Why is my site more popular on Mondays?
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Trending on Mondays
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overmedicalized, poorly educated Americans
The money we spend on health care is money we don’t spend educating our children, or investing in infrastructure, scientific research and defense spending. So if what this means is we ultimately have overmedicalized, poorly educated Americans competing with China, that’s not a very good investment.
Uwe Reinhardt, quoted in Why an MRI costs $1,080 in America and $280 in France
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Rave on
This is actually a scan of an old 35mm negative. I took this photo back in 1998 at a rave in my hometown, long before I knew how to handle my camera. But I’ve always loved the effect, though I think it looked better printed on glossy photo paper than it does scanned.
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Tracking things for no good reason
Could someone explain to me the use of documenting one’s parents ethnic and language groups on a child’s birth certificate is? What possible use can that information be other than for discrimination — either denying something or granting something on the basis of one’s or one’s parent’s ethnic or linguistic group? The only thing I can think is that it could be used for statistics, but that could just as easily come from the census. I think this information is a hold over from when it was used for discrimination, and they just have not removed it, because why would they unless someone forced them to?
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Science proves the rich drive worse
Our findings suggest that if the pursuit of self-interest goes unchecked, it may result in a vicious cycle: self-interest leads people to behave unethically, which raises their status, which leads to more unethical behavior and inequality.
Paul Piff, quoted from Shame on the Rich [sciencemag.org] about research into ‘whether dishonesty varies with social class’
For my own experience, I can state that, without doubt, people in Singapore who drive expensive cars (one of the things studied in the research), drive like they own the road. I remember this was the case in the US too, but in Singapore when we talk about expensive cars we are talking about 50% of the cars on the road (BMW, ‘Benz, or more expensive!). That many asshole drivers makes the traffic in the tiny island of 5 million, with very good infrastructure, as bad as the traffic in New York City with it’s much larger population!