Links - 2nd November 2019 (1)

Have we all underrated the humble pencil? - "there's the American economist Leonard Read, who was a crusader for the principles of small-government free-market economics.In 1958, Read published an essay entitled "I, Pencil" - written in the voice of the pencil itself... Conté painstakingly developed a way to make pencil leads from a mix of clay with low-grade powdered continental graphite. For these efforts, the French government awarded him a patent. And this is where we might start to question whether Read's pencil is right to be so fiercely proud of its free-market ancestry. Would Monsieur Conté have put such effort into his experiments without the prospect of a state-backed patent?Economist John Quiggin raises a different objection. While Read's pencil underlines its history of forests and railway carts, both forests and railways are often owned and managed by governments.And while Friedman was right that there is no Pencil Tsar, even in a free-market economy there are hierarchies.Leonard Read's loquacious instrument was made by the Eberhard Faber company, now part of Newell Rubbermaid - and, as in any conglomerate, its employees respond to instructions from the boss, not to prices in the market. In practice, then, the pencil is the product of a messy economic system in which the government plays a role and corporate hierarchies insulate many workers from Friedman's "magic of the price system"."

Suburb in the sky: how Jakartans built an entire village on top of a mall - "Situated amid a cluster of mega malls in Jakarta’s centre, Cosmo Park is one of two such developments in Jakarta by the Indonesian property developer the Agung Podomoro Group, and was built according to regulations. The second is above the Mall of Indonesia in the city’s north.“But this one is more popular,” notes the real estate agent showing the Guardian around Cosmo Park, past the pool and launderette and minimarket, as she extols its convenient location.“A lot of foreigners choose this place”"

'Manholes' to 'Maintenance Holes': California city bans gender-specific words from city code - "Berkeley City Council has unanimously voted to eliminate gender-specific words from its municipal code.The vote was on Tuesday and the idea was introduced by 23-year-old city council member Rigel Robinson. "Language has power. The words we use are important," Robinson said. "It's not only timely, but necessary to make sure that our laws really speak for everyone."Some of the changes include the word, "manhole" that will now be "maintenance hole."A bondsman will become a "bondsperson." And fireman officially becomes firefighter.The list goes on with other examples, including craftsmen, which becomes artisans.Heirs is changed to beneficiaries. Manpower will now be "human effort" and pregnant woman is now pregnant employee... at one Berkeley fraternity, Andrew Haits, a UC student had this reaction: "Come on. Enough is enough," he snickered. "I think they've gone too far. The reason why they're gender separated is because they are gender separated. Fraternities are male and sororities are female."He's referring to fraternities and sororities, which will now be referred to as "collegiate Greek system residencies." Berkeley's municipal code uses mostly male pronouns, such as "he", but the new code will switch from he and she to "they" when referring to individuals.All forms generated by the city of Berkeley will soon have a space for people filling it out to designate which pronoun they prefer."
If you can't solve real problems, you can at least make up imaginary ones and congratulate yourselves for making a difference

'Sex and the City' author Candace Bushnell regrets not having kids, says she was 'truly alone' - ""Sex and the City" may have left a trailblazing legacy for women on television, but the book's original author now thinks her independent lifestyle may not have been as rewarding.Candace Bushnell, 60, who wrote the original 1997 novel which spawned the successful TV series for HBO, opened up to Sunday Times Magazine about her 2012 divorce, admitting it made her realize how not starting a family made her feel "truly alone.""When I was in my 30s and 40s, I didn’t think about it," she recalled. "Then when I got divorced and I was in my 50s, I started to see the impact of not having children and of truly being alone. I do see that people with children have an anchor in a way that people who have no kids don’t."

The Commuting Principle That Shaped Urban History - "In 1994, Cesare Marchetti, an Italian physicist, described an idea that has come to be known as the Marchetti Constant. In general, he declared, people have always been willing to commute for about a half-hour, one way, from their homes each day.This principle has profound implications for urban life. The value of land is governed by its accessibility—which is to say, by the reasonable speed of transport to reach it. Even if there is a vast amount of land available in the country, that land has no value in an urban context, unless transportation makes it quickly accessible to the urban core. And that pattern has repeated itself, again and again, as new mobility modes have appeared. This means that the physical size of cities is a function of the speed of the transportation technologies that are available... The average one-way commute time in American metropolitan areas today is about 26 minutes"

Why Scotland's huge deficit means that numbers for independence don't add up - "Which country in the developed world has the biggest budget shortfall? A black hole in the public finances larger than the likes of Italy and the rest of southern Europe, bigger than the US under spendthrift Donald Trump and double that of debt-ridden Japan.That dubious honour would go to Scotland if it were an independent country. Its £13bn shortfall is equivalent to more than half the UK’s total notional fiscal deficit despite having less than a tenth of the population... Scotland is not unusual in having a large deficit among Britain’s regions. The UK is increasingly reliant on large surpluses built up in London and the South of England. Scotland has a similar deficit per person to the north of England, while Northern Ireland and Wales have an even higher shortfall per person... Scotland is unusual in that its deficit has been created by higher spending rather than significantly lower tax revenue... Scotland proportionally spends more on a number of areas, such as transport, higher education, social care and economic development, he explains. Flagship SNP policies, such as free personal care for the elderly and no university tuition fees, have been pricey"

Calling Boris Johnson Islamophobic for criticising the burka is preposterous - "He considered such garb to be oppressive and ridiculous, likening it to a letter-box or disguising the wearer as for a bank robbery. But this was not a reason to prohibit it... To most right-thinking people this article, written with the former foreign secretary’s customary elan, was a defence of the rights of Muslim women to dress as they please. His concern – and it is one shared by many – is that they are often not dressing as they please but as they are required to by their community. It might be imagined that those who care about women’s rights would share some of these misgivings. Alternatively, liberals might be expected to praise Mr Johnson for his stand in defence of religious freedom, even if they do not seem to have made a fuss when other EU countries banned the burka outright.But not a bit of it. Mr Johnson is now the latest occupant of the public pillory, fatuously being denounced for a “hate crime” and for pandering to the far-Right. Labour evidently is taking the opportunity to divert attention from its deepening woes over anti-Semitism."

Pritam Singh on 377a: Workers’ Party would not be calling for its repeal - "On the right-to-love liberal camp, Pritam said that they have unwittingly weaponised the concept of love for many of those in the middle, particularly those who do not take a position on the matter.Pritam added that the implicit suggestion is that those who align themselves to conservatives, by default hate LGBT people.Moreover, Pritam said that respected religious figures and friends are singularly judged through their views on 377a, rather than their tremendous contributions to the society... Pritam asked Singaporeans to “rise above the culture war”, adding that such culture wars of American and European societies cannot represent the Singapore war.In other words, Singaporeans should not fight over who is more right than the other, but listen, discuss and debate with the suspicion that we may be wrong, and look for common ground to overcome our differences. In conclusion, Pritam said that WP will not participate in the culture war over LGBT issues because this is prejudicial to the common good of Singapore."
Will the homophiles spoil their votes?

Women are ‘more controlling and aggressive than men’ in relationships - Telegraph - "Women are more likely than men to be aggressive and controlling towards their partner, according to a study.The research found that women showed controlling behaviour along with serious levels of threats, intimidation and physical violence when in a relationship more often than men.More than 1,000 young men and women were questioned about any “Intimate Partner Violence” (IPV) they had inflicted on a girlfriend or boyfriend, or been subjected to themselves...  “This study found that women demonstrated a desire to control their partners and were more likely to use physical aggression than men.“It wasn’t just pushing and shoving,” said Dr Bates, who presented the results at a meeting of the British Psychological Society in Glasgow. “Some people were circling the boxes for things like beating up, kicking, and threatening to use a weapon...  A study in the 1990s led by the US sociologist Professor Michael P Johnson coined the term “intimate terrorism” to describe controlling behaviour in a relationship.He found that such “terrorists” are almost always men, a claim which Dr Bates refutes, pointing to the fact that Professor Johnson’s study looked at men in prison and women in refuges, rather than more typical members of the public"
So much for patriarchy and male oppression of women

Why should Britain offer asylum to people who would rather not make their home in France? - "People traffickers, who are undoubtedly among the most odious gangsters ever to have crawled out from beneath a rock, cruelly exploiting the desperation of others and feeding them a catalogue of lies in order to extort their life savings from them, advise their “clients” which countries they should claim to be from, in order to fool the system and the British authorities. They give them tips on how to prolong their stay, even in the event of a failed asylum application, and helpfully destroy any passports and travel documents their unfortunate victims happen to be carrying, in order to perpetuate the claim that they hail from a particular country... the law of unintended consequences would mean that [accepting all asylum seekers] would mean jackpot day, every day, for the traffickers. Custom would increase tenfold (at least), the costs would go up, the number of failed and fatal voyages would go up. And all the while, the market for the traffickers’ evil services would build.And for what? In order to get people and their families from one wealthy, western democracy – France – to another wealthy, western democracy – Britain. “I’d rather die at sea than go back to Iran,” one aspiring British resident told a reporter during an interview that took place on the French coast. Fair enough, but there’s a Third Way: don’t risk your life by trying to row a dinghy across 20-odd miles of choppy sea and claim asylum in France instead. David Wood, a former Home Office senior civil servant who was previously in charge of immigration policy, has warned ministers that migrants picked up in the Channel must be immediately returned to France. Only by clearly demonstrating that paying three thousand pounds to the traffickers will get you nowhere – literally – will their appalling business be shut down. By delivering migrants safe and sound to the UK, and allowing them to make a fresh asylum application, we are doing the exact bidding of evil men and keeping them in business"

How Muslim Countries Use Islam in Foreign Policy - "In nearly every Muslim-majority country, Islam is an important—and sometimes the only—ideological currency that mixes effectively with more standard realpolitik. With the decline of both socialism and pan-Arabism in the Middle East, the only real ideological competition to Islam comes from nationalism. But nationalism, by definition, is difficult to promote outside one’s own nation. This means that governments—even relatively secular and progressive ones—have a powerful incentive to insert Islam into their foreign policy, using religious ideas to increase their prestige and promote their interests abroad—to deploy, in other words, what we call “Islamic soft power.” There’s a catch, however. Once “Islam” is injected into public debates, how citizens interpret their religion is transformed from a private act of faith into a matter of national security. Governments feel compelled to directly involve themselves in debates around the nature of Islam or else risk leaving an ideological vacuum for domestic challengers to fill... Whereas previous Saudi monarchs and senior royals have always allowed for at least some give-and-take with the country’s religious establishment, MbS has made it clear that for him, moderate Islam is not just about rejecting ISIS but about promoting deference to existing political authorities... internal competition over the role of Islam and Islamism cannot be contained within a country’s borders and that the foreign policies of authoritarian allies are not—and cannot be—insulated from intra-Islamic struggles at home. This means that even for U.S. officials with little interest in human rights, there remain important reasons—along strictly “national interest” lines—to pay close attention to how regimes suppress their domestic opponents. Human rights abuses cannot be bracketed as a matter for naive idealists not schooled in the hard realities of realpolitik."