Links, Wednesday 30 Dec

"It’s a simple idea, but the sex menu is pretty revolutionary. When was the last time you did a thorough inventory of all your kinks and desires, all really focused on the kind of sex you’d like to be having? We routinely evaluate our feelings and goals relating to say, work or physical fitness, but rarely afford the same level of analysis to our sex lives. Writing a sex menu gives your desires the headspace they deserve, and puts the emphasis firmly on what actually works for you." Refinery29

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This was a misconception of mine...

"Today’s Oxford Street was once the main Roman road leading westwards out of London (the via Trinovantica), and was indeed the way to Oxford – but that isn’t why it’s called Oxford Street now. Up until the early 18th century, Tyburn Road still marked the northernmost edge of London, with open fields to the north leading towards the village of Mary le Bone. These fields belonged to Edward Harley, the earl of Oxford, and it was for him the street was renamed in 1739" Guardian

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"After the unexpected death of a rock-star scientist, their frequent collaborators — the junior researchers who authored papers with them — suddenly see a drop in publication. At the same time, there is a marked increase in published work by other newcomers to the field... The new articles represent substantial contributions, at least as measured by long-run citation impact. Together, these results paint a picture of scientific fields as scholarly guilds to which elite scientists can regulate access, providing them with outsized opportunities to shape the direction of scientific advance in that space." Vox

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"Multiple headlines Tuesday suggested that a new study determined vegetarianism to be more harmful to the environment than eating meat, flying in the face previous research. But the researchers behind this new study say that’s a total mischaracterization of what they found." Huff Post

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"If gender neutral clothes are only made for and marketed to the parents of little girls, it is less a sign of gender equality and more an indication of the misogyny that is so ambient in our culture. There is such a devaluing of anything traditionally feminine that we’d rather chuck it out triumphantly than ever demean our boys with it." National Post

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An interview with the inventor of the first spreadsheet software

"Early adopters of the spreadsheet program seemed to possess “magic powers,”"

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"Hill farming not only makes a wildly disproportionate contribution to climate change; it also trashes our watersheds, increasing the chances of dangerous floods, and destroys what would otherwise be our wildlife refuges: the great empty uplands, in which economic activity is sustained only through lavish farm subsidies. It is hard to think of any human activity with a higher ratio of destruction to economic product." Guardian

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"In a complex society, where there’s so much interdependency, the amount of suffering that gets unleashed by an effort at rupture makes it unsustainable under democratic conditions. Under non-democratic conditions, the problem is that authoritarian transitions don’t result in democratic and participatory destinations. I am not prepared to formally proclaim an impossibility theorem. That’s too strong. There are too many contingencies, but my intuition is that a system-level ruptural transformation of capitalism is impossible.

...

I don’t think it’s plausible that the anarchist strategy of just getting on with the business of building the world you want in the world that exists is likely to succeed in transforming the world as a whole. But I do think if [this strategy] is combined with new ways of thinking about taming capitalism, then it might be possible to create a long-term political strategy which combines the best of the progressive side of social democracy with the most constructive versions of anarchist community activism and bottom-up creativity." Jacobin

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:D :D

“I took LSD when I was working on return of the Jedi,” said the Star Wars animator Phil Tippet, in a new video profile with Vice. “And it was fine.”

“Then I decided to go back to work, and I walked into the blue screen stage, and it was like ‘ahhh…’” he adds. “I’d taken way too much.”

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Currently the UK and EU governments actively subsidise farmers to use land in ways that are both economically pointless and  result in flooding.

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"I certainly have, along the way, slept with a nerd. But I don’t think I ever got anything out of it except the sex. It was probably good. Nerds will surprise you. They’re way more enthusiastic. More bang with your buck," Metro

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This is mind-blowing. The financial crisis of 2008 was essentially set off by he panicked sale of 'mortgage-backed securities'. Although AAA-rated, many investors started to doubt that these securities would pay out, which triggered mass sell-offs and rapid price decreases, bankrupting institutions which held these assets. As it turns out, however, these assets in fact *were* extremely safe. The problem wasn't actual losses, but simply the *fear* of loss.

"As of late 2014, the realized principal loss on the AAA-rated tranches was just a fifth of a cent on the dollar. But during the panic, they were not perceived to be safe, and their prices ... plunged." - From 'Foolproof', by Greg Ip

Links, Tuesday 15 December

Gosh. Surely there's a catch somewhere?

"In less than 10 years, Uruguay has slashed its carbon footprint without government subsidies or higher consumer costs, according to the national director of energy, Ramón Méndez .

In fact, he says that now that renewables provide 94.5% of the country’s electricity, prices are lower than in the past relative to inflation."

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Trololololol

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A really good exercise (even if you only do the thought experiment) for thinking about sexual consent

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"Twenty years of government-funded research has shown there are several promising strategies to prevent murders of black men, including Ceasefire. They don’t require passing new gun laws, or an epic fight with the National Rifle Association. What they need—and often struggle to get—is political support and a bit of money." New Republic

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“We emergency physicians pride ourselves on being pretty close to the street... Erowid just blew the doors off what we do.” New Yorker

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"As Gopal explains, however, the American team did not attack al-Qaeda or even the Taliban. They attacked the offices of two district governors, both of whom were opponents of the Taliban. They shot the guards, handcuffed one district governor in his bed and executed him, scooped up twenty-six prisoners, sent in AC-130 gunships to blow up most of what remained, and left a calling card behind in the wreckage saying “Have a nice day. From Damage, Inc.” Weeks later, having tortured the prisoners, they released them with apologies. It turned out in this case, as in hundreds of others, that an Afghan “ally” had falsely informed the US that his rivals were Taliban in order to have them eliminated." NY Books

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"Some researchers have made the case that predator and prey, stripped of the rules of the natural world, are actually well situated for friendship. “Predator and prey animals are already set up to know how to read each other,” said Donna Haraway, the author of When Species Meet. “Predators read prey animals incredible well, because it’s how they get dinner. And prey animals read predators very well, because it’s how they avoid becoming dinner.”" Atlantic

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"if Islamophobic sentiment stays at its current level, about one in every 10,000 Muslims [in the US] will be the victim of a reported hate crime over the next year, similar to the rate of automobile fatalities and orders of magnitude higher than the chance of being a victim of terrorism." NY Times

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Hmmm, a potential treatment to completely block pain: combination of low-dose opioid and an experimental drug.

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Any thoughts on how likely this is likely to succeed/be enforceable?

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Interesting interview with Elena Ferrante

"Male boundary-breaking does not automatically entail negative judgments, it’s a sign of curiosity and courage. Female boundary-breaking, especially when it is not undertaken under the guidance or supervision of men, is still disorientating: it is loss of femininity, it is excess, perversion, disease."

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"NTV, for example, one of the country’s biggest networks, doesn’t try to pretend Russia is a rosy place like Soviet channels used to do—which is also how they lost credibility with viewers. Quite the opposite: It shows non-stop horror stories about how dangerous the country is, encouraging the viewer to look to the “strong hand” of the Kremlin for protection. Even supposedly “science-based” programs are used for manipulative effect. The most expensive documentary ever shown on Russian television aired in 2009 and was called Plesen (“Mold”). It argued that mold is taking over the Earth—an invisible but omnipresent enemy whose evil spores have been invading our lives, causing death and disease." Politico

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Some great titbits in here

Links, Wednesday 2nd December

This is good, especially about the Amazon

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Long read, but very touching story. Check it out.

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London was an immigrant city, starting more than 2000 years ago

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"He then added: “Sir, we’re having big problems with Sars [the South African Revenue Service].”

Zuma listened. He said: “We will look into that.”" Amabhungane

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"Health at Every Size, when compared with a weight-loss approach, leads to lower cholesterol, blood pressure, and other metabolic markers." qz

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"Once those vulnerable childhood years were passed, mid-Victorian life expectancy was not dramatically different from our own. Starting at age five, it averaged 75 for men and 73 for women (reflecting the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth). [For] today’s working and lower-middle classes (socio-economic groups C1, C2 and D) ... relevant figures are around 72 and 76 years for men and women respectively. Women have gained three years thanks to family planning; but it is the men’s loss of three years that reveals the true underlying decline in public health." Spectator

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Strength to the brave folks protesting sexual violence and misogyny at UCT

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Awesome. Watch the video!

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I know people have a lot of emotional reactions to this, but this is *clearly* the rational response. It makes no sense to leave half of the entire escalator free for the small minority who want to walk, often resulting in long queues for the standing side when the walking side is mostly free. You will move more people through, more quickly, if everyone is standing.

I think the stand left, walk right approach is sensible... until a queue starts to form. Then everyone should just stand where they can.

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Great photos here

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"On Iraq, if not other issues, Mandela and Mbeki were on the same page. Mandela phoned the White House and asked for Bush. Bush fobbed him off to [Condoleezza] Rice. Undeterred, Mandela called former President Bush Sr, and Bush Sr called his son the president to advise him to take Mandela’s call. Mandela had no impact. He was so incensed he gave an uncomfortable comment to the cameras: ‘President Bush doesn’t know how to think,’ he said with visible anger.” Guardian

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Absolutely fascinating. Case history of a woman with dissociative identity disorder - some of her personalities are sighted, others are blind (as verified by ECG)

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Gosh

"Last year Cardiff University found that when patients with diabetes were given the drug metformin they in fact lived longer than others without the condition, even though they should have died eight years earlier on average."

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“What if our feminist porn star hero was *gasp* a woman?” Slate

Links, Tuesday 24th November

Lots of interesting titbits in here, but this part jumped out of me. I recently waited in a queue outside a nightclub for more than an hour, in the freezing cold, so that I could go through a metal detector, have my bag searched and my ID recorded, and be patted down. Parties were also processed separately by gender, leading to anxiety and confusion as people lost track of their friends. In short, I started the night in a pretty bad mood and with a sense that security staff there were my enemy.

"Off the record, one big player in London’s night-time economy tells me about the endless perverse consequences of what has recently happened. Installing ID scanners and metal detectors, he says, is hardly the best way of creating the relaxed atmosphere most conducive to running a successful and peaceful bar."

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In case you ever wondered about medieval attitudes towards masturbation, prepare to be informed

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"Slavery generated foundational notions of race and sex in South Africa, yet we have largely forgotten its role in our history. Our forgetting has now lasted longer than slavery itself." Africa is a Country

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Antibiotic resistance may eventually end doctors' ability to treat infections, and is being substantially driven by the use of antibiotics as 'growth promoters' in livestock operations. (They are 'growth promoters' in the sense that animals are kept in such unsanitary conditions that they would fail to thrive if not kept on a constant diet of antibiotics)

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This is just horrifying - Greek coastguard officer basically attempts to murder a boat full of refugees :( :(

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Really disturbing reporting about torture and murder committed by South African police.

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Unconditional cash transfers don't substantially reduce work, generally make things nicer for people.

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:'(

"Some years ago, a sex-worker colleague in Johannesburg co-researched a project on access to healthcare services. Her body bore the painful marks of violent clients and sadistic police in the inner city. But she persisted. Why? She was putting her son through medical school in Cape Town. She said she would die if he found out what she did for a living." M&G

Links, Thursday 19th November

Down with borders and *especially* down with immigration detention. Such good work, everyone who went out to protest.

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"Three officials working for the water department confirm that, although there were long-standing plans on how to mitigate the effect of a national drought, these did not get the attention they needed... “What we did instead was pay lip service to water saving and only got serious when the crisis was too late to avert.”" M&G

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"The Cofimvaba Project involves 70 rural schools which have taught maths and science in isiXhosa up to Grade 6 for the past four years. This is by far the most dominant language in the province. English is taught as a subject and is also used bilingually alongside isiXhosa to teach maths and science.

When the project started, learners were scoring on average around 20% in the Department of Basic Education’s Annual National Assessments. This average has improved to around 65%." M&G

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Oh great, a 0.5m sea level rise from the melting of just *one* glacier :( :(

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The 'Swedish model' in action everyone: sex workers still arrested, but now clients *also* arrested. Wow, such compassion, such decriminalisation of women.

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This is great. An important piece of history I genuinely knew nothing about.

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This is genuinely unbelievable. David Cameron presides over enormous cuts in funding to local councils... then writes to his own local council complaining about reductions in services.

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Very detailed overview of the funding and institutional situation regarding higher education in SA at the moment.

"Floyd Shivambu, a [NSFAS] board member during that period [2009], has described how he was approached by the new Director General of DHET and asked to step down because the Minister wanted to introduce free higher education and needed to appoint experts to implement this. What the Minister actually did was appoint a Communist Party member with no expertise in this area. This was followed by a purge of people with skills; some were forced to leave, others left voluntarily due to what one senior staff member described as the ‘de-professionalisation’ of NSFAS."

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People overestimate the risks of sexual activity, due to the stigma associated with STIs... this stigma paradoxically producing *increased risk behaviour*. People respond much more rationally to risk if the big, scary moral component is removed.

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Interesting to read purely because it puts in words something most of us understand instinctively: very few of us are 'loyal' to brands - we just want a product that does the job, at minimal cost and fuss.

"After 10 or 15 years of f***ing around with digital we’ve realised that people don’t want to ‘engage’ with brands, because they don’t care about them."

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Really upsetting footage taken at a pig slaugherhouse in the US. Watch at your own discretion.

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This is good.

"The media does cover Beirut, just as it has been covering Lebanon's refugee plight for years. That's an uncomfortable truth, because rather than giving us an easy villain, it forces us to ask what our own role might be in the world's disproportionate care and concern for one country over another."

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"Mangcu told me that even he feels the instinct to shield young people from history. He is a believer in black consciousness, the philosophy that suggests that black people stagger under an incredible weight of psychological domination by white people. He supports the student protests. But he also has a young daughter who attends a “posh”, predominantly white school – the dream of many black parents. “All of her friends are white children. So I try to avoid a conversation about black history with her. I’m afraid of how she’ll process it. How she’ll relate to her friends. So I haven’t had the courage to do it.”" Guardian

Links, Thursday 12th November

Ireland, doing a good thing.

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Well, that just came full circle, didn't it?

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Don't agree with everything in here (and it is 20 years old, after all), but some food for thought:

"the socialist case for the centrality of the workers in their movement was not a sectional case. Trade unions pursued the sectional interests of wage-earners, but one of the reasons why the relations between labour and socialist parties and the unions associated with them, were never without problems, was precisely that the aims of the movement were wider than those of the unions. The socialist argument was not just that most people were ‘workers by hand or brain’ but that the workers were the necessary historic agency for changing society. So, whoever you were, if you wanted the future, you would have to go with the workers’ movement.

Conversely, when the labour movement became narrowed down to nothing but a pressure-group or a sectional movement of industrial workers, as in 1970s Britain, it lost both the capacity to be the potential centre of a general people’s mobilization and the general hope of the future. Militant ‘economist’ trade unionism antagonized the people not directly involved in it to such an extent that it gave Thatcherite Toryism its most convincing argument—and the justification for turning the traditional ‘one-nation’ Tory Party into a force for waging militant class-war. What is more, this proletarian identity politics not only isolated the working class, but also split it by setting groups of workers against each other."

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"motorists hate cyclists because they think they offend the moral order. Driving is a very moral activity – there are rules of the road, both legal and informal, and there are good and bad drivers. The whole intricate dance of the rush-hour junction only works because people know the rules and by-and-large follow them: keeping in lane; indicating properly; first her turn, now mine, now yours. Then along come cyclists, innocently following what they see are the rules of the road, but doing things that drivers aren't allowed to: overtaking queues of cars, moving at well below the speed limit or undertaking on the inside." BBC

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Finland is gonna get a universal basic income!

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Very interesting. At one point, Amsterdam was on the way to US-style car-centred urban development, with bikes falling by the wayside, then simply changed course.

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This is great, and a good reminder that markets are ultimately an extremely efficient mechanism for aggregating information about needs and scarcity. The fundamental problem with most real economies isn't that they are based on markets, but that *entitlements with that market* (i.e. money) are so unfairly distributed.

"the Chicago economists managed to design a market that worked even for participants who did not believe in it. Within half a year of the auction system being introduced, 97 percent of food banks won at least one load, and the amount of food allocated from Feeding America's headquarters rose by over 35 percent, to the delight of volunteers and donors."

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"gorillas who were pissed" Cracked

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It seems like a good idea to have a national minimum wage, but I don't see why this couldn't be set at quite a low level (set so that it doesn't cause too much unemployment in sectors where low wages currently prevail) and then combined with higher sectoral and geographical minima?

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I'm not sure I'm opposed in principle to the idea of companies basically operating as Uber subcontractors (loads of people might lack the capital to buy a suitable car, so wouldn't be able to become drivers if the companies didn't invest). Uber's practice of signing up as many drivers as possible to drive down prices is kinda skeazy though. The devil's in the detail, I suspect, as always.

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Don't agree with all of this by any means, but the idea of an 'immigration dividend' is important. Currently most of the economic benefits of immigration goes to immigrants themselves and to relatively skilled people in the destination country (from what I have seen, the less-skilled do benefit, but only slightly). I think the demand for pure solidarity is important, but there's no reason not to sweeten the deal with economic rewards.

My position: citizen's basic income tied explicitly by law to GDP (new immigrants can start receiving these gradually with years of residence, or perhaps be restricted to means-tested benefits for some number of years). Then economic growth, which open borders undoubtedly would achieve, explicitly benefits all existing citizens.

(Though maybe I'm delusional that trying two left-wing aspirations together makes a single policy that is appealing to everyone)

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Watch the xenophobia wheel spin: There are terrorists -> foreigners are terrorists -> refugees are terrorists -> people giving aid to refugees are terrorists.

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*Trollface*

"The findings “robustly demonstrate that children from households identifying as either of the two major world religions (Christianity and Islam) were less altruistic than children from non-religious households”."

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"Contrary to legend, Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) never trained a dog to salivate to the sound of a bell.  In over three decades of research and tens of thousands of experimental trials, he and his coworkers used a bell only in rare, unimportant circumstances.  Indeed, the iconic bell would have proven totally useless to his real goal, which required precise control over the quality and duration of stimuli (he most frequently employed a metronome, a harmonium, a buzzer, and electrical shock)." Marginal Revolution

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"Another bizarre feature of our early prototype was its propensity to respond with “I love you” to seemingly anything" Google Research

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Great headline 

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“The way I think of emotional labor goes as follows: there are certain jobs where it’s a requirement, where there is no training provided, and where there’s a positive bias towards certain people – women – doing it. It’s also the kind of work that is denigrated by society at large.” Guardian

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Interesting case study here about privatisation and the pitfalls thereof. In some ways, privatising and breaking up monopoly telecoms brought big advantages for consumers in the form of efficiency and lower prices... but it also undermined some forms of long-term planning, innovation and gains from exploiting 'natural monopolies'.

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This is really heartbreaking to think about, but it's worth having a detailed conversation with our loved ones about how we want to die. Having a clear plan in place can make a big difference.

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Basically, fingerprint scanners are a terrible, terrible means of securing information.

"Back when the iPhone 5’s touchID system was just announced, [starbug] started salivating. He bought one immediately, played around with it for two days, and demonstrated that he could fake out the fingerprint reader before the lines around the block at the Apple Store had cleared."

Links, Monday 2nd November

"So the short answer to the question “why are (some) drugs illegal?” is simple. It’s because the editors of powerful newspapers want it that way. They see getting drugs banned as a tangible measure of success, a badge of honour. " Guardian

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More brave souls challenging the dogma of 'waiting on red'.

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"The railroad system manager was so impressed with Jack passing all of the tests that he gave Jumper his job back. Furthermore Jack was officially hired, becoming the only baboon in history to work for the railroad. The story goes that in nine years on the job, Jack never made a mistake." Techly

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"Recently, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime quietly circulated a remarkable document not only calling “decriminalising drug use and possession for personal consumption…consistent with international drug control conventions” but stating that doing so “may be required to meet obligations under international human rights law.”...Then, all of a sudden, the paper was censored—or maybe retracted or disavowed, depending on what story you buy—just before it was to be presented at last week’s International Harm Reduction conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia." Salon

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Even without the one-child policy, Chinese people will not have enough babies to avert a demographic crunch from the middle of this century... China needs immigration just as much as the developed West and Japan!

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"One after another, white mothers confessed the trouble their children had gotten into. Some of the behavior was similar to JJ’s; some was much worse. Most startling: None of their children had been suspended." Washington Post

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You don't have to support BDS to recognise the absurdity of this. In practice, 'freedom of speech' is highly dependent on who is speaking, and who they are criticising.

"The absurdity of France’s celebrating itself for free expression was vividly highlighted by this week’s decision from that nation’s highest court, one that is a direct assault on basic free speech rights. The French high court upheld the criminal conviction of 12 political activists for the “crime” of advocating sanctions and a boycott against Israel as a means of ending the decades-long military occupation of Palestine."

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"Fire is raging across the 5,000km length of Indonesia... It is hard to convey the scale of this inferno, but here’s a comparison that might help: it is currently producing more carbon dioxide than the US economy." Guardian

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“Abortion in the U.S. has become a victim of its own success; an entire generation of Americans have grown up without seeing or understanding what the dark days of before Roe were like. Without understanding that history, you can’t fully appreciate what the right to choice means." NY Mag

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It's very important to the Tory government to establish the principle that *some* people have to pay before they can access healthcare. That puts in place the precedent - and the actual verification mechanisms - that can then be used to enforce payment on everyone else

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"the team predicted that this year’s summer would be the hottest South Africa had ever experienced." M&G

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Good rundown on how best to care for your teeth.

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Not so much the quiet diplomat any more, is he?

Links, Wednesday 28th October

Wowzers. It's amazing students didn't shut down campus sooner than this!

"A senior member of management told me that in 2015 Wits excluded up to 3000 students who met our academic requirements but could not raise the fees they needed."

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In the US, the decline in the proportion of GDP taken as wages is pretty much matched by an *increase* in the proportion of GDP taken as rental income on housing. That is - landlords win, workers lose.

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Wow, this is pretty frickin real

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"This, then, is what sex worker-led organisations are calling for. Simply for prostitution-specific criminal law to be dropped and sex work treated as any other business. No one is demanding that the industry be allowed operate in legal grey area. Just as sex workers would be protected by labour, health and safety, human trafficking and other relevant law, so they would have to abide by it." New Statesman

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"Netanyahu was willing to whitewash Hitler to smear Palestinians. Just let that sink in to understand how low he has sunk." Independent

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 "In South Africa we embarked on our own structural adjustment programme in 1996. This is one reason, among others, why there has never been adequate investment in universities at any point since the end of apartheid. When universities have found ways to make up the shortfall they have done so by competing for rich students, for donor money – which seldom comes without agendas, frequently evidently imperial – and pushing academics to become good fund raisers rather than good intellectuals and teachers." Daily Maverick

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Relevant

"It is unclear why Nzimande has not released the report. Comment was repeatedly sought from his department this week, but it did not respond.

Officials in Nzimande’s department told Parliament in October last year that the working group had advised him that free university education for the poor was feasible, according to minutes of the meeting the M&G has seen."

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Well this is depressing...

"the Barrier Fund, formerly known as the Vice Fund, is a “sin-vestor” mutual fund that exclusively invests in companies that are significantly involved in alcohol, tobacco, gambling, or defense. It has beaten the S. & P. 500 by an average of nearly two percentage points per year since 2002. By divesting from unethical companies, “ethical” investors may effectively transfer money to opportunists like the Barrier Fund, who will likely spend it less responsibly than their “ethical” counterparts."

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"A three-year pilot scheme established that allowing cyclists to run red lights improved the flow of traffic and cut the number of collisions, especially those involving a vehicle’s blind spot... Traffic lights are there to slow cars down and allow pedestrians to cross. Bikes are much lighter and much slower so, when there are no pedestrians and the way is clear, it is stupid that a cyclist should have to stop." Guardian

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The London housing market has many features of a speculative bubble (people are willing to pay over the odds for a home precisely because they think the value will keep rising, thereby justifying their initial investment). I appreciate there are lots of homeowners who would be in big trouble if the bubble burst spectacularly, so for their sake we should hope for a gradual deflation. Though the renters among us would probably be quite pleased to see things crashing to earth with a thud :)

Links, Monday 19th October

Saw Bedknobs and Broomsticks for the first time the other night (with Toni​). Just thinking about that scene where the one kid is totally shamed for not believing any old crap that adults tell him to believe, and is proved spectacularly wrong.

But in real life, a lot of the stuff adults telling us is along the lines of "be racist, cos God says so", right? So kids getting old enough to start believing the evidence of their own eyes and not believing any old crap adults tell them is just about the only thing saving us.

PSA over.

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I can see that the university is under pressure here, being squeezed from above by reduced government funding. But I don't think that's an excuse - the students are getting even more squeezed! It's their whole future at stake, not meeting whatever bureaucratic directives. The university has to ensure that students without means can afford to keep studying.

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Human beings just don't like sleeping that much, as it turns out

"Scientists who studied three hunter-gatherer and hunter-horticulturalist societies in Africa and Bolivia found that they stayed up for hours after sunset and got no more sleep than people in the industrialised world. None had access to electricity and their only source of light after dark was a campfire."

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Good throughout, but I especially like this bit:

"American progressives typically try to sell the middle class on expanded public services with the argument that someone else will pay for it, while the Danish idea is more that the middle class should agree to pay high taxes because public services are more valuable than additional private consumption. One consequence that follows is Danes care a lot about trying to deliver services cost-effectively."

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"Many of these relationships were formalized according to local marriage custom. Some signed a contract, even though it was inadmissible in the Qing court. The two husbands commonly swore an oath of brotherhood (possibly in a bid to protect the first husband’s ego)." qz

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“Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.” Atlantic

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This is a well-known story, but the scale of it is simply incredible. 58 hours a weeks on housework in 1900 to only 14 in 2011.

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This really speaks to my experience

"Some people don’t use exclamation points, and with those people, it’s safe to stick with periods.Others use them constantly, and with those people you’re a huge dick if you don’t, so you’re forced to join the party."

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Stereotypical photo klaxon, but some decent reporting

"Sex workers are often reluctant to report rape or violent abuse to the police, because “in most cases the police themselves are perpetrators of these violent crimes”."

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"Government entities have higher costs of complying with regulations because they often must go through political processes to raise the money needed to improve their facilities. And they may face pushback from customers or taxpayers who object to higher rates and have the political power to block them.

Public entities also face lower costs for violating the regulations, the authors argue. There is evidence from other studies that they are able to delay or avoid paying fines when penalties are assessed. And officials with regulatory agencies may be sympathetic to violations by public entities, because they understand the difficulty of securing resources in the public sector." Marginal Revolution

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[CN: Non-graphic discussion of child sexual abuse]

.
.
.

"In a recent policy paper on the subject, the CDU argued that the best protection for children “would be for people with a paedophilic disposition (of whom it is estimated there are around 250,000 in Germany) not to become offenders in the first place”.

“But in order to lessen the number of attacks by paedophiles, our healthcare system must provide sufficient and low-threshold treatment possibilities for them … on a financially sustainable and anonymous basis,” it advised." Guardian

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"Women are  “more likely to be treated less aggressively in their initial encounters with the health-care system until they ‘prove that they are as sick as male patients,’... Nationwide, men wait an average of 49 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain. Women wait an average of 65 minutes for the same thing." Atlantic

Links, Thursday 15th October

Justice!

"The US government is deporting undocumented immigrants back to Central America to face the imminent threat of violence, with several individuals being murdered just days or months after their return"

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This is really good. Moral panics about 'sexting' and childrens' sexuality generally are sexist, shaming and undermine the agency of young people

"When I think back on my camming days, I remember being at peace with myself. I wanted to be sexual. I chose to engage in sexual activity. To me, stripping on webcam wasn't just an informed choice that I made, but one that was affirmed by informed consent. The camming never changed anything in me while it was happening; it was the reaction that destroyed my perception of myself and my sexuality."

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Yep 

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The title is misleading - the article describes *how* the government is protecting apartheid racketeers, but doesn't explain why.

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"We pathologize women’s entirely rational reactions of “nah” and “meh” to sex as the result of antiquated values. Often, these reactions are because sex might be perilous to a woman’s well-being – and often, if we’re honest, a physically substandard experience. This attitude wants sex to be a fundamental good so badly that it puts it in a vacuum, and ignores the snares that still surround it." Guardian

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"To call this a conflict of interests is to miss the point – it’s far too brazen for that. Osborne’s Treasury blithely invited in some of the country’s biggest businesses and asked them to help design their own tax regimes." Guardian

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"In part, their defence of the status quo is based on the fact that so many of them were seduced by the complexity of our founding moment — 1994 held within it both the promise of disruption and the potential for co-option. Those who hold senior institutional positions — university administrators, corporate leaders, media decision-makers — sought to be part of a set of broken systems even as they tried to rise above them." BD Live

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Science is awesome

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This is horrific. Why on earth do Britain and the US continue to support the abhorrent Saudi regime?

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"So, in Star Trek they have a replicator that can make any thing you want. But it makes any *thing* you want. Even now, we spend only 30 per cent of our income on goods the rest is for services, and the replicators won’t help with that... We can imagine a world where ...[w]e have robots or something to do the services. But in order to do the full range of stuff we want they have to be very intelligent things in which case aren’t those then people? So the actual issue is that a world where you have servitors of some kind who will give you everything you want is a world where it’s very hard to tell the difference between servitors and slaves." FT (google the title if you don't have access)

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"We found that people use the label stupid for three separate types of situation: (1) violations of maintaining a balance between confidence and abilities; (2) failures of attention; and (3) lack of control. The level of observed stupidity was always amplified by higher responsibility being attributed to the actor and by the severity of the consequences of the action. These results bring us closer to understanding people's conception of unintelligent behavior while emphasizing the broader psychological perspectives of studying the attribute of stupid in everyday life." Intelligence

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Absolutely disgraceful. Also a good example of how ASBOs are a means for backdoor criminalisation of behaviour that would never have been considered criminal before.

Links, Monday 12th October

"The Tyburn Angling Society has gained publicity in recent years for its proposal to restore the River Tyburn - which originates in Hampstead, before flowing through Regent's Park then into the Thames at Pimlico - as a prime fishing stream. The plans are ambitious to say the least. To come to full fruition, they would require destruction of billions of pounds worth of property including Buckingham Palace." BBC

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Heh

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Interesting 

"Some sociological research has suggested that people simply get more liberal as they age, relative to their younger selves. This is measured, in this case, as an increase in “tolerance” — especially of “nontraditional” behaviors, family roles and the like."

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Wow, so beautiful. One of the few occasions I'm jealous of people living in the (to my South African sensibilities) practically polar regions up  North. :)

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"According to the E.P.A.’s estimates, virtually all the greenhouse benefits — more than 90 percent — come from just a few materials: paper, cardboard and metals like the aluminum in soda cans. That’s because recycling one ton of metal or paper saves about three tons of carbon dioxide, a much bigger payoff than the other materials analyzed by the E.P.A. Recycling one ton of plastic saves only slightly more than one ton of carbon dioxide. A ton of food saves a little less than a ton. For glass, you have to recycle three tons in order to get about one ton of greenhouse benefits. Worst of all is yard waste: it takes 20 tons of it to save a single ton of carbon dioxide." NY Times

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OMG. "The only good Tory is a supposiTory" Dying.

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“Look, I get it, everyone has their kinks, but do you really have to work it all out in front of the entire community? If you get your rocks off by acting like a servant and crawling around with a tennis ball in your mouth, then fine. But there are kids out here, man. Jesus.” Onion

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Very well-deserved, from what I know

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Wowzers

“I always say to business people that if you invest in the ANC, you are wise. If you don’t invest in the ANC, your business is in danger. The TG [ANC treasurer general] is a nice and a handsome young man. When he knocks, open the doors. If he says we need something he will ask one thing only. If he says support the ANC, just write a blank cheque with the instruction that it should be six digits", said Zuma.

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"More than two-thirds of [ISIS] income is from extortion." Vox

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Here's one way of looking at things

"The entire Western world has been moving inexorably in a liberal direction for a couple of centuries. It's a tide that can't be turned back with half measures. Conservative parties in the rest of the world have mostly made their peace with this, and settle for simply slowing things down. American conservatives actually want to reverse the tide."

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Any comments on the accuracy of this?

"Unless you’ve used WeChat in China, it is hard to convey quite how antiquated and clunky it makes WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter feel (it performs the functions of all three, seamlessly)."

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Driverless cars are yesterday's news... on to driverless buses!

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"women have never had a history or culture of leisure. (Unless you were a nun, one researcher later told me.) That from the dawn of humanity, high status men, removed from the drudge work of life, have enjoyed long, uninterrupted hours of leisure. And in that time, they created art, philosophy, literature, they made scientific discoveries and sank into what psychologists call the peak human experience of flow.

Women aren't expected to flow... [W]omen around the globe felt that they didn't deserve leisure time. It felt too selfish. Instead, they felt they had to earn time to themselves by getting to the end of a very long To Do list. Which, let's face it, never ends." Daily Life

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Is hatred of hipsters an aspect of false consciousness?

"For even if creative and enjoyable lives are only accessible to the privileged, that’s not a damning fact about them so much as it is an indictment of a society that has so much wealth and yet only allows a select few to take advantage of it, while others are forced to waste their lives chained to their useless jobs and bloated mortgages."

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Giving parents extra money reduces family conflict and has significant benefits for childhood development (not massively surprising but, you know, all grist to the "give people free money" mill)

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:( :( :(

[tw: graphic images]

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The Los Angeles School District needs to grow the hell up. So what if a porno was shot at a school? There's no accusation that the film-makers damaged property, exposed students to graphic content, whatever. It's purely "Ooooh, porn is icky!"

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Why isn't this coming to market, I wonder?

"Forming on lava flows 600–1000 years old, the unnamed Dictyophora species was deemed a very intense aphrodisiac when smelled by women – despite, or maybe because, of its “fetid” smell. The pair put the claim to the test by asking volunteers ... to take a deep whiff, and recording their arousal levels. The results recorded in the Journal show a significant increase in arousal, with nearly half of the women experiencing spontaneous orgasms."

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"Federal Reserve economists Andrew Chang and Phillip Li set about researching how many of the results published in top economics journals could be replicated — repeating the study and finding the same results... Without the help of the authors, only a third of the results could be independently replicated by the researchers. Even with their help, only about half, or 49%, could." Business Insider

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On the symbolic economy of cycling:

"one way or another, cycling entailed personal negotiations with notions of femininity, whether accepting them, challenging them or accommodating them."

"[cycling] can offer a certain bourgeois distinction to those whose identities are not threatened by the possibility of poverty."

Links, Wednesday 7th October

HA! (US politicians can exercise common sense, except when it comes to guns)

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"The solution, for higher primates, was to slough off the whole superficial endometrium – dying embryos and all – after every ovulation that didn't result in a healthy pregnancy. It's not exactly brilliant, but it works, and most importantly, it's easily achieved by making some alterations to a chemical pathway normally used by the fetus during pregnancy. In other words, it's just the kind of effect natural selection is renowned for: odd, hackish solutions that work to solve proximate problems." Quora

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"Here is the warning Mamdani issued in 1996: in their struggle to deracialise the civilised [sic] laws of Europe in the cities, South Africans will be blindsided to the continuation of despotic rule in the countryside. And the consequences will not be confined to out-of-sight rural ghettos but will come to shape SA’s collective fate." RDM

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[CN: very graphic descriptions of sexual violence]

I'm lost for words here. So much pain and violence in the world, and it just keeps replicating itself.

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It boggles my mind to think how much practice this probably required.

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“I used to be really angry and sad about the struggles to pay for groceries to feed my children. But the niqab has given me something else to be sad and angry about.” Beaverton

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"self-reported earnings from theft are generally very low and there is little evidence of “successful” criminals or consistent earnings from theft... Theft in the United States thus appears to be substantially a phenomenon of individuals entering a temporary period of intensified risk-taking in adolescence." Science Direct

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"The IMF had convinced Irish officials that, as part of any rescue package, those who had lent money to the banks should be forced to share in the pain. But Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank and a key player in any rescue plan, was adamant that there be no “haircuts” for bank creditors.

Trichet’s motivation was not surprising. The biggest creditors of the bankrupt Irish banks were French and German banks that themselves could go under if forced to recognize such losses, requiring costly and unpopular bailouts from their own governments." Washington Post

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"The Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) says Hitachi broke the rules by doing a deal to sell 25% of its shares to Chancellor House precisely so the ANC front company could leverage its political connections to ensure Hitachi won the Eskom contract. Worse, Hitachi then paid a secret $1,12m “success fee” to Chancellor House for its help in ensuring the deal was clinched." Fin Mail

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Some more sensible critiques of Uber here. Lots of issues around employment practices in an age of increasing precarity for workers. I don't think a minimum wage is the best long-term solution (that honour goes to a unconditional basic income), but it might be appropriate under existing institutional arrangements. Working hour limits are also urgently needed!

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I used one of this dude's textbooks, back in the day.

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"Although Graham is often seen primarily as a Cold Warrior, one of his major concerns at the outset of his public career was really the encroachment of the liberal state—not surprising, since one of his strongest financial supporters was oilman Sid Richardson, one of the wealthiest men in the nation at the time." Democracy Journal

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"Through such benign-sounding activities as philanthropy, historic preservation, and serving on committees for parks and liquor licenses, gentrifiers solidified their position in the community and began to erase the cultural presence of those who preceded them." Public Books

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Fascinating. We think that scurvy was "cured" by the advent of lemon juice supplements in the 18th century, but it in fact kept recurring until the isolation of vitamin C in the early twentieth century.

"Unless you already understand and believe in the vitamin model of nutrition, the notion of a trace substance that exists both in fresh limes and bear kidneys, but is absent from a cask of lime juice because you happened to prepare it in a copper vessel, begins to sound pretty contrived."

Links, Friday 2nd October

Well this is good news

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Martian water!

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What sorcery is this?

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Something I find really sick about all this is that the refugees coming from Syria are often spending in the region of thousands of dollars each to buy passage on rickety boats, bus fares, food and frickin life jackets (you know, to hopefully not die when your rickety boat capsizes). And yet an incredibly safe and easy flight from Izmir to Berlin is currently going from about £60.

European governments could charge refugees a fee of a few thousand dollars towards the cost of emergency accommodation and language lessons - or purely to milk them for cash - and they'd STILL be getting a better deal in purely financial terms than they get with people smugglers (not to mention not needing to put their lives at risk). Obviously this wouldn't be as good as just letting people in for free but, you know, imagine if our governments were just hugely exploitative assholes rather than actively murderous assholes.

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This is all very interesting, but I don't think the real mark of inauthenticity is media polish - it's supporting policies that play well in the media and help you win elections even when you know (or really should know) are morally wrong.

Let us not forget that David Cameron supported drug decriminalisation when he was a junior MP and so demonstrably knows that current government policy is a horrific mistake. Yet he supports publicly, because that he thinks that necessary to stay in power. Likewise, I'm sure he knows that letting migrants die trying to enter Europe is a horrible thing to do, but tries not to let his conscience both him in order to support the party line.

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"Why [did not] the highly productive agriculture, commerce and handicrafts he describes [in the Yangzi Delta]... spawn something more like classical English industrialization[?]... He argues that institutional structure, surplus available for investment, and the educational level of the workforce were all quite adequate, and that there was widespread interest in productivity-enhancing technological change.... [He] finds his answers in geography and the supply of natural resources. In particular, he emphasizes a dearth of energy sources that he says gave Jiangnan production a marked bias away from anything energy-intensive, creating what he calls "a super light industrial" economy... few trees... not very many large work animals... no coal or peat, and, being at sea level, relatively little water power. Conditions were even unfavorable for the large-scale use of wind...." Bradford Delong

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"The idea of translating Shakespeare into modern English has elicited predictable resistance in the past. To prove that the centuries were not so formidable a divide, the actor and author Ben Crystal has documented that only about 10% of the words that Shakespeare uses are incomprehensible in modern English. But that argument is easy to turn on its head. When every 10th word makes no sense—it’s no accident that the word decimate started as meaning “to reduce by a 10th” and later came to mean “to destroy”—a playgoer’s experience is vastly diluted." WSJ

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"When injected into the brains of mice, the mesh unfurled to 30 times its size and mouse brain cells grew around the mesh, forming connections with the wires in the flexible mesh circuit. The biochemical mouse brain completely accepted the mechanical component and integrated with it without any damage being caused to the mouse." IB Times

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Where exactly is the distinction between regulation and plain trolling? Some of these proposed rules would do nothing except force Uber to offer a slightly worse service... which I guess would make its competitors look good in comparison, but hardly helps consumers

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:( :( :(

"Official police figures published this week show that 49 people are murdered every day across the country, equivalent to one every half hour, a figure described by one politician as being “what one would expect from a country at war”. It marked an increase for a third consecutive year after the murder rate more than halved over the first 18 years of post-apartheid democracy." Guardian

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"I can recall no head of the army and no serious academic strategist with any time for the Trident missile. It was a great hunk of useless weaponry. It was merely a token of support for an American nuclear response, though one that made Britain vulnerable to a nuclear exchange. No modern danger, such as from terrorism, is deterred by Trident... But the money was spent and the rest of the defence budget had to suffer constant cuts – and soldiers left ill-equipped – to pay for it." Guardian

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"Wherever there have been attempts to include economic crimes as part of the transitional justice process — they have simply failed. Where corruption has been excluded from the transitional justice agenda, either by design or oversight — such as with SA’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission — the problem festers. Those networks stay in business, and rather than face justice they invite members of the new elite to the table." BD Live

Links, Monday 28th Sept

"Britain’s establishment, at least in part, can be visualised (for those of strong stomach) as a group of powerful men standing close together, each with the balls of the man next to him held in a powerful grip. Michael Ashcroft just squeezed" Rob Fahey

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Some striking points of similarity between Buddhism and Hume's philosophy might not be coincidental

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Ibubrofen is basically the best of the standard painkillers.

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Let's all hear it again: drug dependency is extremely contextual, and people will often recover spontaneously if removed from the situation that caused it.

"One of the largest studies of recovery ever conducted found that, of those who had qualified for a diagnosis of alcoholism in the past year, only 25 percent still met the criteria for the disorder a year later. Despite this 75 percent recovery rate, only a quarter had gotten any type of help, including AA, and as many were now drinking in a low-risk manner as were abstinent." PS Mag

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A good overview of what is known scientifically about multitasking, and some guidance on how to do it well

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Apparently poor people in the US get a smaller proportion of their calories in the form of fast food than rich people. Which makes sense, if you think about it, though it is contrary to the common narrative.

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"In the original version of Ithkuil, the word Ithkuil literally means “hypothetical representation of a language,” which reflects the fact that it was never meant to be casually spoken. It was an attempt to demonstrate what language could be, not what it should be. “The idea of Ithkuil is to convey deeper levels of human cognition than are usually conveyed in human language,” Quijada told me. For example, the phrase “characteristic of a single component among the synergistic amalgamation of things” is a single adjective: oicaštik’." New Yorker

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"Trans peoples' body alterations must be seen. Trans people who do not body modify are ridiculed, or presumed not to exist." Verso

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Relating to the previous post, can anyone suggest a good reason why the state should make any official determination of a person's sex or gender at all? After all, we hope that the state will not treat us differently according to our gender (or lack thereof).

(When I've asked this previously, the most cogent reply I got was along the lines of "Well, if the state doesn't know your gender, how will it know which prison to put you in?". This, I think is quite telling in itself)

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"Both the low-wage job and the low-end day care center count as part of GDP for the purpose of measuring "the economy," whereas the labor done by full-time parents and homemakers does not. But from a social welfare perspective, the relevant issue isn't whether child care is performed as market- or non-market labor — it's whether it's performed well." Vox

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Thoughts?

"The working age cohort was 685m in the developed world in 1990. China and eastern Europe added a further 820m, more than doubling the work pool of the globalised market in the blink of an eye. "It was the biggest 'positive labour shock' the world has ever seen. It is what led to 25 years of wage stagnation,"" Telegraph

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LOL

“To have [the close of nominations] at 12 o’clock on a Monday – we must have been on fucking crack cocaine. You can’t get to anyone, so people were wandering in after a weekend of spending time with their bloody constituency secretary or their leftwing wife, they just fucking wander off the train and hadn’t even had a cup of tea in the tea room by 12 o’clock on a Monday. They go straight down to the PLP office and do something stupid. The people that are around on a Monday morning are the London lot – and for fuck’s sake, it’s the home of the left, it’s all the fucking mayoral candidates and deputy leader candidates.”

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Nice piece on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and how it has become such a powerful resource for the discipline.

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This is a perspective we don't hear from often enough

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Apparently a schoolkid represents a security concern if he is a) Muslim and b) talks *about* terrorism at school (it doesn't even have to be religiously motivated terrorism)

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Good throughout, but this point jumped out at me

"The reality, however, is life for middle-class blacks in South Africa is defined by precarity. The only general exceptions are those who have been middle class for several generations or have proximity enough to the state to live from it. For the rest, the status of “middle class” means accumulating debt while drowning in the costs of servicing it, supporting unemployed or under-educated family members, and holding on to whatever semblance of sanity and normalcy you can as you do."

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"So, in the face of my efforts to overcome race, I am vexed to wonder whether, given the evidence, had my name been John Smith, I would have been extended the benefits of Paragraphs 19 and 19A. But my name is not John Smith, and I have been to Yemen. That I believe sealed my fate at Heathrow and led Border Force officials to think that they could not take a chance on me, to decide that given all the options at their disposal, they would enact the harshest. Had John Smith’s circumstances of 19 years in the UK been mine, would British Border Force officials have cancelled his life on the spot?" Africa is a Country

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:D

“Stonewall couldn’t be more whitewashed than if it was doused in Clorox Bleach and thrown into the laundry three times over.” Autostraddle

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"Some have argued that intersectional understanding creates an atmosphere of bullying and “privilege checking.” Acknowledging privilege is hard — particularly for those who also experience discrimination and exclusion. While white women and men of color also experience discrimination, all too often their experiences are taken as the only point of departure for all conversations about discrimination. Being front and center in conversations about racism or sexism is a complicated privilege that is often hard to see." Washington Post

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Worth noting that that douchebag was only able to jack up the price of that drug because of bizarre and counterproductive regulations in the US. The drug is out of patent and the exact same compound is available for $0.05 a pill in India. The issue is simply that competitors were not able to bring those equivalents to market in the US.

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I imagine an advertising campaign that quite dispassionately and factually outlined animal welfare conditions in the meat, dairy and egg industries would prompt quite a large number of people to become vegetarians, or at least provide significant political support for reform of those industries. Conveying factual information to the public about food they eat every day is, however, an unforgiveably fringe and "cranky" concern

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"The root of the problem is that domesticated animals have inherited from their wild ancestors many physical, emotional and social needs that are redundant in farms. Farmers routinely ignore these needs without paying any economic price. They lock animals in tiny cages, mutilate their horns and tails, separate mothers from offspring, and selectively breed monstrosities. The animals suffer greatly, yet they live on and multiply." Guardian

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Today I'm reminded of this piece. The core problem of gentrification is rising rents and, in the face of an inexorably increasing population in London, that can ONLY be averted by increasing the housing stock. Both national and local governments have failed to a staggering degree to either build houses themselves or encourage private actors to do so. So long as that's the case, ANYONE who rents or purchases a home anywhere in London is a gentrifier.

This is not to defend wankers who sell overpriced cereal, but simply to point out that it's very convenient for the rest of us that they exist. We get to displace all the guilt for gentrification onto a few people (who we're conveniently able to cast as eccentric social deviants), rather than face up to a massive collective failure that we're all complicit in.

"You can't escape the role you play in displacement any more than a white person can escape their whiteness, because those are both subject to systemic processes that have created your relevant status and assigned its consequences. Among the classes, there is no division between "gentrifiers" and "non-gentrifiers." If you live in a city, you don't get to opt out."

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"Hughes, who studied the dynamic flow of pilgrims in a fatal crowding episode at jamarat in 1990, said the flawed concept of a violent and irrational crowd entered popular culture during the French Revolution of the 1790s. It was, he said, the result of “sociological writings by aristocrats.”" LA Times

Links, Monday 21 Sept

Just thinking about the genders of the emotion characters in Inside Out (with Toni​). If I recall, in Riley, the main character (who is a pre-teen girl), Joy, Sadness and Disgust are all portrayed as women. Fear and Anger are men. In her father, all the emotions are men; in her mother, they are all women.

What is all this saying? Are children's emotions less gender essentialised than adults'? Anger is a stereotypically masculine emotion, so does that mean Joy and Sadness are feminine? Joy and Sadness are also the main characters, and portrayed as the main players in Riley's emotional life. So emotion itself is kind of feminised in the movie, which I suppose fits the stereotype. Disgust is also a woman, and I suspect this is because she is assigned the role of making fashion choices. Lots to chew on, anyway!

(And yes, I'm still thinking about this movie after a few weeks)

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"Perhaps developing nations have reached “peak stuff”?  That may mean the Chinese manufacturing model, along with the manufacturing models of other nations, will prove less potent than we had thought." Marginal Revolution

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Wow, so it turns out Eric Clapton is a big ol' racist :(

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*Vegan propaganda alert*
[Seriously, some very upsetting images and videos at the link]

Basically, the egg industry is terrible and produces huge amounts of unnecessary suffering. The focus here is on the US, but my understanding is that there are similar practices in most developed countries.

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There's really a missed opportunity for engagement here. It was not that long ago that evolutionary theory was abused to justify denying rights to black people, and black South Africans in particular. So Vavi's comments are not coming out of nowhere. Scientists need to acknowledge this history and engage with these fears, rather than simply asserting that everything is different nowadays.

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"Publishing photos of sensitive keys, after all, is a well-understand screwup in the world of physical security, where researchers have shown for years that a key can be decoded and reproduced even from a photo taken from as far away as 200 feet and at an angle." Wired

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I certainly don't agree with everything in this piece, but this is good:

"Rather than painting student activists as censors — trying to dictate who has the right to say what and when — we should instead see them as trapped in a corporate architecture of managing offense. Have you ever been to corporate sexual harassment training? If you have, you may have been struck by how little such events have to do with preventing sexual harassment as a matter of moral necessity and how much they have to do with protecting whatever institution is mandating it. Of course, sexual harassment is a real and vexing problem, not merely on campus but in all kinds of organizations, and the urge to oppose it through policy is a noble one. But corporate entities serve corporate interests, not those of the individuals within them, and so these efforts are often designed to spare the institutions from legal liability rather than protect the individuals who would be harmed by sexual harassment. Indeed, this is the very lifeblood of corporatism: creating systems and procedures that sacrifice the needs of humans to the needs of institutions." NYTimes

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I should think the intersection of Harry Potter and formal logic fandom is actually quite high (mostly because the first set is just so large)

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Love me some logistics :)

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"A third of all premature deaths [due to air pollution] were the result of using smoky fuels such as wood and coal for heating homes or cooking and using dirty diesel generators for electricity, all well-known hazards. This domestic energy use causes half the 645,000 annual deaths in India and a third of the 1.4 million annual deaths in China.

But the research found that agricultural emissions of ammonia had a “remarkable” impact, according to Professor Jos Lelieveld, at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany, who led the research. A fifth of all global deaths resulted from these emissions, which come mainly from cattle, chickens and pigs and from the over-use of fertiliser." Guardian

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“In terms of bang-for-buck and desired effects, I don’t think there’s a single research chemical out there that competes with MDMA. Drugs are a capitalist commodity; people have a finite amount of money to get off their faces and they make choices based on availability, quality and risk. And I think they make the right choice.” Guardian

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This is glorious

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This is exciting

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Quite long, but very worthwhile

"An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge." PSMag

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Good piece on the economics of Dark Web drug markets. Particularly interesting to see how dealers mitigate the risks of ordering in bulk through the mail

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Thoughts?

"Until now, at any rate, the poor have in the main remained loyal to the African National Congress. Everyone, even those in the remotest villages, has seen someone they know rise.

The politics of the poor has been suffused with hope.

The lion’s share of discontent has instead come from the first three or four deciles of earners, among them those battering their fists against the glass walls of an elite steeped in white culture." BD

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If any of you find my body, no need to suspect foul play. It's quite likely I'll die laughing some time today :D :D :D