Links - 22nd November 2019 (2)

Celeste Brash on Twitter - "A friend wrote a well-performing tech article on Medium. It's a good article with one small error - its click success has come from dudes clicking and sharing and explaining how she's wrong. So she keeps the error in and makes roughly $100/month off of mansplaining."
Of course, as we know mansplaining is simply anytime a man criticises a woman - even if he's right

Ed Solomon on Twitter - "At the cafe where I'm writing the people next to me were disagreeing about the origins of Men in Black & I said "If you'd like, I could clear that up for you" & one responded: "I'm sorry, we do not need an old white male's mansplanation." So I apologized and that was that."
[On a Harry Potter example] ">tfw death of the author only applies to white men"
User's bio: "Writer: BILL&TED FACE THE MUSIC, B&T'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE,BOGUS JOURNEY, MEN IN BLACK.Soderbergh’s MOSAIC(HBO),IT'S GARRY SHANDLING'S SHOW, NYSM1&2, others."
Once again, "mansplaining" is just a way to shut men up on behalf of women, even if the men know more (bonus points for adding in elements of racism and ageism here). Some might claim that they wouldn't have known he was the writer - but the fact that he was dismissed due to his age, sex and race even before he said anything

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "Just because your paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. We now know that US intelligence agencies broke rules, leaked to the press, and lied to get warrants in pursuing the Trump Russia conspiracy cases. These failings hit the highest levels of the FBI, DOJ, and the State Department. Most of the political drama from the last three years has its roots in official misbehavior."
Of course liberals just obsess about "obstruction"

We've lost sight of the real scandal - "For the first time in our nation’s history, an inspector general — one appointed by President Obama — has determined that at least two men who sat in the top spot at the FBI committed multiple violations that warrant possible prosecution. That in itself is a scandal with national implications deserving of headlines, congressional hearings and promises to overhaul a broken system.Of course, the complicating factor in the whole mess is that the government entities responsible for addressing any wrongdoing are the same ones inextricably tied to the alleged wrongdoing... When the FBI lost thousands of text messages, sought by the inspector general, between FBI official Peter Strzok and bureau attorney Lisa Page, it was chalked up to a technical snafu and the case was closed. There was no announcement at the FBI about steps being taken to ensure such a major blunder won’t happen in the future; there was only what amounted to a symbolic shrug. The chaser to that debacle was Strzok and Page’s text messages from their time working for special counsel Robert Mueller also ended up somehow deleted.There’s been no swift, public action that we know of on eight criminal referrals that two House Intelligence Committee Republicans, Reps. Devin Nunes of California and John Ratcliffe of Texas, sent to the Department of Justice more than five months ago. There’s no word of any action more than eight months after Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a criminal referral to the DOJ against Christopher Steele, author of the anti-Trump political opposition research “dossier.”The Department of Justice took a pass on filing charges against ex-FBI Director James Comey for alleged violations that the inspector general documented with precision in more than 70 pages of a report last month.Finally, there have been no FBI apologies offered to former Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page after the FBI wiretapped him for more than a year. No post-mortem launched into how the FBI could have been so wildly wrong when swearing to the court, over and over, that Page was a Russian spy."

Women at Oxford are getting fewer Firsts in Classics for a reason, and lowering standards will make things worse - "Classics (Literae Humaniores or ‘Greats’) is among the oldest degrees at Oxford University. One of the things that attracted me to it when I enrolled over a decade ago was the knowledge that I’d be immersing myself in the same scholarship and debate that shaped some of the most interesting minds in history. News that discussions are to take place to redesign the Classics syllabus has therefore left me apprehensive. Changes to the degree are being considered as a means of addressing the stark gender gap in students’ examination results. Last year, 46.8 per cent of male candidates achieved a First in their Classics Finals compared to just 12.5 per cent of female candidates. According to Dr. Pitcher from the Oxford Classics Faculty, a group has been established to "recast" the syllabus to tackle this disparity. No proposals have as yet been made as to what form a potential recast would take... I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that men are doing better than women at both stages in the language-based papers, which test understanding of Greek and Latin grammar, vocabulary, and translation.This is where the difference between male and female students was most noticeable in my time. I recall arriving for my first language classes, confident that my grammar was strong, only to witness boys compose passages of ancient Greek as if it was their mother tongue.A little probing revealed that many of them had had Greek and Latin grammar drilled into them from the age of eight if not six. The same tradition does not exist in girls’ schools.Even girls from some of the most high-achieving schools in the country had never witnessed such rigour. For all the brilliance of our Oxford language tutors, it was unlikely the gap between us could be closed in a few short years."

Police 'incredibly frustrated' at being sent to Facebook rows rather than burglaries - "Common sense policing has "gone out of the window" with officers forced to spend their time intervening in trivial social media disputes rather than attending burglaries and other serious crimes, the new head of the Police Federation has said. John Apter, who represents 120,000 rank and file officers across England and Wales, said his members were "incredibly frustrated" because they felt were no longer able to do the job they had signed up to do... the Telegraph revealed that police forces were failing to investigate two thirds of domestic burglaries properly and in many cases were not even attending crime scenes because there was little chance of catching the offender.But last week it emerged that one force had asked people to report insults on social media, even if they were not considered to be a hate crime... "Where we get drawn into local disagreements, the argument over the remote control, the dispute in the playground, the row on Facebook it is frustrating. I certainly think police time can be better spent and it makes a mockery when we are so stretched."You can't treat society like that and you can't treat the police as political footballs. We need to have a sensible debate with politicians, with society with the public about exactly what they want their police to do."

My shift at the chip shop where nobody wants to work - "despite having 10 available jobs, in a town where seven per cent of 18-24-year-olds are unemployed, they simply cannot find anybody to fill them.  Not that they’ve been short of applications - there were 300 to 400 in just a fortnight, but when the chip shop invited people in for a shift they often didn't reply. “We were inexplicably getting CVs from all over the country,” says their son Robert, 37, with whom they run the business. “We just didn’t hear back from them. When they do reply, we have tried to organise an interview and trial shift. If you are lucky, about one in 10 show up.”... With Universal Credit having been rolled out in Darlington in March, Frank Suhadolnik (who originally hails from the US) believes that the new benefits system has made people ”workshy”. That one word alone has proved enough for the nation’s media to descend on this unassuming family business.The crux of the matter seems to be this: part of the requirement of claiming Universal Credit is demonstrating that you are actively seeking work – even if you have no intention of actually becoming an employee. Robert believes this might be why he is receiving so many clearly unsuitable applications and so little concrete interest. He has been told by potential recruits that if they work too many hours, their benefits will be reduced to the point where they are essentially receiving around 37 pence for each pound they earn at work. This attitude seems in direct contradiction to the Government’s stated aim of Universal Credit “making work pay”... Since the story was first reported, he has managed to fill four of the vacant 10 positions with local candidates, but the unsuitable CVs keep flooding in. That morning, the latest has arrived in the post: from Biggleswade in Bedfordshire a 400-mile round trip away to work a shift at the national living wage of £7.83 an hour."

By banning pesticides and GMOs, the EU is sleepwalking into a food security crisis - "In France, for example, Emmanuel Macron has said that we can find a replacement for the herbicide glyphosate within three years. This is quite simply impossible without a miracle. He has promised to phase out glyphosate use in France. This will be hugely harmful both for French farmers – who will pay the price initially – and for European agriculture in general, as it will reinforce myths around pesticides... the European Court of Justice recently ruled that gene editing techniques are to be covered by the same rules in Europe as GMOs, making it almost impossible to get authorisation for these techniques. As countries like France take the lead on the anti-GMO movement in Europe, the most promising alternative technologies are being halted by the EU."

Using Physics, We Just Made the Ax Far More Effective - "The LeverAxe uses principles of the lever to split wood more efficiently. The ax’s weight is set off-center, so as the ax strikes the wood, it penetrates the wood a little and expels the rest of the gravitational energy by rotating and splitting the wood in the same way you would with a lever. This design requires less force than a traditional ax to split wood... The LeverAxe requires less brute force as it transfers most of the energy it uses to the wood, unlike a traditional ax that will transfer a lot of energy back to the wood-chopper.This ax update gets even better. Because it splits wood using a lever instead of a brute-force wedge, the tool never gets stuck in the wood. That means the days of wedging your ax in a knot are over."

Here's the Porn That Women Watched in 2018 - "The popularity of women with the ladies is not new. Last year, VICE showed the same trend, and it's been the same since Pornhub began analyzing women's porn habits back in 2014.Two explanations for this have been put forward by Sexual Therapy Psychologist and Pornhub Sexual Wellness Center Director Laurie Betito. She points out that lesbian porn allows women "to see acts they like to receive, which is why" pussy licking "is so popular." Last year, "licking pussy" was 281% more requested by women than men.In 2016 , the psychologist suggested another track, as "lesbian," "lesbian scissors," "lesbian seduces a straight" and "trip to three lesbians" were among the most popular search terms of the year."Looking at these statistics, one might think that bicurious women are turning to [porn sites] for learning, ideas, confirmation and inclusion," she said.  Asian porn has always (or, in any case, since 2014) aroused the interest of women, but 2018 was a year where related terms were among the very most popular. "Japanese", "hentai", and "Korean" were respectively the 2nd, 3rd and 5th most sought after terms. "Threesome" was also among the most popular terms, in 4th place.Pornhub's analysis highlights a peculiarity in women's preferences. Women are twice as likely as men to watch gangbangs and double penetration, but also twice as likely to watch romantic videos. According to psychologist Laurie Betito, "women are looking for more scenarios in their porn. In their fantasies, women want to be taken aback. This is interesting because, in reality, women are stronger, and "in control" of their sexuality, while in their fantasies, some of them return to more traditional gender roles."

Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS 236 - Alex Tabarrok on "Why are the Prices So D*mn High?" - ""Actually, all real prices cannot fall. What we are hoping to see cannot in fact happen. Over time, you must see some prices rise. And that is due to what is called the Baumol effect, what we call the Baumol effect...
'You take the string quartet in 1826. It takes four people 40 minutes to produce the piece. Now, we move all the way to 2019. It still takes four people 40 minutes to produce the piece.So there's been zero increase in productivity over that 180 years or so... Now, at the same time, lots of other industries have increased in productivity. So if we go back to 1826, the average wage is $1 an hour, because those workers, they can't do very much. They're not very productive. The average wage in 2019 is more like $25 an hour.So in 1826, we're saying the opportunity cost of those four workers to produce this piece, it's basically $4. In 2019, for the same four workers, it's $100. So what we've seen is that zero increase in productivity, but the wages have gone up by a factor of 25 --'
'Meaning the wages they could be getting if they left music and went to work in another sector have gone up'
'Or to put it another way, the wages you have to pay them to get them to move from the other sector... So wages have gone up by a factor of 25. Productivity hasn't gone up at all. So it must be that prices have gone up by a factor of 25. And that's the essence of the Baumol effect... wherever you go in the world, or pretty much wherever you go in the world, people will be complaining about the rising cost of healthcare.'...
If you look at professional services -- which is like law, accounting and architecture, things of that nature -- they have gone up in price just as much as healthcare. And there's no big government regulation of accounting or architecture. There's no big government purchases of these things.Now, of course it is true that all of these things are regulated, because everything in our society is regulated. But you have to look cross-sectionally -- does more regulation explain, does it correlate with, higher prices? And the answer is just no... The regulation story I think does not fit law, accounting, architecture, professional services. Nor does the subsidy story. These areas are not particularly subsidized.Here's another area which does not fit the subsidy story, and that is expenditures on pet care, on vets, have also gone up just as much, if not by more, than on human health care. And we don't have big subsidies.And also there's very little third-party payers, is another thing which people blame. There's very little insurance"

CBF Mag 1.05 | Destination Québec - Coffee Break Languages - "'I actually remember, Mark, having a very, I'd say interesting conversation between a French Canadian and we spoke for a bit, half an hour, and he said to me that actually his French was purer than mine. It was very interesting'
'Well, it ultimately is the French that was taken over there in the 1600s, so it is an older form and probably, dare I say, a purer form. Similar to the Spanish used in many parts of Latin America. For exactly the same reasons'...
20:00
'One of the things that I really like about Les Belles-soeurs is the fact that it was actually translated into Scots and performed as The Guid Sisters. And so the working class dialect of Montreal, joual, was translated into working class glaswegian dialect and performed a few years back as The Guid Sisters"