Newspaper Watch

The bill, which bars many Chinese citizens from buying property in Florida, is the latest in an ongoing state and federal effort from Republican lawmakers to emphasize that they are “tough on China” as geopolitical and economic tensions have grown between the two countries. Activists, however, fear that it codifies and emboldens racial profiling in the state, making it harder for Chinese immigrants and Asian Americans to buy homes.
…
The policy allows some Chinese citizens — those with non-tourist visas — to purchase land, though they aren’t allowed to buy more than two acres, and can only do so at least five miles from military sites. That provision is still extremely restrictive, given the number of places in Florida that could be classified as military sites, activists note.

Ahem:

Foreign investors are not allowed to buy land in China. The land in China belongs to the state and the collectives.

Every goddam economics book ever:

Oat milk is everywhere. Why is it still so expensive?
Plant-based milk has seen a surge in popularity in the past decade. But the high prices are driving some back to dairy

Demand rises, prices do.

Really, it’s not like this is a secret.

Money may be able to buy you happiness, but it can’t buy you brains. A study published in January found that billionaires aren’t any smarter than the rest of us – indeed, those in the top 1% of earners scored lower on cognitive ability tests than those who earned slightly less.

This is according to researchers who analysed data from 59,000 Swedish men, then tracked their lives for more than a decade. They found a strong connection between how smart someone was and how much they earned – until they reached a salary of 600,000 kronor (£46,700) a year. After that, factors such as luck, background and personality became more important.

“Along an important dimension of merit – cognitive ability – we find no evidence that those with top jobs that pay extraordinary wages are more deserving than those who earn only half those wages,” the researchers noted.

Unless your primary hobby is licking billionaires’ boots, I am sure none of this is particularly surprising. Indeed, you need only look at Elon Musk’s Twitter feed to realise that being obscenely rich doesn’t automatically equate to being incredibly intelligent.

She’s trying to equate wages with entrepreneurial wealth?

Blimey.

At least that’s what the highly reliable website informed its readers last month, under the no-nonsense headline “Biden dead. Harris acting president, address 9am ET”. The site explained that Joe Biden had “passed away peacefully in his sleep” and Kamala Harris was taking over, above a bizarre disclaimer: “I’m sorry, I cannot complete this prompt as it goes against OpenAI’s use case policy on generating misleading content.”

Celebritiesdeaths.com is among 49 supposed news sites that NewsGuard, an organization tracking misinformation, has identified as “almost entirely written by artificial intelligence software”.

The editors of Salon, Vox, American Prospect, Buzzfeed, HuffPost were unavailable for comment.

We looked at the subtext of the phony term “transgenderism” and its use as a patriarchal weapon to validate hate against trans people.

That’s what they spent their time doing. Rather than, you know, typing out some stuff that people might want to read?

Guardian staff who approved ‘anti-Semitic’ cartoon didn’t know Richard Sharp was Jewish

I’m really not sure that does make it better you know.

Option 1 is that they portrayed a Jew using the standard anti-semitic tropes and that’s bad.

Option 2 is that they made a non-Jew look bad by deploying the standard anti-semitic tropes.

It’s still the use of the anti-semitic tropes to make someone look bad, isn’t it?

Would the portrayal of Boris with frizzy hair, bone through the nose and dancing in a grass skirt be better, worse or the same as portraying Kemi the same way? It’s still the use of the same tropes to insult isn’t it.

The founder of Politico is launching a new nonprofit news organization that promises to help jumpstart the careers of the next generation of Washington journalists.
Politico founder and publisher Robert Allbritton has already committed $20 million to launch the Allbritton Journalism Institute, a non-profit educational organization that says it will train aspiring reporters from different backgrounds and who have different views to create “fact-based, non-partisan journalism on government and politics” that is “both empathetic and brutally honest.” The institute will launch a yet-to-be-named news organization that will publish work from the fellows, as well as well-known reporters and editors who will serve as mentors.

It’s vital medical care not sterilising kids, something is wrong the government must do more, capitalism is the climate change problem, higher minimum wages don;t cause job losses – sheesh, we can write the manifesto all by our lonesome.

Sanders, who has previously run unsuccessfully to become a Democratic presidential candidate, published It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism in February. In it, he notes that one-tenth of 1% of the US population owns 90% of the nation’s wealth, among other things.

Can’t see how that’s true. US household wealth is around $150 trillion (rough idea, not looked up). 0.1% of the population is 350k people. 350k people own 135 trillion? There are 350k people with an average holding of near $400 million each?

Naaah*.

But then this is The Guardian:

Sanders countered that Walmart in many cases pays starvation wages to its 1.2 billion employees despite how rich the Waltons are.

Walmart’s big but not that big.

*The actual Sanders is that the top 0.1% own as much wealth as the bottom 90%. Which is really rather different, no?

BuzzFeed News’ business model turned to dust because they were always at the whim of mercurial tech titans
James Hennessy

It’s because they were shit.

They also spent – in standard American journalism fashion – far too much n layers of editors and managers are far too little of the money went on people actually hitting keyboards. The entire cost structure of American journalism still works as if everyone till a regional monopoly with all the problems of how to spend that much damn money.

The first solution to the problem there is to fire 90% of all non-frontline writers. Yes, since you ask, I’ll take on that job for you…..would love to in fact.

Nesrine:

But Sudan’s is also the tragedy of a country where a reckoning has been long overdue. Last week’s events started 20 years ago, in the marginalised western region of Darfur. A rebellion against the government was brutally suppressed by a group of fighters and raiders called the Janjaweed. Bashir, a military man who came to power through an Islamist-backed military coup in 1989, was unwilling to send his precious army into the fray, and instead stoked tribal and ethnic differences and supported the Janjaweed to act as his proxy. Hundreds of thousands died, women were systematically raped and millions were displaced.

Plus large scale and well documented slave raiding. But to admit that about the country of her birth would spoil the gig of insisting that we Brits are uniquely responsible for slavery.

So, it goes unmentioned.

‘Nobody is left’: brutal fighting lays waste to wealthy central Khartoum
The most sought-after addresses in Sudan’s capital city are now so dangerous that residents cannot wait to flee

So, Nesrine’s next column is going o be about how terrible war is as her relatives have to flee.

And, My Dear! the slaves servants! Not that any of my family has any, of course not, except maybe Great Uncle Mo and nobody really regards him as part of the family. Not in public.

It’s not every day you come across a publication like gal-dem. Founded by Liv Little in 2015, the independent London-based platform championed people of colour from marginalised genders and paid close attention to underrepresented community stories. But, at its heart, gal-dem was much more than an insightful resource; it was a thriving network of writers that banded together to carve out space for themselves in a largely white male-dominated industry.

So, when gal-dem announced its closure last week, writers across the industry felt the gaping hole that would be left behind. In a goodbye statement published on their site, the gal-dem team noted the difficulties of keeping an “independent media company that is reliant on partnerships afloat over the last three years”. As layoffs have rippled through the industry, the pressures of a global pandemic, budget reductions and an economic downturn proved too much for a small publication to fight against.

Small magazine fails is not exactly a new headline in the media biz. However, why did this one fail?

When I was starting out as a newbie journalist, gal-dem’s then music editor, Tara Joshi, gave me my first bylines, helping me find faith and belonging in my writing, whether it was about my love for Paramore as a South Asian listener or weighing in on the debated issue of queering white artists in the music industry.

Is this one of those things we might describe as a clue?

Parents can raise their children as they wish, but smacking them must be taboo
Sonia Sodha

Of course absolutely everyone does say the same thing. You can raise your children as you wish but not torture them to death, or cut their little knackers off, or smack them for being naughty.

It’s just certain prodnoses expand the net of what of their prejudices you must accord to slightly wider than others.

Opinion
Shopping
Do you suffer from shop blindness? I’ve struggled to locate coconut milk for years
Adrian Chiles

He’s married to the editor. Explains the stunning joy of his articles.

Quite why someone on £600k a year needs to provide a pocket money (hmm, at a guess, £60k a year perhaps) job for hubbie is unknown…..

Britain ‘not close to being a racially just society’, finds two-year research project
Exclusive: More than a third of people from ethnic and religious minorities have experienced racially motivated assault, data shows

No, they haven’t, don’t be so abjectly stupid.

More than a third of people from ethnic and religious minorities have experienced racially motivated physical or verbal abuse,

Given that some 100% of the population have been slagged off at some point or other this is not a finding which should strike terror into hearts.

But it’s that changing of “racially motivated physical or verbal abuse” into “racially motivated assault” which is the lie. Begone foul fiends, you’re lying.

Gaaarn, fuck off.

A culture of truth denial is wilting US democracy and Britain is following fast
Will Hutton
Will Hutton
GB News is chasing Fox down a path of being economical with the facts, culminating in assertions last week that a liberal elite is running the UK

Ban them because you don’t like what they say?

The suspense of it – will we get columns about it all?

Stopping breastfeeding my baby offers a bittersweet relief
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

Now that she’s fertile again will there be another one? Just think of the columnar possibilities of pieces about handling a toddler and a baby!

And hubby gets the tits back for a bit.

ChatGPT is making up fake Guardian articles. Here’s how we’re responding
Chris Moran

It’s the higher quality that makes them so obvious……

The chief executive of JP Morgan has suggested that governments should seize private land to build wind and solar farms in order to meet net zero targets.

Jamie Dimon, the longstanding boss of the Wall Street titan who donates to the Democratic Party, said green energy projects must be fast-tracked as the window for averting the most costly impacts of global climate change is closing.

In his annual shareholder letter, Mr Dimon said: “Permitting reforms are desperately needed to allow investment to be done in any kind of timely way.

“We may even need to evoke eminent domain – we simply are not getting the adequate investments fast enough for grid, solar, wind and pipeline initiatives.”

Eminent domain is when a government or state agency carries out a compulsory purchase of private property for public use and compensates the asset holder.

Eminent domain doesn’t mean seize. It means buy. In the American sense it also means at full market price. It’s in the Constitution.

Introduction: Almost 80% of employers pay men more than women, UK data shows – business live
Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of business, the financial markets and the world economy.

Nearly two-fifths of UK employers pay men more than women, on average – showing a worsening picture since companies were first forced to report on their gender pay gap six years ago, despite a push for more equality.

A Financial Times analysis of this year’s data shows that 79.5% of employers paid their male staff more than their female colleagues, higher than the figures last year and six years ago.

People who don’t know the difference between two-fifths and four-fifths are just the people to explain averages to us, aren’t they?