"So since 2005 the 19 plants receiving the waste gas payments have profited handsomely from an unlikely business: churning out more harmful coolant gas so they can be paid to destroy its waste byproduct. The high output keeps the prices of the coolant gas irresistibly low, discouraging air-conditioning companies from switching to less-damaging alternative gases. That means, critics say, that United Nations subsidies intended to improve the environment are instead creating their own damage."
"Gabby Douglas’s mother declared bankruptcy. Ryan Lochte’s family faces foreclosure on their home. Years of spending huge sums, with little outside assistance, to prepare their kids to become Olympic heroes leaves many U.S. families on the brink of financial disaster." Perhaps it has something to do with basically devoting your life to a pursuit with less practical value than even many of the more useless types of university degrees?
"In some ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel, shops are now selling eye glasses with lenses that intentionally blur whatever the wearer is looking at, the web site ynet reports. The goal is to allow men to walk through their neighborhoods without having to risk getting a good look at immodestly clad women."
"EuroNCAP, the safety organisation that gives star ratings to most new cars has said it will not give a five star rating to new cars from 2014 unless they are fitted with Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB). ... [which] automatically apply the brakes if the integrated radar system picks up an obstacle immediately in front of the car which the driver has not reacted to."
The paper asserted that "In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists admit that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues." One of the researchers argued that their survey questions "were so blatant that I thought we’d get a much lower rate of agreement ... Usually you have to be pretty tricky to get people to say they’d discriminate against minorities." A particularly interesting bit: "Generally speaking, the more liberal the respondent, the more willingness to discriminate and, paradoxically, the higher the assumption that conservatives do not face a hostile climate in the academy." Seems worthwhile noting that this study focused on the field of social psychology.
"Esther Kim, a graduate student at Yale University who travelled thousands of miles on Greyhound buses to explore these “unspoken rules and behaviours of commuters,” published her findings in the recent issue of Symbolic Interaction."
