A 10 year old girl asks her mom, "Mummy how was I born?"
The mother smiled and replied: "Once upon a time me and your daddy decided to plant a wonderful little seed. Daddy put it in the earth and I took care of it every single day. After a while the seed started to grow more and more leaves and in a few months, it turned into a beautiful healthy plant. So we took that plant, dried the leaves, smoked it and got so fucking high we fucked without a condom.
Lettuce Is So Much More than Salad. Here Are 10 More Ways to Eat It. - "1. Soup
2. Juice
3. As lettuce wraps
4. Seared or sautéed
5. Grilled
6. Braised
7. Topped like a cracker
8. Layered into spring rolls and wraps
9. Rice and noodle bowls
10. Sauce"
Sugar baby donates monthly allowance to Sungai Buloh Hospital in support of Covid-19 frontliners - "In an unusual move, a former air stewardess-turned-sugar baby has donated RM8,000 to the frontline personnel at Sungai Buloh Hospital in their fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.The 28-year old woman, who only wanted to be known as Natalie, said she was tired of worrying about many of the frontliners who have been risking their lives and decided to donate the amount, said to be her entire monthly allowance from her sugar daddy."
Big Gods Came After the Rise of Civilizations, Not Before, Finds Study Using Huge Historical Database - "One popular theory has argued that moralising gods were necessary for the rise of large-scale societies. Small societies, so the argument goes, were like fish bowls. It was almost impossible to engage in antisocial behaviour without being caught and punished – whether by acts of collective violence, retaliation or long-term reputational damage and risk of ostracism. But as societies grew larger and interactions between relative strangers became more commonplace, would-be transgressors could hope to evade detection under the cloak of anonymity. For cooperation to be possible under such conditions, some system of surveillance was required... Our statistical analysis showed that beliefs in supernatural punishment tend to appear only when societies make the transition from simple to complex, around the time when the overall population exceed about a million individuals. We are now looking to other factors that may have driven the rise of the first large civilisation. For example, Seshat data suggests that daily or weekly collective rituals – the equivalent of today’s Sunday services or Friday prayers – appear early in the rise of social complexity and we’re looking further at their impact.If the original function of moralising gods in world history was to hold together fragile, ethnically diverse coalitions, what might declining belief in such deities mean for the future of societies today? Could modern secularisation, for example, contribute to the unravelling of efforts to cooperate regionally – such as the European Union? If beliefs in big gods decline, what will that mean for cooperation across ethnic groups in the face of migration, warfare, or the spread of xenophobia? Can the functions of moralising gods simply be replaced by other forms of surveillance?"
Jeff Goldblum Under Fire For Questioning Anti-Gay, Anti-Woman Aspects Of Islam
Dr. Barry (LOOK AT PINNED TWEET) on Twitter - "Earlier today I went to the store and as I walking in a white man held the door open. I asked him if he thought holding the door open for a black woman made up for centuries of his ancestors making sure black women had no doors or avenues to success. He was stunned silent.
The fact that the white man thought 1 act of kindness could undo centuries of oppression and slavery speaks volumes to how white people think. Attention white people: ACTING LIKE YOU'RE NOT RACIST MAKES YOU MORE RACIST"
Grievancemongers will never be satisfied
SG Suryah on Twitter - "Couple detected with #Corona in Delhi.! But the girl allegedly has affair with three other men who are also under observation now. In a new twist, out of three, a man has two more other girl friends. Out of those two one is suspected to have more bfs"
satanic panic on Twitter - "Drug dealers really be putting their freedom on the line so other people can get high. That’s why I have sex with them."
Konstantin Kisin on Twitter - "Ethnic minorities: can you please know your place and stop having independently-formed "opinions"? A white liberal will be along to tell you what to think shortly."
Cursed Baizuo Opinions - Posts - Syrian: "I’m not American. I don’t owe you anything lol. Don’t bomb my country and then try to tone police me when I call out your bullshit political system."
"Being educated about your toxic masculinity isn't tone policing."
Sex and Censorship - ""We are not trying to be edgy when we say Fuck Anne Frank. We ARE BEING RAW AND REAL. U think poor&working class colonzied people who have to work PAYCHECK to PAYCHECK who are DYING in prison and concentration camps who are being MURDERED by the police who have to go everyday in" "Here's an illustration of why the intersectional left is a fascist movement. Anne Frank may have died in a concentration camp, but as far as they're concerned she was still a privileged white girl. Their definition of oppression has nothing to do with "lived experience", and is simply based on race and gender"
Real Talk in Jeans - "Babe, you need to change. You need to do better"
"Babe, I'll do better but you must do better too!"
"Well, if you can't accept me for the way That I am, then you should leave the relationship"
Australia explained for Americans (map image)
Some workers still unhappy about food at dorms; MOM says it is continually improving the quality - "Some workers said that they had seen a marked improvement in the variety and quality of food given but others said they were still occasionally being given meals that were undercooked or which did not suit their culture... with 200,000 workers from at least half a dozen nationalities, the scale of organising food distribution is “enormous”. He said that despite the enormity of the task, the inter-agency task force dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic has been working to ensure food is delivered on time and that it suits the dietary and taste preferences of the workers. The Ministry of Manpower (MOM) said that its officers have been conducting taste tests with different groups of workers given that migrant workers come from different countries... Indian national who works in the construction industry said: “The vegetable was soggy and there was no gravy.”However, a week in, Mr Mundla said that there was an increase in the variety of food at his dormitory that was gazetted as an isolation area on April 9.He said he now receives Chinese fusion meals as well as vegetarian and non-vegetarian Indian and Bangladeshi meals. Fruits and packet drinks accompany his meals.Mr Mundla said that while the meals provided are not as good as what he cooks for himself, he acknowledged that it is not an easy feat to cater food on a large scale.He added that government officials and the dormitory staff have also been actively seeking feedback on the food from residents through a common WhatsApp chat group... Bangladeshi national Rahman Mahbobor, 29, shipyard worker, said that he had been receiving Malay food earlier — a cuisine which he was not used to.But lately, he has been provided with Indian food and while it is not the same as his own culture’s cuisine, he explained it is a bit more to his liking and more similar to food from his country... Mr Prasath stressed that they are not asking for fancy meals and will be satisfied if simple South Indian food is provided.This could include rasam (a South Indian soup with a tamarind base), sambar or kootu (lentil and vegetable stews)... Mr Sohrab was also upset that the food provided was not what Bangladeshis typically eat. On Wednesday morning, for instance, he was served fish curry, dhal and rice.The fish, he said, had been boiled and mixed with tomato. While the food was not spoilt, Mr Sohrab said it is not the way Bangladeshis would prepare it.“(We) never touch the curry, just eat the rice or dhal”... the majority of the dormitory’s residents come from different parts of India and Bangladesh and therefore have different cooking styles.At the request of the residents, he said the caterer has changed the rice grain to the ponni variety... Some Bangladeshi workers, for instance, have told him that they received mee goreng for their meals simply because they are Muslim."A lot of Singaporeans think that Muslim food is the same all over. It is not,” he said. “Nobody on the Indian subcontinent eats noodles.”“That is a reflection of the absence of cultural and ethnic sensitivity.”"
I wish I got to choose my food in the army, or food that suited my culture
The number of triggered people in the comments...
EA Finances Hate Initiate Dedicated to Removing Heterosexuality and Right Leaning Opinions From Society - "Pixels for Fascists a political initiative that seeks to oppose fascism which is a merger of corporate and state power, by merging corporate and state power. In order to systematically remove racism and misogyny from video games. Or at least that is what the initial sales pitch says. When taking a look at what their representative Pascal Wagner has written on their goals a completely different picture emerges. One where the organization is aiming to engage in cultural deconstructionism to supplant the dominant culture with a communist/Marxist one...
'Statements and jokes with right-wing rhetoric do not make you a Nazi, but they support the normality of these things, which are pushed more and more into our society, especially from the right. Especially in gaming circles. They help right-wing organizations and groups to be classified as normal and harmless. At the same time, more and more of the spectators slide into the right corner and are not reminded by their idols that these views are not normal.'...
Perhaps Electronic Arts isn’t aware they have funded exactly that. Akin to when a plethora of companies backed the now-defunct Bully Hunter’s initiate under the impression they would garner great media attention by appearing to take a stand against online harassment in gaming. Only to discover to their absolute horror they endorsed a campaign that openly spread misinformation to demonize their entire customer base."
Matt Gabriele on Twitter - "friends #medievaltwitter I'm very worried having seen the trailer that this is gonna be a white supremacist trainwreck #AssassinsCreedValhalla"
The Honey Badger Radio official Facebook group - "Women on the internet bingo
I bet you have a tiny dick
Nazi
Incel
Tags group at you
Parents' basement
Who hurt you
Haha react
Okay sweetie
Wow
Racist
Sexism
Picture of mixed-race baby on their profile
Dyed hair
You must be a Trump supporter
Vegan
Pit mommy
Links to Vice article
Sex work is real work
Numale rushing to her defense
Xanax
Un-diagnosed BPD
PTSD
Bernie 2020
Onlyfans account
Stupid haircut"
Body/sexual experience shaming is bad when targeted at women, but perfect for men with whom you disagree and are unwilling and/or unable to articulate a convincing case as to why
The Unexpected Vikings | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"'As always, you start the book in an unexpected way. With the history of keys. I didn’t even know Vikings had keys, how did you start there?’
‘That’s a great example because when we sort of brainstorm, when we do anything, essentially, but with these books, we sat down or James and I are often driving to our shows. So we've got plenty of time to talk about what we're going to do and we brainstormed this. And, you know, the first thing we did was like, well, what's the established way of doing Vikings? And it's all about invasion. It's all about ships and seafaring and all that sort of stuff. And I said, right, well, let's, let's think about it in an unexpected way. And James said, well, obviously you do the history of keys.’...
‘The whole concept of this series of the Vikings is that with our histories of the unexpected, what we tried to do was to take topics like keys and then connect them to other big topics. So keys were all about Vikings. What we wanted to do with this series, though, was rather than do that was basically flip it on its head. So the Vikings then became about different kinds of topics, and they were sort of a way in. So the key is a way of looking at a variety of topics related to the Vikings. Not only about power but also about female power and housewives as, as figures within Viking society, who would have often held the keys, had control of the keys, and therefore, the keys are all about property and privacy and ownership and legality and being able to control space and things, whether it be controlling domestic space within the household, whether it be controlling military arms, so a chest that has arms in it, whether it be controlling a fort. So it was a great way of just getting into all sorts of Viking topics.’
‘So we could look at it and say our keys are all about power. But it was also clear that for the Vikings, they were all about power. I mean, it was it was very clear. So there's lots of evidence of particularly women having symbolic keys all around their waist as a symbol of being someone who had access to something someone who controlled access… one of the ways they dealt with that was focusing on who had who was the key bearer’...
‘We've pulled the Viking world apart in the following way. We've looked at the history of keys, graffiti, nicknames, mischief, hair grooming, hot springs and soreness, break ins, color, toys, teeth, doors, goading - that’s my favorite chapter - criminal profiling, birds, luck, friendship, fun, double standards, silk, and staffs. So there's a real explosion there... one way of talking about the history of Vikings is actually talking about the history of imagination. So if you come down to the sagas, so these were written hundreds of years sometimes after the actual Viking period. It's someone who's living in medieval I don't know, might be Norway, might not be. Might be England, might be France, imagining what the Viking period would have been like based on a certain amount of information that they've received. And that's one of the things I find completely fascinating about it. It's being able to unpick the truth and the reality and being able to peel away the farce- the imagination of it…
[On goading] The Vikings were very, playful. And they were very provocative. And one of the key things that happened in Viking society as told to us by the sagas, alright, so may not actually be true, but there's enough evidence suggest it was pretty true, is that Viking men were goaded into action, were wound up by women. By principally their partners, but often by their mothers as well. And there's lots and lots of evidence of this. Wars are begun by women goading men into standing up for their, for their pride, for their honor. And it's, the sagas are absolutely full of it. And what's great and interesting about it is the way that you can look at the history of goading in terms of female power. So, on the one hand, this, story, the all of these stories about women exercising their power, suggests that it was, it was a way that women had power and could exercise power in the Viking world. They had a voice, and they could influence their world. But another way of looking at it is saying it’s actually a misogynistic way of looking at the world because often what they're doing is they're goading the men into doing something bad. Usually, wars are begun, usually murders happen, in which case the Viking men can turn around and say, well, it wasn't my idea. It was my wife's idea. It was my mother's idea. It gives the men an excuse for their bad behavior.’..
‘Nicknames. And there were some spectacular names. And my personal favorite has to be Einar Buttered-Bread. But why were names so important? Where did they come from?’
‘Well, butter is really important… also the history of butter. So what do you, to make butter, what do you need?... Cows. Grass. You need access to animals and pasture, which means it's a, it's a symbol of wealth. It's a symbol of success. So, yeah, butter was really, really important to the Vikings and someone who had butter on their bread. Wow, they were successful.’
‘So it's a status symbol.’"
Women only have positive agency - not negative agency. You can't blame them for anything
Jaack on Twitter "Just heard my 6 year old nephew say “why does President Trump fuel hatred, shouldn’t he be bringing America together? Why do people choose hate over love? Can I go play now?” I replied: keep reading the script you little cunt I need to quote ya on Twitter for retweets."
Singapore launches first drone delivery service
Skin Microbiome 101: What To Do For Optimal Health - "if you're addicted to "clean," you could be damaging your skin microbiome. Take soap, for example. By its very nature, it's alkalinizing. That's how it works to remove dirt and microbes. But recall that our skin microbiome prefers a pH of about 5. At this relatively acidic pH, the healthy microbiome thrives. It's also understood that the opportunistic bacteria—the dysbiotic players—do better at a higher, more alkaline pH. And soap has a pH of up to about 10! Thus, we may actually be damaging our microflora with soap or other alkaline topical products and setting the stage for increased risk for skin issues... Minimize the use of hand sanitizers and soaps.Let your microbiome thrive!"
Soap dodger: meet the doctor who says we have been showering wrong - "When James Hamblin tells people he has not used soap in the shower for five years, they tend not to hold back in expressing their disgust. “It’s one of the few remaining things for which we feel fine telling someone that they’re gross,” he says. “It’s amazing to me, honestly.” Yet despite people’s “clearly moralising judgments”, Hamblin is no hygiene slouch. Even pre-pandemic, he made a point of washing his hands with soap. He is, after all, a doctor who lectures at the Yale School of Public Health and a medical writer and podcaster for the US magazine the Atlantic... “I started learning about emerging microbiome science and decided to try going all-out for a bit.”... despite advances in skincare and modern medicine, conditions such as acne, eczema and psoriasis, as well as other autoimmune diseases, have been rising steadily. Also, while we attempt to appear squeaky clean, research has revealed that many of us don’t wash our hands properly – or at all – when it matters most: before eating and after going to the toilet... Once hooked on daily soapings that remove our natural oils, we needed moisturisers and hair conditioners to replace them. In the 50s, the industry further cashed in by highlighting the drying effects of soap and offering milder detergents. Today, Hamblin writes, we have come full circle; many people seek products that are “as close as possible to nothing at all”. He writes about a fellow journalist – and soap dodger – Maya Dusenbery, who had been prescribed every acne treatment going. The only one that worked? Nothing at all... Microbiologists have found that hunter-gatherers and Amish people, who work together on farms from childhood, have optimally diverse microbiomes and minimal chances of contracting autoimmune conditions and associated inflammation. Urban westerners who want to boost their more modest skin microbes would benefit from close contact with other people and animals, and from spending as much time as possible in nature, preferably getting dirty."
Bolsonaro says WHO encourages kids to be gay, masturbate
How Living in a City Can Mess with Your Mental Health - "Compared to rural residents, researchers have found that urbanites are 21 percent more likely to have anxiety disorders and 39 percent more likely to have mood disorders... The same was true for more serious psychological disorders like schizophrenia and paranoia... City living can also chip away at your psychological immune system, which can be precarious for those with a family history of mental illness... too much exposure to air pollution and city noise may cause damage to a person’s cardiovascular health... the bright lights of a city can dampen a person’s ability to get a good night’s rest"
Good for the environment, bad for humans. This seems to be a recurring theme (e.g. vegan nutritional issues, climate change) which ties in to the misanthropy of environmentalism
Chinese diners’ taste for spice is blurring regional cuisines, says Macau chef - "“Shanghainese are open-minded and their culture has received influences from all over the world. As a kid, I tried Western food as well as dishes from various regions in China, particularly Cantonese and Huaiyang cuisine. These memories fuel my creativity.“When I started working in Hong Kong, I had customers from Shanghai who gave me suggestions for enhancing our Cantonese dishes. The essence of Cantonese cuisine is to appreciate original tastes whereas Shanghainese cuisine has many sauces and tends to be sweet and oily.“Shanghainese sauces are dark due to the heavy use of soy sauce. But I always managed to improvise and make my Shanghainese customers happy.”... What is the difference between working in a restaurant and a hotel?" “The clientele at Chinese restaurants enjoy heavier flavours while individuals who are into fine dining prefer subtlety and nuances.“In hotels, we use high-quality ingredients and they are already rich in flavour. In the past eight to 10 years, many restaurants in Hong Kong have been cutting costs and putting less emphasis on quality. The situation is not the same in Macau, where chefs compete in the quality they provide. Macau has its advantages.”... “Individuals from coastal China prefer light flavours and seafood. We have had customers ask for leopard coral grouper cooked in chilli oil – they know what they want and sometimes don’t look at the menu.“In Hong Kong, there is a big trend in marrying luxurious ingredients with Sichuan cooking techniques. Those in their 20s and 30s cannot live without spicy food. Even in Macau’s Chinese restaurants, I would say at least 25 per cent of the items on the menu are spicy.“In the future, I think we will blur the line between various Chinese regional cuisines. I have many foreign friends who cannot tell the difference between these regional cuisines and I don’t think it is important to distinguish among ourselves too rigidly.”"
Meme - "Fiona [McCrossin]
November 28
'I Got My First Ever Gun Today DC9, Post Pics of Your Most Favorite Firearm or the First Gun You've Ever Had, Whatever Speaks to You Most
PS. I'm a Flamboyant Liberal Queer and My More "Right" Friends Feel Like They Have Converted Me and Are Ecstatic (Maaaaybe They're Right a Bit, It's Not Likely Tho but I'lI Just Let Them Think That Bc I Love My Friends)'
'I Don't Feel Contidently About You Owning a Handgun'
'Thats Pretty Fucked Up, I Don't Know Why Anyone Would Feel More Confident About You Owning One for Instance'
'It Would Be One Thing if You Said You Don't Feel Confident About Anyone Owning One. In This Case You Are Very Clearly Implying That There Is Something About Me Which Would Make It Unsafe and That Is So Incredibly Ridiculous I Don't Know Where to Begin but I Guess First of All What Makes You Think That You Have the Authority to Say That Someone That Passed the Background Checks to Buy a Firearm and Who Immediately Registered It and Is Asking for Safety Pointers Would Be Unsafe Using a Gun? I'm Fully Expecting Any Answer You Have to Be Completely Offensive and Inappropriate and Based on Wild Assumptions but Please Continue..'
'Police: Road Rage Leads to Arrest After Woman Shoots at Another Driver'"
Oregon strip club creates drive-thru experience during coronavirus lockdown: 'People are super stoked' - "After figuring out a way to pull off the idea while still keeping the dancers safe and maintaining social distancing, Boulden said the club’s parking lot was transformed using tents, stages, music equipment and barricades.After setting it up, he invited some friends and coworkers to try it out. He installed a GoPro on top of his car and drove through. When he reviewed the footage, he said, it was “awesome.” “It reminded me of driving through a haunted house,” he said. “There’s lights, fog and a giant disco ball.” It basically works like this: Cars pull in and the DJ starts playing a song. Several dancers -- wearing gloves and face masks -- perform for the length of a song and then the customer's food is brought to their car. The club even throws in a free roll of toilet paper (another item that’s been in high demand since the outbreak). “People are super stoked,” Boulden said. “They’re happy to see other human beings and to get the strip club experience.” One group even traveled all the way from Seattle to experience the drive-thru, and at least one regular drove through three times in one night, Boulden said.“The dancers are happy to be working and be labeled as essential workers”"
Biblical Evidence Shows Jesus Christ Wasn't Born on Dec. 25 - "1. We know that shepherds were in the fields watching their flocks at the time of Jesus’ birth (Luke 2:7-8)
Shepherds were not in the fields during December...
2. Jesus’ parents came to Bethlehem to register in a Roman census (Luke 2:1-4).
Such censuses were not taken in winter...
The biblical accounts point to the fall of the year as the most likely time"
Sex Workers Say Online Market Is Saturated With Performers, Fans Are Canceling Subscriptions During Coronavirus Pandemic - "Codi said it is naive to think inexperienced or new sex workers can make a lot of money quickly online."Contrary to popular belief, it is not easy to instantly make money selling nude pictures or video," she said. "For most sites, the highest earners get the most publicity and the lowest earners are the hardest to find, making it difficult to break into a space where you make enough money to live on."... some of her paying fans with their own work and financial struggles are deciding they can no longer justify paying for adult content... "There is a larger segment of the population that will be surfing the internet looking at adult content. This gives us all an opportunity to help the public not only pass the time and be happy, but also help us survive as well during this difficult time""
Nanny barricades herself in bedroom of Ontario home for over a week after being fired - ""She would spend days in her bedroom and not come out."Milnes said the odd behaviour continued to escalate, including one time when she spent $800 at Indigo on gifts for his children, using his debit card.After a month into the job, Milnes said he and his wife had a conversation with the nanny about how to improve but things only got worse. Eventually, one night, just before the Easter long weekend, they were forced to tell her the job wasn’t working out and that they no longer required her services."We said we would give her 30 days extra pay but we told her we wanted her out by the day before Good Friday," Milnes said."That Thursday (before Good Friday) comes around and she tells my wife 'You can't kick me out because of COVID.'""The next day she doesn’t reply to us through the door or text. We noticed we couldn’t see under the door. She stacked up boxes to block the view."Milnes said he contacted York Regional Police on April 10 and told them about the situation. He said officers came to the home and negotiated with the woman, who said she would only leave if the family gave her $3,000 and paid for her to stay two months at a hotel."I felt like I was being extorted," Milnes said... Milnes said he would only agree to pay $2,000 and put her up in a Wasaga Beach apartment that he had access to. He said they agreed and the police left but then the woman cut off communication again.They were forced to call the police again the next day when the nanny refused to leave."Three officers came," Milnes said. "They talked to her. Basically told us that she doesn’t want to leave and there is nothing they can do about it because of the (Residential Tenancies Act)."The police left again and Milnes said he started researching legal options. In the meantime, he said he cut off her WiFi access and cell phone plan, which he also paid for.He said he slept in one bedroom with his wife and three kids out of fear she could hurt them in the night. He said he installed a security camera outside her door that would notify them if she left the room... his brother-in-law came to house and they decided to take back what was theirs inside the nanny’s room. They removed the door and took her bed.Meanwhile, Milnes said the nanny called 911 and told police a break-and-enter was in progress... when the nanny left, the room was a complete mess and that she had been cooking using a hotplate in the en suite bathroom."It was like we were living through a reality TV show. I just couldn’t believe this all happened to us.""
Outcry over reports of mass assault at New Delhi, India, women's college - "Reports that large crowds of men sexually harassed and abused students at a women's college in the Indian capital of New Delhi last week has sparked an outcry and protests there.The men barged onto the Gargi College campus in South Delhi last Thursday, on the final day of a school festival, allegedly molesting and sexually assaulting the female students en masse, according to a statement issued by the General Body of Students.The student group said that "thousands" of men jumped the gates of the university, descended onto the campus and damaged property, while police and non-teaching staff stood by and did nothing."Men stood in gangs and ogled at women, groped them, tried to feel them up, pushed them, and touched them throughout the concert"... "the men followed women, catcalled them, and forced them to reveal their names and Instagram IDs.""
If you call this rape culture you're racist. Just stick to slamming Baby it's cold outside as a rape anthem
American lawns: Designing an end to the toxic yard - "Lawns are an American obsession. Since the mass proliferation of suburbs in the 1950s and '60s, these pristine carpets of green turf have been meticulously maintained by suburbanites, with grass length and other aesthetic considerations enforced with bylaws and by homeowner associations.But for nature, lawns offer little. Their maintenance produces more greenhouse gases than they absorb, and they are biodiversity deserts that have contributed to vanishing insect populations. Residential lawns cover 2% of US land and require more irrigation than any agricultural crop grown in the country. Across California, more than half of household water is used outside of the house... Images of intensely irrigated lawns in Phoenix, ringed by the red sand of the Arizona Desert, were once a disturbing case study of America's lawn addiction. But in recent decades, the state has taken action, charging more for water in the summer and banning lawns on new developments. At the turn of the millennium, 80% of Phoenix had green lawns, now only 14% does... "There's certificates that homeowners can get that certify that a front yard is wildlife friendly, or attracts butterflies, or is certified by master gardeners.""
We’ve just had the best decade in human history. Seriously | The Spectator - "We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline. Little of this made the news, because good news is no news... Perhaps one of the least fashionable predictions I made nine years ago was that ‘the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking’ and ‘we are getting more sustainable, not less, in the way we use the planet’. That is to say: our population and economy would grow, but we’d learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called More from Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall. This does not quite fit with what the Extinction Rebellion lot are telling us. But the next time you hear Sir David Attenborough say: ‘Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources is either a madman or an economist’, ask him this: ‘But what if economic growth means using less stuff, not more?’ a normal drink can today contains 13 grams of aluminium, much of it recycled. In 1959, it contained 85 grams... The quantity of all resources consumed per person in Britain (domestic extraction of biomass, metals, minerals and fossil fuels, plus imports minus exports) fell by a third between 2000 and 2017, from 12.5 tonnes to 8.5 tonnes. That’s a faster decline than the increase in the number of people, so it means fewer resources consumed overall... experts in the 1970s forecast how much water the world would consume in the year 2000. In fact, the total usage that year was half as much as predicted. Not because there were fewer humans, but because human inventiveness allowed more efficient irrigation for agriculture, the biggest user of water... Efficiencies in agriculture mean the world is now approaching ‘peak farmland’ — despite the growing number of people and their demand for more and better food, the productivity of agriculture is rising so fast that human needs can be supplied by a shrinking amount of land... we use 65 per cent less land to produce a given quantity of food compared with 50 years ago. By 2050, it’s estimated that an area the size of India will have been released from the plough and the cow. Land-sparing is the reason that forests are expanding, especially in rich countries... all this energy-saving might cause problems. Innovation requires experiments (most of which fail). Experiments require energy. So cheap energy is crucial — as shown by the industrial revolution. Thus, energy may be the one resource that a prospering population should be using more of. Fortunately, it is now possible that nuclear fusion will one day deliver energy in minimalist form, using very little fuel and land. Since its inception, the environmental movement has been obsessed by finite resources... The Limits to Growth predicted that if growth continued, the world would run out of gold, mercury, silver, tin, zinc, copper and lead well before 2000. School textbooks soon echoed these claims... A modern irony is that many green policies advocated now would actually reverse the trend towards using less stuff. A wind farm requires far more concrete and steel than an equivalent system based on gas. Environmental opposition to nuclear power has hindered the generating system that needs the least land, least fuel and least steel or concrete per megawatt. Burning wood instead of coal in power stations means the exploitation of more land, the eviction of more woodpeckers — and even higher emissions. Organic farming uses more land than conventional."
Policymaking Is Not a Science (Yet) (Ep. 405) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "LIST: So Dana and I met back in 2012 and we were introduced by a mutual friend and we did the usual “ignore each other for a few years” because we were too busy. And push came to shove, Dana and I started to work on early childhood research. And after that, research turned to love.
SUSKIND: I always joke that I was wooed with spreadsheets and hypotheses"
How much does Airbnb really affect rents and housing prices? - "A 1 percent increase in Airbnb listings led to a 0.018 percent increase in rental rates and 0.026 percent increase in housing prices. But consider that the median year-on-year growth rate in Airbnb listings was roughly 28 percent across ZIP codes in the paper's data."
So the median annual increase in housing prices due to Airbnb was 0.7%
Regulation and Housing Supply - "a modest relaxation would lead to an average increase in utility of 2% of household income, while a significant relaxation would result in an average increase of roughly 4% of income.In summary, most models and empirical estimates suggest that regulation reduces aggregate welfare, on net. And the estimated effects are often economically large."
In other words, AirBNB is not a big reason why housing is so pricey
Who’s to blame for high housing costs? It’s more complicated than you think. - "For all the animosity targeted at developers, landlords, and bankers, the largest group of beneficiaries from regulations that restrict housing supply aren’t these for-profit corporations. Homeowners who were lucky enough to purchase their houses in earlier periods have enjoyed substantialwealth gains, most of which areexempt from taxation. Small wonder that homeowners exert theirpolitical muscle to continue restricting new housing supply.State andlocal policymakersacross the U.S. are grappling with how to make housing more affordable. But because our housing production system is so complicated, it’s difficult to even reach a shared understanding of the problem. Making the development process simpler, shorter, and more transparent would be a good start."
Bots and Political Influence: A Sociotechnical Investigation of Social Network Capital - "our expectation was that our intervention would make a significant difference to the evolving network, but we found that the bots we used had very little effect on the conversation network at all"
Blaming bots is a great excuse when "your side" loses (or "loses", e.g. wild claims about the Last Jedi or covid-19)
During the 2019 Finnish parliamentary election there were more bots on Twitter than expected but their impact was negligible - "the impact of bots on Finland's political environment on Twitter is limited despite the fact that bots clearly enhance the visibility of certain politicians"
Cursed Baizuo Opinions - Posts - "@edenblackart Eden Black: "It's important to know how orcs were made to fit into pre-existing racist and colonial ideas, and how that has tainted their portrayal.I think by diversifying and humanizing them, we can keep the good parts and toss out the racist trash.So here, have some soft, queer orcs.""
Woops, Wrong Zoom — Chartr: Data Storytelling - "Some investors have been buying Zoom stock as its popularity explodes. Some thought they were buying Zoom stock, but actually weren't... some people who thought they were investing in Zoom Communications (the real one) were actually buying Zoom Technologies (the other one) by accident. Those mistakes pumped the share price of the wrong Zoom up by 1800% at one point -- a tidy return to anyone who made the mistake early and benefited from others doing the same later. To try and minimise the confusion and protect investors the SEC actually had to suspend trading in Zoom Technologies for a brief period. This isn’t even the first time this has happened. When Zoom Communications went public in April 2019, uninformed investors also poured money into Zoom Technologies, which saw its share price go from less than a cent to almost $6 in about a month... Similar looking tickers have misled other investors in the past. When Twitter (TWTR) went public in 2013, investors bought Tweeter Home Entertainment (TWTRQ) which on one day increased by 1,500%. And in 2017 when Snapchat (SNAP) went public, the stock price of Snap Iterative soared 164%."
Proof of the efficient markets hypothesis!
Arthur Chu on Twitter - "*Picture of girl who can't be more than 6 interacting with 3 men in puppy play outfits* How are countries less accepting of LGBT people going to progress while the west spews out these images?This is deeply sad & worrisome.This is something new to me.I'm shaken by it."
"Please summarize the 'gender critical' belief system in three words or less"
"Oh hello @arthur_affect, how lovely to see you pop up in my mentions again. Of course, you know that this tweet refers to the photo above it, of a child with some fetishists in pup-suits at Montreal Pride, right? Course you do."
"That's right, how dare a child be exposed to *checks notes* ...friendly gay men at a pride parade."
"Friendly gay men - fine. But pup-play is a sexual fetish, not just a sexual orientation. Can you see the difference? Or do you think children should be encouraged to engage in adult sexual fetishes?"
"Children should be encouraged to see the accouterments of "fetishes" as a normal part of adult life, since they themselves will soon be adults and probably have their own "fetishes" (The key problem here is seeing "fetish" as a terrifying virus infecting vulnerable minds)"
Of course, we are still told that the sexualisation of children by LGBT activists is a paranoid right wing conspiracy theory
Cursed Baizuo Opinions - Posts - "Age of consent laws are a reactionary part of bourgeois culture centrally used against young men. If you are ignorant of this and how those laws are used to suppress all sexual expression you should read the following articles"
PC Master Race. - Posts - "Apple: our laptops are so thin that the LAN port cannot be installed!
Fujitsu: HOLD MY SAKE"
Greta Thunberg Bristol strike: Row over College Green damage - "Oh the irony, hundreds of people turning up to talk about our planet dying end up destroying a green area"
Infographic: How To Tell Nazi From Antifa | The Babylon Bee - "Nazi: Beats you up for liking Jews
Antifa: Beats you up for liking Ben Shapiro
Nazi: Thinks Trump is Hitler
Antifa: Thinks Trump is Hitler
Nazi: Widely rejected by own political party
Antifa: Hailed as heroes by own political party"
Everything You Wanted To Know About The Vikings | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘Were there many major differences between the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish Vikings? So, asking to apply sort of modern ethnographic labels I suppose to them but um, but, they did apply to some extent?’
‘Not so much modern ethnographic labels as as modern nations and borders. The nations of Norway, Sweden and Denmark actually came into being during the Viking Age and the idea of a single monarchy ruling over a single nation evolved in that period. The thing that's important to remember is the simple vastness of Scandinavia... the distance from the northern tip of Norway to the southern tip of Norway is the same as the distance from the southern tip of Norway to Rome. It's absolutely kind of massive. And the landscape varies enormously. Denmark is just, you know, the highest point in Denmark 187 metres high. Norway is mountains and fjords. Sweden has its forests and lakes.
So it's extremely varied. So is there anything that unites these people? And I would say what unites them is partly a common language, which they called the Danish tongue strangely enough. And to a large extent, a common culture as well. As it's held together by language. So there's both variety and diversity. In terms of the Viking expansion, almost every book you read about the Vikings will have a little map showing arrows coming out of these three countries, you know with the Swedes going east and the Danes coming West and the Norwegians heading off to Iceland and Greenland. It's a bit more complicated than that because I think there was a lot of mobility within Scandinavia and you could find Swedes in Iceland and Norwegians in the East just as much...
[On getting along with the locals] So if we look at England, I think that once the question specifically once they decided to settle. So we'll leave out the the kind of raiding and the killing bit. And maybe the second phase if you like when people then obviously they settled down. They very soon I think probably married local people and formed families with them. One of the most important ways local people would influence the incoming Scandinavians was in religion because in England, England was a Christian country, the incoming Scandinavians were not Christian, and Christians, you know, it's the commandment: thou shalt have no god but me. Christians are generally at that time very keen to convert other people to Christianity. So one of the things that happened is very soon I think they adopted Christianity, although it's quite interesting in some parts of England, you can see a very Scandinavian form of Christianity evolving as, as the Vikings joined in. They obviously traded with the locals.
What we don't know too much about is the exact mixture of population. I mean, did the Vikings live in their own villages and interact with the next village where the English might have been living? Or did they live cheek by jowl in the same village? Or did they just have a Viking overlord on a large estate where most of the people living on the estate or in the village might not have been Scandinavian? I think their influence on the English language suggests that there was a lot of interaction on a personal level. And also, but that also comes inevitably with immigrants after the first generation or two. Then people start speaking the local language. That's, you can see that with any immigrant group in history, the language doesn't really last more than a few generations...
I personally think that many aspects of what we think of as the Viking Age continued, they crossed over the divide brought about by the coming of Christianity, and it's really only with the Protestant Reformation that life changed quite drastically in many Viking parts of the world."
The Trump Administration Escalates the War on White Supremacist Terrorism - "The Trump administration on Monday applied an international terrorist designation to an ethno-nationalist group known as the Russian Imperialist Movement, marking the first time the U.S. has applied such a designation to a white supremacist organization... While the level of coordination between R.I.M. and the Kremlin remains unclear, the proximity of its training camps to a major Russian metropolis — and their continued operation despite the media attention they received in the wake of the Gothenberg bombings — suggest the group operate with at least the tacit approval of Vladimir Putin... the designation gone largely unremarked upon by the political media’s opinion makers, and most news articles reporting the development have included wary statements from extremism researchers casting the move as a public relations stunt. But, coupled with the FBI’s recent aggressive pursuit of domestic white supremacists — and provided the State Department continues to monitor these foreign groups and designate them accordingly under the new expanded guidance — Trump’s September executive order may prove to be a substantial blow against a white supremacist threat that began to emerge in earnest in Europe during the refugee crisis of 2014 and 2015, and has since metastasized in the U.S."
Literally Hitler and clear proof Drumpf is Putin's lapdog
This is some 4D chess from a "known" white supremacist
Hate crime in Canada: do our laws allow a white nationalist rally? - "Although acts of violence are not protected under the First Amendment in the United States (freedom of speech), white nationalist groups are legally allowed to protest as long as there is no “imminent threat”, according to Richard Moon, a law professor at the University of Waterloo.Even the most hateful and offensive speech is constitutionally protected... Unlike the U.S., you can be jailed for promoting hate speech that targets a group, such as handing out a pamphlet with Neo-Nazi literature. But there are several conditions that must be met. For example, the hate speech must be the most severe of the genre; must be targeted to an identifiable group (such as a religion, race or sexual orientation); and has to be public."
How ‘White Fragility’ Theory Turns Classrooms Into Power Struggles - "“White fragility” is a phrase DiAngelo invented to delegitimize any disagreement with her views on what causes racial inequality.DiAngelo is attempting to address one of the most important issues of our time. But she does so with an air of piety that presumes she knows all the answers. One of the main challenges in the analysis of Whiteness and white privilege is the deeply ambiguous nature of these terms (see here, here, and here). As historian Eric Arsenen wrote, “whiteness has become a blank screen onto which those who claim to analyze it can project their own meanings.” The inherent ambiguity in a term like Whiteness is likely one of the main reasons DiAngelo has encountered resistance over the years. In response, she has doubled down, defining “one aspect of Whiteness and its effects, White Fragility,” as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves,” which “include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation,” all of which allegedly “function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.” In other words, disagreement is bad. In effect, DiAngelo has pulled off a master stroke of rhetorical legerdemain. “White fragility” is a term that rhetorically delegitimizes in one stroke any “defensiveness” when confronted with DiAngelo’s views about racism and Whiteness. Unfortunately, this approach invariably leads to rampant speculation, rather than careful hypotheses, about what Whiteness is and how it causes racial disparities.The inquisitional nature of this approach is so remarkably transparent that one is at a loss to explain how DiAngelo gets away with asserting incoherently that “[h]uman objectivity is not actually possible” given that such a claim is itself an objective statement that also confuses objectivity with neutrality. Instead, the act of pointing out this incoherence is reflexively treated as an act of heresy which must be “cancelled” or punished for allegedly accommodating white supremacy. One area in which this theory has become increasingly influential is education. Mr. Paslay has spent two decades in Philadelphia classrooms and teacher training workshops. He has found that white fragility—apart from raising awareness about structural inequality—is having some unintended side-effects on schools in America. Above all, the theory fosters intolerance from facilitators leading anti-bias trainings in educational settings, which can provoke resentment among teachers... DiAngelo freely admits to limiting the participation of whites in her workshops in favor of people who look different, and even talks of cutting off whites who try to defend themselves. Indeed, in one of her academic papers, she recommends denying “equal time to all narratives in our classrooms.”... DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” is a focused attack on the behaviors of white people, as opposed to placing the primary focus on particular issues... Incredibly, white people taking offense to being called fragile, racist, or reacting with tears or hurt feelings is racial bullying, according to DiAngelo. But all of DiAngelo’s name calling, personal judgements of character, and attacks are not? This amounts to a rhetorical bullying tactic in itself. It is also a classic example of psychological projection, which is another way scholar-activists like DiAngelo can protect the presumed infallibility of white fragility theory while failing to consider perspectives that run counter to its ideology. Tragically, as research suggests, these workshops are a setback for diversity, and too often leave whites with a feeling of frustration or resentment. In essence, white fragility theory boils down to Power vs. Force, a concept made popular by Dr. David R. Hawkins. It analyzes “the hidden determinants of human behavior.” While true power resides from within, force is applied through projection—an outside force trying to impose its will. Force can only work for so long; once it encounters true power, it immediately unravels.Interestingly, many of the emotions DiAngelo cites as evidence of white fragility—such as anger, shame, guilt, and apathy—are listed by Hawkins as a reaction to force. Nowhere in white fragility theory or whiteness studies can one find positive responses related to true power, such as courage, love, joy, or enlightenment; everything tied to white fragility is zero-sum and is based on dichotomy rather than unity."
Stereotypes are good when they shit on white people
Identity politics is really for rich white people - "The dinners were set up by Saira Rao and Regina Jackson... There are so many bizarre parts of this story it’s hard to know where to begin. The attendees are literally asked to name a ‘racist thing [they] did recently’. And by ‘racist’, they don’t actually mean racist. One woman says she wants to hire more people of colour, then trails off because she is fearful of looking like a ‘white saviour’. In another exchange, a woman ties herself in knots when trying to talk about her adopted black children... Indeed Rao comes off far worse in this write-up than the white women she is supposed to be schooling. She has become semi-Twitter Famous in recent years for her absurd, un-self-aware musings. (She once said all her white female friends had disowned her because she kept pestering them about their privilege and racism.) In the piece, one of the less-satisfied former attendees says Rao is ‘needlessly provocative and mean-spirited, unaware of her own class privilege’. Which reminds us of an important thing about this kind of identity politics, political correctness, wokeness, or whatever we want to call it: its primary audience is rich people, particularly rich white people. As a landmark survey by More in Common found in 2018, high income and education levels are two top predictors of support for political correctness, and white people are less likely than average to believe that political correctness is bad. It makes sense. Woke politics is ultimately disempowering for minorities, it treats them as children who are forever bound by the invisible chains of language, culture and unconscious bias. Identitarians’ mad theories largely appeal to over-educated rich people with too much time on their hands and a heavy dose of bourgeois guilt. Wokeness doesn’t help minorities, it gives white people an opportunity to feel better about themselves and distinguish themselves from the allegedly (even more) bigoted masses.Wokeness is a rich white person’s game, and these hilarious and expensive dinners attest to this."
Fabricant was WRONG… but his target is thick, bigoted and hysterical - "TORY MP Michael Fabricant was forced to apologise after tweeting that he might punch journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown “in the throat”... the awful Alibhai-Brown has been screeching likea deranged banshee, accusing him of racism, refusing to accept the apology —and milking it for every last drop. He made his unfortunate tweet while watching this woman on Channel 4 News —debating with me. It was meant to be a discussion about my new book, Selfish, Whining Monkeys. But it was simply Alibhai-Brown and the (not much brighter) presenter Cathy Newman howling “BIGOT!” at me for six minutes. This is because in the book I suggest that the massive influx of immigrantswe’ve seen in the past ten years has made life worse for the lowest paid insociety. And rather better for the well-orf.Oh, and also that I’m not mad on every aspect of Islam, y’know? Not hugelyconvinced by the general Islamic view of women and homosexuals and Jewish people and so on. So, I’m a bigot, then. At one point Alibhai-Brown screeched that she loathed me. I wondered if maybe I should call for the men in white coats. Imagine if I’dsaid that about an Asian woman who had a different opinion to me? But it’s not just me she loathes. She loathes white people, and especially white working-class people... she was asked on a TV programme: “What’s wrong with whiteguys?” And she replied: “I don’t like them. I want them to be a lost speciesin a hundred years.”Nice. Can you imagine what would happen if you or I said that about black men,or women? The police would get involved, pronto.She also delivered a screed of hatred against the white working-class in anewspaper article. Stupid, vicious, scum, she called them. It was white working-class people who fought against fascism and racism in the Second World War, and white working-class people who battled fascism and racism onthe streets. And yet we give her an MBE for “services to journalism”, and make her a visiting professor at a bunch of not very good universities.Truth is, she shouldn’t be punched in the throat. Instead she should be exposed as a hysterical racist and bigot and consigned to oblivion"
VIDEO: Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's Awkward anti-White Racism - "She says, during a conversation about jobs in 2008: “Don’t apply. It would be great if you went away. White, middle class men. We’d just walk in, wouldn’t we?”Challenged by the host of the show Richard Bacon, who asked, “Is that not a racist comment?” she replied, “Of course”.In 2013, she referred to the Liberal Democrat party as “disgracefully white”."
Columnist for Independent (UK) Yasmin Alibhai Brown: 'The Media Has to Be Kind of Controlled'
Financial Times reporter accessed private calls at Independent and Evening Standard - "A Financial Times reporter listened in on confidential and sensitive video calls at rival news organisations as staff were told about salary cuts and furloughs by editors and senior managers, an investigation by The Independent has established. Mark Di Stefano, who has been suspended by the FT pending an investigation into the incident, accessed private Zoom meetings held by The Independent and The Evening Standard as journalists learnt how measures introduced because of the coronavirus pandemic would affect them... Di Stefano joined the FT as a media and technology reporter in January from Buzzfeed, where he gained a reputation as a quick source of media news and gossip, breaking stories to his 100,000 followers on Twitter."
What happens when you hire someone from Buzzfeed. Who isn't even smart enough to use a shell account
Room 21 Worldwide ☠ - "Black people always talk about seasoning food. The reason why they have to season their food so much is because they can’t cook for shit anyways. If you can cook right, you can bring out the foods natural flavors without seasoning."
'Indian students preferred': Discriminatory rental ads have people shying away from applying - "Discriminatory language in rental unit advertisements, appealing specifically to students from India, have left a Windsor woman struggling to find a place.Stephanie Kerr, her two children and boyfriend have been staying at her brother's place for almost one year. During that time, she's been scouring through websites such as Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace to find a place to rent. Her problem is not that she can't find any rental property listings. It's that the language many of them include has left her feeling she doesn't fit the criteria some landlords are looking for in a tenant.The most egregious example, she said, includes wording such as "preferred Indians only."... "There are a lot of people advertising like this — that they prefer Indian students as compared to the Canadians," said real estate agent Preetinder Brar... Brar pointed to multiple reasons this is happening. The first is the ability to collect more rent from international students... the desire to stay on their landlord's good side may result in tenants turning a blind eye to necessary fixes and repairs... Another reason international students are given preference by landlords, according to Brar, is a federal government program which requires out-of-country students to ensure they have enough savings to complete their studies in Canada... Landlords are not allowed to deny housing to a tenant because of their race. The Ontario Human Rights Code says it's not okay to show preference in a rental listing either.Other problematic statements include "adult building," "not suitable for children," "no ODSP" and "seeking a mature couple."... Some landlords make statements that may discriminate "even if they don't mean to," according to the Ontario Human Rights Commission, adding this often happens when landlords are trying to appeal to people they think may like the rental unit.Some examples include "ideal for quiet couple," "suitable for single professional," "perfect for female student," "suits mature individual or couple," "great for working folks or students" — and "not soundproof" (which may indicate bias against families with children."
Is this "punching up"?
Too bad if you mind noisy (not soundproof) places
Comment: "hmmm.... not renting from a racist landlord seems like dodging a bullet"
IATA - About IATA Travel Centre - "The IATA Travel Centre delivers accurate passport, visa and health requirement information at a glance You can count on the IATA Travel Centre as your trusted, centralised source for the latest international travel requirements - as it is powered by Timatic. The IATA Travel Centre is the most accurate source available because we draw on a comprehensive database used by virtually every airline, and information gathered from over 1,600 official sources worldwide, such as immigration and police authorities. What’s more, our user-friendly system is constantly updated, so when you search for destination-specific details, you can rest assured the information returned is both current and complete."
MEDIA RELEASE: Anti-Asian Racism Rife Amid COVID-19 in Canada’s Largest Cities – Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice - "as many as 1 in 5 respondents do not think it's safe to sit next to an Asian or Chinese person on a bus, if they have no mask (21%)"
Not reported:
- How many respondents do not think it's safe to sit next to an Asian or Chinese person on a bus if he has a mask
- How many respondents do not think it's safe to sit next to a white (or whatever) person on a bus if he has no mask
I have a feeling if you survey Chinese people, given their mask fetish, more than 21% would not think it's safe to sit next to anyone on a bus if he had no mask
SJWs gonna SJW. Even by the standards of trash studies this is awful. No wonder. It comes from the "Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice"
One in 5 Canadians think it’s not safe to sit beside an Asian person on the bus, according to recent poll - "Toronto police have repeatedly said they are not experiencing any “notable increase” in hate crimes since the pandemic started. But spokesperson Meaghan Gray acknowledged hate-related incidents often go unreported.“I’m not sure our numbers would accurately reflect the possible lived experiences for some members of the community,” said Gray."
There goes the narrative
"Lived experience" aka flights of fantasy mean that there has been an astronomical increase in hate crimes but the reporting rate has plummeted because something something white supremacy, resulting in no net significant increase in reported hate crimes in Toronto
When You Eat Can Be Just as Important as What You Eat - "In our busy and highly stimulating world, our circadian rhythm could use some assistance. “The two biggest cues you can give your body to tell it the time of day [are] light and food,” says Manoogian. “Evolutionarily, those were very reliable cues to know the time of day. But in modern society, light and food are available around the clock. This can lead to circadian disruption.”Such disruption is associated with an increased risk of heart disease and diabetes... One way to help our bodies is by practicing “time-restricted eating.” What that means is this: Eat within the same 10-hour window every day. That’s it. So if the first thing that you consume is at 8 AM, your last meal should be at 6 PM.The end of your 10-hour eating window should not coincide with your bedtime. (Water is fine, however.)... “Time-restricted eating … can improve glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity, can lead to about a 5 percent weight loss, improves endurance and decreases blood pressure”"
"Intermittent" does not appear in here and "fasting" only once?!
How Much Do the Ingredients Cost in Your Favorite Foods? - "The restaurant business is notoriously tough, and owners have a myriad of costs ranging from health permits to commercial rent.On average, 30% of a restaurants revenues go to labor costs, 30% goes to general overhead, and 30-33% is spent on ingredients. Making a decent profit in the restaurant industry is a high hurdle... In order to cover all of these costs and still make a slim profit (generally 3-5%), restaurants need to mark up ingredients on average 300%. But some items offer dramatically different margins than others... The markup you pay for a given item ranges anywhere from 155% to 636% — and generally, the higher-end meal you purchase, the better the deal you’re getting... Despite being priced $6 more than the standard Cobb salad, the farm to table version has a much lower markup. This is because it contains so many high-cost items: artichokes ($1.15 per salad), organic chicken ($1.13), frisee ($1.08), and bougy touches like a quail egg ($0.66) and prosciutto speck ($0.44)... We looked at two variations of the omelette: a standard spinach option, and the Denver omelette, which contains ham and cheese. Both had much higher markups than the other items we’ve looked at so far... But the true king of marked up dishes? The pizza... Add-ons generally tack on an additional $1 to $3 to the price you pay. For the restaurant, these add-ons typically don’t cost them very much to purchase.Let’s say you add cheese ($1.50) to your standard hamburger. That slice of cheese probably costs the restaurant around 10 cents — but it raises what you pay from $9 to $10.50. That one small addition raises the markup from 384% to 436%... For the first time in recorded history, Americans are spending more at restaurants ($54 billion) than they are on groceries ($52 billion)"
Gender differences in mate selection criteria: Sociobiological or socioeconomic explanation? - "Consistent with past research, men placed more emphasis on the item Good Looks, whereas women placed more importance on the item Good Financial Prospect. Contrary to the structural powerless model, women's expected income was positively related to ratings of the importance of a potential mate's earning capacity in the college sample"
Women look for richer men. Rich women look for even richer men
Priyamvada Gopal On Resistance In The British Empire | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "The pointing out of common ground is something we see all the way from anti slavery through to 20th century anti colonialism, talking about the ways in which the ruling classes of Britain are the same people who might be oppressing people in the colonies, but also exploiting the British working classes. So there is, there is a constant laying out of common ground and common cause which we see in anti slavery and anti colonialism. With anti colonial movements you see, for instance, that by the time you get to the 1950s and 1960s, people like Fanna Brockway [sp?] who are involved in anti colonialism starts to become very involved in anti racism. And he and others who were members of the Movement for Colonial Freedom, which was a British organization set up in the 1950s. The movement for colonial freedom transforms itself by the 1970s into an organization called Liberation, which then is very involved in anti apartheid activism in Britain and many of the people involved in liberation also became part of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which in turn has populated the British anti war movement today. So there is absolutely a genealogy and that's something I was also keen to draw out. That anti slavery doesn't end with abolition. Anti colonialism doesn't end with independence, but these things morph into new dissident movements that take on more contemporary challenges...
I think that too much of the discussion around decolonizing the curriculum has been around diversity. And I think that people are still not very clear about the distinction between diversity and decolonization. My experience of decolonization so far at the level of the curriculum has still been one of a degree of benevolence. So for instance, in my own department, we have agreed to teach our small handful of black and Asian writers or open up the curriculum to the possible study of non mainstream black Asian writers. That to me, it seems to me not the answer. Decolonization, and I tell my students, this is really a question of all of us. And I mean, all of us asking, what is our relationship to the project of empire and how has that shaped how we are today? So this idea that decolonization means throwing white men off the curriculum and replacing them with black women, which is how it has been interpreted in some sections of the British media, I think it's completely wrong... I'm a little concerned that the discussion on decolonization has become one of tolerance and assimilation, rather than a more complicated and challenging engagement with how the British Empire shaped the world for several centuries, and that this is a legacy and an afterlife that we all carry with us... in a very unfortunate way, the story of Empire, rather than a story in which we are all shaped by, in which some of us are complicit, that story has been racialized. And it has been racialized, unfortunately, into a story of white benevolence and black and brown people essentially, as being uplifted by white benevolence. And I think that there is a great deal of racialized investment in that story"
So much for the 'myth' of the slippery slope - if it is celebrated is it still a myth?
Given how much people shit on Empire, it's strange she claims the story is one of white benevolence
Addendum: No surprise at all she made racist remarks later
Victim culture hits the courts: Woman gets paid for career she MIGHT have had but gave up for marriage and kids - "In an unusual divorce case, a woman has been awarded not only half of the assets she and her husband owned, but also a large payout for potential earnings she would have earned had she never given up her career to have children.The judgement in London could have dangerous implications for future marriages ending in years to come, thanks to a court ruling over “relationship-generated disadvantage.”... What makes the decision especially egregious is that the divorcing woman was not only awarded £400,000 for her supposedly stymied career, but also half of the £10 million she and her husband had in assets. The husband is also a solicitor. One would assume the splitting of assets would prove suitable compensation for one person’s career ‘taking precedence’ over their partner’s in a relationship, but now that is not enough... Keir’s celebration of “the principle of compensation” still existing in family law is bizarre, because people going through divorces – especially men – are already responsible for what many would argue is a hefty amount of compensation awarded to their partners through settlements, alimony and the splitting of assets. To now create a new avenue where you need to pay someone for an imaginary, ‘what if’ life they could have had if they never married you is preposterous, and merely one more way for people to take advantage of an already flawed system.Staking a claim to assets or money earned while together is one thing, but to argue a significant other needs to take responsibility for your decisions is victim culture nonsense. And if one is “putting family ahead of ambition and earning power,” but they are also legally allowed to later be compensated for making such a choice, this sounds like they didn’t put family ahead of anything... This ruling is essentially giving legal precedent to a very extreme form of victim culture. If you can get a settlement from a significant other because they are responsible for your past decisions, plenty of other people can make arguments that they are owed compensation from individuals in their past who they see as responsible for their failures. And in a world where people fight tooth and nail to argue about what precise labels hold them back and which groups of ‘privileged’ people keep them down, there are plenty who would surely love to make another person responsible for what they see as their plights in life."
A man is not a financial plan, but a divorce is
Sounds like men should just stay at home instead so they can get half the assets and more in a divorce
"Coronavirus Diaries: I’m a Lesbian. But Since the Lockdown, I’ve Been Sleeping With My Male Roommate." : PinkpillFeminism - "Almost everything that is wrong with liberal feminism has been incidentally covered in this "article... So, in summary, a girl who used to date men but has dated women for a few years is now sleeping with a man and now isn't sure if she can still "identify" as a lesbian. Meanwhile, the fuckboy she lives with is using her for easy access to sex, and even though she felt used and sad when he fucked her and didn't text her or communicate with her (even though they literally live together), she still was happy to be picked by him later that night, because somehow this is going to be empowering sex that will help her "figure out her sexuality?" She is a Deluxe Quarter Pounder Pickmeisha with an extra side of Pickme."
Someone's gonna get #MeToo-ed soon
"BLOOM: Yeah, with benefit of hindsight, it was a mistake in particular to have massive tax cuts over the last two, three years, because we’re actually growing very fast. What would have been much better is to push down the government debt so that right now when we really need it, we could spend money. Normally, you want to have big blowouts in recessions to support the economy, and earn your savings back in the booms. And instead, we’re in the hangover from spending in a boom and suddenly you’re hit with a recession with very little money left in the bank. So the fiscal position, I think, is much more worrying because there we should have been generating a surplus, and instead there’s a big deficit...
DUBNER: As a finance person who’s seen a few of these rises and falls now over the past few decades, do you have any general advice for people?
MOSKOWITZ: Yes, I have very specific advice. Don’t touch it.
BLOOM: One of the basic findings from economics is, you can’t outthink the market
MOSKOWITZ: Any time people try to time the market, they end up doing far more damage than they help themselves. It’s very difficult to do. As one example, I had many colleagues — these are famous economists — who said last week, “I’m buying, I’m buying like crazy. This will be a blip.” They’re all sorry they did.
BLOOM: And you’re swimming with the sharks, because the other side of that trade is guys on Wall Street that eat for lunch retail investors like us, that don’t really know what we’re doing.
MOSKOWITZ: So what I’ve always done — and I’m not the only financial economist that would tell you this — many of us would — is, you have a long-term strategy. You stick to it. And you can’t be blindsided or emotional about these short-term blips because you can’t really do much about them. So the best advice is actually not to look...
BLOOM: Employees working from home — so these were people, I should say, were booking telephone calls and making— processing data on computers. So they were kind of individual working jobs. They were 13 percent more productive. I mean, 13 percent is a huge increase. And the reasons they told us was, you know, A, it’s quieter at home, so they could concentrate more. But B, actually, they just tended to work their full shift rather than spending as much time at lunch or arriving late or taking long toilet breaks. Secondly, their quit rates halved. Many of them much preferred working from home and didn’t want to leave their job. And thirdly, once you controlled for performance, since they were performing better, they actually weren’t getting promoted any faster — so there is some sting in the tail, that being at home seemed to reduce your ability to get promoted... it’s really not a team job. So that’s why you can be at home four out of five days a week.
The second point was that after the end of the study, they then ask employees to re-decide whether they wanted to work from home or come back into the office. And half of the employees said after spending nine months at home, they didn’t like it. They felt isolated and lonely and they volunteered to come back into the office. So for me, the warnings from the Covid experiment is A, the type of working from home we’re talking about now is very extreme. It’s full-time, five days a week. I should note that less than five percent of Americans currently do that. Lots of people work from home a day a week, but very few people work from home full-time. It’s kind of like comparing going to the gym sporadically with marathon training, so it’s pretty extreme...
I really worry about a big tick up in people getting depressed, mental- health issues, which leads to health issues, more generally, because of the isolation it could lead to. My prediction is, we will find that people that do routine jobs may perform okay at home but for the majority of us, I think it’s going to be pretty painful personally, with all the loneliness. And I suspect will be pretty damaging for productivity, particularly as time goes on. So I think if there’s one or two weeks, it wouldn’t be so bad. But if it stretches on to three to six months, I think it’s going to be hugely damaging economically... I think another thing that’s going to be damaged in the long run, actually, is: if everyone’s working from home, there’s not going to be that kind of workplace discussions, coffee-table discussions, lunchtime talk. And most of that, it turns out, is important for long-run innovation...
MOSKOWITZ: Nobody likes commuting. It’s actually the number one thing on surveys that people say they hate the most. And I think the longer this goes, you’ll have more requests for, “Hey, look, I could do this commute three days a week. But not five.”...
BLOOM: I’m not that optimistic that remote learning is going to be that successful. The reason is from personal experience, I feel a lot of my value-added is what I’ll call the personal-trainer effect — you know, giving students motivation. You’re forcing people to focus for an hour and a half. For example, probably the biggest single improvement in my teaching was the year that I banned laptops and cell phones from being used in the class. And it was miraculous. Suddenly everyone pays attention. Whereas when it’s offline, it’s so easy to get distracted by watching the football or seeing the news or watching the stock market...
MOSKOWITZ: Here’s my view on this. And just from 25 years of teaching, myself. I find if you’re just teaching facts and methods, that can be done almost as well online as it can live. You could even argue maybe even better online because you can supplement it with video materials, and you can record it, right, and get it perfect. If you’re trying to teach someone how to think and you’re trying to teach them, let’s say, how to do research or how to ask an interesting question and get a scientific answer, that’s much more hands-on. So, you know, if I’m teaching basic investments — what’s a stock, what’s a bond — I think I can do that just as well online as I probably can in the classroom.But if you’re talking about training students how to think, right, and how to really, you know, whether it’s writing an English essay or writing a poem or coming up with a computer program that does X or, you know, thinking about how to price some obscure private-equity firm — that, I think, requires a lot more back and forth, a lot more interaction. And I suspect that the reason that we still have the university model, is that’s what they’re trying to do. What I tell my students is, I’m trying to teach you how to think, because what I teach you today may not be relevant 5, 10, 20 years from now. But if you know how to think about it, you’ll be able to figure it out. When LeBron James— very terrible analogy. But, you know, there’s a reason that basketball players want to play in front of fans... when you’re teaching, you’re reacting to your students. You see their faces, you see their questions, you see confusion. Sometimes you see a light go on. That’s very difficult to do. Even though you see their faces on the flat screen, it’s not quite the same...
BLOOM: I think socialization is actually really important. It’s also interesting that the American system has been criticized heavily for doing not that well in international comparable maths tests and science tests and reading tests, but Americans are very good at socializing, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. There’s lots of American startups and successful C.E.O.s and entrepreneurs. It’s part of this socialization process. From an early age, American kids are taught to argue, to speak up. And I think that will be lost if we move entirely to online home-based teaching...
DUBNER: Can you talk for a second about your past research on the association between climate change and violence?
BURKE: So one thing we have done is assemble historical data from around the world on violent outcomes. And what we find is a very strong linkage between changes in temperature and increases in various types of violence. So temperatures go up, you actually see more homicides in the U.S. You see more civil wars in sub-Saharan Africa. So this is not a new finding. It comes through very clearly in many different datasets... psychologists have shown for a long time that if you just put people in a room and turn up the temperature, you can piss them off even if there’s no one else in the room. But patterns of social engagement also change. So a warm evening, many more people are out on the street and maybe there are enough different social interactions that lead to an increase in crimes. And these larger scale-changes, declines in economic productivity or other outcomes, is the standard explanation for why you would see things like civil war, civil conflict, increase when temperatures go up...
DUBNER: I mean, I’m old enough now to remember when computing started to become pretty widely available and a lot of smart people said, “Well, that is the end of cities. It’s the end of in-person work, period. Everybody’s going to live in, you know, Fiji or wherever they want.” And it just didn’t happen. In fact, the opposite happened. This propinquity turned out to be incredibly valuable, and urbanization has risen and risen and risen. So I’m curious about what curiosities you may have to — what kind of lasting effects you may want to look for as an economist."
The American obsession about taxes (despite them being relatively low) where they keep bitching about paying too much in taxes and that it's better for them to keep their money instead of funding social programs cannot solely be explained by how dysfunctional their government is (i.e. their not getting much back). Perhaps it's linked to the mythology about taxes and their Revolution - even if they get representation now they still don't like taxes
Mutual Intelligibility of Sinitic Languages - "a monolingual speaker of Cantonese cannot understand a monolingual speaker of Mandarin and vice versa. There is zero intelligibility between the two languages. In fact, even within the huge collection of speech forms that fall under the umbrella of "Mandarin," there are many varieties that are more or less mutually unintelligible... The old canard that "when the dialects are written down they are the same" is simply untrue, since what gets written down are not the regional variants but standard Mandarin (and in earlier times Classical Chinese, a dead language for at least two thousand years). If one, as a tour de force, does contrive to write unadulterated Cantonese or Taiwanese, for example, they will be as hard for a reader of Mandarin to understand as spoken Cantonese or Taiwanese is for a speaker of Mandarin to understand."
Michelle Fullwood's answer to How are written Mandarin and written Cantonese different? - Quora - "Cantonese and Mandarin sometimes use different words to represent the same concept. This is often the case among high-frequency closed-class words. In this case the written word in Cantonese often has a specific character that is either not part of the standard Mandarin set.
佢 keoi5 "he/she/it", c.f. Mandarin 他/她/它 tā
My favourite example of this is 冇 mou5. Take a guess as to what it means! Here's a hint: 有 jau5 (C) / yǒu (M) means "to have". Answer: since it doesn't have the two horizontal bars of 有, it means "to not have", and is the equivalent of Mandarin 没有 méiyǒu.
Another large class of such words are borrowings from other languages like English. For example, in Hong Kong, the English word for "taxi" was borrowed as: 的士 dik7 si2 "taxi", c.f. Mandarin 出租车 chūzūchē lit. "hire car"...
Mandarin and Cantonese sometimes share a word that descended from a common Middle Chinese word, but whose pronunciation diverged. In this case, they both use the same character(s) for the word. But Cantonese always uses traditional characters, while Mandarin is written with simplified characters in China and Singapore.
我 ngo5 "I", c.f. Mandarin 我 wǒ
個 go3 "generic classifier", c.f. Mandarin 个 (simplified) / 個 (traditional) gè
Mandarin and Cantonese have different grammar. For example, in Mandarin ditransitives (e.g. using the verb "give"), the word order is verb–indirect object (recipient)–direct object, while in Cantonese the word order is verb–direct object–indirect object. In this case, the written Cantonese will usually reflect the Cantonese word order.
畀嗰本書我 bei2 go2 bun2 syu1 ngo5 "Give the book (to) me" (source: Wikipedia), c.f. Mandarin 给我那本书 gěi wǒ nà běn shū "Give me the book""
Nat Turner with the burner on Twitter - "The “dictatorship” of the democratic people’s’ republic of North Korea has done more for the liberation of marginalized people than this country you’re definding. Fuck every aspect of this country and it’s disgusting tool, the military. I wish that “dictatorship” won the war."
This self proclaimed Marxist (and also "secular humanist"?!) lives in Detroit/DC. Imagine hating your country that much. Why don't these peple all go live in the Communist countries they love so much?
Comment from elsewhere: "Years ago I was arguing with an American Maoist about fuck knows what. Doesn't matter. Probably something to do with the importance of freedom because he said something foolish like "yeah I'd rather be in prison in China rather than free in America". And I was like "wow, you know you can prove this right now by flying to China and immediately getting yourself arrested, because it's really easy to get arrested in China. You can live your dream life in a Shanghai prison."He stopped responding and eventually blocked when a few people agreed with me. I can only assume he chose shitty freedom over awesome prison."
Marx-y Marx and the Funky Bunch☭ on Twitter - "Kim Jong Un is objectively a more moral person than every single member of the US government"
He lists his pronouns in his profile. Communist countries would not tolerate his degeneracy of course
이름없음 on Twitter - "If you equate both titles “Supreme Leader” and “Prime Minister” with the descriptor “head-of-state” but think one sounds more ‘totalitarian’ than the other as if “Supreme” is not simply just a synonym for “Prime” and “Leader” a synonym for “Minister” - then you might be a racist!"
Its profile: "I have pronouns." Hurr
This person lives in New Zealand and used Jacinda Ardern as an example
‘Zoom fatigue’ is taxing the brain. Here's why that happens. - "The unprecedented explosion of their use in response to the pandemic has launched an unofficial social experiment, showing at a population scale what’s always been true: virtual interactions can be extremely hard on the brain... group video chats become less collaborative and more like siloed panels, in which only two people at a time talk while the rest listen. Because each participant is using one audio stream and is aware of all the other voices, parallel conversations are impossible. If you view a single speaker at a time, you can’t recognize how non-active participants are behaving—something you would normally pick up with peripheral vision.For some people, the prolonged split in attention creates a perplexing sense of being drained while having accomplished nothing... That’s why a traditional phone call may be less taxing on the brain, Franklin says, because it delivers on a small promise: to convey only a voice... If you’re feeling self-conscious or overstimulated, Normand recommends you turn off your camera. Save your energy for when you absolutely want to perceive the few non-verbal cues that do come through, such as during the taxing chats with people you don’t know very well, or for when you want the warm fuzzies you get from seeing someone you love. Or if it’s a work meeting that can be done by phone, try walking at the same time.“Walking meetings are known to improve creativity, and probably reduce stress as well”"
So much for the hype about online learning
Hero Creates AI Doppelgänger of Himself to Get Out of Zoom Video Meetings - "To build his bot, Reed recorded himself in Quicktime looking quizzical, confused, opening his mouth, and smiling, and took screenshots. When these images cycle through, it almost looks like Reed has a poor connection—and he programmed his bot to say as much"
Tiananmen Square Massacre: How China's Millennials Discuss It Now - "Twenty-five years after June 4, 1989, even China’s educated youth have only a foggy understanding of the incident, and they’re skittish about discussing it openly. Textbooks don’t mention the violence that left hundreds, maybe thousands, dead in the streets of Beijing. The Chinese Internet has been scrubbed of all but the official accounts. (The first result on the search engine Baidu is a short article from People’s Daily concluding that the incident “taught the party and the people a useful lesson.”) The Chinese government has arrested dozens of people in recent weeks for planning or participating in events related to the anniversary, and police have warned foreign journalists not to cover the story. Still, most young Chinese people I approached were willing to talk—as long as they could remain anonymous. Awareness of the Tiananmen incident among young Chinese tends to correlate with education level, exposure to the world outside China, and general curiosity... Most Chinese parents don’t talk about politics with their children, said Amy, a bright 26-year-old from Guangdong province who works for a tech company in Beijing. But she was an exception: she heard about the incident from her father. “He hated Deng Xiaoping,” she said. “He thinks Deng caused China to have no morals, no beliefs. I asked why, and he said, ‘Deng Xiaoping ordered tanks to run over college students. Do you think that’s what a good person does?’” Later, when she was attending a top university in Beijing, one of her professors showed photos and videos from the protests. “The teacher told us not to mention it outside class”... Everyone I talked to knew the basic outline: Student protests, government crackdown, innocent civilians shot dead. But they weren’t all sure why the protesters were so upset. Jenny, a sharp 25-year-old legal expert living in Beijing, guessed it had to do with corruption. Several people suggested that the students were being manipulated by outside forces, particularly foreign governments... You can’t blame them for being confused. The 1989 protesters themselves didn’t know exactly what they wanted. They complained variously about high inflation, corruption, and a lack of democracy... Even if they’d agreed on a set of goals, they couldn’t agree how to achieve them: Some wanted revolution, while others pushed for incremental change... As Louisa Lim writes in her new book The People’s Republic of Amnesia, “moving on—not dwelling on the past—has become a key survival tactic, perhaps the most important one.”... She believes that even searching for forbidden key words could get her in trouble, she said: “They can track you down within minutes.” They were pessimistic that the next generation would know any more about 1989 than they do. The post-’90s generation, the oldest of whom are now graduating from college, prefer American TV shows and Korean pop stars to social issues, said Amy. Susan argued that most young Chinese are too focused on getting by to worry about grand political issues. “They don’t care, as long as they have something to eat and a place to live,” she said. “We’re just walking dead.” Between the quest for material goods and the squelching of her own curiosity, Jenny said, “the government succeeded. We’ve been brainwashed.”"
Coronavirus news: Foodora Is Ditching Canada Two Months After Workers Win Right to Unionize - "After five years in Canada, food delivery company Foodora is pulling out of the country in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The announcement comes two months after its workers won the right to unionize... Foodora "has been unable to reach a level of profitability in Canada that’s sustainable enough to continue operations"... The timing of the announcement raises questions because there’s been a reported increase in demand for food delivery services, which are considered an essential service during the pandemic... Foodsters United, the union representing workers, said in a statement that it is “saddened and greatly disappointed” in Foodora and Delivery Hero for their “poorly thought-out decision.” Foodsters said restaurants and couriers will only have two weeks to find alternate ways to survive during the COVID-19 pandemic. “This demonstrates a complete disregard for the wellbeing of us workers in an already extreme and uncertain time”"
Presumably this is the fault of capitalism and nothing to do with unionisation increasing costs and making an already loss-making business model only subsidised by venture capitalists' money even more unviable
The Millennial Lifestyle Is About to Get More Expensive - The Atlantic - "To throw cash at people every time they walk into a restaurant does not sound like a business. It sounds like a plot to lose money as fast as possible—or to provide New Yorkers, who are constantly dining out, with a kind of minimum basic income... I don’t know if it makes sense, and I don’t know how long it’s going to last. Is there a better epitaph for this age of consumer technology?... It’s easy to spend all day riding unicorns whose most magical property is their ability to combine high valuations with persistently negative earnings—something I’ve pointed out before. If you wake up on a Casper mattress, work out with a Peloton before breakfast, Uber to your desk at a WeWork, order DoorDash for lunch, take a Lyft home, and get dinner through Postmates, you’ve interacted with seven companies that will collectively lose nearly $14 billion this year. If you use Lime scooters to bop around the city, download Wag to walk your dog, and sign up for Blue Apron to make a meal, that’s three more brands that have never recorded a dime in earnings, or have seen their valuations fall by more than 50 percent... To maximize customer growth they have strategically—or at least “strategically”—throttled their prices, in effect providing a massive consumer subsidy. You might call it the Millennial Lifestyle Sponsorship, in which consumer tech companies, along with their venture-capital backers, help fund the daily habits of their disproportionately young and urban user base. With each Uber ride, WeWork membership, and hand-delivered dinner, the typical consumer has been getting a sweetheart deal.For consumers—if not for many beleaguered contract workers—the MLS is a magnificent deal, a capital-to-labor transfer of wealth in pursuit of long-term profit; the sort of thing that might simultaneously please Bernie Sanders and the ghost of Milton Friedman. But this was never going to last forever. WeWork’s disastrous IPO attempt has triggered reverberations across the industry. The theme of consumer tech has shifted from magic to margins. Venture capitalists and start-up founders alike have re-embraced an old mantra: Profits matter.And higher profits can only mean one thing: Urban lifestyles are about to get more expensive... Am I getting ripped off by these companies, or am I kinda-sorta ripping them off? In many cases, the answer is the latter... The meal-kit company Blue Apron revealed before its public offering that the company was spending about $460 to recruit each new member, despite making less than $400 per customer. From afar, the company looked like a powerhouse. But from a unit-economics standpoint—that is, by looking at the difference between customer value and customer cost—Blue Apron wasn’t a “company” so much as a dual-subsidy stream: first, sponsoring cooks by refusing to raise prices on ingredients to a break-even level; and second, by enriching podcast producers. Little surprise, then, that since Blue Apron went public, the firm’s valuation has crashed by more than 95 percent."
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