Links - 6th September 2019 (2)

Washington owes Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch an apology - "I testified at his Senate hearing, favoring his confirmation despite unrelenting attacks on him as a “rubber stamp” and an ideologue. Gorsuch has proven his detractors wrong and, as this term has proven, he has emerged as one of the most consistent and courageous voices on the Supreme Court. Indeed, a number of senators and pundits in Washington owe Gorsuch an apology for their attacks on someone who is building a new legacy that could be one of the most lasting on the Supreme Court. Gorsuch has been fascinating to watch over the last two years. He has departed repeatedly from the right of the Supreme Court to do what he considers to be the right thing. He remains a conservative justice but, like his predecessor Antonin Scalia, he has shown a sense of his own “true north” judicial compass. In doing so, he has often made both the left and right of the Supreme Court seem shallow and predictable in their rigidity... Kavanaugh also has broken from the right wing of the Supreme Court on occasion... Gorsuch deserves an apology. Many liberal advocates lambasted him despite his stellar reputation as an appellate judge. His actual record was irrelevant to them, and it likely will mean little to them that Gorsuch has now shown more flexibility than certain members in the left wing of the Supreme Court."

Justice Ginsburg on Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh - "'Siegel noted that President Gerald Ford had said he had looked for the best legal mind in the country before selecting Stevens in 1975. He suggested that may not be the criterion for more recent court nominations.But Ginsburg pushed back gently. "I can say that my two newest colleagues are very decent and very smart individuals," she said, referring to Trump's choices of Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh.Later, she invoked the pair when saying "there are a number of cases this term where we didn't divide along so-called party lines.""Keen observers of what the court does will have noticed that I assigned an opinion this term to Justice Kavanaugh and two to Justice Gorsuch." The chance to assign majority opinions is dictated by seniority, so Ginsburg has the power only when Roberts and the court's longest-serving justice, Clarence Thomas, are on the other side'...
Justice Kavanaugh "made history" by being the first justice to hire all female clerks for a single term. As a consequence, Barnes notes, this past term was the first time ever there were more female clerks than male clerks at the Court."
How long before Ruth Bader Ginsburg becomes a Nazi?

Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers - "It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing Co.’s 737 Max crisis: how a company renowned for meticulous design made seemingly basic software mistakes leading to a pair of deadly crashes. Longtime Boeing engineers say the effort was complicated by a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors... Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace -- notably India... one staffer complained about sending drawings back to a team in Russia 18 times before they understood that the smoke detectors needed to be connected to the electrical system, said Cynthia Cole, a former Boeing engineer who headed the engineers’ union from 2006 to 2010.“Engineering started becoming a commodity”... With a strong dollar, a big part of the attraction was price. Engineers in India made around $5 an hour; it’s now $9 or $10, compared with $35 to $40 for those in the U.S. on an H1B visa, he said. But he’d tell clients the cheaper hourly wage equated to more like $80 because of the need for supervision, and he said his firm won back some business to fix mistakes... The 787 entered service three years late and billions of dollars over budget in 2011, in part because of confusion introduced by the outsourcing strategy. Under Dennis Muilenburg, a longtime Boeing engineer who became chief executive in 2015, the company has said that it planned to bring more work back in-house for its newest planes."

Pomperipossa in Monismania - Wikipedia - ""Pomperipossa in Monismania" (also called Pomperipossa in the World Of Money) is a satirical story written by the Swedish children's book author Astrid Lindgren in response to the 102% marginal tax rate that she incurred in 1976... [It] created a major debate about the Swedish tax system.The marginal tax rate above 100%, dubbed the 'Pomperipossa effect', was due to tax legislation that required self-employed individuals to pay both regular income tax and employer's fees.The story, a satirical allegory about a writer of children's books in a distant country, led to a stormy tax debate and is often attributed as a decisive factor in the defeat of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, for the first time in 40 years, in the elections later the same year"

Pomperipossa in Monismania: a true tale of a 102% tax rate in Sweden - ""Creating something of value causes envy. The community cries: no payola! In the banal bickering of bureaucrats you must take part. And help Comrade Castro carry out war in Angola, Or face therapy nursing home style – you old fart,"I find these libertarian type arguments, wherein the government is just there to steal from the people who are creating value, to be disingenuous, and quite puerile.They of course ignore all the external inputs that allow the protagonist to 'create' whatever it is of value that they claim ownership over, such as education, law-and-order, scientific research, and all the other requisites of a functioning society, which are of course funded by taxes."

Pomperipossa in Monismania. - "In the good old days, when the marginal tax rate was at most 83%, there was something called “periodic support”. This meant that, if you – like Pomperipossa in the good old days – had a little bit more money than she needed for bare subsistence, and had some less fortunate relatives or other people you really cared for, you could give them periodic support. These support payments were deductible, and just because of that, it was possible to give them. The welfare cake would still get its reasonable portion, since the one getting the support must pay taxes on it. But one beautiful day the hairs on all the wise men began standing on end again. Perhaps they had heard of a Monismanic son with adequate income giving his poor mom 25 000 in yearly support, so that she could live above poverty. Shame, shame, this is not right, the wise men thought. Support is not the duty of her son, it takes a village. This way we can assure that everyone is equally poor – or not poor if we could just get hold of some more revenue enhancements. We must put a stop to it! And this they did."

Does Apologizing Work? An Empirical Test of the Conventional Wisdom by Richard Hanania - "Politicians and other public figures often apologize after making controversial statements. While it is assumed that they are wise to do so, this proposition has yet to be tested empirically. There are reasons to believe that apologizing makes public figures appear weak and risk averse, which may make them less attractive as people and lead members of the public to want to punish them. This paper presents the results of an experiment where respondents were given two versions of two real-life controversies involving comments made by public figures. Approximately half of the participants read a story that made it appear as if the person had apologized, while the rest were led to believe that the individual stood firm. In the first experiment, involving Rand Paul and his comments on the Civil Rights Act, hearing that he was apologetic did not change whether respondents were less likely to vote for him. When presented with two versions of the controversy surrounding Larry Summers and his comments about women scientists and engineers, however, liberals and females were much more likely to say that he definitely or probably should have faced negative consequences for his statement when presented with his apology. The effects on other groups were smaller or neutral. Overall, the evidence suggests that when a prominent figure apologizes for a controversial statement, the public is either unaffected or becomes more likely to desire that the individual be punished."
More proof that you should never apologise to SJWs - if they're attacking you over something ridiculous, an apology just makes things worse. Probably because it vindicates them so they become even more vicious
Keywords: apologising psychology liberals no effect, apologies are ineffective liberals, apologise to liberals, liberals smell blood, no point apologising, test apology hypothesis

Segments of Random Thoughts - Posts - "Glastonbury Live: "Open to all! DH "I don't see any borders. Do you?""
"Glastonbury reveals 'super-fence'"

The case of Rhino Albino and other B.C. human rights complaints - "In 2012, Ikponwosa Ero, a woman with albinism, launched a human rights complaint against Earl’s Restaurants in Vancouver because it had a beer called Albino Rhino on tap. The product had been on offer for 25 years at that point.The company claimed the rhyming name was intended to be “whimsical and fun” and denote that the beer was “rare and special,” like a white rhino, and was not intended to be discriminatory...
When Guillame Rey, a server at a Vancouver Milestones restaurant, was fired from his job for rudeness in August 2017, he claimed it wasn’t his fault — he’s French.The professional manner Rey’s co-workers called “combative” and his employer described as “rude and disrespectful” was simply “direct and expressive” and totally within the norms in his home country of France, Rey claimed. He said firing him amounted to discrimination on the basis of place of origin — a creative interpretation of section 13 of the province’s Human Rights Code...
Mokua Gichuru, a man whose use of the B.C. court system has been legally limited because of his long-established habit to sue over anything and everything, complained to the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal in 2016 because a Vancouver swing dancing club banned him for being “creepy.” This amounts to “blatant stereotyping” of older, black men interacting with younger women, and is discrimination on the basis of age, sex and race, Gichuru claimed."

Canadians are paying sky-high prices for flights – and merger could make it worse - "For most Canadians, flying from one corner of their country to the other can be a pricey endeavour – so expensive, in fact, that they could fly to Europe or Asia for nearly the same price.Online travel agency Kiwi noted in its 2017 flight price index that Canadians pay more than twice the price Americans do for similar-distance domestic flights... Canadian airlines are tough to threaten, because the federal government works hard to keep foreign competitors at bay... Some foreign airlines have instead boosted service at airports just across the US border. According to the Conference Board of Canada, 5 million Canadians a year cross the border on land to fly out of US airports... the Canadian government owns the majority of the country’s airports, and leases them to local airport authorities. Most regional markets have only one airport, which keeps the number of available gates low"

Lack of Competition Costs Canadians $1-billion/yr - "Greater competition in the tightly-controlled mobile wireless market could result in savings of about $1 billion a year for consumers and the wider economy, says the Competition Bureau... The bureau says the three largest wireless companies, which together have about 90 per cent of Canada’s cellphone market, have the power to maintain prices above competitive levels for a significant period of time. “The bureau estimates that increased retail competition from an additional nationwide mobile wireless carrier could result in gains of approximately $1 billion per year to the Canadian economy in the form of better product choices, price reductions and other benefits to customers”... This backs up the landmark study released by the CBC using data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that compared the cost of cell phone use in Canada to that of 19 other countries. They found that in Canada a mid-range cell phone package costs an average of $572.86 US per year, which is almost $175 more than the average."
From 2014

A (brief) history of Australian food - "The Australian food scene has been evolving in pattern with migration since Chinese gold rush prospectors began sharing food in the 1900s. “Chinese restaurants emerged as a commercial enterprise on the Victorian goldfields,” says Barbara Nichol in her paper Sweet and Sour History: Melbourne’s early Chinese history. By 1890, one third of all cooks in Australia were Chinese, operating “cookshops” to serve Chinese diggers a hot meal from the back rooms of other businesses. The majority of Chinese settlers came from Southern China’s Guangdong Province, so Cantonese food was on the menu. Little wonder then that the cooks were soon serving people from all nationalities, not just the Chinese. Even when the White Australia Policy abruptly drew a halt to Chinese immigration in 1901, special visa favours were made for Chinese chefs... “In the first half of the 20th century the Chinese restaurant was one of the most visible symbols of cultural diversity in Sydney.” The Italians were not far behind... “It is hard to believe that vegetables that we now take for granted, such as eggplants and zucchini, were virtually unknown to the Australian public,” Vicki Swinbank writes in A brief history of the development of Italian Cuisine in Australia. “It must have been a real culture shock for Italians coming to Australian in the early days and being confronted with the typical Australian way of eating at the time. A diet consisting largely of meat, often three times a day, a very limited range of vegetables, all washed down with gallons of tea.”... In their 2014 paper Thailand in Australia, Tamerlaine Beasley, Philip Hirsch and Soimart Rungmanee estimated that more than a quarter of all restaurants in Greater Sydney are Thai"

'World of Warcraft's' virtual gold is seven times more valuable than Venezuela's real money - "The virtual gold in "World of Warcraft," the online role-playing game, is now almost seven times more valuable than real cash from Venezuela, whose economy is in shambles. "

Don’t kill mosquitoes - let them take blood donation, urges French animal-rights activist - "People should not kill mosquitoes but allow them to take "blood donations", a French animal-rights activist has said.Aymeric Caron, a television presenter, said the insects sucked human blood to obtain protein for their eggs, which was “embarrassing for anti-specists who realise they are being attacked by a mother trying to nourish her future children”.Anti-specists are those who oppose discrimination against any species, usually animals."
So much for the slippery slope being a paranoid right wing fantasy