Links - 2nd April 2020 (1)

Natalie Christian Tan - "Girls when I knew them in secondary school: kanina 每次叫我 tuck in shirt bo lan pa bo daiji PUI
Them on LinkedIn now: Global trade and innovation enthusiast, passionate about bringing data-centred results to power our changing world"

Comiket Blood Drive Reportedly Sees Smaller Turnout After Reducing Reliance On Anime Tiddy Posters - "Takamura pointed out that the feminists creating such a stir resulted in the blood drive going with a far less aggressive promotional campaign, and in result less turnout from people willing to donate blood... hilariously enough there were still feminists complaining about the posters where the females featured in the artwork were not sexualized and even fit the standard of being “cute” without being overly busty, yet it was still attacked... this is why you don’t trust feminists, because even when they tell you to censor something to make it more palatable for the masses, even the censored version isn’t enough"

The Eternals Cast Revealed And Majority Of Them Are Race And Gender-Swapped - "Marvel and Disney went all-in on the diversity agenda. After announcing that Thor would be replaced with femThor played by Natalie Portman in the upcoming Thor: Love and Thunder, Marvel went and completely destroyed the Eternals casting by race-swapping or gender-swapping majority of the heroes... Makkari… this character is a straight, white male who is turned into a deaf, black female. That’s right, not only did they race-swap Makkari, they gender-swapped him, and then they sense-swapped him. He can’t even speak anymore because the actress, Lauren Ridloff… is DEAF! It’s the ultimate affront to casting, and literally just shy of a gay, black, lesbian cyborg. Only this time it’s a deaf, black, woman.  The verdict is still out on whether they’ll hit the token jackpot and make Makkari a lesbian, too. At that point it would be a deaf, lesbian, black woman who is supposed to be portraying a straight, white male"

The mysterious origins of an uncrackable video game - "The pair are among a growing number of “video game archaeologists” who are unearthing long forgotten pieces of software and pulling them apart. Inside they are finding clues to how the early days of video gaming came about, but also secrets that can help modern programmers with some of the problems they are facing today. Like intrepid explorers of catacombs, Aycock and Copplestone sought curious relics inside Entombed. But they got more than they bargained for: they found a mystery bit of code they couldn’t explain. It seems the logic behind it has been lost forever... Aycock and Copplestone were able to interview one of the people involved in the game’s production, Steve Sidley.  He too remembered being confused by the table at the time. “I couldn’t unscramble it,” he told the researchers. And he claimed it had been the work of a programmer who developed it while not entirely sober: “He told me it came upon him when he was drunk and whacked out of his brain.” Aycock tried to contact the programmer in question but got no response... By researching tricks and work-arounds from a former era, perhaps 21st Century programmers, pushing today’s technology to its limits, might learn something genuinely useful... It is not just code that digital archaeologists comb through. In 1983, Atari buried 700,000 cartridges of video games at a landfill site in Alamogordo, New Mexico. It was a historic event in video game history – widely rumoured and discredited by some as an urban myth... in 2014, Andrew Reinhard and colleagues went on a dig at the site. The burial was not, in fact, an urban myth – Reinhard dug up 1,300 cartridges. Hundreds of the ET games were sold on Ebay, for a total of about $108,000 (£83,500). While none of the games initially seemed to be playable, one gamer bought a copy of Asteroids and, by cleaning up and reconnecting some of the electronics, was able to get it working again.It may only have taken a few more decades in the New Mexico dust to make the cartridge completely unsalvageable. There’s a challenge, then, awaiting archaeologists who treat electronics as artefacts in the near future: time may be rapidly running out. Video game archaeology is possibly quite urgent, in fact, because the actual physical form of mass-produced games is ephemeral. And the logic and know-how that went into programming those games can so easily be lost. That’s partly why computer archiving projects seek to store the digital form of old games, in an effort to preserve them long term"

'Pole dancing helped me find body confidence' - "Vanessa Martin says pole dancing and finding "other fat women online" helped her gain body confidence."

'This is what a real body looks like' - "A pop-up catwalk in Trafalgar Square invites people of all shapes and sizes to show body positivity."
If everyone is beautiful, no one is
If your sense of self is contingent on external validation...

The bakery in a mental health hospital - "There’s a very unusual bakery in a mental health hospital outside Beijing. Patients can volunteer to join, and selling their goods helps them to reconnect with the world. However, some people are still wary of the bread they bake."
It's telling that the bread was founded by Europeans and is sold to foreigners, not locals (who refuse to eat it and think it's unsanitary and unsafe to eat)

Swedish Communists Launch New Workers' Party Without Multiculturalism, LGBT, Greta Thunberg - "Almost half of the members of the Communist Party in Malmö are resigning. Instead, they plan establish a new workers' party that doesn't put as much emphasis on things like multiculturalism, LGBT issues and climate alarmism, which have become the staples and rallying calls of today's left. Nils Littorin, one of the defectors, explained to Lokaltidningen that today's left has become part of the elite and has come to “dismiss the views of the working class as alien and problematic”... “Pride, for instance, has been reduced to dealing with sexual orientation. We believe that human dignity is primarily about having a job and having pension insurance that means that you are not forced to live on crumbs when you are old”... Markus Allard, the leader of the left-wing Örebro Party expressed similar thoughts in an opinion piece called "Socialists don't belong to the left", accusing the mainstream left of completely abandoning its base, switching from the working class to “parasitic grant-grabbing layers within the middle class”"

1965, December 16: Gemini VI Sights Strange Object? - ""We have an object, looks like a satellite going from north to south, probably in polar orbit.... Looks like he might be going to re-enter soon.... You just might let me pick up that thing.... I see a command module and eight smaller modules in front. The pilot of the command module is wearing a red suit."
And then ground control heard it: the unmistakeably sound of tiny sleigh bells, accompanied by the tune of "Jingle Bells" being played on a harmonica.
       The astro-nuts in question, Schirra and Stafford, had smuggled the tiny bells and the miniscule harmonica (just 1 inch long) onboard Gemini VI, which was no small feat as allowed personal items usually amounted to just a handle of stuff due to the tiny size of the compartment. They had hatched the plan weeks before launch, and practiced well before being shot into space... and it helped ease a lot of the tension in ground control."

Do Partridges Really Live in Pear Trees? - "There are 92 known species of partridges, which are relatives of quail and live in grasslands the world over.Sadly, though, the birds are ground nesters, and not "likely to roost in pear trees""

How much should bosses be paid? - ""The average chief executive of a major American corporation - according to a recent Senate hearing - is paid about 100 times as much as the average worker. And our government today rewards that excess with a tax break for executive pay, no matter how high it is. That's wrong."That was Bill Clinton, during the 1991 US Presidential campaign. He won. And he promptly made good on his promise to tackle excessive pay.Usually, salaries are treated as costs, reducing the profit on which a company pays tax. President Clinton changed the law. Companies could still pay as much as they wanted to - but salaries over $1m (£770,000) would no longer be tax-deductible.It had a big impact. By the time Clinton left office, in 2000, the ratio of chief executive pay to worker pay was no longer 100-to-one. It was well over 300-to-one... If stock options aren't the best way to reward performance, shouldn't company boards of directors be keen to find alternatives?In theory, yes - it's the board's job to negotiate with corporate bosses on behalf of shareholders. In practice, this is another principal-agent problem, as bosses can often influence who directors are and how much they're paid. There's obvious potential for mutual back-scratching. In their book Pay Without Performance, Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried argue that directors don't actually care about linking pay to performance, but must "camouflage" this indifference from shareholders. The best form of compensation for fat cats is "stealth compensation", and stock options seem to be a way to achieve that.Perhaps shareholders need yet another agent to supervise how directors reward bosses.There is one candidate: many people hold shares not directly, but through pension funds, and there's some evidence that these so-called "institutional" investors can persuade boards to be tougher negotiators.When a large shareholder can assert some control, there's a more genuine link between executive pay and executive performance. However, this link seems all too rare."
Given that pay for performance actually worsens performance...

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, I hate Christmas pudding! - "My whole stand up comedy world, routine and everything. And my shtick, I suppose, is about putting a mirror to the Swedes and celebrating them. The first Christmas I spent here, I was hungry, it was like three o'clock in the afternoon. I thought this is gonna be fantastic. We're going to eat now. And then the whole family and this is the whole nation sit down and they watch Donald Duck cartoons for 30 minutes. Which made me angry and hungry.’
‘I love that. I love that, that's like in, you know in Japan, do you know about that Christmas Day is Kentucky Fried Chicken day. And that everyone on that day stops eating ramen, sushi, and they reserve their buckets of KFC, and they wait dutifully online. And that's what they do.’"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Eat the year - "Eaters in the United States spent a smaller fraction of their disposable income on food than any other developed country. So in the US, we spend about 5% of our disposable income on food. In places like the UK and Europe, you spend about 20% of your disposable income. So for me, a lot of the point that I'm trying to explore and make in the book is that, you know, we have this assumption that food should be cheap, that it should be something that we don't have to spend a lot of money on. And I think that when you look at all of the ways that food reverberates outwards, so not only like I talked about earlier, the costs in the environment, but also our bodies, that it's this investment in our health to come."

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Kafka's The Trial - "'After a series of episodes in strange buildings in unexpected quarters of Prague, meeting with people who may or may not be influential officials and meeting with a number of women with whom he has some very unexpected and abrupt sexual liaisons, he is, there is a final chapter that occurs a year after the first in which he is taken, apparently willingly, to his death by 2 executioners. But we really don't know how all of these episodes join up and in a certain sense I think that ending feels very staged and forced. Almost as though Kafka had written where he wanted to get to, but he somehow never got to and it's that state of being in the middle of the trial that the novel is really characterised by'...
'It's also been called many times... as really a dream. The whole thing is, as the nature of a dream. This is how dreams work rather than narrative fiction works'"
So much for Singaporean essay advice on not to end with: "it was all a dream"

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Donald Trump is impeached - "[On India’s new citizenship law] What this law says is religious minorities, mostly non Muslims from neighboring countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, those who have fled religious persecution, they will be given faster access to citizenship. This has been a longstanding demand of these people who have settled down in the northeast of India, particularly in states like in Assam and in West Bengal. But it has proved controversial because people are saying, you cannot discriminate people on the basis of religion. If you're going to give citizenship to Hindus, Buddhists, Christians and Sikhs, then you should also include Muslims… What the government is saying that, you know, for a long time, people have been demanding that persecuted religious minorities, non Muslims from these three countries, they should be accommodated in India because many political leaders have demanded and they have nowhere else to go. And that's why we have to do this. For Muslims there are many other countries, they can go elsewhere. But critics would point out even among the Muslims, for example, minorities like Ahmadiyya sect in Pakistan, they are persecuted, so why not give them the citizenship? So why exclude those people? And for example, take the Rohingyas from Myanmar"
Ironically liberals would usually approve of prioritising minorities (and they ignore minorities within minorities too)

BBC World Service - The World This Week, The rich countries where people are dying younger - "'As recently as 1975, a Frenchman could kill his wife and enjoy the protection of a Criminal Code that dated back to Napoleon's time and the defense Crime Passionnel'...
'Historically, it was in the law, in the penal code from Napoleon's time that a crime committed by an aggrieved husband or in theory wife, when confronted with their unfaithful partner, would be somehow regarded as less serious than otherwise. All that was wiped out from the law a good 30, 40 years ago, there are no extenuating circumstances. In fact, being in the family is an aggravating circumstance. But nonetheless, I think there's a feeling that sort of culturally, what happens behind the veil of the family is not so important, that there are always mitigating factors and that therefore the state shouldn’t prod its finger too closely into that. That may be arguably why these crimes have persisted longer than they should have. And certainly, from the feminist point of view, it's a veil that needs to be torn down once again, so that the true cruelty of these crimes can be exposed.'"