The right to be a father

A short Swedish film booted from an Amnesty International Film Festival apparently due to protests from a domestic violence organization:

Random links

Generation Y Giving Cars a Pass
Generation Y is apparently "likely to see autos as a source of pollution, not as a sex or status symbol." Sounds to me like progress is being made.
Are Women Voters More Likely To Vote For Female Candidates?
Who could have guessed? Female voters actually care about more than just the gender of the candidate they vote for.
Working from home and online shopping can increase carbon emissions
Shouldn't really be all that surprising I'd say.
How to Raise Boys Who Read
The average boy is somewhere below the average girl in terms of reading ability. That's not a particularly controversial statement. This article attempts to address the drive of publishers to cater to boys, basically by trying to gross them out. "One obvious problem with the SweetFarts philosophy of education is that it is more suited to producing a generation of barbarians and morons than to raising the sort of men who make good husbands, fathers and professionals. If you keep meeting a boy where he is, he doesn't go very far." The article also argues that excessive use of video games and the internet may be a big part of the problem.

Why the disabled might get poor medical care (and otherwise fair poorly)

It could be the laws intended to help the disabled that get in the way. e.g. for doctors, in the US, they're required to provide for deaf people communication of the person's choice - writing on paper doesn't work if the person would prefer a sign language interpreter - with no additional compensation from the government or insurance companies for this.

Consider some comments on this in a New York Times article:

The woman later called again to say she would rather have a sign-language interpreter. Fine, Brooks said, and asked his assistant to make the arrangements. As it turned out, an interpreter would cost $120 an hour, with a two-hour minimum, and the expense wasn’t covered by insurance. Brooks didn’t think it made sense for him to pay. That would mean laying out $240 to conduct an exam for which the woman’s insurance company would pay him $58 — a loss of more than $180 even before accounting for taxes and overhead.

So Brooks suggested to the patient that they make do without the interpreter. That’s when she told him that the Americans With Disabilities Act (A.D.A.) allowed a patient to choose the mode of interpretation, at the physician’s expense.

Sounds like a great way to encourage various non-explicit forms of discrimination against the disabled - e.g. being busy when they are looking to book appointments or failing to suggest additional followup visits that might be important in addressing the patient's concerns.

Consider as well the effects on the employment of disabled people following the adoption of the Americans with Disabilities Act. According to a University of Chicago analysis, this resulted in a decrease in employment amongst the disabled as well as a freeze in their wages.

Good intentions don't always lead to good conclusions.

Random links

Coffee prices on the rise
So, a 44% rise in wholesale coffee prices over the course of the summer. Guess that explains why coffee prices were up at the grocery store last week about 50% over what I'd recalled paying a while back. In related news, Starbucks is hiking prices because their drinks were just too cheap.
Mobile phones in tough places: Reaching the world’s unconnected will require more adventurous carriers
Crazy... in certain remote parts of the world it seems that cell towers have been powered by generators run using fuel transported into the region on the backs of donkeys.
The Voters: Men Are Fuming, Women Despairing
At large men and women have different voting patterns. How does that impact elections?
Gay Saudi diplomat fears for life?
I like the sentence at the end: "Is this a political story? Yes. Is it a cultural story? Yes. Is it a religion story? Yes, of course. Deal with it."

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