Interesting Links for 16-11-2017

[andrewducker]

When Hate Speech Is Soundtracked to Music You Wrote

(tags: music racism rights )

Artificial Intelligence Is Now Your Coworker

(tags: work ai thefuture )

David Davis promises that bankers will get freedom of movement after Brexit

(tags: banking freedom UK europe )

This is frankly one of the most exciting things I've seen in collaborative coding in a very long time

(tags: coding development Microsoft collaboration )

Young people out of love with their own bodies

(tags: mentalhealth UK bodies )

Musings on grammar, notably Czech grammar

(tags: language grammar )

The movie about the creator of Wonder Woman does not sound great. Or good. Or, indeed, not awful. Shame, really

(tags: movies history comics polyamory )

‘Jews are gross’ said Gay Times editor who tweeted homophobic, transphobic posts

(tags: racism homophobia lgbt OhForFucksSake )

Elon Musk: The sad fuzzy bear who's inventing the future

(tags: technology thefuture relationships ElonMusk )

Landmark study links austerity to 120,000 deaths

(tags: austerity death )

The Surprising Link Between Autism, Gender, and Courteney Cox

(tags: autism gender )

In historic move, Christopher Tolkien resigns as director of Tolkien Estate

I'd been wondering what was going on there.
(tags: Tolkien )

We must imagine Sisyphus happy and also as an otter

(tags: otters video cute )

The Hungarian approach to education - and how it helps people learn to think

(tags: thinking Education hungary math )

Boys are more likely to perform well in schools with a higher proportion of girls

(tags: gender Education )

The number of people in work _and_ out of work have both fallen. Anyone care to dig into this?

(tags: employment uk unemployment )

Twitter punishes Nazis! By...removing a small blue tick.

(tags: twitter nazis Yay )

Comments

[elf]

About twitter: The new guidelines say verified status can be lost if a person breaks Twitter's rules or "promotes hate" on the basis of "race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease".

Err... isn't that a violation of the hateful content policy, which should result in deletion of the tweet or suspension or banning?

Because this looks like "well, yeah, it's against our rules to promote violence, threaten, or harrass people, but promoting hate is entirely different from that."

[andrewducker]

You'd think, wouldn't you?

[aldabra]

Out of work doesn't mean not employed. It means actively looking for work but not finding it. There's something called the Labour Force Survey which asks people whether they're looking for work or not; it's quite small sample sizes but I think it's currently the most reliable indicator. They used to use the claimant count, but that's unreliable because great swathes of people don't qualify for it these days. I think you get six months JSA on a contributions basis before it's means tested, and AIUI universal credit is means tested from day one, which means anyone with savings over ?£8,000? isn't counted as unemployed when they lose their job if the counting is done through qualifying for benefit.

Canonically, in recessions, it gets much harder to find work, and so people who can do without it like pensioners and second-income working mothers and people with adequate savings stop bothering to look. That means your economically active population falls, and so employment and unemployment can both fall at the same time.

[teaotter]

Professor Marston et al was definitely not a good movie. I don't necessarily agree with all the criticisms lobbed at it at the post you link to, but they missed some of the things that had me ranting after the film. So. Yeah. Bad movie, and basically missed every single chance it had to talk about poly.

[heron61]

The movie about the creator of Wonder Woman does not sound great. Or good. Or, indeed, not awful. Shame, really

That's an astoundingly ungenerous reading of the film. I can see how the author got there, but I also don't remotely agree. Also, it was by no means a perfect film, but Becca and I both enjoyed it and didn't see it as anything like that.

[calimac]

Article about the Tolkien estate looks likely to be pretty accurate as far as I can tell. Sigh.

[drplokta]

The answer to your question on unemployment is right there in the article. “The number of people classed as economically inactive increased by 117,000 to 8.8 million“. That’s a big drop in the total number of people who can be considered to be either employed or unemployed.

[andrewducker]

Yes - but _why_ have they become economically inactive?

[mair_in_grenderich]

Well, I think aldabra has answered you above: having some resources of their own, they've stopped bothering to look for work, since there doesn't appear to be enough to go around.

[channelpenguin]

Brexit article is paywalled

[andrewducker]

Sorry about that. FT wasn't showing me the paywall, and I assumed that meant that nobody would get it.

Indo-european grammar

[anef]

I've been revising my ancient Greek lately so as to go on some adult education courses. I've been astonished by the amount of stuff that I managed to learn while in my teens, but also at the sheer mental gymnastics that are required to use it, particularly with verbs.

I mean, Greek doesn't just have the active and passive voices, it has the middle as well (which is notionally reflexive, but is sometimes used instead of the active, or the future, or whatever). It has the subjunctive mood but it also has the optative which conveys something more remote, or wished for, or in the past. It doesn't just have the perfect tense but the aorist as well. And all the most common verbs are irregular in some ways, some of them massively irregular. Oh, and there's a specially hideous group of verbs (also some of the most common ones) ending in -mi.

The thing about Indo-European languages is that whoever invented them seemed to think that you could only convey nuance by using grammar. The more nuance you wanted, the more grammar you needed. English has eroded most of this in favour of other (and easier) methods.

Re: Indo-european grammar

[andrewducker]

I really like your closing paragraph there. Rings true to me - English adds nuance in a variety of ways, but not through grammar.