[CN: for violence and family abuse]
"When I was high on LSD it allowed me a glimpse at how to deal with the problems I was having, like opening a drawn curtain. For the first time I realised what had happened. It wasn't my fault, none of it was. It was an eye-opening experience. For me, taking LSD – and talking and thinking about what had happened to me – was actually quite a cherished experience. It made me open to other things: one of the effects was to make me a lot more responsive to the therapy sessions I was going to. I found it easier to approach my problems in therapy, because I already had done so on LSD." Vice
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Oh dear, it seems the classic "the physical act of smiling makes you feel more happy" study has failed a major attempt at replication.
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This research is a really important example of how much toxic gender norms still continue to screw things up for us. Basically, heterosexual people are still unwilling to enter into long-term monogamous relationships in which the woman earns as much or more than the man. The consequence is that people at higher social classes (where there tends to be more income inequality by gender) marry more frequently and, in couples where the earning *potential* of each partner is comparable, the women tend to reduce their labour force participation.
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Nice one :)
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Haha, this is amazing! I want to play! :D
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Interesting. Why Apple and other big tech companies pay much less for information about exploitable bugs in their software than that same information fetches on the malware black market.
"If Apple or other defense bounties tried to outbid or even match offense bug prices, they may lose the employees they need most to fix the issues,"
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Wow, so beautiful
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Not sure what to make of this, tbh
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Statistics is weird. Also: is there a "hot hand" in basketball?
"The probability of getting tails on any individual flip is, of course, always 50 percent. But when you have a finite number of coin flips — or shot attempts, or any other probability-based event — the sequences with consecutive identical outcomes can only be arranged in so many ways. As a result, a given flip of heads is more likely to be followed by tails than by another heads."
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This is quite an important point, and something I haven't thought about enough. There can definitely be a downside to being given formal title to land you informally occupy!
"When property rights are transferred to very poor people, preserving legal tenure will likely entail onerous expenses in the form of attorney and public notary fees, and courts costs. In addition, these charges are higher in relative terms in very unequal societies where the gap between the poor and the relatively well-off is wider."
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An overview of zoning rules in Japan, which are far more rational than what you see in the US or UK.
"Japanese do not impose one or two exclusive uses for every zone. They tend to view things more as the maximum nuisance level to tolerate in each zone, but every use that is considered to be less of a nuisance is still allowed. So low-nuisance uses are allowed essentially everywhere. That means that almost all Japanese zones allow mixed use developments, which is far from true in North American zoning."
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"Is Simeon the fastest athlete from the Marshall Islands? There’s no real way of knowing. But he’s a pretty good athlete who lives in a city with facilities and coaching most Marshallese would have to uproot their lives to access. And so he was the country’s best Olympic hope." SB Nation
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"It’s a reproductive strategy known as “kleptogenesis”—essentially, reproduction by theft."
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Wow, this is horrendous. I've just removed my phone number from my facebook account, though maybe it's too late already!
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"If the DA wants to attract the attention of rural South Africans, it should campaign to have the question of tenure on communal land settled once and for all. It should come out against unholy alliances between chiefs, corporations and politicians and argue that tenure vests in individuals and families and the associations they choose to form. It should present itself as the force that will stop the theft of land in the name of its restitution." BD Live
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"Since 2010 Britain has also sold arms to 39 of the 51 countries ranked “not free” on the Freedom House "Freedom in the world" report, and 22 of the 30 countries on the UK Government’s own human rights watch list."
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"An Indian reservation in North Dakota is the site of the largest gathering of Native Americans in more than 100 years. Indigenous people from across the US are living in camps on the Standing Rock reservation as they protest the construction of a new oil pipeline." BBC
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"Conventional plastic bags made from high-density polyethylene (HDPE, the plastic sacks found at grocery stores) had the smallest per-use environmental impact of all those tested. Cotton tote bags, by contrast, exhibited the highest and most severe global-warming potential by far since they require more resources to produce and distribute." Atlantic
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Horrifying as it is, it's fascinating how the logic of prohibition eats itself: First you ban all the drugs that people want to take, so they end up taking mystery pills that are either adulterated or have much more of the active substance then they want to take. Then you hold venues responsible for harms that occur on their premises, so shutting down the places where people will at least be in public and have access to help when they're taking mystery pills. Then I guess you criminalise whatever the next thing is?
In the end, I see it's all just going to be luxury flats as far as the eye can see, with people in those flats dying from overdoses, alone.
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"I got a phone call from a reporter from that city, who, in the most serious and grave voice told me, "We've got a report that Super Soakers are being used in drive-by shootings, and we were wondering if you had any comment." I had no idea what to say to him. In the end, I said, "Well… you know… I think we should have more of that." In the back of my mind, I felt that my work on toy guns was probably less harmful than the work I did on real weapons systems." BBC
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Music written down 3400 years ago
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The other evening a friend and I were walking along the sidewalk across the road from a park, when we noticed a small cat standing on the edge of the curb watching the road. We inferred that it was waiting for a gap in the traffic so that it could cross the street.
Another passerby, also noticing this, thought he would 'help' the cat by repeatedly trying to pet it, despite it consistently resisting contact and moving away from him. We watched as he spent a few minutes basically chasing this little cat around, without it ever getting any closer to its actual destination.
People: It isn't OK to touch animals that don't want to be touched, for the same reason that it isn't OK to touch humans that don't want to be touched. Just because you think it would be fun to touch an animal doesn't automatically mean that the animal will also think that's fun. Animals have their own needs, desires and right to bodily autonomy, and these are separate from our desires in respect of them. Some animals, like cats, aren't even particularly social animals in the way that humans and dogs are, and will tend to find physical contact threatening except in particular circumstances.
Even lots of people who recognise this point regarding keeping animals for meat or other products of their bodies (i.e. it's bad, and we should at least try to minimise the amount that this happens) don't make this connection regarding relationships between humans and animals that are constructed as "affectionate" or even "loving". (Though I think it's interesting how often animals kept for food are portrayed in advertising as anthropomorphic and even friendly - there's clearly a very strong implicit desire to believe that they get as much pleasure from their relationship to us as we do).
To repeat: While domestic animals *may* enjoy physical contact with you, and even feel affection for you, this does not follow *automatically* from the fact that you feel this way about them. If you want to keep pets, actually try to observe what *they* want out of any interaction with you, if they want any interaction at all.
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"So, why are so many BASE jumpers dying? “The simplest answer is wingsuits,” says Webb. “Right now, wingsuit BASE jumping is, globally, the hottest thing going for the impressionable, 18- to 35-year-old single-male demographic.”" National Geographic
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It's shameful that people with opioid dependencies are still having to rely on black market heroin, where the purity is usually unknown and the supply is often irregular (meaning that people's tolerance can decrease during a 'drought' and making them more prone to overdose). Prescribing heroin would probably eliminate the vast majority of fatalities. However, until that enlightened day arrives, naloxone should be distributed far and wide.
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Just discovered that these are a thing :)
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The face of immigration enforcement in the UK
"Among those rounded up to be removed are a former soldier who served in the British army, a father of three who arrived in the UK aged four, and one who had arrived to sign in with his baby in a pushchair. While detaining him, the Home Office called social services to take his baby."
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Great throughout, worth reading in full!
"The UN’s intervention into the anticolonial movement happened first, and by the time the UN did the same thing with the women's movement they had a tested practice. They created a new class of ‘global’ feminists, going here and there to international institutional gatherings, where they spent nights debating over the wordings of documents. They created new agendas that appropriated the feminist language but discarded its subversive content." Mask
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