Everybody knows that crime rates are down. So I wish this information stopped being delivered so pompously on every corner.
A school forbids clapping and substitutes it with silent cheering. Maybe it’s best to tie children down and forbid them to move altogether to please neurotic adults.
[Russian] South Korea’s defecation park. It blew my mind! There are many photos so it doesn’t matter that much if you don’t speak Russian.
Melania’s speechwriter makes it clear that Melania knew the speech was plagiarized. Maybe Melania isn’t that dumb and simply wanted to hurt her jerk of an owner.
How to ask a new employer for a flexible schedule. My advice is simply not to. Start working, make yourself into a superstar, and you’ll have all you need. People who want to be special cookies before doing anything for the company only annoy everybody.
If one abandons research because of such innocuous little things, one was never going to be a research anyway. Were these over sensitive neurotics raised on “silent cheers”?
God, I hate these self-pitying, guilt-tripping mommies. Just don’t do any of this shit if it’s so damn onerous but stop being such a victim already. The kids will grow up and read this article. How will it make them feel to know that Mom whined to all the world about how much she hated doing a few things for them?
Republican senators are lazy and ineffective to a scary degree. They will lecture people on the value of hard work and bootstrapping but will refuse to do a lick of work for years.
Another insane kerfuffle at Yale. People seem to think that depicting slavery is the same as approving of it. It’s ridiculous beyond words.
No, robots will not leave us unemployed. A good and necessary post.
Clarissa's Blog 
Everybody knows that crime rates are down. So I wish this information stopped being delivered so pompously on every corner.
“Atlantic readers” =/= “everybody.” Otherwise why would Trump’s braying about “law and order” resonate with anyone?
Melania’s speechwriter makes it clear that Melania knew the speech was plagiarized. Maybe Melania isn’t that dumb and simply wanted to hurt her jerk of an owner.
It’s very clear she’s not interested or has very little interest in being a political wife, which involves a lot of ceremonial, mostly pointless work. So why not half ass a speech, she thinks?
God, I hate these self-pitying, guilt-tripping mommies.
I wonder how much of this “motherhood is work and a lot of it is onerous” stems from the idea of motherhood being a free and full choice is so recent in history, so new that it hasn’t reached everyone let alone permeated people’s heads. There’s a lot of countervailing forces who want to make it less free of a choice in America. Also people had children and continue to have for many reasons other than “I want to.” My mother wants grandchildren, but she has no idea how my own upbringing makes me very reluctant to have children. If I explained it to her, she’d be in complete denial.
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I’ve been wondering how the approaching market state will influence Israel and found three articles so far that refer to the issue:
FIRST (and the best, I recommend reading it all)
Israel’s high tech boom threatened by shallow labor pool
The ‘start-up nation’ has a dearth of high-tech-ready employees, fewer students studying maths, computer science and medicine than it used to and has lost its leading positin in R&D funding; importing foreign talent, frequently done in high tech, is proving insufficient.
…
Feeling the heat, firms have been fighting to bring in qualified foreigners to ease the stress. “In Israel, to get a work permit is harder than to make peace,” said Eldad Tamir, head of the Tamir Fishman Investment House and a partner in Eucalyptus Growth Capital, a fund that invests in high tech companies.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4824677,00.html
SECOND
Will US imports uproot Israeli agriculture?
The United States is an agricultural powerhouse, able to export massive quantities of produce at low prices; Will a new trade agreement being negotiated over the coming days see this produce come to Israel? Will it destroy Israeli agriculture?
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4829998,00.html
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THIRD (you liked his writing style and I love reading him too, but one has to remember he is very biased, so I am unsure whether he is right here)
throughout the democratic world there is a growing distaste, even aversion, for the existing political establishment.
Many British voters, it seems, did not vote for or against the Brexit, but for or against the established parties.
This sentiment spurs on extreme fascist, and in some countries also radical leftist, parties everywhere. Donald Trump is the misbegotten child of this sentiment. So, in a more likeable form, is Bernie Sanders.
In Israel we have the same prevalent sentiment, only more so. The spontaneous outcry that sprang up on the morrow of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, “Enough, we are fed up with you!” (or “Enough, you disgust us!”), which swept Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan from power, is now more prevalent than ever.
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1467378467
I do agree with this column’s description of mutual feelings:
Hatred Unlimited
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1467393036
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Was surprised by:
The study published by the University of Hamburg found that the number of German citizens between 18- and 64-years-old who are unable to read or write is now almost 7.5 million – or 14 percent of the work force.
Previous estimates had put the number of functionally illiterate adults in Germany at some 4 million people.
http://www.thelocal.de/20110301/33431#.UYKWGcqFmXk
In case you like:
In pictures: Relics of the Soviet era
An exhibition examining the landscape and abandoned spaces of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries opens in London.
http://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-36764708
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A Quick Guide to Trying to out-SEO a Hate Mob
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After days of purges amid a crackdown on suspects and Erdogan’s rivals in Turkey, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere issued a stern warning to partisans among the world’s largest Turkish diaspora.
“We don’t want these kinds of conflicts to play out in Germany with violence in the streets,” he told ZDF public television.
…
And although many were born in Germany or lived here for decades, many ethnic Turks say they feel more engaged with political life in Turkey.
…
Erdogan has recognised the importance of his base in Germany and even held stadium-sized campaign rallies in recent years in cities such as Berlin and Düsseldorf
…
The BDK federation representing 15,000 police officers cautioned there was a “very, very large” potential for the situation to explode.
“All Erdogan has to do is snap his fingers to get people to confront each other in the streets in a very emotional way,” its vice president Sebastian Fiedler told ZDF.
http://www.thelocal.de/20160722/tensions-in-germanys-turkish-community-grow-after-coup-plot
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Just saw about the upcoming Cologne pro-Erdogan demonstration and about such past ultra-nationalist demos in Austria:
http://www.germanjoys.eu/2016/07/mass-pro-edogan-protest-coming-up-in-cologne.html
Putin wishes he had so many enthusiasts ready to march for him in EU.
Interesting whether after “a demonstration scheduled for Cologne on July 31” the city will be again in the news after new waves (and kinds?) of attacks.
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Shooting(s) in Munich. Several dead in a shopping mall and unconfirmed reports of a shooting elsewhere….
No word yet on the identity of the attacker(s) (the Islamic State is supposedly celebrating but that could be opportunistic and this might be something else entirely….)
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English Live updates page from Munich :
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2016/jul/22/munich-shooting-police-evacuate-shopping-centre-live
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No, robots will not cause most people to be directly unemployed (at least not over the long term), but will cause jobs to move up the cognitive requirements ladder while people will not.
So there will be many people who qualify for no jobs at all.
Should society discard them? What is the solution? UBI seems reasonable to me, because already about 25% of US adults are unable to do any available job. This will only increase.
People like Gus Van Horn are unable to recognize that the world has changed and is changing in ways that have left behind much of macroeconomic thinking.
Old broken ideas only lead to new broken pseudo-solutions.
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Mike, I agree with jobs moving “up the cognitive requirements ladder while people will not,” but I do not believe 25% are naturally uncapable of doing any available job. It’s a matter of training and, as such, may be solved by appropriate education both for adults and for children in danger of falling through the cracks.
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Exactly. People will need to be educated to help them live productive lives in a changing world. This was done quite successfully in the past. For instance, when entire continents went from 90% illiteracy to 90% literacy. It can be done. Or we could say it’s too expensive and complex and just discard millions of people, letting them putrefy physically and intellectually in front of screens.
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Uri’s latest column:
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1469209537/
Much is true, but he oversimplifies reality in a few important places. For instance, he does not mention that most Ashkenazis seemingly vote for the Right too. Or that surveys show the lessening economic gap between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews. Or that many (probably most) born in Israel Jews are mixed: part Ashkenazi and part Mizrahi.
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Comedy Gold:
Arab League Summit: Abu Mazen calls to sue UK over Balfour Declaration
The President of the Palestinian Authority called on the Arab states to support filing a lawsuit against the UK over the 1917 Balfour Declaration, given to the Jewish people almost 100 years ago, which brought “hundreds of thousands of Jews to Palestine at the expense of our people.”
http://www.jerusalemonline.com/news/middle-east/israeli-palestinian-relations/abu-mazen-calls-to-sue-uk-over-balfour-declaration-22580
In other news, after reading:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who also serves as the minister of foreign affairs, the minister of communications, minister of regional cooperation, and minister of the economy—said on Monday, “Soon, I will unburden myself of a few portfolios, so that will facilitate further concentration on tasks that I consider important.”
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4833142,00.html
I not only began wondering at the amount of power he wishes to officially hold but also whether all those minister portfolios were really necessary. After all, if one person can hold four, why not have less ministers? Why not unite minister of foreign affairs with minister of regional cooperation, for instance? Except for political reasons of letting more people to hold a minister’s title.
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Also, we are still Only Orthodox Need Apply kind of country:
The Knesset has approved the “mikveh bill,” which states that reform and conservative religious authorities will not be allowed to use public mikvehs (Jewish ritual baths) as part of the process of religious conversions.
The bill was presented to the Knesset by MK Moshe Gafni (of the United Torah Judaism party), and is meant to circumvent a Supreme Court decision that prohibited the state to discriminate against more liberal streams of Judaism when it comes to public mikvehs run by the state.
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Read this American – Jewish short story about a couple of Haredi Jews from Israel coming to visit friends in America. Don’t know if you will like it, but I did like in parts:
WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ANNE FRANK
By Nathan Englander
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/12/12/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-anne-frank
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