Interesting Links for 12-07-2020

[andrewducker]

Here are the changes that will happen between the EU and the UK come the first of January

(tags:UK Europe Doom )

Vast Brexit customs clearance centre to be built in Kent

(tags:trade Europe UK )

Incredible restored video of Tokyo from 1913-1915

(tags:Japan history video )

CNN asked Black artists from Mississippi to design a new state flag

(tags:flags USA design )

Did you even know you needed 3D printed pasta?

(tags:pasta 3dprinting food technology )

How small satellites are radically remaking space exploration

(tags:space technology )

A fascinating, personal, story of transition, detransition, and transition again.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1281537118183895041.html
(tags:gender transgender LGBT )

Scientists develop new antibody test which gives results in seven minutes

(tags:virus GoodNews )

Nearly all married women take their husband's last name - the patriarchy is alive and well

(tags:names patriarchy uk marriage )

A gold ring, a thieving Roman, and...JRR Tolkien?

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1281534833320222721.html
(tags:Tolkien archaeology rome viaDanielDWilliam )

The idea that the working class have limited interests is ahistoric, and just plain wrong

(tags:class culture history )

We have too much efficiency

(tags:efficiency society )

Why are toys such a bad business?

(tags:toys business )

Comments

[nancylebov]

Two books opposed to efficiency.

Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

Part of it is that efficiency means no resilience.

Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management>

I don't remember this one as well, but includes the very limited usefulness of incentive programs. It's hard to define the goal well enough, and incentives tend to destroy cooperation.

In re why successful products may start out being derided as toys: A "toy" for adults is something that appeals to pleasure/intrinsic motivation but which in a new territory-- that is, there aren't a lot of other products offering that pleasure.

[armiphlage]

With respect to incentives, Goodhart's Law also applies in the few cases where you DO have a well-defined, measurable goal:

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

It's easier to massage the data than to change a process.

So if you decide to reward the team if customer complaints go down, then people find ways to reduce customer complaints. If a customer has a complicated job, then their order "accidentally" gets deleted, and the customer never gets served, and gives up and goes to a competitor. Or the complicated order gets held and not delivered until the last Friday of the month at one minute before closing, so any complaints don't show up on the current month's metrics. Customer satisfaction plummets, but the recorded complaints go down.

[calimac]

About the Tolkien thing? I can do no better than quote from eminent Tolkien scholar John Garth in his new book The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: "[This] is at least nine-tenths a myth about Tolkien, rather than by him. ... Resemblance [of Tolkien's story] to the Lydney curse and Vyne ring is only apparent once the pieces were in place, and that makes coincidence look more likely than imitation, conscious or unconscious. Tolkien's involvement with the Lydney excavations seems to have been blown out of all proportion, and the sense of a powerful nexus of inspiration seems illusory. ... The note itself hardly goes beyond summarizing and refining the existing consensus [on the origins of the name Nodens]."

Tolkien had been writing his mythology for well over a decade before he worked on the Lydney/Nodens note. The Ring as it first appeared in The Hobbit had no significance beyond invisibility; its malevolent backstory was invented for The Lord of the Rings years later. Sauron's role as a giver of rings has long background in Germanic tradition, and requires nothing from the Vyne ring. Gold rings and magic rings are common there, and the idea of the Vyne ring as a necessary inspiration for Tolkien suggests a punter who has never come across a reference to an ancient gold ring before.

[andrewducker]

Thank you for that. Good to have the more detailed information.

[claudeb]

Wow. One could argue it's hardly a surprise, but that comprehensive list as to what will change once Brexit becomes effective becomes sobering in retrospect. It should be recommended reading for any EU citizen.

Pasta

[fanf]

“a normal production line can produce up to nine thousand kilos of pasta per hour, while their printer can currently produce about four kilos per day” https://twitter.com/shaunmahood/status/1278868768962179073?s=21

A coffee-table book on the equations of pasta shapes https://twitter.com/quephird/status/1278835529874722816?s=21

Re: Pasta

[andrewducker]

That would explain why it's a smidge more expensive.

[danieldwilliam]

I like the first of the Mississippi flags.

Not so keen on the others.

Flags are hard.

[ninetydegrees]

"Nearly all married women take their husband's last name - the patriarchy is alive and well"

But how many women live with partners without being married nowadays?

[doug]

Maybe a little under 20% of those who live with a partner:

"Married and civil partner couple families were the most common family type in the UK in 2018, representing two-thirds (67.1%) of all families. Cohabiting couple families were the second-largest family type at 3.4 million (17.9%), followed by 2.9 million (15%) lone parent families. Since 2008, the share of married couple families has declined from 69.1% of all families, while the share of cohabiting couple families has increased from 15.3%."

Source: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/families/bulletins/familiesandhouseholds/2018
(Includes some stats on how same-sex families are rapidly increasing, and the proportion who are civil partnered is falling while the proportion who are married is rising, which is not surprising.)

[doug]

There's a fun sample bias story here too. Some years ago loads of my friends were cohabiting - like the vast majority who had a steady partner, and I was skeptical of the low official figures for this arrangement and then persistently high marriage figures. But now the couples who are still together are almost all married or civil partnered.

My hunch is therefore that people tend to cohabit and then get married if it's working out, and long term cohabitation is not common.

[naath]

are lone individuals not "families" then?

[andrewducker]

See https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/families/articles/familiesandhouseholdsstatisticsexplained/2019-08-07#families-and-households-definitions

But no, a family is two or more people with a familial connection. A household can consist of one person though.

[naath]

Wow, turns out an endless list of corner cases. Categorising a 3-generation household as "two families" is super odd though, stupid ONS.

(not covered - I live with my two wives and our several children... because corner case are also hard; but I do know multiple households with >2 cohabiting adults)

[ninetydegrees]

Thanks a lot for the research. In my country, you can't take your partner's name, legally I mean, if you're civil partners. We were not at half marriage half partnership yet per year in 2016 and we mustn't be far nowadays as more and more couples pick civil partnership over marriage. Also at the same date, 20% couples were living together without being married or in a civil partnership (this is way less than marriage but way more than civil partnership).

So I think it would be interesting to know if being able to take your husband's name is one of the motives for marriage (vs civil partnership for example).

[andrewducker]

Wow.

Over here you can change your name almost trivially.

[ninetydegrees]

Here it can be really complicated, making the lives of transgendered people kinda hard BTW too.

I don't know why. Certainly my country not being very progressive over some things, bureaucracy not dealing well with change bc we don't give them the means to be, fears over ID card trafficking,... Names are a big deal for ID cards and family record books (which is an official document). I could have been denied my ID card renewal because I didn't use the diacritic over my capitalized family name when I filled the form. If that had been the case I would have had to start the process all over again.

We started giving up on the Miss vs Ms very recently too.

Patriarchy, the working class

[anna_wing]

I wonder how widespread this name-changing thing is? Cultures that don't use surnames presumably wouldn't have it ( patronymics, matronymics, completely individual names regardless of relationship). In Southeast Asia, ethnic Chinese women quite commonly don't take their husband's name or surname upon marriage. Miss XYZ who marries Mr ABC doesn't have to become Mrs ABC, or Mrs AYZ; she can equally well become Madam XYZ, where the change of title shows the change of status.

In the UK, are there still significant differences in inheritance and other property or access rights between children of married or unmarried parents?

I still remember a very interesting conversation that I had (in 1989, I was a student) with an elderly gentleman who described himself as working class, at 7 am in the queue for cheap day seats at the Royal Opera House. He was first in the queue, I was second. He had been doing this for decades, after hearing some opera on the radio and deciding that he liked it. That was yet another fascinating insight into the intersection of race, class and money in English society. To summarise: well-spoken young foreigners such as myself were perfectly fine as neighbours, Jamaican gangsters were horrible. I could not really disagree with that proposition.

Re: Patriarchy

[andrewducker]

No difference in inheritance since 1969, from my reading of Wikipedia. Looks like it's been a patchwork of changes.

Re: Patriarchy

[naath]

It depends on how the child is registered IIRC.

Re: Patriarchy, the working class

[andrewducker]

I'd also be unhappy living next to gangsters. But I worry that being young, male, and insufficiently White was enough to get you tarred a gangster.

Re: Patriarchy, the working class

[anna_wing]

He was elderly, lived in Brixton, and was much disturbed by violence and drug use in his street, so I was certainly not about to challenge his, as they call it, 'lived experience'.

Plus ca change...the last time that I was in the UK, in early 2019, my taxi-driver from Heathrow regaled me all the way into town with tales of knife crime in London, blamed Theresa May for defunding the police, and complained that London was far more dangerous now than when he came from Pakistan in the 1970s...

[naath]

Names> dammit, actually *thinking about it* should be more the norm. There are so many choices, and many of them end up with "a shared name". Just assuming the default choice is ludicrous really.

(we are cohabiting (on that - a CP looks increasingly attractive for tax reasons), sharing a mortgage was a much bigger commitment IMO than sharing a name would be, especially since I rarely actually use my surname)

[andrewducker]

What were the tax savings?

[naath]

IHT; we now co-own a house worth, er, a lot more than the IHT threshold. Bit morbid. (Also we didn't end up owning two houses at any point; and for Cap Gains you want to be unmarried so you can have two primary residences... ) If you are not both earning $$$$$ there are income tax differences; but we both earn too much for that to apply to us so I don't have details.

[naath]

do not try to disprove the four colour theorem on your flag! (no weapons though, good!)