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Metaphors can change our opinions in ways we don’t even realize
ROOKIE MISTAKE
Metaphors can change our opinions in ways we don’t even realize
ROOKIE MISTAKE
What has the ability to influence your opinions, in some cases, even more than your own political party? A metaphor, as it turns out.
When we think about metaphor, we might think about how we typically learn about metaphor in school: as a poetic device or a rhetorical flourish. But, metaphors are not simply confined to the world of poetry—they are all around us. We describe time as money (“spending time”), arguments as war (“you attacked my argument,” “I defended my argument”), love as a journey (“their relationship hit a dead end”), and emotional states as directions (“he was feeling down,” “cheer up”). By some estimates, we use metaphors every 25 words, but because metaphors are so embedded in our language, they often go unnoticed.
Emerging psychological research tells us that something as simple as a single metaphor can have consequences for how we think. They can also be powerful tools in the hands of those looking to shape our opinions.
In a recent Stanford study, participants were presented with brief passages about crime in a hypothetical city named Addison. For half of the participants, a few words were subtly changed to describe crime as a “virus infecting” the city. For the other half, crime was described as a “beast preying” on the city. Otherwise, the passages remained exactly the same. …
DEGREE OF EXECUTION: Simply changing a few words in a passage dramatically changed people’s ideas of how crime should be dealt with.
Trump’s latest Twitter rant is completely at odds with his administration’s Mexico policy
NEED WALL!
The wall trumps US-Mexico cooperation for Trump supporters.
Donald Trump had some strong words for the Mexican government on Easter morning. In a series of tweets, he chastised Mexico for not curbing illegal immigration.
Mexico is doing very little, if not NOTHING, at stopping people from flowing into Mexico through their Southern Border, and then into the U.S. They laugh at our dumb immigration laws. They must stop the big drug and people flows, or I will stop their cash cow, NAFTA. NEED WALL!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 1, 2018
That’s the same country Trump’s own homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen praised just last week for cooperating with the US on border issues. We “are neighbors, we are allies, we are friends,” she said in heavily-accented Spanish after announcing three new border-security agreements between the US and Mexico.
The belligerent tone Trump uses when talking publicly about Mexico belies the more civil interactions his administration has with Mexican officials. Despite the president’s frequent rants and threats, the two countries have carried on with their work on the routine issues that define their relationship, including immigration and trade. “We don’t want differences to define the relationship,” Mexican foreign minister Luis Videgaray recently told a San Diego audience. “We’ll continue to engage and try to make this as strong a relationship as possible.”
Border security
The Mexican government has actively stopped undocumented immigrants from making it to the US. It ramped up detentions and deportations of Central Americans to help the Barack Obama administration handle a surge of immigrants into the US from that region starting in 2014. …
— Francis Wegner (@FrancisWegner) April 1, 2018
Trump claims ‘caravans’ of migrants in Mexico mean US ‘is being stolen’
• Large group, mostly Honduran, is travelling through Mexico
• A Dreamer’s impossible dilemma: where to die?
Central American migrants gather before continuing their journey to the US in Ixtepec, Mexico.
Donald Trump returned to the offensive on immigration on Monday, repeating a claim that “caravans” of migrants from Central America are threatening to enter the US via Mexico and demanding: “Act now Congress, our country is being stolen!”
Mexico has the absolute power not to let these large ‘Caravans’ of people enter their country,” the president tweeted. “They must stop them at their Northern Border, which they can do because their border laws work, not allow them to pass through into our country, which has no effective border laws.
“Congress must immediately pass Border Legislation, use Nuclear Option if necessary, to stop the massive inflow of Drugs and People. Border Patrol Agents (and ICE) are GREAT, but the weak Dem laws don’t allow them to do their job. Act now Congress, our country is being stolen!”
Trump’s use of the term “caravans” – also made in a sequence of tweets on Easter Sunday – was a reference to a large group of people who are heading through Mexico, hoping to reach the US border. A reporter from Buzzfeed has been with them. …
The Passing of the Libertarian Moment
The end of the Cold War and the rise of Donald Trump have left classical liberals without a political home.
Senator Rand Paul speaks on Capitol Hill in September 2017.
Senator Rand Paul is a man out of time. It was only a few years ago that the editors of Reason magazine held him up as the personification of what they imagined to be a “libertarian moment,” a term that enjoyed some momentary cachet in the pages of The New York Times, The Atlantic, Politico (where I offered a skeptical assessment), and elsewhere. But rather than embodying the future of the Republican Party, Paul embodies its past, the postwar conservative era when Ronald Reagan could proclaim that “the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism,” when National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. could publish a conspectus of his later work under the subtitle “Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist,” and young blue-blazered Republicans of the Alex P. Keaton variety wore out their copies of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose.
The view from 2018 is rather different. The GOP finds itself in the throes of a populist convulsion, an ironic product of the fact that the party that long banqueted on resentment of the media now is utterly dominated by the alternative media constructed by its own most dedicated partisans. It is Sean Hannity’s party now.
The GOP’s political situation is absurd: Having rallied to the banner of an erratic and authoritarian game-show host, evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell Jr. are reduced to comparing Donald Trump to King David as they try to explain away his entanglement with pornographic performer Stormy Daniels. Those who celebrated Trump the businessman clutch their heads as his preposterous economic policies produce terror in the stock markets and chaos for the blue-collar workers in construction firms and manufacturers scrambling to stay ahead of the coming tariffs on steel and aluminum. The Chinese retaliation is sure to fall hardest on the heartland farmers who were among Trump’s most dedicated supporters. …
How did we let modern slavery become part of our everyday lives?
Society abhors exploitation but we are complicit. The cheap goods and services consumers expect makes exploitation inevitable.
Since the Modern Slavery Act of 2015, British companies over a certain size have been required to report on slavery in their supply chains. Their statements are both shocking and admirable. Shocking because they make clear that the incidence of slavery has become normalised once again – and not just in criminal operations such as the illegal drugs trade or trafficking for prostitution, but in the mainstream economy. The declarations are prefaced with management expressions of abhorrence, of course, but there they are, another note alongside the annual accounts. They are admirable, however, in that transparency must be the first step to tackling this phenomenon.
Last month the National Crime Agency reported a 35% annual rise in the number of suspected slavery victims found in the UK, with more than 5,000 people referred to the government mechanism that supports them in 2017. Labour exploitation, rather than sexual exploitation, was the most common type of modern slavery cited.
The list of high-risk sectors for slavery declared in company statements is long: temporary workers in distribution and office cleaning; agency labour in logistics operations; subcontracted car-washes cleaning company vehicles; construction workers building and renovating company premises; outsourced security staff. A catalogue of the casualised workforce, in other words. It is hardly surprising that the most egregious forms of exploitation should appear where economic, legal and moral responsibility has been deliberately diffused. Modern slavery is the flipside of the coin that has seen corporates offshore their profits and dodge tax. Both represent a sloughing-off of what were seen in the past as important obligations to society. …
Retailers Race Against Amazon to Automate Stores
A shopper at Hema, a Chinese grocery chain operated by Alibaba, the internet giant, scanning a product with her smartphone. The company is experimenting with ways to automate shopping in its stores.
To see what it’s like inside stores where sensors and artificial intelligence have replaced cashiers, shoppers have to trek to Amazon Go, the internet retailer’s experimental convenience shop in downtown Seattle.
Soon, though, more technology-driven businesses like Amazon Go may be coming to them.
A global race to automate stores is underway among several of the world’s top retailers and small tech start-ups, which are motivated to shave labor costs and minimize shoppers’ frustrations, like waiting for cashiers. They are also trying to prevent Amazon from dominating the physical retail world as it does online shopping.
Companies are testing robots that help keep shelves stocked, as well as apps that let shoppers ring up items with a smartphone. High-tech systems like the one used by Amazon Go completely automate the checkout process. China, which has its own ambitious e-commerce companies, is emerging as an especially fertile place for these retail experiments.
If they succeed, these new technologies could add further uncertainty to the retail work force, which is already in flux because of the growth of online shopping. An analysis last year by the World Economic Forum said 30 to 50 percent of the world’s retail jobs could be at risk once technologies like automated checkout were fully embraced. …
Musk and Zuckerberg are fighting over whether we rule technology—or it rules us
Silicon Valley selects, relentlessly, for optimists who believe they control their destinies, and ours.
In the public imagination, the Amish are famous for renouncing modern technology. In truth, many Amish farms hum with machines: milk vats, mechanical agitators, diesel engines, and pneumatic belt sanders are all found in their barns and workshops.
The Amish don’t actually oppose technology. Rather, the community must vote on whether to adopt a given item. To do so, they must agree almost unanimously, says Jameson Wetmore, a social science researcher at Arizona State University. Whereas the outside world may see innovation as good until proven otherwise, the Amish first decide whether a new technology might erode the community values they’re trying to preserve. “It is not individual technologies the concern us,” one Amish minister told Wetmore, “but the total chain.”
It’s an idea that is resonating in Silicon Valley these days, where a debate over technology and its potential unintended consequences is cleaving the industry into rival camps—each with a tech titan as its figurehead.
On one side is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who sees technology as an intrinsic good. Any social or ethical problems can simply be handled as they arise (preferably without much regulation). This is the default setting for Silicon Valley, which sees the future through utopia-tinged glasses: The problem is the past, and the future can’t come soon enough.
On the other side is Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who argues for caution when dealing with technologies such as artificial intelligence lest humans lose control of their creations, and has expressed reservations about Zuckerberg’s online surveillance business model.
Neither man disavows technology; indeed, both insist our future depends upon rapid progress. (Musk, after all, is pouring billions into interplanetary rockets and a new solar economy.) But the Cambridge Analytica scandal has laid bare ideological rifts between the two men, and the attitudes toward technology that they represent. …
6 Household Items You Didn’t Realize Were Totally Disgusting
We’re gonna go ahead and guess that you don’t care much for germs. Nobody goes around saying, “Oh yeah, gimme that filthy stuff, baby.” (Not in this context, anyway.) And yet, so many of the objects we use every day are spectacularly good at gathering bacteria. Listen, we’re not trying to make every germaphobe reading this toss all their belongings into a fire. All we’re saying is that if there are any aliens watching us, they likely think we invented the following items for the specific purpose of spreading tiny, disease-causing organisms.
6. Your Smartphone Is Probably Dirtier Than A Public Toilet (Especially If You Work In A Hospital)
Way back in 2009, we talked about how filthy an office telephone can be, housing up to 25,127 germs per square inch. Now that everyone carries slick, modern, super advanced smartphones, we’re probably much cleaner, right? Hahaha, nope. Not even close.
The problem with smartphones is that they’re portable and super handy, and we have a tendency to whip them out anywhere and everywhere, from restaurants to restrooms. You may know restrooms as “those places with poop particles floating around everywhere.” But how dirty could our smartphones things be? According to researchers from the University of Arizona, about ten times dirtier than the average toilet seat. Which is rather troubling for an item intended to be pressed closely to your face. Like, your undies are almost definitely dirtier than your phone, but if you’re talking into them, you’re probably using them wrong.
The “T” doesn’t stand for thongs.
One study tested smartphones belonging to secondary school students. Not only were the phones loaded with potentially harmful bacteria, but researchers hypothesized that they also contributed to the spread of illnesses throughout the community. OK, so you probably suspected teenagers were doing that anyway, but what about doctors and nurses? Surely, they of all people understand the importance of keeping things clean? That’s … not what the evidence says. …
Heavy rains in Kenya reveal a crack that shows Africa will split into two continents
NEW CONTINENT
Splitting up.
Heavy rains caused havoc in Kenya in March, collapsing hospital walls, flooding entire neighborhoods, and closing off major highways. The downpour also exposed a fault line that geologists now say is evidence that the African continent will split into two over the next tens of millions of years.
The floodwaters created a rift stretching several kilometers near Mai Mahiu town in the Rift Valley, ripping a major highway open and creating a deep gully that sucked in cars and impacted farmers and their homes. Scientists say seismic tremors and tectonic shifts in the region are to blame, with the rains only exacerbating the problem by washing away the surface and exposing the underlying activities.
The East African Rift System (EARS), part of the Great Rift Valley, stretches thousands of kilometers, starting from the Gulf of Aden in the north to Mozambique in the south. The EARS is an actively developing rift, a process that will slowly thin the earth’s lithosphere crust, spread the seafloor, stretch and break the topography through faulting, and eventually break the continent apart. Once this is done, most of Africa will remain on what is known as the Nubian Plate, while Somalia and parts of Kenya, Ethiopia, and Tanzania will form a new continent on the Somali Plate.
The chasm caused by a heavy downpour along an underground fault line near the Rift Valley town of Mai Mahiu, Kenya.
Over the last few years, scientists have been paying attention as to how and why these two massive chunks of land are slowly breaking apart. It’s also not the first time that huge crevices have opened up in the Horn of Africa region…
What Saudi Arabia’s 200 GW solar power plant would look like—if placed in your neighborhood
SOLAR BLANKET
The bright side.
Saudi Arabia has a plan to wean its economy off oil. In the biggest sign of what the future of the Gulf state would look like, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed Bin Salman, has signed a memorandum of understanding with Japanese multinational Softbank to build 200 GW of solar power by 2030 at a cost of $200 billion.
These are eye-popping numbers. If built, that solar-power plant will be about 200 times the size of the biggest solar plant operating today. It would more than triple Saudi Arabia’s capacity to produce electricity, from about 77 GW today.
With current technology, solar panels capable of generating 200 GW would likely cover 5,000 sq km—an area larger than the the world’s largest cities. …
Alibaba’s car vending machine in China gives free test drives to people with good credit scores
Cat-themed with free three-day test drives for people with scores of 700 or better.
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Alibaba and Ford signed a deal to form a partnership last year that would see both companies working together on new technological opportunities. Now, the companies have opened a cat-themed car vending machine in Guangzhou, China, that lets customers easily test-drive Ford vehicles they’re looking to buy. The “Super Test-Drive Center” is an unstaffed, digital vending machine that works with the Tmall app. Users select the car model they’re interested in, put down a deposit electronically, schedule a pickup time, and snap a selfie so the vending machine can recognize them when they pick up the car for a test drive. The test drives are free, as long as customers have a very respectable credit score of 700 or above.
In China, the government rates citizens using a social ranking system. Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial’s credit ranking system is known as Zhima or Sesame Credit, and is an independent, opt-in, private credit scoring service. In an email to The Verge, Alibaba said users with a Zhima score below 700 will have to pay a fee. According to Wired, users start with a score of 550 when they have no transaction history, with scores ranging from 350 to 950.
And yes, there was indeed a Black Mirror episode about this type of societal ranking gone terribly wrong.
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When they get to the vending machine, customers verify their identity, and the car is then dispensed from the multistory structure. The process is quick, and Alibaba says it lasts no longer than 10 minutes. Customers can drive the car for three days, testing the car in different scenarios like a normal commute, a trip to the grocery store, and a road trip if they wish. AutoBlog previously reported that Alibaba will build the kiosks across China and that customers could also buy the car outright with a 10 percent deposit and financing through Alibaba affiliates. …
A Big Ol’ Bean Battle Erupts Between Chi-Town And H-Town
Visitors look over the Cloud Gate sculpture, also known as the “bean,” in Millennium Park in Chicago, Illinois.
The Windy City and the Bayou City are fighting.
Depending on your perspective, it’s over something very big or something very small – two beans.
Though Chicago and Houston have been longtime rivals, Houston’s installment of an enormous silver art piece on Monday got people in both cities all fired up. Just wait for the plot twist.
Houston's own bean! pic.twitter.com/A8Uh0XIk7E
— Davis Land (@davis_land) March 26, 2018
Chi-town lovers say their problem is that the Houston Anish Kapoor sculpture, lowered by a crane and installed outside the city’s new Glassell School of Art building, is just too similar to the “Bean” in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Their bean.
Chicago’s “Cloud Gate,” by the same artist, has become an iconic tourist destination – one of those places that makes selfie-enthusiasts’ dreams come true.
On the other side, Houstonians argue that even if their new piece, which looks more like a vertical liquid vitamin, is similar to the Chicago kidney-bean shaped icon that lays on its side, Houston is just a better city anyway. …
HAS ANYONE EVER TRIED TO PAY FOR SOMETHING WITH A BRIEFCASE FULL OF CASH?
A briefcase full of cash is a trope so common that even TV Tropes, a website dedicated to cataloguing cinematic cliches, requests that users only mention “exceptions, parodies and subversions”. While you’d expect something so ridiculous to be an invention, or at the very least an exaggeration, of Hollywood, it appears that paying for things with a big ol’ stack of cash stored conveniently inside of a briefcase is more common than you’d think. In fact, during our research we very easily found many dozens of documented examples of exactly this happening, some of the more interesting of which we’d like to share now.
While you’d expect exchanges involving briefcases full of cash to be near-exclusively done by seedy underworld types, that’s not really the case. Before we continue, yes, that was a briefcase pun.
For example, in 2013 George Clooney (yes, that George Clooney) gathered up 14 of his closest friends and presented each one of them with a briefcase containing exactly $1 million in cash. The star explained to his stunned friends that the money was a gift to thank them for their support when he was just a struggling actor, reportedly stating:
Listen, I want you guys to know how much you’ve meant to me, and how much you mean to me in my life. I came to L.A., I slept on your couch. I’m so fortunate in my life to have all of you, and I couldn’t be where I am today without all of you. So, it was really important to me that, while we’re still all here together, that I give back… I know we’ve all been through some hard times, some of you are still going through it… You don’t have to worry about your kids; you don’t have to worry about school; you don’t have to worry about paying your mortgage.
According to one of the recipients of the money, Rande Gerber, Clooney went as far to pay all of the associated taxes on the gift so that each man got to keep 100% of the cash for themselves. George Clooney is just that kind of guy apparently. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
America’s dysfunctional immigration court system forces many children to appear in court alone. That’s as ridiculous in real life as it would be on a courtroom television show.
Heineken faces accusations of racism after running an ad that features a beer bottle sliding past three black people before stopping in front of a light-skinned woman.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
No basket for Max. But he keeps himself busy.
FINALLY . . .
Paula Oransky never dreamed she could be fired for protesting against oil and gas wells near her home
Paula Oransky
t was without question the best job Paula Oransky had ever had. The Colorado School of Mines graduate was making six figures, had a great benefits package and as far as she knew, was the only woman in her multi-billion dollar corporation, Martin Marietta Materials, who held the title of district sales manager. The job allowed Oransky and her family — a husband and two small children — to purchase a nice home in Boulder County, Colorado. Erie, to be exact. It was just the kind of small town community in which the couple, who met at age 16 and have been married for 15 years, always dreamed of living.
“We chose this place because we love the community,” she says. “We can walk our kids to the elementary school. We can ride our bikes to the rec center for T-ball games or downtown to get ice cream. We love living in a small town.”
But the Oransky family’s American dream was about to get turned upside down. On October 17, 2017, Paula Oransky was fired.
She says it all happened really fast. “They said, ‘We need your computer, we need your phone and you need to get out of here.’ They gave me the option of gathering up my personal things right then or coming back to get them. I was emotional. Tearing up, I just went home.”
So what was Oransky’s crime? What terrible thing had she done to deserve such an unceremonious dismissal? Was she bad at her job? No, it wasn’t that. In her three years with the company she had received nothing but good performance reviews and she had even recently received a substantial bonus. It turns out Oransky was fired for just one reason: She had participated in a lawful, nonviolent, public protest against the proposed drilling of new oil and gas wells near her home. And her employer believed that her protesting created a conflict of interest with her job. …
CRANK IT !!!
Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?