Links - 25th August 2019 (2)

One nation under Galt: How Ayn Rand's toxic philosophy permanently transformed America - "Ayn Rand (1905-1982) helped make the United States into one of the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world, a neo-Dickensian society where healthcare is only for those who can afford it, and where young people are coerced into huge student-loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy."
But the ones "coercing" young people into huge student-loan debt ar ethe people who hate Rand

These seven moral rules unite human beings, according to research - "Curry’s group studied ethnographic accounts of ethics from 60 societies, across over 600 sources. The universal rules of morality are:
Help your family
Help your group
Return favors
Be brave
Defer to superiors
Divide resources
Respect others’ property"
This shows just how alien liberal morality is to all other moral systems

How Malaysia has learned nothing from Japan - "We cannot truly be great until we remove the things that prevent us from getting there — our preoccupation with tribalism, pork barrel politics, the national tidak apa (it doesn’t matter) culture and the general slipshod nature that is associated with the Malaysian way of doing things... Don’t talk to me about cars when Malaysians have yet to understand the virtues of punctuality and efficient customer service.It isn’t just Japan we can learn from — China is industrious, with the most sophisticated manufacturing supply chain in the world, Korea has made marketing its culture an art and Thailand’s economy has proven resilient even in times of political turmoil.I love my country but sometimes it’s difficult to be proud of it; when we have politicians with limited imagination, tunnel vision and a knack for infighting and a populace forever keening over racial issues."

Pursuing 'efficiency' in the public sector: why privatisation is not necessarily the answer - "There is a common misconception that the private sector is inherently more efficient at the provision of public services. But this is not supported by theory or evidence... Public services are provided mainly in areas where standard competitive market conditions do not apply. For example, distributional outcomes are often important: public services are generally thought best to follow need rather than willingness or capacity to pay (like justice or disability services), and minimum service levels are often desired even if they are high cost (like services to rural and remote communities)... A review of 129 reports and case studies undertaken by Graeme Hodge found that outsourcing works well in some cases and badly in others. And it is worth noting that many studies that found benefits did not take into account the broader economic and social costs of outsourcing. For example, outsourcing frequently results in significant job cuts, and the welfare costs of increased unemployment may exceed any savings. This lack of support for private sector primacy continues to be found in more recent studies. Public and private hospitals show similar efficiency levels once their different roles are taken into account. Public and private schools show similar levels of attainment once the demographic profile of the students is factored in."

Is the private sector more efficient? A cautionary tale - "This review finds no conclusive evidence that one model of ownership (i.e. public, private or mixed) is intrinsically more efficient than the others, irrespective of how efficiency is defined. Instead the literature suggests that the efficiency of service provision is dependent on the type of service (health, education, etc.) and other specific contextual factors (e.g. regulation, market competition)...
Health: Most of the literature identified in this review is focused on the health sector. In this sector there is no conclusive evidence that either public or private provision is more efficient. This finding is replicated across high-, middle- and low-income countries. However, the literature does highlight a difference between private for-profit and private non-profit providers. While private non-profit providers have similar levels of efficiency to public hospitals, many studies find that private for-profit hospitals have lower levels of efficiency than the other two models...
Privatisation of state owned enterprises: Studies which look at the comparative efficiency of enterprises before and after privatisation (i.e. the transfer of ownership from public to private) find that privatisation can lead to improved efficiency, but this is not always the outcome. A significant number of high-income country studies find efficiency improves following privatisation. Evidence from low- and middle-income countries is limited and more mixed. The studies suggest there needs to be additional factors (e.g. a developed stock market) or prior reforms (e.g. national banking reforms) for privatisation to improve efficiency in these contexts."

Myth 5: The private sector is more efficient than the public sector - "The largest study of the efficiency of privatized companies looked at all European companies privatized during 1980-2009. It compared their performance with companies that remained public and with their own past performance as public companies. The result? The privatized companies performed worse than those that remained public and continued to do so for up to 10 years after privatization. Even in the super-competitive telecoms sector, where customers have benefited from lower costs and increasing variety of services over the years, this result holds. A global survey found that ‘privatized sectors perform significantly worse’ than telecom companies remaining in state hands"

Why Were Medieval Europeans So Obsessed With Long, Pointy Shoes? - "Shoes with absurdly long toes were expensive and would clearly impair the wearer from efficiently partaking in any kind of physical labor. So they were also an indicator of leisure and luxury, free of extraneous effort or the tyranny of practicality... Poulaines stand out even more because medieval fashion was often governed by clean lines and a practical, chaste minimalism, Shawcross says. (Poulaines also marked a rare period in history when men’s fashion outshone women’s in terms of sheer frill, according to Keily.) Perhaps the best explanation for this confounding flamboyance is that the shoes emerged soon after the Black Death killed 30 to 60 percent of the population of Europe. “It may have been a reaction to a type of austerity,” Keily says. “The plague left a landscape with a lot of people who had lost close family members, a generation of mourning. Suddenly there were less people who had more money to spend on clothing.” So poulaines may have been a kind of retail therapy for coping with the surprise disappearance of 25 million people. Keily points to other fashion trends that followed widespread losses of life, such as the conspicuous designs that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, following World War II... Eventually, the English crown felt the need to intervene, in part because of the lascivious connotations that the increasingly extended toe-tips carried. “People thought the longer the toe, the more masculine the wearer,” Shawcross says. “But some people weren’t keen on that connotation.” Parliament equated wearing the shoes to public indecency, and stepped forward to put limits on a variety of racy fashions"

The Surprising Resilience of Failed Fast Food Chains - "while Kenny Rogers was winding down its U.S. operations it was doing the opposite in Asia, having been bought by a Malaysian firm in 2008. Three years later, the chain was earning $100 million in revenue—nearly all from overseas—despite the fact Kenny Rogers is presumably less of a draw in Asia than he might be in the U.S."

Super Quick Video Tips: How to Open a Stubborn Jar Lid - YouTube

If asked the right way, toddlers will choose broccoli over cake, study finds - ""Would you like cake or broccoli?" If you ask a child under the age of 3, the answer—eight times out of 10—will be broccoli.But this has less to do with parents successfully instilling healthy food preferences than the order in which the choices are presented. A study led by the University of California, Irvine and published in the online journal PLOS One has found that toddlers are highly subject to "recency bias" when faced with "or" questions: They tend to pick the last option, even if it's not what they actually want."

Want to expand your toddler's vocabulary? Find another child - "Previous work has shown that infants attend selectively to their mother's voice over another female's voice. But new research suggests that children learn new words best from other children."

Domestic abuse cuts both ways, and differently, for women and men - "women tend to endure the most severe kinds of physical violence, including homicide, in part because men are often stronger.What is not so well known, however, is that males are more likely to be recipients of different kinds of spousal violence — such as slapping, kicking, biting and hitting with the fist. Men also more often experience emotional abuse when their jealous spouses try to limit their contact with friends or family, or demand to know who they were with and where they were at all times... 418,000 Canadian males and 341,000 females report being victims of physical or sexual spousal violence... Lysova knows the kind of data they’re uncovering can disturb some people, who don’t want to see information about men’s domestic anguish used to erode hard-won programs for female victims of violence. But Lysova emphasizes that supporting survivors “should not be a zero-sum game” in which only one gender receives empathy."... By 2014... the proportion of women reporting spousal violence had dropped dramatically, to 3.5 per cent. But the segment of spousal violence against males had declined slower, to 4.2 per cent... While there are now hundreds of shelters across the country for women who are fleeing domestic abuse, Lysova said, “We know there are no shelters for men in Canada. Where do they go?”"
This replicates research showing that women are more abusive to their spouses than men (since 70% of non-reciprocal partner violence is caused by the woman)
So much for feminism being about men too

Availability of cookies during an academic course session affects evaluation of teaching.

Segments of Random Thoughts - Posts - "How's your comic coming?"
"Pretty cutting-edge. The characters are queer POC."
"How about their personalities?"
"Their what"

Britney Spears' music used by British navy to scare off Somali pirates - "Her songs were chosen by the security team because they thought the pirates would hate them most. These guys can't stand western culture or music, making Britney's hits perfect. As soon as the pirates get a blast of Britney, they move on as quickly as they can"

Hospital Lets Kids Drive To Surgery To Help Reduce Anxiety And Stress, And It's A Success - "The cars aren't just easy to drive around in and look cute but are fully equipped. Both the one-seater cars come with a stereo, a collection of preloaded music, and an MP3 player which can be operated by the children or by using a remote control. The cars even have working headlights, doors that open, and even back up and dashboard lights. This way the children are made to be excited by driving the cars into the operating room. They are so preoccupied with the car that they forget about the surgery itself."

British man calls S’pore a Disneyland for adults with little racism after 9 years here - "When asked if he faced racism in Singapore, Francis, a black British man, said it was minimal.
“I can’t say there’s much… There’s a tiny, tiny amount of racism here, but it’s so small it’s ridiculous.
I would say there’s none.”...
he said even though he “mixes a lot” with the Malays and the Indians, he does not do that much with the Singaporean Chinese. When asked to elaborate on his answer, he said he does not see a lot of Chinese locals out on the weekends.
“If you’re living next door (to a Singaporean Chinese), you don’t normally see them. They’re either inside doing something, or they’re out.
Their children are studying.”...
Francis also spoke of his quest to find the best chicken rice in Singapore.He said that when he first came here, he spent a year just eating chicken rice.He tried the dish from all over Singapore in order to find out the best one there is.In his second year, he switched to wanton noodle soup, and then to laksa for his third year.He said with a laugh, laksa is “completely different no matter where you go”.However, he did not say in the interview which place he thinks has the best chicken rice, wanton noodle soup, or laksa."
Maybe Sangeetha would say Malays are more oppressed than black people
Presumably you should only shut up and listen when a minority is talking when that minority is complaining - praise needs to be ignored as it is problematic (for the narrative)
Lived experience is only valid when it advances victim culture