Links - 9th July 2019 (1)

More minors offering sex online: Lawyers - "An underage girl was so desperate for male companionship and validation that she advertised in online sex forums for boyfriends.Apart from having sex with them, she would also shower them with gifts and monetary favours... Lawyer Gloria James-Civetta told TNP that she now handles 12 to 18 cases a year of underage commercial sex after a steady rise of such cases over the years."
Underaged girls nowadays can afford to have sugar babies?

Man who punched women when they refused sex gets jail - "Abdul Rahman A Karim, 35, met two of the three women on online classifieds site Locanto, where they had advertised their sexual services.One of the women was an 18-year-old student who had posted an advertisement on Locanto in July last year, saying she was selling her virginity to the highest bidder as she was "really in need of cash".The girl, whose identity is protected by gag order, was contacted by Abdul Rahman, who offered her S$5,000.They met at Aljunied MRT Station on the evening of Aug 20 last year and went to a hotel.After showering, the girl asked Abdul Rahman to pay her the S$5,000 before having sex, but the man refused, saying he would pay her after.He kissed her but the girl pushed him away. Abdul Rahman then punched her on her head, before grabbing her and swinging her towards the bed.Abdul Rahman covered her mouth with a hand before punching her head three to four times.She also refused a demand from him for oral sex, pushing him away and screaming for help. By this time, she was naked as her towel had fallen off during the assault... He had met another woman on Locanto in November 2017. He agreed to pay the 21-year-old pub singer S$800 for two sessions of sex, and they met later that month at a void deck.Abdul Rahman claimed that he had forgotten to bring the money and asked the woman to meet him at a place he claimed was his home.At a staircase landing, Abdul Rahman began kissing and touching the woman, but she pushed him away and demanded the cash first.They began arguing about the money and Abdul Rahman punched the woman's face and stomach, while the woman hit him twice in his back and shouted for help.After punching the woman four to five times in the head, Abdul Rahman fled and she called the police... The third victim was a 32-year-old jobless woman Abdul Rahman met on a mobile application.They met at a hotel on the night of Jan 10 last year. However, after Abdul Rahman kissed the woman, she changed her mind about having sex with him and said she wanted to go home.This upset Abdul Rahman, who began arguing with her. As the woman tried to leave, he punched her in her ribs and body.He also hit her on the jaw when she reached for the phone to call reception and report the assault.The pair had "a quick session of intercourse" before Abdul Rahman left the room and the woman called the police.""
Interestingly the sentence for 3 attacks (and 1 incident that sounds rapey) is much less than for sex with a 15 year old

"I Now Understand How Nelson Mandela Felt" - "The permanent suspension only lasted for a day, but the experience was traumatic and lasting. I now understand how Nelson Mandela felt. If anything, my ordeal was even more damaging. Mandela may have had to endure 27 years of incarceration, but at least his male privilege protected him from ever having to put up with mansplaining, or being subject to wolf-whistling by grubby proles on a building site... Unfortunately, those who fight for the progressive cause are continually bombarded by alt-right trolls who like to engage in a form of harassment known as “debate.” Only a few days before my suspension, a misogynist referred to me as “shrill and humourless.” As I was quick to point out, humour is a patriarchal construct. This is why it has been so gratifying to see the success of our current wave of feminist comedians, those brave women who are subverting the genre by ensuring that it doesn’t make anyone laugh... In my absence from Twitter, I took the opportunity to spend some time at a resort in Val d’Isère, where I could relax and contemplate my oppression. I even managed to write a book which I have entitled Woke: A Guide to Social Justice. I did want to call it My Struggle, but that title was already taken apparently.I am a healer, a weaver of dreams. I have been put on this earth to defend minorities and fight for social justice. My work is not about ego. It is so much bigger than me. So please make sure you spread the word about my new book so that as many copies as possible can be sold."

17 years’ jail for man who raped underage girl at staircase landing - "Tee began to send sexually explicit messages to the teen, asking if she wanted to have sex with him. She declined.He then asked her for intimate photos and when she did not oblige, he pestered her.She eventually gave in to his requests and sent him six photographs, some of which were photos of her topless.He threatened to disseminate her photos when she did not comply with his request to send more of such photos."
It's so easy to get girls to send you nude photos?

One day after announcing wage gap plan, report shows men are paid more than women in Kamala Harris' office - "Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) may have wanted to check the books in her own office before announcing her strict plan to end the "wage gap" if she becomes president... If a company can't meet the threshold of justification for their wage differences, they will face massive fines - a point Harris bragged about repeatedly... The penalties outlined by Harris' team include a fine of 1% of the company's profits for every 1% of a "wage gap" that exists. Harris' plan would force companies to reveal the "total pay and total compensation gap that exists between men and women, regardless of job titles, experience, and performance."
Companies would just not hire women. Then she'd force companies to hire women. So they'd close down (or stay small)

Why America Can’t Solve Homelessness - "Just four years ago, Utah was the poster child for a new approach to homelessness, a solution so simple you could sum it up in five words: Just give homeless people homes.In 2005, the state and its capital started providing no-strings-attached apartments to the “chronically” homeless — people who had lived on the streets for at least a year and suffered from mental illness, substance abuse or a physical disability. Over the next 10 years, Utah built hundreds of housing units, hired dozens of social workers ― and reduced chronic homelessness by 91 percent... While Salt Lake City targeted a small subset of the homeless population, the overall problem got worse. Between 2005 and 2015, while the number of drug-addicted and mentally ill homeless people fell dramatically, the number of people sleeping in the city’s emergency shelter more than doubled. Since then, unsheltered homelessness has continued to rise. According to 2018 figures, the majority of unhoused families and single adults in Salt Lake City are experiencing homelessness for the first time. “People thought that if we built a few hundred housing units we’d be out of the woods forever,” said Glenn Bailey, the executive director of Crossroads Urban Center, a Salt Lake City food bank. “But if you don’t change the reasons people become homeless in the first place, you’re just going to have more people on the streets.”... In 2012, researchers found that a $100 increase in monthly rent in big cities was associated with a 15 percent rise in homelessness. The effect was even stronger in smaller cities... While city residents consistently tell pollsters that they support homeless services in principle, specific proposals to build shelters or expand services face vociferous local opposition. “The biggest hindrance to solving homelessness is that city residents keep demanding the least effective policies,” said Sara Rankin, the director of the Homeless Rights Advocacy Project at Seattle University School of Law. The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that punishing homeless people makes it harder for them to find housing and get work. Nonetheless, the most common demands from urban voters are for politicians to increase arrests, close down soup kitchens and impose entry requirements and drug tests in shelters. "

College suspends young mother for posing with gun at gun range. She’s suing. - "The college, which is part of the St. Johns County School District, suspended Dallas after another student reported a Facebook photo of her and her fiance “holding legally purchased and lawfully possessed firearms at a gun range in Palatka”"

Convert a photo of data into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet in a snap

Health Impact of Fasting in Saudi Arabia during Ramadan: Association with Disturbed Circadian Rhythm and Metabolic and Sleeping Patterns - "Modern Ramadan practices in Saudi Arabia, which are associated with evening hypercortisolism, are also characterized by altered adipokines patterns, and an abolished hsCRP circadian rhythm, all likely to increase cardiometabolic risk."

College Students Aren't Checking Out Books - "When Yale recently decided to relocate three-quarters of the books in its undergraduate library to create more study space, the students loudly protested... A sit-in, or rather a “browse-in,” was held in Bass Library to show the administration how college students still value the presence of books. Eventually the number of volumes that would remain was expanded, at the cost of reducing the number of proposed additional seats in a busy central location... Buried in a slide deck about circulation statistics from Yale’s library was an unsettling fact: There has been a 64 percent decline in the number of books checked out by undergraduates from Bass Library over the past decade. Yale’s experience is not at all unique—indeed, it is commonplace. University libraries across the country, and around the world, are seeing steady, and in many cases precipitous, declines in the use of the books on their shelves... College students at UVA checked out 238,000 books during the school year a decade ago; last year, that number had shrunk to just 60,000... At the same time that books increasingly lie dormant, library spaces themselves remain vibrant—Snell Library at Northeastern now receives well over 2 million visits a year—as retreats for focused study and dynamic collaboration, and as sites of an ever wider array of activities and forms of knowledge creation and expression, including, but also well beyond, the printed word. It should come as no surprise that library leadership, in moments of dispassionate assessment often augmented by hearing from students who have trouble finding seats during busy periods, would seek to rezone areas occupied by stacks for more individual and group work. Yet it often does come as an unwelcome surprise to many, especially those with a powerful emotional attachment to what libraries should look like and be... academics often approach books like “sous-chefs gutting a fish.”With the rapidly growing number of books available online, that mode of slicing and dicing has largely become digital. Where students or faculty once pulled volumes off the shelf to scan a table of contents or index, grasp a thesis by reading an introduction, check a reference, or trace a footnote, today they consult the library’s swiftly expanding ebook collection (our library’s ebook collection has multiplied tenfold over the past decade), Google Books, or Amazon’s Look Inside... today’s undergraduates have read fewer books before they arrive on campus than in prior decades, and just placing students in an environment with more books is unlikely to turn that around. (The time to acquire the reading bug is much earlier than freshman year.) And while correlation does not equal causation, it is all too conspicuous that we reached Peak Book in universities just before the iPhone came out... we should beware the peril of books as glorified wallpaper. The value of books, after all, is what lies beneath their covers, as lovely as those covers may be."
Virtue signalling!

What Can Prewar Germany Teach Us About Social-Media Regulation? - "State control over radio had been intended to defend democracy. It unintentionally laid the groundwork for the Nazi propaganda machine... As the Weimar Republic became more and more politically unstable, Bredow and others pushed through reforms in 1926 and 1932 that mandated direct state supervision of radio content. Bredow believed that increased state direction would prevent Weimar democracy from failing.Ironically, this effort played right into the Nazis’ hands, and meant that the Nazis could seize immediate control over radio content when they came to power"
Everyone loves censorship when they are in power
Presumably the liberal answer is to regulate social media so tightly that "Nazis" never come to power

Why Do Employers Lowball Creatives? A New Study Has Answers - "On one hand, passion for one's work can lead to greater satisfaction. But the researchers' new paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, "Understanding Contemporary Forms of Exploitation: Attributions of Passion Serve to Legitimize the Poor Treatment of Workers," lays bare the unique ways passionate workers can be taken advantage of in a culture that encourages us to find our life's calling at work.Through eight different studies with over 2,400 participants, researchers discovered that people find it more acceptable for managers to ask passionate workers to work extra hours without additional pay, sacrifice sleep and family time, and take on demeaning tasks outside of their job descriptions."
If non-pecuniary rewards should not be considered, should we pay hardship pay to compensate for onerous jobs?

Can the Census Ask About Citizenship?
Somehow this article manages to ignore the question of whether the non-citizen population should be counted in allocating political representatives. Presumably the liberal answer is yes, since they live in the country and deserve representation too
The article also manages to not mention the three fifths compromise applying to slaves and Native Americans and how this might be linked to citizenship not mattering for political representation