Links - 26th March 2020 (1)

Unlike Most Millennials, Norway’s Are Rich - "Best known for its Viking history, snow sports and jaw-dropping fjords, Norway is making a new name for itself as the only major economy in Europe where young people are getting markedly richer... Young Norwegians have enjoyed a 13 percent rise in disposable household income in real terms compared to Generation X (those born between 1966 and 1980) when they were the same age... Norway’s youth unemployment rate (among 15- to 29-year-olds) is also relatively low at 9.4 percent compared to an OECD average of 13.9 percent... A huge part of young Norwegians’ fantastic lifestyle is down to the country’s rapid economic growth... it is not just how much money Norway makes that’s significant, but what it does with it.“It has managed the oil [money] well in that it is saving, and using a portion of that to put back into society,” she says. “So rather than a few getting a lot, many people have access to this wealth.”... taxes are kept high and the country has a compressed wage structure, which means minimum salaries are negotiated by unions... rising inequality has been a core factor in driving down disposable incomes for millennials in other strong economies such as the US, UK and Germany. In these countries, where there are wider wage bands, young people bear the brunt of a lack of pay growth and job mobility.By contrast, Bjørnland argues that an egalitarian approach – distributing wealth between generations – has contributed to strong life satisfaction and a lack of social unrest in Norway."
The same people who mock the idea of never ending economic growth bemoan the fact that young people are worse off than their parents

How Crisco toppled lard – and made Americans believers in industrial food - "Instead of dwelling on its problematic sole ingredient, then, Crisco’s marketers kept consumer focus trained on brand reliability and the purity of modern factory food processing.Crisco flew off the shelves. Unlike lard, Crisco had a neutral taste. Unlike butter, Crisco could last for years on the shelf. Unlike olive oil, it had a high smoking temperature for frying. At the same time, since Crisco was the only solid shortening made entirely from plants, it was prized by Jewish consumers who followed dietary restrictions forbidding the mixing of meat and dairy in a single meal."

What Is the Perfect Temperature for Sleep - The Atlantic - "Anyone complaining about it being too hot in the bedroom is not just being “a whining loser.” People who sleep in hot environments have been found to have elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol the next morning. Researchers also recently posited that patients sleep so poorly in hospital ICUs in part because the rooms are too warm. Those who sleep in cold environments, meanwhile, tend to fare better. A study of people with a sleep disorder found that they slept longer in temperatures of 61 degrees Fahrenheit versus 75 degrees. The cold-sleepers were also more alert the next morning. The basic physiology is that your body undergoes several changes at night to ease you into sleep: Your core and brain temperatures decrease, and both blood sugar and heart rate drop. Keeping a bedroom hot essentially fights against this process. Insomnia has even been linked to a basic malfunctioning of the body’s heat-regulation cycles—meaning some cases could be a disorder of body temperature. In light of this physiology, sleep experts unanimously suggest keeping your bedroom cooler than the standard daytime temperature of your home"

My Marriage Has a Third Wheel: Our Child - NYT Parenting - "I would never have predicted that the hardest part of parenting would be that our only child would come to fully believe she is the third person in our marriage. This arrangement began roughly as soon as she learned to talk... only children often feel like one of the adults. As with our tripartite system of government, they view the daily running of the household as a three-way power-sharing agreement... our child feels insulted if Tom and I go out to dinner alone. If we’re on vacation, she balks at being “dumped,” as she puts it, in the Kids’ Club. She would be happy to Photoshop her picture into our wedding photos. If Tom and I give each other a hug, she has gotten in the habit of jumping in between us. At least she doesn’t referee when we fight, as she did when she was smaller. A couples’ counselor put a stop to that when he advised me to put a photo of Sylvie in a drawer by my bedside table. Whenever I was about to lose my temper with Tom, he told me, I was to run to the bedroom, pull out the photo, and say to it: I know that what I’m about to do is going to cause you harm, but right now, my anger is more important to me than you are. I only had to repeat that brutal phrase a couple of times... Sylvie may be comfortable around adults, but she is still a child, one who lacks the reasoning abilities and experience of a grown-up — so I must catch myself when I absently reply to her questions about money, or other parents, before realizing, whoops, shouldn’t have told her that.  As Newman advises, “Before you allow your child to weigh in, take a pause and ask yourself, ‘Is this really a topic or an issue that a 9-year-old should be involved in, or is this a decision for adults?’ ”  Sylvie needs time away from us to be a kid — time to act silly and make jokes about butts and drone on about the intricacies of Minecraft. She has a group of good friends, but I do see her picking up on her middle-aged parents’ habits, such as calculating how many hours of sleep she got every morning."

(1) \_( .__.)_/ on Twitter - "Black Americans comprise 13% of the population, but they make up 40% of the prison population. Need even more evidence that systemic racism is real?"
"@benandjerrys Men make up 49% of the US population but make 90% of the prison population. Need more proof systemic sexism is real "

Universal Basic Income Wasn't Invented by Today's Democrats - Bloomberg - "Since the late 18th century, UBI hasn’t been seen as a form of welfare so much as a way to get rid of welfare entirely. That may explain why it has attracted such an eclectic group of supporters over the centuries — and may account for its renaissance today. The UBI is premised on the idea that every member of society is entitled to cash payments that will enable them to subsist. The key here is subsistence: Most proposals emphasize that the payment should be minimal, so small, in fact, that it would be an incentive for the poorest recipients to seek work. Thomas Paine, the Founding Father and all-around 18th-century revolutionary, was among the first to propose some version of the idea... Although proponents of the idea in the 20th century, including members of the British Labour Party, were unapologetic statists, the same could not be said of another convert to the UBI idea: the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek. Like his predecessors, the Nobel laureate believed the UBI should be a bare minimum; anything more would require “controlling or abolishing the market.”... Friedman believed the level had to be “low enough to give people a substantial and consistent incentive to earn their way out of the program.” All other public assistance would be abolished... Perhaps there’s room for a grand compromise of the kind envisioned by Mill, Friedman, Galbraith and others"
Some libertarians who denounce UBI claim that Friedman's negative income tax was not the same. But at most that'd qualify the universal bit - most components of UBI would still be there, and people would still get money for nothing (which seems to be the biggest objection to UBI - bigger than how to pay for it)

Rio+20: a tyranny of green do-gooders - "By winning whatever passes for the hearts and minds of the political establishment, environmentalism has been installed throughout political institutions without ever having won a democratic contest of its ideals. Such is the extent of this insidious colonisation that any public debate about the future, especially of energy policies, is already prefigured according to environmental precepts. Party-political debates about the environment in the UK have consisted of no more than oneupmanship: who is taking the climate issue most seriously. Similarly, debates in the wider public sphere consist of little more than terrifying stories about our imminent demise... Nowhere is environmentalism more protected from scrutiny than at conferences such as Rio+20. They are held well beyond the reach of democratic politics and far from critics. Yet some are not convinced that such institution-making is put far enough outside our control. Just as the basis for political environmentalism is seemingly justified on ‘what science says’, so resistance to environmentalism’s political projects is explained by its advocates in pseudoscientific terms: that we are all addicted to consumer society. This assumption that the masses are suffering from consumption addiction allows world leaders to step in and make the big decisions about the future on our behalf. Yet conferences like Rio+20 are not about protecting us plebs; these shindigs are really about protecting the elites. The real reason Huhne couldn’t build ‘environmentalism in one country’ is because nobody in that country wanted it. The way around such stumbling blocks is to establish a basis for political institutions internationally, away from such troubling concepts as democracy... The desire to organise society according to ‘scientific’ principles inevitably treats humans like trash, without exception. Prejudices are smuggled under cover of science. A proper perspective on the context of Rio gives us many more clues about what it is really intended to achieve than The Science does. Hollow politicians escape their domestic problems to pose in front of cameras as planet-savers. Morally bankrupt and self-serving NGOs appoint themselves as the representatives of non-existent future generations and the poorest people in the world, while campaigning for a form of politics that puts political power beyond the reach of democratic control. Sociopathic public-health control freaks and weirdo Malthusian scientists – the rightful heirs of the eugenics movement – get to parade their anti-human hypotheses as virtues. A supine media, in search of drama, declares this the final opportunity to save us from ecological Armageddon."

Games With Words: Which English? - "Is Throw me down the stairs my shoes a good English sentence?The answer depends on where you live. Many people in Newfoundland find that sentence perfectly grammatical.By taking this quiz, you will be helping train a machine algorithm that is mapping out the differences in English grammar around the world, both in traditionally English-speaking countries and also in countries like Mexico, China, and India.At the end, you can see our algorithm's best guess as to which English you speak as well as whether your first (native) language is English or something else."

At What Age Does Our Ability to Learn a New Language Like a Native Speaker Disappear? - "researchers from three Boston-based universities showed children are proficient at learning a second language up until the age of 18, roughly 10 years later than earlier estimates. But the study also showed that it is best to start by age 10 if you want to achieve the grammatical fluency of a native speaker... There are three main ideas as to why language-learning ability declines at 18: social changes, interference from one’s primary language and continuing brain development. At 18, kids typically graduate high school and go on to start college or enter the work force full-time. Once they do, they may no longer have the time, opportunity or learning environment to study a second language like they did when they were younger. Alternatively, it is possible that after one masters a first language, its rules interfere with the ability to learn a second. Finally, changes in the brain that continue during the late teens and early 20s may somehow make learning harder... Perhaps even more important than when one learns a language is how. People who learned via immersion—living in an English-speaking country more than 90 percent of the time—were significantly more fluent than those who learned in a class. Hartshorne says that if you have the choice between starting language lessons earlier or learning through immersion later, “I'd learn in an immersion environment. Immersion has an enormous effect in our data—large even relative to fairly large differences in age.” In what could be the most surprising conclusion, the researchers say that even among native speakers it takes 30 years to fully master a language. The study showed a slight improvement—roughly one percentage point—in people who have been speaking English for 30 versus 20 years. The finding is consistent for both native and non-native speakers... The enthusiasm for the study is not shared by everyone in the field. Elissa Newport, a professor of neurology at Georgetown University who specializes in language acquisition, remains a skeptic. “Most of the literature finds that learning the syntax and morphology of a language is done in about five years, not 30,” she says. “The claim that it takes 30 years to learn a language just doesn’t fit with any other findings.”"

Grève des transports : deux fois plus de vélos que de voitures sur un boulevard de Paris
Great data on the underutilisation of cycle lanes. Despite the promotion of cycling, it takes a public transport strike for bicycles on the road to exceed cars. Under normal conditions there're almost always more cars as bicycles on the boulevard Voltaire (and cars transport 1.1 people on average). Often there're twice as many cars as bicycles.

Gov. Cuomo Vetoes Bill To Let Judges Officiate Weddings, Blames Trump - "New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is facing criticism from both sides of the political aisle after he vetoed a bill to allow federal judges to officiate weddings in his state because some of them were appointed by President Donald Trump."... "I cannot in good conscience support legislation that would authorize such actions by federal judges who are appointed by this federal administration," Cuomo said when he vetoed the bill that had passed through both side of the state house with bipartisan support... Albany Law School Professor Vincent Bonventre, who has supported the governor in the past, called Cuomo’s reason for the veto “utterly unpersuasive,” according to the New York Post.“It’s hard to imagine a more petty, small action from a sitting governor, but that’s Prince Andrew in a nutshell’’"
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