Quotulatiousness

March 12, 2018

Sarah Hoyt on women’s advantages and disadvantages

Filed under: Europe, Randomness — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

A recent post at According to Hoyt:

I did not ask to be born a woman. At least presumably I didn’t ask. If we look too closely at this, we get into all sorts of things about pre-existing souls, reincarnation and what not. Neither fit into my system of belief, but neither am I absolutely sure of what happens after you die, or before you’re born, because how can I be? Eventually I’ll find the one out, the other also if my system is wrong. And in either case it matters very little to here and now.

However, I do know being born a woman wasn’t some sort of achievement, like I just won a race and deserve a medal. I am a woman, and that’s fine. My little tomboy self didn’t always think it was a good idea, this being a woman thing, but I’ve come to enjoy it. I can still slay dragons and drink but I can also wear bitching shoes while doing it, and no one looks at me sideways.

Or to put things another way: I have my limitations, my sticking points, and things I do that make people look at me oddly. The limitations and sticking points have bloody nothing to do with being female. Even in Portugal, where I was presumed to be dumber than most males (it’s a cultural thing) I never found that to be an impairment, because I wasn’t and I’d eventually show it. Also, because I’m that kind of person, I enjoyed the look of shock on their faces when I showed it. The sticking points: I’ve gone to pot, physically for various reasons, mostly having to do with hypothyroidism and asthma, and true, I was never as strong as most males. So in a test of strength, I’d have failed. But I was quite strong enough when I was young to carry furniture as heavy as the movers did, and for as long (I never had to tell my husband “I can’t lift this” until my fifties. And in a fight I just had to be twice as low-minded and nasty. Because a fight isn’t won on a straight up context of strength.

I never found being a woman an impairment. I did take shameless advantage of it a time or twenty. It’s easier to get out of a ticket, if you act the ditsy woman. It’s easier to diffuse a situation that for a male would end in a fight by smiling and talking in a “little girl lost” voice.

Do I feel bad about using the advantage that the evolutionary triggers against hurting females gives me? Oh, please. You are born who you are born. You use ALL your weapons. All of them. Why not? There are disadvantages that come with your advantages. There are disadvantages for everyone. You use all your advantages. They’re yours. Why wouldn’t you use them?

The pesky and persistent gap between what men earn and what women earn

Filed under: Britain, Business, Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall responds to yet another Guardian article decrying the difference in earnings for men and women:

There is a gender earnings gap in British – as with all others – society. The interesting question is what is causing it, the important one what we do about it. The answers being, in turn, children and nothing.

This is not, you will note, the general direction of the political conversation. It does have the merit of being true on both counts.

Take this finding that there are lots more highly paid men out there:

    There are almost four times more men than women in Britain’s highest-paid posts, according to “scandalous” figures that show the extent of the glass ceiling blocking women from top jobs.

    Government data reveals the huge disparity in the number of men and women with a six-figure income, fuelling concerns over the gender pay gap in the City and other professions.

    There were 681,000 men earning £100,000 or more in 2015-16, according to new HMRC data. It compares with only 179,000 women. The latest figures show that 17,000 men earned £1m in 2015-16, while only 2,000 women did so.

Those numbers are true. There are more men earning higher incomes than there are women. This is the entire and whole driver of that gender pay gap – or what it actually is, a gender earnings gap. And what is the cause of this? As the TUC has pointed out [PDF]:

    There is an overall gender pay gap of 34 per cent for this cohort of full-time workers who were born in 1970. This gap is largely due to the impact of parenthood on earnings – the women earning less and the men earning more after having children.

That really is just about all there is to it. It’s illegal, and has been for decades, to pay people differently based solely upon their gender. People doing the same job get the same pay by gender – there’re fortunes to be made dobbing in employers where this isn’t the case and we don’t see such dobbing in happening.

[…]

We can also point out that the true answer here is entirely in womens’ hands. Granny knew how to manage G-Pops, Lysistrata shows the Ancient Greeks got the point. If the only way men got nookie and or children was by being house husbands then there wouldn’t be a gender earnings gap, or it would run the other way. That women don’t strike for this – perhaps that not enough do – shows that this might well not be what women actually want.

OK, maybe not in womens’ hands but certainly in their control….

Genghis Khan – Khan of All Mongols – Extra History – #4

Filed under: Asia, China, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 10 Mar 2018

Temüjin had a plan: a set of strategies to keep amassing wealth and followers for himself while keeping unity between all the disparate Mongol tribes he was collecting. But Jamukha and Ong Khan had other plans…

And the next premier of Ontario is likely to be … Doug Ford?

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Saturday’s Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership contest went down to the wire … and beyond, as voting glitches pushed the announcement of a winner beyond the time the party had rented the facility in Markham, so attendees had to go elsewhere to wait for the final result. In a disturbingly similar way to the last US presidential election, Christine Elliot won the popular vote, but the result hinged on the number of constituencies won, which went to Ford. Several of my (Liberal or NDP) friends on Facebook, who’d announced they’d joined the PCs explicitly to vote against Ford, were aghast at the result.

New Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford at the 2014 Good Friday procession in East York.
Photo via Wikimedia.

In the National Post, Chris Selley reports on the three-ring circus:

In the end, maybe caucus had it right. If more than anything else Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives wanted to win on June 7 then maybe they should have stuck with interim leader Vic Fedeli. If the ultra-folksy MPP for Nipissing wasn’t the most compelling imaginable premier-in-waiting, he would certainly have cut a less divisive figure than Doug Ford, who was announced as the party’s new leader late Saturday night in a small room at a Markham conference centre.

“To the party members I say thank you. To the people of Ontario I say relief is on its way,” Ford told reporters and campaign workers. “And to Kathleen Wynne, I say your days as premier are numbered.”

That got a massive cheer, of course, but this is an outcome that many in the party consider a worst-case scenario. An Angus Reid poll released this week asked “soft” Tory voters whether each candidate would make them more or less likely to support the party: Ford’s net score (more likely minus less likely) was minus 27 per cent; Christine Elliott, who finished a very narrow second Saturday — her third failed shot at the position — was at plus 20.

Sticking with Fedeli would also have spared the party the hideous embarrassment of Saturday’s botched convention. Vote-counting dragged on for hours thanks to a chunk of ballots that had been allocated to the wrong ridings. A packed crowd of partisans was left in the dark for three hours, then told to hang tight for another 30 minutes, and then sent away into the night with no result. In lieu of a cascade of balloons, there was booing and hollering. Various Ford supporters, citing ostensibly conclusive media reports earlier in the day that Ford had won, alleged party elites were trying to steal it.

These were not the ideal circumstances in which to build unity, which was the stated purpose of the event. “You’ve been through a very tough couple of months — perhaps the toughest times in the history of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario,” Alberta United Conservative Party leader Jason Kenney told the crowd. “You’ve gone through weeks of anxiety and adversity. But I am certain that you will overcome this time of trial, and that this afternoon, with the election of your leader, you will emerge stronger, united and victorious in the election.”

“This afternoon,” he said. We were so young then.

The flow of votes from Allen to Ford was expected, but what I didn’t expect was the proportion of Mulroney votes that flowed to Ford instead of Elliot (I’d expected roughly 100% to Elliot, but a significant number went to Ford instead).

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the leadership campaign was how well Ford managed to stick to his talking points and not be baited into the kind of media spectacle his late brother seemed to specialize in. A tougher test awaits in the June provincial election, however. The Liberals and NDP have been gifted a full warehouse of attack ads, based on the Ford brothers’ chaotic and at times incoherent term in office in Toronto, but there may be a limit to the overall usefulness of this arsenal: rather like the US media attacking Trump during the last US election, we’ve probably heard it all before.

The circus may not be over yet, however, as reports on Sunday indicated that Christine Elliot is demanding an investigation into the election.

How to Make Mead at Home

Filed under: Food, Wine — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

This Old House
Published on 22 Jan 2017

Ask This Old House host Kevin O’Connor learns about the centuries-old art of making mead.

Time: A few hours of work, 1 year of aging

Cost: under $100

Tools:
Funnel

Shopping List:
Yeast
2x One-gallon jug
3 pounds of honey
Air lock cap
Marbles
Siphon tube
Home brewing sanitizer

Steps:
1. Before beginning the home brew process, ensure the gallon jug, funnel, and siphon tube have been properly sanitized.
2. Fill up the gallon jug about a third of the way up with either tap or bottled water (don’t use distilled water).
3. Add 3 pounds of honey, then cap the solution and mix it up by shaking the jug.
4. Heat up water to 104 degrees in a pan and add yeast to dissolve it.
5. While the yeast is dissolving, you can add optional yeast nutrients to get a cleaner ferment.
6. Once the yeast is dissolved, use a funnel to pour the yeast solution into the jug.
7. Pour more water into the jug and top it off until you reach the neck of the jug.
8. Place air lock cap on top of the jug and pour a little bit of water into it to form a seal. This will prevent oxygen from getting in but will allow carbon dioxide to escape.
9. After a several weeks, once carbon dioxide has stopped releasing from the jug and fermentation is complete, it’s time to siphon the solution into a new, clean jug.
10. Ensure the siphon tub and second jug have been properly sanitized, then place the older jug higher than the new jug. Fill the siphon tube with water and gravity will pull the mead from one jug to the next. Ensure you only siphon liquid, leaving behind any solids at the bottom of the jug.
11. To fill up the void left behind from one jug to the next and limit exposure to oxygen, place a number of sanitized marbles into the new jug.
12. Place the air lock on the new jug. Leave that on for about a month and then place a regular cap onto the jug once bubbles no longer appear.
13. Leave the solution in a dark spot, like the basement for about a year for the mead to age properly.

QotD: Punctuation

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The rules [of punctuation] we’re taught in school are the syntactic ones; in these, punctuation is a part of the grammar of written English and the rules for where you put it are derived from grammatical phrase structure and pretty strict. Lynne Truss of Eats, Shoots & Leaves fame is an exponent of this school. But there is another…

Punctuation marks originated from notations used to mark pauses for breath in oral recitations, but 17-to-19th-century grammarians tied them ever more tightly to grammar. There remains a minority position that language pedants call “elocutionary” – that punctuation is properly viewed as markers of speech cadence and intonation. Top-flight copy editors know this: the best one I ever worked with was a syntactic punctuationist on her own hook who noted that I’m an elocutionary punctuationist and then copy-edited in my preferred style rather than hers. (That, my friends, is real professionalism.)

And why am I an elocutionary punctuationist? Because I pay careful attention to speech rhythm and try to convey it in my prose. Not all skilled writers do this, but elocutionary punctuation survives in English because it keeps getting rediscovered for stylistic reasons. Consider Rudyard Kipling or Damon Runyon – two masters of conveying the cadences of spoken English in written form; both used elocutionary punctuation, though perhaps not as a conscious choice.

To an elocutionary punctuationist, the common marks represent speech pauses of increasing length in roughly this order: comma, semicolon, colon, dash, ellipsis, period. Parentheses suggest a vocal aside at lower volume; exclamation point is a volume/emphasis indicator, and question mark means rising tone.

In normal usage, most of the differences between the schools show up in comma placement. But in less usual circumstances, elocutionary punctuationists will cheerfully countenance written utterances that a grammarian would consider technically ill-formed. Here’s an example: “Stop – right – now!” The dashes don’t correspond to phrase boundaries, they’re purely vocal pause markers.

Eric S. Raymond, “Extreme punctuation pedantry”, Armed and Dangerous,

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