Quotulatiousness

October 6, 2015

Jay Currie trolls the readers at Dr. Dawg’s blog

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jay Currie has a bit of fun at the expense of poor folks suffering from sudden-onset Harper Derangement Syndrome:

Oh Dear the “yokels” and the “unwashed”, being thoroughly unenlightened, are failing in their duty to follow the lead of their betters and have noticed that there may be a few issues with mass Muslim immigration. Disgusting.

Worse, that spiv Harper doesn’t even have the grace and breeding to use dogwhistles in herding his flock. The dreadful man is throwing raw meat to the rubes and, to no one’s great surprise those Ill-educated reactionaries and rednecks are eating it up. There is, I fear, a very real danger that the 80% of bigoted Canadians (90% in the idiot reaches of Quebec) will take this opportunity to try to undo forty years of enlightened immigration and refugee policy by voting for those revolting CPC candidates.

The Wal-Mart classes are restless.Time to clutch the pink pearls and person the checkpoints surrounding the nicer, leafier, bastions of tolerance in Canada’s more sophisticated urban centers. Lock down the common rooms and charcuterie bars, disguise your Prius and avoid being seen with your Said (or books of any sort really): the proles are on the move.

[…]

The beast Harper looked vulnerable at the beginning of this campaign. After all, no one we knew would think of voting for the thug. But Harper has a low, animal, cunning. He is unafraid of the great white blob. He has been seen at hockey rinks at 6 in the morning and obviously buys his suits in some dreadful mall. His wife has stayed at home with the children. He is, obviously, one of them. He does not need to dogwhistle – the blob knows its own.

So, beware. The unwashed, the yokels, the bigots and the rubes have been summoned. All we can hope for is that, once they have vented their fury on niqab wearers they will resume their slumber. The alternative is simply too awful to contemplate.

Bulgaria in World War 1 – The New Central Power I THE GREAT WAR – Special

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Published on 5 Oct 2015

Thank you Plamen Ganev for helping with the research for this episode!

Bulgaria joined the ranks of the Central Powers in World War 1 in October 1915 and shortly after invaded neighbouring Serbia to support the German-Austro offensive on Belgrade. A lot of promises about territory were made towards Ferdinand I and especially the chance of getting back territories lost in the Balkan Wars was music to Bulgarian ears. Find out all about Bulgaria joining World War 1 in our special episode.

Puerto Rico’s minimum wage experiment

Filed under: Economics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

J.R. Ireland describes what happened to Puerto Rico’s economy when the minimum wage was raised to the mainland level by congress in 1974:

Prior to 1974, Puerto Rico had its own minimum wage and was not tethered to the general American wage. Then, in their infinite wisdom, the US Congress decided to normalize the minimum wage across all US territories and passed legislation making Puerto Rico’s minimum wage the same as the American wage had always been.

Well what happened next, you might ask? The economy imploded. Puerto Rico had an unemployment rate around 12% and an employment to population ratio of approximately 78% pretty much continuously between 1960 and 1974. The numbers had gone up a bit — they had come down a bit — but overall, year in and year out, you could look at Puerto Rico and be sure that the unemployment rate would be between 10 and 14 percent and the employment to population ration would be between 75 and 80 percent. You could set your watch by this kind of consistency.

Then Puerto Rico’s minimum wage was raised substantially beginning in 1974. The Puerto Rican unemployment rate then proceeded to increase for four consecutive years until it peaked at 20%. It roughly plateaued for half a decade or so, and then it went up again until Puerto Rico had an unemployment rate of 25% by 1984. Meanwhile, the employment to population ratio fell from 78% to 60% and has never recovered.

It is not just me pointing out the absolutely catastrophic consequences of the minimum wage increase in Puerto Rico — the National Bureau on Economic Research agrees. According to them:

    Imposing the U.S.-level minimum reduced total island employment by 8-10 percent compared to the level that would have prevailed had the minimum been the same proportion of average wages as in the United States. In addition, it reallocated labor across industries, greatly reducing jobs in low-wage sectors that had to raise minima substantially to reach federal levels. (3) Migrants from Puerto Rico to the United States are drawn largely from persons jobless on the island, with characteristics that make them liable to have been disemployed by the minimum wage. As the Puerto Rican minimum rose toward U.S. levels, the education of migrants fell below that of nonmigrants. (4) Migration was critical in allowing Puerto Rico to institute U.S.-level minimum wages and played a major role in the long term growth of real earnings in Puerto Rico by reducing the labor supply and raising the average qualifications of workers on the island.

In other words, the minimum wage increase caused massive unemployment, forced hundreds of thousands of unemployed Puerto Ricans to flee the island because there were no jobs, and the only reason the entire territory wasn’t rendered destitute is because the poorest Puerto Ricans all moved to Chicago or New York rather than choosing to remain unemployed on the island itself.

Your daily recommended minimum intake of water

Filed under: Food, Health, Science — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

I’m sure you’ve heard variations on the notion that we’re all effectively dehydrated and should drink more water … where “more” is defined as a minimum of 64 ounces of water. It’s pseudo-scientific bullshit, as you may have already decided for yourself:

If there is one health myth that will not die, it is this: You should drink eight glasses of water a day.

It’s just not true. There is no science behind it.

And yet every summer we are inundated with news media reports warning that dehydration is dangerous and also ubiquitous.

These reports work up a fear that otherwise healthy adults and children are walking around dehydrated, even that dehydration has reached epidemic proportions.

Let’s put these claims under scrutiny.

I was a co-author of a paper back in 2007 in the BMJ on medical myths. The first myth was that people should drink at least eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day. This paper got more media attention (even in The Times) than pretty much any other research I’ve ever done.

It made no difference. When, two years later, we published a book on medical myths that once again debunked the idea that we need eight glasses of water a day, I thought it would persuade people to stop worrying. I was wrong again.

Many people believe that the source of this myth was a 1945 Food and Nutrition Board recommendation that said people need about 2.5 liters of water a day. But they ignored the sentence that followed closely behind. It read, “Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.”

QotD: Real science

Filed under: History, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The easy way to tell real religion from fake religion is that real religion doesn’t make you feel good. It doesn’t assure you that everything you’re doing is right and that you ought to keep on doing it.

The same holds true for science. Real science doesn’t make you feel smart. Fake science does.

No matter how smart you think you are, real science will make you feel stupid far more often than it will make you feel smart. Real science not only tells us how much more we don’t know than we know, a state of affairs that will continue for all of human history, but it tells us how fragile the knowledge that we have gained is, how prone we are to making childish mistakes and allowing our biases to think for us.

Science is a rigorous way of making fewer mistakes. It’s not very useful to people who already know everything. Science is for stupid people who know how much they don’t know.

A look back at the march of science doesn’t show an even line of progress led by smooth-talking popularizers who are never wrong. Instead the cabinets of science are full of oddballs, unqualified, jealous, obsessed and eccentric, whose pivotal discoveries sometimes came about by accident. Science, like so much of human accomplishment, often depended on lucky accidents to provide a result that could then be isolated and systematized into a useful understanding of the process.

Daniel Greenfield, “Science is for Stupid People”, Sultan Knish, 2014-09-30.

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