Career Women...So Scary!

Daily Mail.co.uk talks about women's rise in society and makes sure we all know what the word "purse-whipped" means. In case, you know, that other pu***-whipped insult wasn't bad enough...

"Women with money can go where they like and do what they please (economists call it the ‘independence effect’)." 

>Translation: OMG, is there anything scarier than a woman DOING WHAT SHE LIKES and GOING WHERE SHE PLEASES??! If that's not what they mean, then why do we even need to mention this "independence effect" like it's a thing to note?

"By the time these graduates reached the peak of their careers, ‘the entire management structure of Britain will have been transformed and feminised ...This thing is huge, and it is happening at every level, and no one seems to be thinking about the consequences’."

>Oh no...how terrible that women will be able to influence their workplaces in a way that is beneficial to themselves! What the heck would a "feminized" work structure look like, anyway?...

>Daily Mail also warns us that in this new nightmare world of the future, women will not need men and so will never settle down:

"Social life: With more women being self-sufficient, increased numbers will choose to remain single"

>Yep.  Thanks for that handy bullet point, Daily Mail!  Women who have good jobs don't need or want husbands, in fact career women are 80% more likely to become lesbians, right? And not the fun kind like Katy Perry, either!

"Men may find they need marriage more than women, and start to panic if they haven’t found a partner by a certain age."

>I don't think so, especially since men still earn more $ then women on average, and women overwhelmingly outnumber men as single parents.  Still, the image of a man panicking if he's still single before he becomes an "old maid" is kind of cute.  Cause we all know that's what women do nowadays, right?

"Man caves will become a thing of the past because the whole house will become a man cave, with men dominating kitchens: furnishing them, equipping them with blow torches and Japanese sushi knives in the effort to find something new to bring to the table."

>Ah, men must have blowtorches and sushi knives to cook dinner, I see.

"For the under-30s, there is nothing futuristic about this: the fairer sex is becoming the richer sex. More than ever, this is becoming a woman’s world."

>Hmm, I guess I didn't get my "woman's world" raise yet. And it would be nice if we could also end violence against women and stuff, but as long as the Daily Mail says it's a woman's world...guess we're all right!

So seriously, there are some HUGE PROBLEMS with the way this article is framed:
1. 46-58% women in the workforce is not "A woman's world." Statistically significantly that's just about as equal as numbers get.

2. More than a bit alarmist: "All this is especially alarming to men when you think how things were just a few generations ago." Why should it be alarming at all? If this really was as huge a social change as the article says, then men should be celebrating that the women in their lives now have new ways to be successful & fair chances at achieving their dreams, and men have more freedom to take roles in family life & less pressure to always be the family breadwinner. It's only alarming to men if they can't compete in a world where women have a fair chance, and that's NOT how all men are. Men can be happy for women's success too, rather than worried and full of erectile dysfunction, which is how this article makes it sound.

3. On the erectile dysfunction note, this article subtly BLAMES WOMEN for marital problems arising from their own success: "the world is changing, but attitudes need to change with it. And the problem may well not be with old-fashioned male chauvinism. but with female atavism." This is even after they talk about the term "purse-whipped," women having to lie about their success to get dates, and men who have ED because their spouses earn more then them. None of these problems are women's fault. And what popular journalist uses the term "atavism," really? It doesn't even make sense here as a thing to blame.

4. It's hard to keep funding affirmative action for women when you read things like "‘College is built for the female brain,’ she says. ‘What do you do in college? You sit. You read. You write and you talk.’"

Yep, clearly women are DOMINATING college with 58% attendance rates, and this has nothing to do with the huge social pushes to support women's advancement, nope it's only because college is FEMINIZED because apparently we don't spend enough time shooting lasers and hitting things with sticks.

Sigh...I'm happy that women are getting more freedom and are no longer outnumbered by men in the workforce, but we should celebrate that responsibly and in a positive way, instead of calling red alert and acting like women are all uber-successful dominatrixes.

Similar to the "affluent gay guy" stereotype, This kind of propaganda does the same harm. People don't try as hard to look out for oppressed groups when you make people think they are rich and successful.

Snapchat: Live your Life in Real Time

Snapchat is trying to bring social media to a healthier place:

"The social media profile attempts to convince us that life, in all its ephemeral flow, should also be its simulation; the ephemeral flow of lived experience is to be hacked into a collection of separate, discrete, objects to be shoved into the profile containers. The logic of the profile is that life should be captured, preserved, and put behind glass. It asks us to be collectors of our lives, to create a museum of our self. Moments are chunked off, put in a grid, quantified, and ranked. Permanent social media are based on such profiles, with each being more or less constraining and grid-like. Rethinking permanence means rethinking this kind of social media profile, and it introduces the possibility of a profile not as a collection preserved behind glass but something more living, fluid, and always changing."

First becoming popular in September, CNN already predicts Snapchat is here to stay.

How the USA Shutdown Effects Food Safety

Warning! You will probably need to check your groceries extra-carefully before purchasing and eating for the next month or so.  And forget about eating in restaurants where you can't see the rare food before they cook it.  Since the FDA shutdown, no one is checking imported food, to turn away the "filthy, putrid, or decomposed substances" in food imports that normally get rejected hundreds of times per month!

The situation is "pretty bleak for consumers, most of whom aren’t in the habit of asking questions about where their food comes from and don’t realize that they might suddenly need to start self-regulating their groceries when the government stops doing it for them."

Normally, only 1% of incoming food is inspected (at random) but that check means any importer risks losing product if they send something unacceptable.  Now that news of our shutdown has had plenty of time to spread around the globe, I can only imagine how food exporters are responding.

Safety Tips:

• avoid imported seafood, leafy greens, tomatoes, and cantaloupe, as these are the most likely to be contaminated. 
• Thinking of eating local produce instead ? Check this guide out: 

• And DON'T read THIS, unless you want to hear about even more nightmarish USA food problems. 
• And look out for the Food Safety Modernization Act, which will impose more proactive food safety checks for imported foods. This will start in November, if our government can get its act back together.

Lobster Economics: It used to be cheap

Did you know that before 1950, lobster was considered "trash food" for the impoverished, so undesirable that prisoners and military troops were forced to eat it, while regular citizens had job contracts making their employers promise not to serve them lobster more than 3 times a week?

Yep, according to Pacific Standard: "Lobsters were so abundant in the early days—residents in the Massachusetts Bay Colony found they washed up on the beach in two-foot-high piles—that people thought of them as trash food. It was fit only for the poor and served to servants or prisoners."

And you can thank railroads for making lobsters expensive: "when the railways started to spread through America, transportation managers realized something interesting: If no one knew what lobster was, trains could serve it to passengers as if it were a rare, exotic item, even thought it was very cheap for those running the railroad to procure it. Inland passengers were intrigued. This lobster was delicious. Passengers, who didn’t know lobster was considered trash food on the coast, started to love it and began to ask for it even after they left the train."

Chefs started to realize that lobster was tastier if cooked alive at this time, and from there prices really took off.  Prices rose and lobster populations dwindled until the Great Depression, when no one could afford to buy lobster in restaurants anymore and it went back to being cheaply canned and served to military troops for World War I and WWII.  But as food grew short in WWII, Lobster wasn't rationed, so it became popular again, and prices went back up.

So, there you have it.  A cheap abundant food, that people thought was gross because it resembled giant insects, became expensive because of railroad marketing and war-induced rationing!   Funny how economics can change things like that.

How the USA Shutdown Killed Science

An anonymous scientist talking to Wired tells us how shutting down the United States government even for 1 day destroys most live biomedical research experiments:

"Scientists are hardworking people. They work long hours, on weekends, and they do that because it’s necessary. The schedules they follow aren’t like an industrial plant’s. If you interrupt them, they can’t pick up and start again. It’s an enormous waste of money and resources to interrupt this and have it abandoned."

Then he goes on to talk about "mercy killing"  their lab animals and it gets a bit creepy, but he ends with this gem:

"It’s ironic that factions with names like Tea Party and Patriot engage in anti-American behavior: shutting down the government because they don’t agree with a vote passed by the majority."

Ironic?  I'm not sure that's the right word.