Links - 19th July 2019 (1)

Sorry, keto fans, you're probably not in ketosis - "The diet gets billed as a miraculously enjoyable diet—eat all the fat you want, just cut out the carbs. But the ketogenic diet (also called keto) was never supposed to be fun. It was supposed to treat severe epilepsy. And as a medical treatment, it was only intended to be administered under the supervision of trained nutritionists and physicians... because staying in true ketosis is exceptionally challenging for adults... the real problem isn’t going over your carb limit—it’s the protein...If you give your body any more than the absolute minimum amount of protein that it needs, it will immediately break it down into carbs. This is why keto sites often give a guideline for not eating too much protein. The problem is that there’s no one guideline that works for everyone, and without specifically tailoring keto to your body it’d be easy to accidentally ingest too much protein. On the other hand, you can’t eat no protein. You need it to keep your muscles functioning and to build hair and nails and to manufacture hormones.This is why epilepsy patients have to get prescribed diets from profession nutritionists. Without getting into true ketosis, dieters risk ingesting an enormous amount of fat—and potentially a lot of saturated fat, if you’re eating animal meat—without any of the fat-burning effects of ketosis... Of course, ketosis itself comes with its own risks. Circulating ketone bodies make your blood too acidic, and your body will draw calcium from your bones as a buffer. This also happens in ketoacidosis, which is when you have so many ketone bodies that it becomes dangerous and will draw far more calcium out of your bones. Giancoli notes that dieters usually aren't in such an extreme starvation mode that they develop ketoacidosis. There are few to no studies on healthy adults undertaking a non-therapeutic ketogenic diet, but studies of epileptic children on the diet show increased bone demineralization and high calcium levels in the blood... Without the fiber from whole grains and fruits, you’re also likely to get constipated and have other digestive issues. Plus you need fiber to maintain a health gut microbiome, which tends to come from the kind of whole grains that you can’t eat on the diet, and though it is possible to get enough fiber from vegetables on the keto diet you have to carefully monitor your eating to ensure that. Neither Giancoli nor Fung any of the other dietitians and nutritionists who evaluated keto for a recent US News & World Report diets ranking would recommend it. Many of them said they had serious concerns about long-term safety of doing keto"

This Is How 30 Places That ‘GoT’ Was Filmed In Look In Real Life

Mark Zuckerberg’s Call for Regulation Will Only Benefit Facebook - "With increased government oversight, Facebook’s leadership will finally be able to pass the buck to someone else. The government will provide them with a clear set of rules that they will be accountable for. Any negative press coverage that occurs outside of those guidelines, will not be attributable to their company but to the rule-making body of the government. This will allow Facebook’s leadership to regain credibility within a clearly definable framework that they are not responsible for creating.But perhaps Zuckerberg’s appeal for regulation is even more cunning. Government regulation will undoubtedly be met with higher costs. Internet companies will have to spend more on staffing to be in compliance with the increased burdens implemented by the rule-making body. We saw this play out in the banking industry after the Great Recession. A study conducted last year found that since 2009, banks have been fined a total of $345 billion dollars in penalties and noncompliance costs. Further, another study found that in 2016 banks spent $100 billion dollars on regulatory compliance alone.Large internet companies like Facebook and Google will easily absorb the strain of increased regulatory costs. It is the smaller businesses that will feel the financial squeeze. With increased regulatory compliance spending, smaller startups will face an even bigger hill to climb to compete with the likes of Facebook. Ironically enough, in an age when presidential candidates such as Elizabeth Warren are clamoring against tech monopolies, Zuckerberg is appealing to the government to help him create one. It is a clear move towards regulatory capture"

GDPR After One Year: Costs and Unintended Consequences - Truth on the Market Truth on the Market - "GDPR can be thought of as a privacy “bill of rights.” Many of these new rights have come with unintended consequences. If your account gets hacked, the hacker can use the right of access to get all of your data. The right to be forgotten is in conflict with the public’s right to know a bad actor’s history (and many of them are using the right to memory hole their misdeeds). The right to data portability creates another attack vector for hackers to exploit. And the right to opt-out of data collection creates a free-rider problem where users who opt-in subsidize the privacy of those who opt-out...
Compliance costs are astronomical
Prior to GDPR going into effect, it was estimated that total GDPR compliance costs for US firms with more than 500 employees “could reach $150 billion.” (Fortune)...
“About 220,000 name tags will be removed in Vienna by the end of [2018], the city’s housing authority said. Officials fear that they could otherwise be fined up to $23 million, or about $1,150 per name.” (The Washington Post)
Other reports claim that GDPR does not require removing name tags from buildings, but it is telling that ambiguity in the law caused the Vienna housing authority to believe it did (derStandard)...
“Hundreds of companies compete to place ads on webpages or collect data on their users, led by Google, Facebook and their subsidiaries. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which took effect in May, imposes stiff requirements on such firms and the websites who use them. After the rule took effect in May, Google’s tracking software appeared on slightly more websites, Facebook’s on 7% fewer, while the smallest companies suffered a 32% drop, according to Ghostery, which develops privacy-enhancing web technology.” (WSJ)...
Startups: One study estimated that venture capital invested in EU startups fell by as much as 50 percent due to GDPR implementation. (NBER)
Mergers and acquisitions: “55% of respondents said they had worked on deals that fell apart because of concerns about a target company’s data protection policies and compliance with GDPR” (WSJ)
Scientific research: “[B]iomedical researchers fear that the EU’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will make it harder to share information across borders or outside their original research context.” (POLITICO)...
GDPR has been the death knell for small and medium-sized businesses
SMBs have left the EU market in droves (or shut down entirely)"

Husband should not get any part of $2 million marital flat, judge rules - "A judge has ruled that a husband should get nothing from a divorcing couple's $2.05 million flat, taking the unusual step of departing from the usual formula when splitting matrimonial assets.Justice Choo Han Teck reversed a family court decision that gave the 46-year-old husband $363,960, according to a formula which gave him 18 per cent... The wife's lawyer Foo Soon Yien argued that the husband had contributed nothing, including financially, to the buying of the flat. The husband's lawyer Tan Yew Fai, however, pointed to the family car and sofa set the husband had bought, and highlighted his efforts in raising their child."
Gender equality!

Planned Obsolescence is largely a myth, besides a few blatant examples. There ar.. - "There are a few factors that drive consumer perception of planned obsolescence
-Demand for cheaper products: Consumers tend to prefer cheaper products. This means cheaper materials and a product that doesn't last as long. Common household appliances cost much less than they did in the earlier half of the 20th century, and people act surprised when they don't last as long as an appliance from the 1950s that cost more than twice as much
-Survivor bias: Only durable products from the past survived, broken and unrepairable products were sent to the landfill. Therefore people only see the most durable products of the past and assume everything made back then was just as durable.
-Technical obsolescence: Old products become less useful as technology progresses. Why use a 100 year old still functional device when it is inefficient and technologically obsolete?
The article even mentions some of these factors with regards to the so-called planned obsolescence of light bulbs. Longer lasting bulbs are dimmer and less efficient, so it makes sense to design them in such a way to maximize light output over a certain timespan. "
On "The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy"

Professor accused of ‘hostile learning environment’ for assigning male authors - "A 22-year old female University of Utah student reported her business professor to campus administrators for, among other things, assigning too many historical texts written by influential male economists of the past.“I understand the importance of studying the work of those before us and the importance of context,” wrote the student in a complaint to the university’s bias reporting system, where she labeled the professor’s transgressions “derogatory,” “degrading,” and “intimidating,” thereby causing a “hostile learning environment.”... “I believe it to no longer be necessary when teaching the foundations of our country’s economic system and those who helped build [its] ideals to be presented in conjunction with their sexist beliefs that have already planted their roots within our global and local communities,” the student stated in her complaint, filed in December 2018 and recently obtained by The College Fix through a public records act request.The complaint was among 27 bias reports lodged at the public university in the Fall 2018 semester, according to the results of the request. The documents provided by the University of Utah redact all personal identifying information.In the female student’s bias report, she stated that while her professor “never applauded these philosophers on their sexist beliefs,” he “never outright said they were wrong” and “continued to place them upon a pedestal.”... She continued that she began to “fear” his sexist banter and said she “also began to fear the readings and I could not even finish one assigned reading due to its clear sexist message.”...
other bias incidents reported last semester include:
· A student in the College of Social Work complaining about racial bias by a professor who indicated students of color should be able to speak first in class in order to “decenter the whiteness” of the classroom.
· When a black male student walked into the student union office, an employee appeared “visibly taken aback” and called out, “can we help you?” The student responded he had a meeting scheduled there, and he had never had to explain himself when he previously walked into the office...
A communications professor discussing concealed-carry of weapons likened the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to the First Amendment, arguing that since a university can set up “free speech zones” on campus, he would be setting up a “Second Amendment zone” in his classroom. The professor had taped off a three-foot by three-foot square in the back of the room that he said students can “share with all other gun carriers.”“As a person who has my CCW and carries a weapon daily, this is discriminatory and illegal under Utah Code 76-10-500,” wrote the student.
On September 7, a group of four male students were sitting at a table studying. A female student just finishing up a group project noticed the table of male students being “loud and distracting.” At one point, a young man wearing a black shirt and khaki shorts complained that his laptop computer battery was dying. One of the other men at the table offered his charger to the student but he says the charger is incompatible with his laptop. The student offering the charger says it will definitely work if you “just force it.” The student put his hands around his mouth and loudly whispered, “That’s rape. I’m not raping my computer.”"

Bias report filed against professor for defending Brett Kavanaugh - "In a University of Oregon classroom in October of 2018, a professor was finishing his lecture when he made a rhetorical aside. The professor was discussing a PowerPoint slide that referenced “Potiphar’s Wife,” a Biblical story in which a married woman makes an offer to have sex with one of her husband’s slaves, Joseph, only to have him turn her down. To punish him, Potiphar’s wife then accuses Joseph of rape.“This is an issue in our society,” the professor allegedly said. “Now that you all know what this phrase means, you can go use it to describe the Kavanaugh trial,” he is recounted as saying... According to one incident report, a lesbian student was in her dorm room with her bisexual girlfriend one October night, watching videos and studying, and heard someone yell “Shut the fuck up, you fucking faggot” in the hallway. The student opened the door, looked out, and didn’t see anyone in the hallway, but said she was “80% sure” the slur came from the room next door to hers. She knocked on the door three times and no one answered.“I don’t necessarily believe the slur was directed at me, but it still stressed me out to hear it used so loudly and freely,” the student reported. Nonetheless, she reported the name of the student living next to her to the university, based on suspicion alone."

Student files bias complaint against dorm roommate for watching Ben Shapiro video - "a Michigan State University student awoke from his nap to see his roommate sitting at his computer. There was a video playing, and the student realized his roommate was watching a video of conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.The newly awoken student then took to his own computer to file a complaint with the administration’s bias reporting system against his roommate for watching the Shapiro video... Young was unable to give an estimate of costs to run the bias reporting program, although she noted the campus Office of Institutional Equity has one employee dedicated to following up on reports of bias."

Making jokes at Portland State gets you reported to its bias response team - "Portland State has long been a hotbed of progressive activism. In just the past few weeks, psychology student Lesley Guerra attempted to testify before the university Board of Trustees in favor of armed police officers on campus, but was repeatedly shouted down by protesters.Earlier in March, pro-gun activist Michael Strickland came to speak on campus but was prevented from doing so by a bell-ringing activist who stood next to Strickland as he attempted to speak. Campus police later said they were unable to do anything to restrain the disruptive bell-ringer.

Off-campus road rage incident reported to university’s ‘Hate or Bias’ system - "a student-athlete approached a professor to have a sheet of paper signed for the athletic department. The professor allegedly recognized the student right away, saying “Oh yeah, the minorities are always easiest to remember.” The student-athlete conceded in the report that he or she is the only minority in a class of 15 people. The professor was then reported to the “Hate or Bias” website."

‘Cry Closet’ installed at University of Utah - "An art student at the University of Utah has built a “Cry Closet” designed to allow the campus community a private and safe space to blow off some steam during finals.The tall wooden box, complete with stuffed animals inside, is officially titled “Safe Place for Stressed Out Students Otherwise Known as The Cry Closet,” and it went viral on Twitter after a student there tweeted images of it out and said: “so my school installed a cry closet in the library LMFAOOOOOOOOO what is higher education.”"