Interesting Links for 18-03-2025

[andrewducker]

1. How much welfare is fraudulently claimed, and how much bigger is the tax lost through evasion?

(tags:tax welfare fraud )

2. Edinburgh's Summerhall arts venue has 'bright future' after signing of 10-year lease

(tags:Edinburgh art GoodNews )

3. Nietzsche! Vs! Spicy! Food!

(tags:food philosophy pain )

4. A rational way of feeling about the present state of the world.

(tags:usa politics comic )

5. Planet Definitions

(tags:planets space comic )

6. "My brother stole a phone - 13 years on, he's still in prison"

(tags:prison uk OhForFucksSake )

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

This is a horrible story, about 13 years in prison. Horrible.

[andrewducker]

Yes. A terrible way to treat people.

[calimac]

3) Nietzsche is wrong (probably something I'd say frequently about Nietzsche) as far as I'm concerned. I eat spicy food, but not because of enjoying pain. To me, enjoying pain is perverse. Spice increases the vividness of taste, and as a person whose senses, including taste, are wearing down with age, this is gratifying. But there are foods that are too spicy for me, and I won't eat them. I tried the recent fad of Nashville hot chicken twice, and since then I avoid it.

6) Indeterminate sentences can be horrifying, but so can determinate ones. In either case, the question is, are you being too draconian?

[andrewducker]

I can't eat food that's got more than a small amount of capiscin in it. Food that has plenty of flavour is great though.

[calimac]

Oh yes, food that is intensely flavorful without spice is a great thing. I do find also, however, that some bland and boring foods become absolutely delicious if I add a little hot oil or tabasco.

The misapprehension comes with some people who, like you, don't tolerate capiscin. They assume that everyone is like them, i.e. don't tolerate capiscin, and that therefore people who consume it must enjoy pain. This is exactly backwards, two wrong assumptions in one line of reasoning.

[simont]

#3: if you give in to the almost irresistible temptation to imagine a sort of anthropomorphic personification that directed the evolution of a given species according to some plan, I've always thought that the evolutionary spirit of the chilli must have been very confused.

It must have seemed like such a great idea, combined with some competent chemical engineering, to invent a substance that causes pain to every creature who might eat your fruit except birds, so that only birds would eat them, and would spread the seeds far and wide. The chilli spirit must have thought it was on to a winner there.

But wait! Along come humans, who turn out to be masochists. They eat the fruit anyway, and (at least some of them) enjoy the pain. Darn it, thinks the chilli spirit, I surely couldn't have been expected to predict they'd be that perverse. Oh well, back to the drawing board ...

... waaaaait.

Turns out nothing says "survival trait" like being delicious to humans. You get agriculted if you manage that. What looked initially like a freak failure was actually a freak success.

In my head, the evolutionary spirit of the chilli spends most of its time drunk in bars, slurring to anyone foolish enough to sit near it "I mean, I'm not complaining, exactly, but WTF?" until the bartender throws it out.

[andrewducker]

Ooh, that's an excellent point with the last bit! I hadn't even thought of that. Although the food that does get turned into agriculture usually looks very different from the wild varieties!

[simont]

Yes, I think that's part of why my imaginary chilli spirit spends its time drinking to cope with confusion. It succeeded, but at the same time, it lost most of its control over the direction of its species. No wonder it's not quite sure how to feel about the outcome!

[andrewducker]

Poor confused chilli spirit!

[ninetydegrees]

1. So you got that BS in the UK too. Social fraud as we call it here is a ridiculoulsy low amount of money "lost" as compared to tax evasion, corruption, etc. but our government still goes on and on about it. Easy way to please their voters, the far right and their millionaire friends. Always easy to blame the most vulnerable ones too.

[channelpenguin]

Yes, everywhere where there are state benefits I guess. But overstating the differential does NOT help the cause, rather hinder it!

Tax evasion/avoidance/lack of enforcement IS larger than benefit fraud, but NOT the 100x that was being bandied about. The article attempts to put a more factually-based number to it.

[ninetydegrees]

In my country, depending on what you mean by welfare fraud (fraud by individuals, companies, professionals, all of them?) and the number official organizations give, which greatly vary, this can reach 100x.