Links, Tuesday 16th August

CN for *extremely* graphic depictions of birth and surgery

"Childbirth is not empowering. It’s grisly, frightening, and astonishing stuff. Which is not to say that it can never be pleasurable or rapturous, or even mundane. Rather, hoping for something as politically freighted as “power” out of a chaotic biological experience aligns us with a long history of moralizing about birth — a history that has rarely given women the space to honestly encounter what happens to their own bodies." Hairpin

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You might not expect this, given my various political positions, but I'm actually not that fussed about inheritance taxes. I think inequality in income (and especially inequality in consumption) should worry us more than inequality in paper wealth. That is, I don't care if the Duke of Westminster happens to be a wealthy person, but he should be taxed extremely punitively if he want's to *live* like a wealthy person, as opposed to simply re-investing everything in new productive enterprises.

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I would kind of love to take this course

"In this class we will go a step further and say that something is fucked if it presents hard conceptual challenges to which implementable, real-world solutions for working scientists are either not available or routinely ignored in practice."

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Amazing. I hope they crack it :)

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"There’s a reason the word “sissy” comes up repeatedly—method acting, as it’s practiced today, depends on framing less drastic techniques as feminine, and therefore inferior." Atlantic

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Wow, was not familiar with this history. Apparently a judge in the US unequivocally ruled that MDMA has legitimate medical uses way back in the 1980s, but simply didn't have the authority to reverse the DEA decision.

"The judge was unequivocal in finding that MDMA should still be allowable as a therapeutic device... The judge’s opinion was damning, but it wasn’t the end of the story. An administrative judge only has the power to recommend a course of action — the ultimate say rests with the administrator. And DEA administrator John Lawn simply assigned MDMA to Schedule I anyhow."

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This is useful!

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"And in fact, I would argue that self-compassion also provides a sense of self-worth, but it's not linked to narcissism the way self-esteem is. It's not linked to social comparison the way self-esteem is, and it's not contingent, because you have self-compassion both when you fail and when you succeed. The sense of self-worth that comes from being kind to yourself is much more stable over time than the sense of self-worth that comes from judging yourself positively." Atlantic

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Yay, removing barriers to cannabis research!

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Just a reminder about that time James Blunt (in his pre-pop star days) defied a direct order to attack Russian troops in Kosovo, possibly averting World War III in doing so

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Someone making the case for the land value tax, which I mentioned in connection to the inheritance of the Grosvenor estate the other day.

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Maybe nightlife in London can actually be saved...

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Awww this is so great, exactly how I would like to go (though hopefully at a somewhat more advanced age)

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The benefits of a planning system that actually functions...

"...in 2014 there were 142,417 housing starts in the city of Tokyo (population 13.3m, no empty land), more than the 83,657 housing permits issued in the state of California (population 38.7m), or the 137,010 houses started in the entire country of England (population 54.3m)."

Links, Wednesday 3rd August

Gosh, this is horrible. The sheer quantity of food that is rejected by supermarkets and ends up being destroyed because of cosmetic imperfections!

“I would say at times there is 25% of the crop that is just thrown away or fed to cattle,”

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Gosh, various online concierge services routinely obscure the extent to which actual human beings are doing most of the legwork. People now think that being served by an algorithm is more prestigious. The mind boggles

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"It becomes impossible to define the “goodness” or “badness” of drugs according to drug type – in the abstract. Rather, the balance between potential help and potential harm depends on the person and the circumstances." Guardian

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For the physics geeks: hyperuniformity is a property of various disparate systems, including the distribution of cone cells in the eyes of birds...

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The use of "mama" and "papa" (or very similar words) for mother and father across very distantly and even unrelated languages is something that has puzzled me a lot. In Xhosa, for instance, it's "mama" and "tata". Well, it turns out there's a scientific explanation, and it relates to the early development of language!

"If you’re a baby making a random sound, the easiest vowel is ah because you can make it without doing anything with your tongue or lips. Then, if you are going to vary things at all, the first impulse is to break up the stream of ahhh by closing your lips for a spell, especially since you’ve been doing that to nurse. Hence, mmmm, such that you get a string of mahs as you keep the sound going while breaking it up at intervals."

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Yikes, the City of Cape Town owns 24000 units of land in the city about half of which are standing empty! If they can't use the land effectively, they should be giving it away to people who can.

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The UK has massively reduced the number of teen pregnancies over the last 20 years. The solution: better sex and relationship education. But we still need more!

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Fascinating profile of Martha Nussbaum, many interesting snippets.

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“Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.” New Yorker

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"Today is International Drug Users Remembrance Day. It is the day when we honour and remember our friends, loved ones, peers, and comrades who have died as a result of the unjustifiable, fruitless, and absurd war on drugs. The war on drugs is not only a failure by its own misguided metrics and standards; it is also, bluntly, a war on people who use drugs and their communities." INPUD

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Annoying that these figures are not give as percentages, but still.

"They found that, in the 17 states with a medical-marijuana law in place by 2013, prescriptions for painkillers and other classes of drugs fell sharply compared with states that did not have a medical-marijuana law. The drops were quite significant: In medical-marijuana states, the average doctor prescribed 265 fewer doses of antidepressants each year, 486 fewer doses of seizure medication, 541 fewer anti-nausea doses and 562 fewer doses of anti-anxiety medication. But most strikingly, the typical physician in a medical-marijuana state prescribed 1,826 fewer doses of painkillers in a given year."

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"The UVA researchers have shown that a specific immune molecule, interferon gamma, seems to be critical for social behavior and that a variety of creatures, such as flies, zebrafish, mice and rats, activate interferon gamma responses when they are social. Normally, this molecule is produced by the immune system in response to bacteria, viruses or parasites. Blocking the molecule in mice using genetic modification made regions of the brain hyperactive, causing the mice to become less social. Restoring the molecule restored the brain connectivity and behavior to normal." Science Daily

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The assassination of ANC candidates for ward councillor continues apace :(

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I think this is useful, even if it doesn't go far enough (i.e. gradual abolition of the police entirely). Basically, my view is that rank-and-file cops shouldn't be armed *even in places (like the US and SA) where citizens are armed*. The fact that cops are armed in fact makes them more likely to be murdered. If you think a cop might draw a gun on you, you may try to shoot first. If you know that cop is unarmed, then you know you can just threaten them with your gun and walk away. Not to mention the problem (at least in SA) of cops being specifically targeted in order to steal their weapons.

Insofar as you think there is a need for armed police, this should be restricted to special armed units who are given extensive training in the tactical use of force, including the *de-escalation* of armed confrontations. Most armed cops are not adequately trained, as is obviously from the totally incompetent and frankly criminal ways in which many of them deploy their weapons.

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A good piece on police training (in the US). Trainees are repeatedly drilled on and taught to expect worst-case-scenarios (e.g. someone suddenly drawing a gun and firing) that an officer is statistically unlikely to encounter even once in several lifetimes of policing. Cops are specifically taught to be unreasonably afraid of members of the public (especially men of colour), and so use force unreasonably.

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The mind boggles

"In one particularly slow week for Trump’s media ratings back in mid-May, a tape of a 25-year-old conversation between Trump and People Magazine reporter Sue Carswell was leaked to the Washington Post, exposing the real estate mogul’s propensity for posing as his own PR representative under an assumed name.... Trump most likely leaked the tape himself. He released to the press an old tape exposing his own chicanery for the sole purpose of keeping his name in the media for another week." Patheos

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This is really horrible. Byron burgers employed loads of undocumented migrants (mainly Latin Americans) for years, and then basically sold them out to the immigration police. Never eat there, they're obviously bad people.

(Use Google Translate on the link)

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"The injustice is that the cost of the bailouts was switched to ordinary Greek citizens – the least able to support the burden – and it was never acknowledged that the true motive of EU-IMF Troika policy was to protect monetary union. Indeed, the Greeks were repeatedly blamed for failures that stemmed from the policy itself. This unfairness – the root of so much bitterness in Greece – is finally recognised in the report." Telegraph

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Holy Moly

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"Foreign journalists on the ground here [in Turkey] have told me that they despair about editors’ obsession with President Erdogan. Even while the coup attempt was still underway, the focus of much analysis had already turned to Erdogan’s expected iron-fisted crackdown." War on the rocks

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How long before a hedge fund is launched to exploit this?