Read it.

“Sugar daddies”—the official moniker granted to these wealthy men—and the microcosm they occupy aren’t anything new, but they’ve become more mainstream in recent years. That they’ve emerged as a noteworthy group during America’s student-debt crisis is indicative of their growing prevalence—as well as that of “sugar babies,” the ones entrenched in that crisis. And the subculture—”daddies” and “babies” alike—appears to be expanding rapidly. 2014 saw a huge spike in sugar babies nationwide, especially in the southern states, according to new data from SeekingArrangement, a site where “babies” and “daddies” sign up and connect. The trend itself, let alone writing about it, might seem frivolous or demeaning. But the data could clarify what’s going wrong with the system and where those problems lie.

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.

The Wall Street Journal does its own variant on SOTU Bingo.

I’ll start: ‘White people suck. Raise taxes.’

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According to the Brandeis student newspaper, The Justice, Professor Donald Hindley will step down from the position he has held for over half of a century because, as he said, there are “far fewer … let me call them, activist, liberal-minded people” at Brandeis University.

Hard to know how to respond … good riddance? the system works? Of course, at Brandeis ‘too many conservatives on campus’ means some guy with a Real Job managed to wander onto the campus before he realized he was in the wrong neighborhood and escaped. But still.

Eric Raymond is Armed & Dangerous.

The problem is, maradydd’s attempt requires the feminists and social-justice warriors she is addressing to be fundamentally be about justice and inclusion, enough so that it is possible to change their behavior by appealing to those values. But that’s not what I see what I look at those people. What I see is thin rationalizations over bullying, dominance games, and an endless scream of monkey rage.

That sums up the Left better than anything else I’ve read.

Read it.

Mosheh ben Maimon, better known in the west as Maimonides, was one of the most famous Jewish philosophers and physicians of the Middle Ages. One of his many works was On Poisons and the Protection against Lethal Drugs, which he wrote up as a quick guide on dealing with animal bites and poisoning. The treatise was written in 1199 at the request of Saladin’s secretary, and proved to be very popular for centuries afterwards. Here is some of the advice that Maimonides gives on poisons.

Read it.

How about even one?

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, invites our attention to the Middle Kingdom.

The thorny tangles of identity, ethnicity, nation, and race, are made thornier under a state ideology based on utopian fantasies and the denial of reality.

Sound familiar? It should; it’s what we write about here at VDARE.com.

And very well, too.

The Communist Party’s policy towards the “nationalities question” has followed Lenin’s, as described in Book Two of Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism. Their ethnicity is officially recognized (and recorded on personal i.d. cards). It is also to be celebrated, for example with minority dance troops showcased in TV spectaculars on national holidays. Their home regions, if big enough, are declared “autonomous.” They send representatives to regional and national legislatures. They enjoy some minor social privileges, notably exemption from the one-child policy.

The autonomy, however, like the legislatures, is perfectly bogus. Even to advocate self-determination for minorities is both an ideological sin (“splittism”) and a serious crime (Article 103). The Party center makes all significant political decisions, and it is totally Han Chinese.

…

(The January 11th “Unity March” in Paris following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, with a slew of world leaders at the head of the march, has raised much indignation on Chinese blogs. “Where’s our unity march?” they are asking, with reference to the Kunming incident. Short answer: Same place as the rest of your civil freedoms, pal. You live in a communist dictatorship.)

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The President is fond of invoking “The Folks” in his droning speeches. Now, in rural Minnesota, your “folks” are your parents. But he is referring to those “little” people who make up the once-vast middle class in America. The not-rich and unfamous. The God-fearing, gun-totin’ clingers. In other words, people he has never ever hung out with in his entire pampered life and has total contempt for; he doesn’t have a clue what makes us tick.

And that’s cool. I don’t pretend to know what it’s like to be so rich that I lose track of how many homes I own. Or to be able to spoil someone’s wedding reception in order to golf. Or to whine about being flat broke while giving six-figure speeches. Now, praise God, I’ve never been a homeless junkie either, but I’ll tell you what flat broke was for the working poor, Missy Hillary.

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All this means, as I understand it, that these transgressions should be forgiven or written off, because this behavior is not typical of them. They, or we, can only be called to account if it is something they or we do regularly, and the general public is to accept that this was not the case.

Well, baloney.

Typically it’s used in circumstances where the truth would be ‘Well, that actually is who we are, but that’s not what I’d like you to believe we ought to be.’

Read it.

You, too, can be a cliche. (I don’t see an entry for Grump, but no doubt I would feature prominently.)

Read it.

There is a Clock ringing deep inside a mountain. It is a huge Clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every once in a while the bells of this buried Clock play a melody. Each time the chimes ring, it’s a melody the Clock has never played before. The Clock’s chimes have been programmed to not repeat themselves for 10,000 years. Most times the Clock rings when a visitor has wound it, but the Clock hoards energy from a different source and occasionally it will ring itself when no one is around to hear it. It’s anyone’s guess how many beautiful songs will never be heard over the Clock’s 10 millennial lifespan.

At least it’s not a government program at taxpayer expense.

Read it.

On December 2, Attorney General Eric Holder, the top law enforcement official in the country, went to Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church to announce that the Justice Department would soon “institute rigorous new standards-and robust safeguards-to help end racial profiling, once and for all.”

…

But by focusing on the role of race to the exclusion of other contributing factors in these cases, both the powerless in the streets and the powerful in the suites were letting an important culprit off the hook: power itself.

Start with the grand jury process that produced both non-indictments. “The system is under the complete control, under the thumb, of prosecutors,” Cato Institute Criminal Justice Director Tim Lynch told CBS News in December. “If they want an indictment they are going to get an indictment. If they don’t want an indictment it won’t happen.”

…

In practice, the only class reliably protected by grand juries is people that the local prosecutors don’t actually want to prosecute. Namely, cops. The conflicts of interest here are beyond blatant: Prosecutors absolutely depend on the work and testimony of police to send defendants to jail. Grand juries absolutely depend on prosecutors to present information and guidance on whether to indict. There is no impartial judge, no adversarial check on the power of law enforcement.

Jim Goad wants to make sure that all news is treated equally.

Many black people on Twitter—as well as untold legions of their white enablers and allies—appear very pissed that the NAACP story never really got “legs,” as they like to say in the publishing biz. Or as the blacks like to say, there may be a bit of “player hating” going on here by disgruntled African Americans who feel nudged out of the victimization spotlight, however temporarily. They decry the fact that the racist media cares about a dozen dead white Parisians much more than it does about the slightly scuffed side of a building in Colorado.

…

In what may have been a deliberate attempt to make things look worse than they were, progressive white MSNBC host Chris Hayes, a verified friend of the black man, covered the bombing story while a photo montage that unfolded behind him included a still photo of massive destruction to a storefront that turned out to be from the recent unrest in Paris rather than outside the NAACP office in Colorado Springs. Hayes apologized for the network’s faux pas by writing “Our bad” on Twitter. Just when you think Chris Hayes couldn’t get any worse, he goes ahead and says “Our bad.”

Read it.

Sigmund Freud said the founder of civilization was the first person who hurled an insult instead of a rock. He was almost right. The true founder was the first person to respond to an insult with an insult of his own.

Some modern-day people have yet to reach the stage achieved by some of our ancient forebears. Muslims who treat offensive depictions of the prophet Muhammad as grounds for execution are the most conspicuous examples of that tragic failure to evolve.

Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology, masquerading as a religion, with which no co-existence is possible.

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The basic idea is that because your body uses energy to maintain a normal body temperature, exposure to cold expends calories. The vest’s inventor, Wayne B. Hayes, an associate professor at the University of California at Irvine, claims that wearing it for an hour burns up to 250 calories, though his data are very rough. A little more than a year ago, he began selling the vest, which he calls the Cold Shoulder, out of his Pasadena apartment. Name notwithstanding, people won’t ignore you when you wear it.

Read it.

George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, said this month that in 2015 Britain would repay part of the country’s debt from World War I, and that he wanted to pay off other bonds for debt incurred in the 18th and 19th centuries.

That includes borrowing that may have been used to compensate slave owners when slavery was abolished, to relieve the famine in 19th-century Ireland and to bail out the infamous South Sea Company, which caused the bubble in 1720.

Read it.

Much good it did them.

Peter Hitchens is as good a writer as his brother and far more intelligent politically.

Once again we are ruled by a Dictatorship of Grief. Ever since the death of Princess Diana, we have been subject to these periodic spasms when everyone is supposed to think and say the same thing, or else.

We were told on Friday that ‘politicians from all sides’ had lined up to attack Ukip’s Nigel Farage for supposedly ‘exploiting’ the Paris massacre.

Mr Farage had (quite reasonably) pointed out that the presence of Islamist fanatics in our midst might have something to do with, a) uncontrolled mass migration from the Muslim world, and b) decades of multicultural refusal to integrate them into our laws and customs.

Rather than disputing this with facts and logic (admittedly this would be hard), the three ‘mainstream’ parties joined in screeching condemnation.

…

Great mountains of adjectives piled up on every corner, much like those hills of flowers and teddy bears we like to place at the scenes of tragedies.

You can feel the presence of the snarling conformist mob, waiting for some dissenter on whom they can fall, kicking and biting. So-called social media, in fact an intolerant and largely brainless electronic mob, has made this much worse since the sad death of the Princess.

Read it.

In the United States failure appears to be a profit opportunity. Several  American friends have unaccountably offered me exactly  the same piece of sage advice.  ”Richard, never trust anyone who hasn’t failed.”  In their view anyone who hasn’t been flat broke at least once in his life has some kind of character defect. One acquaintance  wistfully recalled the time he lost his fortune and had to live out of his car, and how that motivated him to even greater wealth.  Maybe his last conscious thoughts when the time comes to cross the river will not be of the yacht anchored off the Riviera, or of starlit nights and steel guitars in Rio, but fond memories of a shower and shave at the CITGO rest room.

The downside to this laudable impulse to self-help is that very few American politicians are ever punished for their blunders.  The population apparently finds it easier to adapt.  It is easier to invent a new industry than start a political movement.

…

Megan McArdle notes the reason Vermont gave up on Single Payer was it would cost as much as everything the State was now spending. The problem isn’t how to divvy up the bill. The problem is the bill. Nobody can make the unaffordable affordable any more than guys at a clip joint can pay for the bottle service when the dollars in their pocket come up short. Asking the waiter for single or separate bills is irrelevant. The reason health care is so expensive is it already consists of a mass of workarounds.

Read it.

We’ll see that, in the North, the invention of the police was just one part of a state effort to manage and shape the workforce on a day-to-day basis. Governments also expanded their systems of poor relief in order to regulate the labor market, and they developed the system of public education to regulate workers’ minds. I will connect those points to police work later on, but mostly I’ll be focusing on how the police developed in London, New York, Charleston (South Carolina), and Philadelphia.

Read it.

Of course, that ought to read ‘… that ought to have …’, but nobody teaches grammar in the schools these days.

Steve Sailer has good commenters.

The Left is an amorphous religion from which one cannot claim religious freedom, because the Religion of Political Correctness has never been formally declared. But it has its own dogma – racial and gender quality, etc. It has its own scriptures – poems like “The New Colossus,” and plays like The Crucible. It has its own hymns – “Imagine.” It has its own deities, including one – The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior – with his own holiday. “Public schools” are now effectively parochial schools owned and run by the Religion of Political Correctness.

Steve Sailer explains it all to you.

But why do these nonsensical accounts get perpetuated?

The study of the workings (and failures) of the Megaphone is one of the central subjects of our time, but we lack even a word for the subject. Perhaps Megaphonics will do?

It’s a sprawling topic, so I’m only going to cover a few elements of Megaphonics here.

…

For example, the hammer murder of Bosnian immigrant Zemir Begic in St. Louis last week for the offense of being white after midnight terrified the local establishment into a paroxysm of lying. The mayor and police chief explained how the minority mob, which shouted “Kill the white people,” couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with the mob violence in nearby Ferguson.

Why? Although Bosnian Muslims are not terribly tough by Balkan standards—back home in the 1990s they got shoved around by Serbs and Croats the way the poor little Ferguson shopkeeper got shoved around by Michael Brown—they are still much more likely to respond to communal violence in kind than are American-born whites.

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While lauding a tool that facilitates incomplete success may seem absurd, such a tool is essential to getting successful systems built. Access allowed users to actualize the systems that they wanted, and those systems that passed subsequent peer review created user demand and demonstrated efficacy. This situation was no cul-de-sac, as many such systems were eventually re-implemented by specialists using more professional tools. Without Access, arguably, those systems would not have been implemented at all.

In other words, don’t let The Best be the enemy of The Good.

Read it.

More important that you might think.

According to Prana, there is a vast difference between breathing through your belly and chest breathing. The way you sit affects which way you are most likely pulling air into your lungs. Persidsky says this affects everything from back problems to overall stress levels. “Think about when stress is elevated. You are sitting in your office with a million things to do, you slump down, you start with short, shallow breaths. You need to sit up and breath in a way to counteract that,” he says.

From the diaphragm! From the diaphragm!

Read it.

Producing usable penicillin from Penicillium notatum mold was no easy feat, says PBS: “In spite of efforts to increase the yield from the mold cultures, it took 2,000 liters of mold culture fluid to obtain enough pure penicillin to treat a single case of sepsis in a person.”

Pencilin production couldn’t happen nearly fast enough to match rising demand. To make up the shortfall, writes Rebecca Kreston for her Body Horrors blog at Discover Magazine, researchers came up with a novel way to get the penicillin they needed: extracting and isolating it from patients’ urine.

Not all of the penicillin given to a patient is broken down. Some—in fact, most—of the penicillin passes through the body unchanged.

Read it.

That spatial concept described the until then nameless megalopolis straddling the European continent, stretching from the industrial cities in the northwest of England to their counterparts in the northern part of Italy, also including densely populated, highly industrialised areas in the Benelux countries, France, Germany and Switzerland.

James Pethokoukis connects the dots.

Taxes on businesses aren’t paid by businesses, they’re paid by their customers — it’s just a roundabout sales tax with the business acting as a conscripted collection agent for the IRS.

No corporate income tax, no million-dollar lobbyists in Washington buying legislators (and their staff) to carve out billion-dollar tax breaks for their cronies … which is the real reason why it will never happen. Nevertheless, people deserve to know the truth, even if they ignore it as they cast their votes for King Putt and the inhabitants of the Democrat Klown Kar.

Read it.

When Carly Guthrie was running HR for Per Se, one of the hottest restaurants in New York, the general manager gave her a piece of advice: “You know, Carly,” he said. “If we’re doing our job as leaders, a performance review should only be two columns: Column A is what you do great and Column B is what you do not-so-great. Now, here’s how we move things from Column B to Column A.”

That makes too much sense to ever happen.

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Despite what the name may suggest, New College is one of Oxford’s oldest. Founded in 1379, at its heart lies a dining hall that features expansive oak beams across its ceiling. About a century ago, an entomologist discovered that the beams were infested with beetles and would need replacing. The College agonized over where they might find oaks of sufficient size and quality to make new beams. Then, as Stewart Brand recounts,

One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be some worthy oaks on the College lands. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country which are run by a college Forester. They called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years, and asked him if there were any oaks for possible use.

He pulled his forelock and said, “Well sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”

‘Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for over five hundred years saying “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Lion of the Blogosphere has the solution.

Why have crime rates fallen so much during the last two decades?

I say that a major contributor is that teenagers are busy at home playing videogames, or using social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Teenagers at home addicted to videogames, computers and iPhones means that they are not out on the streets getting themselves into trouble.

This means that the government could help nudge crime even lower by providing free videogames and internet access to poor families.

This is the ‘circuses’ half of the ‘bread & circuses’ formula. Coupled with Food Stamps, it gives us the same solution that the Romans discovered 2,000 years ago. And look how it worked for them!

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Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, became interested in our taste for heat in the 1970s, when he began to wonder why certain cultures favor highly spicy foods. He traveled to a village in Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, to investigate, focusing on the differences between humans and animals. The residents there ate a diet heavy in chili-spiced food. Had their pigs and dogs also picked up a taste for it?

“I asked people in the village if they knew of any animals that liked hot pepper,” Dr. Rozin said in an interview. “They thought that was hilariously funny. They said: No animals like hot pepper!” He tested that observation, giving pigs and dogs there a choice between an unspicy cheese cracker and one laced with hot sauce. They would eat both snacks, but they always chose the mild cracker first.

Next, Dr. Rozin tried to condition rats to like chilies. If he could get them to choose spicy snacks over bland ones, it would show that the presence of heat in cuisine was probably a straightforward matter of adaptation. He fed one group of rats a peppery diet from birth; another group had chili gradually added to its meals. Both groups continued to prefer nonspicy food. He spiked pepper-free food with a compound to make the rats sick, so they would later find it disgusting—but they still chose it over chili-laced food. He induced a vitamin-B deficiency in some rats, causing various heart, lung and muscular problems, then nursed them back to health with chili-flavored food: This reduced but didn’t eliminate their aversion to heat.

Actually, ‘we’ don’t like spicy food — I avoid it in the same way that I avoid cigarettes, whisky, hip-hop, and other Stupid Stuff People Do.

Read it.

Legally speaking, human rights have proliferated over the last 40 years. Only 20 human rights were listed by treaty in 1975. Today there are around 300, including the right to privacy, the right to freedom of movement, the right to join a trade union, and the right to an interpreter in official proceedings. With so many human rights recognized by so many countries, we clearly are moving toward a more just and humane world.

Or perhaps not. In his new, short, drily pessimistic book The Twilight of Human Rights Law, University of Chicago law professor Eric A. Posner meticulously, and with a touch of glee, pours cold water on the hopes of the international human rights regime.

Heh.

You might think that the solution here is to reduce the number of rights to a bare minimum—say, the rights to free speech, free elections, and fair trial. But such a reduction would never receive international assent, in part because it might actually be enforceable. With tons of human rights laws available, the United States can say that it needs to spy on its citizens, despite the right to privacy, because otherwise it will violate the right to security. China can say it needs to limit the right to free expression in order to ensure the right to development. One right is at least potentially legally meaningful. Hundreds aren’t.

Dress those windows! The world is watching!

Freeberg at his best. This whole essay is worth carving on a wall somewhere. Most of it is an extended fisking of a recent essay by Paul Graham regarding the utter necessity of expanding the number of H1-B visas that allow places like Google and Facebook to skim the cream of foreign tech schools and bring them home to the U.S. like safari trophies. My favorite:

4. What Congress is being asked to do, by these tech firms, is to assist them as they give up hope in the country. You can say the situation is not that simple, but you’d be wrong. And this is a significant point, since Congress is the country. This country has a legacy of inventing new things, thinking up new ideas, then making them happen. If that’s nothing more now than an echo in the ash bin of history and the snapshot of the present is some approximate reverse of that, the concerned patriot should be asking why. If his attention is not focused there, he forfeits any claim of concern about the country’s future.

Read it.

This is the method the nuns taught me in school. Of course, I eventually traded up.

I learned how to type in high school, and it’s the single most useful skill I took into adulthood.

Read it.

Don’t read this if you ever have an urge to go into politics.

Freeberg nails it again.

Years ago I had learned, along with many other people interested in the subject I suspect, that the forces at work in an economy are supply and demand. My learning was that they are like at opposite ends of a seesaw. If one is in ascension then the other will be in a state of descent, both of these have some effect on the price of a product or service, and eventually things will stabilize — supply, demand and price. If we’re looking at a commodity on the stock exchange, then this search for supply/demand/price stabilization will be renewed daily. Also, an abundance of the one will intensify the power exerted by the other: If many people are demanding a certain item, and there is a limited number of suppliers of it, then the price will go up. If there are many suppliers and only limited demand, conversely the price will go down. This results in signaling. An “economy,” when you study it awhile and think about it awhile, turns out to be nothing more than a network of those signals. Because of this signaling, the tendency is toward benefit for all because the supply will respond to the signals; people will labor toward creating whatever it is that other people need. They’ll move their vocations around, away from the products and services declining in price due to this signaling, toward the products and services that are becoming more precious, so that abundances are relaxed and scarcities are cured.

My new word describes, essentially, a newer economy in which this circuit is being shorted because the whims of the suppliers are unnaturally affecting the nature of demand. Retail consumer technology has devolved to become a good example of this. When a new phone comes out and people line up around the block to get hold of it, there is no tug-of-war between supply and demand because the supply is the demand. Apple made something; I want whatever it is. Have no clue what it does. I just want it.

Read it.

And she was a batshit-crazy socialist, so what’s your excuse?

Read it.

No doubt you know several folks with perfectly respectable IQs who repeatedly make poor decisions.

Every Democrat in Congress.

Read it.

You have been warned.

John C. Wright waxes philosophical.

I have previously expressed doubt about the R/K theory of Anonymous Conservative that Conservatives exhibit typical carnivorous behavior of pack-hunting animals like wolves (including such things as having few young and lavishing resources on training each one) and Progressives exhibit herbivorous behavior (including such things as having many young and devoting little or no care to them). However, as time passes, I confess the explanatory power of the theory makes it more and more attractive.

Read it.

And, surprise, surprise, the social mobility of communist China, including the Mao years, and the previous nationalist years, is very similar to that of England (and to all the other countries in the list.) Maybe you are thinking that, yes, of course, there was an elite in communist China, there is one everywhere—but surely they would be different names and people from those that formed the pre-communist elite. After all, as Clark and Cummins note, a million mainland Chinese fled to Taiwan when the communists defeated the opposing Nationalists—most of them members of the elite. Under the communist agrarian reform in the late 1940s and early 1950s the land owned by the landlord class was seized and redistributed—amounting to 43% of all the land in China; in the process, 800,000 landlords were executed. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, about 10 million of the relatives of former landlords, businessmen, and apparent bourgeois were killed during the Cultural Revolution. All in all, the communists killed about 60 million people on the excuse that they were bourgeois. This included teachers, intellectuals, professionals and anybody that sniffed at being a member of the previous elites. Large numbers of students in the urban regions were sent to the countryside and denied education—to facilitate the equalization of society.

…

Surprisingly, he did not. The authors identified 13 surnames that appear with unusual frequency in the Qin examination system—the Chinese test to identify who will become a member of the highest elite in the country, the state bureaucracy. They selected them from more than 50,000 successful candidates (the most successful) in the Yuan, Ming, and Qin dynasties, starting in 221 BCE (we are talking China). These surnames are overrepresented in the modern imperial era and in modern Chinese elites—the high officials in the Nationalist government from 1912 to the triumph of the communists in 1949; professors at the ten most prestigious universities in the country in 2012; chairs of the boards of companies listed in 2006 as having assets of $1.5 million and above; and members of the (still communist) central government administration in 2010.

The intergenerational correlation of status between the Nationalist period (just before the Communists escalated power) and 2006 (that is, covering almost thirty years of Maoism and then the current variety of communism) was 0.9 for professors in 2006, 0.8 for company board chairs and 0.74 for central government officials. This means that if you predict that the surname of a member of the elite in 1912-1949 would still be a member of the central government elite in 2006, you would be right in 74% of the cases in each generation. Other names come and go, but these ones stay. That is staying power. And it happened under a communist regime that killed scores of millions of people suspected of being members of the elite.

Read it. And watch the video.

Houshi Ryokan was founded around 1,300 years ago and it has always been managed by the same family since then. ?It is the oldest still running family business in the world.

Read it.

The answer is so simple that we sometimes forget to give it, but it matters. We teach students to do research because it’s one powerful way to teach them to understand and appreciate the past on its own terms, while at the same time finding meaning in the past that is rooted in the student’s own intellect and perspective. Classrooms and assigned readings are necessary to provide context: everyone needs to have an outline in mind, if only to have something to take apart; and everyone needs to know how to create those outlines and query them constructively. Reading monographs and articles is vital, too. To get past the big, generalized stories, you have to see how professional scholars have formed arguments, debated one another, and refined theories in light of the evidence.

Read it.

Yet another reason to avoid exercise.

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Nine years ago, Badische Staatsbrauerei Rothaus AG was struggling with production bottlenecks that weighed on its profits. Workers couldn’t package and crate the company’s beer quickly enough to stock bars and supermarkets, prompting customers to buy other brands.

Since introducing an ABB Ltd. IRB7600 robot in 2005, however, the company has sped up its delivery times, particularly at peak holiday periods. The robot does the heavy lifting, sorting through 30,000 bottles an hour, allowing the company to reassign its human employees to its bottling and packaging operations.

Go ahead, raise that minimum wage. ABB Ltd appreciates it.

‘We have heard charmingly goofy criticisms of the idea that Neanderthals were competitively inferior to modern humans. It has been suggested that such a position is racist. Somehow, saying that a population that split off from modern humans half a million years ago (one generally considered a separate species) had some kind of biological disadvantage is beyond the pale, even though we’re here and Neanderthals are not. For that matter, we’ve seen people argue that the idea that some genes were picked up from archaic humans is racist, while others have argued that the idea that humans didn’t pick up Neanderthal genes is racist.’

— Cochran & Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion, p. 28

Ammo Grrrll points out that you have it easy.

Sometimes I think my life’s story could be called “A Life Full of Microaggressions.” What with “The Audacity of Hope” already taken and all. And it would be the same for every hapless human. I will mention a very few “slings and arrows” from my life. For example, In 7th grade I brought my adorable six-year-old sister to a school basketball game and a cool girl classmate said, “That’s your little sister? But, she’s so cute! She looks nothing like you.” Ouch.