When you can't live without bananas

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Wednesday, September 04, 2024

Links - 4th September 2024 (2)

Meme - 10pin bowling lounge @10pin_Chicago: "Bet you guys can't wait to stick your fingers in these new babies... *2 women with bowling balls*
The balls!!! We got new bowling balls guys wtf"

Meme - "If you had to look twice, this is why we're friends... *Asian girl with cat's paw stroking her mouth, looking like her giving a blowjob*"

What color is the fire truck : r/2busty2hide
Mirror

Meme - "Shakespeare spoilers
Hamlet. Macbeth. King Lear
everyone dies
Austen spoilers
Pride and Prejudice. Emma. Sense and Sensibility
everyone gets married"

Meme - "How Godzilla stands in the middle of the ocean *super long legs to stand on ocean floor far below surface*
Burkal1337 @burkal1337: "Why have I never questioned this?""

Meme - "He loves getting raked by the back scratcher. He is my zen garden *cat*"

Meme - *Hot Wheels logo* *Women in wheelchairs*

Meme - Mark Zuckerberg: "ifcookies.accepted) {trackUser();} else {trackUserAnyway();}"

Meme - "What is your age?
14 or younger
15-18
19-22
Old"

Meme - "If you understand this meme, you're just old
Homer Simpson: My family pc
Barney at Door with gun: LINkiNg PaRk- nUmB.exe"

Meme - "AT LAST! My SEX BOMB IS COMPLETE! LOOPS CITY WILL FINALLY BE MINE!"
"NOT ON OUR WATCH, LIPLOCK!"
"GASP! MEGA MILK AND THUNDER THIGHS?!"
"HAVE A TASTE OF MY CALCIUM CANNONS, FIEND!"
"GAH! BREASTMILK! MY SECRET WEAKNESS!"
"ISN'T IT KINDA WEIRD HOW SHE ALWAYS YELLS OUT HER "SECRET" WEAKNESS?"
"ISN'T THAT JUST A NORMAL CLICHE?"
"OH, NOO-! I FEEL MY POWER WEAKENING! NO MORE! PLEASE!"
"ALRIGHT, YOU KNOW WHAT? MAYBE IT IS A LITTLE WEIRD."
"I'VE BEEN A BAD, BAD GIRL!"

Meme - "Reddit mods are on a power trip. I wonder why r/funny only gets 44 posts in a day. Surely it couldn't be because the mod team does this to its users:"
"Hi there, I'm not sure why I was banned?"
"We're going to pretend that you didn't contact us. Read the message that you received with your ban."
"I did and I'm still confused. Can you please elaborate? It's also my first time even posting in this subreddit. What specific rule did I break?"
"Welp, we tried. Per the message you received with your ban, said ban is now permanent."
"I read the rules, and I was asking for clarification. It's super frustrating that you feel inclined to ban me permanently when I was looking for more information."

Meme - Renson Seow: "When you read about the election results in Europe and see the hand wringing about "the (alleged) rise of the far right". It's called false narrative. They won't be winning elections if they don't actually represent the reasonable middle."
Bell curve: Far left - "left", Left - "right", Centre Left rightwards - "far right"

Meme - "When your boss asks you to train your replacement *Toddler with newborn, with toddler giving the parent the stinkeye*"

One in ten UK children have never been to the seaside, survey reveals - "two-thirds of Britons consider a day out at the seaside a national institution, and nine in ten reminisce positively about their own beach adventures. Despite this, classic childhood memories are being lost for future generations. These include walking along piers (47 per cent), digging large holes in the sand (35 per cent) and burying your parents (13 percent). Nostalgic seaside staples like souvenir shops (17 per cent), donkey rides (20 per cent) and arcade games (41 per cent) also feature among the experiences today's kids rarely enjoy. Other fond memories at risk of being forgotten include beach cricket (10 per cent), men in socks and sandals (10 per cent), battling with windbreakers (9 per cent) and running from seagulls (11 per cent). Over half of parents (51 per cent) wish they had more time to take their children for some seaside air"

Why the interview process is more annoying than ever - "matchmaking is taking longer than several years ago. In 2023, the time it took to get workers in the door was 44.5 days, up from 40 in 2019, according to the most recent figures from HR data firm Josh Bersin Research... Schielke said, for her, the sweet spot is three — maybe four — interviews. She said some hiring managers could have felt chastened by the red-hot years following the pandemic when attracting workers was difficult, and employees had ample opportunities to hand in their resignation letters. That made some employers cautious about hiring. "The culture fit — now more than ever — matters to these companies because they want people who are going to stay and not jump ship," Schielke said."

It's wild how many job listings might be fake - "Companies often post bogus roles to ease employees' concerns about being overworked and signal that the organization is growing, said Resume Builder, which recently found three in 10 employers have fake job listings. Resume Builder, which offers résumé templates, surveyed nearly 650 hiring managers in May and found nearly seven in 10 said it was "morally acceptable" to post fake jobs. Hiring managers credited the move with increasing revenue, morale, and how much workers get done... The reasons for listing fake jobs included signaling that the employer was willing to hire from outside the organization. Yet about six in 10 respondents also said companies wanted to make overworked employees think help was on the way — and that they could be replaced... About six in 10 hiring managers said the intent was to scoop up résumés for when a role opens. Haller said there's no issue collecting the information, provided employers are upfront about it... Haller said employers that dangle fake listings risk hurting themselves by undermining their reputations. One reason is simply that companies often get caught. Two-thirds of hiring managers said those they meant to dupe, including workers, investors, and job seekers, figured out they were being hoodwinked... many fake listings often lead to real interviews — and even employment. Four in 10 hiring managers said they always contacted workers who applied for made-up jobs. Forty-five percent said they sometimes contacted those job seekers. Among companies that contacted applicants, 85% report interviewing the person... "If it was five months ago, and it's still up there, it's fake," she said."

Why talk of grow-your-own (GYO) is irrelevant and unhelpful - "Growing food in urban environments has many benefits, but it cannot reach anywhere near the scale needed to provide for more than a minuscule fraction of the population... The profit margins on fresh produce along the whole supply chain is a miserly 0-2.5%. When businesses have to scrape a living, they either leave the sector, or move into niche markets and/or diversify and/or scale up. (No surprise then that huge companies dominate the food sector and the UK.) You can add in another point about scale, too. And that’s about the hard physical effort it takes to grow even small quantities of food for yourself. There are ~10K allotments in this city (so less than 1% of us rent one) and a fair few of them are unoccupied. No surprise, it’s hard work, it can be frustrating too sometimes, what with the weather and slugs who view our food as their food. Despite all that, growing food in back gardens, allotments, school and community gardens has many social and personal benefits as well as the production of fruit and veg. GYO is also picturesque and easy to understand. But (and it’s a big BUT) it diverts attention away from the risks to our food supplies and what we need do. And because the dangers are urgent, we need do stuff now, rather than faff on about the irrelevant. Evidence-based, pre-crisis thinking is necessary now."

'Cocaine Sharks' Discovered in Brazil Raise Alarm Over Ocean Pollution - "Brazil faces a particularly serious problem with cocaine as a pollutant. In fact, water samples collected from the Bay of Santos in 2017 contained as much cocaine as they did caffeine, a common yardstick for pharmaceutical contamination given its prevalence in various beverages around the world. Both drugs filter into the waterways via sewage after being excreted by consumers. As a major cocaine exporter, Brazil's illegal refining facilities could also be contributing to its pollution problem, as could drug packages lost or discarded by traffickers within the nation's ports."

My Daughter Starved Because of My Determination to Exclusively Breastfeed and Lack of Knowledge on How to Supplement - Fed Is Best Foundation
She listened to her doctors — and her baby died. Now she’s warning others about breast-feeding. - The Washington Post - "Landon Johnson had been trying to breast-feed almost continuously since his birth days earlier — and screaming each time his mother pulled him from her chest. Just stick with it, the first-time parents were told; it will take some time to get the hang of breast-feeding.  But hours after the Johnsons took their son home from the hospital, Jillian found him unresponsive... A doctor in a neonatal intensive care unit told them he suspected Landon was so severely dehydrated that his heart had stopped beating, she said... "there were these doctors and nurses who kept telling me, ‘Just keep feeding him. Just keep him on the breast. You’ve got a great latch. You’re doing fine.’ ”  But she had no breast milk to offer him, she said... he said, “formula is very acceptable source,” both alone or to supplement breast milk.  But much more common is the societal pressure some women say they feel to breast-feed.  In an op-ed for The Post last year, three psychiatrists wrote that although the benefits of breast-feeding are backed by science, “the recommendations carry the force of a threat: If I don’t breastfeed, my child is more likely to get sick; if I don’t breastfeed, my child won’t be as smart; if I don’t breastfeed, I’m not a good mother... Then there’s the physical pain some women say they endure to breast-feed their babies.  Johnson, Landon’s mother, said that during the three days she was constantly nursing her son, her breasts were sore and her nipples were raw and bleeding."
Beware Of Accidentally Starving Your Breastfed Newborn, Warns The Fed Is Best Foundation - "medical professionals, lactation consultants and leading breastfeeding advocacy organization La Leche League tell new mothers that newborns who nurse frequently will get enough milk. They warn against supplementation, saying that it will hinder breastfeeding success. Del Castillo-Hegyi explains that one “logical fallacy of breastfeeding education is that humans have evolved perfectly and therefore nature protects our babies.” She stresses that this is misguided, and that historically, babies died when mothers who failed to lactate couldn’t find a wet nurse or another source of milk. “Luckily, humans developed an alternative that allowed the least-fed to survive, an alternative that is being made less available to mothers who are made to feel like failures for using it,” she explains. Indeed, hospitals increasingly discourage the use of infant formula, and the breastmilk versus formula battle rages on in parenting forums internet-wide...  We know that not getting enough milk can cause brain damage in babies, and exclusively breastfed newborns are at higher risk of starvation... She points to a study published in Pediatrics, which shows that limited supplementation of underfed breastfed babies may be a good temporary method to help reduce early weight loss, and has the potential to actually increase long-term breastfeeding success."
Mindless promotion of breastfeeding and demonisation of mothers who don't do it has costs

Meme - "*Tuxedo Winnie The Pooh* POSTING A MEME
GETTING REACTIONS
GETTING SHARES
GETTING DEATH THREATS"

Meme - Library Poster: "Enter a new World. Read a book" *kid sliding down rainbow into book*
*Kid pulling out book with arcane writing, spider-skull and ouroboros*
*kids sliding down rainbow into book*
*Hellscape*

Why Are Middle East Girls Better in School Than Boys? - The Atlantic (aka "Boys Are Not Defective") - "Jordan has never had a female minister of education, women make up less than a fifth of its workforce, and women hold just 4 percent of board seats at public companies there. But, in school, Jordanian girls are crushing their male peers. The nation’s girls outperform its boys in just about every subject and at every age level. At the University of Jordan, the country’s largest university, women outnumber men by a ratio of two to one—and earn higher grades in math, engineering, computer-information systems, and a range of other subjects. In fact, across the Arab world, women now earn more science degrees on a percentage basis than women in the United States. In Saudi Arabia alone, women earn half of all science degrees. And yet, most of those women are unlikely to put their degrees to paid use for very long.  This is baffling on the most obvious levels. In the West, researchers have long believed that future prospects incentivize students to invest in school. The conventional wisdom is that girls do better in school as women acquire more legal and political rights in society. But many Middle Eastern women do not go on to have long professional careers after graduating; they spend much of their lives working at home as wives and mothers. Fewer than one in every five workers is female in Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman... It’s part of a pattern that is creeping across the globe: Wherever girls have access to school, they seem to eventually do better than boys... Motivation is the dark matter of education. It’s everywhere but impossible to see... the slow slipping away of boys’ interest in education represents a profound failure of schools and society. And the implications are universally terrible. All over the world, poorly educated men are more likely to be unemployed, to have physical- and mental-health problems, to commit acts of violence against their families, and to go to prison. They are less likely to marry but quite likely to father children... Across the developed world, girls report doing one more hour of homework than boys per week, according to survey data... boys and girls might as well have been attending schools in different countries.  For one thing, boys’ schools are more violent places... Boys also reported worse relationships with their male teachers. Only 40 percent of male students interviewed said they believed their teachers cared about how well they did in school—compared with 74 percent of girls... male teachers were three times as likely as female teachers to say they were dissatisfied with teaching. Teachers do not earn a lot of money in Jordan, but men are still expected to be the primary breadwinners in families. So male teachers are more likely to work second or third jobs... Boys are not defective; schools are. The fact that boys are struggling around the world means that too many schools are designed with a bias for girls. Too many teachers prefer compliance over competition, quiet diligence over risk-taking, and on average that leads to schools that are more comfortable for girls than for boys in every time zone. But given the world they are inheriting, just as boys need to learn to focus, girls need to learn to take risks."
Of course, since more men than women get First Class degrees in the developed world, this is proof that patriarchy stacks the education system against women
Weird. Left wingers keep complaining that homework is useless

School Quality and the Gender Gap in Educational Achievement - "Recent evidence indicates that boys and girls are differently affected by the quantity and quality of family inputs received in childhood. We assess whether this is also true for schooling inputs. Using matched Florida birth and school administrative records, we estimate the causal effect of school quality on the gender gap in educational outcomes by contrasting opposite-sex siblings who attend the same sets of schools—thereby purging family heterogeneity—and leveraging within-family variation in school quality arising from family moves. Investigating middle school test scores, absences and suspensions, we find that boys benefit more than girls from cumulative exposure to higher quality schools."

Meme - "*Galaxy Brain Meme* Killing the monarch in public execution
Killing the monarch in a private location so it doesn't look bad
Keeping the monarch alive, seizing all his wealth and property, and giving him an ordinary job."

Meme - "Service Center
Girls girls girls
Just kidding. Oil changes"

Home Alone in Poland: An Unexpected National Tradition - "The 1990 American family comedy is an idiosyncratic icon of Polish Christmas. On the classic list of a Pole’s holiday associations, it could only be beat by a short list of nouns: Christmas Tree, Santa Claus, presents, and a couple of traditional dishes. Let us introduce you to the phenomenal popularity of Kevin McCallister’s adventures in Poland... The majority of viewers are actually adults. According to public polls, every third viewer between the age of 16 and 49 watches Home Alone during the Christmas period. This is because it is not only a family ritual, but also a sentimental journey in time.  When the blockbuster first hit the cinemas, and then the TV screens across a Poland of the 1990s, it was a revelation and a must-see picture for all kids. For those of us born in the last years of Poland’s communist regime, all things American were an object of worship. The United States represented an unreachable paradise for those who lived behind the Iron Curtain. The only thing that seeped through to Poland were some action films and – less frequently – packages full of Western goods sent in by relatives from abroad. On the threshold of the 1990s, Kevin McCallister became an ambassador of the better, Western world. A brief wave of patriotic war films of Reagan’s epoch had previously swept through Poland, with Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone and Clint Eastwood becoming the imported icons of bravery. But Home Alone’s Kevin was the first child hero to mark our consciousness in such a strong way...   And Kevin is not alone. Other icons of American culture have also grown into the Polish holiday landscape. For reasons that remain completely unknown, another recurring Christmas blockbuster was Die Hard. The invincible Bruce Willis taught us a bloody lesson just as we were finishing our family dinners, and as we got down to opening our presents. Why did the Polish TV channels decide to air this action film during the holidays? It’s hard to guess, although noticeably Die Hard is essentially Home Alone for adults."

Brad Fox's answer to Why are most American movies and television shows these days filmed in Canada? - Quora - "“Most” American movies and television shows aren’t filmed in Canada but some are. It’s tough to quantify hard numbers about volume, but the MPAA says the Film & Television industry spent about $47 Billion in the US in 2015, while the CMPA estimated the Canadian screen industry financial impact in 2015 at $7.1 Billion (pdf). And the Canadian numbers include domestic Canadian production, as well as international production from everywhere else in the world - so the US would be only a portion of that. As for why some productions would chose to shoot in Canada there’s all kinds of reasons but here’s just a few:
The Canadian dollar is cheaper...
There’s certain government rebate incentives (tax credits) to encourage producers from other countries to shoot in Canada (lots of countries, and some US cities and states do this as well)
But money isn’t the *only* reason productions come to Canada. There are much cheaper countries to shoot in (Romania, China, India) and even when the Canadian dollar was *more* expensive than the US one there was still *some* US production here.
Crews are (mostly) English and plane rides are short from the US so you don’t have some of the travel / language / culture concerns that you might have in some other countries.
There are some locations (like Vancouver) that are extremely geographically diverse, so you have access to a variety of locations in a short area (mountains, cities, prairies, ocean). This is one reason that Vancouver has become so popular for television series. There are some locations (like Toronto) that can pass for large US cities (New York, Chicago) but are much easier to shoot in.
There are some locations (like Montreal or Quebec) that can pass for European cities, but are closer to the US (also Montreal has a couple of the *largest* soundstages in the world, necessary, for production requiring heavy CGI work (“300” was shot in Montreal).
There is a large pool of experienced crew, as well as english-language acting talent that can all pass for American (if you need 100 extras filling out a restaurant, that’s going to be easier to do in Winnipeg than, say, Dongyang).
There is a lot of infrastructure to support film and television production in Canada (studios, equipment rental companies, costume / prop / wardrobe rental warehouses…)
All that being said the amount of production coming up to Canada changes over time. Certainly the US film industry isn’t shooting the number of features in Canada that it was, say, back in 2000."

Singapore Luxury Business Faces Downturn as China's Rich Vanish - Bloomberg - "For many of us in Singapore hoping to buy a car, a home, or even a luxury item as a gift for a loved one, the last few years have been rough. Prices skyrocketed for everything from designer handbags to whisky, and long queues for the latest offerings of glitzy Orchard Road shops became a regular event. (A big hole in my paycheck a year ago for a green Goyard bag testified to this.) Foreigners were shelling out nearly S$1 million ($744,000) for membership of the country's top golf club.  Now that's changing. The influx of rich Chinese that drove the boom is waning, a point driven home to me when I came across a line of second-hand Rolls-Royces in a dingy carpark in the west of Singapore. The shift is raising questions about who benefitted from the largesse. It’s not just a first-world problem for Crazy Rich Asians, there's a deeper concern afoot... For all the talk of benefits to the roughly 3.6 million resident citizens, there has been little beyond the rise in prices to show for it. Wealth managers say the rich arrivals rarely give them much business beyond custodian deals, while the proliferation of Lamborghinis and Bentleys and galloping house prices served to foster resentment among some about the unaffordability of homes and cars.  And with the influx of cash, there also came illicit funds, culminating in the country's biggest money-laundering scandal. Singapore isn’t alone in trying to rein in the widening gap between ordinary citizens and the super rich. But as a recent UBS report stated about the city: “It appears that most of the rise in wealth has benefited the upper income brackets.”  It remains to be seen if this is just a retreat or an exodus. But as other nations that tried to lure wealthy foreigners with tax breaks and golden visas have found, rolling out the red carpet for the rich has more repercussions than just money"

Meme - "My mum's laptop wallpaper was a picture of her granddaughter. I copied the picture 100 times and made her wallpaper a slide show of the same picture over and over again, so the file would change but nothing would change visibly on the monitor. The pictures would change every 10 seconds. On one of the images I painted a tiny little curly moustache on her. So randomly for 10 seconds niece would have moustache. My thought she was either losing her mind or had a computer virus and everytime the moustache popped up, it was gone by the time she tried to show anyone"

Gerry McBride on X - "After the early bricks but before smartphones, there was a stretch where phone design went absolutely catshit bananas... I call this one the Shyamalan because of the unnecessary twist... One more- here's a phone I had, the Sony Ericsson W995. Nothing unusual about it really, slide out keypad etc. But it had a little kickstand that let you prop it up to watch videos! isn't that something?! Where's that innovation nowaways?!... Back to Nokia land! And finally the networks were catching up with providing good, reliable internet. Plus it had bluetooth so if you knew someone with one of these and two hours to spare they could transfer you some incredibly low-res pornography."

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