Ben Casnocha has set out to experience things that scare him. This qualifies:
One year ago I received an epic, unforgettable Chinese massage in Beijing. The short version of a Chinese massage is you're thrown into a co-ed room with others, the lights are bright, you lie on a futon naked, an overweight old woman comes in and slaps your ass, stuffs her fingers into your ears, pounds your head with clenched fists, grabs your balls, gives you scalding hot tea halfway through, and then 10 seconds after she finishes she hands you a feedback form to fill in on what you thought of the experience.
The RAND corporation put out a similar study, specifically parsing whether a small tax or larger tax would be preferable in order to achieve the supposed reduction in caloric intake.
Another writes:
Talk of taxing sodaand sweets misses the bigger economic distortion caused by the roughly $20 billion dollars the federal government spends on agricultural subsidies, most of which goes to large agribusiness – not small family farms. Here’s a conservative idea from a Seattle liberal: Cut the total agricultural subsidies in half and save the money from administering another tax. Production of corn goes down, the price of soda and sweets goes up, consumption might go down, and liberty and freedom from taxes reigns. Who would oppose this? (I mean, other than the Senators from rural states and agribusiness, both of whom milk the current system.)
Another:
Rather than a tax, how about we get rid of the U.S. Sugar Program? Yes, there is a US Department of Agriculture program that subsidizes the production of sugar!
Another:
And eliminate the sugar tariffs while we're at it, so I don't have to go out of my way to buy Coca-Cola from Mexico, where REAL sugar is used.
It’s not that the game is low-scoring; fans of baseball were raving this month or last that a bad call cost a pitcher a perfect game, which is one in which quite literally nothing happens. People watch golf, and apparently have been known to be entertained by it. It’s also not that the game is terribly complicated or taxing for American brains. There are basically three rules, and one of them is that you can’t use your hands. We got this. Moreover, it’s not as though Americans have never heard of soccer. Among other things, it’s the middle class suburban pastime for children, largely because you don’t need much equipment, there are basically three rules, and anything that wears out the little rugrats so they sleep is welcomed.
What we don’t have in the U.S. is a large tradition of watching good soccer.
And this hurts soccer’s popularity during the World Cup, and I suspect more generally, because soccer is a game that is mostly about flow. A game that is about flow is a game where elegant control of the ball-like object leads to the creation of chances to achieve the goal in the game; the opposing team stops them by interrupting them, and taking over. Soccer, basketball, hockey, and were I in the mood for a challenge I’d argue NASCAR (um, minus the ball bit), are games like this. Games of flow can be contrasted with games of plays, where one team tries to do something to get points, and the other team is defending. Football and baseball are games like this.
In the past month alone, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) and its allies have suffered a series of significant legal setbacks, culminating with last week's nearly unanimous Supreme Court ruling in a case arising from a Washington State ballot measure. Collectively, these defeats, in states from California to Maine, could make it much harder for these activists to wage war on gay marriage. For this, New Jersey-based NOM really has no one to blame but itself. That's largely because in its quest to fend off gay marriage, it has engaged in a host of potentially illegal stealth campaign tactics and waged legal battles to shield its supporters from public exposure.
I think AC is an abomination because I would always freeze in the summer – in stores, in offices – which caused me to have to carry around a wool sweater in August. Yuck.
On a more philosophical note, air-conditioning has only exacerbated a go-go, workaholic, culture. There's also an arrogant and distasteful, conspicuously wasteful "domination of nature" aspect to it, as epitomized by the indoor ski slopes in Dubai. In more "slow" locales like Italy and Spain, there's not a lot of AC, but there are siestas, and virtually everyone takes the whole of August off, fleeing the blazing asphalt and concrete of the cities. There's something to be said for allowing the environment to lead us to pause and have time for reflection, time to spend resting or reading, or eating and drinking and conversing with family and friends.
There's also something to be said for moderation and the ability to avoid heat-stroke. I can't converse with anyone in 90 degree humidity.
If the Republican primaries in states like California, Florida, and Texas are required to award delegates proportionally, it would throw a curve ball into the nominating process that would have interesting, and unforeseeable, consequences. At the very least, these new rules would seem to favor candidates who have national, rather than merely regional, appeal within the GOP and would also be advantageous for those candidates able to convince voters that they have a chance of winning in November, rather than candidates who appeal to some hard-line ideology.
I'm not saying that everyone everywhere has to be non-monogamous; the authors of Sex At Dawn don't make that argument either. (Lots of monogamists, however, run around insisting that everyone everywhere should be monogamous—and the monogamists get a pass because, hey, they mean so well and wouldn't it be nice if everyone were?)
The point is that people—particularly those who value monogamy—need to understand why being monogamous is so much harder than they've been lead to believe it will be. In some cases this understanding may help people find the courage to seek out non-monogamous relationships and/or arrangements and/or allowances that make them—gasp!—happier and make their relationships more stable, not less, as a routine infidelity won't doom their marriage/domesticpartnership/commitment/slavecontract/whatever. But understanding that monogamy is a struggle for most people, and being able to be honest with our partners about it, may actually help some people remain monogamous.
However limiting and intellectually repressive parenthood may be in America, it's much more restrictive for mothers in traditionalist gender-segregated societies like Japan, Italy and Greece. That comes out in childbirth statistics: women in Japan, Italy and Greece have simply stopped having children. In other societies with gender-segregated traditional family roles, like Vietnam, higher birthrates result from intense Confucian pro-natalist social pressures that leave women extremely unhappy, and birthrates there are likely to drop rapidly as women achieve greater social independence. American women, meanwhile, are still choosing to have kids, and that's partly because they can continue to have careers, and their male partners share at least some of the child-rearing duties.
And this is a success for Western feminism, right? It's good for kids to have non-miserable mothers.
The Dish 