A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds. “Some of the people who are most [...]
Posts from ‘February, 2009’
The moral state, the nanny state, and the total state
When you think about it, the motivations for becoming a total state don’t matter; the eventual condition of that state does, which is that a government is trying to apply political dogma to a population. Genetic information taken from nearly 1.1 million children is now stored on the national DNA database, official figures show, and [...]
Doubling the workforce was a dumb idea
Does the woman in your life really need a job? Admittedly, this is not a fashionable question. From Iceland to Australia, men are blamed for causing the credit crunch, while a more feminine approach to finance is proposed as the solution. Indeed, working women almost certainly caused the credit crunch by bringing a second income [...]
Big business big immigration supporter
When you think of those who support immigration, you think of hippies who just love everyone right? It couldn’t be as cynical as… a business venture, could it? I mean, I thought the only big business people were Republicans. 521 corporations, trade associations, business groups, labor organizations, government entities, and nonprofit organizations reported lobbying on [...]
Hope, maybe, but not through change
A Pentagon report requested by President Obama on the conditions at the Guantánamo Bay detention center concluded that the prison complies with the humane-treatment requirements of the Geneva Conventions. The report concluded that the Pentagon was in compliance with the requirements of the Geneva Conventions. The review included some of the most contentious issues, including [...]
Feedback loops we don’t like to see
Recessions snowball because we panic: Shopping centers are caught in a bind driven by the steep pullback in consumer spending: Lower sales have forced many mall tenants to close stores, leading to higher vacancy rates and lower foot traffic, which further drives down sales. WAPO People cut costs so can do less business so get [...]
Green reality
Illusion: someday, humanity will wake up, drop everything else and focus on being green. Reality: the green solutions that will win will be gradually adopted because they are both green and superior to the way we’re doing things now. The national obsession with soft paper has driven the growth of brands like Cottonelle Ultra, Quilted [...]
An underworld
He might not be a household name, but Ricardo Fanchini is one of the world’s most well-connected gangsters, with mobster friends as far afield as Moscow, New York, London, Antwerp, Naples, Poland and Israel. “He was like the CEO of crime and used to organise crime summits in Austria, where people from the Camorra [Neapolitan [...]
The fallacy of pure logic
Only a true ingenue would fall for this one: Here, mathematician Manil Suri suggests that children should be encouraged to find answers purely using logic. Everyone should think for themselves more, rather than relying on ideology. Don’t ride along with the teachings of your left- or right-wing politics – or even worse, your religion I’d [...]
Culture is produced by biology
People often speak of culture in the plural (“cultures”) because they believe that there are many different cultures in the world. At one level, this is of course true; the American culture is different from the Chinese culture, both of which are different from the Egyptian culture, and so on. However, all the cultural differences [...]
