Links, Tuesday 20th December

The police are not the solution; the police are a big part of the problem

"Vulnerable individuals, including domestic abuse victims, alcohol and drug addicts, sex workers and arrested suspects were among those targeted by officers and staff,"

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Really important investigate reporting here: How Transnet suppliers were induced into giving kickbacks to Gupta-controlled companies.

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Lots of people will read this sort of thing and conclude "Oh, clearly there needs to be law enforcement against opioids". But please note that overdose deaths started to climb "After the government finally began to curb painkiller prescriptions, making it more difficult for addicts to find the pills and forcing up black market prices, Mexican drug cartels stepped in to flood the US with the real thing – heroin – in quantities not seen since the 1970s."

In fact, it's a pretty general rule that prohibition and a lack of legal options drives people towards more potent and more dangerous black market

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There's loads of political analysis and finger-pointing I could be doing, but right now I'm just filled with grief that we, the human race collectively, have done this :'( :'(

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I was worried about this!

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:'( :'( :'(

“The reports we had are of people being shot in the street trying to flee and shot in their homes,” Guardian

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Indeed

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Oh great, more bad news :'(

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Yep, so the data collected on schoolchildren by the Department for Education has been, and presumably will continue to be, systematically shared with the Home Office for purposes of immigration enforcement. Absolutely despicable, though hardly surprising in the current climate :/

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"All kidnapping insurance is either written or reinsured at Lloyd’s of London. Within the Lloyd’s market, there are about 20 firms (or “syndicates”) competing for business. They all conduct resolutions according to clear rules. The Lloyd’s Corp. can exclude any syndicate that deviates from the established protocol and imposes costs on others... The private governance regime for resolving criminal kidnappings generally delivers low and stable ransoms and predictable numbers of kidnappings. Most kidnappings can be resolved for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. This makes profitable kidnapping insurance possible. When the protocol fails, insurers sustain losses and must innovate to regain control." Washington Post

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"One key to Kozak’s success in securing the release of so many prisoners were the late-night gatherings he hosted at his stylish home in the La Reina neighbourhood of Santiago. Night after night, Kozak invited senior members of the secret police, army generals and foreign diplomats to meet over whisky and cocktails. As the drinks flowed, he would get officials to sign expulsion orders for detainees. He would also use the parties to find out where certain prisoners were being held and which embassies were processing visas, which allowed him to begin negotiations for exit papers." Guardian

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"The difference between the Carbon Bubble deflating rapidly now and popping spectacularly in a decade or more could mean literally trillions more dollars in profits for the kind of people now helicoptering into Washington." Medium

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"Since 1950 life expectancy at birth has been growing at a remarkably steady rate of about 1.8 years per decade but that growth has only been bought by ever increasing number of researchers... Each clinical trial [for cancer] used to be associated with ~8 lives saved per 100,000 people but today a new clinical trial is associated with only ~1 life saved per 100,000." Marginal Revolution

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I was definitely told the tongue-rolling and eye colour stories in high school biology...

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Relying on tips to pay staff is not very good business (but can also be hard to change)

"With tipping, chaos is a consequence. Servers compete ruthlessly for Saturday night shifts, when tips run high, but many are no-shows for Monday lunch. An experienced line cook who carries $40,000 in debt from years of culinary school earns $12 an hour, while a new server can reap three times that much.

Tipping can also prompt servers to nudge customers into ordering more expensive food and wine. And, at its most malign, it encourages servers to accept harassment, whether verbal, sexual or professional."

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😂😂

"I might head down the orgy later, it depends if I can be bothered to get out of bed. There’s so much fun stuff happening this week with all the other cool people who are already on holiday, so I want to pace myself." Daily Mash

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Wow, thought it looked kind of interesting, but definitely NOT going to see this film now :( (Article contains SPOILERS)

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Yikes, this is horrible. As if South Africa's arbitrary, inhumane immigration system is somehow too *lenient*

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"To put our court order in perspective, a Danish man who spat on refugees passing below a motorway bridge received a fine of DKK 5,000 (£450). While it should be recognised that our legal system still finds it a criminal offence to abuse people in distress – hooray for small victories – it also shows that spitting on refugees is a milder offence than helping them [DKK 45,000 / £4,000]." Guardian

Links, Wednesday 7th December

Google knows what shops you've been to, and gets paid by advertisers if you go one of their shops after seeing an ad...

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Loads of interesting titbits on here (I'll be reposting some individual ones that catch my eye)

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More on the use of cell-site simulators, this time by the UK government

"Signs of IMSI catchers — also known as stingrays or cell-site simulators — were found at several locations in the British capital, including UK parliament, a peaceful anti-austerity protest, and the Ecuadorian embassy. "

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The cost of solar power is falling so rapidly it is now the cheapest way to produce electricity in sunny locations. Expect this trend to continue...

"The solar bid in Abu Dhabi is not just the cheapest solar power contract ever signed – it’s the cheapest contract for electricity ever signed, anywhere on planet earth, using any technology."

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Twitter can afford to keep making a loss for a looooong time

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"As you might expect for a song contest held in the late seventies, Intervision didn’t allow its viewers to vote by text message. Instead, those watching at home had to turn their lights on when they liked a song and off when they didn’t, with data from the electricity network then being used to allocate points. The strange thing about this (well, one of the strange things) is that it’s a far more democratic system than the one used by Eurovision which, until 1997, relied solely on panels of music professionals for its judging." Insure and Go (!)

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"For decades the model for understanding PTSD has been “fear conditioning”: quite literally the lasting psychological ramifications of mortal terror. But a term now gaining wider acceptance is “moral injury.” It represents a tectonic realignment, a shift from a focusing on the violence that has been done to a person in wartime toward his feelings about what he has done to others—or what he’s failed to do for them." GQ

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"Taken as a whole, then, the picture in the UK is one where women still face epidemic levels of violence, but lack the support of a state which at best enables and at worst perpetrates it. It’s time to move beyond an understanding of violence against women as a personal issue between individuals, and see it as a strategy built into our institutions and society in order to maintain a status quo where women – particularly the most marginalised – are subordinated." Guardian

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"I knew, without looking, that none of the victims would be CEOs. When I did look it up, because this story has taken over my life, I saw the victims were a student, a chef, an artist and a forklift truck driver. I also saw that one of them was an escort, and one of them was a migrant. Employees and artists and prostitutes and foreigners — bad gays. Good gays, the rich homos with the good teeth and the second car, the police wouldn’t let their murderers get so far. A man who poisoned and raped a ‘good gay’ wouldn’t have a chance to accrue 22 separate charges of poisoning with intent." Gay Star News

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I was given grief for being a vegan the other day on the grounds that "rainforests are cleared to grow soybeans". While that is true, it has basically nothing to do with tofu and lots to do with meat production.

"About 85 percent of the world’s soybean crop is processed into meal and vegetable oil, and virtually all of that meal is used in animal feed. Some two percent of the soybean meal is further processed into soy flours and proteins for food use... Approximately six percent of soybeans are used directly as human food, mostly in Asia."

(Incidentally, the person in question was trying to convince me to eat crickets - which are indeed LESS environmentally harmful than conventional meat but, you know, still raised on soy-containing feed and so considerably more environmentally destructive than just eating the soy directly. (That's leaving aside the ethics of killing any animal for food, though I agree that the issue is obviously less clear-cut for insects than it is for mammals))

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Cuba's low infant mortality rates may actually be systematic misreporting of data

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"Sometimes—often—a leader with authoritarian tendencies will lie in order to make others repeat his lie both as a way to demonstrate and strengthen his power over them... Being made to repeat an obvious lie makes it clear that you’re powerless; it also makes you complicit. You’re morally compromised. Your ability to stand on your own moral two feet and resist or denounce is lost. Part of this is a general tool for making people part of immoral groups. One child makes a second abuse a third. The second then can’t think he’s any better than the first, the bully, and can’t inform. In a gang or the Mafia, your first kill makes you trustworthy, because you’re now dependent on the group to keep your secrets, and can’t credibly claim to be superior to them." Niskanen Center

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Amazing, a great victory for the Standing Rock Sioux, their allies and supporters, and the environment!

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Gosh, this is actually surprisingly effective!

Links, Friday 2nd December

Censorship of the internet inside China has apparently become more aggressive and more effective recently

"On a multiweek visit to China early last year, I switched among three VPNs and was able to reach most international sites using my hotel-room Wi-Fi. On a several-day visit last December, the hassle of making connections was not worth it, and I just did without Western news sources."

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Both horrifying and somehow utterly predictable :( :(

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"[internet connection records] will be made available to a wide range of government bodies. Those include expected law enforcement organisations such as the police, the military and the secret service, but also includes bodies such as the Food Standards Agency, the Gambling Commission, councils and the Welsh Ambulance Services National Health Service Trust." Independent

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Just a reminder that the *vast majority* of refugees from conflict or environmental disaster are internally displaced or flee to neighbouring countries (which also tend to be poor). People who have almost nothing themselves are stepping up every day to help those in need, while rich country governments continually step up their anti-refugee rhetoric.

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"...since privilege is structural and not individual, it has nothing to do with goodness or badness. It’s plainly a factual reality about life. The key is to focus on two distinctions: systems as distinct from individuals, and having privilege as independent of choosing how to engage with it. Since both of these distinctions tend to be obscured, I have found that people often find relief in teasing apart these two aspects of privilege." Fearless Heart

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This is good

"As a black person, I don’t feel comfortable in a lot of psychedelic spaces if no one’s talking about the racism inherent to the war on drugs. In the psychedelic community, people will talk about the unfairness of the drug war and how it violates people's autonomy, but they refuse to name racism - ignoring the biggest elephant in the room. By failing to make the implicit explicit, the psychedelic movement excludes people of color, especially black people, from having their voices heard."

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The power of selection!

"An increasing number of African elephants are now born tuskless because poachers have consistently targetted animals with the best ivory over decades, fundamentally altering the gene pool.

In some areas 98 per cent of female elephants now have no tusks, researchers have said, compared to between two and six per cent born tuskless on average in the past."

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"As usual, the left and centre (myself included) are beating ourselves up about where we went wrong. There are plenty of answers, but one of them is that we have simply been outspent. Not by a little, but by orders of magnitude. A few billion dollars spent on persuasion buys you all the politics you want. Genuine campaigners, working in their free time, simply cannot match a professional network staffed by thousands of well-paid, unscrupulous people." Guardian

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"After three doses of MDMA administered under a psychiatrist’s guidance, the patients reported a 56 percent decrease of severity of symptoms on average, one study found. By the end of the study, two-thirds no longer met the criteria for having PTSD. Follow-up examinations found that improvements lasted more than a year after therapy...

The researchers are so optimistic that they have applied for so-called breakthrough therapy status with the Food and Drug Administration, which would speed the approval process. If approved, the drug could be available by 2021." NY Times

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Happy holiday season, everyone!

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Sometimes I think these things go beyond honest policy differences and speak to personal character. To whit, it seems pretty obvious to me that the current prime minister is basically just a petty, mean-spirited person.

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I missed this, somehow

"The British Medical Journal has called for the legalisation of illicit drugs for the first time."

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Gosh, evidence of some quite sophisticated hacking techniques used against Standing Rock protesters. (I know it's Cracked.com - any thoughts on reliability/plausibility?)

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Many of the 'missing girls' in China may actually be alive and well, and just not officially registered to avoid legal problems.

"the researchers ... examined Chinese population data by cohort, and they compared the number of children born in 1990 with the number of 20-year-old Chinese men and women in 2010. In that cohort, they discovered 4 million additional people, and of those there were approximately 1 million more women than men."

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TL;DR - Facebook's operating in China would probably be terrible from an ethics point of view, and not really commercially tenable either. Also this:

"Chinese SIMs are subjected to Chinese censorship, whether the user is in Dalian or Dusseldorf. (This is why Chinese mobile plans have such advantageous international rates; cheap roaming means users often don’t bother to get local SIM cards, allowing censorship to follow them worldwide.)"