Police Lieutenant Indicted For Murder For Shooting Active Shooter - "The suspect, later identified as 34-year-old Micheal Ann Godsey, ultimately opened fire on police as they pursued her through the town... Blackwell Police Lieutenant John Mitchell managed to pull in behind the active shooter’s vehicle... a state grand jury determined that Lt. Mitchell engaged in “imminently dangerous conduct” towards Godsey without excusable or justifiable cause by firing approximately 60 rounds during the gun battle, The Oklahoman reported. He faces up to 10 years in prison if he is convicted of the second-degree murder charge against him... Smith noted that the indictment against Lt. Mitchell marked the “first time in American history that a police officer – or anybody – was charged with the crime of murder for shooting at an active shooter”"
Rober Escobar - Y sí fuera al revés? Sí los policías fuesen todas... - "*Picture of a woman flashing her breasts at police* [Auto-translated] And what if it was backwards? What if the policemen were all women and a guy came to show his dick off in front of their faces? He'd be arrested, treated as a beast, a degenerated, a rapist..., and they'd want him to end up in prison. Honestly, I don't understand this equality they talk about."
Alyssa Milano Rips ICE For Sting Operation Using Fake University. It Was Created Under The Obama Administration. - "alerted that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had arrested roughly 250 students since January on immigration violations as part of a sting operation involving a fake university, actress Alyssa Milano, a fervent opponent of ICE, tweeted, “OH MY GOD. ICE has arrested about 250 students who were enrolled at a fake university set up by ICE to lure in students.”... Prosecutors argued that the students enrolled in the university so they could retain their student-visa status and stay in the U.S. despite being aware “that they would not attend any actual classes, earn credits or make academic progress towards an actual degree”... Former federal prosecutor Peter Henning stated, “It’s creative and it’s not entrapment. The government can put out the bait but it’s up to the defendants to fall for it.”"
I saw a lot of people slamming ICE. I guess if you believe in open borders, visa fraud is not a crime
Stop the Anti-Science Movement - Posts - "Marie Kondo opening an online shop that sells dumb crap you don't need is my favorite heel turn of 2019"
Actually looking for things that "spark joy" ties perfectly into consumerism, with habituation
Meet VN Parthiban - The 55-YO Chennai Professor Who Has A Whopping 145 Academic Degrees To His Credit
GarbageHuman - Posts - "PETA: "HE LOOKS MISERABLE! NO dog deserves to be packed up, carted from state to state, and paraded in front of a stadium full of screaming fans. Animals are NOT mascots"
"Peta says sorry for taking girl's pet chihuahua and putting it down"
New Study Gives Hope To Sleep Apnea Sufferers Who Can't Tolerate CPAP - "the pacemaker-like device monitors breathing patterns and is activated during sleep to stimulate the hypoglossal nerve, which controls muscles in the upper airway... the Cleveland Clinic Head & Neck Institute utilizes the Inspire® hypoglossal nerve stimulator implant system, though there are other systems available. The Inspire® device is controlled by a small handheld sleep remote that allows the user to turn it on and off, increase and decrease stimulation strength and pause during the night if needed. The FDA approved the Inspire® device for use in patients who are unresponsive to or intolerant of other treatments for OSA in 2014. “This device operates by generating electrical stimulation, which advances the tongue forward and opens the pharyngeal airway during respiration. It is made up of three implanted elements: a breathing sensor, a small electrical impulse generator and a hypoglossal nerve stimulator”"
'Cannot make this sh*t up’: Battle erupts over gender of military dog Conan - "The gender of the military canine who participated in the raid that resulted in the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi has become a controversial topic since it has been labeled as both a male and female."
Conflict, Conquest, and the Performance of War in Pre-Columbian America - "The presence of violent conflict and warfare is widely acknowledged throughout the Pre-Columbian Americas"
Of course, some people think the pre-Columbian Americas were peaceful before the Europeans came
Actress, 43, left bruised and covered in blood after ‘being attacked by thugs’ yelling ‘dirty white b****es’ - "AN actress was left bloody and bruised after a mob allegedly ambushed her and some friends at a New York City club early Saturday morning.Jennifer Agostini, 43, and her friend Prendinellys Garcia, 47, were leaving the Sky Room when a group of thugs - allegedly shouting anti-white slurs - attacked. According to a lawsuit filed Tuesday, a group of 10 to 15 people reportedly shouted out "white motherf***ers,” “dirty white b***es” and “f**k those white b****es and their money.""
If it'd been the other way around...
"Straight" Pakistani Men Are Resorting To Sex With Other Men Because They're Not Getting Any Action Otherwise - "It’s understandable why they are resorting to this option and also, no one will have to live with the “shame” of being labelled as gay (the shame attached to the term gay is another story altogether) because when you say that you’re having sex with men because you can’t find a woman, you’re not gay, right?"
Of course, sex educators like to claim that orientation is about interest and not behavior - i.e. you can be a lesbian but sleep with men
Gay Pakistan: Where sex is available and relationships are difficult - "Pakistan is not the kind of place that most people would associate with gay liberation. But some say the country is a great place to be gay - even describing the port city of Karachi as "a gay man's paradise".Underground parties, group sex at shrines and "marriages of convenience" to members of the opposite sex are just some of the surprises that gay Pakistan has to offer. Under its veneer of strict social conformity, the country is bustling with same-sex activity... Sex between men occurs in some very public places - including, surprisingly, Karachi's busiest shrine.Families go to the Abdullah Shah-Ghazi shrine to honour the holy man buried there and to ask for God's blessings, but it is also Karachi's biggest cruising ground. Every Thursday evening, as the sun sets, men from across the city gather there. A tightly packed circle is formed and those in the centre of the circle are groped by those on the periphery... "In Pakistan men are discouraged from having girlfriends and so often, their first sexual experiences will be with male friends or cousins. This is often seen as a part of growing up and it can be overlooked by families - it's the idea that 'boys will be boys'," he says. "Sex between men will be overlooked as long as no-one feels that tradition or religion are being challenged. At the end of it all, everyone gets married to a member of the opposite sex and nothing is spoken about."... "There was an instance where two boys were caught having sex in a field," says Iqbal."The family tried to bribe the police with money because they didn't want the story going public. When the police wouldn't back down the family asked for one detail to be changed - they wanted their son to be presented as the active sexual partner. For them, their son being passive would be even more shameful." In almost all cases charges will be dropped, Iqbal says, but the boys will be forced to get married by their families."
Is Pakistan a gay man’s paradise? - "Pakistan is an extremely patriarchal, macho culture, with a strict understanding of gender expression and behaviour. Ironically, it’s that culture that enables same-sex relationships to flourish, as long as the participants are discreet.This is because Pakistan is a homosocial society, as Sinaan puts it, meaning that men can only go out in public or socialize with men, women with women. Male friends can often be seen in twos or threes, holding hands or with an arm affectionately around the other’s waist or neck.In macho Pakistani culture, having sex with a man — as long as you’re the one penetrating or “the top” — means you are the epitome of machismo. “It makes you super-straight,” says Ali (who asked that only his first name be published). “You’re dominating a guy. Dominating a woman is easy, but you’re dominating a guy. You must be super masculine.”“I’m going to sodomize you” is a common insult, Ali says, something that fathers would use for their sons, or brothers use for each other. It’s not a sexual threat, but an expression of domination, power and punishment, similar to an English expression like “I’m going to knock your teeth out.” Some gay men describe Pakistan as a paradise, where sex is always available, especially with men who identify as heterosexual. Sinaan recounts the story of a man he knows, an Ahmadi Muslim, who moved to Canada to avoid religious persecution and now writes to him saying, “I’m in hell.” In Pakistan it was extremely easy for the man to find macho, straight men to have sex with, Sinaan explains, but in Canada, this is not the case. The man wouldn’t have sex with gay men in Pakistan, Sinaan notes, because he found them too effeminate... For some gay men, they are pressured into marriage in order to preserve the honour of their sisters. Sinaan says he “has always been posing as a straight man” because of his parents and two sisters, though his two brothers know the truth and are supportive. In Pakistan’s patriarchal society, if a man brings dishonour to his family by being openly gay, he could destroy his sisters’ chances of a suitable marriage."
The Ultimate Toronto Neighbourhood Rankings - "Everybody knows that Toronto is one of the best places to live in the world. But where’s the best place to live in Toronto? To figure that out, we ranked all of the city's neighbourhoods, measuring everything from housing to transit to diversity. Click the button below to see our list, or pick your own priorities to generate a custom ranking suited to your needs."
Supercharged small towns are offering an attractive alternative to big-city living - "We compared 415 municipalities across the country; more than three-fifths of the top 50 are towns with fewer than 40,000 people like Salmon Arm (the sixth-best place to live in the country and the top place in B.C.). Contrary to the popular image of the struggling small town, these communities rose to the top of the ranking because of their high incomes, strong population growth and access to thriving regional economies. These places are all either within driving distance of a larger population centre or are hubs of local economic activity in their own right. They’re supercharged small towns, and residents don’t have to compromise—they’ve got access to the same amenities a suburb might offer, the natural splendour of a rural area and the opportunities of an urban centre. Anyone trying to decide where to live in Canada faces a paradox. Toronto and Vancouver create most of the country’s high-paying jobs, but the cost of owning a home in those cities has spiralled out of reach for most people... Vicki-May Hamm, mayor of Magog, Que., has spent years combatting the perception that all small towns are struggling. Her community—the 110th-best community in Canada and the 10th best in Quebec, according to our ranking—may be small, but it’s an hour from Montreal, two from Quebec City and 30 minutes from the U.S. border.“Magog has all the services I need—the hospitals, the schools, the kindergartens, the local businesses. I have almost everything I need here without the inconvenience of traffic, of pollution,” says Hamm, a past president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. “If, for example, your head office is in Montreal, and you only have to go once or twice a week, why wouldn’t you live here next to the lake?”... Ontario and B.C. communities dominate the top of the ranking, with Ontario towns and cities accounting for 28 of the top 50 and B.C. accounting for 16. Municipalities in those two provinces are at an advantage because of B.C.’s and Ontario’s strong economies and great weather (for Canada, anyway). Ontario also has the shortest health care wait times in the country and B.C. has low sales and income taxes... census data on commuting patterns suggest few people living in these small towns are driving to work in the big city."
Lee Valley Jar Opener - "We have all developed techniques for opening jar lids, perhaps even buying special wrenches to provide greater leverage when twisting off a lid. However, the reason jar lids are so tight is that the contents are under a partial vacuum, sucking the rubber-lined lid down tightly on the jar. If you release the vacuum, the jar lid unscrews easily.That's exactly what our jar opener does. It's as simple as hooking one of the ends over the lid, pressing the contoured handle down until you hear the telltale "swoosh" of the invading air. The lid can then be unscrewed effortlessly.The small hook end is for the most common lid size, while the larger end is for the deeper lids, usually found on jars of salsa or spaghetti sauce. Whichever way it is used, the handle is always situated over the jar preventing it from tipping. The only lids it won't work on are two-piece canning jar lids, which are not normally a problem because you just unscrew the ring and, yes, lift the lid slightly to break the vacuum.The combination of effectiveness, simplicity and utility truly makes it one of those "why didn't I think of that" kinds of tools."
There's a tool for everything
L'origine de Bert
Thursday, January 30, 2020
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
Links - 29th January 2020
Common test used to determine racism is flawed, says UTM professor - "Known as the Implicit Association Test, the tool is supposed to reveal hidden truths by delving into the secret unconscious. Test-takers can discover they are racist, among other things, even if they are unaware of their implicit bias.The problem, according to Ulrich Schimmack, a psychology professor at U of T Mississauga, is that the test can’t delve into our unconscious and reveal our hidden prejudices. Instead, the test is “basically a roulette wheel that comes up with a random number.”Yet the tests have been used in countless academic studies and have been employed by companies and institutions in their implicit bias training sessions. They have been featured in mainstream media and are freely available to anyone through Project Implicit, a website hosted by Harvard and marketed to the general public as a means of determining their implicit bias.Schimmack says the test became popular after it was published some 20 years ago because psychologists had been fascinated with the unconscious but had no scientific method to measure it. The promise of the IAT was that it would “finally provide a scientific window to the unconscious.”... “We found our happiness IAT was giving us random results. It wasn’t useful at all to measure a person’s happiness,” Schimmack says. “Then you wonder, if it’s not working for this, when does it work and what does it really measure?”He published those first findings 10 years ago and continued his research without the use of IAT. More recently, though, he noticed another decade had passed and the test was still being widely used and taken at face value, so he took a closer look at the tool... one study claimed the IAT could predict some people would not vote for Barack Obama due to anti-black implicit bias. But on closer inspection, Schimmack says they found that was not true. Schimmack says his colleague also found that, in simulations, IAT scores could not predict if a police officer was more likely to shoot a black suspect or a white suspect. Others have also criticized the authors of the IAT for making bold claims without demonstrating that their measurement predicts any real world behaviour of discrimination"
US man eliminates competition, creates dating app where he's the only guy allowed on it - "Aaron Smith, a 31-year-old from the US, wasn't having much luck on regular apps so he decided to take matters into his own hands... "Singularity saves you countless hours of swiping by just matching you with me""
Malaysian man had no time to buy a cake for wife’s birthday, gets her a burger instead
"Happy Betday"
'Thanksgiving Four' say Google is punishing them - "Google has fired four employees in what activists within the company describe as an attempt to "crush" workers' attempts to organise.The people, who have been dubbed the "Thanksgiving Four", had their contracts terminated on Monday.Staff were told via an internal memo that the firings were related to data security and employee safety.But those who lost their jobs have said they were being punished for "speaking out". The sackings followed a demonstration at Google's San Francisco office on Friday, attended by more than 200 Google employees. Two of the four fired employees, Rebecca Rivers and Laurence Berland, spoke at the protest... Observers see the move as heralding the end of Google's famously open working culture. Executives have locked down the degree to which employees can access information on projects they are not involved with, while earlier this month Google's chief executive Sundar Pichai told staff its weekly "all-hands" meeting would no longer take place... "They think this will crush our efforts, but it won't," the Google workers statement distributed on Monday added. "For every one they retaliate against, there are hundreds of us who will fight, and together we will win. One of the most powerful companies in the world wouldn't be retaliating against us if collective action didn't work.""
"Don't be evil"
China's growing threat to academic freedom - "Chinese academics now struggling under what the Scholars at Risk Network describes as systematic Chinese government policies intended “to constrict academic activity and to intimidate, silence, and punish outspoken academics and students” might find much to relate to in Wu’s story.Yet foreign scholars may also find this story relatable... Recently, one foreign scholar was arrested in China, apparently for possessing a “forbidden book”: the Hokkaido University historian Nobu Iwatani, who was just released following over two months of detention.Iwatani’s detention marks a potential new, dangerous phase in the CCP government’s undermining of academic freedoms for its expansive regime security interests. However, the circumstances of his release may provide some indicators for how academic associations and institutions can push back against such infringements... Japanese news organizations finally broke the story, though without releasing Iwatani’s name. Soon Iwatani’s detention had become international news. In hindsight, this publicity generated welcome effects, beginning with indignant reactions from Japanese media and academics which may have stiffened the resolve of the Japanese government to demand Iwatani’s release. In late October the Japanese Association of Scholars Advocating Renewal of the Japan-China Relationship published an open letter signed by many prominent China studies scholars. It stated that they were “shocked beyond words” by Iwatani’s detention, warned that academic exchange between China and Japan was being undermined and demanded an explanation for Iwatani’s detention. Other research groups posted similar letters of protest... as word spread of Iwatani’s detention, Japanese academics began canceling research trips to China. One scholar told me of being the only Japanese researcher at a recent conference in China, all the others having pulled out. A high level Japan-China policy forum scheduled for Nov. 2 was also canceled in reaction to Iwatani’s detention... During a meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in Bangkok on Nov. 4, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe hinted that the prospects for President Xi Jinping’s scheduled state visit to Japan next year might hinge on a proper handling of Iwatani’s case. This strategem seems to have paid off... The now silenced Chinese jurist Xu Zhangrun warned last year that under Xi’s rule China is becoming “a polity that is fundamentally totalitarian in ambition … this is something that should unsettle the whole world.” Yet among China’s elites there are also anxieties over the profound tensions between such totalitarian ambition and the norms of global systems of commercial, scientific and geopolitical collaboration upon which China is so dependent."
It is claimed that when working with Asian powers, behind-the-scenes negotiation works better than public pressure which will only make them dig in more. But apparently this isn't the case here
Xi Jinping Portraits Replace Catholic Symbols in Churches - "Places of worship refusing to be controlled by the state are being shut down, while government-run churches are used to worship the Chinese Communist Party... What has hurt the congregations the most was the removal of a painting of the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child, later discarded into a dark corner of the church. Instead, a portrait of president Xi Jinping was hung in the center of one of the walls, surrounded by propaganda slogans on both sides. A few days later, officials confiscated the keys to the church and locked all its doors and windows. The congregation lost their place of worship... The church’s cross, a painting of the Virgin Mary, and religious couplets were removed, and portraits of Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong were displayed instead."
Opinion: Social media in Egypt: From harbinger of a revolution to weapon of authoritarian control - The Globe and Mail - "Social media was celebrated after the revolution as having facilitated the overthrow of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Eight years later, the same platforms are leveraged by an increasingly authoritarian Egyptian state to stifle freedom of expression, arrest ordinary citizens and track political dissidents."
A Montreal Bagel War Unites Rival Kings - The New York Times - "rumors began to circulate that a City Hall official was planning to ban the ovens, which emit fine particles that can aggravate respiratory ailments like asthma. Angry neighbors had complained to the city and some were boycotting the vaunted bagel shops. Coming to the defense of the bagels were fans who treasure the carb-heavy snack as an essential part of the city’s Jewish history and social fabric... The Montreal bagel has such a hold on the Canadian psyche that fears of its demise spurred a national outcry. “The Death of the Montreal Bagel?” asked a story last year in The Globe and Mail, a leading national newspaper... Mr. Morena, at St-Viateur, dismissed what he called anti-bagel “radicals.” “Why are they picking on small mom-and-pop bagel shops?” he asked, standing under St-Viateur’s wall of fame showing local celebrity patrons like Celine Dion. “I want to be able to say that my bagels are hand rolled and cooked in a wood burning oven,” he said. “That’s what makes a Montreal bagel.”... For the moment, the bagel war is at an impasse. City Hall is considering a regulation that would require businesses with wood-burning ovens to install purifiers. Fairmount Bagel said it had already done so, while St-Viateur has installed a filter in one of its seven locations. But the authorities in the area have banned new businesses from installing such ovens, causing alarm that the art of Montreal bagel-making could disappear... Such is the pull of the Montreal bagel that a Japanese tourist once arrived in a limousine in front of Fairmount Bagel, holding a map with a line of dots leading from Osaka to the bagel shop. And St-Viateur once received an order for 20 dozen bagels for Prince Charles. Mr. Morena thought it was a joke until a British naval officer arrived to pick them up... in a province that recently passed a law banning teachers, judges and police from wearing religious symbols like turbans or skullcaps while at work, the bagel had become a secular symbol of civic pride. That, he added, was helped by its manifest superiority to New York bagels"
The death of the Montreal bagel? - The Globe and Mail - "My community usually agrees on hot-button issues – Syrian refugees, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, even Bill 101 – but the fate of Montreal bagels tore us apart.People started rage posting – more than 300 comments appeared on my wall in 72 hours. On one side, pleas for the lives of trees, warnings about global warming, concerns about pollution, attacks on gluten; on the other side, accusations of gentrification, appeals for civic traditions and comparisons to the CAQ’s proposed ban on yarmulkes and hijabs... By banning the traditional method of making bagels, we risk erasing something unique and specific to the history of Montreal. Which explains why the bagel apocalypse is such a big deal: It’s part of a larger trend that’s transforming our cities. It looks and smells like gentrification. As real estate prices rise, our neighbourhoods are becoming cleaner and prettier, but local places are closing, replaced with generic chains that threaten to make Montreal feel the same as other cities. St-Viateur Bagel is hanging in there beside a DavidsTea and across from a Lululemon. I don’t want to live in a neutral, homogeneous no-place. It’s rare in this quickly globalizing world of chains and franchises to have a sense of place and history. Sure, we need clean air. But human health also requires a sense of belonging. And this is just what felt threatened by the wood-burning ban... I’m attached to the fire-cooked bagel because I’m attached to the dirtiness of my city. I don’t want my city sanitized. After decades of pasteurization, we discovered the microbiome and realized that humans need bacteria. Parenting manuals now say kids should splash in the mud to develop their immune systems. Sanitation became a moral imperative when Protestants declared that “cleanliness is next to godliness.” Well, Montreal is more French-Catholic and Jewish than WASPy – and has always been a dirty city. We used to be known as Sin City North! There’s a reason why the biggest jazz festival in the world doesn’t happen in Vancouver... The 70 food establishments on the island that burn wood produce about 60 tonnes of fine particulate pollution a year. Those concerned with environmental health will get more bang for their buck if they focus on Quebec’s maple-syrup industry, meat farms or retail shops that import their wares by plane. For urban pollution, it might be more effective to address diesel delivery trucks, enforce idling bylaws and improve public transportation. Although I suppose it’s easier to challenge small family businesses than big industry – such as the centrally located tobacco factory owned by Japan Tobacco International."
TikTok unblocks teen's account after criticizing China detention camps - "Social media app TikTok has issued a public apology for suspending the account of 17-year-old Feroza Aziz after she posted a video criticizing China's treatment of Uighur Muslims. The teen's video went viral for her unexpected transition to anti-China remarks while giving a makeup tutorial."
Medieval Paintings of Cats Licking Their Butts - "Butt licking cats is a weirdly common theme in medieval art, and nobody’s really sure why. The theory is that they were just etched in the margins by bored monks who wanted to amuse themselves. They thought the idea of sneaking in naughty pictures of cats into serious books was funny... But that’s just a theory. Only one medieval monk ever commented on it, and as far as he was concerned, his fellow monks were just wasting time and precious ink"
Ebola nurse Pauline Cafferkey: return to Sierra Leone will give me closure - "Pauline Cafferkey, the Scottish nurse who nearly died twice from Ebola, has said she is seeking “closure” as she announced plans to return to Sierra Leone for the first time since contracting the disease there... Cafferkey was cleared by her regulatory body, the Nursing and Midwifery Council, which had investigated allegations that she concealed her high temperature at Heathrow on her return from Sierra Leone. The NMC, which could have struck her off the nursing register, said Cafferkey’s judgment had been compromised by her developing illness and so she could not be held responsible for putting the public in danger."
If she gets Ebola again there, will it count?
US man eliminates competition, creates dating app where he's the only guy allowed on it - "Aaron Smith, a 31-year-old from the US, wasn't having much luck on regular apps so he decided to take matters into his own hands... "Singularity saves you countless hours of swiping by just matching you with me""
Malaysian man had no time to buy a cake for wife’s birthday, gets her a burger instead
"Happy Betday"
'Thanksgiving Four' say Google is punishing them - "Google has fired four employees in what activists within the company describe as an attempt to "crush" workers' attempts to organise.The people, who have been dubbed the "Thanksgiving Four", had their contracts terminated on Monday.Staff were told via an internal memo that the firings were related to data security and employee safety.But those who lost their jobs have said they were being punished for "speaking out". The sackings followed a demonstration at Google's San Francisco office on Friday, attended by more than 200 Google employees. Two of the four fired employees, Rebecca Rivers and Laurence Berland, spoke at the protest... Observers see the move as heralding the end of Google's famously open working culture. Executives have locked down the degree to which employees can access information on projects they are not involved with, while earlier this month Google's chief executive Sundar Pichai told staff its weekly "all-hands" meeting would no longer take place... "They think this will crush our efforts, but it won't," the Google workers statement distributed on Monday added. "For every one they retaliate against, there are hundreds of us who will fight, and together we will win. One of the most powerful companies in the world wouldn't be retaliating against us if collective action didn't work.""
"Don't be evil"
China's growing threat to academic freedom - "Chinese academics now struggling under what the Scholars at Risk Network describes as systematic Chinese government policies intended “to constrict academic activity and to intimidate, silence, and punish outspoken academics and students” might find much to relate to in Wu’s story.Yet foreign scholars may also find this story relatable... Recently, one foreign scholar was arrested in China, apparently for possessing a “forbidden book”: the Hokkaido University historian Nobu Iwatani, who was just released following over two months of detention.Iwatani’s detention marks a potential new, dangerous phase in the CCP government’s undermining of academic freedoms for its expansive regime security interests. However, the circumstances of his release may provide some indicators for how academic associations and institutions can push back against such infringements... Japanese news organizations finally broke the story, though without releasing Iwatani’s name. Soon Iwatani’s detention had become international news. In hindsight, this publicity generated welcome effects, beginning with indignant reactions from Japanese media and academics which may have stiffened the resolve of the Japanese government to demand Iwatani’s release. In late October the Japanese Association of Scholars Advocating Renewal of the Japan-China Relationship published an open letter signed by many prominent China studies scholars. It stated that they were “shocked beyond words” by Iwatani’s detention, warned that academic exchange between China and Japan was being undermined and demanded an explanation for Iwatani’s detention. Other research groups posted similar letters of protest... as word spread of Iwatani’s detention, Japanese academics began canceling research trips to China. One scholar told me of being the only Japanese researcher at a recent conference in China, all the others having pulled out. A high level Japan-China policy forum scheduled for Nov. 2 was also canceled in reaction to Iwatani’s detention... During a meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in Bangkok on Nov. 4, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe hinted that the prospects for President Xi Jinping’s scheduled state visit to Japan next year might hinge on a proper handling of Iwatani’s case. This strategem seems to have paid off... The now silenced Chinese jurist Xu Zhangrun warned last year that under Xi’s rule China is becoming “a polity that is fundamentally totalitarian in ambition … this is something that should unsettle the whole world.” Yet among China’s elites there are also anxieties over the profound tensions between such totalitarian ambition and the norms of global systems of commercial, scientific and geopolitical collaboration upon which China is so dependent."
It is claimed that when working with Asian powers, behind-the-scenes negotiation works better than public pressure which will only make them dig in more. But apparently this isn't the case here
Xi Jinping Portraits Replace Catholic Symbols in Churches - "Places of worship refusing to be controlled by the state are being shut down, while government-run churches are used to worship the Chinese Communist Party... What has hurt the congregations the most was the removal of a painting of the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child, later discarded into a dark corner of the church. Instead, a portrait of president Xi Jinping was hung in the center of one of the walls, surrounded by propaganda slogans on both sides. A few days later, officials confiscated the keys to the church and locked all its doors and windows. The congregation lost their place of worship... The church’s cross, a painting of the Virgin Mary, and religious couplets were removed, and portraits of Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong were displayed instead."
Opinion: Social media in Egypt: From harbinger of a revolution to weapon of authoritarian control - The Globe and Mail - "Social media was celebrated after the revolution as having facilitated the overthrow of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Eight years later, the same platforms are leveraged by an increasingly authoritarian Egyptian state to stifle freedom of expression, arrest ordinary citizens and track political dissidents."
A Montreal Bagel War Unites Rival Kings - The New York Times - "rumors began to circulate that a City Hall official was planning to ban the ovens, which emit fine particles that can aggravate respiratory ailments like asthma. Angry neighbors had complained to the city and some were boycotting the vaunted bagel shops. Coming to the defense of the bagels were fans who treasure the carb-heavy snack as an essential part of the city’s Jewish history and social fabric... The Montreal bagel has such a hold on the Canadian psyche that fears of its demise spurred a national outcry. “The Death of the Montreal Bagel?” asked a story last year in The Globe and Mail, a leading national newspaper... Mr. Morena, at St-Viateur, dismissed what he called anti-bagel “radicals.” “Why are they picking on small mom-and-pop bagel shops?” he asked, standing under St-Viateur’s wall of fame showing local celebrity patrons like Celine Dion. “I want to be able to say that my bagels are hand rolled and cooked in a wood burning oven,” he said. “That’s what makes a Montreal bagel.”... For the moment, the bagel war is at an impasse. City Hall is considering a regulation that would require businesses with wood-burning ovens to install purifiers. Fairmount Bagel said it had already done so, while St-Viateur has installed a filter in one of its seven locations. But the authorities in the area have banned new businesses from installing such ovens, causing alarm that the art of Montreal bagel-making could disappear... Such is the pull of the Montreal bagel that a Japanese tourist once arrived in a limousine in front of Fairmount Bagel, holding a map with a line of dots leading from Osaka to the bagel shop. And St-Viateur once received an order for 20 dozen bagels for Prince Charles. Mr. Morena thought it was a joke until a British naval officer arrived to pick them up... in a province that recently passed a law banning teachers, judges and police from wearing religious symbols like turbans or skullcaps while at work, the bagel had become a secular symbol of civic pride. That, he added, was helped by its manifest superiority to New York bagels"
The death of the Montreal bagel? - The Globe and Mail - "My community usually agrees on hot-button issues – Syrian refugees, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, even Bill 101 – but the fate of Montreal bagels tore us apart.People started rage posting – more than 300 comments appeared on my wall in 72 hours. On one side, pleas for the lives of trees, warnings about global warming, concerns about pollution, attacks on gluten; on the other side, accusations of gentrification, appeals for civic traditions and comparisons to the CAQ’s proposed ban on yarmulkes and hijabs... By banning the traditional method of making bagels, we risk erasing something unique and specific to the history of Montreal. Which explains why the bagel apocalypse is such a big deal: It’s part of a larger trend that’s transforming our cities. It looks and smells like gentrification. As real estate prices rise, our neighbourhoods are becoming cleaner and prettier, but local places are closing, replaced with generic chains that threaten to make Montreal feel the same as other cities. St-Viateur Bagel is hanging in there beside a DavidsTea and across from a Lululemon. I don’t want to live in a neutral, homogeneous no-place. It’s rare in this quickly globalizing world of chains and franchises to have a sense of place and history. Sure, we need clean air. But human health also requires a sense of belonging. And this is just what felt threatened by the wood-burning ban... I’m attached to the fire-cooked bagel because I’m attached to the dirtiness of my city. I don’t want my city sanitized. After decades of pasteurization, we discovered the microbiome and realized that humans need bacteria. Parenting manuals now say kids should splash in the mud to develop their immune systems. Sanitation became a moral imperative when Protestants declared that “cleanliness is next to godliness.” Well, Montreal is more French-Catholic and Jewish than WASPy – and has always been a dirty city. We used to be known as Sin City North! There’s a reason why the biggest jazz festival in the world doesn’t happen in Vancouver... The 70 food establishments on the island that burn wood produce about 60 tonnes of fine particulate pollution a year. Those concerned with environmental health will get more bang for their buck if they focus on Quebec’s maple-syrup industry, meat farms or retail shops that import their wares by plane. For urban pollution, it might be more effective to address diesel delivery trucks, enforce idling bylaws and improve public transportation. Although I suppose it’s easier to challenge small family businesses than big industry – such as the centrally located tobacco factory owned by Japan Tobacco International."
TikTok unblocks teen's account after criticizing China detention camps - "Social media app TikTok has issued a public apology for suspending the account of 17-year-old Feroza Aziz after she posted a video criticizing China's treatment of Uighur Muslims. The teen's video went viral for her unexpected transition to anti-China remarks while giving a makeup tutorial."
Medieval Paintings of Cats Licking Their Butts - "Butt licking cats is a weirdly common theme in medieval art, and nobody’s really sure why. The theory is that they were just etched in the margins by bored monks who wanted to amuse themselves. They thought the idea of sneaking in naughty pictures of cats into serious books was funny... But that’s just a theory. Only one medieval monk ever commented on it, and as far as he was concerned, his fellow monks were just wasting time and precious ink"
Ebola nurse Pauline Cafferkey: return to Sierra Leone will give me closure - "Pauline Cafferkey, the Scottish nurse who nearly died twice from Ebola, has said she is seeking “closure” as she announced plans to return to Sierra Leone for the first time since contracting the disease there... Cafferkey was cleared by her regulatory body, the Nursing and Midwifery Council, which had investigated allegations that she concealed her high temperature at Heathrow on her return from Sierra Leone. The NMC, which could have struck her off the nursing register, said Cafferkey’s judgment had been compromised by her developing illness and so she could not be held responsible for putting the public in danger."
If she gets Ebola again there, will it count?
Post ID: 5198124943210428379
Tuesday, January 28, 2020
Links - 28th January 2020 (2)
Here's exactly how you should be spending your money - "he recommends only spending between 18-and-23 percent of your income on housing at most. “Housing costs can have an extreme impact on achieving your overall financial goals,” he writes. “Housing costs are extremely dependent on the region in which you live and keep in mind this is a zero sum game; if one category increases, you must decrease in another.”"
Korean lady loses 40kg & divorces husband after he insulted her for postpartum weight gain - "Park Jee Won is a South Korean single mother and former fitness instructor... After 10 months, she lost a whopping 40kg, bringing her total weight down to 46kg. However, her husband remained equally critical as when she had gained the weight and even commented that looking at her gave him goosebumps.Feeling disheartened, Park decided to divorce him and raise their daughter alone."
Why Does India Refuse to Participate in Global Education Rankings? - "India’s refusal to participate in PISA is hard to understand and also defies logic. In the 2009 survey, students from two Indian states, Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh, participated; India placed 72nd among the 74 participating countries. Since then the Human Resource Development Ministry in India has chosen not to participate in PISA, as they perceived that there was a socio-cultural disconnect between the questions and Indian students, because of India’s peculiar “socio-cultural milieu.” Although India’s concerns have been backed by educational experts, that doesn’t change the fact that the PISA results can help in assessing standards of education in India, especially at the primary level... the former vice chancellor of the Delhi University bemoaned the fact that a large majority of students in the university were unemployable because of their inability to apply their knowledge in real-life situations. This is because of a poor foundation in schools, where the emphasis is more on rote learning, rather than testing a student’s creative skills. According to Pratham’s Annual Status of Education 2013 report, close to 78 percent of Indian children in Standard III and about 50 percent of children in Standard V cannot yet read Standard II texts. Arithmetic is also a cause for concern as only 26 percent students in Standard V can do a division problem... The students’ knowledge of India’s “socio-cultural milieu” was no better. According to the authors, “only a third of these ‘top school’ students in class four knew who was the alive person [sic] in a list of four: Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, and Sonia Gandhi (a small number thought, interestingly enough, that it was Mahatma Gandhi who was still alive).” As per UNESCO data, India has one of the lowest public expenditure rates on education per student, especially compared to other Asian countries like China... One crude fact about India’s education sector is that 282 million Indians are illiterate. With a literacy rate of 77 percent, India lags behind other BRICS nations, which have literacy rates above 90 percent."
Yet the Chinese do well in the culturally biased" tests
Music by the numbers: Scientists reveal a secret to great song writing - "What makes some music so enjoyable, and can science help us engineer the perfect pop song?A group of researchers who statistically analysed tens of thousands of chord progressions in classic US Billboard hits say they have found the answer, and it lies in the right combination of uncertainty and surprise... when the test subjects were relatively certain about what chord to expect next, they found it pleasant when they were instead surprised. Conversely, when individuals were uncertain about what to expect next, they found it pleasurable when subsequent chords weren't surprising."
Cornell Black Students Group Protests The Admission of African and Caribbean Students - "Cornell University’s Black Students United presented the University president with a list of demands with one particularly surprising addition: a call to reduce the admission of African and Caribbean students in favor of African Americans. The demand would define true African American students as those who are at least second generation Americans."
Is this anti-racist black solidarity?
Apple exec: students who use Google's cheap laptops won't succeed - "Right now, there are far more Chromebooks being sold to schools than other kinds of computers. In 2018, 60% of all laptops and tablets purchased for U.S. K-12 classrooms were Chromebooks, with Microsoft Windows-powered computers coming in at second at 22%. Apple’s iOS and macOS had 18% of the market... The education market is important to Apple... Aside from cost, Google enjoys a competitive advantage over Apple with its Google Classroom software, according to Boreham. Google Classroom lets students log on to any Chromebook to pull up their profile and saved work. Google’s device management software is also better suited for IT administrators"
Australia bushfires: Domestic violence campaigner Sherele Moody says firefighters will return home, beat their partners - "Australian domestic violence campaigner Sherele Moody has been slammed for her "shameless" comments suggesting firefighters tackling the NSW blazes will "subject women to domestic violence"."
Germany's Got Talent hopeful makes judges ill by shoving sausages up her bum - "Duckie L’Orange, who didn’t speak on her appearance on Das Supertalent, pulled a string of sausages from her apron and dropped them on the floor.Judges then watched in horror as she walked to the back of the stage, lifted up her shirt and dropped her trousers to reveal a face of a dog.She then sat on the floor and scooted over to the sausages, picking them up with her bum and shoving them so it looked like the dog was eating them.Tensing her buttcheeks to make it look like the dog was chewing, the live studio audience recoiled in horror and the judges held their hands over their mouths trying not to be sick... Barking loudly as she ran around the stage, the whole performance descended into chaos with Bruce kicking his leg on the judges desk when he stood up in horror just at seeing her flash the audience. That was before we got to the sausage part!... Something tells us that this may be one of the most bizarre routines to ever grace the Got Talent format.And this is coming from a country where Mr Uekusa stripped naked on live primetime TV, stuck plungers to his stomach and held crockery over his bits to protect his modesty."
Extinct animals: Previously extinct bird species comes back from the dead - "A previously extinct species of bird has re-evolved back into existence, according to a new study. The Aldabra rail first went extinct around 136,000 years ago. Now, it's reclaimed its home island... sediments from the Aldabra Atoll in the Indian Ocean show that the island has been completely submerged multiple times, wiping out all species inhabiting it. Every time, every species on the island went extinct — but the Aldabra rail has returned, again and again. The rail is an example of iterative evolution — when the same ancestral lineage leads to repeated evolution of a species at different points in time. The rare phenomenon means that species can re-emerge over and over, despite past iterations going extinct. The flightless bird — a descendant of a species of flying bird known as the white-throated rail — was completely wiped out when the island disappeared below sea level about 136,000 years ago. When sea levels fell again a few thousand years later, fossils show that the species re-colonized it, once again losing the ability to fly due to an absence of predators on the island... While flying was not necessary to avoid predators, it also meant the birds had no way to escape their native island once sea levels began to rise"
Google Assistant will screen spam calls on the Pixel 3 - "The Pixel 3 will be able to screen spam calls and provide real-time transcriptions, Google announced during its Pixel 3 event today. The new feature will allow Google Assistant to answer a suspected spam call and then transcribe the response in real time, letting users decide whether to answer the call, end it early, or block the number entirely and report it as spam."
Nip Allergies in the Bub - A Food Allergy Prevention Project - "Research shows that giving your baby the common allergy causing foods before they are one year of age can greatly reduce the risk of them developing an allergy to that food. When your baby is ready at around 6 months, but not before 4 months, start to introduce first foods including smooth peanut butter/paste and well-cooked egg. Delaying the introduction of the common allergy causing foods does not prevent food allergy."
Singapore Police Force - "SPF STATEMENT ON AWARE’S FACEBOOK POST CRITICISING SPF’S CRIME PREVENTION POSTER
We refer to comments made by AWARE on Police crime prevention posters, warning against outrage of modesty... These posters are part of crime prevention visuals that the Police have produced in collaboration with the National Crime Prevention Council and Singapore Polytechnic’s Media, Arts & Design School. Other crimes such as shop theft and dishonest misappropriation of property are also featured in these visuals.These visuals target potential perpetrators, and specifically highlight the punishments for committing the criminal acts, in order to send a strong deterrent message.AWARE has criticised the posters, on the basis that they focus on the punishment, and do not refer to the harm suffered by the victim. AWARE does not seem to have understood the purpose of the posters.The posters are designed to warn would-be offenders, who are unable to exercise self discipline or control themselves, regardless of their knowledge of the harm that their act will cause to the victim. The visuals were designed to influence their behaviour, by telling them what punishment they will face. AWARE’s suggestion, on the other hand, is unlikely to have the intended deterrent effect on such offenders... the objective of these visuals is to prevent such harmful actions in the first place, by driving home the point that outrage of modesty is an egregious offence with serious penalties. Hence, our crime prevention messages are carefully curated, based on our understanding of the profile of offenders."
When you have nothing better to do and need to justify your existence. I wonder what sort of ineffectual ads AWARE would come up with
South Korea battles ‘spycam porn’ with 24/7 monitoring by 16-member unit - "In a drab government office in Seoul, a team of broadcast regulators spend their days watching online porn – the frontline troops of South Korea’s attempts to crack down
on spycam videos that mostly expose women... As of last month it operates 24 hours a day... The task force also targets “revenge porn”... “When I went outside, I could not look at women around me because pictures I saw in the office overlapped in my mind’s eye. I had to keep my head down.” To find the material, they search for Korean-language hashtags on domestic and international platforms – including Twitter and YouTube – that reference sexual acts, although sometimes key terms are disguised with asterisks. They can instruct South Korean sites to take down suspect videos, but the vast majority are hosted on overseas servers beyond their jurisdiction – when they tell domestic internet service providers to block access, but can only ask the foreign operators to remove them voluntarily... The first day after initial upload was the “golden time” to intervene, said Min Kyeong-joong, secretary general of the KCSC, after which repostings are likely to “spiral out of control”... Park Yu-na, 31, said she now routinely avoids using public toilets “as much as possible”."
Taiwanese actress Ili Zheng has ‘fixed partner’ to satisfy her sexual needs twice a month - "Busty Taiwanese actress Ili Zheng Jiazhen is known for her 34D “assets” which earned her praise from social media for baring it all in a recently published calendar. In a recent interview with Taiwanese media, the One Night in Taipei star spoke about her love life that raised eyebrows when she revealed that despite being single, she has a partner whom she sees twice monthly for her “needs”."
Report: Prescriptions Aren't Causing The Opioid Epidemic - "A new study reported in the November 1, 2019 Annals of Emergency Medicine pours more cold water on the false but persistent narrative that the opioid overdose crisis was caused by doctors prescribing opioids to patients in pain... there is no correlation between opioid prescription volume and non-medical use or opioid use disorder among persons age 12 and over. But policymakers and law enforcement continue to pressure health care practitioners into undertreating patients in pain. At a recent international breast cancer conference experts stated the under-prescribing of opioids to breast cancer patients in the U.S. is now comparable to treatment in third world countries."
Recruiters around the world say NUS graduates are among the top 10 most employable in the world - "the global survey asked 7,000 recruiters from 22 countries which universities they thought were the best at preparing graduates for the workplace.NUS, which is ranked 23rd on the World University Ranking, was just one of two universities in Asia which made the top 10, the other being Tokyo University at ninth place... Other notable universities in the top 100 include: University of Oxford at 11th place; Columbia University at 14th; New York University at 15th; Imperial College London at 17th; Tsinghua University at 52nd; Carnegie Mellon University at 61st; UCLA at 62nd; Cornell University at 65th; Nanyang Technological University at 73rd; London School of Economics and Political Science at 83rd and more."
World's first HIV positive sperm bank launched in effort to reduce stigma - "Sperm Positive has begun with three male donors from across New Zealand who are living with HIV but have an undetectable viral load"
Good luck finding people who are willing. If the viral load suddenly rises and someone gets infected...
Private school faces scrutiny after tracking pupils’ periods - "A private girls’ school has been reprimanded after inspectors found teachers were “tracking pupils’ menstrual cycles” against their will.On September 26, Ofsted made an emergency visit to Lady Aisha Academy, a £3,600-a-year Islamic school in Barking, after the Department for Education received a complaint pupils were being questioned about their periods if they did not attend daily prayer services."
If it'd been a Christian school...
Korean lady loses 40kg & divorces husband after he insulted her for postpartum weight gain - "Park Jee Won is a South Korean single mother and former fitness instructor... After 10 months, she lost a whopping 40kg, bringing her total weight down to 46kg. However, her husband remained equally critical as when she had gained the weight and even commented that looking at her gave him goosebumps.Feeling disheartened, Park decided to divorce him and raise their daughter alone."
Why Does India Refuse to Participate in Global Education Rankings? - "India’s refusal to participate in PISA is hard to understand and also defies logic. In the 2009 survey, students from two Indian states, Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh, participated; India placed 72nd among the 74 participating countries. Since then the Human Resource Development Ministry in India has chosen not to participate in PISA, as they perceived that there was a socio-cultural disconnect between the questions and Indian students, because of India’s peculiar “socio-cultural milieu.” Although India’s concerns have been backed by educational experts, that doesn’t change the fact that the PISA results can help in assessing standards of education in India, especially at the primary level... the former vice chancellor of the Delhi University bemoaned the fact that a large majority of students in the university were unemployable because of their inability to apply their knowledge in real-life situations. This is because of a poor foundation in schools, where the emphasis is more on rote learning, rather than testing a student’s creative skills. According to Pratham’s Annual Status of Education 2013 report, close to 78 percent of Indian children in Standard III and about 50 percent of children in Standard V cannot yet read Standard II texts. Arithmetic is also a cause for concern as only 26 percent students in Standard V can do a division problem... The students’ knowledge of India’s “socio-cultural milieu” was no better. According to the authors, “only a third of these ‘top school’ students in class four knew who was the alive person [sic] in a list of four: Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, and Sonia Gandhi (a small number thought, interestingly enough, that it was Mahatma Gandhi who was still alive).” As per UNESCO data, India has one of the lowest public expenditure rates on education per student, especially compared to other Asian countries like China... One crude fact about India’s education sector is that 282 million Indians are illiterate. With a literacy rate of 77 percent, India lags behind other BRICS nations, which have literacy rates above 90 percent."
Yet the Chinese do well in the culturally biased" tests
Music by the numbers: Scientists reveal a secret to great song writing - "What makes some music so enjoyable, and can science help us engineer the perfect pop song?A group of researchers who statistically analysed tens of thousands of chord progressions in classic US Billboard hits say they have found the answer, and it lies in the right combination of uncertainty and surprise... when the test subjects were relatively certain about what chord to expect next, they found it pleasant when they were instead surprised. Conversely, when individuals were uncertain about what to expect next, they found it pleasurable when subsequent chords weren't surprising."
Cornell Black Students Group Protests The Admission of African and Caribbean Students - "Cornell University’s Black Students United presented the University president with a list of demands with one particularly surprising addition: a call to reduce the admission of African and Caribbean students in favor of African Americans. The demand would define true African American students as those who are at least second generation Americans."
Is this anti-racist black solidarity?
Apple exec: students who use Google's cheap laptops won't succeed - "Right now, there are far more Chromebooks being sold to schools than other kinds of computers. In 2018, 60% of all laptops and tablets purchased for U.S. K-12 classrooms were Chromebooks, with Microsoft Windows-powered computers coming in at second at 22%. Apple’s iOS and macOS had 18% of the market... The education market is important to Apple... Aside from cost, Google enjoys a competitive advantage over Apple with its Google Classroom software, according to Boreham. Google Classroom lets students log on to any Chromebook to pull up their profile and saved work. Google’s device management software is also better suited for IT administrators"
Australia bushfires: Domestic violence campaigner Sherele Moody says firefighters will return home, beat their partners - "Australian domestic violence campaigner Sherele Moody has been slammed for her "shameless" comments suggesting firefighters tackling the NSW blazes will "subject women to domestic violence"."
Germany's Got Talent hopeful makes judges ill by shoving sausages up her bum - "Duckie L’Orange, who didn’t speak on her appearance on Das Supertalent, pulled a string of sausages from her apron and dropped them on the floor.Judges then watched in horror as she walked to the back of the stage, lifted up her shirt and dropped her trousers to reveal a face of a dog.She then sat on the floor and scooted over to the sausages, picking them up with her bum and shoving them so it looked like the dog was eating them.Tensing her buttcheeks to make it look like the dog was chewing, the live studio audience recoiled in horror and the judges held their hands over their mouths trying not to be sick... Barking loudly as she ran around the stage, the whole performance descended into chaos with Bruce kicking his leg on the judges desk when he stood up in horror just at seeing her flash the audience. That was before we got to the sausage part!... Something tells us that this may be one of the most bizarre routines to ever grace the Got Talent format.And this is coming from a country where Mr Uekusa stripped naked on live primetime TV, stuck plungers to his stomach and held crockery over his bits to protect his modesty."
Extinct animals: Previously extinct bird species comes back from the dead - "A previously extinct species of bird has re-evolved back into existence, according to a new study. The Aldabra rail first went extinct around 136,000 years ago. Now, it's reclaimed its home island... sediments from the Aldabra Atoll in the Indian Ocean show that the island has been completely submerged multiple times, wiping out all species inhabiting it. Every time, every species on the island went extinct — but the Aldabra rail has returned, again and again. The rail is an example of iterative evolution — when the same ancestral lineage leads to repeated evolution of a species at different points in time. The rare phenomenon means that species can re-emerge over and over, despite past iterations going extinct. The flightless bird — a descendant of a species of flying bird known as the white-throated rail — was completely wiped out when the island disappeared below sea level about 136,000 years ago. When sea levels fell again a few thousand years later, fossils show that the species re-colonized it, once again losing the ability to fly due to an absence of predators on the island... While flying was not necessary to avoid predators, it also meant the birds had no way to escape their native island once sea levels began to rise"
Google Assistant will screen spam calls on the Pixel 3 - "The Pixel 3 will be able to screen spam calls and provide real-time transcriptions, Google announced during its Pixel 3 event today. The new feature will allow Google Assistant to answer a suspected spam call and then transcribe the response in real time, letting users decide whether to answer the call, end it early, or block the number entirely and report it as spam."
Nip Allergies in the Bub - A Food Allergy Prevention Project - "Research shows that giving your baby the common allergy causing foods before they are one year of age can greatly reduce the risk of them developing an allergy to that food. When your baby is ready at around 6 months, but not before 4 months, start to introduce first foods including smooth peanut butter/paste and well-cooked egg. Delaying the introduction of the common allergy causing foods does not prevent food allergy."
Singapore Police Force - "SPF STATEMENT ON AWARE’S FACEBOOK POST CRITICISING SPF’S CRIME PREVENTION POSTER
We refer to comments made by AWARE on Police crime prevention posters, warning against outrage of modesty... These posters are part of crime prevention visuals that the Police have produced in collaboration with the National Crime Prevention Council and Singapore Polytechnic’s Media, Arts & Design School. Other crimes such as shop theft and dishonest misappropriation of property are also featured in these visuals.These visuals target potential perpetrators, and specifically highlight the punishments for committing the criminal acts, in order to send a strong deterrent message.AWARE has criticised the posters, on the basis that they focus on the punishment, and do not refer to the harm suffered by the victim. AWARE does not seem to have understood the purpose of the posters.The posters are designed to warn would-be offenders, who are unable to exercise self discipline or control themselves, regardless of their knowledge of the harm that their act will cause to the victim. The visuals were designed to influence their behaviour, by telling them what punishment they will face. AWARE’s suggestion, on the other hand, is unlikely to have the intended deterrent effect on such offenders... the objective of these visuals is to prevent such harmful actions in the first place, by driving home the point that outrage of modesty is an egregious offence with serious penalties. Hence, our crime prevention messages are carefully curated, based on our understanding of the profile of offenders."
When you have nothing better to do and need to justify your existence. I wonder what sort of ineffectual ads AWARE would come up with
South Korea battles ‘spycam porn’ with 24/7 monitoring by 16-member unit - "In a drab government office in Seoul, a team of broadcast regulators spend their days watching online porn – the frontline troops of South Korea’s attempts to crack down
on spycam videos that mostly expose women... As of last month it operates 24 hours a day... The task force also targets “revenge porn”... “When I went outside, I could not look at women around me because pictures I saw in the office overlapped in my mind’s eye. I had to keep my head down.” To find the material, they search for Korean-language hashtags on domestic and international platforms – including Twitter and YouTube – that reference sexual acts, although sometimes key terms are disguised with asterisks. They can instruct South Korean sites to take down suspect videos, but the vast majority are hosted on overseas servers beyond their jurisdiction – when they tell domestic internet service providers to block access, but can only ask the foreign operators to remove them voluntarily... The first day after initial upload was the “golden time” to intervene, said Min Kyeong-joong, secretary general of the KCSC, after which repostings are likely to “spiral out of control”... Park Yu-na, 31, said she now routinely avoids using public toilets “as much as possible”."
Taiwanese actress Ili Zheng has ‘fixed partner’ to satisfy her sexual needs twice a month - "Busty Taiwanese actress Ili Zheng Jiazhen is known for her 34D “assets” which earned her praise from social media for baring it all in a recently published calendar. In a recent interview with Taiwanese media, the One Night in Taipei star spoke about her love life that raised eyebrows when she revealed that despite being single, she has a partner whom she sees twice monthly for her “needs”."
Report: Prescriptions Aren't Causing The Opioid Epidemic - "A new study reported in the November 1, 2019 Annals of Emergency Medicine pours more cold water on the false but persistent narrative that the opioid overdose crisis was caused by doctors prescribing opioids to patients in pain... there is no correlation between opioid prescription volume and non-medical use or opioid use disorder among persons age 12 and over. But policymakers and law enforcement continue to pressure health care practitioners into undertreating patients in pain. At a recent international breast cancer conference experts stated the under-prescribing of opioids to breast cancer patients in the U.S. is now comparable to treatment in third world countries."
Recruiters around the world say NUS graduates are among the top 10 most employable in the world - "the global survey asked 7,000 recruiters from 22 countries which universities they thought were the best at preparing graduates for the workplace.NUS, which is ranked 23rd on the World University Ranking, was just one of two universities in Asia which made the top 10, the other being Tokyo University at ninth place... Other notable universities in the top 100 include: University of Oxford at 11th place; Columbia University at 14th; New York University at 15th; Imperial College London at 17th; Tsinghua University at 52nd; Carnegie Mellon University at 61st; UCLA at 62nd; Cornell University at 65th; Nanyang Technological University at 73rd; London School of Economics and Political Science at 83rd and more."
World's first HIV positive sperm bank launched in effort to reduce stigma - "Sperm Positive has begun with three male donors from across New Zealand who are living with HIV but have an undetectable viral load"
Good luck finding people who are willing. If the viral load suddenly rises and someone gets infected...
Private school faces scrutiny after tracking pupils’ periods - "A private girls’ school has been reprimanded after inspectors found teachers were “tracking pupils’ menstrual cycles” against their will.On September 26, Ofsted made an emergency visit to Lady Aisha Academy, a £3,600-a-year Islamic school in Barking, after the Department for Education received a complaint pupils were being questioned about their periods if they did not attend daily prayer services."
If it'd been a Christian school...
Post ID: 3120647330672576214
Singapore’s Long-Awaited Moment May Have Arrived
Singapore May Eclipse Hong Kong on Southeast Asia’s Rise
If any place has been rehearsing for the moment when it overtakes Hong Kong as the economic capital of Asia, it’s Singapore.
The Southeast Asian city-state’s founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, took Hong Kong as a direct model when trying to build a stable future for Singapore after its expulsion from the Malaysian federation in 1965. “I thought I would learn from Hong Kong, which had also been cut off from its hinterland, mainland China,” Lee said in a 1992 speech.
The two ethnically Chinese, former British colonies have been transformed utterly since then, but still resemble each other closely as low-tax, affluent cities that compete to attract white-collar professionals from across the world.
That’s where the similarities end. For Asia’s cosmopolitan classes, Singapore and Hong Kong aren’t so much twins as opposites. Exploring the profound differences between the two is a favorite parlor game — and one Singapore traditionally loses.
The city-state’s tidy, controlling tendencies are often contrasted unfavorably with Hong Kong’s more freewheeling model of entrepot capitalism. It rarely escapes notice that while Hong Kong was a model for Lee, his Singapore in turn was a template for Deng Xiaoping’s vision of the Chinese state.
Hong Kong was traditionally so laissez-faire that the government resisted the official collection of economic and financial statistics until the 1980s, and didn’t have a central banking function until 1993. Singapore is far more interventionist, running its own singles events to support the fertility rate and accommodating 79% of the population in government-built homes.
Visiting Hong Kong in 1954, Lee was astonished to find that a local tailor was able to measure and fit a new suit for him in just 12 hours: “Singapore tailors do not work at that speed,” he said years later. His conclusion, that Hong Kongers were a “leaner and keener people,” isn’t so different from the popular view even now.
Those differences have helped engender a different model of capitalism in Singapore. For all its ambitions to turn itself into the London of Asia, it looks a lot more like the region’s Zurich — dominated by the discreet worlds of private banking and commodities trade, rather than the colorful chaos of capital markets and dealmaking found in its northern cousin.
Of the 30 companies on the FTSE Straits Times index, all but three count as major shareholders either government-owned investment fund Temasek Holdings Pte. or a handful of Asian and British tycoons, led by Hong Kong’s Jardine Matheson Holdings Ltd. That leaves the exchange embarrassingly stunted by financial-center standards, with the total market capitalization of its primary listings slipping below near neighbors in Thailand and Indonesia.
The stock market is less than one-tenth the size of Hong Kong’s, where blue-chip mainland Chinese companies such as Tencent Holdings Ltd. and PetroChina Co. make up about a third of the total. That’s a problem for Singapore, because share trading is a core component of a vibrant financial center.
“If your equity market is not efficient, it will not attract high quality firms,” said Meijun Qian, a professor of finance at Australian National University in Canberra. “The situation becomes a spiral, stuck in an inefficient equilibrium.”
This junior status has been a concern for many years. The response has been characteristically Singaporean — harnessing the powers of the state in a multi-decade campaign to compete with a city whose success is based, as much as anything, on its resistance to government intervention.
Over the past few decades, Singapore has built parks, theaters, concert halls, casinos and theme parks in an attempt to shake off the perception that it’s Hong Kong’s straitlaced relative. Six of the city’s 10 top-ranked attractions on TripAdvisor have been built since 2008 (not everything has changed: the number one place still goes to the city’s metro rail system). The Singapore Grand Prix, a major pull for private-banking clients, started the same year.
Just a handful of Singapore’s major performance-arts venues existed 20 years ago, and the same goes for the the city’s main nightlife spot, the Clarke Quay district. Until the 1990s, most discos were run by community centers or the police, and weren’t allowed to serve alcohol.
Walking around the coffee shops of the downtown business district, the city now has a distinctly hipsterish vibe that couldn’t be more different from the stereotype. This transformation, combined with its lower cost of living and better-quality housing, appears to have done the trick in luring people to live there. The population of non-citizen permanent residents increased by about 235,000 between 2000 and 2018, outstripping the 199,000 rise in non-Chinese residents in Hong Kong over a comparable period. About 13% of the population are now non-citizens, up from 4.1% in 1990.
Despite all this, the vision from a decade ago that Singapore might finally cement a position as Asia’s pre-eminent financial capital has been thwarted so far by the sheer scale of mainland Chinese growth spilling over the border to Hong Kong.
On one measure of a city’s status as an international banking center — the value of claims that local branches of international banks have on foreign non-banks — Singapore seemed like it had a chance of catching up a decade ago. It’s since been comprehensively left behind.
Even in private banking — in theory, one of Singapore’s strong suits — Hong Kong has won out, as the army of rich people minted by China’s boom have sought to stash their wealth over the border, but not too far away.
“We’re a center for Southeast Asia, Hong Kong is for China,” said Joseph Lim, an associate professor of finance at the Singapore University of Social Sciences.
For most of the 22 years since the Hong Kong handover, Singapore’s distance from China has been a disadvantage. Only the individuals and businesses most obsessed with keeping their assets out of Beijing’s reach have gone to the effort of moving their wealth so far from the dynamic engine of the world economy.
Now, that liability may gradually be turning into an asset. Mainland China is already in demographic decline, with the labor force shrinking by 1.4 million people in 2018 — more than three times the combined 436,000 lost by Japan and the European Union. Meanwhile, the trade war is diverting supply chains towards Singapore’s backyard in Southeast Asia, causing wealth to spring up in new locations.
After years of leading every other major economy, the growth rate of China’s gross domestic product is now falling behind the Philippines, Vietnam, and India. Even its vast size is subject to the law of gravity: By 2035, the eight largest economies in South and Southeast Asia will have pulled level in terms of aggregate output, according to forecasts by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. They’ll accelerate further after that.
Indeed, it’s possible that this weakening in the economy — with its violation of China’s unofficial social contract, where dramatic improvements in citizens’ material well-being were seen as compensating for the lack of civil liberties — is one factor that’s contributing to Beijing’s tightening political grip. Unable to placate the population with wealth, China’s government is resorting to harsher methods to keep control. That’s an alarming prospect even for rival financial centers.
“It’s not in anybody’s interest to have an unstable greater China,” said Yougesh Khatri, a Singapore-based fellow with British foreign-policy think tank Chatham House. “We all would like to see a stable and prosperous Hong Kong economy.”
If Singapore takes over from Hong Kong as Asia’s pre-eminent financial center, it won’t be because it’s become a better place for global capital to shake hands with China. Instead, it will be because global capital may one day come to regard China the same way it now regards Japan — as a vast but challenging market overshadowed by faster-growing rivals.
If any place has been rehearsing for the moment when it overtakes Hong Kong as the economic capital of Asia, it’s Singapore.
The Southeast Asian city-state’s founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, took Hong Kong as a direct model when trying to build a stable future for Singapore after its expulsion from the Malaysian federation in 1965. “I thought I would learn from Hong Kong, which had also been cut off from its hinterland, mainland China,” Lee said in a 1992 speech.
The two ethnically Chinese, former British colonies have been transformed utterly since then, but still resemble each other closely as low-tax, affluent cities that compete to attract white-collar professionals from across the world.
That’s where the similarities end. For Asia’s cosmopolitan classes, Singapore and Hong Kong aren’t so much twins as opposites. Exploring the profound differences between the two is a favorite parlor game — and one Singapore traditionally loses.
The city-state’s tidy, controlling tendencies are often contrasted unfavorably with Hong Kong’s more freewheeling model of entrepot capitalism. It rarely escapes notice that while Hong Kong was a model for Lee, his Singapore in turn was a template for Deng Xiaoping’s vision of the Chinese state.
Hong Kong was traditionally so laissez-faire that the government resisted the official collection of economic and financial statistics until the 1980s, and didn’t have a central banking function until 1993. Singapore is far more interventionist, running its own singles events to support the fertility rate and accommodating 79% of the population in government-built homes.
Visiting Hong Kong in 1954, Lee was astonished to find that a local tailor was able to measure and fit a new suit for him in just 12 hours: “Singapore tailors do not work at that speed,” he said years later. His conclusion, that Hong Kongers were a “leaner and keener people,” isn’t so different from the popular view even now.
Those differences have helped engender a different model of capitalism in Singapore. For all its ambitions to turn itself into the London of Asia, it looks a lot more like the region’s Zurich — dominated by the discreet worlds of private banking and commodities trade, rather than the colorful chaos of capital markets and dealmaking found in its northern cousin.
Of the 30 companies on the FTSE Straits Times index, all but three count as major shareholders either government-owned investment fund Temasek Holdings Pte. or a handful of Asian and British tycoons, led by Hong Kong’s Jardine Matheson Holdings Ltd. That leaves the exchange embarrassingly stunted by financial-center standards, with the total market capitalization of its primary listings slipping below near neighbors in Thailand and Indonesia.
The stock market is less than one-tenth the size of Hong Kong’s, where blue-chip mainland Chinese companies such as Tencent Holdings Ltd. and PetroChina Co. make up about a third of the total. That’s a problem for Singapore, because share trading is a core component of a vibrant financial center.
“If your equity market is not efficient, it will not attract high quality firms,” said Meijun Qian, a professor of finance at Australian National University in Canberra. “The situation becomes a spiral, stuck in an inefficient equilibrium.”
This junior status has been a concern for many years. The response has been characteristically Singaporean — harnessing the powers of the state in a multi-decade campaign to compete with a city whose success is based, as much as anything, on its resistance to government intervention.
Over the past few decades, Singapore has built parks, theaters, concert halls, casinos and theme parks in an attempt to shake off the perception that it’s Hong Kong’s straitlaced relative. Six of the city’s 10 top-ranked attractions on TripAdvisor have been built since 2008 (not everything has changed: the number one place still goes to the city’s metro rail system). The Singapore Grand Prix, a major pull for private-banking clients, started the same year.
Just a handful of Singapore’s major performance-arts venues existed 20 years ago, and the same goes for the the city’s main nightlife spot, the Clarke Quay district. Until the 1990s, most discos were run by community centers or the police, and weren’t allowed to serve alcohol.
Walking around the coffee shops of the downtown business district, the city now has a distinctly hipsterish vibe that couldn’t be more different from the stereotype. This transformation, combined with its lower cost of living and better-quality housing, appears to have done the trick in luring people to live there. The population of non-citizen permanent residents increased by about 235,000 between 2000 and 2018, outstripping the 199,000 rise in non-Chinese residents in Hong Kong over a comparable period. About 13% of the population are now non-citizens, up from 4.1% in 1990.
Despite all this, the vision from a decade ago that Singapore might finally cement a position as Asia’s pre-eminent financial capital has been thwarted so far by the sheer scale of mainland Chinese growth spilling over the border to Hong Kong.
On one measure of a city’s status as an international banking center — the value of claims that local branches of international banks have on foreign non-banks — Singapore seemed like it had a chance of catching up a decade ago. It’s since been comprehensively left behind.
Even in private banking — in theory, one of Singapore’s strong suits — Hong Kong has won out, as the army of rich people minted by China’s boom have sought to stash their wealth over the border, but not too far away.
“We’re a center for Southeast Asia, Hong Kong is for China,” said Joseph Lim, an associate professor of finance at the Singapore University of Social Sciences.
For most of the 22 years since the Hong Kong handover, Singapore’s distance from China has been a disadvantage. Only the individuals and businesses most obsessed with keeping their assets out of Beijing’s reach have gone to the effort of moving their wealth so far from the dynamic engine of the world economy.
Now, that liability may gradually be turning into an asset. Mainland China is already in demographic decline, with the labor force shrinking by 1.4 million people in 2018 — more than three times the combined 436,000 lost by Japan and the European Union. Meanwhile, the trade war is diverting supply chains towards Singapore’s backyard in Southeast Asia, causing wealth to spring up in new locations.
After years of leading every other major economy, the growth rate of China’s gross domestic product is now falling behind the Philippines, Vietnam, and India. Even its vast size is subject to the law of gravity: By 2035, the eight largest economies in South and Southeast Asia will have pulled level in terms of aggregate output, according to forecasts by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. They’ll accelerate further after that.
Indeed, it’s possible that this weakening in the economy — with its violation of China’s unofficial social contract, where dramatic improvements in citizens’ material well-being were seen as compensating for the lack of civil liberties — is one factor that’s contributing to Beijing’s tightening political grip. Unable to placate the population with wealth, China’s government is resorting to harsher methods to keep control. That’s an alarming prospect even for rival financial centers.
“It’s not in anybody’s interest to have an unstable greater China,” said Yougesh Khatri, a Singapore-based fellow with British foreign-policy think tank Chatham House. “We all would like to see a stable and prosperous Hong Kong economy.”
If Singapore takes over from Hong Kong as Asia’s pre-eminent financial center, it won’t be because it’s become a better place for global capital to shake hands with China. Instead, it will be because global capital may one day come to regard China the same way it now regards Japan — as a vast but challenging market overshadowed by faster-growing rivals.
Post ID: 2817078723242307729
Links - 28th January 2020 (1)
Dominatrix specializes in turning ‘white, right-wing men’ into socialists - "for Reba Maybury, a 27-year-old political science professor and professional dominatrix, the larger problem is a historical power imbalance that she’s now working to correct in a unique fashion.A socialist of mixed-race background, Maybury, who also goes by the name Mistress Rebecca, says that she had “always been fascinated by sex and notions of shame around sexuality,” particularly in regard to fetishes... For many of her clientele, who are almost exclusively white right-wing men because she finds herself unable “to be even fictionally cruel to any other type of man,” that fetish is serving a powerful woman. Maybury derives her pleasure comes from forcing those men to see the contradiction between their love of powerful women and their support for political parties that actively work to limit women’s rights and empowerment."
This isn't parody
Presumably there isn't any contradiction in feminist women with rape fantasies
The pleasure revolution: the sex women really want - "In these post #MeToo days, when sex is often presented as immoral, dangerous or potentially illegal, female pleasure has, according to Theobald, become politically important. “Anger is not going to get us anywhere,” she says, which is why she is calling for a pleasure revolution. “The first sexual revolution,” she says, “was about male desire. Back in the 1970s men were still asking if women had orgasms and if they did, who cares? #MeToo was about men imposing their pleasure on women. The pleasure revolution is about women asserting their own pleasure.”In her book, a sort of Thelma and Louise meets Eat Pray Love road trip across the States, Theobald seeks out America’s first wave of sex-positive feminist legends from the 1970s and 80s in a bid to chart a new path to sexual pleasure for herself, following the break-up of a 10-year relationship. “My usual relationship pattern was to get bored with the sex, cheat, get found out, cause chaos,” she says. “So I thought I’d be open and talk about how I needed to go off and find my desire again.”... Computer scientist and Goldsmiths University lecturer Dr Kate Devlin sees a similar bias in favour of male sexual gratification in the sex tech industry... Harmony sex robots, from California-based Realdoll, are rolling off the production line: perfectly sculpted plastic women. All aimed at men. “We have this idea of a perfect artificial lover and it tends to be a very sexy woman, a femme fatale, and that’s kind of rubbish,” says Devlin, who generates ideas that appeal to women, ideas that are more sensuous, intimate and personal. “There has been talk of bringing out a male version of a sex robot, but that’s still in its infancy and, to be honest, I can’t really see the appeal – especially for women.”... It’s only recently we’re starting to hear about female sexual dysfunctions, says Moyle... All masculinity, when we look at it from a historical point of view, is to dominate women"
I like how cheating on your partner and causing chaos is men's fault
Apparently the fact that there're so many types of vibrator around and that there're sex robots for men but not for women (because women don't want them) shows that there's a bias in favor of male sexual gratification
The same people who claim we're only just starting to hear about female sexual dysfunction likely excoriate talk about "frigid" women and take it as proof that sexism is as old as history
Apparently gay men didn't exist historically (the queer theorists might have something to say about that)
Photographers, Instagrammers - Stop Being So Damn Selfish and Disrespectful - "What does it take to push a farmer to this point?The point where, fed up of thousands of disrespectful photographers, wannabe “influencers” and narcissistic tourists, they feel the only way to get them to stop damaging their business and property, is to damage those people’s photographs?I guess those visiting the lavender fields of Valensole, Provence – in the south of France, just found out...
What I found, however, was truly shocking:
Cars dumped, strewn all along the roadside, blocking traffic with people darting in and out across the road.
Mobile wardrobes (with 5-6 outfit changes) being transported into the farmer’s private land for a fashion “shoot”.
Photographers with step-ladders to get higher up, trampling and crushing the rows of lavender which had been cared for all year.
People picking (yes, another word for stealing) huge bunches of lavender from the farmer’s fields for their photoshoot, and ultimately, to take home.
And all this occurring INSIDE the fence that the land owner had clearly erected to keep people out...
These weren’t people wanting to enjoy the view – or even capture the scenery to share and enjoy well into the future with friends. These are people so obsessed with their own sense of self-importance for the sake of a few instant “likes” on their social media profile that they find it perfectly acceptable to trespass, steal, disrespect the workers and their land – all in the name of “influencing”...
The lavender fields of Provence, “that Wanaka tree” in New Zealand, Iceland’s amazing glaciers, the ancient temple of Angkor Wat – we’re trashing the wonderful world that’s our temporary home for the sake of what? A few virtual “likes” from strangers who couldn’t care less about you mere seconds after scrolling up by a few pixels on a tiny screen."
Abuse In Guardians Of The Galaxy, Vol. 2 - "What do a talking raccoon, baby tree, cybernetically enhanced assassin, dancing space captain, and a blue criminal with a metal mohawk have in common? They’re all victims of abuse in Guardians Of The Galaxy, Vol. 2... no one is more abusive in Volume 2 than Drax. And not just to Mantis. He calls Rocket a rodent, Gamora a whore, Groot a dumb tree, and makes up words just so he can argue with Starlord. In the case of Drax, abuse is the only way he knows how to show love... perhaps, it is all just a way of making his death easier. Everything Drax loved is gone. Taken from him. And he further separates himself from those he calls family with insults and abuse. He only seems most joyous when he is courting death. He willingly leaps into the mouth of an interdimensional monster, dangles himself through the breached hull of a crashing spaceship, and seems indifferent as he is swallowed alive by the very planet he’s standing on. He isn’t willing to risk anyone else’s life. He doesn’t think twice before holding Mantis above him as he sinks into the planet’s soil and he demands to know where Starlord is even as the planet dissolves around him. Yet his own life seems damn dispensable, as if he’s hoping to rejoin the family he lost... In the most touching scene in the film, Yondu sacrifices himself to carry Starlord to safety. He accepts that his own pain was never an excuse to hurt others, that what he did to Starlord and the other children was wrong, and he gives his life in atonement. This theme of forgiveness and love carries through for the rest of the film, saving each character. Ego, who is unable to acknowledge that he did anything wrong, crumbles to dust."
Shots fired suspect, 'I don't like white people in my hood' - "Devonta Allen, 18, faces four counts of felonious assault... Allen turned himself in Monday night. He had an audiotaped statement admitting to shooting at the victims. However, he said they were armed and fired at him first. Police say the video and statements from the victims and witnesses contradict Allen's claims."
If it'd been the other way around...
Border Force banned from using X-rays to seek out migrant stowaways - "Britain’s border guards can no long use X-rays to examine lorries they believe may contain illegal immigrants while exiting French ports, it has been claimed.Lucy Moreton from the Immigration Services Union said French authorities had banned the devices, which take around an hour to scan each vehicle, on health and safety grounds.She said: The French will not allow us to use them for looking for illegals. They only allow us to use scanners to search for contraband, not people.’... This is not the first time The UK’s border agency has been prevented from using X-ray technology on vehicles. In 2008 it was reported that French authorities had written to British immigration officials to inform them they would have to obtain illegal migrants’ written permission before proceeding with such a search."
Essex truck deaths: Three more arrested after 39 victims found in container -- live updates - "Four people have been arrested this week in connection with the deaths of 39 people found in a container at the back of the truck, at an industrial park in Grays, Essex...
When asked by CNN about the possibility of Chinese citizens being illegally trafficked, the question was rebuffed by the spokesperson. "Chinese people have gained an unprecedented level of gratefulness, safeness, fulfillment and happiness over the past, over the past seven decades," Hua replied. "If you look around the globe you will find more and more foreign friends wishing to work, study and holiday in China even more they hope live in China for a long time, so I think this is not an appropriate question for you to raise here.""
If only they had X-rays...
Houston bans “evil and sleazy” sex-robot brothel - "Houston could have become a real-life Westworld, but instead the city council has unanimously voted to pass an ordinance that effectively blocks a proposed “sex robot brothel” from opening.The brothel was supposed to be the first U.S. showroom of the try-before-you-buy Canadian love doll company KinkySdollS, which already has a location in the much more free-thinking city of Toronto. Since the human-like dolls can cost more than $3,000 each, the company seems to think it’s only polite to let potential customers try them on for size.Houston locals were not thrilled by the prospect of turning their fair city into a robotic Wild Wild West. According to USA Today, prior to the council’s vote, a petition opposed to the robot sex business had more than 13,000 signatures. Residents testified that the brothel was “crooked, evil and sleazy,” according to FOX 26 News, and would “tear families apart,” which says something about Houston families and their predilections."
Swedish feminists demand a ban on sex robots because they dehumanise women just like pornography - "Feminist groups in Sweden have called for a ban on 'dangerous' sex robots because they encourage men to treat women's bodies as objects and could lead to violence against real women and girls... The groups believe that the increasingly lifelike dolls and robots are posing a threat to the safety of women as they are not programmed with the ability to say 'no' to men's demands... Using new technology to create lifelike 'women' in doll and robot form is justifying slavery by dehumanising women, claimed the groups... With automated brothels, with no human prostitutes, now open in neighbouring Denmark and Finland, the feminist groups have called for Swedish authorities to make it hard for the brothels to open."
Even though there're no women involved. And that we know that porn reduces sex crime, so sex robots will have an even bigger effect
This all just goes to show that all these measures to ""protect" women" are really about controlling male sexuality - women dislike porn, prostitutes and sluts for the same reason
KLIM Fusion review: Quality in-ear gaming headphones for $20 - "The KLIM Fusion in-ear headset can pull double duty — it's great for gaming, but you can also use it for everyday use. The design isn't ridiculous, they work with both PCs and phones, they're solidly build, and best of all the headset only costs $20!... There's also a five-year warranty, such is KLIM's commitment to the quality of its products."
Domestic worker denied entry at SCC: Private clubs’ rules are ‘discriminatory’, ‘archaic’, some say - "Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2) and the Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics (Home) said that it is “discriminatory” and “elitist” to prohibit people from entering the club because of their social status. "This is outright discrimination. They should be given equal rights as other guests of club members”... “The rule is there in some clubs to make sure that the clubs don't get overcrowded and to prevent the misuse of facilities. What if every member has his or her own domestic helper in the club? The place may become overcrowded and members might not be able to properly enjoy the facilities and amenities. Will this then be fair to members who pay an exorbitant fee for the club membership?”Ms Phua added that in the open market, people are paying “hundreds of thousands” for memberships to private clubs such as SCC and the Singapore Island Country Club. She also said that not all clubs have this rule because each club serves “different purposes".“For example, the Singapore Recreation Club (SRC) allows domestic helpers because it has more local members, and is (regarded to be) a place for family activities… these clubs tend to have swimming pools (as well), so it would make sense to allow maids.“Whereas for a club like SCC, where most of the members go for business networking, the members prefer a quiet environment. You seldom see children around and so, it would also make sense if maids are not allowed (entry).”... Other clubs in Singapore, such as The Tanglin Club, also have such similar rules.It is the same at The British Club, except that domestic workers are allowed in when attending a function organised by the club for them. Its spokesperson explained that the bylaws are in place for reasons related to the possibility of overcrowding... The spokesperson added that club members are regularly surveyed on this bylaw, and “an overwhelming majority support the policy”. The British Club’s membership base comprises 51 nationalities including Singaporeans."
Presumably if a maid applied for membership, she wouldn't be denied membership. And how likely is it that a club member would bring in his maid as a guest - rather than as a maid to take care of children?
Student kicked out of class for saying there are only two genders is now expelled - "The Scottish student who was suspended from school for posting a video showing him disagreeing with his teacher who insisted that there are more than two genders has now been expelled... A GoFundMe appeal, which was set up for Murray earlier this week to help cover his expenses as he searches for a new school, was shut down two days later by the popular crowdfunding site. “So GoFundMe has cancelled the campaign and also banned my account. I have not been given any reason other than I violated the terms somehow,” tweeted I,Hpocrite. “All donations were refunded.”"
"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."
Parlez-vous le "Franponais" ? - "Il est en effet de bon goût, au Japon, d'utiliser des mots français dans des domaines relatifs à l'image de la France, comme la mode,la pâtisserie, la crêperie, les cafés, la restauration ou la coiffure."
Legendary S’pore hawker who made charcoal-toasted bread & home-made kaya passes away - "In it, long-time patron Ng Kwok Hua talked about how Seng had, after his cancer diagnosis, imparted the art of brewing coffee and preparing toasts to his son.His wife also had to constantly reassure him that the stall would be in good hands."
This isn't parody
Presumably there isn't any contradiction in feminist women with rape fantasies
The pleasure revolution: the sex women really want - "In these post #MeToo days, when sex is often presented as immoral, dangerous or potentially illegal, female pleasure has, according to Theobald, become politically important. “Anger is not going to get us anywhere,” she says, which is why she is calling for a pleasure revolution. “The first sexual revolution,” she says, “was about male desire. Back in the 1970s men were still asking if women had orgasms and if they did, who cares? #MeToo was about men imposing their pleasure on women. The pleasure revolution is about women asserting their own pleasure.”In her book, a sort of Thelma and Louise meets Eat Pray Love road trip across the States, Theobald seeks out America’s first wave of sex-positive feminist legends from the 1970s and 80s in a bid to chart a new path to sexual pleasure for herself, following the break-up of a 10-year relationship. “My usual relationship pattern was to get bored with the sex, cheat, get found out, cause chaos,” she says. “So I thought I’d be open and talk about how I needed to go off and find my desire again.”... Computer scientist and Goldsmiths University lecturer Dr Kate Devlin sees a similar bias in favour of male sexual gratification in the sex tech industry... Harmony sex robots, from California-based Realdoll, are rolling off the production line: perfectly sculpted plastic women. All aimed at men. “We have this idea of a perfect artificial lover and it tends to be a very sexy woman, a femme fatale, and that’s kind of rubbish,” says Devlin, who generates ideas that appeal to women, ideas that are more sensuous, intimate and personal. “There has been talk of bringing out a male version of a sex robot, but that’s still in its infancy and, to be honest, I can’t really see the appeal – especially for women.”... It’s only recently we’re starting to hear about female sexual dysfunctions, says Moyle... All masculinity, when we look at it from a historical point of view, is to dominate women"
I like how cheating on your partner and causing chaos is men's fault
Apparently the fact that there're so many types of vibrator around and that there're sex robots for men but not for women (because women don't want them) shows that there's a bias in favor of male sexual gratification
The same people who claim we're only just starting to hear about female sexual dysfunction likely excoriate talk about "frigid" women and take it as proof that sexism is as old as history
Apparently gay men didn't exist historically (the queer theorists might have something to say about that)
Photographers, Instagrammers - Stop Being So Damn Selfish and Disrespectful - "What does it take to push a farmer to this point?The point where, fed up of thousands of disrespectful photographers, wannabe “influencers” and narcissistic tourists, they feel the only way to get them to stop damaging their business and property, is to damage those people’s photographs?I guess those visiting the lavender fields of Valensole, Provence – in the south of France, just found out...
What I found, however, was truly shocking:
Cars dumped, strewn all along the roadside, blocking traffic with people darting in and out across the road.
Mobile wardrobes (with 5-6 outfit changes) being transported into the farmer’s private land for a fashion “shoot”.
Photographers with step-ladders to get higher up, trampling and crushing the rows of lavender which had been cared for all year.
People picking (yes, another word for stealing) huge bunches of lavender from the farmer’s fields for their photoshoot, and ultimately, to take home.
And all this occurring INSIDE the fence that the land owner had clearly erected to keep people out...
These weren’t people wanting to enjoy the view – or even capture the scenery to share and enjoy well into the future with friends. These are people so obsessed with their own sense of self-importance for the sake of a few instant “likes” on their social media profile that they find it perfectly acceptable to trespass, steal, disrespect the workers and their land – all in the name of “influencing”...
The lavender fields of Provence, “that Wanaka tree” in New Zealand, Iceland’s amazing glaciers, the ancient temple of Angkor Wat – we’re trashing the wonderful world that’s our temporary home for the sake of what? A few virtual “likes” from strangers who couldn’t care less about you mere seconds after scrolling up by a few pixels on a tiny screen."
Abuse In Guardians Of The Galaxy, Vol. 2 - "What do a talking raccoon, baby tree, cybernetically enhanced assassin, dancing space captain, and a blue criminal with a metal mohawk have in common? They’re all victims of abuse in Guardians Of The Galaxy, Vol. 2... no one is more abusive in Volume 2 than Drax. And not just to Mantis. He calls Rocket a rodent, Gamora a whore, Groot a dumb tree, and makes up words just so he can argue with Starlord. In the case of Drax, abuse is the only way he knows how to show love... perhaps, it is all just a way of making his death easier. Everything Drax loved is gone. Taken from him. And he further separates himself from those he calls family with insults and abuse. He only seems most joyous when he is courting death. He willingly leaps into the mouth of an interdimensional monster, dangles himself through the breached hull of a crashing spaceship, and seems indifferent as he is swallowed alive by the very planet he’s standing on. He isn’t willing to risk anyone else’s life. He doesn’t think twice before holding Mantis above him as he sinks into the planet’s soil and he demands to know where Starlord is even as the planet dissolves around him. Yet his own life seems damn dispensable, as if he’s hoping to rejoin the family he lost... In the most touching scene in the film, Yondu sacrifices himself to carry Starlord to safety. He accepts that his own pain was never an excuse to hurt others, that what he did to Starlord and the other children was wrong, and he gives his life in atonement. This theme of forgiveness and love carries through for the rest of the film, saving each character. Ego, who is unable to acknowledge that he did anything wrong, crumbles to dust."
Shots fired suspect, 'I don't like white people in my hood' - "Devonta Allen, 18, faces four counts of felonious assault... Allen turned himself in Monday night. He had an audiotaped statement admitting to shooting at the victims. However, he said they were armed and fired at him first. Police say the video and statements from the victims and witnesses contradict Allen's claims."
If it'd been the other way around...
Border Force banned from using X-rays to seek out migrant stowaways - "Britain’s border guards can no long use X-rays to examine lorries they believe may contain illegal immigrants while exiting French ports, it has been claimed.Lucy Moreton from the Immigration Services Union said French authorities had banned the devices, which take around an hour to scan each vehicle, on health and safety grounds.She said: The French will not allow us to use them for looking for illegals. They only allow us to use scanners to search for contraband, not people.’... This is not the first time The UK’s border agency has been prevented from using X-ray technology on vehicles. In 2008 it was reported that French authorities had written to British immigration officials to inform them they would have to obtain illegal migrants’ written permission before proceeding with such a search."
Essex truck deaths: Three more arrested after 39 victims found in container -- live updates - "Four people have been arrested this week in connection with the deaths of 39 people found in a container at the back of the truck, at an industrial park in Grays, Essex...
When asked by CNN about the possibility of Chinese citizens being illegally trafficked, the question was rebuffed by the spokesperson. "Chinese people have gained an unprecedented level of gratefulness, safeness, fulfillment and happiness over the past, over the past seven decades," Hua replied. "If you look around the globe you will find more and more foreign friends wishing to work, study and holiday in China even more they hope live in China for a long time, so I think this is not an appropriate question for you to raise here.""
If only they had X-rays...
Houston bans “evil and sleazy” sex-robot brothel - "Houston could have become a real-life Westworld, but instead the city council has unanimously voted to pass an ordinance that effectively blocks a proposed “sex robot brothel” from opening.The brothel was supposed to be the first U.S. showroom of the try-before-you-buy Canadian love doll company KinkySdollS, which already has a location in the much more free-thinking city of Toronto. Since the human-like dolls can cost more than $3,000 each, the company seems to think it’s only polite to let potential customers try them on for size.Houston locals were not thrilled by the prospect of turning their fair city into a robotic Wild Wild West. According to USA Today, prior to the council’s vote, a petition opposed to the robot sex business had more than 13,000 signatures. Residents testified that the brothel was “crooked, evil and sleazy,” according to FOX 26 News, and would “tear families apart,” which says something about Houston families and their predilections."
Swedish feminists demand a ban on sex robots because they dehumanise women just like pornography - "Feminist groups in Sweden have called for a ban on 'dangerous' sex robots because they encourage men to treat women's bodies as objects and could lead to violence against real women and girls... The groups believe that the increasingly lifelike dolls and robots are posing a threat to the safety of women as they are not programmed with the ability to say 'no' to men's demands... Using new technology to create lifelike 'women' in doll and robot form is justifying slavery by dehumanising women, claimed the groups... With automated brothels, with no human prostitutes, now open in neighbouring Denmark and Finland, the feminist groups have called for Swedish authorities to make it hard for the brothels to open."
Even though there're no women involved. And that we know that porn reduces sex crime, so sex robots will have an even bigger effect
This all just goes to show that all these measures to ""protect" women" are really about controlling male sexuality - women dislike porn, prostitutes and sluts for the same reason
KLIM Fusion review: Quality in-ear gaming headphones for $20 - "The KLIM Fusion in-ear headset can pull double duty — it's great for gaming, but you can also use it for everyday use. The design isn't ridiculous, they work with both PCs and phones, they're solidly build, and best of all the headset only costs $20!... There's also a five-year warranty, such is KLIM's commitment to the quality of its products."
Domestic worker denied entry at SCC: Private clubs’ rules are ‘discriminatory’, ‘archaic’, some say - "Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2) and the Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics (Home) said that it is “discriminatory” and “elitist” to prohibit people from entering the club because of their social status. "This is outright discrimination. They should be given equal rights as other guests of club members”... “The rule is there in some clubs to make sure that the clubs don't get overcrowded and to prevent the misuse of facilities. What if every member has his or her own domestic helper in the club? The place may become overcrowded and members might not be able to properly enjoy the facilities and amenities. Will this then be fair to members who pay an exorbitant fee for the club membership?”Ms Phua added that in the open market, people are paying “hundreds of thousands” for memberships to private clubs such as SCC and the Singapore Island Country Club. She also said that not all clubs have this rule because each club serves “different purposes".“For example, the Singapore Recreation Club (SRC) allows domestic helpers because it has more local members, and is (regarded to be) a place for family activities… these clubs tend to have swimming pools (as well), so it would make sense to allow maids.“Whereas for a club like SCC, where most of the members go for business networking, the members prefer a quiet environment. You seldom see children around and so, it would also make sense if maids are not allowed (entry).”... Other clubs in Singapore, such as The Tanglin Club, also have such similar rules.It is the same at The British Club, except that domestic workers are allowed in when attending a function organised by the club for them. Its spokesperson explained that the bylaws are in place for reasons related to the possibility of overcrowding... The spokesperson added that club members are regularly surveyed on this bylaw, and “an overwhelming majority support the policy”. The British Club’s membership base comprises 51 nationalities including Singaporeans."
Presumably if a maid applied for membership, she wouldn't be denied membership. And how likely is it that a club member would bring in his maid as a guest - rather than as a maid to take care of children?
Student kicked out of class for saying there are only two genders is now expelled - "The Scottish student who was suspended from school for posting a video showing him disagreeing with his teacher who insisted that there are more than two genders has now been expelled... A GoFundMe appeal, which was set up for Murray earlier this week to help cover his expenses as he searches for a new school, was shut down two days later by the popular crowdfunding site. “So GoFundMe has cancelled the campaign and also banned my account. I have not been given any reason other than I violated the terms somehow,” tweeted I,Hpocrite. “All donations were refunded.”"
"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."
Parlez-vous le "Franponais" ? - "Il est en effet de bon goût, au Japon, d'utiliser des mots français dans des domaines relatifs à l'image de la France, comme la mode,la pâtisserie, la crêperie, les cafés, la restauration ou la coiffure."
Legendary S’pore hawker who made charcoal-toasted bread & home-made kaya passes away - "In it, long-time patron Ng Kwok Hua talked about how Seng had, after his cancer diagnosis, imparted the art of brewing coffee and preparing toasts to his son.His wife also had to constantly reassure him that the stall would be in good hands."
Post ID: 7024203967824235972
Monday, January 27, 2020
Links - 27th January 2020 (2)
We're Only Fooling Ourselves : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘I can believe that I'm a nice person and I can do horrible things and you should think that if I do a horrible thing, I’ll think I'm a bad person now, but somehow we can interpret evidence and filter it to still think that we're great no matter what we do… you're cheating yourself. So if you think about so I definitely am motivated to convince you that I'm a nice person, even if I'm wrong. It's a little bit more curious that I'd be motivated to convince myself that I'm still a nice person, if I do a bad thing, because I may as well just accurately perceive who I am... [One theory is] that the best way to convince you of a lie, if I want to get something from you, and it's not really true, is to lie to myself... Imagine taking a test with the answers at the bottom. And you can glance at the answers whenever you like. Well, it turns out, you do a lot better on the test. The problem is, we then say how well are you going to do on another test, without the answers? And people should say, well, let me think here, wait a minute... If they're at all sensible, they would say to themselves, I wonder if my perfect score on that first test had something to do with having all the answers at the bottom, at least they’d correct a little bit and we find they don't correct at all. So they really self deceived... we even pay them to be accurate... no effect at all’...
'People who think better, that their partner is better than their partner really is are happier in their relationships. But that doesn't mean that it's better for your partner for you to think you're better than you are. So I think there's this interesting balance between the erroneous beliefs that are a little positive and having to deal, so it's nice if I think you're great. It's not so nice if I think I'm great and you have to wake up to me every morning'"
The Switching Type : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘Your interest in price or the degree to which you value getting a good deal was actually not related at all to switching. But what was related was locomotion. So customers who have a higher locomotion score are more likely to say that they will switch or more likely to have recently switched.’
‘So basically what's happening is that people who are switching the companies that are advertising price, but the people are switching are just the switching types. So is there a way to take switching types and get them to switch less? Is there a different type of message?’
‘So there is a message and what this research shows is that it's not necessarily about switching specifically, but it's about feeling like you're getting something done or being in motion, making progress towards goals. So we can give customers a way to feel like they're making progress without that progress being switching, then we can sort of appease them and make them feel like they're getting something done but letting them stay… we designed an email that had a little icon at the top that said, you've moved into your new house, you've unpacked but yet you still need to do this and switch back. And so we made them feel like they still needed to work on their to do list and actually make progress. And the thing that needed to be done was to switch back to this provider that they may have just switched from’"
Unconscious Decision-Making : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University; John W. Payne, Joseph J. Ruvane, Jr. Professor of Management and Marketing : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘People who went off and worked in the garden did better than those who thought for four minutes. But those people who thought for 25 seconds until they were you know, comfortable making a decision did every bit as well as the unconscious thought’...
‘It's not so much unconscious versus conscious [thought]. That if you ask people to think too much, then they can actually make a mistake. Is that?’
‘You can do bad conscious thinking. And when you do bad conscious thinking, you make bad decisions… We may study and study and study and a good example might be in some financial decisions, or college choice decisions, etc. And what we end up doing sometimes is because we overthink it, we start paying attention to irrelevant information as much as relevant information.’...
'Magnitudes mattered. So for example, if we gave you a lottery task, and it wasn't just whether you won money or didn't, but you could win $4 or 14… where the payoffs mattered the more, the magnitudes mattered the more, there we found that the conscious self actually outperformed the unconscious...
Most people read the first half of Blink, they don't read the second half of Blink. If you read the second half of Blink, he actually, to be honest and fair to Malcolm Gladwell, he actually points out the places where your gut can lead you astray. And it turns out that you got quick blink responses work well under certain circumstances. You get clear feedback, you get a lot of it. You can over time learn. And you then make a decision that there's some stability, in terms of decision how is mapped on to the decisions that you've learned from. If that's not true, your gut can lead you very much astray'"
BBC World Service - The Food Chain, How dangerous is your food delivery? - "[On London] There are parts of the capital that drivers see as no go areas because they're known gang hotspots, but some of the apps make them hard to avoid"
I suppose No-Go Zones aren't a paranoid right wing conspiracy theory anymore. Especially coming from food delivery riders, who are largely (?) minorities
BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Bakers: Earning a crust - "‘I feel a little bit shy to say that our bakery is doing fairly well. We have the advantage I guess, of having those primary ingredients being grown here in Canada, so I don't really import anything. So my costs are fairly low. Our major costs are rent and labor, to find people who are willing to start a shift at one o'clock in the morning. You can't pay them, you know, minimum wage and nor should you. And I definitely find versus restaurants, bakeries are very expensive to start up. You spend so many years just paying off equipment. The ovens are extraordinarily expensive. I would compare an oven to, you know, a high end luxury car’
‘And how do margins compare with running a restaurant?’
‘There's no comparison. You know, I'm not bringing in meat or fish. I don't have to buy cases of wine or have wine glasses, even if you're paying in our case for a bag of organic flour, $60 Canadian or $50 US. That bag of flour is going to make me quite a few loaves of bread. So versus a restaurant, a successful restaurant that's got a 4% margin per year of profit. You know bakeries are easily in the double digits.’…
‘Having three children at home I find that the hours lend itself very well to my family life versus the restaurants. I'll start generally between one and three o'clock in the morning, but I finish around two or three o'clock in the afternoon. So you know, a 12 hour day isn't uncommon. But I'm there for picking up my kids from school, doing the homework and having dinner… I don't think that this is necessarily a business for people who require eight to 10 hours of sleep a night… I would say on a good night I'm getting six hours.’"
BBC World Service - The World This Week, Why the prince left public life - "Across South Asia we use a lot of spices in food here and onions are something that reduce the intensity of those spice. It's a pungent vegetable that adds a distinctive taste to many of the dishes. That also, it's the vegetable that is available throughout the year because it's cultivated four times a year and you can store it up for months. So, on the days when you cannot afford or on the days when you cannot buy vegetable from the market, you can just use onion as a substitute"
BBC World Service - The World This Week, Trump impeachment hearings go public - "[On Bolivia] ‘This is now resembling the governments of old, i.e. European, white, not majority indigenous in what is still the one nation in the Americas that has a majority indigenous population.’"
BBC World Service - The World This Week, Turkey goes to war - "[Trump:] ‘We want to bring our troops back home. And I got elected on that. If you go back and look at our speeches, I would say we want to bring our troops back home from these endless wars.’...
‘Isn't bringing US troops home generally popular?’
‘Yes, it is. There's a saying in American politics that Republicans want a massive military and they don't want to send it anywhere. And Democrats want a small military and they want to send it everywhere’"
What’s the Difference Between English, Irish and Scottish Breakfast Teas? - "Breakfast teas are black tea blends intended to accompany a hearty, rich morning meal (think of the full English breakfast or fry-up) and are therefore more robust than afternoon tea blends. Because they are so strong, breakfast teas go well with milk. Breakfast tea blends made with Assam tea tend to have higher caffeine levels...
Irish breakfast tea has a strong Assam component, which gives it a more robust, malty flavor and reddish color...
Scottish breakfast tea tends to be the heartiest of the bunch, possibly due to Scotland’s soft water... It’s important to note that at no time has there been a standard formula for any of these blends. “One company’s English breakfast could be identical to another company’s Irish breakfast”"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Robert Burns - "He is writing an autobiographical letter, he describes how love and poesie [sp?] began together. And he tells the story about one of the plus sides of being on the farm, I think, was when he was working on the harvest at age 15. And by his side was a very attractive 14 year old, and he had worked out that in order to perhaps get some tender feelings from his co worker, he could, he could try a poem or a song. So he makes no secret of that. In fact, he's rather proud of it. But we also know that not much later than that he had a relationship with Elizabeth Patton, a servant girl. She became pregnant by him. And there was a scandal about that. He had to answer for that. In the Kirk. He didn't marry Elizabeth. By the time she had her baby, he was already interested in Jean Armor, who also became pregnant by him quite quickly. He also had a complication with Mary Campbell. We don't know quite what's happened there. It’s possible she was pregnant as well. So he was one of these, obviously very attractive man who didn't get really go for either/or, if there were plenty of opportunities."
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Rapture - "‘One of the interesting things to emphasize that was picked up in bits and pieces and several comments is that people coming to, you know, to hear about some of these ideas of dispensations and rapture for the first time would probably assume, this is very anti rationalist. And this is liable to come from and take hold amongst people who are not very educated and maybe socially deprived. But that's just not the history of the beginnings of dispensationalism. In Ireland, in Britain and America, this takes hold first amongst political elites, the most educated scholars, the leaders of mainline Protestant denominations, in the case of America. And in America takes root in New York and Chicago and Boston first, which is probably not the places that people would associate with this sort of thought now. And it's really not until after, into the post war era, that this thought is kind of abandoned by scholars and leaders of mainline denominations and political leaders in some countries, and becomes more of an anti intellectual movement of the people. That's a shift that takes place much later.’"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Rousseau on Education - "'He admits at one point that he enjoys the sister of the clergyman who's teaching him spanks him and he thinks that excites him as a boy. It's one of the things that he confesses to in his Confessions, one of his posthumously published works'
'Alright. Does that lead to anything?'
'Well it leads to a great deal because obviously to Rousseau,confessing your sins but not doing it in the manner of St Augustine is... the idea of confessing your sin is something that you need to do, but with the idea in the back of your mind that you're good'...
'He wasn't very keen on children reading books. He wanted them to experience the difficulties of life, making things, trying to make things, failing in things, playing, socialising and all that. At one stage he says 'I hate books'.... And he's not allowed to read a book... until he's 13 or so. And that's Robinson Crusoe to sort of teach you how to pull your life together from scraps'...
'In some ways, Rousseau's an author who is successful like many authors because the following generation completely misunderstands him. And turning him into an advocate of austere Republican morality, which is what the French Revolutionaries do and also an advocate of rebellion against contemporary society. The idea of a revolution in France, in Paris, which for Rousseau is just so beyond the pale, it's so corrupting, it would never, he would argue, it would never be conceivable. So they're going directly against Rousseau but they believe that he is the ultimate critic of existing society'"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Dorothy Hodgkin - "‘She's the only British woman to have won the Nobel prize. Why do you think she's not better known?’...
‘Marie Curie... is well known because she was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. I personally think she's an absolutely appalling role model. When people talk now about the need for role women, role models to encourage more women into science, [she’s] presented as someone who's always alone in the laboratory, who sacrificed her life, her interests to science. Dorothy Hodgkin, was, seems to me a very, very nice, warm, generous person. She had a family whom she absolutely adored. She was, she just got on with the work in a very quiet unassuming way. And for some reason, we like to have great geniuses, great heroes of science who, who was rather nasty, or who’ve got some scandalous story to tell. She, to me is the absolute role model of what a woman in science should be’"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow - "Napoleon completely misunderstood Alexander's position, both his strengths and his weakness. His weakness was that Tsardom was often characterized by the phrase autocracy tempered by assassination. And Alexander, in fact, had come to the throne in 1801, when his father had been assassinated, because he’d offended the elites in Russia by what seemed like capricious policy. And Alexander couldn't afford to offend the elite in the Guards Regiment, who were very patriotic and would not have tolerated coming to terms with Napoleon...
‘One might think it's a French army, it isn't. 40% of it’s French. The next largest national contingent would be various German contingents from the smaller German states and from Austria and from Prussia which have been compelled to send units in. So the German speakers would be roughly about a quarter, 20%. So it's still a 100,000 plus would be Polish speakers. And then you'd have other nationalities too: Italians, Spanish speakers, even a minority of Portuguese, people from the Balkans. It is a European army’
‘That must have been extraordinarily difficult to control.’
It is and that that becomes apparent really during the retreat. But even during the advance, it's an army of such a size that a single person sitting on a white horse hasn't got any oversight. And yet the kind of structures you get later on in the 19th century, of General Staff, what modern armies have, that doesn't exist in this period. So that's a real weakness, the command and control - rather the lack of it.’"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Treaty of Limerick - "‘I remember someone saying to me when I was studying history a number of years ago that had Mary lived as long as her sister and had the Tudor conquest of Ireland being a Catholic Tudor conquest, that all the Irish would have been roaring Presbyterians, you know, to be, just to be difficult.’"
'People who think better, that their partner is better than their partner really is are happier in their relationships. But that doesn't mean that it's better for your partner for you to think you're better than you are. So I think there's this interesting balance between the erroneous beliefs that are a little positive and having to deal, so it's nice if I think you're great. It's not so nice if I think I'm great and you have to wake up to me every morning'"
The Switching Type : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘Your interest in price or the degree to which you value getting a good deal was actually not related at all to switching. But what was related was locomotion. So customers who have a higher locomotion score are more likely to say that they will switch or more likely to have recently switched.’
‘So basically what's happening is that people who are switching the companies that are advertising price, but the people are switching are just the switching types. So is there a way to take switching types and get them to switch less? Is there a different type of message?’
‘So there is a message and what this research shows is that it's not necessarily about switching specifically, but it's about feeling like you're getting something done or being in motion, making progress towards goals. So we can give customers a way to feel like they're making progress without that progress being switching, then we can sort of appease them and make them feel like they're getting something done but letting them stay… we designed an email that had a little icon at the top that said, you've moved into your new house, you've unpacked but yet you still need to do this and switch back. And so we made them feel like they still needed to work on their to do list and actually make progress. And the thing that needed to be done was to switch back to this provider that they may have just switched from’"
Unconscious Decision-Making : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University; John W. Payne, Joseph J. Ruvane, Jr. Professor of Management and Marketing : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘People who went off and worked in the garden did better than those who thought for four minutes. But those people who thought for 25 seconds until they were you know, comfortable making a decision did every bit as well as the unconscious thought’...
‘It's not so much unconscious versus conscious [thought]. That if you ask people to think too much, then they can actually make a mistake. Is that?’
‘You can do bad conscious thinking. And when you do bad conscious thinking, you make bad decisions… We may study and study and study and a good example might be in some financial decisions, or college choice decisions, etc. And what we end up doing sometimes is because we overthink it, we start paying attention to irrelevant information as much as relevant information.’...
'Magnitudes mattered. So for example, if we gave you a lottery task, and it wasn't just whether you won money or didn't, but you could win $4 or 14… where the payoffs mattered the more, the magnitudes mattered the more, there we found that the conscious self actually outperformed the unconscious...
Most people read the first half of Blink, they don't read the second half of Blink. If you read the second half of Blink, he actually, to be honest and fair to Malcolm Gladwell, he actually points out the places where your gut can lead you astray. And it turns out that you got quick blink responses work well under certain circumstances. You get clear feedback, you get a lot of it. You can over time learn. And you then make a decision that there's some stability, in terms of decision how is mapped on to the decisions that you've learned from. If that's not true, your gut can lead you very much astray'"
BBC World Service - The Food Chain, How dangerous is your food delivery? - "[On London] There are parts of the capital that drivers see as no go areas because they're known gang hotspots, but some of the apps make them hard to avoid"
I suppose No-Go Zones aren't a paranoid right wing conspiracy theory anymore. Especially coming from food delivery riders, who are largely (?) minorities
BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Bakers: Earning a crust - "‘I feel a little bit shy to say that our bakery is doing fairly well. We have the advantage I guess, of having those primary ingredients being grown here in Canada, so I don't really import anything. So my costs are fairly low. Our major costs are rent and labor, to find people who are willing to start a shift at one o'clock in the morning. You can't pay them, you know, minimum wage and nor should you. And I definitely find versus restaurants, bakeries are very expensive to start up. You spend so many years just paying off equipment. The ovens are extraordinarily expensive. I would compare an oven to, you know, a high end luxury car’
‘And how do margins compare with running a restaurant?’
‘There's no comparison. You know, I'm not bringing in meat or fish. I don't have to buy cases of wine or have wine glasses, even if you're paying in our case for a bag of organic flour, $60 Canadian or $50 US. That bag of flour is going to make me quite a few loaves of bread. So versus a restaurant, a successful restaurant that's got a 4% margin per year of profit. You know bakeries are easily in the double digits.’…
‘Having three children at home I find that the hours lend itself very well to my family life versus the restaurants. I'll start generally between one and three o'clock in the morning, but I finish around two or three o'clock in the afternoon. So you know, a 12 hour day isn't uncommon. But I'm there for picking up my kids from school, doing the homework and having dinner… I don't think that this is necessarily a business for people who require eight to 10 hours of sleep a night… I would say on a good night I'm getting six hours.’"
BBC World Service - The World This Week, Why the prince left public life - "Across South Asia we use a lot of spices in food here and onions are something that reduce the intensity of those spice. It's a pungent vegetable that adds a distinctive taste to many of the dishes. That also, it's the vegetable that is available throughout the year because it's cultivated four times a year and you can store it up for months. So, on the days when you cannot afford or on the days when you cannot buy vegetable from the market, you can just use onion as a substitute"
BBC World Service - The World This Week, Trump impeachment hearings go public - "[On Bolivia] ‘This is now resembling the governments of old, i.e. European, white, not majority indigenous in what is still the one nation in the Americas that has a majority indigenous population.’"
BBC World Service - The World This Week, Turkey goes to war - "[Trump:] ‘We want to bring our troops back home. And I got elected on that. If you go back and look at our speeches, I would say we want to bring our troops back home from these endless wars.’...
‘Isn't bringing US troops home generally popular?’
‘Yes, it is. There's a saying in American politics that Republicans want a massive military and they don't want to send it anywhere. And Democrats want a small military and they want to send it everywhere’"
What’s the Difference Between English, Irish and Scottish Breakfast Teas? - "Breakfast teas are black tea blends intended to accompany a hearty, rich morning meal (think of the full English breakfast or fry-up) and are therefore more robust than afternoon tea blends. Because they are so strong, breakfast teas go well with milk. Breakfast tea blends made with Assam tea tend to have higher caffeine levels...
Irish breakfast tea has a strong Assam component, which gives it a more robust, malty flavor and reddish color...
Scottish breakfast tea tends to be the heartiest of the bunch, possibly due to Scotland’s soft water... It’s important to note that at no time has there been a standard formula for any of these blends. “One company’s English breakfast could be identical to another company’s Irish breakfast”"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Robert Burns - "He is writing an autobiographical letter, he describes how love and poesie [sp?] began together. And he tells the story about one of the plus sides of being on the farm, I think, was when he was working on the harvest at age 15. And by his side was a very attractive 14 year old, and he had worked out that in order to perhaps get some tender feelings from his co worker, he could, he could try a poem or a song. So he makes no secret of that. In fact, he's rather proud of it. But we also know that not much later than that he had a relationship with Elizabeth Patton, a servant girl. She became pregnant by him. And there was a scandal about that. He had to answer for that. In the Kirk. He didn't marry Elizabeth. By the time she had her baby, he was already interested in Jean Armor, who also became pregnant by him quite quickly. He also had a complication with Mary Campbell. We don't know quite what's happened there. It’s possible she was pregnant as well. So he was one of these, obviously very attractive man who didn't get really go for either/or, if there were plenty of opportunities."
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Rapture - "‘One of the interesting things to emphasize that was picked up in bits and pieces and several comments is that people coming to, you know, to hear about some of these ideas of dispensations and rapture for the first time would probably assume, this is very anti rationalist. And this is liable to come from and take hold amongst people who are not very educated and maybe socially deprived. But that's just not the history of the beginnings of dispensationalism. In Ireland, in Britain and America, this takes hold first amongst political elites, the most educated scholars, the leaders of mainline Protestant denominations, in the case of America. And in America takes root in New York and Chicago and Boston first, which is probably not the places that people would associate with this sort of thought now. And it's really not until after, into the post war era, that this thought is kind of abandoned by scholars and leaders of mainline denominations and political leaders in some countries, and becomes more of an anti intellectual movement of the people. That's a shift that takes place much later.’"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Rousseau on Education - "'He admits at one point that he enjoys the sister of the clergyman who's teaching him spanks him and he thinks that excites him as a boy. It's one of the things that he confesses to in his Confessions, one of his posthumously published works'
'Alright. Does that lead to anything?'
'Well it leads to a great deal because obviously to Rousseau,confessing your sins but not doing it in the manner of St Augustine is... the idea of confessing your sin is something that you need to do, but with the idea in the back of your mind that you're good'...
'He wasn't very keen on children reading books. He wanted them to experience the difficulties of life, making things, trying to make things, failing in things, playing, socialising and all that. At one stage he says 'I hate books'.... And he's not allowed to read a book... until he's 13 or so. And that's Robinson Crusoe to sort of teach you how to pull your life together from scraps'...
'In some ways, Rousseau's an author who is successful like many authors because the following generation completely misunderstands him. And turning him into an advocate of austere Republican morality, which is what the French Revolutionaries do and also an advocate of rebellion against contemporary society. The idea of a revolution in France, in Paris, which for Rousseau is just so beyond the pale, it's so corrupting, it would never, he would argue, it would never be conceivable. So they're going directly against Rousseau but they believe that he is the ultimate critic of existing society'"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Dorothy Hodgkin - "‘She's the only British woman to have won the Nobel prize. Why do you think she's not better known?’...
‘Marie Curie... is well known because she was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. I personally think she's an absolutely appalling role model. When people talk now about the need for role women, role models to encourage more women into science, [she’s] presented as someone who's always alone in the laboratory, who sacrificed her life, her interests to science. Dorothy Hodgkin, was, seems to me a very, very nice, warm, generous person. She had a family whom she absolutely adored. She was, she just got on with the work in a very quiet unassuming way. And for some reason, we like to have great geniuses, great heroes of science who, who was rather nasty, or who’ve got some scandalous story to tell. She, to me is the absolute role model of what a woman in science should be’"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow - "Napoleon completely misunderstood Alexander's position, both his strengths and his weakness. His weakness was that Tsardom was often characterized by the phrase autocracy tempered by assassination. And Alexander, in fact, had come to the throne in 1801, when his father had been assassinated, because he’d offended the elites in Russia by what seemed like capricious policy. And Alexander couldn't afford to offend the elite in the Guards Regiment, who were very patriotic and would not have tolerated coming to terms with Napoleon...
‘One might think it's a French army, it isn't. 40% of it’s French. The next largest national contingent would be various German contingents from the smaller German states and from Austria and from Prussia which have been compelled to send units in. So the German speakers would be roughly about a quarter, 20%. So it's still a 100,000 plus would be Polish speakers. And then you'd have other nationalities too: Italians, Spanish speakers, even a minority of Portuguese, people from the Balkans. It is a European army’
‘That must have been extraordinarily difficult to control.’
It is and that that becomes apparent really during the retreat. But even during the advance, it's an army of such a size that a single person sitting on a white horse hasn't got any oversight. And yet the kind of structures you get later on in the 19th century, of General Staff, what modern armies have, that doesn't exist in this period. So that's a real weakness, the command and control - rather the lack of it.’"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Treaty of Limerick - "‘I remember someone saying to me when I was studying history a number of years ago that had Mary lived as long as her sister and had the Tudor conquest of Ireland being a Catholic Tudor conquest, that all the Irish would have been roaring Presbyterians, you know, to be, just to be difficult.’"
Post ID: 6598445734012667712
European Millennials Are Not Like Their American Counterparts
Europe's Young Are Not That Woke - The Atlantic
"In public perception, age is often related to political views. “Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head,” the 19th-century French monarchist François Guizot is supposed to have said...
There is indeed some evidence that people become more conservative with age, as an individual’s views evolve with one’s lifestyle and needs. However, most research suggests that one’s political outlook is formed at an early age, shaped by major economic and political events. In the United States, economic insecurity has pushed Millennials (born from 1981 to 1996) and Gen Zers (born after 1996) to the left on nearly every policy issue, economic and cultural alike...
If a European-style welfare state is the preferred destination of young Americans, where are young Europeans heading? After all, they already have most of the things their transatlantic counterparts say they want...
Polls show growing support among younger European voters for policies advanced by left-wing parties. Millennials and Gen Zers value public services; they worry about racial and other forms of discrimination, as well as about climate change. They are more pro-European than previous generations and more willing to hand over new governing powers to Brussels.
Yet on closer inspection, Europe’s young are less progressive—or “woke”—than their American contemporaries. A third of Millennial and Gen Z voters in Europe consider themselves centrists, compared with about a fifth who are on the center left and fewer than a 10th who are far left. Young Europeans may worry about the environment, but for four out of five under-25s, it is not their No. 1 or even their No. 2 priority. And they are emphatically not socialists. Like their parents, most of them believe that the private sector is better at creating jobs than the state is, that work contracts should become more flexible, and that competition is good. Indeed, under-25s have a more positive view of globalization than do older cohorts.
In the U.S., Millennials and Gen Zers are losing their belief in the American dream, with its individualistic promise that your destiny is in your own hands. Some surveys even put socialism ahead of capitalism with very young voters. In Europe, by contrast, the under-30s are more disposed than their parents to view poverty as a result of an individual’s choice. Even as they still support the social contract typical for Europe, whereby the welfare state limits inequality and provides generous public services, they are also less in favor than older generations of fiscal redistribution to reduce inequality.
Research from the International Monetary Fund shows that the young bore the brunt of Europe’s post-2008 economic downturn. Because pensions and salaries—especially in the public sector—were relatively well protected, older voters were much less exposed to the consequences of the financial crisis. It was younger Europeans who were hit by very high unemployment rates, precarious or part-time employment, and the low wages that go with such jobs. Moreover, fiscal-consolidation efforts generally hit younger age groups harder than older ones, especially pensioners.
All of this has contributed to a growing generational economic divide. The inflation-adjusted income of EU pensioners has risen by nearly 10 percent since 2007, according to the IMF, while that of the rest of the population fell during the financial crisis and has only recently regained its precrisis level. Before the crisis, the under-25s were not much more at risk of poverty than the over-64s. Now they are nearly 10 percentage points more likely to be poor...
Many young Americans share Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s vision of democratic socialism as something that already exists in northern Europe. “What we have in mind and what my policies most closely resemble,” she told Anderson Cooper earlier this year, “are what we see in the U.K., in Norway, in Finland, in Sweden.”
However, the young people who actually live in those countries have a less rose-tinted view of European welfare states. During the crisis, Europe’s young learned that the welfare state in practice provides a much bigger safety net for older voters than for younger ones.
According to polls, only about a fifth of Americans under 35 want the U.S. president to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Among the older age groups, support for the wall is evenly divided. Yet in Europe, Millennials and Gen Zers are not fundamentally different from the population as a whole when it comes to immigration. Survey data show that they have a more positive view of immigration (from inside and outside the EU) than do older generations. Almost as much as their parents, however, they want national governments and the EU to take additional measures to fight illegal immigration...
For many Central and eastern Europeans, the collapse of the Soviet Union was as much about restoring national independence as it was about restoring liberty and democracy. They have little appetite for ceding sovereignty to Brussels."
"In public perception, age is often related to political views. “Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head,” the 19th-century French monarchist François Guizot is supposed to have said...
There is indeed some evidence that people become more conservative with age, as an individual’s views evolve with one’s lifestyle and needs. However, most research suggests that one’s political outlook is formed at an early age, shaped by major economic and political events. In the United States, economic insecurity has pushed Millennials (born from 1981 to 1996) and Gen Zers (born after 1996) to the left on nearly every policy issue, economic and cultural alike...
If a European-style welfare state is the preferred destination of young Americans, where are young Europeans heading? After all, they already have most of the things their transatlantic counterparts say they want...
Polls show growing support among younger European voters for policies advanced by left-wing parties. Millennials and Gen Zers value public services; they worry about racial and other forms of discrimination, as well as about climate change. They are more pro-European than previous generations and more willing to hand over new governing powers to Brussels.
Yet on closer inspection, Europe’s young are less progressive—or “woke”—than their American contemporaries. A third of Millennial and Gen Z voters in Europe consider themselves centrists, compared with about a fifth who are on the center left and fewer than a 10th who are far left. Young Europeans may worry about the environment, but for four out of five under-25s, it is not their No. 1 or even their No. 2 priority. And they are emphatically not socialists. Like their parents, most of them believe that the private sector is better at creating jobs than the state is, that work contracts should become more flexible, and that competition is good. Indeed, under-25s have a more positive view of globalization than do older cohorts.
In the U.S., Millennials and Gen Zers are losing their belief in the American dream, with its individualistic promise that your destiny is in your own hands. Some surveys even put socialism ahead of capitalism with very young voters. In Europe, by contrast, the under-30s are more disposed than their parents to view poverty as a result of an individual’s choice. Even as they still support the social contract typical for Europe, whereby the welfare state limits inequality and provides generous public services, they are also less in favor than older generations of fiscal redistribution to reduce inequality.
Research from the International Monetary Fund shows that the young bore the brunt of Europe’s post-2008 economic downturn. Because pensions and salaries—especially in the public sector—were relatively well protected, older voters were much less exposed to the consequences of the financial crisis. It was younger Europeans who were hit by very high unemployment rates, precarious or part-time employment, and the low wages that go with such jobs. Moreover, fiscal-consolidation efforts generally hit younger age groups harder than older ones, especially pensioners.
All of this has contributed to a growing generational economic divide. The inflation-adjusted income of EU pensioners has risen by nearly 10 percent since 2007, according to the IMF, while that of the rest of the population fell during the financial crisis and has only recently regained its precrisis level. Before the crisis, the under-25s were not much more at risk of poverty than the over-64s. Now they are nearly 10 percentage points more likely to be poor...
Many young Americans share Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s vision of democratic socialism as something that already exists in northern Europe. “What we have in mind and what my policies most closely resemble,” she told Anderson Cooper earlier this year, “are what we see in the U.K., in Norway, in Finland, in Sweden.”
However, the young people who actually live in those countries have a less rose-tinted view of European welfare states. During the crisis, Europe’s young learned that the welfare state in practice provides a much bigger safety net for older voters than for younger ones.
According to polls, only about a fifth of Americans under 35 want the U.S. president to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Among the older age groups, support for the wall is evenly divided. Yet in Europe, Millennials and Gen Zers are not fundamentally different from the population as a whole when it comes to immigration. Survey data show that they have a more positive view of immigration (from inside and outside the EU) than do older generations. Almost as much as their parents, however, they want national governments and the EU to take additional measures to fight illegal immigration...
For many Central and eastern Europeans, the collapse of the Soviet Union was as much about restoring national independence as it was about restoring liberty and democracy. They have little appetite for ceding sovereignty to Brussels."
Post ID: 2594272286054635749
Links - 27th January 2020 (1)
How my iPhone landed me with a £476 fine and made me a criminal | Financial Times - "a bus inspector asked to see my £1.50 ticket. I had tapped into the bus with my iPhone using Apple Pay, but alas, in the five minutes since I’d boarded, my phone had run out of juice, so I had no means of proving that I had paid... I had been charged with failing to produce a valid ticket on a Transport for London service — and that I had 21 days to plead either “guilty or not guilty”. TfL said it had sent a letter ahead of this, but I never received it... I had recently switched my bank account to make use of a £100 bonus offer. And that meant the current account that had been linked to my Apple Pay in October no longer existed, so getting a statement was going to be tricky.My old bank told me they could get me a statement, but that they needed to send it to me in paper form, which would take 7-10 working days. And although I did give them my new address, they somehow sent the statement to the old one, delaying me by several more days.Finally, on January 16, I got the bank statement showing the date in question. There it was, on October 8: £6.80 for “TfL travel” on October 6. I was relieved to see that I had hit the payment cap for travel in zones 1 and 2: given that the bus in question was in zone 2, I would surely be vindicated. I swiftly sent off a picture of my bank statement to TfL and requested that they withdraw the charge.But a week later, I was told that the bank statement was not sufficient. “If you have registered your contactless card with TfL you are in a position to obtain your own detailed journey history,” I was told, while also advised to “urgently enter (my) plea”.Well, the problem was that I hadn’t registered my card, had I? And nor had I ever been told that I needed to — I was only faintly aware that registering a bank card was even possible... “There is no requirement for cards to be registered, the same as paying for any goods and services in a shop”. But it’s not the same, actually; in a shop, you are given a breakdown in the form of a receipt.I didn’t hear back from the woman at TfL; though it later said it had sent a letter, I never received one. But a few days later, I received a letter telling me that my case had been heard in a magistrates' court, that I had been found guilty, and I owed £476.50. By now I was feeling quite put out. I tried the number I’d originally called, but they couldn’t help, and I was given another number to call. That pointed me to an email address I was to write to, appealing against the decision. Having had no reply from that, I was given another email address, and still no reply. I sent five emails during these weeks — all of them unanswered, despite my labelling the messages “Urgent”.On April 26, £476.50 was docked from my pay cheque, as instructed by the court... I had an interview at the US Embassy in London for a media “I” visa for a five-week “bleisure” trip — California for a holiday and New York for work. I was due to set off on May 4... I was told in no uncertain terms by a most disagreeable official that there was no way I would be travelling to the US on May 4, and that I needed to get a police records certificate before they would even think about issuing me with a visa.I finally got my passport back, and my US visa, almost two weeks after I was due to travel, having spent another £90 on the certificate. My flights were non-exchangeable and non-refundable. By this stage I was over £1,000 down and I couldn’t afford to rebook my flights. The whole trip was off... I have now invested in a portable charger. I must stop forgetting to charge it."Being unable to turn on your phone is basically like losing your paper ticket
Why is the world's financial plumbing under pressure? - "In June 1887, Mr Primrose sent a message to his agent in Kansas about buying wool. Because the Western Union telegraph company charged by the word, the message was in code to save money. It was supposed to say "BAY ALL KINDS QUO", meaning "I've bought half a million pounds of wool". But it actually read "BUY ALL KINDS QUO", which the Kansas agent understood as an instruction to "Please buy half a million pounds of wool". Primrose lost $20,000 - several million dollars in today's terms. And Western Union wouldn't compensate him, because he could have paid a few cents extra for the message to be verified - but had not. Clearly, there was a need for a way to send financial information more reliably than through a vacuum tube and more securely than via telegraph in an easily-mistranscribable code."
Episode 139: Witches, Bitches — The Art History Babes - "‘The Spanish Inquisition, strangely enough, were very skeptical about witches and didn't really worry that much about witches. It seems that the Protestants were way more freaked out about witches. Puritan, Protes-, oh, they were like very, very afraid and you could literally just be a pubescent girl who maybe just disobeyed a couple of times and someone could label you a witch and you would either shape up or ship out.’"
Episode 142: Spooky Corner: Zombies — The Art History Babes - "‘The hugely important 1968 George Romero first film Night of the Living Dead. We all know Night of the Living Dead and I'm sure you do too, even if you haven't seen it because famously George Romero never copyrighted the movie. So in every horror movie ever, if there's a horror movie on the screen in that movie, it's Night of the Living Dead because it's in the public domain… this movie, not even, not just made zombies huge in cultural importance. It also basically created the modern horror movie... I’ll be so surprised if you didn't come out of that movie saying like, oh man, it was so cliched. It did all these different stuff. It's not cliche. This is the one that started all those cliches. This is the origin of the modern horror that it basically brought gore and nihilism to horror, which, surprisingly, wasn't there really prior to this... The zombies eat people in this one. They're all cannibals. That did not happen until this movie. All of these survivors are holed up into a house. The commentary in this movie is the scariest thing is not outside trying to get in. It's what's inside... there's a white family in there with another patriarchal figure that is struggling to cope with taking orders from this other [black] man'...
There are local police basically going up and rounding up and shooting zombies in the head, which is another thing this one's brought to the zombie lore is that you can only kill zombies by shooting in the head, thank you Night of the Living Dead... Return of the Living Dead, of the same year 1985. Which brought another famous trope to zombies that I'm sure you all know, that zombies eat brains. That didn't happen until this movie… I love Return of the Living Dead, I think it's a fun movie but it is not the the cultural phenomenon that things like Night of the Living Dead, or Dawn of the Dead were and we're now at, you know, 1985 and the first zombie film was 1932"
Episode 143: The Art of Instagram with Caroline Calloway — The Art History Babes - "‘I studied art history at Cambridge University. It's a three year program. absolutely incredible. They use the City of Cambridge to actually teach you the history of art, everything from putting you in buses and taking you out to look at cave paintings to the Roman ruins that Cambridge is based on. Cantabria was the Roman river port, and that's actually what our emails are. It's @cantab.net... from all that up into the Baroque chapels and Gothic architecture and the modern art that is in collections in the different colleges. And so you get a really exhaustive look at the full sweep of the history of art. A pattern that I've seen repeated over and over is that technology is always looked down upon. You know, first it was like new pigments and paint and synthetic pigments seeing as, like, of lesser merit. But more, I think more analogous is the example of the introduction of photography, when like cameras were first invented, I mean, people were like, this is technology. This is science. This is too democratized because anyone can buy a fucking camera. And you know, you have to go to ‘art school’ to learn how to paint. And it was also younger people who were interested in buying cameras and making art with it. And now, almost every major museum in the world has a photography collection, and I'm not out here trying to say that all Instagram posts are fine art or every tweet, you know, is art. But I'm not saying every short story or every painting is good art. I really just think we need a reevaluation of, of how much potential we allow social media to have as an expressive media, as an expressive medium. And I also think a twin bias with our bias against technology is our bias against media that is the purview of young women in particular. And Instagram has really become an area where young women express themselves visually and if you just look at anything, you know, samplers come to mind, you know, things that, embroidery, things that were sort of like girl crafts scrapbooks, another good example. All of these things were things that young girls did for creative expression. And they're not considered fine art. I mean, but barely so'"
Applied and decorative arts like wrought iron candlesticks aren't considered fine art either. But because they're made by men you can't blame sexism
Sexual Economics : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘How do men want sex to be portrayed?’
‘In general, men like sex and find sex appealing. And so in general men like sex based ads, when they see an ad that uses very sexual imagery, their general predisposition is to like it. Now, I'm going to tell you later that we found one exception to this, which is extremely notable.’ ‘Tell me now’
‘Okay, tell you now. So we made some sex based ads. And we refigured them sort of, and we decided to change the features in them. And in one experiment, we decided to make the ad be particular to a man giving a woman a gift. And so we have a sexual ad. And then alongside it is a woman's watch and the woman's watch is said to be a gift from a man to that special woman in his life. And in this experiment, and this experiment alone, there's been no other data like this in the literature, we find that men do not like a sexual add when it reminds them that they have to give up resources in order to be in a sexual context.’
‘So men like sex, but they like free sex more than paid sex’
‘Indeed, and they like to, they prefer to not think about sex in terms of resource exchange. But women, on the other hand, find the idea of resource exchange very appealing. And so if you remind women, in many different forms, we’ve done this several different ways, if you remind them that they may be getting resources or that some women may be getting resources to be sexual, then they like sexual ads more.'"
What Makes a Drug Desirable? : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga has estimated that if an average student takes Ritalin while writing their SAT, they'll do, they'll score like 100 points higher or something like that.’"
Making Difficult Decisions : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘If somebody else chooses for you unappetizing food, you kind of okay with it but if you have to choose yourself that's really miserable. And part of it is you blame yourself for it?’..
‘You feel responsible for like an undesirable outcome... We thought about healthcare, and we thought that there are a lot of situations in which you have options in front of you, or for example, health treatment or cancer treatment, and all of these options are undesirable. Do you want to have radiation, or do you want to have camo or do you want to have surgery... But somehow, nowadays different from like about 30 years ago. This choice is up to the patients.’"
The Irrationality of Sports Betting : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘People are optimistic about their favorite teams. So they, they're not only more likely to bet on favorites versus underdogs, sort of across all games, but they also are more likely to bet on teams they like versus teams they dislike, but those two effects are independent, independent’
‘Because I always thought that from a portfolio perspective, you should always bet on a team that that you don't like. Because then you'll be a little bit happy regardless of the outcome. Whereas if you've bet on a team that you like, you'll be happy when they won and happy when you get the money, but there'll be fewer, you will not spread the happiness across all games.
‘Yeah, so that's like an emotional hedge, basically. And, in fact, I'm the only person I know who does that. So I bet, I do when I place bets, I bet against my favorite team, in order to, in order to hedge emotionally and when I tell that to other people, they think I'm crazy... One reaction I get when I tell people this is that somehow I'm being immoral. By betting against my team’"
Cheating is Par for the Course : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "[On golf] People feel basically okay to hit the ball a little bit with the golf club, they feel a little bit worse about kicking it with their feet because it's more direct, you touching it more, and they feel much, much worse about picking it up and moving it directly with their hands. And again, I think the idea is that, as we have something that is less direct, that is more, has more steps between us and the ball, people feel more comfortable cheating. And finally, we also ask the question of when would people cheat more, when they play against the friend, their boss or a client? And it turns out the people are the most honest when they play with the boss, least honest when they play with friends and clients, kind of in the middle... people think that they cheat much less than other people, by about five times more... we asked them what industry they were from… And it turns out that one of the most cheating industries were - advertising. Okay, maybe not the big surprise. But what was nice was that people in advertising actually cheated a lot, but they recognize it. When we asked them how much are people in your industry cheating, people in advertising basically said, we're cheating and we know it. Another interesting industry was law enforcement. Those people cheat more than average, but actually don't think that they cheat at all."
The Bribery Index : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘What differentiates one culture from another, we found that one of the biggest differentiators is how interdependent or dependent, the people within a particular country actually feel. So how collectivist… we find a very high correlation between collectivism and bribery’"
Children and Cheating : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "'People often think that the kids somehow are moral beings, that they're somehow nicer than we are, even though they punch each other and kick each other and steal things, that they have some sort of purity, inherent goodness of youth that then the world beats out of them over time... even I think when you see kids behaving badly, you still somehow see it as differently motivated than when grown ups behave badly. Kids, it's maybe they’re need a nap or they're out of control, or they need a snack. They’re not really bad'...
'One other interpretation of this is the kids, that young kids are more pure. They’re just more pure about their selfish motivations... they are more honest in their selfish[ness]'"
Cultures of Corruption : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘If I've been brought up in a place where people flout the law, I take it to New York City and where I'm able to the flout the law without consequence I do so. As opposed to the Swedes, for example, who grow up in a high legal compliance society. And when they move to Manhattan, and have the opportunity to break the law with no legal consequences, they don't... I think a big part of it, a big part of what governs behavior is what I think everyone else is doing or will do. And so if I grow with people not obeying the police, and I have the opportunity to not obey the police and not suffer the consequences, I will do so... European parliamentarians get paid a stipend of around 300 euros for each day they show up to work, sign the register. Now there was a scandal a few years ago, captured on film by an Austrian Member of the European Parliament, of parliamentarians literally leaving their cars idling outside, running in, signing the register and then running, running out and driving off… some might call it corruption. But it doesn't involve the police... [This] is similarly correlated with home country corruption. You get a lot of this from Italian and Greek MEPs, not so much from the Swedes.’"
Why is the world's financial plumbing under pressure? - "In June 1887, Mr Primrose sent a message to his agent in Kansas about buying wool. Because the Western Union telegraph company charged by the word, the message was in code to save money. It was supposed to say "BAY ALL KINDS QUO", meaning "I've bought half a million pounds of wool". But it actually read "BUY ALL KINDS QUO", which the Kansas agent understood as an instruction to "Please buy half a million pounds of wool". Primrose lost $20,000 - several million dollars in today's terms. And Western Union wouldn't compensate him, because he could have paid a few cents extra for the message to be verified - but had not. Clearly, there was a need for a way to send financial information more reliably than through a vacuum tube and more securely than via telegraph in an easily-mistranscribable code."
Episode 139: Witches, Bitches — The Art History Babes - "‘The Spanish Inquisition, strangely enough, were very skeptical about witches and didn't really worry that much about witches. It seems that the Protestants were way more freaked out about witches. Puritan, Protes-, oh, they were like very, very afraid and you could literally just be a pubescent girl who maybe just disobeyed a couple of times and someone could label you a witch and you would either shape up or ship out.’"
Episode 142: Spooky Corner: Zombies — The Art History Babes - "‘The hugely important 1968 George Romero first film Night of the Living Dead. We all know Night of the Living Dead and I'm sure you do too, even if you haven't seen it because famously George Romero never copyrighted the movie. So in every horror movie ever, if there's a horror movie on the screen in that movie, it's Night of the Living Dead because it's in the public domain… this movie, not even, not just made zombies huge in cultural importance. It also basically created the modern horror movie... I’ll be so surprised if you didn't come out of that movie saying like, oh man, it was so cliched. It did all these different stuff. It's not cliche. This is the one that started all those cliches. This is the origin of the modern horror that it basically brought gore and nihilism to horror, which, surprisingly, wasn't there really prior to this... The zombies eat people in this one. They're all cannibals. That did not happen until this movie. All of these survivors are holed up into a house. The commentary in this movie is the scariest thing is not outside trying to get in. It's what's inside... there's a white family in there with another patriarchal figure that is struggling to cope with taking orders from this other [black] man'...
There are local police basically going up and rounding up and shooting zombies in the head, which is another thing this one's brought to the zombie lore is that you can only kill zombies by shooting in the head, thank you Night of the Living Dead... Return of the Living Dead, of the same year 1985. Which brought another famous trope to zombies that I'm sure you all know, that zombies eat brains. That didn't happen until this movie… I love Return of the Living Dead, I think it's a fun movie but it is not the the cultural phenomenon that things like Night of the Living Dead, or Dawn of the Dead were and we're now at, you know, 1985 and the first zombie film was 1932"
Episode 143: The Art of Instagram with Caroline Calloway — The Art History Babes - "‘I studied art history at Cambridge University. It's a three year program. absolutely incredible. They use the City of Cambridge to actually teach you the history of art, everything from putting you in buses and taking you out to look at cave paintings to the Roman ruins that Cambridge is based on. Cantabria was the Roman river port, and that's actually what our emails are. It's @cantab.net... from all that up into the Baroque chapels and Gothic architecture and the modern art that is in collections in the different colleges. And so you get a really exhaustive look at the full sweep of the history of art. A pattern that I've seen repeated over and over is that technology is always looked down upon. You know, first it was like new pigments and paint and synthetic pigments seeing as, like, of lesser merit. But more, I think more analogous is the example of the introduction of photography, when like cameras were first invented, I mean, people were like, this is technology. This is science. This is too democratized because anyone can buy a fucking camera. And you know, you have to go to ‘art school’ to learn how to paint. And it was also younger people who were interested in buying cameras and making art with it. And now, almost every major museum in the world has a photography collection, and I'm not out here trying to say that all Instagram posts are fine art or every tweet, you know, is art. But I'm not saying every short story or every painting is good art. I really just think we need a reevaluation of, of how much potential we allow social media to have as an expressive media, as an expressive medium. And I also think a twin bias with our bias against technology is our bias against media that is the purview of young women in particular. And Instagram has really become an area where young women express themselves visually and if you just look at anything, you know, samplers come to mind, you know, things that, embroidery, things that were sort of like girl crafts scrapbooks, another good example. All of these things were things that young girls did for creative expression. And they're not considered fine art. I mean, but barely so'"
Applied and decorative arts like wrought iron candlesticks aren't considered fine art either. But because they're made by men you can't blame sexism
Sexual Economics : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘How do men want sex to be portrayed?’
‘In general, men like sex and find sex appealing. And so in general men like sex based ads, when they see an ad that uses very sexual imagery, their general predisposition is to like it. Now, I'm going to tell you later that we found one exception to this, which is extremely notable.’ ‘Tell me now’
‘Okay, tell you now. So we made some sex based ads. And we refigured them sort of, and we decided to change the features in them. And in one experiment, we decided to make the ad be particular to a man giving a woman a gift. And so we have a sexual ad. And then alongside it is a woman's watch and the woman's watch is said to be a gift from a man to that special woman in his life. And in this experiment, and this experiment alone, there's been no other data like this in the literature, we find that men do not like a sexual add when it reminds them that they have to give up resources in order to be in a sexual context.’
‘So men like sex, but they like free sex more than paid sex’
‘Indeed, and they like to, they prefer to not think about sex in terms of resource exchange. But women, on the other hand, find the idea of resource exchange very appealing. And so if you remind women, in many different forms, we’ve done this several different ways, if you remind them that they may be getting resources or that some women may be getting resources to be sexual, then they like sexual ads more.'"
What Makes a Drug Desirable? : Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga has estimated that if an average student takes Ritalin while writing their SAT, they'll do, they'll score like 100 points higher or something like that.’"
Making Difficult Decisions : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘If somebody else chooses for you unappetizing food, you kind of okay with it but if you have to choose yourself that's really miserable. And part of it is you blame yourself for it?’..
‘You feel responsible for like an undesirable outcome... We thought about healthcare, and we thought that there are a lot of situations in which you have options in front of you, or for example, health treatment or cancer treatment, and all of these options are undesirable. Do you want to have radiation, or do you want to have camo or do you want to have surgery... But somehow, nowadays different from like about 30 years ago. This choice is up to the patients.’"
The Irrationality of Sports Betting : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘People are optimistic about their favorite teams. So they, they're not only more likely to bet on favorites versus underdogs, sort of across all games, but they also are more likely to bet on teams they like versus teams they dislike, but those two effects are independent, independent’
‘Because I always thought that from a portfolio perspective, you should always bet on a team that that you don't like. Because then you'll be a little bit happy regardless of the outcome. Whereas if you've bet on a team that you like, you'll be happy when they won and happy when you get the money, but there'll be fewer, you will not spread the happiness across all games.
‘Yeah, so that's like an emotional hedge, basically. And, in fact, I'm the only person I know who does that. So I bet, I do when I place bets, I bet against my favorite team, in order to, in order to hedge emotionally and when I tell that to other people, they think I'm crazy... One reaction I get when I tell people this is that somehow I'm being immoral. By betting against my team’"
Cheating is Par for the Course : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "[On golf] People feel basically okay to hit the ball a little bit with the golf club, they feel a little bit worse about kicking it with their feet because it's more direct, you touching it more, and they feel much, much worse about picking it up and moving it directly with their hands. And again, I think the idea is that, as we have something that is less direct, that is more, has more steps between us and the ball, people feel more comfortable cheating. And finally, we also ask the question of when would people cheat more, when they play against the friend, their boss or a client? And it turns out the people are the most honest when they play with the boss, least honest when they play with friends and clients, kind of in the middle... people think that they cheat much less than other people, by about five times more... we asked them what industry they were from… And it turns out that one of the most cheating industries were - advertising. Okay, maybe not the big surprise. But what was nice was that people in advertising actually cheated a lot, but they recognize it. When we asked them how much are people in your industry cheating, people in advertising basically said, we're cheating and we know it. Another interesting industry was law enforcement. Those people cheat more than average, but actually don't think that they cheat at all."
The Bribery Index : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘What differentiates one culture from another, we found that one of the biggest differentiators is how interdependent or dependent, the people within a particular country actually feel. So how collectivist… we find a very high correlation between collectivism and bribery’"
Children and Cheating : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "'People often think that the kids somehow are moral beings, that they're somehow nicer than we are, even though they punch each other and kick each other and steal things, that they have some sort of purity, inherent goodness of youth that then the world beats out of them over time... even I think when you see kids behaving badly, you still somehow see it as differently motivated than when grown ups behave badly. Kids, it's maybe they’re need a nap or they're out of control, or they need a snack. They’re not really bad'...
'One other interpretation of this is the kids, that young kids are more pure. They’re just more pure about their selfish motivations... they are more honest in their selfish[ness]'"
Cultures of Corruption : Dan Ariely, Duke University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive - "‘If I've been brought up in a place where people flout the law, I take it to New York City and where I'm able to the flout the law without consequence I do so. As opposed to the Swedes, for example, who grow up in a high legal compliance society. And when they move to Manhattan, and have the opportunity to break the law with no legal consequences, they don't... I think a big part of it, a big part of what governs behavior is what I think everyone else is doing or will do. And so if I grow with people not obeying the police, and I have the opportunity to not obey the police and not suffer the consequences, I will do so... European parliamentarians get paid a stipend of around 300 euros for each day they show up to work, sign the register. Now there was a scandal a few years ago, captured on film by an Austrian Member of the European Parliament, of parliamentarians literally leaving their cars idling outside, running in, signing the register and then running, running out and driving off… some might call it corruption. But it doesn't involve the police... [This] is similarly correlated with home country corruption. You get a lot of this from Italian and Greek MEPs, not so much from the Swedes.’"
Post ID: 4149320391274473069
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
