Links - 15th August 2018 (2)

Korean Tutor Motivated His Students By Promising To Buy Them Prostitutes - "Korea TV show "Shocking Real Life Stories" recently told the story of a tutor who brought the grades of his pupils up by promising to bring them to a brothel"

New Zealand adds prostitution to list of employment skills for would-be immigrants - "The skill is regarded as providing social companionship in the Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations (ANZSCO) list... The applicants should also have relevant recognized qualifications or have at least three years of work experience in the relevant industry."

Gourmet demand revives Central America cocoa farms - "Spanish explorers recorded that indigenous people used cocoa beans as currency. Ten could buy a night with a prostitute, 100 could buy a slave, according to archeologist Michael Coe, joint author of a book called “The True History of Chocolate.”"

Spilt milk: are the breastfeeding wars finally over? - "since the start of this century, pragmatists have been increasingly drowned out in favour of a 00s absolutism that affected all kinds of areas of parenting (principally, motherhood): a mother who would accept second-best was barely even a mother. Breastfeeding was the frontier issue in a burgeoning culture where intense risk aversion was a sign of perfect parenting. It covered alcohol in pregnancy, soft cheese, stress; at one point, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists put out advice to pregnant women not to sit on new furniture... the science was never actually that settled... Comically, one of the reasons that was given in favour of breastfeeding was that it prevented the return of menstruation, and therefore acted as a contraceptive This is comical, a) because it’s not very reliable and you actually can get pregnant while you’re breastfeeding, and b) because a woman in Keswick does not need to breastfeed in order to prevent a pregnancy. It’s like telling a population in South Korea to clean a wound with ash to ward off infection: ash might be better than no ash, but not if you’ve got Germolene... Writing anything about evidence bases, much like writing anything about economics, always invites a fair amount of sneering (“Why, oh why, does this journalist think she could ever understand this material which only I understand”) but this is, funnily enough, the only time I have ever been physically threatened... The underlying issue was class-based: breastfeeding, the middle-class choice, gave middle-class parenting a superior status that would otherwise have been difficult to assert"

All about sex: Real reason why Chinese women bound their feet ... and it wasn't for their pleasure - "Crippled feet required one to walk in a certain mincing manner to avoid toppling over; as a result, it was believed, the inner thigh and pelvic muscles became unusually tight. Thus, more lurid thought processes went, the smaller the bound feet, the stronger the vaginal muscles would be during lovemaking."

Duck snapped twice for speeding in 30km zone - "A duck or pair of ducks have been caught by the same speed camera flying at more than 20 kilometers per hour over the limit. The feathered felons are still at large... The alpine country calculates fines based on the offender's wealth. In 2010, it billed a Swiss driver some $290,000 for clocking 137 kilometers per hour in an 80-kilometer zone."

Aussie girl marries her Swiss Guard soulmate - "A few things can delay a budding romance with a Swiss Guard. Firstly, Swiss Guards are called to celibacy, and can only marry if they become a corporal, of which there are only 10 in Vatican City. Secondly, all Swiss Guards work six days a week, and have an extra three days on reserve – which according to the corporal means a Swiss Guard is “never free”. Thirdly, couples intending to marry must apply to the Holy See’s Secretary of State for permission, and foreigners are taken through a rigorous reference check. A Swiss Guard also promises to serve and give his life in service for another three years. And he also cannot marry the secretary to the commander as it is considered a “conflict of interest”."

I tried leaving Facebook. I couldn’t - "Facebook had replaced much of the emotional labor of social networking that consumed previous generations. We have forgotten (or perhaps never noticed) how many hours our parents spent keeping their address books up to date, knocking on doors to make sure everyone in the neighborhood was invited to the weekend BBQ, doing the rounds of phone calls with relatives, clipping out interesting newspaper articles and mailing them to a friend, putting together the cards for Valentine’s Day, Easter, Christmas, and more. We don’t think about what it’s like to carefully file business cards alphabetically in a Rolodex. People spent a lot of time on these sorts of things, once, because the less of that work you did, the less of a social network you had"

Diane Abbott repeatedly refuses to say what should happen to illegal migrants in car-crash interview with Piers Morgan - "Pressed on the issue, Ms Abbott refused EIGHT times to lay out exactly what her solution would be if she got into power... Piers replied: “With respect, that’s not an answer to my question. I don’t think it’s unreasonable in the light of this massive scandal to ask the shadow home secretary what Labour’s policy on illegal immigrants is... The interview will revive memories of Ms Abbott’s slip-up during the election campaign last year, when she suggested that it costs only £30 a year to hire a police officer."

Breaking Video: Police are pursuing a stolen tank across Central Virginia - "Police were spotted early tonight behind a tank-like military vehicle that was stolen from Fort Pickett. The tank was spotted along Route 460 in Dinwiddie, then it was spotted on interstate 85 and interstate 95."

Clean up San Francisco’s streets, tourist industry pleads - "People injecting themselves with drugs in broad daylight, their dirty needles and other garbage strewn on the sidewalks. Tent camps. Human feces. The threatening behavior of some people who appear either mentally ill or high. Petty theft. “The streets are filthy. There’s trash everywhere. It’s disgusting,” D’Alessandro said, adding he’s traveled the world, and San Francisco stands out for the wrong reasons. “I’ve never seen any other city like this — the homelessness, dirty streets, drug use on the streets, smash-and-grabs."

President Trump Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize by Norwegian Lawmakers
Looks like Norway is Far Right too

Stanford Prison Experiment: why famous psychology studies are now being torn apart - "A new exposé based on previously unpublished recordings of Philip Zimbardo, the Stanford psychologist who ran the study, and interviews with his participants, offers convincing evidence that the guards in the experiment were coached to be cruel. It also shows that the experiment’s most memorable moment — of a prisoner descending into a screaming fit, proclaiming, “I’m burning up inside!” — was the result of the prisoner acting. “I took it as a kind of an improv exercise,” one of the guards told reporter Ben Blum. “I believed that I was doing what the researchers wanted me to do”... Perry has also revealed inconsistencies in another major early work in psychology: the Milgram electroshock test, in which participants were told by an authority figure to deliver seemingly lethal doses of electricity to an unseen hapless soul. Her investigations show some evidence of researchers going off the study script and possibly coercing participants to deliver the desired results. (Somewhat ironically, the new revelations about the prison experiment also show the power an authority figure — in this case Zimbardo himself and his “warden” — has in manipulating others to be cruel.)...
I can list so many more textbook psychology findings that have not stood the test of time. Like:
Social priming: People who read “old”-sounding words (like “nursing home”) were more likely to walk slowly — showing how our brains can be subtly “primed” with thoughts and actions.
The facial feedback hypothesis: Merely activating muscles around the mouth caused people to become happier — demonstrating how our bodies tell our brains what emotions to feel.
Stereotype threat: Minorities and maligned social groups don’t perform as well on tests due to anxieties about becoming a stereotype themselves.
Ego depletion: The idea that willpower is a finite mental resource...
Psychology has changed tremendously over the past few years. Many studies used to teach the next generation of psychologists have been intensely scrutinized, and found to be in error. But troublingly, the textbooks have not been updated accordingly."

The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment - "Much of the study’s cachet depends on the idea that the students responded en masse, giving up their individual identities to become submissive “prisoners” and tyrannical “guards.” But, in fact, the participants responded to the prison environment in all sorts of ways. While some guard shifts were especially cruel, others remained humane. Many of the supposedly passive prisoners rebelled

Where the jobs are: The new blue collar - "Although manufacturing jobs have declined 35% since 1980, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there's actually been a resurgence in recent years as American companies have found that moving jobs offshore was not a good approach for production that requires highly skilled labor. "There's a lot of re-shoring," says Andrew Crapuchettes, CEO of Economic Modeling Specialists Intl. "They're coming back, but they are coming back different. More technician jobs, which pay more. There may be fewer jobs, but they are better jobs."... Society's push to get all young people into four-year colleges — what William Symonds calls the "one road to heaven" approach — contributes to a shortage of skilled workers."

Belief in free will affects causal attributions when judging others’ behavior - "we tested whether believing in free will is related to the correspondence bias—that is, people’s automatic tendency to overestimate the influence of internal as compared to external factors when interpreting others’ behavior. Overall, we demonstrate that believing in free will increases the correspondence bias and predicts prescribed punishment and reward behavior."

The Peak Age For Beauty, Happiness, Salary And More - "Our salaries are highest around age 40, and our arithmetic skills are best at 51, for instance. And get this—life satisfaction peaks at the ripe old age of 69. So, whenever you start feeling like you’re past your prime, just remember the best is likely yet to come."

The Birth And Death Of Privacy: 3,000 Years of History Told Through 46 Images - "If I want to know whether I will suffer a heart attack, I will have to release my data for public research. In the end, privacy will be an early death sentence... It’s hard to know whether complete and utter transparency will realize a techno-utopia of a more honest and innovative future. But, given that privacy has only existed for a sliver of human history, it’s disappearance is unlikely to doom mankind. Indeed, transparency is humanity’s natural state."

Why Unfriending People on Facebook Is Immature and Counterproductive - "What is being lost in this age of unfriending is debate. What might seem commonsensical to you might not be so to others. Or, they just might have a different opinion. I would expect no belief of mine to be shared by seven billion others on this planet, nor even among my 150 closest friends. Honest dialogue and discussion only makes us stronger. That’s impossible when you’re clicking the unfriend button at the first sign of distress... Ideally, education is a lifelong pursuit. This means coming to terms with views that challenge your own"
When liberals talk about "education", they only want to "educate" other people - not themselves

This Is What A Cup Of Tea Looks Like In 22 Different Countries

NFL national anthem policy: Players on field must show 'respect'
"I bet all my leftist friends who kept asserting as culturally good that private companies could enforce whatever speech they wanted for whatever reason - and loved it when it was against speech they dislike - are just thrilled about this"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Eating Blockchain, What if you could tip the farmer that grew your coffee?

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Absolute Food: Part I - "Some of the greatest disasters of agricultural policy and food production, but also some of the greatest humanitarian disasters in history have revolved around the attempts by Communist dictatorships to force independent farmers into agricultural collectives, and to make them produce set quotas for the government...
'What's more common... in most autocracies today is policies which privilege the urban over the rural sector by keeping food prices low and providing little support to farmers. In the short term this can work in the regime's favor, but in the long run, it can backfire.'
'By discriminating against the agricultural sector you're reducing the incentives for farmers to produce. So you create a long term liability for the country and a dependence on food imports. And this is what happened in Egypt and other countries in Africa that have really discriminated heavily against the agricultural sectors. That they become less autonomous in food production and more dependent on imports. And so when some sort of an exogenous shock hits the system, whether it be a collapse in the oil price or whether it be an increase in the price of imported food, this policy equilibrium, which really may have worked in the long run to prevent unrest in cities and to buy off urban elites can backfire on a regime, because the country doesn't produce much food and they have to import food at a high cost. And that's when the policy equilibrium starts to come undone. And that's what we saw in Egypt before the Arab Spring, where the government's promises to provide affordable food to the population particularly cheap bread and cooking oil and staples like that really couldn't be met in the face of soaring global food prices"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Absolute Food: Part II - "Dictatorships tend to ignore the relatively large agricultural sector and to tax that sector in order to provide lower food prices for the urban interests, which are more powerful because they can mobilize and protest against government policies that increase the price of food. There are a lot of people working in the agricultural sector, but the interests of the agricultural sector tend to be under represented under dictatorship, because they don't need to win elections...
[On ISIS] They wanna fight the West and say everything from the West is bad, but saying go away, we hate you. But leave your Chicken McNuggets, leave your Pepsi. There is a certain hypocrisy to it. And also, I have to say the quantities, and I know that in Islam... it's not very Islamic to order and eat a lot of food and be wasteful with food like this. And I have to say that even when food was left over where we were staying they were throwing away food in large quantities...
As a specialist in Chinese food, I knew that state socialism with its hostility to private enterprise and elitist culture was usually the enemy of gastronomy in China. In the 1950s privately owned restaurants had been nationalized during the Cultural Revolution. A decade later, even street vendors were banned as capitalists.Grand restaurants were forced to abandon their menus of expensive delicacies and serve instead cheap and substantial food for the masses, Standards of food and service plummeted to a notorious low."

This ‘air umbrella’ is amazing and amazingly pointless - "This Air Umbrella, pictured above as a non-working prototype, promised to be an “invisible umbrella” that uses a stream of air to shield you from the elements. It was on Kickstarter in mid-2015. Judging by the rough schematic diagrams, it was basically a Dyson Air Multiplier fan that you hold above your head. But the Air Umbrella Kickstarter went belly up in December 2015, with the founders finally admitting that they couldn’t pull off the next-generation product – but not before the project raised US$102,240 from 842 backers... This capitulation should have surprised no one – the flaws in this ‘umbrella’ were immediately obvious. This Air Umbrella was pointless. This was tech for the sake of tech"

Feel Busy All the Time? There’s an Upside to That. - "the perception of oneself as a busy person — having what we call a busy mindset — can actually increase people’s self-control via a boost in self-importance. In other words, a busy mindset may make you more likely to choose the fruit bowl."

Weinstein to Congress: You Can't Say 'Donald Trump Is President' in Campus Safe Spaces

Bret Weinstein Testifies Before Congress: Social Justice Activists Function 'Like a Cult' - "“Am I alleging a conspiracy?” Weinstein began. “No. What I have seen functions much more like a cult in which the purpose is only understood by the leaders, and the rest have been seduced into a carefully architected fiction. Most of the people involved in this movement earnestly believe that they are acting nobly, to end oppression. Only the leaders understand that the true goal is to turn the tables of oppression.”"