capital cities the best places to live?

What makes capital cities the best places to live?

Capital cities, no matter the size, are centres of
economic and institutional resources, and the
quality of life they offer contributes to their
competitive advantage, especially in attracting
investment and highly qualified labour forces.Quality of life data show that in most countries, the capital city has advantages compared to the regions outside the capital. In light of the continued growth of capital city populations and the concentration of resources within them, this policy brief explores the source of the advantages of capital cities in quality of life. Are these advantages mostly related to specific demographics that these cities nurture and attract? Or do these advantages stem from opportunities that major cities provide due to their scale and economic growth?
The policy brief aims to clarify why policy should focus on both the economy and society when it comes to advancing economic, social and territorial cohesion.

In Europe, people living in the capital city generally have a better quality of life than people living in other parts of a country. On this basis, it seems that capital cities are indeed the best places to live.

Capital cities have, by and large, larger proportions of people who report feeling resilient – able to cope during times of hardship – compared to other urban centres and rural regions in the same country. Some characteristics of city populations – such as a younger age profile and higher educational attainment – contribute to resilience, while others, such as housing insecurity, erode it. The findings suggest that some other latent factor, possibly related to opportunities for economic advancement and improving one’s living standards, could underlie the extra resilience that capital cities provide.
 The findings are drawn from the European
Quality of Life Survey 2016, which monitors
different dimensions of quality of life examined
here: individual quality of life and well-being,
quality of society, and quality of public
services.

https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/publications/policy-brief/2020/what-makes-capital-cities-the-best-places-to-live?&utm_campaign=quality-of-life-and-public-services&utm_content=ef18025&utm_source=social-europe&utm_medium=banner
 Eurofound (2020), What makes capital cities the best places to live?, European Quality of Life Survey 2016 series, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg.

$5.34 Ladder Defeats $2.5 Billion wall

Brilliant New $5.34 Ladder Defeats Not So Brilliant $2.5 Billion Trump Fever Dream

by

Abby Zimet, Further columnist

Now, Mexicans still determined to come here despite our national mayhem have discovered a new, cheap, go-to method of scaling Dear Leader's pesky, pointless pet project. Using two lengths of light, cubed, readily available rebar called castillo - ubiquitous in Mexican construction and LOL the wall itself - they're fashioning hook-and-ladder rigs; the rebar is fitted with steps, and connected to four thinner poles bent into a U-shape to hug the top of the wall. The rust-colored rebar is naturally, fortuitously camouflaged, barely visible against the rust brown wall. And it's dirt cheap: Six meters of castillo cost 99 pesos, about $5.34, at Juárez' Hágalo - or Do It Yourself - True Value hardware store.

Last spring, the new ladders started turning up near the El Paso section of wall, where the number of single male migrants who mostly use them has nearly doubled in recent months; border agents say the level of "evading activity" has likewise soared. Last week, they found 9 ladders in one spot. Meanwhile, the whole stretch of border is littered with rusted rebar - waiting on the Mexican side, yanked down on the U.S. side, poking from dumpsters, their users long gone. Outwitted and conscripted into ludicrous service, agents say all they can do is pull abandoned ladders off the wall, cut them up, and hope they can't be used again. "It's a very powerful, very powerful wall," Trump brayed at a September rally there, "the likes of which, probably, to this extent, has not been built before."

"A wise man lets a fool build a wall before choosing the height of his ladder.” - Socrates

Think the US is more polarized than ever? You don’t know history

February 14, 2020 5.23pm ESIt has become common to say that the United States in 2020 is more divided politically and culturally than at any other point in our national past.
As a historian who has written and taught about the Civil War era for several decades, I know that current divisions pale in comparison to those of the mid-19th century.
Between Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 and the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army at Appomattox in April 1865, the nation literally broke apart.
More than 3 million men took up arms, and hundreds of thousands of black and white civilians in the Confederacy became refugees. Four million enslaved African Americans were freed from bondage.https://theconversation.com/think-the-us-is-more-polarized-than-ever-you-dont-know-history-131600

Facial expressions don't tell the whole story of emotion

by Laura Arenschield, The Ohio State University

"Some claim they can detect whether someone is guilty of a crime or not, or whether a student is paying attention in class, or whether a customer is satisfied after a purchase," he said. "What our research showed is that those claims are complete baloney. There's no way you can determine those things. And worse, it can be dangerous."...
After analyzing data about facial expressions and emotion, the research team—which included scientists from Northeastern University, the California Institute of Technology and the University of Wisconsin—concluded that it takes more than expressions to correctly detect emotion.
Facial color, for example, can help provide clues.
"What we showed is that when you experience emotion, your brain releases peptides—mostly hormones—that change the blood flow and blood composition, and because the face is inundated with these peptides, it changes color," Martinez said.
The human body offers other hints, too, he said: body posture, for example. And context plays a crucial role as well.,,,,https://techxplore.com/news/2020-02-facial-dont-story-emotion.html

Bloomberg Misleads on Stop-And-Frisk

Bloomberg Misleads on Stop-And-Frisk

February 14, 2020

Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg misleadingly stated that he “cut” the police practice of stop-and-frisk — a policy that he “inherited” — by “95%” by the time he left office as mayor of New York. There were nearly twice as many stops in his last year as mayor compared with the year before he took office.