Links - 14th July 2019 (2)

IRCTC Just Schooled a Man Who Complained About Porn Ads on Their App - ""Obscene and vulgar ads are very frequently appearing on the IRCTC ticket booking app. This is very embarrassing and irritating," he wrote, asking the railway ministry, IRCTC and union minister Piyush Goyal to look into the matter...
"Irctc uses Googles ad serving tool ADX for serving ads.These ads uses cookies to target the user. Based on user history and browsing behaviour ads are shown. Pl clean and delete all browser cookies and history to avoid such ads"."

Logic, Empathy, Honesty - Posts - "Girls' and womens' feelings AND bodies are valued INFINITELY more in the West than those of boys and men, and paradoxically, this is the reason people believe they are oppressed."
"This was shared to r/unpopularopinion. It was removed by moderators. Just think about that for a minute."

McDonald's Curry Sauce, so good it almost caused a riot - " Sometime in the 1990s, Curry Sauce was added to McDonald’s in Singapore.
Before 14 Nov 2011, it was truly a great time to be living in. People had UNLIMITED CURRY SAUCE privileges.
But alas, good times never last. 14 Nov 2011, Singapore unexpectedly ran out of curry sauce (!!!) #ripcurrysauce
A week later the curry sauce was back… but tasted different.
It just wasn’t the same. People cried. People rioted. The old sauce had peanuts. The new had soybeans.
From then on, unlimited curry sauce privileges were removed from the population and we had to ration curry sauces.
Times were bad, and people had to fork out hard earned money for a meager portion. Some even begged secondary school kids for curry sauce (evidence required).
Feb 2015, the sauce once again disappeared, this time due to a congestion at the United States West Coast ports.
June 2015, it returned.
July 2016, McDonald’s sold 375ml bottles of the stuff for S$4.50, limited to 4 per customer, Purchase with Purchase. Apparently sold out in a week or two.
30 May 2019, McDonald’s to sell 375ml bottles again, for S$5.50, limited to 4 per customer, Purchase with Purchase."

CPD Files Show Smollett Paid O Bros For Pot, Ecstasy and Cocaine - "Newly released investigative files from the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax show that the Empire star used Venmo to pay his accomplices for pot, ecstasy, and cocaine. The documents, which were made public on Thursday, a week after a Cook County Circuit Court judge ordered their release, reveal in detail how the Osundairo brothers described the staged attack.The documents also show that police found inconsistencies between what Smollett told them right after the alleged attack and what he later claimed during his interview on Good Morning America.And in a brand new development, Chicago police described in one document that the Cook County State's Attorney's Office informed them on February 28, almost a month before the charges against Smollett were dropped, that they would be settle with Smollett, and have him pay $10 thousand in restitution to the city of Chicago, as well as do "community service."... Judge Steven Watkins said in his order last week that Smollett’s actions both before and after his case was dismissed "did not appear to be those of someone seeking to maintain his privacy."
Maybe there're liberals who still believe that the police are making everything up and that Smollett was really a victim

Police Release Records On Jussie Smollett Case: Read The Full Text - "The final release will be pertinent video files that require a heavy amount of digital redaction for things like license plates of unrelated vehicles and the blurring of faces of individuals not involved in the criminal investigation. We hope to have that completed by the week after next."
The Chicago Police Department is really dedicated in forging hundreds of pages of records

Facebook Users Value the Service More Than Investors Do - "He and his team asked some 1,300 Facebook users, from colleges, community, and online samples, to put a dollar number on the value the social network brings to their lives. Specifically, they asked users how much they'd need to be paid to deactivate their accounts. And the stakes were real. If a user's offer was accepted, she'd have to deactivate her account, for up to a year. And Cash—remember, that’s the actual name of the economist, Cash—would have to pony up the money."We did have some budget breaking surprises."But how big of a surprise? Cash and his team found that, on average, users asked for more than $1,000 dollars in exchange for shutting down their accounts for a year... If you divide Facebook's market capitalization by its number of users—more than 2.2 billion—you'd find that each user is worth about $175 bucks to investors. But actual users seem to prize access to the platform at more than five times that. Not that Cash and his team are suggesting CEO Mark Zuckerberg should charge that much for access. What they're measuring instead, is what’s called consumer surplus—or more simply put, the additional perceived value—that users get from using the service."

Malaysia will use Huawei 'as much as possible', says Mahathir - "Dr Mahathir said: "Yes, there may be some spying. But what is there to spy (on) exactly in Malaysia? We are an open book.""Everybody knows, if any country wants to invade Malaysia, they can walk through, and we will not resist because it's a waste of time."
I knew Singapore's National Service was pointless!

Rein in politicized judges and their injunctions - "on issue after issue, liberal district judges have blocked President Trump’s executive orders or rules promulgated by his administration. The most prominent example occurred when Trump ordered an end to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration program. Even though DACA was created out of thin air by an executive memorandum by President Barack Obama, three separate district judges ruled that Trump could not undo it using the same presidential power. All three said their orders apply nationwide... district judges have issued at least 37 nationwide injunctions against the Trump administration in barely more than two years. They issued such injunctions only 27 times in the entire 20th century, he said. The Trump administration has been hounded by such injunctions more than any other, but the threat applies across ideological lines. A trial judge in Texas, for example, blocked an ill-advised Obama administration directive that public schools allow students to use bathrooms corresponding with their chosen “gender identity,” not their biological sex... A New York University Law Review paper in October 2017 listed many practical problems with such injunctions, and its key point was that they violate constitutional principles, undermining "the structural design of the federal courts by allowing a single lower court to make nationwide law.”"

Bikini Car Wash (Funny video)

Abrams: 'Identity politics is exactly who we are and exactly how we won' - "Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams on Wednesday urged Democrats to embrace identity politics, at a time when the issue has become a source of debate within the party.Speaking at the Center for American Progress’s Ideas Conference, Abrams warned that the term “identity politics” had been twisted by those aiming to silence emergent minority voters seeking political power for the first time... Buttigieg, a 2020 presidential contender who is white and gay, ignited a fierce debate among Democrats earlier this month when he said that “so-called identity politics” had contributed to a “crisis of belonging” in the country that has “divided and carved up” people of different backgrounds... In his speech to a prominent LGBTQ group, Buttigieg said that “divisive lines of thinking” had seeped into the Democratic Party, leaving some feeling as if they need to “choose between supporting an auto worker and supporting a trans woman of color, without stopping to think about the fact that sometimes the auto worker is a trans woman of color.”"
I guess this is why she won. Oh wait, she didn't.
Then again some people claim Bernie won in 2016

An Influencer With Two Million Followers Couldn't Sell 36 Items From Her Brand

White Women Can Now Go To Dinners So That They Can Be Shamed For Racism - "Race To Dinner is aimed at white women and was co-founded by Saira Rao after her 2018 congressional run, according to the website.The group’s website points out that the company’s goal isn’t to make white women comfortable. Its aim is to be seen and heard by white women, whose only job is to sit during the dinner and “bear witness” to their pain, which they say white women have caused... Even if you don’t think that you are racist, you are, according to Race To Dinner. Denouncing Trump, the KKK and Nazis does not exempt you from racism, this group says. Rather, “as a white person in America, you are an active participant in upholding white supremacy.” Everyone is a part of the system, the website says, but “Black and Brown” people are “on the receiving end of white supremacy” while white women “are on the giving end.”"

Did Cellphones Bring Down Crime Rates in the '90s? - "The intriguing new theory suggests that the arrival of mobile phones made holding territory less important, which reduced intergang conflict and lowered profits from drug sales.Lena Edlund, a Columbia University economist, and Cecilia Machado, of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, lay out the data in a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. They estimate that the diffusion of smartphones could explain 19 to 29 percent of the decline in homicides seen from 1990 to 2000... The criminologist Maria Tcherni-Buzzeo published a review of the contending theories in 2018 that found no fewer than 24 different explanations for why crime began a multi-decade decline in the early 1990s, through economic times good and bad, in different countries and cities, under draconian policing regimes and more progressive ones... For the period from 1990 to 1999, the Brennan Center found that all the following factors combined explained only about a quarter of the drop: increased incarceration, increased police numbers, aging population, growth in income, decreased alcohol consumption, and unemployment. They also concluded that the decrease in environmental lead exposure and crack use and the increase in abortions “possibly” had some effect... While most of the researchers above have focused narrowly on the 1990s crime decline, Tcherni-Buzzeo has a different temporal perspective. In her review paper, she showed a broader pattern of centuries of declining human violence. From that view, all the ways the entire world has changed can be summed to more peace, and the real aberration was the spike in crime from the 1960s through the 1980s."

Ultra-Orthodox Jews Flee After Protesters Strip To Bras - "Hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jews clashed with police in Jerusalem over the weekend in protest of the Eurovision Song Contest final, which was held on Shabbat... The protestors, shouting “Shabbes” in Yiddish, claimed the scheduling of the international contest was a “desecration” of the Jewish day of rest, the BBC reported. A small group of women held a counter-protest by taking off their shirts, revealing their bras and causing the protesters to go elsewhere. Orthodox Jews live by strict modesty codes and are forbidden from looking on immodestly-dressed women."