Links - 16th December 2019 (2)

Milton Friedman's "Shareholder" Theory Was Wrong - The Atlantic - "An established business will make the most profits by eliminating competition; the tried-and-true method for doing that is to persuade the government to pass a law that discourages new firms from entering its market, or that in some other way reduces its costs. And if the purpose of a business is to “increase its profits,” as Friedman argued, then it is not only “clear-headed,” but also justifiable for a business to use its political influence to dismantle the free market that Friedman cherished... Legally, business executives are employees of the corporation, which—crucially—they, not the shareholders, control. The shareholders have a contractual relationship with the corporation that entitles them to a share of its profits and a vote on certain major corporate decisions. Time and again, CEOs have used their power over the corporation to bat away shareholders when they propose that the corporation should act in a socially responsible way. When an employer says “jump” to an employee, the employee jumps. When shareholders say “jump” to the CEO, the CEO sues them."

Asking America's Police Officers to Explain Abusive Cops - The Atlantic - "police and their critics often see the same events very differently. For example, one anecdote concerns a man in the back of a police car who told his arresting officers that he was having trouble breathing. They ignored him. He died. Many who watched the video saw callous cops who placed no value on a human being's life. But police officers who watched the same tape saw two cops who thought that their seemingly healthy arrestee was faking, as so many people fabricate medical conditions to avoid being taken to jail. These differences in perspective are useful to understand, even if one believes that a given incident is clearly the fault of the police or the person they're arresting."

Just How Wrong Is Conventional Wisdom About Government Fraud? - The Atlantic - "post-Katrina discussions were shaped by the perceived need to ensure multiple safeguards and to move slowly in releasing the intended aid. I thought that was backward. If the money were made more easily available, there would have been more fraud. But if the program had stated upfront that ill-gotten gains would be met with fierce investigation and prosecution on the back end, it could have distributed the cash faster, enabling more people to rebuild their homes, and their lives, much quicker. Instead, it was two to three years before most victims started receiving any money. Two and a half years after the storm, nearly 40 percent still had not received a cent. Meanwhile, there was fraud anyway. The federal government reported about $500 million of it -- or a little less than 10 percent of the total aid payout. Most of this wasn’t undeserving poor people ripping off the system just so they could get a new house in one of the grimmest neighborhoods in the country. More frequently, it was undeserving middle-class people ripping off the system to pocket the money for themselves. It turns out fraud was rampant among officials at government agencies and even charities... the problem with fraud isn’t government programs or beneficiaries. It’s that fraud losses are a cost of doing business in just about everything. According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), the typical business loses 5 percent of its revenue to fraud each year. Even when detected, 40 to 50 percent of victimized companies don’t recover their losses. The industries most likely to be victims of fraud are the banking and financial sector; government and public administration; and manufacturing... it’s usually managers and executives who commit the worst fraud. It’s not easy to get agreement on actual fraud levels in government programs. Unsurprisingly, liberals say they’re low, while conservatives insist they’re astronomically high. In truth, it varies from program to program. One government report says fraud accounts for less than 2 percent of unemployment insurance payments. It’s seemingly impossible to find statistics on “welfare” (i.e., TANF) fraud, but the best guess is that it’s about the same. A bevy of inspector general reports found “improper payment” levels of 20 to 40 percent in state TANF programs -- but when you look at the reports, the payments appear all to be due to bureaucratic incompetence (categorized by the inspector general as either “eligibility and payment calculation errors” or “documentation errors”), rather than intentional fraud by beneficiaries... The majority of food-stamp fraud appears to be generated by supermarkets “trafficking” in the food stamps. Beneficiaries intentionally ripping off the taxpayers account for perhaps 1 percent of payments... For the most part, fraud isn’t the product of scheming low-income beneficiaries -- Mitt Romney’s 47 percent -- living high on the hog on your dime, but rather someone other than the beneficiary standing to make a buck off it... A landmark 2012 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association not only found that fraud rates are consistent across both government programs and wholly private health care; it also concluded that a “less harmful strategy” than the “common” approach “to contain costs us[ing] cuts, such as reductions in payment levels, benefit structures, and eligibility” would be to “reduce waste” -- mostly on the provider side... Combatting fraud requires efforts and investments that target the real perpetrators, not cheap shots at beneficiaries and reflexive cuts in their programs. There are, after all, equal levels of fraud and theft in other fields, most notably finance -- but we don’t try to reduce it by shutting down the entire industry and blaming the customers."

Canada Ranked As Top Racial Discrimination Countries In The World During The Hiring Process - "While Canada is one of the most multicultural countries around the world, a new study shows that Canada isn't as accepting as we often appear to be. In fact, Canada has just ranked as one of the most racial discriminating countries around the globe when it comes to the hiring process. So, when applying for a job, it appears that a lot more factors occur than just your qualifications... Canada was ranked as the fourth top countries to show a level of discrimination during the hiring process. France, Sweden, and Great Britain all ranked in first, second and third, respectively... Canada was ranked as more discriminatory than the United States when it comes to the hiring process. In fact, the United States was ranked as one of the best countries when it came to being non-discriminatory in the workplace."

Sarah Jeong No Longer A Member Of New York Times Editorial Board - "Jeong’s hiring last August despite her anti-white, anti-men, and anti-cop tweets led many to accuse the paper of a double standard, particularly because at the time it had recently fired Quinn Norton for derogatory tweets about minorities"

The Female Chef Making Japan’s Most Elaborate Cuisine Her Own | The New Yorker - "Hundreds of rules can govern the preparation of a kaiseki meal. Almost all of them serve aesthetic or gastronomic ends, though to a nonexpert they can seem ludicrously fussy. Plates should be arranged with the main element slightly to the rear, so that, to a seated guest looking down, it appears to be centered. Pieces of sashimi should be served in odd numbers. Round food should be served in square vessels, and square food in round vessels. No two bowls of the same shape and material should consecutively appear. Food that is grilled should precede food that is steamed, which in turn should precede food that is fried. Ingredients with narrow, days-long windows of shun—like bamboo shoots in spring, or plum blossoms in winter—should be included not only to bring diners joy but to prompt a melancholy reflection on the relentlessness of time and the inevitability of death. Almost all of kaiseki’s rules can be subverted by the chef; knowing how and when to break them is the most confident expression of kaiseki mastery... Even in Japan, you’re far more likely to see a non-Japanese man behind the sushi counter than a Japanese woman."

Lessons From Putin’s Russia for Living in Trump’s America - "my friend Alex and I got stuck in Moscow traffic a few cars ahead of an EMT van. The siren wailed, the lights whirled, but no one would budge: The ambulance crawled along at the same pace as the rest of us. When I noted this, Alex scoffed. Everyone knows that ambulance drivers make money on the side selling VIP airport rides, he said. Who knows who’s in that van right now? Fuck ’em.  What struck me most, at that moment, was how little difference it made whether his allegation was true, an urban legend, or something that had occurred only once or twice. All you needed for it to matter was for it to be plausible. The moment you lived in a society where someone could conceive of an EMT van used as an Über-Uber, you lived in a society where ambulances no longer received the right of way. One tends to imagine life in an autocratic regime as dominated by fear and oppression: armed men in the street, total surveillance, chanted slogans, and whispered secrets. It is probably a version of that picture that has been flitting lately through the nightmares of American liberals fretting about the damage a potential autocrat might do to an open society. But residents of a hybrid regime such as Russia’s — that is, an autocratic one that retains the façade of a democracy — know the Orwellian notion is needlessly romantic. Russian life, I soon found out, was marked less by fear than by cynicism: the all-pervasive idea that no institution is to be trusted, because no institution is bigger than the avarice of the person in charge. This cynicism, coupled with endless conspiracy theories about everything, was at its core defensive (it’s hard to be disappointed if you expect the worst). But it amounted to defeatism. And, interestingly, the higher up the food chain you moved, the more you encountered it... Now people may get arrested for single-man pickets where, five years ago, 100,000-person marches were fine. The new restrictive laws — such as the “gay propaganda” one, or the notorious Article 282 that reinterprets hate speech as anything anyone can take offense at — are shoddily written and full of holes on purpose; their true message is that anyone can be found guilty at any time. This moves justice fully into the realm of ponyatiya and obliterates all need for mass repression: One or two show trials, such as the Pussy Riot ordeal and the fabricated cases against the protesters of May 6, 2012, ensured that everyone else got the message. That message? Again, it wasn’t to operate in totalitarian fear. More like: Sit quietly, enjoy your new bike lanes, or face a carefully randomized punishment. Living in Moscow meant a constant background calculation as to how much this or that transgression against the ponyatiya would cost you, whether it would be worth it or not. Probably not jail. Just your career. Your name on a “stop list.” Maybe. No one has seen these lists. But how much would you be willing to bet that they don’t exist?"
Ridiculous dig at the US aside, this is quite an interesting article

Are U.S. Railroad Gauges Based on Roman Chariots? - " claims about a direct line descent between ancient Roman chariot tracks and the standard U.S. railway gauge jump the tracks when confronted with the fact that despite some commonality of equipment, well into the 19th century the U.S. still did not have one “standard” railroad gauge"

Chicken Biscuit fight - "There’s another famous biscuit that comes from Perak, and it’s the chicken biscuit.It contains zero real chicken, but has all the beauty of chicken flavouring. It also contains nam yu, a type of red coloured fermented bean curd, sesame seeds, sugar, maltose, winter melon, spices and a healthy dose of lard. It’s a far cry from the salty Western option in the form of Nabisco’s Chicken in a Biscuit."

Baby-Faced Teacher in the Philippines is Really 22 Years Old - "Ian Francis Manga is a 22-year-old teacher in the Philippines’ Bulacan province but is often mistaken for being a student himself."

Is Firefox better than Chrome? It comes down to privacy. - The Washington Post - "I peered under the hood of Google Chrome and found it brought along a few thousand friends. Shopping, news and even government sites quietly tagged my browser to let ad and data companies ride shotgun while I clicked around the Web.This was made possible by the Web’s biggest snoop of all: Google. Seen from the inside, its Chrome browser looks a lot like surveillance software.Lately I’ve been investigating the secret life of my data, running experiments to see what technology really gets up to under the cover of privacy policies that nobody reads. It turns out, having the world’s biggest advertising company make the most popular Web browser was about as smart as letting kids run a candy shop... I discovered 11,189 requests for tracker “cookies” that Chrome would have ushered right onto my computer but were automatically blocked by Firefox... Look in the upper right corner of your Chrome browser. See a picture or a name in the circle? If so, you’re logged in to the browser, and Google might be tapping into your Web activity to target ads. Don’t recall signing in? I didn’t, either. Chrome recently started doing that automatically when you use Gmail. Chrome is even sneakier on your phone. If you use Android, Chrome sends Google your location every time you conduct a search. (If you turn off location sharing it still sends your coordinates out, just with less accuracy.)... After the [Gmail] sign-in shift, Johns Hopkins associate professor Matthew Green made waves in the computer science world when he blogged he was done with Chrome. “I lost faith,” he told me. “It only takes a few tiny changes to make it very privacy unfriendly.”"

Meme - "Think you've won this argument? Hah, but you can't sexually please women #owned
Sounds something that an Incel would say but OK
Wow <half-assed provocative pseudoargument here> bye
Imagine being this wrong
Hahaha, no
Honey, no need to be mad you'll stop being an incel one day I'm sure
STOP CRITICIZING WOMEN
Everything you've said is invalid because I say you're a misogynist"

The Righteous and the Woke – Why Evangelicals and Social Justice Warriors Trigger Me in the Same Way - "To a former Evangelical, something feels too familiar—or better said, a bunch of somethings feel too familiar.
Righteous and infidels —There are two kinds of people in the world: Saved and damned or Woke and bigots, and anyone who isn’t with you 100% is morally suspect*. Through the lens of dichotomizing ideologies, each of us is seen—first and foremost—not as a complicated individual, but as a member of a group, with moral weight attached to our status as an insider or outsider.  (*exceptions made for potential converts)
Insider jargon... jargon isn’t merely a tool for efficient or precise communication as it is in many professions—it is a sign of belonging and moral virtue.
Born that way... generic average oppression scores get assigned to each tribe and then to each person based on intersecting tribal identities. Thus, a queer female East Indian Harvard grad with a Ph.D. and E.D. position is considered more oppressed than the unemployed third son of a white Appalachian coal miner.
Original sin...
Orthodoxies... The Woke also have tenets of faith that must not be questioned. Most if not all ills flow from racism or sexism. Only males can be sexist; only white people can be racist. Gender is culturally constructed and independent of sex. Immigration is an economic boon for everyone. Elevating the most oppressed person will solve problems all the way up. Did my challenging that list make you think you might be reading an article by a conservative? If so, that’s exactly what I’m trying to illustrate.
Denial as proof... In Woke culture, any pushback is perceived as a sign of white fragility or worse, a sign that one is a racist, sexist, homophobe, Islamophobe, xenophobe, or transphobe. You say that you voted for Barack Obama and your kids are biracial so your problem with BLM isn’t racism?  LOL, that’s just what a racist would say. In both cultures, the most charitable interpretation that an insider can offer a skeptic is something along these lines, You seem like a decent, kind person. I’m sure that you just don’t understand. Since Evangelical and Woke dogmas don’t allow for honest, ethical disagreement, the only alternative hypothesis is that the skeptic must be an evildoer or bigot.
Black and white thinking—If you are not for us, you’re against us... pragmatism and compromise are signs of moral taint.
Shaming and shunning...
Selective science denial... Gender dimorphism affects how we think, not just how we look. Personal responsibility has real world benefits, even for people who have the odds stacked against them. Lived experience is simply anecdotal evidence. Skin color is often a poor proxy for privilege. Organic foods won’t feed 11 billion.
Evangelism...
Hypocrisy... Where Evangelicalism traffics in hubris cloaked as humility, Woke culture traffics in discrimination cloaked as inclusion...
Gloating about the fate of the wicked... Some of the Woke curse those they see as fascists to burn in the very same Christian hell, metaphorically if not literally. They dream of restorative justice for criminal offenses but lifelong, ruinous retribution for political sinners: Those hateful Trump voters deserve whatever destitution or illness may come their way. Unemployed young men in rural middle America are turning to Heroin? Too bad. Nobody did anything about the crack epidemic. Oil town’s on fire? Burn baby burn."