Independent: World's biggest banks are plotting a mass exodus from London

Dismayed by the lack of a clear plan to protect the UK’s status as a global financial hub, executives are planning for the worst — that they will lose the right to sell services freely around the European Union from the City, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private.

Facing a long process with potential waits for regulatory approvals before workers can pack their bags, banks want to start quickly in order to have new or expanded offices set up in Europe before the end of the two-year Brexit negotiation period. [...]

Bank executives are privately discouraged that seven weeks after the referendum, the ministers in charge of negotiating the best deal for the UK believe they can retain the benefits of being in the single market without accepting the free movement of EU citizens, the people said. [...]

Before the referendum, Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan chief executive said he would relocate as many as 4,000 employees to the continent after Brexit.

Morgan Stanley may move as many as 1,000 employees out of the UK, while Goldman Sachs Group and Citigroup indicated they would also shift people abroad. European banks including HSBC and Deutsche Bank said they may have to move people or activities to France and Germany.

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Vox: Riots are destructive, dangerous, and scary — but can lead to serious social reforms

Historians and experts argue that these types of riots aren't solely random acts of violence or people taking advantage of dire circumstances to steal and destroy property. They are, instead, a serious attempt at forcing change after years of neglect by politicians, media, and the general public. [...]

But, Hunt of UCLA explained, the riots were really a culmination of anger in black and Hispanic communities over decades of economic inequality and police abuses in Los Angeles. Previous research found, for example, that high unemployment and poverty in South Central Los Angeles made it a hotbed for violent outbursts. Hunt also said the community was simmering with anger at the time over the recent sentence of Soon Da Ju, a Korean-born shop owner who was sentenced to five years' probation for fatally shooting a black teenager she thought was stealing a bottle of orange juice. [...]

But riots can and have led to substantial reforms in the past, indicating that they can be part of a coherent political movement. By drawing attention to some of the real despair in destitute communities, riots can push the public and leaders to initiate real reforms to fix whatever led to the violent rage. [...]

So by viewing riots as criminal acts instead of legitimate political displays of anger at systemic failures, the politicians of the 1970s, '80s, and '90s pushed some policies that actually fostered further anger toward police, even as other, positive reforms were simultaneously spurred by urban uprisings. By misunderstanding the purpose of the riots, public officials made events like them more likely.

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Vox: How systemic racism entangles all police officers — even black cops

But social psychologists and criminal justice experts say this question fundamentally misunderstands how institutional racism affects everyone, regardless of race. Racial bias isn't necessarily about how a person views himself in terms of race, but how he views others in terms of race, particularly in different roles throughout his everyday life. And systemic racism, which has been part of the US since its founding, can corrupt anyone's view of minorities in America.

In the case of police, all cops are dealing with enormous cultural and systemic forces that build racial bias against minority groups. Even if a black cop doesn't view himself as racist, the way policing is done in the US is racially skewed — by, for example, targeting high-crime neighborhoods that are predominantly black. [...]

A lot of US police work is inherently racially biased. Cops are told to patrol predominantly poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods that are so segregated that most of the residents are black. And since police are mostly present in these neighborhoods, most of the arrests and actions they take end up impacting a disproportionate numbers of black people. [...]

But police aren't just disproportionately deployed in predominantly black neighborhoods; they're also encouraged to arrest and ticket as many people as possible while on the job. For example, many police departments still use the number of arrests and tickets as a measure for evaluating individual police officers for raises and promotions. [...]

What's more, Sklansky said inequities in law enforcement can create "a vicious cycle" in which black residents are fearful of police, making them more likely to display discomfort around cops, which in turn makes officers more likely to perceive black residents as suspicious.

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Political Critique: The rise of ‘youth nationalism’ in Poland

Youth are also strikingly absent from the mass grassroots protest movement that has emerged in opposition to the current government of the conservative and populist Law and Justice party though this does not necessarily translate into support for the government.

Young people seem to have been massively swayed by an anti-establishment, xenophobic, and Eurosceptic discourse fueled by underlying economic resentments. At the same time, a rise in nationalist sentiments can be observed among the younger generation. To large extent, this is the result of the state’s ‘politics of history’ of the past decade. [...]

Rather, it is a phenomenon of ‘consuming patriotism‘ that has substituted historical consciousness among the younger generation, which has been fueled by the rise of populist rhetoric in the political sphere. It is not books or academic debates on the country’s history -history as a subject is in decline as testified by a continuing decrease of matriculations in the subject- that serve to imbue the youth’s views.

Instead, we are witnessing a process in which patriotic-historical symbolism has meshed with youth pop culture, a development rooted in the 2005-2007 period of Law and Justice’s governments. It is thus not surprising that many young people donning T-shirts with WWII resistance symbols or the national ‘eagle’ voted massively for Paweł Kukiz, a rock star who espoused anti-establishment populism tainted with nationalist-patriotic overtones.

More so, the governing Law and Justice party has tolerated or even supported attacks on academics and historians who disagree or are critical of the current politics of history. It has not condemned nationalist and far right youth demonstrations which have increased in frequency since Law and Justice came to power. Simultaneously, a worrying proliferation of racist hate crimes has taken place around the country.

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FiveThirtyEight: Hosting The Olympics Is A Terrible Investment

But it could be much worse. The 2014 Winter Games in Sochi blew their budget by 289 percent. The 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid overtopped projections by 324 percent. And the 1976 Games in Montreal ran a staggering 720 percent over projections; the city spent three decades paying down the bill. While outliers such as these distort the average cost overruns somewhat (176 percent for Summer Games, 142 percent for Winter Games), the median cost overrun for all games for which we have data is 90 percent, making Rio’s cost overrun somewhat lower than the historical norm, at least so far. [...]

To put those cost overruns into perspective, Flyvbjerg and his colleagues compared the Olympics to other megaprojects such as bridges, dams, highways, railway lines and major IT projects. The Olympic Games average 156 percent cost overruns, outdistancing all other types of megaprojects. For comparison, road projects average overruns of 20 percent; bridges and tunnels 34 percent; energy projects 36 percent; rail projects 45 percent; dams 90 percent and IT projects 107 percent. Even road, bridge and rail projects come in under budget 10 percent of the time. Of all the types of projects compared, only the Olympics has a flawless record for going over budget, making the games a particularly risky undertaking for governments unprepared to absorb those additional costs. [...]

At the very least, the return on investment would have likely been greater. While most major infrastructure projects go over budget, megaprojects such as bridges, dams and railway lines tend to yield economic benefits for longer than the few weeks that many Olympic facilities are used. Host cities almost invariably fail to cover Olympics costs with associated revenues (for instance, in 2012 London took in $3.5 billion in revenues and shelled out something like $18 billion to host the games), leaving them with piles of debt and various useless venues. Research has repeatedly shown that in most cases the Olympics are a money loser for cities, particularly those in developing nations where the cost-benefit proposition tends to skew even worse.

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Slate: Citizen Science Isn’t Just About Collecting Data

USGS’s Did You Feel It? initiative is a great example of one kind of citizen science—everyday people using their experiences or interests to participate in scientific projects. These research projects come from a startling variety of scientific disciplines. Bird lovers can participate in the Audobon Society’s annual Christmas bird count. History enthusiasts can scrutinize 19th-century whaling logbooks to better understand climate change. You could also use a virtual microscope to hunt for particles of interstellar dust retrieved by the Stardust spacecraft in 2006. If neuroscience is more your thing, you can help to map the brain by playing EyeWire, an online game designed by a lab at Princeton University.

Citizen contributions to projects like these go back at least as far as Thomas Jefferson’s plan to collect weather data from as many people as possible in order to produce “a reliable theory of weather and climate.” It’s the kind of citizen science that most everyone agrees is worthwhile—helpful to researchers and edifying for the public. In fact, a bipartisan bill making its way through Congress at the moment, the Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Act of 2015, encourages collaboration between scientists and the public. The bill appeals to a range of political sensibilities because it encourages public engagement in science and broadens the scope of federally funded research without increasing budgets. (Citizen volunteers cost even less than postdocs, it turns out.) [...]

This gets to an important final point about public involvement in science policy: Citizen participation improves the science. Ominous clouds have been building above many parts of the scientific establishment, aided by a steady updraft of retractions, fraudulent practices, reproducibility problems, conflicts of interest, conflicting results, and simple irrelevance. One of the reasons for this is that scientists are rarely accountable to anything outside their community. A citizenry that demands tangible results—such as effective cancer therapies and safe drinking water—can help to discipline research efforts toward finding solutions to pressing, real-world problems.

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Mashable: LGBTQ people hold 'kiss-in' after couple ejected from supermarket

Last Monday, Thomas Rees and his boyfriend Joshua Bradwell were reprimanded by a security guard at the store after a customer complained about the couple's handholding.

According to Michael Segalov — who organised the "kiss-in" — the couple were told by a security guard that "holding hands was 'inappropriate,'and they’d need to stop right away or leave the store." [...]

During the kiss-in, Rees and Bradwell took to a microphone and delivered an "emotional address," stating “no matter how you identify, or who you love, it’s your human right to express that love as you see fit”.

Drag queen Rodent Decay began the countdown, and after ten seconds, the mass kissing began inside the store, continuing out into the street. 

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The Telegraph: Victorian pumping station dubbed the 'Cistern Chapel' is turned into a museum

Crossness Pumping Station was built because of the 1858 "Great Stink" - when warm weather and filthy drinking water created a horrible smell across most of London and led to typhoid and cholera epidemics. [...]

The smell was so bad that high-ranking government officials were forced to soak their parliamentary curtains in lime chloride to mask the odor.

But in 1865, engineer Joseph Bazalgette unveiled a complex new modern sewage system which used steam engines to pump the capital's waste into a 27 million gallon reservoir - enough to fill 49 Olympic swimming pools.

The sewage then remained in the reservoir, concealed from the public, until high tide, when it was released into the Thames and carried out to sea.

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Quartz: Donald Trump is wrong about the jobs impact of immigration, and a century of data proves it

Trump was also mistaken in his assertion that higher immigration results in lower wages for Americans. In fact, the opposite is true, as Quartz has noted before. In a 2012 study (pdf), economic professors Gianmarco Ottaviano of the London School of Economics and Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis, found that immigration in the US between 1990 and 2006 improved the salaries of native-born workers on average by 0.6%. The study also looked specifically at native-born workers with no high school degree, the slice of the US population that is commonly thought of as being most vulnerable to competition from immigrant labor, and found that in their case, too, there was a small, positive impact (between 0.6% and 1.7%) on the wages of native-born workers.

How does this happen? As Michael Greenstone at the University of Chicago, and Adam Looney, the deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis at the US Treasury, have argued in their work at the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project , immigrants tend to complement the skills of native-born workers, and create new jobs instead of competing for the same, finite set of jobs. For instance, immigrants with fewer skills working in industries such as agriculture or construction help grow US enterprises and farms by increasing production and consuming goods and services themselves. In doing so, they increase the responsibilities and salaries of native-born workers with higher skills, and create more jobs for them.

Trump made one other serious error in his interpretation of the data. The “record” level of immigration he refers to is nothing of the sort—not when you measure it properly, as a percentage of the population, rather than basing it on absolute numbers.

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