Links - 18th December 2019 (3)

Beto O'Rourke's Comments at the LGBTQ Forum - The Atlantic - "The issue of gay rights and recognition and acceptance of the LGBTQ community has moved at warp speed—in political terms anyway—this past decade.“I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage,” said the candidate Barack Obama in 2008.At Thursday night’s nationally televised forum on LGBTQ rights, candidate Beto O’Rourke showed how far, and how quickly, the Democratic Party has moved. The former Texas congressman caused quite a stir when he said he would support revoking the tax-exempt status of religious institutions—colleges, churches, and charities—if they opposed same-sex marriage. Though his swift “yes” in response to the CNN moderator Don Lemon’s question received an enthusiastic response from the Los Angeles audience, much of America—including those blue-hued states—might see troubling ramifications of this that go well beyond O’Rourke’s applause line... it aligns with the Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet’s policy recommendation to take a “hard line” with religious conservatives because, after all, “trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War,” and “taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.” Even so, O’Rourke’s comments mark the first time a Democratic presidential candidate has overtly endorsed stripping the tax-exempt status of religious organizations who hold conservative views about marriage and sexuality. This feels very much like the candidate Obama’s “cling to guns and religion” comment at a 2008 San Francisco fundraiser that became first an attack line used by Hillary Clinton and then a well-worn conservative talking point that the would-be president was aloof and out of touch with small-town America. But more troubling than the rhetoric is where it leads... journalists should ask O’Rourke and every other Democratic candidate how this policy position would affect conservative black churches, mosques and other Islamic organizations, and orthodox Jewish communities, among others... policy analysts should assess the damage O’Rourke’s proposal would cause to the charitable sector. O’Rourke’s stance—if played out to its end—would decimate the charitable sector... During a 2015 summit at Georgetown University that focused on caring for the poor, then-President Obama and the Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam showed a similar lack of understanding. Putnam asserted that “most organized religion has … been entirely focused on issues of homosexuality and contraception and not at all focused on issues of poverty.” Obama added that “fighting poverty” for Christians is often seen as just “nice to have.” As the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat observed at the time: “It would be too kind to call these comments wrong; they were ridiculous.” In fact, religious individuals and organizations spend billions of their own dollars in the charitable sector and donate hundreds of millions of hours of service in global and domestic regions where the social fabric is the most distressed. They have spent generations building institutions, infrastructure, and networks that enable large-scale responses to natural disasters and other calamities. When hurricanes and tornadoes devastate entire communities, churches and religious organizations mobilize thousands of volunteers and many tons of relief supplies"
So much for the "myth" of the slippery slope
Keywords: religion and charity

Men become richer after divorce - "Divorce makes men - and particularly fathers - significantly richer. When a father separates from the mother of his children, according to new research, his available income increases by around one third. Women, in contrast, suffer severe financial penalties. Regardless of whether she has children, the average woman's income falls by more than a fifth and remains low for many years... "The general belief that men get fleeced by their divorces while women get richer and live off the proceeds has long been due for exposure as a pernicious myth," said Ruth Smallacombe, a family consultant at Flip. "In reality, women often suffer economic hardship when they divorce."... Jenkins combined data from 14 different British Household Panel Surveys over 1991 to 2004 with the findings from five European surveys. Recalculating the results using the formula by which the government measures poverty, he established new per capita incomes. Jenkins found that the positive effect on men's finances is so significant that divorce can even lift them out of poverty, while women are far more likely to be plunged into destitution. Separated women have a poverty rate of 27% - almost three times that of their former husbands...
Almost half of all marriages in England and Wales will end in divorce."
Nice try. Divorce only makes women "poorer" in the sense that they no longer have access to their husbands' earnings. Using this same methodology, a new child would also make both parents "worse off" because their per capita income would fall - even if their raw incomes didn't change at all
To look at it another way: marriage makes women better off because they marry richer men, and makes men worse off because they marry poorer women. Somehow marriage making men poorer isn't an issue

Cat needs glucose drip after mating with at least five females in single night - "'I thought they'd be professional, but the staff member didn't feed Xiaopi during the day and let him out to roam freely at night.'That's right, all the cats were free to walk around the shop and then the employee went home."

The Average Worker Spends 51 Percent of Each Workday on These 3 Unnecessary Tasks - "1. Unnecessary Commuting (13 percent)
As of 2018 (the last year measured), the average one-way commute to work is 27 minutes, nearly six minutes more than in 1980, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And that's just the average, which means that some of us are spending a lot more than that. (I've known people with three-hour commutes--one way.)...
2. Unnecessary Meetings (16 percent)
According to a study at MIT that I described in a previous post, the average worker spends approximately 22 years of their 45-year career in meetings. An estimated third of that time is spent in meetings where there's no value added...
3. Unnecessary Emails (23 percent)
According to research cited in Forbes, the average office worker spends 2.5 hours a day reading and responding to an average of 200 emails, of which approximately 144 (mostly CCs and BCCs) aren't relevant to their job...
1. Implement company-wide work-from-home.
While some jobs (like equipment maintenance) must be performed on-site, most office jobs can be accomplished remotely. Indeed, several studies have shown that remote office workers are much productive than on-site workers, without even counting the time they waste commuting... top management must admit to themselves that their brand-new open plan office was a dumb idea. However, smart bosses don't throw good money after bad, so it's time to bite the proverbial bullet on this one.
2. Create an efficient-meeting culture...
3. Throttle your email system.
Here's are some approaches I've seen over the years:
Turn off email during peak working hours.
Limit the number of emails an employee can send each day.
Discourage CC, BCC, and Reply All emails.
Discourage Sisyphus-like behaviors like trying to achieve "zero Inbox."
Here's an idea: Customize the company-wide email client so that it's impossible to close any internal email until you've rated its usefulness to you and your job.Track those ratings and it will quickly become clear who's wasting everyone else's time with unnecessary email. Then adjust their compensation accordingly (all the way to $0 when appropriate)."

Petition for Cell Service on the Subway - "Did you know that Toronto is the only major Canadian city without a connected underground for all? More than two-thirds of TTC riders surveyed are unaware that connectivity is available on the subway in Toronto, and 71% don’t realize that their mobile carrier isn’t allowing them to use it...
iwantaccess.ca is brought to you by BAI Communications. The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) awarded BAI Communications the contract, in a fair and open tender process, to design, build and operate its free public Wi-Fi (TCONNECT) and cellular network. Coverage in the stations has been live since 2015 for Freedom Mobile customers, however, the Big 3 Telcos have yet to join the network. Now, BAI is committed to educating cellular customers of the Big 3 Telcos about why they can’t access this network, and what they can do about it."

Japan ninja student gets top marks for writing essay in invisible ink - "A Japanese student of ninja history who handed in a blank paper was given top marks - after her professor realised the essay was written in invisible ink.Eimi Haga followed the ninja technique of "aburidashi", spending hours soaking and crushing soybeans to make the ink.The words appeared when her professor heated the paper over his gas stove."

Woman Takes Anti-Selfies Stance By ‘Dying’ At Famous Landmarks And They’re Strangely Hilarious (30 Pics)

79 Times Kids Realized Their Parents Were Cooler Than Them

Argument analysis: Justices divided on federal protections for LGBT employees (UPDATED) - "Karlan spent much of her time at the lectern dealing with two main sets of concerns. The first was the argument that Congress could not possibly have intended to bar employment discrimination based on sexual orientation when it passed Title VII back in 1964. After all, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed, at that time the American Psychiatric Association labeled homosexuality a mental illness... Arguing on behalf of the employers, attorney Jeffrey Harris had to grapple with questions from Gorsuch and some of the court’s more liberal justices about the text of Title VII. Justice Elena Kagan led the way, telling Harris that the test to determine whether there is discrimination under Title VII is whether the same thing would have happened if the employee were a different sex. That test, she suggested to Harris, comes out against the employers: Although Bostock and Zarda were fired for being gay – that is, for being men who were attracted to other men – they would not have been fired if they were women who were attracted to men... David Cole of the American Civil Liberties Union argued on behalf of Aimee Stephens, a Michigan funeral director. Stephens had dressed and appeared as a man until 2013, when she announced that she intended to live and work as a woman and would eventually have sex-reassignment surgery. Thomas Rost, the owner of the funeral home where Stephens worked, fired Stephens because she “was no longer going to represent himself as a man. He wanted to dress as a woman,” which Rost believed would violate “God’s commands.”Cole described the case in simple terms. Stephens is being treated differently because of the sex she was assigned at birth. If she had been assigned a female sex at birth, he argued, she would not have been fired for wanting to come to work dressed as a woman. But instead she was assigned a male sex, Cole continued, and so she was fired because she failed to conform to the sex stereotypes of her employer. It can’t be the case, Cole asserted, that Ann Hopkins – the plaintiff in the Supreme Court’s original case on sex stereotyping – couldn’t be fired or denied a promotion for being insufficiently feminine, but Stephens could be fired for being insufficiently masculine."
Maybe soon, women's shelters can be forced to accept "cis" men

Surprising New Data Shows Comic Readers Are Leaving Superheroes Behind - "For the first time that anyone can remember, superheroes are being outsold in their native medium – American comic books and graphic novels – by other kinds of content, notably kid-oriented fare and Japanese (or Japanese-inspired) manga."
Strange, we were told that audiences demanded diversity. Apparently the Japanese didn't get the memo

Thor 4: Let’s topple every pale, male and stale superhero character we can get our hands on - "It’s the ostensibly more reasonable complaints of “I don’t mind female/POC/LGBT+ characters, but why can’t they make their own?” that nettles me – because make no mistake, we are! Villain, Interrupted, my play about supervillains in prison therapy, runs at the Camden Fringe in August – highlighting my point perfectly. Original characters, even the ones created by behemoths like Marvel or DC, have nothing like the traction of old favourites, meaning we’re starting the race seconds before the big boys cross the finish line. Stealing a few of their spots at the front is not only positive, but absolutely necessary. Quite apart from anything else, it genuinely makes the art better and bigger.Audiences tire of the same old stories, told by the same old people, with the same old characters just dressed up in different superpowers... Giving audiences superheroes (and spies and princesses) different to themselves normalises diversity in a way targeted campaigns can only dream of. This is the power of representation – I can’t tell you how good it felt to watch women, PLURAL, fight alongside the men in Endgame, and how disappointing it was to have Marvel swerve an (onscreen-or-it-doesn’t-count) bisexual superhero in the form of Valkyrie – something they have pledged to correct in Phase 4... We’re stepping out of the shadows – and if we can step on our male predecessors along the way, all the better."
When they loudly proclaim their Agenda

[Unsolicited Opinions on Israel???] | Know Your Meme - "[Unsolicited Opinions on Israel???] is an exploitable quote originally featured in the fourth issue of Marvel's comic series Angela Queen of Hel. Since its publication in late January 2016, the satirical censorship joke has come under criticism from many readers who read it as an out-of-place commentary on heavyhanded sociopolitical issues like feminism, manosphere and anti-zionism, leading to a series of photoshopped parodies and satirical jokes poking fun at the commentarial nature of the original comic...
Upon confronting her, Bor goes on what can only be assumed to be a politically incorrect tirade against Angela, as indicated by the author's self-censored black-bar redaction notes in (shown below).
[A lot of misogynist filth]
[Red Pill M.R.A. Meninist Casual Racism]
[Unsolicited Opinions on Israel???]"
It's amazing how far comics have fallen. Apparently hitting people on the head with your hatred and not even bothering to be subtle or make your "social commentary" make sense in-world are what passes for "art" nowadays