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]

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"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