensive properties in Hong Kong."
SMRT Feedback tracks down Person of Interest in Singhealth hack - "a command was made to delegate access control of Singhealth’s database named “SHHQ” from a senior officer in Singhealth to an employee of an IT Contractor. The IT contractor in the log is shown to be CTC Global Pte Ltd which is based in Singapore and a wholly-owned subsidiary of ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation, a Japanese technology firm. The employee is an outsourced IT Analyst based in Chennai, India."
Cost savings from outsourcing...
SMRT Feedback releases new evidence showing database queries targeting hospital VIPs - "while 1.5 million Singaporeans were illegally accessed and copied, the golden nugget is actually the VIPs and VVIPs receiving medical treatment in Singapore."
Has generation snowflake infiltrated Hong Kong’s mighty police force? - "“Criminals are not necessarily all bad guys – there are many objective factors behind a crime or reasons to be sympathetic. Likewise, not each and every cop is a good guy.” It was enough to cause deep offence among the sensitive souls tasked with protecting this city, and they fired off a letter of complaint and condemnation to the hapless minister."
Italy: Minister shows Mafia stance with swim in seized pool - "Italy’s interior minister has demonstrated his anti-Mafia priorities by diving into a swimming pool at a Tuscan villa that was confiscated from a mobster. Matteo Salvini then swam a lap in the pool as journalists watched... Referring to stripping mobsters of illicitly acquired wealth, Salvini said: “We must leave these gentlemen in their underwear.”"
BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Madhur Jaffrey: My Life in Five Dishes - "I started writing my cookbooks in the early 80s. The BBC actually hired me to do these programs, and they were considered educational programs. Nobody thought anybody was going to really cook with them, and I think they printed 30,000 books to begin with, not thinking they'd sell but they were gone after the first program. All those books were gone, so they realized that they had a population that was hungering for Indian food and they were making it themselves. There would be reports that all Manchester ran out of green coriander after I had made chicken with green coriander"
Podcast: Sherlock Forest and the Robin Hood myth - History Extra - "If you're gonna go hunting, you need more than just forest. In fact, forests in terms of woodland as we think about it, they're not great for hunting, you think low branches, you're riding, chasing a deer. you're just gonna go slap bang. So you need heathland, you need moorland, you need scrubland, you mean trees"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Emancipation of the Serfs - "The origins of serfdom lay in a process that took best part of 200 years really between the 15th and the 17th centuries, mid 15 and mid 17th centuries. And the logic there was driven partly by the need of the state to placate particular interest groups, because that 200 year period was a period of Muscovite territorial expansion. And so in a free market, the price of labor would have gone up and indeed it did go up. And the logical consequence of that was that peasants started running away from lords who couldn't pay them, to lords who could pay them more. And that was a problem for the state because the state needed the middle ranking landlords to officer the cavalry. And in order to officer the cavalry of course, they needed some labor force at home. So the idea was to restrict peasant movement in order to keep peasants tied to the middle ranking cavalry officers...
[On emancipation] We're talking millions of people, nothing like that had ever been attempted before. There were no precedents and no one had any conception of what the consequences might be. Catherine raised the issue, but it was made very clear to her by the nobles that her throne depended on leaving it well alone...
They weren't allowed to move... legal authority of them was transferred from the landlord to the commune, to the community, and they were all responsible for each other so people just couldn't take off. They still had to pay taxes. The community still had to pay all their due. They had to serve in the army. So in a sense, the bondage was transferred from the landlord to the commune. And that remained the same up until really after the 1905 Revolution...the landlord couldn't flog us anymore... exercise that power over us in the way that he had exercised the power of a slave owner if he chose to exercise it over them, that was gone. And that was indisputable change brought about by the emancipation. What they lost was access to woods, forests, meadows, which had been an integral part of their economy, and they now had to pay for that, which they were furious about because they thought this is ours...
This was a big psychological bow to the nobility. It had been the striking definition of nobility that you were allowed, and only nobles were allowed to own serfs"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Echolocation - "This is actually a nice experiment that you can do at home is you can demonstrate your moth defense mechanisms. All you need is a bunch of keys. Keys produce a lot of ultrasound when you dangle them and if you have an outside light that you have moths gathering around... you sneak up on your moth with a bunch of keys very, very carefully and then you take your keys and you jangle them very violently and what you'll see the moth doing is it will do a whole series of loops and dives, it might fly from the opposite direction. And sometimes they even just drop to the ground, and hide up in the grass...
What the horseshoe bats are doing is they lower the frequency of the call from call to call, in relation to the speed that they're flying so they're compensating for the Doppler Shift incurred by their flight speed. This means that the call they send out and the echo that they receive are on different frequencies, so they don't have this problem with self-deafening. They're separating the pulse and the echo in frequency rather than in time...
We kind of have this idea that echolocation somehow is difficult. Flight we know has evolved multiple times. Lots of animals climb up trees and chuck themselves out and glide. So the evolution to powered flight is probably not that difficult, but somehow the idea that echolocation is this Holy Grail, but we all echolocate to some extent, we perceive the space around us by the reflection of our own echoes. So you put somebody into an echo chamber that absorbs all sound around... really disorientating experience. Because everything, even the rustling of your clothing, you can't pick up the echoes. You have no idea how big the spaces is. Whereas you walk down a corridor, you pick up the sound of your own feet, your clothes, rustling. You know how big that space is. So all human beings will echolocate to some extent...
People have recently analyzed the sound clicks that echolocating humans make... Daniel Kish in America who rides bikes by using echolocation, et cetera, and the clicks that these humans are producing are round about three miliseconds long, which is about the same duration as are the calls of bats... ... the humans using these clicks are actually using the visual cortex in the brain, which we use to understand the world by sight to process the echoes. In the bats it's the auditory cortex"
Post ID: 4495425447898214779
Tuesday, September 18, 2018
Links - 18th November 2018 (2)
Commentary: Should a man be expected to earn more than his wife? - "The study from the US census titled Manning Up and Womaning Down, looked at what it termed “non-traditional couples” — the 22.9 per cent of married couples where the woman earns more than her spouse, according to data from the US Internal Revenue Service. It found that both partners in such couples inflate the husband’s salary and reduce the wife’s when they report. However, the researchers were especially struck by the finding that a higher-earning woman tends to talk up her husband’s salary even more than he does... "I don’t want to micromanage housework. I want a partner with equal initiative."
There are strategies to deal with this, such as that deployed by the City lawyer who instructed me on the secret to a happy marriage. Throw money at cleaners, ban guilt, lower your domestic standards and insist that neither parent bakes for the school cake sale."
Does Divorce Risk in Sweden depend on Spouses' Relative Income? A Study of Marriages from 1981 to 1998 - "The relationship between increasing women’s earnings and rising divorce rates frequently has been explained by the so-called independence effect: If a wife enjoys a higher earning than her husband does, she gains less from marriage. It has also been argued that in a society with egalitarian gender attitudes this effect is less important. In this paper, we test if the independence effect applies to Sweden, a country in which egalitarian gender views dominate and female labour-force participation and divorce rates are high. Our analysis is based on a large register data set and intensity regression models. We found support for the ‘independence effect’: The relationship between the share of a wife’s income and the divorce risk is positive regardless of the couple’s total income and the wife’s education level."
Even in the most feminist country in the world, you can't change human nature
The independence effect can also be explained as female hypergamy
Why Is Hospital Food So Disgusting? - "Food for the sick wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, Brad’s Jell-O would have been wine jelly, and the reconstituted broth a clear consomme. Cookbooks and home economics manuals used to include sections on “invalid cookery” as a standard part of domestic instruction. Why was the stuff on Brad’s hospital tray so deeply unappetizing? How did we get here?"
Grooming: Sajid Javid orders officials to build profile of sex gangs - "Javid was responding to a letter from members of a cross-party working group on the issue that includes the Labour MP, Sarah Champion, whose Rotherham constituency was one of those to suffer at the hands of a gang. It emerged on Wednesday that she was given extra police security after getting death threats in response to comments she made about the British Pakistani men who groomed white girls for sexual abuse.
Racism! Islamophobia!
Is Google’s Caste System the Future of the Workforce? - "Google, like other tech companies, espouses an idealistic vision—“be socially beneficial,” and “avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias” are among the principles listed in the guidelines for its artificial-intelligence arm. But while Silicon Valley ostensibly aims to change the world for the better, its actual practices are accelerating a trend throughout the U.S. and the world that’s creating a new tier of second-class workers. According to Bloomberg, Google is not required to provide full benefits to its contractors. In addition, contractors are reportedly not privy to the same corporate perks that full-time workers enjoy: they clock in and out every day, while full-time workers take their time getting to the office; they must pay for the Google shuttles that employees ride to work for free; and they aren’t entitled to stock options."
Ever Wanted to Get Revenge? Try This Instead - The New York Times - "“I wanted to confront my detractors,” he said, “not to shame them, but to simply ask why they wrote that negative thing about me. And then see where the conversation could go from there.” Those conversations became part of a podcast Mr. Marron created called “Conversations With People Who Hate Me.” The dialogue often featured people finding a common ground or similar experience, such as being bullied in high school. Through these conversations, Mr. Marron is able to spin negativity into something that can be leveraged for good."
Dozens injured as hundreds of migrants storm Spain's Ceuta border with Morocco - "More than 700 sub-Saharan migrants on Thursday stormed the border fence surrounding the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in Morocco, with dozens injured in an incursion of “unprecedented violence”. Sixteen migrants and ten officers from Spain’s Guardia Civil received hospital treatment following Thursday morning’s incident, during which the group bombarded agents with quicklime, sticks, stones and bags of excrement as well as aerosols used as flame throwers, the force said in a statement. The incursion, which comes days after Spain officially overtook Italy in migrant arrivals by sea, occurred at around 6.30 am when the men used angle grinders and shears to cut through the outer and inner layers of the border fence... The 602 migrants who ultimately made their way onto Spanish soil have been taken into Ceuta’s temporary migrant reception centre, a facility already overflowing with 650 current residents for its 520 places. It is not the first such incursion across the borders of Ceuta and Melilla, the two Spanish outposts in North Africa which are seen by many fleeing poverty and conflict as their best hope of reaching a new life in Europe. But it is the first entry of such a magnitude into Ceuta since February 2017, when 850 migrants crossed into the territory in four days. Security forces speaking to Europapress said the level of violence employed in the assault was “unprecedented”."
Maybe Morocco is also considered an unsafe country whose people must flee for their lives
This suggests that being welcoming to migrants just attracts more
Luckily this wasn't Israel or they would be condemned for protecting their borders
Conservatives Find Life More Meaningful Than Liberals - "social, rather than economic, conservatives were especially likely to find meaning in life. This was true even when controlling for their “religiosity,” which means it wasn’t just that conservatives had a more ardent belief in God... Past studies have also shown that conservatives tend to be happier than liberals. Republicans are happier in their marriages. Similarly, this current study also found that economic, but not social, conservatives were more satisfied with their lives... Conservatives also tend to be more “self-enhancing” than liberals are, says Peter Ditto, a psychologist at the University of California at Irvine. They tend to talk up how great their lives are and downplay their struggles. But it’s liberals who actually act happier, even if they say they aren’t, Ditto says. He found in a study that people affiliated with Democratic causes are more likely to show a genuine “Duchenne” smile—a “smile with your eyes,” as Tyra would say—and to use positive words in their speech. Then again, Ditto speculated, “the bar for meaning-in-life might just be lower for conservatives.” Ouch... the labels “liberal” and “conservative” don’t actually mean that much right at this current moment. These days, Democrats are rooting for George W. Bush appointee Robert Mueller, and the nation’s most prominent conservative is questioning the justice system"
In Firing James Gunn, Disney Hurts All of Hollywood - "To demand that every artist who works for you to have never had a past, to have never had jagged edges that have been sanded down over time, is asking for people who will make boring art. I want people who challenged the world around them. I want people who were misfits and outcasts. I want people who raised hell. I want David Bowie and Tim Burton and John Waters and Sarah Silverman and Mel Brooks and Patton Oswalt and Eddie Murphy. I want the voices that carry — and many of those voices didn’t always say things we want to hear."
Actually this is a good argument for not slamming them even for things they say now
Business students more likely to have a brain parasite spread by cats - "Toxoplasma gondii is a protozoan parasite carried by cats... Some studies have linked infection with the parasite to slower reaction times, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, suicidal behaviour, and explosive anger.... those who had been exposed to the parasite were 1.7 times more likely to be majoring in business. In particular, they were more likely to be focusing on management and entrepreneurship than other business-related areas. The study also found that professionals attending business events were almost twice as likely to have started their own business if they were T. gondii positive, and that countries with a higher prevalence of T. gondii infection show more entrepreneurial activity. The team behind the study say their data suggests that the parasite may be involved in reducing a person’s fear of failure and high-risk, high-reward ventures. Rodents infected with T. gondii are known to become less fearful of encountering cats."
Burglar wakes up couple to ask to use their Wi-Fi network
Pictured: Las Vegas woman who threw milkshake on McDonald's worker and employee who body slammed her - "A McDonald's employee and the customer she body slammed after the patron threw a milkshake at her, hit her in the face with a metal tray and insulted her mother, have been identified. Erika Chavolla, 24, was working at a Las Vegas McDonalds when she got into a dispute with the 24-year-old customer after she allegedly tried to fill up a water cup with free soda. Sabrinah Fontelar, of Las Vegas, has since bragged on Instagram that she was the customer in the video and has posted screen grabs from the shocking video and links to DailyMail.com's original story."
Man With No Penis Tricked Women During Sex By Using 'Unknown Object' - LADbible - "A sex attacker with no penis has been placed on the sex offenders register after he tricked two women into believing they were having 'sex' with him while the lights were out. But in fact, Carlos Delacruz, 35, actually used an unknown implement when he pretended to have sex with the women who he was in a relationship with... She also suffered 'extreme pain from penetration' during lovemaking and on the first occasion had to tell Delacruz to stop as she was bleeding. The couple then had sex around ten times over the course of their nine-month relationship"
Normally a phallocentric view of sex would be seen as a bad thing
If it was so bad why did they do it 10 times?
Commentary: Expats have an edge over locals. Here's why - "Employers often observe that Singaporean graduates are strong in technical competence but less adept in people skills... Western expatriates may be more effective than locals because of cultural differences and exposure to education systems that emphasise soft skills and self-promotion."
Literature And Life - "Jessica Valenti has noted on The Nation’s Web site that potential triggers for trauma are so manifold as to be beyond the possibility of cataloguing: “There is no trigger warning for living your life.” Some have suggested that a professor’s ability to teach would be compromised should it become commonplace for “The Great Gatsby” to bear a trigger warning alerting readers to misogyny and gore within its pages. Others have worried that trigger-warning advocates, in seeking to protect the vulnerable, run the risk of disempowering them instead. “Bending the world to accommodate our personal frailties does not help us overcome them,” Jenny Jarvie wrote on The New Republic’s online site."
Opinion | The Essay That Helped Bring Down the Soviet Union - The New York Times - "in divorcing human rights from foreign policy President Trump is following President Obama’s lead. Mr. Obama repeatedly prioritized engaging dictatorial regimes rather than challenging their human rights records. His eagerness to strike a nuclear deal with Iran muffled his moral voice during Iran’s Green Revolution of 2009. And he refused to make diplomatic progress conditional on demands that Iran stop supporting terror globally or executing its own people at home"
China Built an Army of Influence Agents in the U.S. - "A common thread runs through much of the United Front’s related activities in the United States and other Western democracies. It uses the freedoms guaranteed in liberal democracies to promote Beijing’s own ends. At times it resembles the tools that democracies such as the United States use to promote their own interests—funding friendly media outlets, recruiting sympathetic locals—but Chinese influence operations often employ elements of secrecy, coercion, and repression that the United States usually does not. It also means that any response to the United Front must be carefully calibrated to preserve the rights and freedoms of Chinese-Americans."
Artificial Intelligence Shows Why Atheism Is Unpopular - "people tend to secularize when four factors are present: existential security (you have enough money and food), personal freedom (you’re free to choose whether to believe or not), pluralism (you have a welcoming attitude to diversity), and education (you’ve got some training in the sciences and humanities). If even one of these factors is absent, the whole secularization process slows down. This, they believe, is why the U.S. is secularizing at a slower rate than Western and Northern Europe... MERV shows that mutually escalating violence is likeliest to occur if there’s a small disparity in size between the majority and minority groups (less than a 70/30 split) and if agents experience out-group members as social and contagion threats (they worry that others will be invasive or infectious). It’s much less likely to occur if there’s a large disparity in size or if the threats agents are experiencing are mostly related to predators or natural hazards."
Too bad the headline is irrelevant clickbait
There are strategies to deal with this, such as that deployed by the City lawyer who instructed me on the secret to a happy marriage. Throw money at cleaners, ban guilt, lower your domestic standards and insist that neither parent bakes for the school cake sale."
Does Divorce Risk in Sweden depend on Spouses' Relative Income? A Study of Marriages from 1981 to 1998 - "The relationship between increasing women’s earnings and rising divorce rates frequently has been explained by the so-called independence effect: If a wife enjoys a higher earning than her husband does, she gains less from marriage. It has also been argued that in a society with egalitarian gender attitudes this effect is less important. In this paper, we test if the independence effect applies to Sweden, a country in which egalitarian gender views dominate and female labour-force participation and divorce rates are high. Our analysis is based on a large register data set and intensity regression models. We found support for the ‘independence effect’: The relationship between the share of a wife’s income and the divorce risk is positive regardless of the couple’s total income and the wife’s education level."
Even in the most feminist country in the world, you can't change human nature
The independence effect can also be explained as female hypergamy
Why Is Hospital Food So Disgusting? - "Food for the sick wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, Brad’s Jell-O would have been wine jelly, and the reconstituted broth a clear consomme. Cookbooks and home economics manuals used to include sections on “invalid cookery” as a standard part of domestic instruction. Why was the stuff on Brad’s hospital tray so deeply unappetizing? How did we get here?"
Grooming: Sajid Javid orders officials to build profile of sex gangs - "Javid was responding to a letter from members of a cross-party working group on the issue that includes the Labour MP, Sarah Champion, whose Rotherham constituency was one of those to suffer at the hands of a gang. It emerged on Wednesday that she was given extra police security after getting death threats in response to comments she made about the British Pakistani men who groomed white girls for sexual abuse.
Racism! Islamophobia!
Is Google’s Caste System the Future of the Workforce? - "Google, like other tech companies, espouses an idealistic vision—“be socially beneficial,” and “avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias” are among the principles listed in the guidelines for its artificial-intelligence arm. But while Silicon Valley ostensibly aims to change the world for the better, its actual practices are accelerating a trend throughout the U.S. and the world that’s creating a new tier of second-class workers. According to Bloomberg, Google is not required to provide full benefits to its contractors. In addition, contractors are reportedly not privy to the same corporate perks that full-time workers enjoy: they clock in and out every day, while full-time workers take their time getting to the office; they must pay for the Google shuttles that employees ride to work for free; and they aren’t entitled to stock options."
Ever Wanted to Get Revenge? Try This Instead - The New York Times - "“I wanted to confront my detractors,” he said, “not to shame them, but to simply ask why they wrote that negative thing about me. And then see where the conversation could go from there.” Those conversations became part of a podcast Mr. Marron created called “Conversations With People Who Hate Me.” The dialogue often featured people finding a common ground or similar experience, such as being bullied in high school. Through these conversations, Mr. Marron is able to spin negativity into something that can be leveraged for good."
Dozens injured as hundreds of migrants storm Spain's Ceuta border with Morocco - "More than 700 sub-Saharan migrants on Thursday stormed the border fence surrounding the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in Morocco, with dozens injured in an incursion of “unprecedented violence”. Sixteen migrants and ten officers from Spain’s Guardia Civil received hospital treatment following Thursday morning’s incident, during which the group bombarded agents with quicklime, sticks, stones and bags of excrement as well as aerosols used as flame throwers, the force said in a statement. The incursion, which comes days after Spain officially overtook Italy in migrant arrivals by sea, occurred at around 6.30 am when the men used angle grinders and shears to cut through the outer and inner layers of the border fence... The 602 migrants who ultimately made their way onto Spanish soil have been taken into Ceuta’s temporary migrant reception centre, a facility already overflowing with 650 current residents for its 520 places. It is not the first such incursion across the borders of Ceuta and Melilla, the two Spanish outposts in North Africa which are seen by many fleeing poverty and conflict as their best hope of reaching a new life in Europe. But it is the first entry of such a magnitude into Ceuta since February 2017, when 850 migrants crossed into the territory in four days. Security forces speaking to Europapress said the level of violence employed in the assault was “unprecedented”."
Maybe Morocco is also considered an unsafe country whose people must flee for their lives
This suggests that being welcoming to migrants just attracts more
Luckily this wasn't Israel or they would be condemned for protecting their borders
Conservatives Find Life More Meaningful Than Liberals - "social, rather than economic, conservatives were especially likely to find meaning in life. This was true even when controlling for their “religiosity,” which means it wasn’t just that conservatives had a more ardent belief in God... Past studies have also shown that conservatives tend to be happier than liberals. Republicans are happier in their marriages. Similarly, this current study also found that economic, but not social, conservatives were more satisfied with their lives... Conservatives also tend to be more “self-enhancing” than liberals are, says Peter Ditto, a psychologist at the University of California at Irvine. They tend to talk up how great their lives are and downplay their struggles. But it’s liberals who actually act happier, even if they say they aren’t, Ditto says. He found in a study that people affiliated with Democratic causes are more likely to show a genuine “Duchenne” smile—a “smile with your eyes,” as Tyra would say—and to use positive words in their speech. Then again, Ditto speculated, “the bar for meaning-in-life might just be lower for conservatives.” Ouch... the labels “liberal” and “conservative” don’t actually mean that much right at this current moment. These days, Democrats are rooting for George W. Bush appointee Robert Mueller, and the nation’s most prominent conservative is questioning the justice system"
In Firing James Gunn, Disney Hurts All of Hollywood - "To demand that every artist who works for you to have never had a past, to have never had jagged edges that have been sanded down over time, is asking for people who will make boring art. I want people who challenged the world around them. I want people who were misfits and outcasts. I want people who raised hell. I want David Bowie and Tim Burton and John Waters and Sarah Silverman and Mel Brooks and Patton Oswalt and Eddie Murphy. I want the voices that carry — and many of those voices didn’t always say things we want to hear."
Actually this is a good argument for not slamming them even for things they say now
Business students more likely to have a brain parasite spread by cats - "Toxoplasma gondii is a protozoan parasite carried by cats... Some studies have linked infection with the parasite to slower reaction times, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, suicidal behaviour, and explosive anger.... those who had been exposed to the parasite were 1.7 times more likely to be majoring in business. In particular, they were more likely to be focusing on management and entrepreneurship than other business-related areas. The study also found that professionals attending business events were almost twice as likely to have started their own business if they were T. gondii positive, and that countries with a higher prevalence of T. gondii infection show more entrepreneurial activity. The team behind the study say their data suggests that the parasite may be involved in reducing a person’s fear of failure and high-risk, high-reward ventures. Rodents infected with T. gondii are known to become less fearful of encountering cats."
Burglar wakes up couple to ask to use their Wi-Fi network
Pictured: Las Vegas woman who threw milkshake on McDonald's worker and employee who body slammed her - "A McDonald's employee and the customer she body slammed after the patron threw a milkshake at her, hit her in the face with a metal tray and insulted her mother, have been identified. Erika Chavolla, 24, was working at a Las Vegas McDonalds when she got into a dispute with the 24-year-old customer after she allegedly tried to fill up a water cup with free soda. Sabrinah Fontelar, of Las Vegas, has since bragged on Instagram that she was the customer in the video and has posted screen grabs from the shocking video and links to DailyMail.com's original story."
Man With No Penis Tricked Women During Sex By Using 'Unknown Object' - LADbible - "A sex attacker with no penis has been placed on the sex offenders register after he tricked two women into believing they were having 'sex' with him while the lights were out. But in fact, Carlos Delacruz, 35, actually used an unknown implement when he pretended to have sex with the women who he was in a relationship with... She also suffered 'extreme pain from penetration' during lovemaking and on the first occasion had to tell Delacruz to stop as she was bleeding. The couple then had sex around ten times over the course of their nine-month relationship"
Normally a phallocentric view of sex would be seen as a bad thing
If it was so bad why did they do it 10 times?
Commentary: Expats have an edge over locals. Here's why - "Employers often observe that Singaporean graduates are strong in technical competence but less adept in people skills... Western expatriates may be more effective than locals because of cultural differences and exposure to education systems that emphasise soft skills and self-promotion."
Literature And Life - "Jessica Valenti has noted on The Nation’s Web site that potential triggers for trauma are so manifold as to be beyond the possibility of cataloguing: “There is no trigger warning for living your life.” Some have suggested that a professor’s ability to teach would be compromised should it become commonplace for “The Great Gatsby” to bear a trigger warning alerting readers to misogyny and gore within its pages. Others have worried that trigger-warning advocates, in seeking to protect the vulnerable, run the risk of disempowering them instead. “Bending the world to accommodate our personal frailties does not help us overcome them,” Jenny Jarvie wrote on The New Republic’s online site."
Opinion | The Essay That Helped Bring Down the Soviet Union - The New York Times - "in divorcing human rights from foreign policy President Trump is following President Obama’s lead. Mr. Obama repeatedly prioritized engaging dictatorial regimes rather than challenging their human rights records. His eagerness to strike a nuclear deal with Iran muffled his moral voice during Iran’s Green Revolution of 2009. And he refused to make diplomatic progress conditional on demands that Iran stop supporting terror globally or executing its own people at home"
China Built an Army of Influence Agents in the U.S. - "A common thread runs through much of the United Front’s related activities in the United States and other Western democracies. It uses the freedoms guaranteed in liberal democracies to promote Beijing’s own ends. At times it resembles the tools that democracies such as the United States use to promote their own interests—funding friendly media outlets, recruiting sympathetic locals—but Chinese influence operations often employ elements of secrecy, coercion, and repression that the United States usually does not. It also means that any response to the United Front must be carefully calibrated to preserve the rights and freedoms of Chinese-Americans."
Artificial Intelligence Shows Why Atheism Is Unpopular - "people tend to secularize when four factors are present: existential security (you have enough money and food), personal freedom (you’re free to choose whether to believe or not), pluralism (you have a welcoming attitude to diversity), and education (you’ve got some training in the sciences and humanities). If even one of these factors is absent, the whole secularization process slows down. This, they believe, is why the U.S. is secularizing at a slower rate than Western and Northern Europe... MERV shows that mutually escalating violence is likeliest to occur if there’s a small disparity in size between the majority and minority groups (less than a 70/30 split) and if agents experience out-group members as social and contagion threats (they worry that others will be invasive or infectious). It’s much less likely to occur if there’s a large disparity in size or if the threats agents are experiencing are mostly related to predators or natural hazards."
Too bad the headline is irrelevant clickbait
Post ID: 4364307319809139000
The Simpsons on Gender Differences
It seems The Simpsons joined the alt-right in 2006; from Girls Just Want to Have Sums (remarkable how prescient it was):
"We celebrate the first of many, many, many, many diversity forums.
Why is it that women appear to be worse at math than men? What is the source of this illusion or is I call it the biggest lie ever told?"
"You're a worse version of Hitler"
"Please, believe me, I understand the problems of women, see?"
"Haha! The principal's a tranny!"
"Am I wearing women's clothes? I didn't notice. When I look in my closet, I don't see male clothes or female clothes, they're all the same."
"Are you saying that men and women are identical?"
"No, no, of course not. Women are unique in every way."
"Now he's saying women and men aren't equal. No, no, no, it's the differences of which there are none that make the sameness exceptional. Just tell me what to say. *hyperventillation*"
"Attention students, due to nervous exhaustion and diarrhea of the mouth... Principal Skinner is going to be replaced by Women's educational expert, Melanie Upfoot"...
"For too long, there's been an anti woman bias in math. Boys are aggressive, obnoxious and never let us be heard. From now on, I am splitting the school in two, separating the boys and the girls forever... Now that the boys and their atmosphere of intimidation are gone, we can finally breathe. Breathe! Ladies!
Now, let's buckle down and do some math...
How do numbers make you feel? What does a plus sign smell like? Is the number seven odd or just different?"
"Are we gonna do any actual math problems?"
"Problems? *splutter* That's how men see math - something to be attacked, to be figured out"
"But, isn't it? I mean confidence building can't replace real learning."
"Uh oh, Lisa. Sounds like you're trying to derail our self esteem engine."...
"Don't you think it's wrong that I can't get the best math education because I'm a girl?"
"*sigh* I don't have any opinions anymore. All I know is that no one is better than anyone else and everyone is the best at everything."
"We celebrate the first of many, many, many, many diversity forums.
Why is it that women appear to be worse at math than men? What is the source of this illusion or is I call it the biggest lie ever told?"
"You're a worse version of Hitler"
"Please, believe me, I understand the problems of women, see?"
"Haha! The principal's a tranny!"
"Am I wearing women's clothes? I didn't notice. When I look in my closet, I don't see male clothes or female clothes, they're all the same."
"Are you saying that men and women are identical?"
"No, no, of course not. Women are unique in every way."
"Now he's saying women and men aren't equal. No, no, no, it's the differences of which there are none that make the sameness exceptional. Just tell me what to say. *hyperventillation*"
"Attention students, due to nervous exhaustion and diarrhea of the mouth... Principal Skinner is going to be replaced by Women's educational expert, Melanie Upfoot"...
"For too long, there's been an anti woman bias in math. Boys are aggressive, obnoxious and never let us be heard. From now on, I am splitting the school in two, separating the boys and the girls forever... Now that the boys and their atmosphere of intimidation are gone, we can finally breathe. Breathe! Ladies!
Now, let's buckle down and do some math...
How do numbers make you feel? What does a plus sign smell like? Is the number seven odd or just different?"
"Are we gonna do any actual math problems?"
"Problems? *splutter* That's how men see math - something to be attacked, to be figured out"
"But, isn't it? I mean confidence building can't replace real learning."
"Uh oh, Lisa. Sounds like you're trying to derail our self esteem engine."...
"Don't you think it's wrong that I can't get the best math education because I'm a girl?"
"*sigh* I don't have any opinions anymore. All I know is that no one is better than anyone else and everyone is the best at everything."
Post ID: 8901659074362109746
Links - 18th September 2018 (1)
The environmental footprint of organic vs. conventional food - The Washington Post - "A report out of Stanford University found no consistent differences in nutritional content between organic and conventionally grown crops... organic methods produce 25 percent less food than conventional farming on the same land area"
Comparative analysis of environmental impacts of agricultural production systems, agricultural input efficiency, and food choice - "A meta-analysis of life cycle assessments that includes 742 agricultural systems and over 90 unique foods produced primarily in high-input systems shows that, per unit of food, organic systems require more land, cause more eutrophication, use less energy, but emit similar greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) as conventional systems; that grass-fed beef requires more land and emits similar GHG emissions as grain-feed beef; and that low-input aquaculture and non-trawling fisheries have much lower GHG emissions than trawling fisheries. In addition, our analyses show that increasing agricultural input efficiency (the amount of food produced per input of fertilizer or feed) would have environmental benefits for both crop and livestock systems. Further, for all environmental indicators and nutritional units examined, plant-based foods have the lowest environmental impacts; eggs, dairy, pork, poultry, non-trawling fisheries, and non-recirculating aquaculture have intermediate impacts; and ruminant meat has impacts ~100 times those of plant-based foods"
So ruminants (e.g. cows) have lower environmental impact. Yet they also result in fewer animals being killed. The socially conscious consumer has no optimal choice
Bad news: Eating local, organic won't shrink your carbon footprint - "organic meats tended to have lower carbon footprints, while organic vegetables tended to have higher carbon footprints compared to those that were conventionally produced. Some of Clark's other findings were:
Grass-fed beef generates 19 per cent more emissions per kilogram than grain-fed beef, largely because grass is less nutritionally dense. Cattle need to eat more grass to get the same nutrition as they would from a smaller amount of grain, they grow more slowly, and must be raised for a longer time before slaughter, generating more emissions.
Trawled fish, especially flat fish, such as sole and halibut, generate an average of 2.8 times more emissions than schooling fish caught with mid-water trawling, seine nets and lines such mackerel and cod.
Crops grown in greenhouse have emissions that are, on average, three times higher than crops grown in field. However, those emissions can be reduced by heating and powering greenhouses with renewable energy."
Organic food no healthier than non-organic: study - "Smith-Spangler and her colleagues found there was no difference in the amount of vitamins in plant or animal products produced organically and conventionally - and the only nutrient difference was slightly more phosphorus in the organic products... it was uncommon for either organic or conventional foods to exceed the allowable limits for pesticides, so it’s unclear whether a difference in residues would have an effect on health"
6 Practical Ways Romans Used Human Urine and Feces in Daily Life - "When left out too long, urine decomposes into ammonia, which is a great cleaning product that takes out stains easily. Roman authors like Catullus attest to people using both human and animal urine as a mouth rinse that helped whiten their teeth... The emperor Vespasian levied a tax on urine around 70 CE. Reportedly, when his son Titus expressed disgust at the tax, Vespasian retorted, "pecunia non olet"—"money doesn’t stink." His tax was so famous that his name is still used today as a general term for public urinals (vespasiennes in French and vespasiani in Italian).
This is how Taiwan responded when one of its conscript soldiers died - "The tragic death of NSF Dave Lee has brought attention to the SAF’s training program and sparked a nationwide debate on the safety of our full time national servicemen. An anonymous post made by a soldier from the 1st Battalion Singapore Guards has gone viral, alleging misconduct by a handful of NSF commanders and the lack of safety measures in place during an 8km “fast march”... On July 20, 2013, 30,000 protestors gathered outside the defence ministry building, where the Deputy Minister of National Defence accepted a petition letter from protestors. A subsequent protest, held on August 3 by the same group, attracted a record turnout, reaching over 100,000... Taiwan’s Parliament quickly approved major reforms to the military justice system, which included the abolition of court martial during peacetime and transfer of military prisoners to civilian prisons. Military prosecutors said some of Hung’s superiors bypassed standard disciplinary procedure. The military investigation led to the arrest and investigation of several officials, with the case eventually transferred to civilian prosecutors. The court subsequently found 13 military officials guilty of various charges and meted out prison sentences of up to eight months."
I guess the Taiwanese need some National Education
Colonnes Morris. | Paris-1900 - "Les colonnes Morris: éléments typique du mobilier urbain Parisien implantés sur les trottoirs de la ville afin de lutter contre l’affichage sauvage très répandu au début du 19ème siècle. A cette époque, l’affichage publique n’est pas réglementé et l’affichage de toute sorte de publicité à lieu sur des urinoirs dotés d’un panneau d’affichage à l’extérieur mais aussi sur les murs et les arbres. Cela sent mauvais, et il faut donc régler ce problème d’hygiène: les « colonnes urinoirs » sont remplacées en 1868 par les colonnes Morris pour l’affichage et par les vespasiennes pour les lieux d’aisances. Ces colonnes doivent leur nom à l’imprimeur Gabriel Morris qui en a obtenu la concession à des fins publicitaires en 1868. Mais l’invention en revient au Berlinois Ernst Litfass qui les avait introduites à Berlin, dès 1854. A Berlin on les appellent Litfaßsäule, ou « colonne de Litfass ». Ces colonnes de forme cylindrique avaient pour vocation première l’affichage théâtral et cinématographique. Mais les Colonnes Morris servaient aussi d’entrepôt au matériel de nettoyage des rues de la capitale, et dissimulaient parfois même des toilettes publiques."
Against metrics: how measuring performance by numbers backfires - "the most dramatic negative effect of metric fixation is its propensity to incentivise gaming: that is, encouraging professionals to maximise the metrics in ways that are at odds with the larger purpose of the organisation... Short-termism is another negative. Measured performance encourages what the US sociologist Robert K Merton in 1936 called ‘the imperious immediacy of interests … where the actor’s paramount concern with the foreseen immediate consequences excludes consideration of further or other consequences’. In short, advancing short-term goals at the expense of long-range considerations. This problem is endemic to publicly traded corporations that sacrifice long-term research and development, and the development of their staff, to the perceived imperatives of the quarterly report. To the debit side of the ledger must also be added the transactional costs of metrics: the expenditure of employee time by those tasked with compiling and processing the metrics in the first place – not to mention the time required to actually read them... employees end up working longer and harder at activities that add little to the real productiveness of their organisation, while sapping their enthusiasm"
Michael Rooker Quits Twitter Following Firing of Guardians Director James Gunn - "While James’ brother Sean and Guardians actor Dave Bautista have spoken in support of Gunn, Rooker went further in his stance, and announced he’s leaving Twitter. “This account will be inactive after today,” he wrote on Sunday. “We’re very tired & upset over the ongoing BULLSHIT… neither I nor my rep will use Twitter again. Twitter sucks and I want nothing to do with it.”"
Has anyone used www.easyrentcars.com? - South Korea Forum - TripAdvisor - "I used them for a rental in Orlando. The rental company overbooked and there was no car available. Easyrentcars.com investigated, confirmed the car wasn't supplied, said they would take care of the claim within 20 working days of the end of the rental contract, didn't and replied to my last email asking for proof that there was no car available and said I was a no show and asked for proof that I showed up. How do I prove that? I am asking Visa to retrieve my payment. Don't trust them. They will do anything not to pay you a refund. Book directly with a reputable rental company. I booked with easyrentcars.com originally because they claimed to cover the extra insurance but if they cover it the way they did the non-supply refund, you will be left high and dry. Avoid easyrentcars.com like the plague. In my experience, they are scammers and nothing more."
"The trip was over and the experience with easyrentcars.com was not all satisfactory. The booking confirmation from easyrentcars.com clearly stated that one-way return fee (for returning the car at different location) was included. But when I picked up the car at Avis counter at Incheon Airport, I was told that one-way fee was not included and I was asked to pay additional KRW185000 for it. I emailed earyrentcars.com to request for a refund of that one-way fee and they are still helping me to investigate the matter. I will follow-up on this issue in the next post."
"We booked car hire with Hertz in Canada, via EasyRentCars, as they came up with a very competitive deal that included insurance and taxes... except when we got the to Hertz desk, it didn't. There was a long delay while we phoned EasyRentCars who spoke to Hertz and asked us to pay the higher price, which was over £100 more and said they would refund us when we got home and sent them the receipt from Hertz. It took several phone calls and a total of 15 emails before they did eventually refund us. And a couple of those calls and several of those emails were sent after they claimed they had transferred the money into our account but it was nowhere to be seen, even 10 days after they first said they had done the transfer. Perhaps they should think again about their company name."
"yes... it is cheap, but comes with a hidden price. I booked one for my Taiwan, and it cancelled on me the night before my flight. So book it if you are a gambler."
"Terrible practice of business.
1. Found somewhere cheaper, and actually offered more thing compared to EasyRentCars. Initiate the Lowest Price Guarantee, get rejected because things offered are not the 'same' because of the extra.
2. Cancellations - Got told that due to system update, they lost my payment information, so can't do refund and was requested to give the transaction that took place half year ago. Sent email on same day, no response yet as of 1 week after email sent.
STEER CLEAR FROM THIS COMPANY. YOU ARE WARNED."
"Easyrentcars is a fraud. I booked a car in Dublin. After 3 weeks they cancelled my booking stating that the Supplier cancelled it. I called the Supplier (Dollar) and they said they simply can't cancel broker's bookings and they didn't or couldn't cancel. Easyrentcars said they will rebook it only if I add more money, but anyway they decided to still charged me the original amount even though they cancelled it! I rent cars constantly and a fraud like that never came across me until this booking."
Venezuela crisis: UN says security forces killed hundreds - "The UN's human rights chief said no-one was being held to account, suggesting the rule of law was "virtually absent". Venezuela has in the past dismissed human rights allegations as "lies"... Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil reserves... These officers may have killed more than 500 people since July 2015 as a way to showcase crime-reduction results, it says. They are alleged to have faked evidence to make it look as though the victims died in exchanges of fire."
Oxfam and Jeremy Corbyn must approve
Female breadwinners: why earning more can poison a marriage - ""My male colleagues don’t ask their stay-at-home wives to work in supermarkets. But, despite my feminist beliefs, I have this prejudice that a man who doesn’t work is somehow a lesser being. I’ve evolved but not enough.” ... When Liza Mundy was researching her book, The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love and Family, she was intrigued to discover that more women than men struggled with role reversal. “I found some men felt threatened by their partners’ high-earning status and retaliated against it, but mainly it was women who were having problems coming to terms with the situation and were surprised that it bothered them so much,” she says. “Women are brought up to expect parity, but they’re dismayed to be out-earning men because of the pressure it entails. They feel they have less flexibility, that they can’t leave that job or go part time and so they are, as one woman put it, ‘getting boxed in’ – which, of course, is what men have encountered throughout history.”"
Comparative analysis of environmental impacts of agricultural production systems, agricultural input efficiency, and food choice - "A meta-analysis of life cycle assessments that includes 742 agricultural systems and over 90 unique foods produced primarily in high-input systems shows that, per unit of food, organic systems require more land, cause more eutrophication, use less energy, but emit similar greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) as conventional systems; that grass-fed beef requires more land and emits similar GHG emissions as grain-feed beef; and that low-input aquaculture and non-trawling fisheries have much lower GHG emissions than trawling fisheries. In addition, our analyses show that increasing agricultural input efficiency (the amount of food produced per input of fertilizer or feed) would have environmental benefits for both crop and livestock systems. Further, for all environmental indicators and nutritional units examined, plant-based foods have the lowest environmental impacts; eggs, dairy, pork, poultry, non-trawling fisheries, and non-recirculating aquaculture have intermediate impacts; and ruminant meat has impacts ~100 times those of plant-based foods"
So ruminants (e.g. cows) have lower environmental impact. Yet they also result in fewer animals being killed. The socially conscious consumer has no optimal choice
Bad news: Eating local, organic won't shrink your carbon footprint - "organic meats tended to have lower carbon footprints, while organic vegetables tended to have higher carbon footprints compared to those that were conventionally produced. Some of Clark's other findings were:
Grass-fed beef generates 19 per cent more emissions per kilogram than grain-fed beef, largely because grass is less nutritionally dense. Cattle need to eat more grass to get the same nutrition as they would from a smaller amount of grain, they grow more slowly, and must be raised for a longer time before slaughter, generating more emissions.
Trawled fish, especially flat fish, such as sole and halibut, generate an average of 2.8 times more emissions than schooling fish caught with mid-water trawling, seine nets and lines such mackerel and cod.
Crops grown in greenhouse have emissions that are, on average, three times higher than crops grown in field. However, those emissions can be reduced by heating and powering greenhouses with renewable energy."
Organic food no healthier than non-organic: study - "Smith-Spangler and her colleagues found there was no difference in the amount of vitamins in plant or animal products produced organically and conventionally - and the only nutrient difference was slightly more phosphorus in the organic products... it was uncommon for either organic or conventional foods to exceed the allowable limits for pesticides, so it’s unclear whether a difference in residues would have an effect on health"
6 Practical Ways Romans Used Human Urine and Feces in Daily Life - "When left out too long, urine decomposes into ammonia, which is a great cleaning product that takes out stains easily. Roman authors like Catullus attest to people using both human and animal urine as a mouth rinse that helped whiten their teeth... The emperor Vespasian levied a tax on urine around 70 CE. Reportedly, when his son Titus expressed disgust at the tax, Vespasian retorted, "pecunia non olet"—"money doesn’t stink." His tax was so famous that his name is still used today as a general term for public urinals (vespasiennes in French and vespasiani in Italian).
This is how Taiwan responded when one of its conscript soldiers died - "The tragic death of NSF Dave Lee has brought attention to the SAF’s training program and sparked a nationwide debate on the safety of our full time national servicemen. An anonymous post made by a soldier from the 1st Battalion Singapore Guards has gone viral, alleging misconduct by a handful of NSF commanders and the lack of safety measures in place during an 8km “fast march”... On July 20, 2013, 30,000 protestors gathered outside the defence ministry building, where the Deputy Minister of National Defence accepted a petition letter from protestors. A subsequent protest, held on August 3 by the same group, attracted a record turnout, reaching over 100,000... Taiwan’s Parliament quickly approved major reforms to the military justice system, which included the abolition of court martial during peacetime and transfer of military prisoners to civilian prisons. Military prosecutors said some of Hung’s superiors bypassed standard disciplinary procedure. The military investigation led to the arrest and investigation of several officials, with the case eventually transferred to civilian prosecutors. The court subsequently found 13 military officials guilty of various charges and meted out prison sentences of up to eight months."
I guess the Taiwanese need some National Education
Colonnes Morris. | Paris-1900 - "Les colonnes Morris: éléments typique du mobilier urbain Parisien implantés sur les trottoirs de la ville afin de lutter contre l’affichage sauvage très répandu au début du 19ème siècle. A cette époque, l’affichage publique n’est pas réglementé et l’affichage de toute sorte de publicité à lieu sur des urinoirs dotés d’un panneau d’affichage à l’extérieur mais aussi sur les murs et les arbres. Cela sent mauvais, et il faut donc régler ce problème d’hygiène: les « colonnes urinoirs » sont remplacées en 1868 par les colonnes Morris pour l’affichage et par les vespasiennes pour les lieux d’aisances. Ces colonnes doivent leur nom à l’imprimeur Gabriel Morris qui en a obtenu la concession à des fins publicitaires en 1868. Mais l’invention en revient au Berlinois Ernst Litfass qui les avait introduites à Berlin, dès 1854. A Berlin on les appellent Litfaßsäule, ou « colonne de Litfass ». Ces colonnes de forme cylindrique avaient pour vocation première l’affichage théâtral et cinématographique. Mais les Colonnes Morris servaient aussi d’entrepôt au matériel de nettoyage des rues de la capitale, et dissimulaient parfois même des toilettes publiques."
Against metrics: how measuring performance by numbers backfires - "the most dramatic negative effect of metric fixation is its propensity to incentivise gaming: that is, encouraging professionals to maximise the metrics in ways that are at odds with the larger purpose of the organisation... Short-termism is another negative. Measured performance encourages what the US sociologist Robert K Merton in 1936 called ‘the imperious immediacy of interests … where the actor’s paramount concern with the foreseen immediate consequences excludes consideration of further or other consequences’. In short, advancing short-term goals at the expense of long-range considerations. This problem is endemic to publicly traded corporations that sacrifice long-term research and development, and the development of their staff, to the perceived imperatives of the quarterly report. To the debit side of the ledger must also be added the transactional costs of metrics: the expenditure of employee time by those tasked with compiling and processing the metrics in the first place – not to mention the time required to actually read them... employees end up working longer and harder at activities that add little to the real productiveness of their organisation, while sapping their enthusiasm"
Michael Rooker Quits Twitter Following Firing of Guardians Director James Gunn - "While James’ brother Sean and Guardians actor Dave Bautista have spoken in support of Gunn, Rooker went further in his stance, and announced he’s leaving Twitter. “This account will be inactive after today,” he wrote on Sunday. “We’re very tired & upset over the ongoing BULLSHIT… neither I nor my rep will use Twitter again. Twitter sucks and I want nothing to do with it.”"
Has anyone used www.easyrentcars.com? - South Korea Forum - TripAdvisor - "I used them for a rental in Orlando. The rental company overbooked and there was no car available. Easyrentcars.com investigated, confirmed the car wasn't supplied, said they would take care of the claim within 20 working days of the end of the rental contract, didn't and replied to my last email asking for proof that there was no car available and said I was a no show and asked for proof that I showed up. How do I prove that? I am asking Visa to retrieve my payment. Don't trust them. They will do anything not to pay you a refund. Book directly with a reputable rental company. I booked with easyrentcars.com originally because they claimed to cover the extra insurance but if they cover it the way they did the non-supply refund, you will be left high and dry. Avoid easyrentcars.com like the plague. In my experience, they are scammers and nothing more."
"The trip was over and the experience with easyrentcars.com was not all satisfactory. The booking confirmation from easyrentcars.com clearly stated that one-way return fee (for returning the car at different location) was included. But when I picked up the car at Avis counter at Incheon Airport, I was told that one-way fee was not included and I was asked to pay additional KRW185000 for it. I emailed earyrentcars.com to request for a refund of that one-way fee and they are still helping me to investigate the matter. I will follow-up on this issue in the next post."
"We booked car hire with Hertz in Canada, via EasyRentCars, as they came up with a very competitive deal that included insurance and taxes... except when we got the to Hertz desk, it didn't. There was a long delay while we phoned EasyRentCars who spoke to Hertz and asked us to pay the higher price, which was over £100 more and said they would refund us when we got home and sent them the receipt from Hertz. It took several phone calls and a total of 15 emails before they did eventually refund us. And a couple of those calls and several of those emails were sent after they claimed they had transferred the money into our account but it was nowhere to be seen, even 10 days after they first said they had done the transfer. Perhaps they should think again about their company name."
"yes... it is cheap, but comes with a hidden price. I booked one for my Taiwan, and it cancelled on me the night before my flight. So book it if you are a gambler."
"Terrible practice of business.
1. Found somewhere cheaper, and actually offered more thing compared to EasyRentCars. Initiate the Lowest Price Guarantee, get rejected because things offered are not the 'same' because of the extra.
2. Cancellations - Got told that due to system update, they lost my payment information, so can't do refund and was requested to give the transaction that took place half year ago. Sent email on same day, no response yet as of 1 week after email sent.
STEER CLEAR FROM THIS COMPANY. YOU ARE WARNED."
"Easyrentcars is a fraud. I booked a car in Dublin. After 3 weeks they cancelled my booking stating that the Supplier cancelled it. I called the Supplier (Dollar) and they said they simply can't cancel broker's bookings and they didn't or couldn't cancel. Easyrentcars said they will rebook it only if I add more money, but anyway they decided to still charged me the original amount even though they cancelled it! I rent cars constantly and a fraud like that never came across me until this booking."
Venezuela crisis: UN says security forces killed hundreds - "The UN's human rights chief said no-one was being held to account, suggesting the rule of law was "virtually absent". Venezuela has in the past dismissed human rights allegations as "lies"... Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil reserves... These officers may have killed more than 500 people since July 2015 as a way to showcase crime-reduction results, it says. They are alleged to have faked evidence to make it look as though the victims died in exchanges of fire."
Oxfam and Jeremy Corbyn must approve
Female breadwinners: why earning more can poison a marriage - ""My male colleagues don’t ask their stay-at-home wives to work in supermarkets. But, despite my feminist beliefs, I have this prejudice that a man who doesn’t work is somehow a lesser being. I’ve evolved but not enough.” ... When Liza Mundy was researching her book, The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love and Family, she was intrigued to discover that more women than men struggled with role reversal. “I found some men felt threatened by their partners’ high-earning status and retaliated against it, but mainly it was women who were having problems coming to terms with the situation and were surprised that it bothered them so much,” she says. “Women are brought up to expect parity, but they’re dismayed to be out-earning men because of the pressure it entails. They feel they have less flexibility, that they can’t leave that job or go part time and so they are, as one woman put it, ‘getting boxed in’ – which, of course, is what men have encountered throughout history.”"
Post ID: 1840291471677734441
Monday, September 17, 2018
Links - 17th September 2018 (3)
An English seaman became the first Western samurai by impressing a Japanese warlord with his knowledge, centuries later inspiring novel "Shogun" - "William Adams... made it his mission to establish trade between England, the Netherlands, and Japan. He never returned to his home country, and died in Japan in 1620, at the age of 55. In his will, he left half of his holdings to his wife in Japan, the other half to his wife and children in England."
China’s Die-Hard Star Wars Fans Respond to ‘Last Jedi’ Flop - "For China’s small but enthusiastic subculture of Star Wars fans, the latest film was a visual feast hampered by a protracted plot and uninspired characters. On popular review website Douban, the new film is rated a fairly weak 7.3, based on over 43,000 reviews. The most upvoted review complains that “the whole film really insults the IQ of its audience,” and demands to know how the universe could possibly be ruled by such an incompetent Galactic Empire. “In Star Wars, it seems only Darth Vader had a brain — it’s such a shame he’s already dead,” the reviewer concludes... factors, according to Chen, include Chinese audiences’ preference for physically attractive protagonists and stories rooted in reality. He points out that, for example, superhero films from Marvel — a Disney cash cow that has enjoyed great success in China — feature recognizable settings, such as New York and even China, and are filled with larger-than-life leads who meet the public’s aesthetic standards. The Star Wars characters, meanwhile, look ordinary by comparison. “These actors aren’t very beautiful, which may deter a lot of Chinese from seeing the recent films,” said Chen. “We fans often joke that if Finn were played by Will Smith, Chinese people might be more inclined to watch it — because he’s very handsome.”... Like the heroic Rebel Alliance, China’s Star Wars fans are a small but feisty bunch, said Chen — mostly university-educated urbanites with some English ability, in his observation... Echoing the sentiments of many fellow fans, Wang and Chen both described the new film as visually appealing but riddled with issues such as atypical behavior from established characters. Luke Skywalker was particularly disappointing to Wang, who felt that the character’s brooding behavior didn’t jibe with the resilience and fearless optimism of the young Luke he had come to know from the original trilogy."
What's interesting is that the Chinese Star Wars fans are basically shitlords - even though they are the more liberal sort
Chinese poster for Star Wars: The Force Awakens minimises role of black actor - "There is no obvious reason for the demotion, especially as the space previously occupied by Finn is now inhabited by additional battling Tie fighters, iconic emblems of the dark side of the force in Star Wars lore but hardly essential inclusions. Also relegated in China are Oscar Isaac’s X-wing pilot Poe Dameron and Peter Mayhew’s Wookiee smuggler Chewbacca, who disappear altogether."
How come no one is complaining that Poe and Chewbacca got totally removed?
How ‘Little Fresh Meats’ Are Winning China Over - "there are in general two types of little fresh meats. One is an alluring, passive sexual object, while the other is an innocent, naive boy. Both are beautiful, and more importantly, both of are markedly different from common male stereotypes in the Chinese popular culture in times past."
"Liberals Have Compromised on Their Own Values": An Interview with Ali A. Rizvi - "Minority communities often have very conservative social values, so by defending and guarding them, you end up, inadvertently, defending and guarding the actual beliefs themselves. Many liberals are unable to make that distinction, between defending someone’s right to believe what they want, and defending the beliefs themselves; between defending the right to wear the hijab, and celebrating or endorsing the hijab itself. Often these things get conflated... The underlying narrative is that the only good Muslim is a conservative Muslim. This is bizarre. If an ex-Catholic has been persecuted by her religion, and she comes out and says that religion is bullshit, she’s hailed as a hero. Leah Remini, who escaped from Scientology, has her own TV show, and a best-selling book. But if there’s a Muslim who comes up and says that she believes in free speech, in gender equality and in secularism, suddenly there’s mass confusion. Look, Europeans challenged their own religion during the Enlightenment, and we’re all benefiting from their efforts today. But when non-Europeans want to do the same, it’s ‘Islamophobia’? That is the real bigotry...
A 2012 Gallup poll showed that, in Saudi Arabia, 19 percent of people don’t have a religious affiliation, and 5 percent are flat-out atheists. That’s pretty stunning...
Whether you like it or not, the fanatics are consistent and have more credibility. I’ve argued with these fundamentalists on our podcast (Secular Jihadists), and they do have scriptural and philosophical back-up for what they’re saying. They really try to explain and justify some of the horrible ideas they have. And even though I disagree with them much more than I disagree with the moderates, I respect their intellectual consistency. At least you can have a dialogue, which is more than you can say about the wishy-washy apologists who keep saying that you take things out of context. And then when you ask, “So, what’s the real context?” their answer is “Well, I’m not a scholar.” That’s not a way to argue...
Many moderates haven’t even read the Quran, and they’re very surprised to find all these disturbing things in there"
Unfabling the East—A Review - "Edward Said’s acolytes have become the new intellectual imperialists... “the Enlightenment’s discovery of Asia entailed a more open-minded, less patronizing approach to foreign cultures than suggested by those who see it as a mere incubation period of Orientalism.” Osterhammel’s book is an oblique criticism of the Orientalism approach to intellectual history"
The New Dean of Students Must Restore Our Trust Deficit - The Octant - "In the past two years alone, we have witnessed growing student anxiety and despair over various issues fundamental to student life and welfare. In Oct. 2016, The Octant ran an exposé over the college’s Counselling Centre (previously known as Wellness Centre). The article highlighted an understaffed counselling team facing high turnover and internal politicking, straining the already-tight mental health resources in an increasingly stressed-out college. Student concerns culminated in a tense town hall during the same month, where former President of Yale-NUS Pericles Lewis faced multiple questions over the topic."
Looks like Yale-NUS is Truly Yale
A Century of Cinemas, Movies and Blockbusters | Remember Singapore
Doing well in school is nothing to be proud of - "while genetics do not definitively determine how someone will fare in school, they create certain predispositions. In total, all the genetic variants account for 11% of variation in educational attainment across the population. This is pretty significant. In comparison, The Atlantic notes, research shows that household income explains 7% of variation in educational achievement... knowledge about how genetics influences years in schooling can help correct inequalities. For example, if we know someone is genetically predisposed to have less success in school, we can change teaching methods or provide extra tutoring to combat that disadvantage... We are so invested in the idea that academic achievement is a de facto good that we fail to consider whether intelligence should be rewarded in the first place... The notion that rewards should go to the most intelligent isn’t a sign of a fair society, but a truly unjust one"
We could deprioritise intelligence and have society collapse. Then everyone would be equal - equally miserable
Behavioral genetics, one of the fastest growing fields in science, still makes a lot of people very uncomfortable - "many who care deeply about the effects of privilege seem to flinch at the research. I’ve spoken to people with no knowledge of the scientific literature but a strong political perspective who insist that such studies about the role of genes simply cannot be true"
After #MeToo, South Koreans are demanding better sex education - "“This society has a lot of injustices when it comes to gender equality,” said Go Young-ju, a 44-year-old English teacher in Iksan, in the southwest of the country. He has been incorporating more feminist material into his classes, such as asking his students to translate Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngochi Adizie’s We Should All Be Feminists from English into Korean. “We all need to find the courage to… take action. My teaching is just the beginning.”"
I'm sure this will reassure their parents that their kids are not being indoctrinated at school
Decline in plastic bags on seabed suggests measures to tackle waste are working - "Despite the reduction in carrier bags, the overall amount of deep-sea litter remained roughly constant due to an increase in the number of other plastic items, including bottles and fishing debris"
Here's How NASA Thinks Society Will Collapse - ""Two important features seem to appear across societies that have collapsed," reads the study. "The stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity and the economic stratification of society into Elites and Masses.""
Why the British Are Better at Satire - "As the English comedian and actor Stephen Fry has noted, failure is a wellspring of British comedy, but its American counterpart rewards “optimism [and] a refusal to see oneself in a bad light.” Ricky Gervais, a co-creator of the original, British version of The Office—also considerably bleaker than its American progeny—put it more bluntly in a piece for Time. “Brits are more comfortable with life’s losers,” he explained, an attitude that enables a form of all-encompassing mockery. In America, such humor runs up against the national inclination to “applaud ambition and openly reward success.” One might think that in political times as jaundiced and polarized as ours, we would be ready to swap the old fable of embattled do-gooders for a diagnosis of structural dysfunction and the bracing personal ridicule that goes with it. But even in a country proud of its antiauthoritarian heritage, there isn’t much precedent for that kind of skewering. For all the partisan furor on daily display, American politicians still enjoy a degree of deference from their colleagues, the press, and (occasionally) the public that their counterparts across the pond couldn’t dream of. In Britain, jeering at—and among—politicians is a national pastime. Remember when South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” during a 2009 congressional address by President Obama? “It was a national incident,” Libby Watson wrote on The Atlantic’s Web site last year, “but raucous shouting at the prime minister during Prime Minister’s Questions has been a weekly institution since the 19th century.” It’s a combative temperament that our political satirists can’t help but envy. No less an authority in this sphere than Jon Stewart introduced a 2011 segment on David Cameron’s brutal give-and-take during a debate in the House of Commons by declaring, “England is awesome!”"
The Tragedy of the American Military - "more often and more skillfully than the public usually appreciates, today’s military has managed to distance itself from the lengthening string of modern military failures—even when wrong... the main effort of military leaders through the past decade, under the Republican leadership of the Bush administration and the Democratic leadership of Obama, has been to get rid of the A-10 so as to free up money for a more expensive, less reliable, technically failing airplane that has little going for it except insider dealing, and the fact that the general public doesn’t care... the all-in costs of this airplane are now estimated to be as much as $1.5 trillion, or a low-end estimate of the entire Iraq War. The condensed version of this plane’s tragedy is that a project meant to correct some of the Pentagon’s deepest problems in designing and paying for weapons has in fact worsened and come to exemplify them. An aircraft that was intended to be inexpensive, adaptable, and reliable has become the most expensive in history, and among the hardest to keep out of the shop... a plane designed to do many contradictory things—to be strong enough to survive Navy aircraft-carrier landings, yet light and maneuverable enough to excel as an Air Force dogfighter, and meanwhile able to take off and land straight up and down, like a helicopter, to reach marines in tight combat circumstances—has unsurprisingly done none of them as well as promised"
Minimum Wage: How High Is Too High? - "Minimum wage increases that are either too high or too abrupt can have adverse economic consequences. As cities continue to take the lead on the minimum wage, they should use empirical data to determine a locally-appropriate threshold. According to leading labor economists, like Arindrajit Dube of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, an ideal minimum wage can be set for particular regions rationally and empirically by pegging the local minimum to roughly 50 percent of the local median wage... a $15 an hour minimum wage may be too high for most metros... most of the country, especially city dwellers, live in places where the minimum wage is too low"
Lalo Dagach - America’s most famous Muslim Olympian only became a... - "America’s most famous Muslim Olympian only became a fencer because her parents thought the suit was “modest” and she could wear hijab.
Why aren’t these details considered disturbing?"
On Ibtihaj Muhammad
“Haka” video taken down after severe criticism of cultural misappropriation - "This cyberstorm has even crossed the seas over to New Zealand. An article by Stuff.co.nz noted that Keppel Corporation has no link with New Zealand at all. This makes their choice to use the Haka seem even baffling."
Good luck getting ruggers to stop using the Haka too
Tom Gara on Twitter: "You can shoot up heroin in public, toss the needle into the street and then take a shit on it, but God help you if you try to drink iced coffee with a straw afterward…
China’s Die-Hard Star Wars Fans Respond to ‘Last Jedi’ Flop - "For China’s small but enthusiastic subculture of Star Wars fans, the latest film was a visual feast hampered by a protracted plot and uninspired characters. On popular review website Douban, the new film is rated a fairly weak 7.3, based on over 43,000 reviews. The most upvoted review complains that “the whole film really insults the IQ of its audience,” and demands to know how the universe could possibly be ruled by such an incompetent Galactic Empire. “In Star Wars, it seems only Darth Vader had a brain — it’s such a shame he’s already dead,” the reviewer concludes... factors, according to Chen, include Chinese audiences’ preference for physically attractive protagonists and stories rooted in reality. He points out that, for example, superhero films from Marvel — a Disney cash cow that has enjoyed great success in China — feature recognizable settings, such as New York and even China, and are filled with larger-than-life leads who meet the public’s aesthetic standards. The Star Wars characters, meanwhile, look ordinary by comparison. “These actors aren’t very beautiful, which may deter a lot of Chinese from seeing the recent films,” said Chen. “We fans often joke that if Finn were played by Will Smith, Chinese people might be more inclined to watch it — because he’s very handsome.”... Like the heroic Rebel Alliance, China’s Star Wars fans are a small but feisty bunch, said Chen — mostly university-educated urbanites with some English ability, in his observation... Echoing the sentiments of many fellow fans, Wang and Chen both described the new film as visually appealing but riddled with issues such as atypical behavior from established characters. Luke Skywalker was particularly disappointing to Wang, who felt that the character’s brooding behavior didn’t jibe with the resilience and fearless optimism of the young Luke he had come to know from the original trilogy."
What's interesting is that the Chinese Star Wars fans are basically shitlords - even though they are the more liberal sort
Chinese poster for Star Wars: The Force Awakens minimises role of black actor - "There is no obvious reason for the demotion, especially as the space previously occupied by Finn is now inhabited by additional battling Tie fighters, iconic emblems of the dark side of the force in Star Wars lore but hardly essential inclusions. Also relegated in China are Oscar Isaac’s X-wing pilot Poe Dameron and Peter Mayhew’s Wookiee smuggler Chewbacca, who disappear altogether."
How come no one is complaining that Poe and Chewbacca got totally removed?
How ‘Little Fresh Meats’ Are Winning China Over - "there are in general two types of little fresh meats. One is an alluring, passive sexual object, while the other is an innocent, naive boy. Both are beautiful, and more importantly, both of are markedly different from common male stereotypes in the Chinese popular culture in times past."
"Liberals Have Compromised on Their Own Values": An Interview with Ali A. Rizvi - "Minority communities often have very conservative social values, so by defending and guarding them, you end up, inadvertently, defending and guarding the actual beliefs themselves. Many liberals are unable to make that distinction, between defending someone’s right to believe what they want, and defending the beliefs themselves; between defending the right to wear the hijab, and celebrating or endorsing the hijab itself. Often these things get conflated... The underlying narrative is that the only good Muslim is a conservative Muslim. This is bizarre. If an ex-Catholic has been persecuted by her religion, and she comes out and says that religion is bullshit, she’s hailed as a hero. Leah Remini, who escaped from Scientology, has her own TV show, and a best-selling book. But if there’s a Muslim who comes up and says that she believes in free speech, in gender equality and in secularism, suddenly there’s mass confusion. Look, Europeans challenged their own religion during the Enlightenment, and we’re all benefiting from their efforts today. But when non-Europeans want to do the same, it’s ‘Islamophobia’? That is the real bigotry...
A 2012 Gallup poll showed that, in Saudi Arabia, 19 percent of people don’t have a religious affiliation, and 5 percent are flat-out atheists. That’s pretty stunning...
Whether you like it or not, the fanatics are consistent and have more credibility. I’ve argued with these fundamentalists on our podcast (Secular Jihadists), and they do have scriptural and philosophical back-up for what they’re saying. They really try to explain and justify some of the horrible ideas they have. And even though I disagree with them much more than I disagree with the moderates, I respect their intellectual consistency. At least you can have a dialogue, which is more than you can say about the wishy-washy apologists who keep saying that you take things out of context. And then when you ask, “So, what’s the real context?” their answer is “Well, I’m not a scholar.” That’s not a way to argue...
Many moderates haven’t even read the Quran, and they’re very surprised to find all these disturbing things in there"
Unfabling the East—A Review - "Edward Said’s acolytes have become the new intellectual imperialists... “the Enlightenment’s discovery of Asia entailed a more open-minded, less patronizing approach to foreign cultures than suggested by those who see it as a mere incubation period of Orientalism.” Osterhammel’s book is an oblique criticism of the Orientalism approach to intellectual history"
The New Dean of Students Must Restore Our Trust Deficit - The Octant - "In the past two years alone, we have witnessed growing student anxiety and despair over various issues fundamental to student life and welfare. In Oct. 2016, The Octant ran an exposé over the college’s Counselling Centre (previously known as Wellness Centre). The article highlighted an understaffed counselling team facing high turnover and internal politicking, straining the already-tight mental health resources in an increasingly stressed-out college. Student concerns culminated in a tense town hall during the same month, where former President of Yale-NUS Pericles Lewis faced multiple questions over the topic."
Looks like Yale-NUS is Truly Yale
A Century of Cinemas, Movies and Blockbusters | Remember Singapore
Doing well in school is nothing to be proud of - "while genetics do not definitively determine how someone will fare in school, they create certain predispositions. In total, all the genetic variants account for 11% of variation in educational attainment across the population. This is pretty significant. In comparison, The Atlantic notes, research shows that household income explains 7% of variation in educational achievement... knowledge about how genetics influences years in schooling can help correct inequalities. For example, if we know someone is genetically predisposed to have less success in school, we can change teaching methods or provide extra tutoring to combat that disadvantage... We are so invested in the idea that academic achievement is a de facto good that we fail to consider whether intelligence should be rewarded in the first place... The notion that rewards should go to the most intelligent isn’t a sign of a fair society, but a truly unjust one"
We could deprioritise intelligence and have society collapse. Then everyone would be equal - equally miserable
Behavioral genetics, one of the fastest growing fields in science, still makes a lot of people very uncomfortable - "many who care deeply about the effects of privilege seem to flinch at the research. I’ve spoken to people with no knowledge of the scientific literature but a strong political perspective who insist that such studies about the role of genes simply cannot be true"
After #MeToo, South Koreans are demanding better sex education - "“This society has a lot of injustices when it comes to gender equality,” said Go Young-ju, a 44-year-old English teacher in Iksan, in the southwest of the country. He has been incorporating more feminist material into his classes, such as asking his students to translate Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngochi Adizie’s We Should All Be Feminists from English into Korean. “We all need to find the courage to… take action. My teaching is just the beginning.”"
I'm sure this will reassure their parents that their kids are not being indoctrinated at school
Decline in plastic bags on seabed suggests measures to tackle waste are working - "Despite the reduction in carrier bags, the overall amount of deep-sea litter remained roughly constant due to an increase in the number of other plastic items, including bottles and fishing debris"
Here's How NASA Thinks Society Will Collapse - ""Two important features seem to appear across societies that have collapsed," reads the study. "The stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity and the economic stratification of society into Elites and Masses.""
Why the British Are Better at Satire - "As the English comedian and actor Stephen Fry has noted, failure is a wellspring of British comedy, but its American counterpart rewards “optimism [and] a refusal to see oneself in a bad light.” Ricky Gervais, a co-creator of the original, British version of The Office—also considerably bleaker than its American progeny—put it more bluntly in a piece for Time. “Brits are more comfortable with life’s losers,” he explained, an attitude that enables a form of all-encompassing mockery. In America, such humor runs up against the national inclination to “applaud ambition and openly reward success.” One might think that in political times as jaundiced and polarized as ours, we would be ready to swap the old fable of embattled do-gooders for a diagnosis of structural dysfunction and the bracing personal ridicule that goes with it. But even in a country proud of its antiauthoritarian heritage, there isn’t much precedent for that kind of skewering. For all the partisan furor on daily display, American politicians still enjoy a degree of deference from their colleagues, the press, and (occasionally) the public that their counterparts across the pond couldn’t dream of. In Britain, jeering at—and among—politicians is a national pastime. Remember when South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” during a 2009 congressional address by President Obama? “It was a national incident,” Libby Watson wrote on The Atlantic’s Web site last year, “but raucous shouting at the prime minister during Prime Minister’s Questions has been a weekly institution since the 19th century.” It’s a combative temperament that our political satirists can’t help but envy. No less an authority in this sphere than Jon Stewart introduced a 2011 segment on David Cameron’s brutal give-and-take during a debate in the House of Commons by declaring, “England is awesome!”"
The Tragedy of the American Military - "more often and more skillfully than the public usually appreciates, today’s military has managed to distance itself from the lengthening string of modern military failures—even when wrong... the main effort of military leaders through the past decade, under the Republican leadership of the Bush administration and the Democratic leadership of Obama, has been to get rid of the A-10 so as to free up money for a more expensive, less reliable, technically failing airplane that has little going for it except insider dealing, and the fact that the general public doesn’t care... the all-in costs of this airplane are now estimated to be as much as $1.5 trillion, or a low-end estimate of the entire Iraq War. The condensed version of this plane’s tragedy is that a project meant to correct some of the Pentagon’s deepest problems in designing and paying for weapons has in fact worsened and come to exemplify them. An aircraft that was intended to be inexpensive, adaptable, and reliable has become the most expensive in history, and among the hardest to keep out of the shop... a plane designed to do many contradictory things—to be strong enough to survive Navy aircraft-carrier landings, yet light and maneuverable enough to excel as an Air Force dogfighter, and meanwhile able to take off and land straight up and down, like a helicopter, to reach marines in tight combat circumstances—has unsurprisingly done none of them as well as promised"
Minimum Wage: How High Is Too High? - "Minimum wage increases that are either too high or too abrupt can have adverse economic consequences. As cities continue to take the lead on the minimum wage, they should use empirical data to determine a locally-appropriate threshold. According to leading labor economists, like Arindrajit Dube of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, an ideal minimum wage can be set for particular regions rationally and empirically by pegging the local minimum to roughly 50 percent of the local median wage... a $15 an hour minimum wage may be too high for most metros... most of the country, especially city dwellers, live in places where the minimum wage is too low"
Lalo Dagach - America’s most famous Muslim Olympian only became a... - "America’s most famous Muslim Olympian only became a fencer because her parents thought the suit was “modest” and she could wear hijab.
Why aren’t these details considered disturbing?"
On Ibtihaj Muhammad
“Haka” video taken down after severe criticism of cultural misappropriation - "This cyberstorm has even crossed the seas over to New Zealand. An article by Stuff.co.nz noted that Keppel Corporation has no link with New Zealand at all. This makes their choice to use the Haka seem even baffling."
Good luck getting ruggers to stop using the Haka too
Tom Gara on Twitter: "You can shoot up heroin in public, toss the needle into the street and then take a shit on it, but God help you if you try to drink iced coffee with a straw afterward…
Post ID: 6139712399961457516
Flame of the Day
"You really are one of the worst people I’ve met and you continue to reinforce that with every comment you make."
Post ID: 5253163642372658915
Links - 17th September 2018 (2)
Trouble for bubble tea shops as San Francisco bans plastic straws - "For the hundreds of independent businesses that sell bubble tea, many of them immigrant-owned, finding a supply of the compostable bubble tea straws may be almost impossible... Whereas plastic straws cost 1 to 3 cents apiece, paper costs 7 to 19 and compostable plastic 7 to 20... Given the consumption rates of Boba Guys’ five locations, supplying San Francisco’s dedicated bubble tea shops may require straws on the magnitude of 30 million to 35 million — and that’s not including all the other cafes that serve iced tea with tapioca pearls. Because of the rush to order paper straws, Aardvark already has a long backlog. Jumbo straws from neither of the other two companies are on the market yet"
Maybe straw bans can be framed as racist
Men With Same-Sex Partners 28 Times More Likely to Get HIV - U.N. - "Men with same-sex sexual partners are 28 times more likely to contract HIV than their heterosexual counterparts despite a radical reduction in new infections among gay men in Western countries"
Of course this is framed as being due to homophobia
Lesbians are at relatively low risk of HIV. I guess this shows that lesbians aren't victims of homophobia and so aren't oppressed
Illegal Border Crossers Receive Meals That Meet Religious Needs While Homeless Go Hungry - "the cost to feed illegal border crossers has been increasing as food choices change from “macaroni and cheese” to meals that accommodate religious needs. The total cost of meals for illegal border crossers now exceeds $770,000 per year. The $770,000 price tag covered the temporary meals of roughly 10,000 individuals in the last 6 months.
Editors Note: There were over 26,000 border crossers in 2017 surpassing the total number of Syrian refugees accepted in 2016... Charles Adler vented his frustration with the process noting:”Fewer than 1% of more than 28,000 irregular asylum seekers have been removed from Canada so far. So Canada is as accessible to illegal entry as a #McDonalds Drive Thru. And our taxpayers pay for the Happy Meals. If this is government competence, what does incompetence look like?”... while asylum seekers receive aid, many of Canada’s homeless eat out of garbage bins and feel completely helpless. Canada’s homeless population could very well be in for even worse conditions, as they continue to face competition from the rapidly growing population of asylum seekers which use many of the same services traditionally used by the homeless population."
Your medical record is worth more to hackers than your credit card - "Your medical information is worth 10 times more than your credit card number on the black market... The data for sale includes names, birth dates, policy numbers, diagnosis codes and billing information. Fraudsters use this data to create fake IDs to buy medical equipment or drugs that can be resold, or they combine a patient number with a false provider number and file made-up claims with insurers, according to experts who have investigated cyber attacks on healthcare organizations. Medical identity theft is often not immediately identified by a patient or their provider, giving criminals years to milk such credentials. That makes medical data more valuable than credit cards, which tend to be quickly canceled by banks once fraud is detected"
Micab: 15,000 phantom bookings in June point to Grab - "After booking one of our cabs, then waiting as usual before canceling, our drivers will receive a call a few minutes later inviting them to a driver’s orientation for Grab
Angry groom publicly shames bride by playing video of her cheating with another man at wedding dinner
Toronto shooting rampage: New details emerge about gunman Faisal Hussain - "a law enforcement source told CBS News that Faisal Hussain visited Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) websites and may have expressed support for the terrorist group. They were looking into whether Hussain may have lived at one time in Afghanistan and possibly Pakistan... The assailant's family has said he suffered from psychosis and depression for years but they never imagined he would do such a thing... The mass shooting in Toronto's Greektown neighborhood stunned people in a normally safe city, already unsettled by an attack just three months ago when a man used a van to plow over pedestrians on a downtown sidewalk, killing 10 people and injuring 14 in an attack apparently aimed at women."
Yet liberals keep insisting that it's only mental illness when it's white, straight men
FUREY: Meet the spin doctor behind the Hussain family statement - "The man who has presented himself as the point of contact for the family of Faisal Hussain is a professional activist who has reportedly committed himself to “framing a new narrative of Muslims in Canada” and creating a “national political movement.” Shortly after the Ontario Special Investigations Unit revealed the identity of the Danforth shooter as 29-year-old Faisal Hussain, a news release was sent out to select media attributed to the “Hussain Family”... despite his familiarity with media, Hashim refused to answer questions from the Sun about the Hussain family and his connection with them, including how long he had known them and whether he reached out to them or vice versa... To date, no member of the Hussain family has spoken publicly or made any direct contact with media... Hashim would not clarify which family members contributed to the statement."
FATAH: Mentally ill? The media or the murderer? - "a Toronto Star investigative reporter went as far as to blame all men for the crime. Kenyon Wallace wrote, “why, many are inevitably asking, would someone do such a thing?” Then answering his own question Wallace determined, “In truth, we may never know.”... another male was digging for the truth as in facts, not a discourse in gender studies that would diminish Bin Laden, ISIS, al-Qaida and the Taliban responsibility for crimes against humanity and share it with all of us males as their partners in crime. In the meantime, Warmington reports that “files being reviewed by police include concern Hussain expressed “support” for a website that was “pro-ISIL” and his visits to Pakistan and Afghanistan. There are questions that remain unanswered – like which mosque Hussain attended, who scrubbed his social media presence and how it was that his name was withheld until the family issued their polished statement."
Boy, 13, charged with assault after 'firing Mcdonald's chip at woman with straw' - "The boy was then arrested despite his mother claiming he was aiming the chip at his friend. After months of prosecutors building up the case, the case was eventually dropped when he accepted a police caution. His friends, who are all aged 13, were also charged. One pleaded guilty, one was handed a caution and another is awaiting a trial. The boy’s mother said the whole case was a waste of time as her son had ‘actually thrown the straw wrapper at a friend’."
STUDY: Women Don’t Want to Date Vegetarian Men - "The study, “Eating Meat Makes You Sexy: Conformity to Dietary Gender Norms and Practices,” was published in the recent issue of Psychology of Men and Masculinity and was led by University of Padova researchers Susanna Timeo and Caterina Suitner... women rated vegetarian men as less attractive in all circumstances -- even when the woman was vegetarian herself."
Masculine Dads Raise Confident Daughters - WSJ - "A glance at the public figures felled in the #MeToo purges—not to mention Bill Clinton —should cure us of the idea that progressive politics incline men to better treatment of women. Masculinity, like femininity, is neither inherently good nor bad. Enormous damage can be inflicted by the sorts of malice we associate with girls: spreading rumors, convincing someone’s friends to turn against her, refusing to acknowledge someone purportedly beneath notice. Femininity and masculinity are manners of comportment and modi operandi; they are not codes of conduct. Men have used masculinity for acts of heroism and decency. That they have also applied it to despicable behavior says nothing of masculinity itself... There is something regrettable in the way our exclusive focus on boys and men lets young women off the hook. As if women bear no responsibility for their own behavior. As if they are too weak, too emotional, too foolish ever to take care of themselves. And that is the greatest disappointment of the #MeToo movement, that it has so spectacularly refused to insist that a woman not allow any man to treat her badly"
Google Emerges as Early Winner From Europe’s New Data Privacy Law - WSJ - "GDPR, the European Union’s new privacy law, is drawing advertising money toward Google’s online-ad services and away from competitors that are straining to show they’re complying with the sweeping regulation... That means the new law, the General Data Protection Regulation, is reinforcing—at least initially—the strength of the biggest online-ad players, led by Google and Facebook Inc.
In other words, regulatory burdens are better borne by big companies and can be anti-competitive
The Dark Side of the Enlightenment - WSJ - "the principal advances that today’s Enlightenment enthusiasts want to claim were “set in motion” much earlier. And it isn’t at all clear how helpful the Enlightenment was once it arrived... One such myth was Locke’s claim that the state was founded on a contract among free and equal individuals—a theory the Enlightenment’s critics understood to be both historically false and dangerous. While the theory did relatively little harm in tradition-bound Britain, it led to catastrophe in Europe. Imported into France by Rousseau, it quickly pulled down the monarchy and the state, producing a series of failed constitutions, the Reign of Terror and finally the Napoleonic Wars—all in the name of infallible and universal reason. Millions died as Napoleon’s armies sought to destroy and rebuild every government in Europe in accordance with the one correct political theory allowed by Enlightenment philosophy. Yet Napoleon was simply trying, in Mr. Brooks’s phrase, to “think things through from the ground up.”... Marx saw himself as promoting universal reason, extending the work of the French Revolution by insisting that the workers of the world stop (again in Mr. Brooks’s words) “deferring blindly to authority.” The “science” Marx developed “from the ground up” killed tens of millions in the 20th century."
Democracy Is Far From Dead - WSJ - "Viewed in broad historical terms, the democratic model continues to excel when measured against all the alternatives. Established democracies almost never go to war with each other, helping explain why the decades since World War II have been among the least violent in human history, at least when it comes to interstate war... The U.S. leads a coalition or loose alliance system of some 60 states that together account for roughly 70% of world military spending and a similar fraction of total world gross domestic product. Except in the Middle East, almost all these U.S. allies are democracies. Democracies have struggled with corruption, violent crime, poverty, populism, challenges from globalization, and other hard realities of modern life. Democracy does not change human nature. It does, however, generally put us in a much better position to address those problems peacefully. Witness South Korea, which impeached a president earlier this year but seems no worse for the wear. Or Brazil, dealing with similar political problems in an ugly yet still constitutional manner. Or India, where a strongman leader is nonetheless checked in some of his ambitions by a balance-of-powers system. Or the U.K., where Brexit, itself the result of a democratic choice, seems likely to cause only limited damage"
Americans' view of marijuana is rosy, and unscientific - "While studies have shown that cannabis can help quiet seizures in children with hard to treat epilepsy, quell the nausea and vomiting that can accompany chemotherapy and sooth nerve pain, there's no evidence that it can help with the vast majority of other medical conditions, Keyhani said. And yet, people think of it as a cure all, she added... nine percent of people become addicted to cannabis."
Portugal Dared to Cast Aside Austerity. It’s Having a Major Revival. - The New York Times
Maybe straw bans can be framed as racist
Men With Same-Sex Partners 28 Times More Likely to Get HIV - U.N. - "Men with same-sex sexual partners are 28 times more likely to contract HIV than their heterosexual counterparts despite a radical reduction in new infections among gay men in Western countries"
Of course this is framed as being due to homophobia
Lesbians are at relatively low risk of HIV. I guess this shows that lesbians aren't victims of homophobia and so aren't oppressed
Illegal Border Crossers Receive Meals That Meet Religious Needs While Homeless Go Hungry - "the cost to feed illegal border crossers has been increasing as food choices change from “macaroni and cheese” to meals that accommodate religious needs. The total cost of meals for illegal border crossers now exceeds $770,000 per year. The $770,000 price tag covered the temporary meals of roughly 10,000 individuals in the last 6 months.
Editors Note: There were over 26,000 border crossers in 2017 surpassing the total number of Syrian refugees accepted in 2016... Charles Adler vented his frustration with the process noting:”Fewer than 1% of more than 28,000 irregular asylum seekers have been removed from Canada so far. So Canada is as accessible to illegal entry as a #McDonalds Drive Thru. And our taxpayers pay for the Happy Meals. If this is government competence, what does incompetence look like?”... while asylum seekers receive aid, many of Canada’s homeless eat out of garbage bins and feel completely helpless. Canada’s homeless population could very well be in for even worse conditions, as they continue to face competition from the rapidly growing population of asylum seekers which use many of the same services traditionally used by the homeless population."
Your medical record is worth more to hackers than your credit card - "Your medical information is worth 10 times more than your credit card number on the black market... The data for sale includes names, birth dates, policy numbers, diagnosis codes and billing information. Fraudsters use this data to create fake IDs to buy medical equipment or drugs that can be resold, or they combine a patient number with a false provider number and file made-up claims with insurers, according to experts who have investigated cyber attacks on healthcare organizations. Medical identity theft is often not immediately identified by a patient or their provider, giving criminals years to milk such credentials. That makes medical data more valuable than credit cards, which tend to be quickly canceled by banks once fraud is detected"
Micab: 15,000 phantom bookings in June point to Grab - "After booking one of our cabs, then waiting as usual before canceling, our drivers will receive a call a few minutes later inviting them to a driver’s orientation for Grab
Angry groom publicly shames bride by playing video of her cheating with another man at wedding dinner
Toronto shooting rampage: New details emerge about gunman Faisal Hussain - "a law enforcement source told CBS News that Faisal Hussain visited Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) websites and may have expressed support for the terrorist group. They were looking into whether Hussain may have lived at one time in Afghanistan and possibly Pakistan... The assailant's family has said he suffered from psychosis and depression for years but they never imagined he would do such a thing... The mass shooting in Toronto's Greektown neighborhood stunned people in a normally safe city, already unsettled by an attack just three months ago when a man used a van to plow over pedestrians on a downtown sidewalk, killing 10 people and injuring 14 in an attack apparently aimed at women."
Yet liberals keep insisting that it's only mental illness when it's white, straight men
FUREY: Meet the spin doctor behind the Hussain family statement - "The man who has presented himself as the point of contact for the family of Faisal Hussain is a professional activist who has reportedly committed himself to “framing a new narrative of Muslims in Canada” and creating a “national political movement.” Shortly after the Ontario Special Investigations Unit revealed the identity of the Danforth shooter as 29-year-old Faisal Hussain, a news release was sent out to select media attributed to the “Hussain Family”... despite his familiarity with media, Hashim refused to answer questions from the Sun about the Hussain family and his connection with them, including how long he had known them and whether he reached out to them or vice versa... To date, no member of the Hussain family has spoken publicly or made any direct contact with media... Hashim would not clarify which family members contributed to the statement."
FATAH: Mentally ill? The media or the murderer? - "a Toronto Star investigative reporter went as far as to blame all men for the crime. Kenyon Wallace wrote, “why, many are inevitably asking, would someone do such a thing?” Then answering his own question Wallace determined, “In truth, we may never know.”... another male was digging for the truth as in facts, not a discourse in gender studies that would diminish Bin Laden, ISIS, al-Qaida and the Taliban responsibility for crimes against humanity and share it with all of us males as their partners in crime. In the meantime, Warmington reports that “files being reviewed by police include concern Hussain expressed “support” for a website that was “pro-ISIL” and his visits to Pakistan and Afghanistan. There are questions that remain unanswered – like which mosque Hussain attended, who scrubbed his social media presence and how it was that his name was withheld until the family issued their polished statement."
Boy, 13, charged with assault after 'firing Mcdonald's chip at woman with straw' - "The boy was then arrested despite his mother claiming he was aiming the chip at his friend. After months of prosecutors building up the case, the case was eventually dropped when he accepted a police caution. His friends, who are all aged 13, were also charged. One pleaded guilty, one was handed a caution and another is awaiting a trial. The boy’s mother said the whole case was a waste of time as her son had ‘actually thrown the straw wrapper at a friend’."
STUDY: Women Don’t Want to Date Vegetarian Men - "The study, “Eating Meat Makes You Sexy: Conformity to Dietary Gender Norms and Practices,” was published in the recent issue of Psychology of Men and Masculinity and was led by University of Padova researchers Susanna Timeo and Caterina Suitner... women rated vegetarian men as less attractive in all circumstances -- even when the woman was vegetarian herself."
Masculine Dads Raise Confident Daughters - WSJ - "A glance at the public figures felled in the #MeToo purges—not to mention Bill Clinton —should cure us of the idea that progressive politics incline men to better treatment of women. Masculinity, like femininity, is neither inherently good nor bad. Enormous damage can be inflicted by the sorts of malice we associate with girls: spreading rumors, convincing someone’s friends to turn against her, refusing to acknowledge someone purportedly beneath notice. Femininity and masculinity are manners of comportment and modi operandi; they are not codes of conduct. Men have used masculinity for acts of heroism and decency. That they have also applied it to despicable behavior says nothing of masculinity itself... There is something regrettable in the way our exclusive focus on boys and men lets young women off the hook. As if women bear no responsibility for their own behavior. As if they are too weak, too emotional, too foolish ever to take care of themselves. And that is the greatest disappointment of the #MeToo movement, that it has so spectacularly refused to insist that a woman not allow any man to treat her badly"
Google Emerges as Early Winner From Europe’s New Data Privacy Law - WSJ - "GDPR, the European Union’s new privacy law, is drawing advertising money toward Google’s online-ad services and away from competitors that are straining to show they’re complying with the sweeping regulation... That means the new law, the General Data Protection Regulation, is reinforcing—at least initially—the strength of the biggest online-ad players, led by Google and Facebook Inc.
In other words, regulatory burdens are better borne by big companies and can be anti-competitive
The Dark Side of the Enlightenment - WSJ - "the principal advances that today’s Enlightenment enthusiasts want to claim were “set in motion” much earlier. And it isn’t at all clear how helpful the Enlightenment was once it arrived... One such myth was Locke’s claim that the state was founded on a contract among free and equal individuals—a theory the Enlightenment’s critics understood to be both historically false and dangerous. While the theory did relatively little harm in tradition-bound Britain, it led to catastrophe in Europe. Imported into France by Rousseau, it quickly pulled down the monarchy and the state, producing a series of failed constitutions, the Reign of Terror and finally the Napoleonic Wars—all in the name of infallible and universal reason. Millions died as Napoleon’s armies sought to destroy and rebuild every government in Europe in accordance with the one correct political theory allowed by Enlightenment philosophy. Yet Napoleon was simply trying, in Mr. Brooks’s phrase, to “think things through from the ground up.”... Marx saw himself as promoting universal reason, extending the work of the French Revolution by insisting that the workers of the world stop (again in Mr. Brooks’s words) “deferring blindly to authority.” The “science” Marx developed “from the ground up” killed tens of millions in the 20th century."
Democracy Is Far From Dead - WSJ - "Viewed in broad historical terms, the democratic model continues to excel when measured against all the alternatives. Established democracies almost never go to war with each other, helping explain why the decades since World War II have been among the least violent in human history, at least when it comes to interstate war... The U.S. leads a coalition or loose alliance system of some 60 states that together account for roughly 70% of world military spending and a similar fraction of total world gross domestic product. Except in the Middle East, almost all these U.S. allies are democracies. Democracies have struggled with corruption, violent crime, poverty, populism, challenges from globalization, and other hard realities of modern life. Democracy does not change human nature. It does, however, generally put us in a much better position to address those problems peacefully. Witness South Korea, which impeached a president earlier this year but seems no worse for the wear. Or Brazil, dealing with similar political problems in an ugly yet still constitutional manner. Or India, where a strongman leader is nonetheless checked in some of his ambitions by a balance-of-powers system. Or the U.K., where Brexit, itself the result of a democratic choice, seems likely to cause only limited damage"
Americans' view of marijuana is rosy, and unscientific - "While studies have shown that cannabis can help quiet seizures in children with hard to treat epilepsy, quell the nausea and vomiting that can accompany chemotherapy and sooth nerve pain, there's no evidence that it can help with the vast majority of other medical conditions, Keyhani said. And yet, people think of it as a cure all, she added... nine percent of people become addicted to cannabis."
Portugal Dared to Cast Aside Austerity. It’s Having a Major Revival. - The New York Times
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