Interesting Links for 18-04-2024

[andrewducker]

1. Edinburgh's jobless total halved, economy booming and average pay higher than elsewhere

(tags:Edinburgh economy GoodNews Scotland )

2. Eleven-year-old girl's fossil find leads to discovery of largest known sea reptile - an icthyosaur the size of a blue whale!

(tags:dinosaurs fossils )

3. What science tells us about smacking children

(tags:children violence )

4. Amazon is filled with garbage ebooks. Here's how they get made.

(tags:fraud publishing amazon ai )

Comments

1

[danieldwilliam]

Edinburgh should build more houses.

Re: 1

[andrewducker]

It should.

I think that https://westcraigs-edinburgh.com/ and https://west-town-edinburgh.com/ will provide a bunch. Whether it's enough for the moment is a good question, I'm sure more will follow.

[nancylebov]

3. It's also possible that smacking teaches children that high status people get to hit and/or that high status means not needing to regulate anger.

[andrewducker]

Wouldn't surprise me.

[calimac]

3) I can't say that being smacked as a child ever taught me anything. My parents were never interested in explaining what I had done wrong (it always mystified me since I never misbehaved deliberately), because they considered inquiries to be "talking back."

My father also believed in resolving sibling disputes by literally knocking heads together. Pain from this was minimized by straining one's neck as much as possible in the opposite direction.

4) Fake books of this kind - mostly consisting of pasting together Wikipedia articles - exist in the print universe also. I got a couple of these from Ammazon.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I don't think it teaches people much beyond "You can hurt people to get them to do what you want" and "You need to hide things from your parents so they don't hurt you."

[wildeabandon]

I remember being smacked a couple of times as a child, and do feel like I learned positive lessons from it. One time it was in response to me being violent towards my younger sister, and on another it was an in the moment reaction to me being about to do something dangerous that I'd already been told not to do. On both occasions it was a single slap to the hand rather than a sustained spanking.

Having said that, I think it was impactful mainly because it was so rare - mostly what it taught me was that what I had been doing was unusually serious. But I think that even if there are occasions where it can be beneficial (which of course is not in conflict with the study showing that it's deleterious at a population level) I would expect those most opposed to a ban to be least apt at judging when those occasions were.

Edinburgh and smacking, sequentially.

[snippy]

1. That's really nice! I am starting to mentally plan my escape if the US presidential election goes awry, but Scotland is a particularly difficult place to emigrate to.
3. I was hit/spanked/smacked/whipped with various things by multiple people, never for anything I'd actually done. I resolved never to hit my children and was successful.

Re: Edinburgh and smacking, sequentially.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, Scotland wants immigrants, but sadly England doesn't...

I'm glad you were successful.