Man Blames Cat For Getting Wife Pregnant After It Poked Holes In Condoms
How constant Slack messaging has made work more taxing - "here is the thing about Slack and its growing number of rivals: Not everyone who has it uses it... To generalise greatly, workers who grew up texting or WhatsApp-ing instead of phoning or emailing gravitate easily to a system such as Slack but their bosses often do not... They splinter communication, especially inside big companies that need it more than ever now that so many staff are working from home. A friend of mine at a large firm moaned often before the pandemic about the need to constantly check for important work news on email and Slack, along with Google chat, Facebook Workplace and a slew of other platforms that had crept relentlessly into his office.Now he has gone into overdrive.That points to one of the big failures of workplace chat tools. They were supposed to replace or at least reduce brimming email inboxes. Instead, too many people must now spend time monitoring both. That is not all. Because Slack feels so similar to the pinging messaging apps we use at home, it instills a sense of privacy at work that does not necessarily exist.There are times when its use does make sense. For a one-off team assignment with a pressing deadline, it is brilliant.It can also help to keep far-flung team members in touch.But the chief reason I will always find it hard to love Slack is that it can be such a monumental distraction... once they get a message addressed to themselves, they tend to respond within an average of just 12 minutes.That adds up to a lot of interruptions, which is a problem. Researchers say it can take around 23 minutes to return to the task at hand after being interrupted.Some jobs require ceaseless communication. But most do not, meaning a lot of this activity either dents productivity or creates stressful extra work to make up for lost time.""
Matt McGorry Lost So Much Weight For Sex Scenes ‘Nothing Came Out When He Orgasmed’ - "Orange Is The New Black star Matt McGorry put his body through so much while trying to lose weight for sex scenes that his sex drive plummeted and nothing came out when he orgasmed."
Michigan Supreme Court Rules Government Can't Seize Entire Value of Home Over Property Tax Delinquency Worth $8.41 - "'In 2014, Oakland County, Michigan foreclosed on a home owned by Uri Rafaeli's business—Rafaeli, LLC—over an $8.41 tax debt. The County sold the property for $24,500, and kept profits. Ditto for Andre Ohanessian, when the County seized and sold his property for $82,000, and pocketed every penny left over from the $6,000 tax debt. While most states refund the surplus, Michigan is among a handful of states that allow property theft to fill government coffers. PLF asked the Michigan Supreme Court to strike down this bureaucratic theft and restore our clients' constitutional rights.'... civil asset forfeiture laws in many states do not require the government to prove that the owner had actually committed a crime, or even charge her with one. They therefore often allow law enforcement agencies to seize property without compensation even if the owner did nothing wrong, and had no idea that their property might have been used for an illicit purpose. Like excessive tax forfeitures, asset forfeitures disproportionately victimize the poor, small businesses, ethnic minorities, and others who may lack the knowledge and resources to conduct a prolonged legal battle against difficult odds."
Most Competitive Economies Ranking Puts Canada Ahead Of U.S. For 1st Time - "Canada has beaten the U.S. for the first time ever in a ranking of the world’s most competitive economies, in part because of U.S. President Donald Trump’s damaging trade war with China... Arturo Bris, a finance professor and head of IMD’s Competitiveness Centre, noted that virtually all of the countries in the top 10 are now relatively small economies. “The benefit of small economies in the current crisis comes from their ability to fight a pandemic and from their economic competitiveness. In part these may be fed by the fact it is easy to find social consensus,” Bris said in the report.“This marks a new world in which de-globalization (and) the importance of national government has increased”... The success of many of these smaller countries ― particularly northern European countries, Canada, Australia and New Zealand ― is due to “their pretty much open welfare state”"
The chork is the fork-chopstick love child that America deserves - The Washington Post - "Meet “the chork”: a fork-chopstick hybrid that is, depending on whom you ask, genius, stupid, fun or ridiculous, and most likely a mixture of these things. The internet was in an uproar earlier this month when Panda Express, America’s largest Chinese food chain, announced it will introduce the chork on some occasions. For the uninitiated, the chork can be used three ways. It can be used as a fork, for Americans who prefer to stick to stabbing and scooping, or as “trainer” chopsticks, where the ends remain attached, making them easier to use. Or the plastic can be snapped apart to make "normal" chopsticks. As we'll see, the chork represents the inevitable culmination of America’s long tradition of Chinese food apostasy.".
Thread by @Jkylebass - "China’s Three Gorges Dam is at severe risk of breaking. The chinese Communists hailed the massive dam as a “1000-year dam” once constructed in 2003. CCP messaging this week is now calling it a “100-yr dam in a 200-yr flood”. They are telling the people to prepare for collapse. The scary reality is that the overwhelming majority of chinese (and therefore US) pharmaceutical production is located on the Yangtze River just below the creaking dam. If it breaks, it could be a catastrophe for the people of china AND the United States #china #PharmaGeddon"
When Corporate Social Responsibility Backfires: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment - "This paper uses a natural field experiment to connect corporate social responsibility (CSR) to an important but often neglected behavior: employee misconduct and shirking. Through employing more than 1,500 workers, we find that our use of CSR increases employee misbehavior—24% more employees act detrimentally toward our firm by shirking on their primary job duties when we introduce CSR. Observed data patterns across the treatments are consonant with a model of “moral licensing,” whereby the “doing good” nature of CSR induces workers to misbehave on another dimension that is harmful to the firm."
More evidence for moral licensing
Loke Hoe Yeong - "I am baffled at the hue and cry from some quarters about Pritam Singh donating half of his new Leader of the Opposition salary. It reminded me of an episode from the past which I covered in “The First Wave”:In 1985, Wong Kan Seng (then a Minister of State) challenged J.B. Jeyaretnam and Chiam See Tong to donate half their MP’s allowance and their own salaries from their legal practice, to "show their sincerity in feeling for the less fortunate".Wong announced that he had written out a cheque to the Community Chest to donate half his ministerial salary and his MP’s allowance. Quite unbelievably, Wong denied that he was “blowing his trumpet” when Chiam took him to task... It's worth bearing in mind some history here before hurling accusations about Pritam's intentions"
MSF Singapore - Posts - "You may have come across a Facebook post, about a member of public’s encounter on the train with an elderly woman who works as a cleaner. The elderly woman was quoted as saying that she was seeking additional employment to earn a living.Our Social Service Office (SSO) colleagues have identified the elderly woman, Mdm L. She is staying in a five-room flat with her son’s family. The family has a domestic helper. Her son provides her with food and shelter but she works to supplement her other expenses... The Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) has verified that Mdm L’s elder son, a regular warrant officer, died during a Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) freefall training session in South Africa, in May 2009. Full compensation was paid out to his family."
I saw many people slamming MSF. Apparently facts don't matter - it is more important to be morally right than factually correct. This ties in with the weaponisation of fact checking as a way to discredit political enemies (not least by lying either outrightly or implicitly while 'fact checking')
Tan Chuan-Jin - Posts - "The reality is that MSF Singapore’s clarification will NEVER viral the way the original criticism did. A number of folks sent the post to me because the individual who had posted it had taken the opportunity to attack me. Some sent to me to flag it up for my attention and asked me to help the lady. Some taunted and mocked me.I have no regrets about the work I do on this front. I used to share more because it helps us understand the complexities better but more critically it was to encourage folks to be proactive and approach people who appear to need help.But obviously I post less on the people I meet and assist because I know what the mob would do with it. My advice still remains. If in doubt, provide assistance. It’s ok if we are ‘taken for a ride’ because you never know, it may well have been critical. Speak to them, listen, find out more, take down details and let us know so that we can follow up and verify. Things aren’t often as it seems but we will help where needed. Don’t just take an image, write and slam but yet nothing structurally is done to help the person. Often, if things sound quite so bad, there is definitely help available."
Benjamin "Mr Miyagi" Lee - Posts - "I love what the unions in NTUC do for workers. Every time someone says 'our unions are hopeless one lah', I tell them how I've been privy to the behind the scenes work, including how Lim Swee Say used to put on this gangster hat over his nonchalantly centre-parted hair and threaten companies to comply with labour measures. Or how, once when we found out some workers were unfairly dismissed, union comms people contacted me to ask if my 'social media friends could help whack the company online'."
Arsen Ostrovsky on Twitter - "I kid you not! At Knesset hearing on Antisemitism, @Twitter rep tells me they flag @realDonaldTrump because it serves ‘public conversation’, but not Iran's @khamenei_ir call for GENOCIDE, which passes for acceptable 'commentary on political issues of the day'."
In other words: "As an example of how much Twitter is a shitshow, Twitter TnS rep answering questions at the Knesset, can't explain why they tag Trump's tweets for glorifying violence, but does nothing for Khamenei's tweets calling for genocide of Israelis."
To liberals, killing Jews is "punching up" and enforcing law and order on rioters linked to BLM is "punching down". Power relations means never having to say you're sorry (one liberal endorsed the latter as a characterisation of their racism/sexism/other bigotry)
Lucas Lynch - "It is a little interesting how whenever conservative female politicians have all kinds of scorn, specifically gendered or otherwise, heaped upon them, suddenly people aren’t rushing to say that they are connected to the struggle of every woman in society.  Which is fine. It would be strange to say that Margaret Thatcher was united in some kind of “common story“ of every woman in existence. In reality, Margaret Thatcher was just herself, the individual. "
Reproductive trade-offs in extant hunter-gatherers suggest adaptive mechanism for the Neolithic expansion - "The rise of agriculture during the Neolithic period has paradoxically been associated with worldwide population growth despite increases in disease and mortality. We examine the effects of sedentarization and cultivation on disease load, mortality, and fertility among Agta foragers. We report increased disease and mortality rates associated with sedentarization alongside an even larger increase in fertility associated with both participation in cultivation and sedentarization. Thus, mothers who transition to agriculture have higher reproductive fitness. We provide the first empirical evidence, to our knowledge, of an adaptive mechanism behind the expansion of agriculture, explaining how we can reconcile the Neolithic increase in morbidity and mortality with the observed demographic expansion."
Melissa Chen - "Dr. Kristina Schierenbeck @BotanyRules: I am trying to #decolonize my bio majors #Evolution course. Surely Darwin/Wallace ideas existed in other cultures? Any suggestions for readings? Some good resources in geography, zoology, botany, but specifically, evolution?"
"I’ve fought many battles against conservative Christians over their denial of evolution.I now have to fight similar attempts at defenestrating science from the left.To paraphrase Reagan: reason is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction.
Comments: "This person is a professor at Cal State University in Chico, CA"
"When I first was scheduled to teach evolutionary psych at CUNY a colleague asked me “are you getting heat from your conservative students?” Shockingly (at the time years ago), my answer was “no, my main issues come from my liberal students”"
"We should decolonize slavery, imperialism and racism. Surely these practices existed in other cultures? Any suggestions on readings?"
Resistance Movement Vows To Do Anything To Stop Trump Short Of Treating Other Half Of Country With Respect | The Babylon Bee - "This is a sentiment widely shared by all the loudest opposition to Trump—antifa, Democrats, journalists—who see Trump as a challenge to this country unlike anything it has ever faced. To them, that means every strategy must be considered to stop the rising tide of fascism short of treating their political opponents as fellow human beings and not the cartoon villains they have dreamed up in their heads.“Absolutely everything is on the table to stop the evil of Trump,” said antifa member Tommy Barker. “Get in people’s faces. Destroy property. Punch people we think are Nazis. Love has to win—unless that involves giving up my hatred for approximately half the people in this country. I’d rather Trump be dictator for life than ever do that.”"
