rantlust

Posted by renéejo on December 10th 2008 in Europe, Sex, Society
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Meanwhile in other news, in my backyard, a fight is brewing over the recent efforts by the Amsterdam city government to reduce the number of brothels and ‘coffee shops’ in the red light district. The city leaders rationalise this by saying that this move will help reduce organised crime. One of them also soothes the nerves by saying: “We can still have sex and drugs, but in a way that shows the city is in control.”

The various sections of society that’ll be severely affected by this ‘cleanup’ plan to fight back vigorously. Maybe it’s time for all the ‘lusters’ lurking here to rant about this as well.

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Posted by anupcs on December 04th 2008 in Comics, Humor, Society
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Salon’s Carol Lay has the following suggestion for what to do with dead people:

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Posted by riyer on November 23rd 2008 in Parenting, Rants, Society
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The New Yorker has a great article on Over-parenting

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Posted by riyer on November 23rd 2008 in Medicine, Society, Technology, Women
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While we frequently get caught up in the cool aspects of mobile telephony (social networking, LBS etc.), there are many cases where a bare-bones mobile phone with SMS actually helps to save lives. This is one such story.

Satyam Computer Services in collaboration with the state of Andhra Pradesh in India developed an SMS application with a view to decrease pre-natal and neo-natal mortality rates.

The way this works is as follows

Geek Details

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Posted by riyer on November 23rd 2008 in India, Rants, Society, USA
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The NYT has a very well written piece titled “India Calling“.

Story covers the growing trend of ABCDs (children born to Indian immigrants) returning to India - for good. It introduces the term ‘brain circulation’ instead of ‘brain drain’.

I have argued that the IT boom in India and the leg-up that India has in globalization can be directly attributed to those who came to the MBA schools in the 70s and the IT consulting (aka IT body-shops) in the 80s (I was one of them).

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Posted by anupcs on March 19th 2008 in Politics, Rants, Society, USA
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If my wife and I ever have any children, they would be neither “brown” nor “yellow” but something else entirely (I am South Asian and my wife is Taiwanese). So, why do people perceive Barack Obama as black? His mother is fully white as far as I know and he’s biracial and both white and black. Why is everyone referring to him as the first black person to have a real chance at winning the presidency?

As the furor over the racial remarks by a pastor associated with Obama rages on, I am really curious about this. Obama is definitely the first half-black person to have a chance at becoming president but he’s not fully black. Maybe the Obamans in the audience can shed some light to this mystery.

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Posted by tafkap on January 31st 2008 in Economics, Society
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Nice article on ‘repugnance constraint’ markets - how moral repugnance may constrain a free market and if/what should be done about it. Very interesting to me was the reference to a paper [pdf] that I tracked down. It estimates the price at which the kidney wait backlog would be eliminated if live donors were allowed to be paid (see pages 11, 12). This is for the US, and the value they come up with is $15,200 per donor. Among other things, they take into account the value of a ’statitistical life’ ($1.5 million to $10 million for an average annual income of $35000), lost wages pre/post operation, risk of death, etc.

They did not have a good way to quantify loss of quality of life (they added an arbitrary $7,500), and they did not as far as I could see, take into account the ‘repugnance factor’ of paying for an organ. Not much comfort I’m sure for all those people who are waiting for a transplant.

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Posted by anupcs on January 06th 2008 in Society, Statistics
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Denmark is too cold; Switzerland is too neutral for my taste; I didn’t particularly like Austria when I visited it last year; and Iceland is too homogenous. So, I am going to move to The Bahamas if that’s what it takes to achieve happiness. I have always liked tropical islands anyway.

A recent comprehensive “scientific” study of the relative happiness of people in various countries have been published in the United Kingdom. The Danes came out on top. America is at a respectable 23 (out of 178) though the Asian countries seem far behind (India is at 125, China 82 and Japan 90). See here for the complete happiness map (PDF).

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