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?