Links - 24th September 2019 (2)

Police Erased Suspects Face Tattoos for Line-Up Photo - "A federal court in Oregon is evaluating whether Portland police violated the rights of a bank robbery suspect by digitally removing the man’s face tattoos from his mugshot and using the altered image in a photo lineup. The question before the court is whether the photo constitutes fabricated evidence... Appearing before U.S. District Judge Marco A. Hernandez, Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Maloney said police were right to alter Allen’s photo before presenting it to eyewitnesses.“The whole idea was to make Mr. Allen blend in so his photo wouldn’t stand out’’ in the lineup, Maloney said.Maloney argued that police changed Allen’s picture so that it would emulate the disguise worn by Allen when he committed the robberies."

Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers - "Here’s the problem with the current immigration debate: Neither side is revealing the whole picture. Trump might cite my work, but he overlooks my findings that the influx of immigrants can potentially be a net good for the nation, increasing the total wealth of the population. Clinton ignores the hard truth that not everyone benefits when immigrants arrive. For many Americans, the influx of immigrants hurts their prospects significantly.This second message might be hard for many Americans to process, but anyone who tells you that immigration doesn’t have any negative effects doesn’t understand how it really works. When the supply of workers goes up, the price that firms have to pay to hire workers goes down. Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent. Even after the economy has fully adjusted, those skill groups that received the most immigrants will still offer lower pay relative to those that received fewer immigrants. Both low- and high-skilled natives are affected by the influx of immigrants. But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip. The monetary loss is sizable. The typical high school dropout earns about $25,000 annually. According to census data, immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent. As a result, the earnings of this particularly vulnerable group dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year... immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer. And the additional profits are so large that the economic pie accruing to all natives actually grows... When we look at the overall value of immigration, there’s one more complicating factor: Immigrants receive government assistance at higher rates than natives. The higher cost of all the services provided to immigrants and the lower taxes they pay (because they have lower earnings) inevitably implies that on a year-to-year basis immigration creates a fiscal hole of at least $50 billion—a burden that falls on the native population. What does it all add up to? The fiscal burden offsets the gain from the $50 billion immigration surplus, so it’s not too farfetched to conclude that immigration has barely affected the total wealth of natives at all. Instead, it has changed how the pie is split... Those winners are primarily their employers. And the immigrants themselves come out ahead, too. Put bluntly, immigration turns out to be just another income redistribution program... we’re worrying about the wrong things, with policy fights focused on how many and which immigrants to accept, and not enough on how to mitigate the harm they create along the way."
Ironically, those who push for uncontrolled immigration are the same ones who push for higher minimum wages - and then say without immigrants working below minimum wage, the economy would collapse

How the Jews invented God, and made him great - "Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe in a single, omnipotent deity that created the heavens and earth. But if he was and is the only god, why would God need a name? The Bible explicitly tells us that God has one, which indicates he had to be distinguished from other celestial beings, just like humans use names to identify different people... Modern biblical scholarship and archaeological discoveries in and around Israel show that the ancient Israelites did not always believe in a single, universal god. In fact, monotheism is a relatively recent concept, even amongst the People of the Book... The main source for investigating the history of God is, of course, the Bible itself.  When exactly the Jewish holy text reached its final form is unknown. Many scholars believe this happened sometime between the Babylonian exile, which began after the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BCE (some 2600 years ago), and the subsequent periods of Persian and Hellenistic rule.  However, the redactors of the Bible were evidently working off older traditions, Römer says.  “Biblical texts are not direct historical sources. They reflect the ideas, the ideologies of their authors and of course of the historical context in which they were written”... the name "Israel" is probably older than the veneration of Yhwh by this group called Israel, Römer says. “The first tutelary deity they were worshipping was El, otherwise their name would have been Israyahu.”... Yhwh’s penchant for appearing in the biblical narrative on top of mountains and accompanied by dark clouds and thunder, are also typical attributes of a deity originating in the wilderness, possibly a god of storms and fertility... Nor, in ancient Israel, was Yhwh the invisible deity that Jews have refrained from depicting for the last two millennia or so.In the kingdom of Israel, as Hosea 8 and 1 Kings 12:26-29 relate, he was often worshipped in the form of a calf, as the god Baal was. (1 Kings 12:26-29 explains that Jeroboam made two calves, for the sanctuaries at Bethel and Dan, so the people could worship Yhwh there and wouldn’t have to go all the way to Jerusalem. Ergo, in northern Israel at least, the calves were meant to represent Yhwh.)In Jerusalem and Judah, Römer says, Yhwh more frequently took the form of a sun god or a seated deity. Such depictions may have even continued after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian Exile... many scholars agree that Yhwh became the main god of the Jews only after the destruction of the kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians, around 720 BCE."

How America's alt-right got its signature hairstyle - "The Washington Post article took a humorous look at the evolution the hairstyle has undergone in the past months, from hipster affectation to neo-fascist show of power: “Until a few weeks ago, you saw a man with that haircut and assumed he might be a good person to hit on, or to buy small-batch beer from, or to ask the whereabouts of the nearest bicycle shop. Now you see him and wonder if he’s trying to deport half the nation.”"

Alice Teller on Twitter - "Have you ever noticed the popularity of white robots? The reason for these shades of technological white may be racism, according to new research."
"Quite right, CNN. Any fool an see that robots with no rights, who exist purely to serve us without pay should be black."

Dzar Ismail - Don't talk to me about racism lah. I was rejected... - "Don't talk to me about racism lah. I was rejected for roles so many times because of my skin colour. And the whole decision board is Malay. Settle your internal racism first. "
On racism in Singapore
Presumably the logic of not throwing the first stone or the criticism of hypocrisy don't apply to minorities

Here's Why It’s Not Cool That Donald Trump Wants The Constitution Interpreted The Way The Founding Fathers Did
Strange how when it comes to the census counting non-citizens, we must follow the Founding Fathers' intent

Psychiatrist on CNN says Trump may be responsible for more deaths than Hitler. - "“Calling Trump crazy hides the fact that we’re crazy for having elected him,” Frances said on CNN’s Reliable Sources. “And even crazier for allowing his crazy policies to persist. Trump is as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were in the last century. He may be responsible for many million more deaths than they were. He needs to be contained, but he needs to be contained by attacking his policies, not his person.”"

The Current State of the Left - "FUNCTIONAL COUNTRY WITH RIGHTS AND PROTECTIONS
TRUMP ICE RUSSIA CONCENTRATION CAMPS WHITE NATIONALISM THE FLAG
*curl up and look frightened*"

Yasmine Mohammed ياسمين محمد 🦋 on Twitter - "I got an email from Twitter telling me this tweet is in violation of UK law...not Pakistani this time, UK I asked for clarification as to which law prohibits ppl from stating historical fact. I havent heard back yet"

Segments of Random Thoughts - Posts - "The Muslim conquests in India killed tens of millions of people.But yeah, let’s only talk about the British, cause racism."
"The conquest of Afghanistan in the year 1000 was followed by the annihilation of the Hindu population; the region is still called the Hindu Kush, i.e. Hindu slaughter. The conquest of the Vijayanagar empire in 1564 left the capital plus large areas of Karnataka depopulated"

Why Women Are Likelier to Be Hurt in a Car Crash - "“We obviously know a lot of ways that men and women are different bio-mechanically,” he says, in terms of both body size and shape. Female pelvises, for example, are generally wider and more shallow than those of males, and fat is distributed differently. Females typically have more tissue concentrated around the waist and thighs, while in males it’s more concentrated around the belly.“These differences … have the potential to change the ways that seatbelts interact with the body and with our underlying skeletal structures,” Forman said. Subtler deviations exist, too, like the fundamental mechanical properties of bones and ligaments and tissues; hormonal variations can affect the stiffness of tissues and their susceptibility to injury."

Automobile injury trends in the contemporary fleet: Belted occupants in frontal collisions - "Females exhibited a greater risk of lower extremity injury, even after adjusting for age, height, BMI, and delta-V. This suggests that sex itself has an effect on injury tolerance, affecting the tolerance in a manner distinct from differences in anthropometry or collision exposure. Biomechanical factors that may contribute to differences in injury tolerance may include bone mineral density (with earlier onset of osteoporosis in women), differences in local bone and ligament geometry, and differences in bone and ligament material properties"
Women are more prone to injury