Links - 5th February 2020 (2)

Let's all laugh - Posts - "Since it's illegal to spank them when they misbehave, if they act grown, give them to grown men haircut. *ugly haircut*"

Betrayed by the Big Four: whistleblowers speak out | Financial Times - "These individuals worked for four of the most renowned names in the business world: EY, Deloitte, KPMG and PwC. They are among 20 former employees from the Big Four accounting firms who have spoken to the Financial Times about their experience of harassment, bullying and discrimination in the workplace over the course of a year’s investigation into how these firms treat whistleblowers within their ranks.The FT identified a disturbingly common pattern in terms of how complainants were treated: most initially felt ignored, then isolated and were eventually pushed out. Legal clauses aimed at silencing them swiftly followed; nine of those interviewed said they were pressured into signing restrictive non-disclosure agreements. Others were asked to sign but resisted. “Much worse than the incident itself is the fact that the company I thought was going to protect me then betrayed me and protected him and hung me out to dry,” says Mary. “That has been much more damaging to me in the long run.”... Many of these whistleblowers — most of whom shared documents with the FT that supported their accounts — claim they were treated like pariahs by their employers at a time when they most expected to receive support.They found this particularly galling given the influential role the Big Four — who employ more than one million people between them and posted $154bn in collective revenues over the past 12 months— have in advising the world’s most powerful institutions on best management practices... The 20 whistleblowers interviewed for this article worked around the world, from San Diego to Tokyo to London, but their experiences were strikingly similar. Almost all complained about an individual of a higher rank within the firm. In most of these cases, the whistleblower left within months of raising their concerns, while the alleged perpetrator remained.The reason this pattern is so stark is simple, according to several current and former insiders: the Big Four want to protect their top fee-earners, even if this is to the detriment of the rest of the workforce. "

Caleb Hull 🏻 on Twitter - AOC: "Me waiting on the haters to apologize after we were proven right on Amazon and saved the public billions "
"@AOC It's incredible how dumb your followers are and how they're praising you for this. Amazon was initially offering 25,000 jobs in YOUR DISTRICT to now only offering 1,500 jobs OUTSIDE your district. Meaning you caused 94% job loss in NYC."

Recreational Marijuana Laws and Junk Food Consumption: Evidence Using Border Analysis and Retail Sales Data by Michele Baggio, Alberto Chong - "We use retail scanner data on purchases of high calorie food to study the link between recreational marijuana laws (RMLs) and consumption of high calorie food. To do this we exploit differences in the timing of introduction of marijuana laws among states and find that they are complements. Specifically, in counties located in RML states monthly sales of high calorie food increased by 3.1 percent for ice cream, 4.1 for cookies, and 5.3 percent for chips."
So pot does give you the munchies

Ethnicity has greatest impact on degree grades: Report - "attending an independent school does not appear to enhance university performance. State school students tend to do better in degree studies than students with the same prior educational attainment from independent schools... "Degree outcomes are not affected by the average performance of the school that a student attended"... The most reliable indicator is A-level performance"
So much for standardised exams being useless

Grammatical case - Wikipedia - "Languages such as Ancient Greek, Armenian, Assamese, most Balto-Slavic languages, Basque, most Caucasian languages, German, Icelandic, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Sanskrit, Tamil, Tibetan (one of a few tonal languages), the Turkic languages and the Uralic languages have extensive case systems, with nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and determiners all inflecting (usually by means of different suffixes) to indicate their case. The number of cases differs between languages: Persian and Esperanto have two; modern English has three but for pronouns only; German and Icelandic have four; Romanian has five; Latin, Slovenian, Russian and Turkish each have at least six; Armenian, Czech, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovak and Ukrainian have seven; Sanskrit and Tamil have eight; Estonian has 14; Finnish has 15; Hungarian has 18 and Tsez has 64 cases."

Meme - "Meet Fatima. She Is a Muslim Woman Who Is Breaking Stereotypes
Fatima Makes and Sells Heroin and Crystal Meth
'I Wanted to Show the World That Muslim Women Are Empowered- That Muslim Women Can Also Be Drug Dealers'"

New Study Finds Cash Transfers To Poor Families Lift Up Their Neighbors Too - "Over the past decade there has been a surge of interest in a novel approach to helping the world's poor: Instead of giving them goods like food or services like job training, just hand out cash — with no strings attached. Now a major new study suggests that people who get the aid aren't the only ones who benefit... as expected, the families who got the money used it to buy lots more food and other essentials.  But that was just the beginning.  "That money goes to local businesses," says Miguel. "They sell more. They generate more revenue. And then eventually that gets passed on into labor earnings for their workers."  The net effect: Every dollar in cash aid increased total economic activity in the area by $2.60.  But were those income gains simply washed out by a corresponding rise in inflation?  "We actually find there's a little bit of price inflation, but it's really small," says Miguel. "It's much less than 1%.""
Meanwhile libertarians with their simplistic economics claim that a universal basic income of $1,000 will just make all landlords raise rent by $1,000, making it useless

In an ethnic breakdown of sports, NBA takes lead for most diverse - "With 80.7 percent of players being people of color, the NBA takes the lead among men’s sports for player diversity."
Basically an admission that "diversity" is being anti-white

Lori Hendry on Twitter - "When all the guns have been banned, When all the words have been censored, When all the history has been erased, When all our freedoms have been taken, Only then will you discover that you should’ve spoken up and done something about it..."

The Real News Crisis Isn’t Fake News - "In the aftermath of the twin shocks of 2016—Brexit on one side of the Atlantic, Donald Trump on the other—many in the media identified “fake news” as the culprit and as one of the emergent evils of the modern world. It was invoked the way terrorism was after 9/11: shadowy, stateless, destabilizing. It’s no surprise that, by June 2019, 50 percent of Americans viewed it as a bigger threat than terrorism, with 70 percent saying that it was greatly affecting trust in government institutions... In general, there is little evidence suggesting that fake news has had a major impact on how people view current events. Furthermore, fake news is most likely to reach “heavy news consumers,” whose opinions have already been set... the study finds few instances of Russian trolls turning voters into frothing Trumpers"
Sadly the author had to turn this into a bashing of "right wing media outlets"

3 Problems With USB-C You Need To Know About - "We’ve scared you enough at this point that you are probably going to be concerned about plugging in random USB-C cables into your devices, and that’s a good thing. But we shouldn’t leave you without a solution, and we won’t.Your best bet for almost any cable, including USB-C cables, is to buy AmazonBasics cables—they aren’t just really affordable, but they are consistent, and most important, the listings on Amazon are clearly labeled with the speed"

Woman wants Ontario to raise $4 HST exemption for prepared food - "A realtor in Waterloo is feeling frustrated that a tax exemption, designed to make food more affordable for people on low incomes, hasn't risen with inflation... prepared food under $4.00 is priced differently than food over $4.00.When HST was introduced in 2009, the government made special accommodations for meals under $4.00. Consumers aren't charged the provincial portion of the HST — just the 5 per cent federal tax."When [it] was put in place, it was realistic that you can go out and get a small lunch for $4.00 and under," she said.Brown-Aitken feels the new cap should be set to at least $7.00 to match the price "for a reasonable sandwich and drink" at fast-food joints like Tim Horton's or McDonalds."In doing a bit of research, it's looking like $7.00 would be a very lean lunch for somebody. Most often, even in fast-food, it's closer than $10.00"... Alan Macnaughton, a professor in the School of Accounting and Finance at the University of Waterloo, said the $4.00 exemption predates 2009, and was actually set in 1989... "It was 1989 when $4.00 would be the equivalent of $7.00 today""

Man with autism opens own coffee shop after no one would hire him - "When Michael Coyne -- who has autism and is a Special Olympics athlete -- applied for jobs, he kept getting passed over."

SNL mocked my appearance. Here's why I didn't demand an apology - "SNL's Pete Davidson mocked my appearance - "he lost his eye in war . . . or whatever," Davidson said, referring to the eye patch I wear. His line about my looking like a "hit man in a porno movie" was significantly less infuriating, albeit a little strange. I woke up on the Sunday morning after the show to hundreds of texts about what Davidson had said. A lot of America wasn't happy. People thought some lines still shouldn't be crossed.I agreed. But I also could not help but note that this was another chapter in a phenomenon that has taken complete control of the national discourse: outrage culture. It seems like every not-so-carefully-worded public misstep must be punished to the fullest extent, replete with soapbox lectures and demands for apologies. Anyone who doesn't show the expected level of outrage will be labelled a coward or an apologist for bad behaviour. I get the feeling that regular, hardworking, generally unoffended Americans sigh with exhaustion - daily. Was I really outraged by SNL? Really offended? Or did I just think the comment about losing my eye was offensive? There is a difference, after all. I have been literally shot at before, and I wasn't outraged. Why start now?So I didn't demand an apology and I didn't call for anyone to be fired. That doesn't mean the "war . . . or whatever" line was acceptable, but I didn't have to fan the flames of outrage, either... There are many ideas that we will never agree on. The left and the right have different ways of approaching governance, based on contrasting philosophies. But many of the ultimate goals - economic prosperity, better health care and education, etc. - are the same. We just don't share the same vision of how to achieve them... When all else fails, try asking for forgiveness, or granting it. On Saturday, Pete Davidson and SNL made amends. I had some fun. Everyone generally agreed that a veteran's wounds aren't fair game for comedy. Maybe now we should all try to work towards restoring civility to public debate."

I raped my girlfriend. Can my relationship survive? - "I raped my girlfriend.Some background: My girlfriend and I were high school sweethearts. We have been together for 12 years and were each other’s first sexual partners. Five years ago, she cheated on me with a friend about whom I had expressed discomfort with her hanging out with because she snuck around to hang out with him. I did not hear about this until last year. A year after she cheated, he had completely tossed her aside, and he was moving across the country as she and I were preparing to move in together to be closer to her graduate school. She was withdrawing and pulling away from me; I was stressed and I angrily pressured her to have sex with me more often. I raped my girlfriend. I did not threaten her with a weapon of any kind, I did not physically force myself on her, and she verbally gave consent, but it was still rape because she did not want to have sex—I just did not know it at the time."
The redefinition of rape into any sex a woman doesn't like after the fact continues. And he gets gaslighted/gaslit to boot

The Big Read: After the sound and fury, the dust settles on e-scooter footpath ban - "These days, 58-year-old Loy Chit See no longer feels bothered or stressed when he takes his children out for walks at the weekend. The same could not be said before the ban, when e-scooters could be seen everywhere in his Serangoon estate.“I nearly got knocked down once, the guy just sped past and I couldn't believe it,” said the father of two children aged seven and ten. “The stress becomes high … When I walk (my children) to NEX (shopping mall), I have to be extra careful.”After the ban, Mr Loy said the number of e-scooters he sees in his neighbourhood has dropped significantly. Like Mr Loy, many of the 16 pedestrians we spoke to across e-scooter “hotspots” such as Punggol, Choa Chu Kang, Yishun and Serangoon, welcome the ban... Mr Mahadi lamented that the actions of some black sheep have caused the authorities to enact a ban — to the chagrin of responsible users. “Now everyone has to pay for it”"