Joseph Lofthouse - "Years ago, I felt super embarrassed about buying a sex toy to use for buzz pollination of tomatoes. It cost a tenth of the price of an electric toothbrush, so I couldn't stand the thought of paying ten times the price for the same tool.Then I was even more embarrassed, the first few times I used it to pollinate tomatoes. My field is on the main highway through downtown Paradise, Mormonville. I'm not embarrassed this year. It's become just a really effective gardening tool."
Smart People Are More Likely to Stereotype - The Atlantic - "A second study showed similar results, but for measures of implicit bias... while smart people learn and apply stereotypes more eagerly, they also unlearn those stereotypes quickly in the face of new information."
Since liberals say the fact that more educated people tending to be liberal shows that liberalism is right... See also Mensa supposedly being overrun by the alt-right: Jamie Loftus, the Comedian Who Infiltrated Mensa | The New Yorker
Amazingly the article frames accurate pattern recognition as a bad thing
Meme - "When I Grow Up I Want to Be Pinochet
Me: *helicopter*
Bodies falling through the air: *communist swine*"
Meme - "Does communism support free speech?"
"You have been permanently banned from participating in r/communism101."
Caso Cerrado: Transgender woman sues over 'broken penis' - "Jennifer, who is transgender and still has her male genitalia, claimed defendant Sylvia hired her to sleep with her husband, Miguel, on his 60th birthday
But while she was having sex with him, Miguel had a heart attack and died
Jennifer sued Sylvia for £16,000, claiming Miguel broke her penis when he died
She said that she was still inside of Miguel when he collapsed and died"
Vogue Slammed for Hiring Annie Leibovitz for Simone Biles Cover Instead of Black Photographer - "Fashion magazine Vogue has come under fire over the cover of its August issue. The magazine featured world-renowned gymnast Simone Biles, and critics are upset at both the style of the images and the fact that Biles was photographed by Annie Leibovitz and not a Black photographer... Some photographers joined in the criticism, even posting re-edits of some of the photos. Others, however, came to Leibovitz defense. Supporters of the shoot pointed out that the article attached to these photos—a somber profile that covers the impact that the Larry Nassar trial had on Biles, her family, and her career—called for muted images.They also defended Leibovitz by pointing out what may have been her artistic inspiration for these shots, and saying that it’s absurd to claim that Annie Leibovitz somehow “doesn’t know what she’s doing” when it comes to lighting any sort of skin tone.“Annie has shot Kendrick Lemar for Vanity Fair, President Obama for Vanity Fair, Michelle Obama for Vogue, Chris Rock, Denzel, Viola Davis, etc,” wrote one photographer on Reddit, “but yea get a black photographer because she has no clue what she’s doing. /s”"
Mark Hughes - "Eminem circa 2000: *raps about wanting to kill his mother and his wife* Eminem circa 2020: "Eminem criticises non-mask wearers on new rap track""
bruh on Twitter - "My brothers ex had been stealing our Netflix for the past two months now by disguising her account as “settings” and honestly I ain’t even mad. I’m just really disappointed in myself for actually believing that an account named “settings” would legitimately be Netflix settings"
Cops's Killers Get Paroled In Under 4 Years, Promptly Go Back To Committing Crimes - "Teenage brothers convicted of murdering a 25-year-old Utah police officer got early release from prison and then promptly went out and incited a riot that led to a shooting."
Five Guys employees fired, suspended after refusing service to Alabama police officers - "Officers told the news outlet six or seven individuals were involved in the incident. One officer claims an employee said, “I’m not serving them.”"
Mass Effect Andromeda: Motion Capture Session - YouTube
Matt Walsh on Twitter - "If you think this country was stolen and we have no right to be here, please explain why you haven’t donated your stolen property and assets to an Indian reservation and returned to your land of origin. Not a rhetorical question. I really want to see how you rationalize this."
Why the Asian Food in Paris Is So Bad - Bloomberg - "International culinary offerings in Paris, especially Asian cuisine, often pale in comparison to the options available in other global cities. “Parisians love Asian food, but the Asian food here is really mediocre compared to London and New York, as far as I’m concerned,” says Alexander Lobrano, current food and travel contributor to the New York Times and recent author of Hungry for Paris: The Ultimate Guide to the City’s 102 Best Restaurants. “Really aside from North African cuisine, which is a very special case for demographic reasons, Paris hasn’t embraced the sort of gastric internationalism that reigns in almost every big city.” The lack of good Asian restaurants invokes a sense that Paris is a city in denial about how international its population actually is, especially considering Asian migration patterns to the city over the last century... Part of the issue stems from the difficulties Asian restaurateurs encounter accessing the proper produce and ingredients... The French republican ideology also encourages integration processes that undoubtedly further dilutes a migrant group’s presence in the city. “The French nation confuses its principles with a political project to abstract ethnic or religious distinctions”... This approach to integration in lieu of multiculturalism seems to have translated into a dumbed-down approach to Asian cuisine in Paris over time; In order to suit the quieter, subtler French palate, Asian migrants toned down the spicy, vibrant, and loud tastes so ingrained in their cuisine, transmitting the French abstraction of ethnic distinction to their kitchens... For centuries, the gastro scene in Paris remained static, with French cuisine assuming a de facto dominance that yielded little to no room for foreign kitchens to gain credibility. “This very confident sense of superiority, which was not unjustified most of the time, sort of blindsided the French in terms of their ability to be receptive to or honestly curious about food from other countries,” says Lobrano, who served as the European Correspondent for Gourmet Magazine for 10 years, until it folded in 2009... “I think Paris is on the cusp of change. All of the concierge kitchens—Italian, Spanish and Portuguese—no one ever used to take them seriously, but that’s changed. The Lebanese food is good now, and North African cooking is much better here than it is in any other major European city. But in terms of anything Asian, I think Paris still has a long way to go.”"
Hozefa Aziz Singapore Wala - "Ryanair to close base after pilots reject pay cut"
""It is bizarre that the union canvassed against the deal knowing full well that the result would be base closures and job losses."
Unions are not necessarily a good thing for workers. Union leaders are after all politicians in a different outfit."
Memes - "When you tell your man its cheat day so you start eating cake and he starts fucking your sister @Supersaw"
Imam of Peace on Twitter - "First they said “ISIS has nothing to do with Islam.” Then, when I criticize ISIS, they accuse me of insulting Islam. One of us is crazy, and it’s not me."
Imam Tawhidi - Posts - "Muslim governments kill thousands of Muslims each year, then they tell you “Poland is Islamophobic.”Polish government has not killed or oppressed a single Muslim. They are (mostly) Christians who want to live in peace, without any illegal immigrants or terrorism. Good on them.Not to mention that I have close friends in the Polish government who have nothing but positive things to say. Walk in Warsaw and you’ll find Middle Eastern (HALAL) food, Arabic Music, Mosques, Friday Prayers, the full package. There’s no bigotry. Loving your country doesn’t make you a racist.Poland’s Muslims (especially their leaders) are integrated and their loyalty is for Poland. That’s how it should be."
Imam Tawhidi - Posts - "Huma Younus, a Christian girl who was kidnapped from her home in Karachi on October 10 last year, has become pregnant due to the incessant sexual violence perpetrated by her abductor Abdul Jabbar.Where are the feminist organizations and human rights activists?"
Economists on the Run - "Krugman branded just about everybody who questioned the rapid pace of globalization a fool who didn’t understand economics very well. “Silly” was a word Krugman used a lot to describe pundits who raised fears of economic competition from other nations, especially China. Don’t worry about it, he said: Free trade will have only minor impact on your prosperity.Now Krugman has come out and admitted, offhandedly, that his own understanding of economics has been seriously deficient as well. In a recent essay titled “What Economists (Including Me) Got Wrong About Globalization,” adapted from a forthcoming book on inequality, Krugman writes that he and other mainstream economists “missed a crucial part of the story” in failing to realize that globalization would lead to “hyperglobalization” and huge economic and social upheaval, particularly of the industrial middle class in America. And many of these working-class communities have been hit hard by Chinese competition, which economists made a “major mistake” in underestimating... It was quite a “whoops” moment, considering all the ruined American communities and displaced millions of workers we’ve seen in the interim. And a newly humbled Krugman must consider an even more disturbing idea: Did he and other mainstream economists help put a protectionist populist, Donald Trump, in the White House with a lot of bad advice about free markets?... He even had some kind things to say about proto-progressives such as Robert Reich, the former Clinton administration labor secretary who worried about global competition and sought better protections and retraining for American workers, and whom Krugman had once dismissed to me—back in his lacerating days in the ’90s—as an “offensive figure, a brilliant coiner of one-liners but not a serious thinker.”... it has taken an awful long time for economists to admit that their profession has been far too sure of itself—or, as a penitent Krugman put it himself in a 2009 article in the New York Times Magazine, that “economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.” As the journalist Binyamin Appelbaum writes in his book, The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society, economists came to dominate policymaking in Washington in a way they never had before and, starting in the late 1960s, seriously misled the nation, helping to disrupt and divide it socially with a false sense of scientific certainty about the wonders of free markets. The economists pushed efficiency at all costs at the expense of social welfare and “subsumed the interests of Americans as producers to the interests of Americans as consumers, trading well-paid jobs for low-cost electronics.”... [it] was ironic considering that [Krugman's] Nobel-winning work in economics was far more nuanced than his books and columns (and actually helped lay the intellectual foundations for smart strategic trade policy)... Another Nobel-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, who like Rodrik warned back in the ’90s of the disruptive effects of too rapid lowering of trade and capital barriers, told me that the problem with “standard neoclassical analysis” was that it “never paid any attention to adjustment. Labor market adjustment miraculously happened costlessly.”... there were plenty who did pay attention to how the old verities about open trade and comparative advantage were no longer as telling, displaced by new trends such as global supply chains, which shifted huge numbers of jobs overseas and took out whole communities. Krugman himself eventually concluded in a 2008 academic paper that because of these supercomplex supply chains, “the changing nature of world trade has outpaced economists’ ability to engage in secure quantitative analysis.”... Economists once believed that low unemployment led to inflation, but today that relationship, called the standard Phillips curve, has broken down... The main loser, again, is the American worker. Whereas economists used to believe that workers, during boom times, could drive up their compensation (thus leading to inflation), the emerging economic wisdom now suggests something different: After a quarter century in which multinationals have turned the whole globe into their economic turf (while workers usually have to stay in their home countries), globalized capital—manifesting itself as multinational supply chains—has the upper hand over domestic labor. Hence, economists themselves are surprised at how quickly the mainstream of their profession has moved leftward" Of course, the libertarians will cling on to their Economics 101
Meme - "Fantastic idea for the girls who love to masturbate in cinema"
Coke vs. Pepsi: The Difference Is One Simple Ingredient - "Coca-Cola, nutritionally, has a touch more sodium than Pepsi, which reminds us of Topo Chico or a club soda and results in a less blatantly sweet taste. Pepsi packs more calories, sugar, and caffeine than Coke... "Pepsi is sweeter than Coke, so right away it had a big advantage in a sip test. Pepsi is also characterized by a citrusy flavor burst, unlike the more raisiny-vanilla taste of Coke. But that burst tends to dissipate over the course of an entire can. Pepsi, in short, is a drink built to shine in a sip test"... people tended to prefer Pepsi in a single sip test because naturally, we're drawn to sweeter sips. It's proven by Pepsi's nutritional content that it has slightly more sugar than Coke, and therefore Pepsi tends to take home a sip test easily with a big advantage. However, it's when it comes down to the full can where Coca-Cola shines. Then, the bright citrus flavor of Pepsi doesn't hold up well to the smooth flavor of Coca-Cola."
The Food Lab, Drinks Edition: Is Mexican Coke Better? - "People prefer American Coke to Mexican Coke from a pure flavor and aroma standpoint.
People prefer glass bottles to aluminum cans from a purely tactile standpoint...
Those folks who prefer Mexican Coke (like myself), really just like the idea of Mexican Coke—whether it's because they think real sugar is tastier/healthier than corn syrup, whether it's because Mexican Coke is more expensive and harder to find, thus more valuable, whether it's because of its exoticism, whatever the reason—strip away the Mexicanness of it, and suddenly it's a lot less appealing."
Say goodbye to the traditional buffet, at least for now - "Buffets still aren’t allowed, so Gulati is reformatting the restaurant. It will be a test run for the other two restaurants in Ontario... He says management came up with two possibilities: one being cafeteria service, in which diners are handed a plate and go up to one of the 12 food stations, where an attendant serves them food. The drawback to that is how to ensure guests will be able to stand two metres apart without intruding on others in the dining room.The other, more likely, scenario is to have diners order unlimited food from their table, a format most diners would already be familiar with at all-you-can-eat sushi spots. Guests order from a pared down menu, likely between 50-70 items, from their table and a server brings the food to them on platters. Gulati says they’re also working to enable diners to get the menu as well as pay from their phones to minimize contact.Still, the common sentiment from restaurant owners is that reopening a dining room at half capacity won’t generate enough revenue. That’s especially true for buffets that occupy massive spaces (and with that, have massive operating costs). Tandoori Flame’s locations are around 10,000 square feet. The buffet stations occupy a fifth of that. Since a buffet charges a flat rate, it relies on having a full room and a high customer turnover. For every voracious diner that tries to game the system by only eating high-cost items such as seafood, there needs to be people that don’t eat as much or fill up on bread and pasta... “I always liked the model at dim sum and sushi restaurants because it helps control waste,” he says. “Serving as you go helps lower the costs, which helps considering everything else is going up. It’s the only way I can see it working.”... “You’ll be shocked at how much goes uneaten,” says Ling Lee’s Chinese Cuisine owner Norina Karschti, whose parents opened the restaurant atop a curling club in Thunder Bay in 1973. “You’ll see someone take five egg rolls but only eat two, or know that the price of pork loin went up but you can’t charge people more for it. It’s sad to see, because we make things from scratch.”She estimates about a third of the food at the buffet goes uneaten and with the ingredients costing 38 per cent of what she charges, she doesn’t see it as a money-maker... It’s hard to shake the gluttonous image of the modern buffet considering its origins.The Las Vegas Sun credits the late publicist Herb McDonald with coming up with the idea of the all-you-can-eat buffet back in 1946 when he was working for the El Rancho Vegas hotel. McDonald brought out cheese and meats from the kitchen and laid them out on the bar to make a sandwich, catching the attention of hungry gamblers who wanted in on the spread.Other casinos followed. At first, it was a way to lure gamblers with unlimited cheap food (hello, $1-Salisbury steaks!) but as Vegas became more family-friendly, the buffets became attractions themselves. The 600-seat, aptly named Bacchanal Buffet at Caesar’s Palace opened in 2012 with a budget of $100 million and served a million people within its first year.A few buffets tried to curb the “all-you-can-eat” mantra in recent years. An executive chef of the American buffet chain Sizzlers told the defunct food magazine Lucky Peach in 2014 that they prefer to call it “all-you-care-to-eat” so that diners don’t see it as a challenge to overeat.But the buffet represents more than flashy excess. In her 2019 book Chop Suey Nation, journalist Ann Hui writes about the Chinese restaurant-turned-buffet her parents owned in Abbotsford as well as places such as Ling Lee’s Chinese Cuisine in Thunder Bay.“For a lot of Canadians, the buffet was the introduction of Chinese food,” says Hui, adding that in Canada, it was Montreal restaurateur Bill Wong who popularized the all-you-can-eat concept with his namesake restaurant in 1963. “At that time, going out to eat was a special occasion and restaurants offered an experience. That’s why Chinese restaurants were popular: it was a new experience that people couldn’t have at home.”The buffet in particular was an extra novelty, says Hui. Just as my first time trying Indian food was at a buffet, diners unfamiliar with Chinese food first got their taste at these restaurants. “You approach the buffet and pick what looked good,” she says. “You didn’t have to ask questions or know what it was on the menu. It was a perfect entry point for people and made the food more approachable.”"
The Northumbrians: From Bede To Geordie Shore | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "The Great Northern coal field which was characterized by, by death and danger constantly, in fact, there’s mass grave of all those men and boys in *something* churchyard, just has the inscription on the top of it: in the midst of life, we are in death. And that was a fact of life in the coal fields. And like I said, I grew up in a pit village. My grandfather was a coal miner at a colliery called Bates in Blythe in Northumberland, which was a wet pit. It was known as a wet pit because it went out six or seven miles under the North Sea and the sea water used to come in, which used to strike me as absolutely terrifying. And I think a lot of miners had a sort of odd love hate relationship with coal mining, because it was so hard and dangerous on the one hand, but on the other hand, it could be absolutely spectacular and rewarding, and it was the ultimate skilled work in many respects. So periodically, you hear people say, you know, my, my grandfather would never let his son go down the pit and that sort of thing. Or we should be careful not to romanticize coal mining. And I entirely agree because I mean, between 1850 and 1950, I think the stats are for Britain about 100,000 coal miners were killed at work. Many thousands more horribly injured and disabled and so on. So we definitely shouldn't romanticize it. But the problem is the miners themselves romanticized coal mining. Because they wrote ballads about it. They wrote poetry about it. My own grandfather was a painter, a Pitman painter, although not part of the Ashing [sp?] group. But he painted coal mining scenes in his spare time, he was obsessed with it, he loved being a coal miner"
The Life & Legend Of Florence Nightingale | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "She was always fascinated by statistics and said she'd much rather read a book of statistics than a novel. I mean, it was her idea of relaxation to sit down and write statistics. I suppose the way into the subject is to look at the statistical work she did when she came back from the Crimean War, exposing the mortality rates of the British soldier during the war. Many more British soldiers had died from disease at Scutari and in the Crimea than from battle wounds, and she exposed this by creating this brilliant visual diagram what, which is known as the rose diagram or the Coxcomb, because she wanted to present it in as an attractive a light as possible and communicate it to as large a number of people as possible this terrible disaster, the destruction of the British Army from disease. And she did that with this brilliant rose diagram. And then of course, she went on to become the first woman Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. And for the rest of her life, right up to the time she's working on Indian Affairs where she's looking at the subject of irrigation and the problem that the lack of irrigation and the problem that poses for the Indian Riot or Penn's peasant, she's taking statistical material and analyzing its data and then looking for solutions that can be taken from it."
The Gender Gap in Real Estate Sales: Negotiation Skill or Agent Selection? - " Regardless of the buyer’s agent gender, net selling price results for female listing agents are 6.5% higher than their male counterparts... Females seem to be involved in transactions with larger, more expensive, newer homes. Female listing and buyers’ agent transactions involve homes that are approximately 600 square feet larger than the homes for the average male transactions... The homes listed by females were, on average, 10 years newer than those listed by males... Female transactions, both for listing and buyer’s agents, tend to be in wealthier neighborhoods with median household income approximately $20,000 higher for female agents... Fixer-upper homes, those presumably in a poor state of repair, are nearly three times as likely to be listed by males at 11% than females at 4%. Foreclosure differences are the most dramatic of the special circumstance homes with 7% of the female listings and 31% of the male listings. The male focus on foreclosures is also clear among the buyer’s agents with 11% of female transactions and 26% of the male transactions. It is clear that these special-circumstance transactions are more prominent among the male agents... Consistent with the prior descriptive results for the agent/gender groups, the dyadic results point to female association with larger, more expensive homes, particularly when compared to the male/male dyads. The all-female transactions are $480,881 on average, while the male/male transactions average approximately $243,610. This large difference may be partially explained by the concentration of males in the “special circumstance” transactions and poorer neighborhoods as described in the prior section." I saw someone claiming that "the 2008 mortgage sinkhole is a result of women real estate agents creating overvalued sales... women real estate agents are slightly less in numbers, but sell higher value properties... The proof is all there. The banks were dupped as well as the purchaser." Then when I presented the above he claimed he'd already read it and his statement still stood
Canada goose found with explosive duct taped to its body - "A Long Island, N.Y. man has saved a Canada goose after finding the bird with an explosive device duct taped to its chest... LION said the firecracker appeared to have been lit but was soaked in water. DiLeonardo speculates that when the perpetrator lit the fuse, it scared the goose, causing it to run into the water"
Taiwan police return lost Nintendo Switch with the help of Animal Crossing: New Horizons - "One way for players to interact with each other is to send letters. This can be done by heading to the island’s airport, where you can pick a postcard, craft a message, and mail it to friends who have previously visited you... While Animal Crossing takes place in a virtual world, it has previously crossed over with the real world in many ways. In Hong Kong, companies hired players to advertise their brands in the game, while protesters decorated their islands with anti-government slogans and held vigils for the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown."
