Interesting Links for 31-07-2023

[andrewducker]

1. China Launches First 700 TEU Electric Containership - with swappable batteries to keep it on the move

(tags:electricity shipping China )

2. "The Tragedy of the Commons" is nonsense written by a racist

(tags:economics psychology wrong )

3. 'No one I know has a bank account that stays open for long': The rise of sex industry workers being de-banked

(tags:Banking sexwork OhForFucksSake )

4. Why non-Jews being cast as Jews in Oppenheimer really isn't a problem

(tags:jewish movies society )

5. UK public libraries return six times their investment, generating billions of pounds worth of value

(tags:libraries economics UK )

6. Regular use of vitamin D supplement is associated with fewer melanoma cases

(tags:vitaminD cancer )

7. Government cuts cost of polluting in Britain in latest anti-green move

(tags:Conservatives pollution OhForFucksSake uk )

8. How should you pronounce the name of the company that was Twitter?

(tags:twitter names greece )

9. The evidence on low-traffic neighbourhoods and what fewer cars means for pollution and street safety

(tags:traffic uk evidence )

10. The looming battle over pylons across Scotland for green energy

(tags:scotland electricity infrastructure windpower nature )

11. Mindfulness reduces psychological distress

(tags:mindfulness psychic anxiety depression )

12. r/law bans Twitter submissions over child sex abuse material

(tags:twitter reddit )

Comments

[anna_wing]

4 All the author's arguments would equally apply to actors playing Africans, Asians, or their descendants now resident in other parts of the world. He didn't actually make any kind of argument for why Jews should be treated differently.

[calimac]

2) Garrett Hardin was also a prominent advocate for abortion rights back when that position was only beginning to percolate through general discourse. In the context of his fascist anti-life views as depicted here, that becomes a disturbingly strong anti-abortion argument. Especially in a defamatory article like this one. Two things bother me about the article: 1) whatever the invalidity of "the tragedy of the commons" in the terms that Hardin offered it, it's a real phenomenon. I have a graphic story of being victimized by it myself. 2) The author tars Hardin with the behavior of "a group he was involved with," whatever that means, under the Trump administration. I'd prefer an accusation more relevant in time when accusing someone who died 20 years ago. Groups change, sometimes startlingly.

3) Here I'm on the liberal side of rights for those with whom I disagree. Nigel Farage should have the right to a bank account. If he's doing something illegal with his money, that should be up to prosecutors, not the bank. Nor should the bank be privately policing sex workers, for the same reason. A bank is not a social media site, and having money in the bank is not controversial speech.

4) I'm a Jewish person who agrees that nothing bothers me about having qualified (in terms of their appropriateness for the part, not just the excellence of their work) non-Jewish actors playing Jewish roles, and Murphy made a good Oppenheimer, or would have if he hadn't mumbled so much. But anna_wing above is correct: the author offers no reason why this shouldn't apply to racial groups as well.

[andrewducker]

With you on (3) - business which provide a service which is core to surviving in society should have clear rules about their usage, which are limited strictly to things pertinent to the service. "This is an elite banking service which you will need £1million in wealth to be a customer of" is fine, "We don't like the job you do/politics you have" is not.

I think that for (4) there's are two fundamental issues. (1) Is the portrayal a respectful/accurate one and not a bunch of stereotypes and (2) have the people who would otherwise have taken the role been historically under-employed due to systemic racism.

And I think that for Jews (2) doesn't really hold. So the attention should mostly be on (1). Whereas a lot of people from Asian (for instance) backgrounds have found that they were restricted to smaller supporting roles, if they appeared at all, and so rewriting an Asian leading role to be white (as in, for instance, The Ghost In The Shell in 2017) is piling insult onto injury.

[calimac]

Perhaps, then, you should have written item 4 instead of the person who did.

[andrewducker]

If only they'd asked!

[mountainkiss]

I don't think I agree re Farage. Banking - absolutely "core to surviving in society" and I think the argument holds. Private banking - it seems to me that they should be allowed to choose whichever customers they like. Given that they offered him a NatWest account, I'm not sure that I think that he had a right to a Coutts one. This isn't a strongly held belief and I'm open to changing my mind, but at the moment I can't see they had an obligation.

[andrewducker]

I think I'm generally very nervous about large companies making decisions based on people's politics.

Sure, individuals, and very small companies I would not want to force to work with people, but I think that allowing larger companies to cut people off from services based on their opinions is asking to make culture wars significantly worse, and isn't good for society in general.

[toothycat]

Never mind the right of a private business to choose their clients - Farage has repeatedly gone on record as defending employees' right to discriminate against customers regardless of such petty concerns as the legality of the act or their employers' wishes.

So one might argue that he now inhabits precisely the world he always wanted.

[andrewducker]

It would be hilarious to assign him to an employee he would disagree with the existence of, should they fancy the task.

(They could form a rota, so nobody had to go near him too much.)

[dewline]

3. I agree with you on all of this. If the bank suspects their services are being used to criminal ends and wants to stop those specific activities, that's one thing. Cutting people off from banking completely is a troubling practice.

[redbird]

On item 6, the abstract notes that the causality is obscure.

People who are worried about skin cancer, and tend to apply sunscreen regularly and wear hats when they're out in the sun might be more likely to take vitamin D supplements, to make up for the vitamin D that isn't being made in their skin.

It's also plausible that vitamin D intake correlates with some other thing people do because (they believe) it will help their health, and one of those other things is actually protective against melanoma.

I'm going to keep taking my vitamin D supplements, for other reasons. I'm also not sure those are good reasons either, but the supplements are inexpensive and my doctor thinks I should be taking them.

[gingicat]

(4) one Jewish person's opinion is one Jewish person's opinion.

(Due to worries from friends, I will in fact be going to see Oppenheimer and taking notes.)

[toothycat]

I like how you have a mostly-but-not-entirely ad hominem essay explaining that the tragedy of the commons isn't a real thing because a guy that wrote about it was a horrible person in the same links post as the news article complaining how all our companies are going to pollute the commons more now the government has reduced the costs of doing so.

[andrewducker]

It's not saying that people won't be dicks. It's saying that "privatise it so that people own their own slices of the commons" isn't the only answer. Regulation works too - as is obvious from the fact that reducing regulation causes many big companies to act badly.

[toothycat]

That point is very well hidden in the everything else. AFAICT the main purpose of the whole article is to attach a whole bunch of negative karma to the phrase "tragedy of the commons" to help people more easily pattern-match to concepts like "defending racism" and shift conversations from logical modes to rhetorical ones.