After I chose this image it started to feel familiar, so I checked and found that this is the sixth time I have featured a modern image of a minotaur on this blog (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). It seems that the minotaur means something to the kind of modern artists I like.
Amazing story of two mad but brilliant plumbers, by Jeremiah Sullivan at Harpers, winner of one of David Brooks' Sidney Awards.
Gizmodo's Best Archaeological Discoveries of 2023.
Some Swedes thought to test whether poverty causes crime by studying lottery winners. They find that winning the lottery does not decrease the number of crimes people commit, so they reject the hypothesis that lack of money leads to crime in any simple way. (Marginal Revolution)
Stolen artifact from Pompeii found in the house of a Swedish tourist who bought it in the shadiest circumstances imaginable.
Northern College, a small college in central Ontario, once educated the children of loggers and miners, but now the student body is 80 percent from India, and they are transforming the town. (NY Times) A recent audit identified the dependence on students from India as a danger for the Canadian educational system, especially given the political tensions over alleged Indian assassination attempts within Canada.
Fascinating Roman-period grave from southern France with miniature objects.
Marvelous photographs of winter scenes by Mikko Lagerstedt.
Wooden strips bearing signs describing an ancient celestial calendar found in Han Dynasty Chinese tomb.
The year 2023 saw the startup of the first new American nuclear reactor since 2014, and the second since 1997; this a 1,000 MW unit in Georgia that uses a new, much safer design.
Kevin Drum explains the legal question behind the newly Democratic Wisconsin Supreme Court striking down their severely gerrymandered electoral map, which is about "municipal islands": "it's pretty obvious that the previous Republican court ruled in favor of Republicans and the new Democratic court has ruled in favor of Democrats. Neither side is especially imbued with either virtue or villainy here."
About the same number of people migrated to Canada last year (1,131,181) as the US (1,138,989). Canada's population grew 3.1% last year, entirely due to immigration.
Awesome map of world population density.
Map showing the movements of one eagle over 20 years.
Archaeologists in Sweden find the burial of a tall medieval man with a very long sword.
Figurines depicting the fertility goddess Cybele found in Pompeii.
NY Times story describing one part of California where farmers have to pay for groundwater, and the system works fine. But the story notes that this practice has driven low-value agriculture out of the area (e.g., alfalfa), so spreading the practice to other areas would put pressure on farmers growing those crops and maybe drive up food prices. I say, great; we just shouldn't grow low-value crops with irrigated water, period.
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Some Swedes thought to test whether poverty causes crime by studying lottery winners. They find that winning the lottery does not decrease the number of crimes people commit, so they reject the hypothesis that lack of money leads to crime in any simple way.
What an absurd way to approach the problem! As if people weren't creatures of habit! As if crime was the product of a lack of money directly, rather than the product of the neuroses and stressors which are caused by poverty!
Give someone who has spent their entire life on the brink of starvation a lifetime supply of food (or the equivalent in some other form, such as winning the lottery), and they don't suddenly transform into a normal person - they continue to exhibit all the toxic behaviors associated with chronic food insecurity:
Eating quickly; eating in private; sneaking food; hiding and stashing food for later; eating large volumes of food; responding badly to other people eating from the same plates / dishes; responding badly to food being taken away (even just to be adjusted, such as food being sent back at a restaurant); overwhelmingly consuming only safe / familiar foods; et cetera.
All of these behaviors stick around in such people, despite the fact that there is no longer a scarcity of food driving them to act that way. People become conditioned, and it takes a very long time for them to shed that conditioning and replace it with something else instead. Lottery winners don't get magically reconditioned overnight - they continue to live almost exactly the same way as they did before winning the lottery, which is often destructive.
Just look at the number of people who win the lottery, but then fritter away all their winnings wastefully in a short period of time, because they don't have any experience with managing money. Someone who grows up in poverty, who lives hand to mouth and paycheck to paycheck, never develops the skills and the mindset necessary to properly manage wealth long-term.
Criminality is likewise habitual in nature, and driven by psychological conditioning. If you have someone who has a history of chronic criminality, that very fact tells you that they have become acclimated to engaging in crime itself - that they have developed a certain level of comfort and confidence with it. If you then give such a person a winning lottery ticket, it's not going to magically erase their willingness and confidence in their ability to engage in crime - if anything, it's going to embolden them, because they view money as power, and are now willing to take even more risks that previously, because now they can afford a lawyer, or bribes, or other "get out of jail" tactics which were previously not possible for them.
Now, if they reran this entire study and focuses purely on crimes of desperation, that might potentially provide some interesting observations. Or it might not differ meaningfully at all - because even then, people are products of their conditioning, and someone who has chronically engaged in even just crimes of desperation is still going to have the same damaged psyche even after winning the lottery.
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