Interesting Links for 31-01-2018

[andrewducker]

UK mass digital surveillance regime ruled unlawful

(tags: surveillance GoodNews )

What does Hollywood's reverence for child rapist Roman Polanski tell us?

(tags: children Child_abuse rape movies RomanPolanski hollywood )

What's behind rich people pretending to be self-made?

(tags: psychology work money success )

Woebot is a therapy chatbot and app for depression and anxiety

(tags: automation counselling psychology mentalhealth )

Reporter covering school shooting learns suspect is her son

(tags: guns school reporting children )

A techie’s rough guide to GDPR

(tags: privacy technology Europe law viaFanf )

Autism, Labour and Birth

Beautifully written, and I really feel for her.
(tags: autism birth healthcare pain )

The ‘Black Panther’ premiere just put every other red carpet in Hollywood to shame

(tags: viaFJM clothing movies Hollywood marvel )

Bacteria in milk and beef linked to rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn's

(tags: disease immune_system )

Fujifilm to cut jobs as demand for photocopiers drops

(tags: technology paper )

Thousands of cash machines may be closed

(tags: cash technology UK money )

The Jaffer-Humphreys Test: A Bechdel for the Museum World

(tags: women museums art history )

Toronto cops eat cannabis on duty, freak out, call in reinforcements, climb tree

(tags: police marijuana fail canada )

Number of social housing properties in England drops 11% in one year

(tags: housing inequality UK OhForFucksSake )

Comments

[miss_s_b]

I felt for that autistic lady too. I was lucky in my antenatal classes: I don't know whether it was aimed at me, or just generally, but the midwife at the antenatal classes told us explicitly to not suppress/hide pain, although she framed it in terms of embarrassment rather than autism: she told us not to be afraid or embarrassed to ask for pain relief, or to scream, or swear, or to worry that anybody would disapprove, because all the midwives had seen it all before.

That felt like permission, to me, when I was screaming my lungs out in extremely forceful and sweary terms.

[hilarita]

Yup. I find that doctors often think I'm less sick than I am, because I am performing Social Human Being when around them.

[calimac]

What's the difference between an ATM and a cash machine? The article treats them as separate categories.

[andrewducker]

I think they're just switching randomly between the two terms in order to confuse people.

[skington]

Eh? They mean the same thing, and the article used them interchangeably (someone quoted used a third synonym, cashpoint) to avoid repeating the same word over and over.

[alithea]

For someone with no intention of giving birth, I am always fascinated reading accounts of it - maybe because they always seem to be such powerfully honest writing.

And that Black Panther red carpet is indeed fab - can't wait to see it!

[hilarita]

Hooray for the ruling about mass digital surveillance!

[randomdreams]

I feel like the answer to "What's behind rich people pretending to be self-made?" is very straightforwards: if you pretend that you're self-made, then all the people who aren't rich are just lazy moochers who deserve their station in life. It's an extremely tidy way to justify your situation and your opposition to welfare.

[agoodwinsmith]

This.

[danieldwilliam]

I agree.

I think what many people who have "made it" ignore is that there is a large amount of luck involved in their eventual prosperity.

They also ignore the larger issue of the type of economic system we have chosen. We've chosen to have a system that we *think* is optimised for economic growth but which has a side effect that some individuals will struggle to cope with the requirements of the system and some will do well or be lucky. We could have a system where we thought we were all going to be poorer but the least able or least lucky of us didn't suffer active hardship.

[splodgenoodles]

I was surprised that there were still studies around MAP and Crohn's/RA - I thought that vein of research had fizzled out.

I would be delighted to find new treatments!

Toronto Cops ...

[agoodwinsmith]

.... good grief.

No wonder Toronto elected Rob Ford. I hope the Duh isn't catching.

[danieldwilliam]

That Roman Polanski is a one, eh?

[birguslatro]

There's a 2013 interview with the girl (now woman) he raped here...

https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2571722/samantha-geimer-the-girl

From my memory of it, I believe she said she's forgiven him.

[danieldwilliam]

There's a long running tension between "affordable" and "cheap". If you are a developer it's much cheaper for you to provide property to rent at 80% of the market rate rather then 50%.

Which means that you can afford to build more (or the financial burden of being required to build more is not prohibitive). More housing, at any price, should push down market rates or pull up standardsacross the board.

But slowly I think and not very effectively if the number of houses being built is not keeping up with a growth in demand.

[andrewducker]

I agree that building more housing in general will help. And we're not doing anywhere near enough of that.

But we'll still need to deal with the end of the "market" which has had subsidised housing for generations, until it was largely sold off.

[danieldwilliam]

Yes we will. The problem would be less acute if we were building more houses.

But we're facing an ideological issue here, on several fronts - that people who are poor enough to be socially renting deserve to be in over crowded sub-standard housing and that a) we have free markets and b) free markets will provide both the supply and the demand for better housing by making people richer and providing the goods they want.

[andrewducker]

I do find it frustrating that people (not you) think you either support free markets or you don't, rather than thinking that free markets can be a very useful tool in the box.

[danieldwilliam]

Aye, the converation can easily descend to a Market Good vs Market Bad position. Which is unhelpful. It also misses a problem that many of the problems with "the market" are problems with regulatory capture by oligopolist firms. Also, that there are different forms of competition outside of a strictly market structure.

Generally I favour free-ish markets for goods and services which have a short life-cycle, a more heavily regulated market for goods and services which have longer life-cycles and where defects are not readily apparant and some sort of collective ownership where the goods and services have profound knock-on effects, are natural monopolies and have long-term product life-cycles.

So, free markets for shoes, wine and air-travel, more regulated markets for advertising, pensions and pharmaceuticals and probably state control for the underpinnings of energy systems.

[andrewducker]

I think I view free markets as being good for supplying things to the middle and high ends of the market, where people are able to bargain relatively freely in an educated manner.

It's towards the lower end, where it's far too easy for one side to cut corners and not be held accountable for it, that we run into problems.

[danieldwilliam]

For "free markets" here I am implicitely assuming such general and ordinary regulations as might be considered uncontroversial in a well run market ranging from a common system of weights and measures through effective legal remedies for breach of contract, proper health and safety and product safety protocols and so on.

The idea of a perfectly free market outside of a context of a foundation of operating rules is, to my mind, unworkable.

But it does all get a bit murky and at the margins is probably a political decision - that we decide to exchange more or fewer people being ripped off for lower regulatory compliance costs, or a less regulated market for a more innovative one - sort of thing.