Saturday 21 July 2012

Link Tank 21/07

Been busy, as you may have noted.

Prescription drug abuse is killing more Americans than the drug cartels

Subway plan to open in a Manchester Sixth Form college

Catering for people who watch porn in public

Mum arrested for letting her 11 & 7 year old kids walk to the pizza shop

Your desk is making you stupid

New Zealand traffic signs destroyed by pole-dancing prostitutes

London for beer lovers

Porn stars use Twitter to go mainstream

Austrian court bans cowbells

Domesticated Neanderthals

Waterproof Hummingbirds


5 comments:

Mag01 said...

DP, it seems that bloggers such as yourself questioning
plain packaging are referred to as “affiliates” of the tobacco industry:


 


The
tobacco industry and its affiliates
have stepped up their lobbying in
the United Kingdom against proposals to introduce standardised plain packaging on
cigarettes and other tobacco products, say health campaigners and industry
observers.


 


The
rise in campaigning against plain packaging since the Department of Health
launched its consultation in April has been “massive,” said Andrew Rowell, a
research fellow at the University
of Bath
. He added, “There
has been a huge amount of lobbying by industry, both direct and
indirect
. It is reaching a crescendo to coincide with the end of the
consultation.”



http://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e4856


 

Jax said...

Re the desk story.  Where do these researchers get the idea from that anyone in an office job sits resolutely at their desk from 9.00 am until 5.30 pm?  I’ve worked in offices all my life, but the times that I’ve actually stayed sitting down without getting up at all for more than half an hour at a stretch are virtually nil – in most office jobs you’re up and about every five minutes – over to the photocopier, downstairs to see someone, bending and stretching about doing the filing, nipping into the next-door office to get something, down to the IT department to get advice when the computer goes belly-up, going to the coffee machine or to the smoking area – there are still lots of tasks in offices that can’t be done by computer or e-mail, so it falls to office staff to cover those.  Indeed, this story might explain why smokers make the best and most inspired employees, because these days, as well as all the aforementioned "getting up and down," they also have to get up and walk to a designated smoking area (whether on or off the work campus) whereas their non-smoking colleagues just sit around on their fat backsides in the coffee-room (or at their desks) drinking coffee and noshing biscuits, thus reducing their mental capacities even further than they’re already reduced by the lack of nicotine-inspired stimulation!
 
But that aside, I suspect that, apart from in jobs like call centres, where people are tied to a desk for the whole time, in most offices there’s a direct correlation between the seniority of the member of staff and the amount of time they spend sitting at their desks.  The more senior you are, the more likely people are to be doing all the “moving about stuff” on your behalf – like photocopying, filing, getting information from other people and passing on messages etc – and the more likely it is, too, that people will be coming in to see you from their offices, rather than the other way around.  And the bigger the corporation, the more people there are below you to do all that “moving stuff.”   Which might go a long way towards explaining why so many managers these days seem incapable of making sensible, practical or inspired decisions, whereas the more active staff below them are often far more capable of running things than they are!
 

Forest said...

 There is an open invitation for everyone to turn up for a pro smoking protest march on sunday 29 july,  washingborough Road Lincoln, we are hoping for a couple of hundred to turn up with local press and local radio confirmed, drinks and nibbles laid on.

53.21965,-0.52227 copy and paste those coordinates into google maps

see you at st swithins at 1pm, for a march  down washingborough  Road from st swithins to toll bar lodge.

Churchmouse said...

Great selection of articles, Dick -- symptomatic of more nannying.

Re the desk story, I can't think of anyone on any level who sits down all the time, except maybe as Jax said, people at call centres. Thirty or forty years ago the situation was exactly the opposite. Women who stood all the time (e.g. behind supermarket tills) were advised to spend time sitting down; many of them had bad, painful varicose veins which require surgery to correct. I rarely see any women with varicose veins now.

Subway -- that was amusing, considering that a number of their sandwiches, especially the marinara one, are very high in calories: 800 to 1000. (A deluxe burger with fries elsewhere comes in under the marinara in terms of calories.) There was an excellent documentary on Subway's calorie content a few years ago. 'Fresh' does not equal low-fat. Some of their shops also use halal meat, IIRC.

I feel for the mother who was arrested for allowing her kids to walk unsupervised to the pizza place. That's against the law? Terrible. Poor woman.
 

Dick_Puddlecote said...

Ta Mag. Will see if a friendly jewel robber can access the rest of it. :)