"Mass Shootings Are A Bad Way To Understand Gun Violence"

"First, they’re rare, and the people doing the shooting are different. The majority of gun deaths in America aren’t even homicides, let alone caused by mass shootings. Two-thirds of the more than 33,000 gun deaths that take place in the U.S. every year are suicides... 

Second, the people killed in mass shootings are different from the majority of homicides. Most gun murder victims are men between the ages of 15 and 34. Sixty-six percent are black. Women — of any race and any age — are far less likely to be murdered by a gun. Unless that gun is part of a mass shooting. There, 50 percent of the people who die are women. And at least 54 percent of mass shootings involve domestic or family violence — with the perpetrator shooting a current or former partner or a relative... 

policies aimed at reducing gun deaths will likely need to be targeted at the specific people who commit or are victimized by those incidents. And mass shootings just aren’t a good proxy for the diversity of gun violence. Policies that reduce the number of homicides among young black men — such as programs that build trust between community members, police and at-risk youth and offer people a way out of crime — probably won’t have the same effect on suicides among elderly white men. Background checks and laws aimed at preventing a young white man with a history of domestic violence from obtaining a gun and using it in a mass shooting might not prevent a similar shooting by an older white male with no criminal record."

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/mass-shootings-are-a-bad-way-to-understand-gun-violence/?ex_cid=story-facebook

FB: "If we focus on mass shootings as a means of understanding how to reduce the number of people killed by guns in this country, we’re likely to implement laws that don’t do what we want them to do — and miss opportunities to make changes that really work."

"Women Aren’t Ruining Food"

"Any form or style of food or drink is, literally, a matter of taste. It is also all gender neutral, though that hasn’t stopped people from associating tofu and chocolate with women or bitter alcohols with men. Whether that’s because women do most of the buying, or because marketers have an insatiable appetite for turning human enjoyment into target-based profit, we wind up with things like chocolate bars that say they’re “not for girls.” “Women’s” foods tend to be sweet (cupcakes, macarons, wine coolers); thought of as healthy (yogurt, froyo, diet soda, smoothie bowls, salad) or otherwise “fussy” (unicorn lattes, pumpkin spice anything); and come in pink. “Men’s” foods tend to be bitter (hops, coffee, whiskey), spicy (hot sauce, tacos, Flamin’ Hot Cheetohs), and hearty (meat!).

When those foods blow up, we judge women for falling for the marketing or trying to jump on the bandwagon, and we assume that because they like something other women like, they don’t have minds of their own. And on top of that, women are asked to reckon with, consciously or unconsciously, the perceived psycho-sexual symbolism attached to seemingly innocuous foods."

https://www.tastecooking.com/women-arent-ruining-food/

Related: women + food other one about food tech

"Why Are Prosecutors Putting Innocent Witnesses in Jail?"

"Across America, some prosecutors—arguably with the authority of state and federal laws—are jailing innocent crime victims and witnesses, in hopes of insuring their testimony in court. In Washington State, a sexual-assault victim was arrested and jailed to secure her testimony against the alleged perpetrator. (He was found guilty of kidnapping, attempted rape, and assault with sexual motivation.) In Hillsboro, Oregon, a Mexican immigrant was jailed for more than two years—nine hundred and five days—to obtain his testimony in a murder case. (The case was being brought against his son.) And in Harris County, Texas, a rape survivor suffered a mental breakdown in court while testifying against her assailant. Afraid that the woman would disappear before finishing her testimony, the court jailed her for a month...

In 1984, Congress reaffirmed the right to jail material witnesses, but also noted that their testimony should be secured by deposition, rather than imprisonment, “whenever possible.” Jailing crime survivors and innocent witnesses, in other words, was legal but undesirable... In late 2001, the Department of Justice used material-witness laws to target Muslims, often arresting them at gunpoint and later placing some in solitary confinement. According to Human Rights Watch, the U.S. government eventually apologized to at least thirteen people for wrongful detention as material witnesses, and released dozens more without charges... 

As the trial for the second defendant neared, however, Mitchell’s relationship with the D.A.’s office soured. Mitchell, according to the A.C.L.U. and Civil Rights Corps lawsuit, felt that prosecutors “seemed more intent on telling him what had happened than actually listening to Mr. Mitchell’s account of the shooting.” Equally troubling, he told me, was that the D.A.’s office had made—but not kept—certain promises intended to allay his fears about his safety...

Mitchell felt that the prosecutors hadn’t taken into account how being arrested and jailed would affect him, or others like him. “They were looking for awards and promotions,” he told me. “We’ve still got to go on and live, even afterward.”"

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-are-prosecutors-putting-innocent-witnesses-in-jail?mbid=social_facebook

FB: "In parts of the country, prosecutors are using these orders to put crime victims—especially poor victims, and, in cities like New Orleans, victims of color—in jail in order to get swift victories in court, sometimes, puzzlingly, in minor cases." 

"In one corner of the law, minorities and women are often valued less"

"The 4-year-old’s case is a rare public look at one corner of the American legal system that explicitly uses race and gender to determine how much victims or their families should receive in compensation when they are seriously injured or killed.

As a result, white and male victims often receive larger awards than people of color and women in similar cases, according to more than two dozen lawyers and forensic economists, the experts who make the calculations. These differences largely derive from projections of  how much more money individuals would have earned over their lifetimes had they not been injured – projections that take into account average earnings and employment levels by race and gender...

Law professors who study the practice in the United States say it deserves a fresh look, given America’s increasing awareness of the role race plays in the justice system – as well as the progress women have made in closing other economic disparities. Some other countries, including Canada and Israel, have moved away from using the averages in the name of equality. And the United States has banned the use of race and gender averages in some other calculations. The Affordable Care Act, for example, outlawed the practice of charging women more for health insurance than men...

Still, even some economists acknowledge the practice has problems. For example, most economists don’t attempt to account for how the earnings and employment gaps between men and women will change over time. “If I had used [averages] for females back in 1970, I probably would have underestimated their incomes substantially,” said Bill Brandt, a forensic economist in Washington state...

none of the discussion in court directly addressed G.M.M.’s demographics, according to court records. Yet that wasn’t the end of the story. Although the judge banned discussion of the boy’s ethnicity in the court, the jury still had access only to calculations of damages that included ethnicity as a component."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/wonk/settlements/

"The Unique Merger That Made You (and Ewe, and Yew)"

"The transition from the classic prokaryotic model to the deluxe eukaryotic one is arguably the most important event in the history of life on Earth. And in more than 3 billion years of existence, it happened exactly once... 

It is not for lack of opportunity. The world is swarming with countless prokaryotes that evolve at breathtaking rates. Even so, they were not quick about inventing eukaryotic cells. Fossils tell us that the oldest bacteria arose between 3 and 3.5 billion years ago, but there are no eukaryotes from before 2.1 billion years ago. Why did the prokaryotes remain as simple cells for so damn long?... 

There are many possible explanations, but one of these has recently gained a lot of ground. It tells of a prokaryote that somehow found its way inside another, and formed a lasting partnership with its host. This inner cell—a bacterium—abandoned its free-living existence and eventually transformed into the mitochondria. These internal power plants provided the host cell with a bonanza of energy, allowing it to evolve in new directions that other prokaryotes could never reach.

If this story is true, and there are still those who doubt it, then all eukaryotes—every flower and fungus, spider and sparrow, man and woman—descended from a sudden and breathtakingly improbable merger between two microbes...

According to the sudden-origin ideas, mitochondria were not just one of many innovations for the early eukaryotes. “The acquisition of mitochondria was the origin of eukaryotes,” says Lane. “They were one and the same event.” If that is right, the rise of the eukaryotes was a fundamentally different sort of evolutionary transition than the gradual changes that led to the eye, or photosynthesis, or the move from sea to land. It was a fluke event of incredible improbability—one that, as far as we know, only happened after a billion years of life on Earth and has not been repeated in the 2 billion years since. “It’s a fun and thrilling possibility,” says Lane. “It may not be true, but it’s beautiful.”... 

In 2004, James Lake changed the rules of engagement. Rather than looking at any single gene, he and his colleague Maria Rivera compared the entire genomes of two eukaryotes, three bacteria, and three archaea. Their analysis supported the merger-first ideas: They concluded that the common ancestor of all life diverged into bacteria and archaea, which evolved independently until two of their members suddenly merged. This created the first eukaryotes and closed what now appeared to be a “ring of life.” Before that fateful encounter, life had just two major domains. Afterward, it had three."

http://nautil.us/issue/10/mergers--acquisitions/the-unique-merger-that-made-you-and-ewe-and-yew

Evolution isn't a straight line from basic to complex, inadequate to ideal. It's random changes that are under varying degrees of selective pressures. 

FB: "Prokaryotes are stuck in an energetic canyon that keeps them simple and small. They have no way of climbing out. If anything, evolution drives them in the opposite direction, mercilessly pruning their genomes into a ring of densely packed and overlapping genes. Only once did a prokaryote escape from the canyon, through a singular and improbable trick—it acquired mitochondria."

"WHEN DENMARK CRIMINALISED KINDNESS"

"At school I was lucky enough to meet good people, who understood how to coach the aggressive and emotionally disturbed young girl that I was – believe me, it was no easy task. At one institution for especially difficult girls, I met Karen, who saw through my anger and loathing, and was patient enough that I eventually came to trust her. Today, thirty-four years later, she still is. She was the person who pushed me on to university – I would never have thought it possible without her.

The consensus was that we do not accept that refugees from a war, people in distress, have to walk on the highways in Denmark and sleep in the open, when so many of us have cars and beds. Some used the term civil disobedience, infuriated by the statement from the police. On Wednesday, the police again changed their position. Now, it was no longer illegal – now people offering lifts were merely ‘leaning towards breaching the law’... 

anti-Muslim sentiments are very strong in Denmark today, and people vote accordingly. Kindness towards Muslims scares away voters, so there is no room for kindness in government. On the contrary, measure after measure is being taken to make the life of the refugees as miserable as possible. People are housed in tents, even in winter, even though better accommodation is available. The refugees are searched for valuables when they enter Denmark, and met with ludicrous demands when applying for asylum, reunion with their families or permanent citizenship. The Danish government has published ads in Middle Eastern newspapers warning refugees to stay away from our country. To me it seems that we have sacrificed the human decency Danish society is built on."

https://granta.com/denmark-criminalised-kindness/

FB: "Refusing to help the people standing right in front of us, needing care and assistance, corrupts our moral values and perceptions about decency and common humanity. It is a dangerous path to choose. It breeds a cynicism that may well poison the remnants of solidarity in Denmark, and actually unravel the social fabric that some of our opponents, in a misguided way, are actually trying to protect."

“Your App Isn't Helping The People Of Saudi Arabia”

“For people like Srinivasan, a vindicating narrative is playing out. A young population craving freedom flocks to new technology, bypassing their oppressive gatekeepers, ultimately to ring in modernity—all while investors enjoy a windfall from a new generation of app users. The invisible hand rightfully triumphs over the iron fist, as it was always meant to be.

This fairy tale allows people who make ungodly sums of money for contributing very little of actual value to society to see their compensation as a just—even modest—reward for changing the world. Like most things rich people tell themselves after the sun goes down, it’s self-serving bullshit.

The structural forces oppressing the most marginalized Saudis in the streets and prisons, it turns out, do not wither in the presence of a 4G data connection. The most popular Saudi accounts on Twitter aren’t bold young entrepreneurs challenging the social order; they’re hardline preachers who tell those young people that they should be put to death if they lay with someone of the same sex. The people who want to punish sinners don’t end their pursuit of heresy once they log on. In fact, Saudi Arabia shows how easily the tools tech entrepreneurs imagine will liberate the world can be bent to the service of oppression of the vulnerable.”

https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/your-app-isnt-helping-the-people-of-saudi-arabia-1790198445

FB: “I also don’t think the paid ass-kissers and tech masters of the universe truly have any idea how apps could fix a national system designed to treat the majority of a nation’s residents as second-class citizens at best, and defective property at worst. Even if they did have benevolent intentions beyond enriching themselves, the systems and technologies they’re so excited about are already tools for the same hateful takfiris they pretend they’re upending. It’ll take more than a car service app to fix a country that was deliberately driven insane.”