All atheists now tend to be called “militant”, yet we seek to silence none, to burn no books, to stop no masses or Friday prayers, impose no laws, asking only free choice over sex and death. Religion deserves its say, but only proportional to its numbers. No privileges, no special protection against feeling offended.

via Sex and death lie at the poisoned heart of religion | Polly Toynbee | Comment is free | The Guardian.

What an excellent piece! Read this, please, for the sake of humanity.

Lord Bingham of Cornhill obituary | Law | The Guardian.

Given that there is such a large pool of applicants for internships and a significantly smaller number of places — i.e. the supply of interns far outstrips demand — it makes sense that internship ‘wages’ are low. It is also unsurprising that many internship seekers have left this market altogether by offering themselves as unpaid interns, thereby taking the element of price out of the equation and competing on other grounds, such as their qualifications.

Now, however, this situation is being threatened by calls for the unpaid internship to be scrapped because, among other things, it violates minimum wage laws. See, for example, this piece in the New York Times which was published in April and this article in the Guardian’s Comment is free. The other major criticism of unpaid internships is that it hinders social mobility: poorer people cannot afford to work for free, leaving these internships to the middle-income and well-to-do.

The Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr) in the UK published a report last month (scroll down to download the report in PDF) which argued for unpaid internships to be phased out because of these two concerns. It makes a concise case — bordering on being too brief — and offers good solutions. Unfortunately, the report’s fatal flaw is to conflate the legality and fairness issues, when clearly they must be addressed separately. Arguably, the report’s chief concern is fairness and social mobility, but by supporting the fairness argument with the illegality issue, its potency was diluted.

Nevertheless, the concern about the fairness of unpaid internships is legitimate. But should the solution be to impose a minimum wage? Disregarding the law on minimum wages for a moment, textbook economics teaches us that a minimum wage would enlarge the already-overflowing pool of internship seekers and reduce the number of internships available, ceteris paribus. Whether this is accurate is for economists to decide; I am not qualified to expound on an issue which has dogged Western economics for decades.

Still, at least in the short run, it seems likely that the number of available internships will fall. This is especially since paid interns will likely be less valuable than true employees, given that they need closer supervision and perform less efficiently. If we hold this assumption to be true, the imposition of a minimum wage would cause a small number of low-income applicants to benefit at the cost of a larger number of applicants losing out.

Moreover, there are other solutions, some of which may be more promising than imposing a minimum wage. Perhaps the government or a charitable organisation could provide financial support to needy applicants. Alternatively, banks or other financial organisations could offer specialised low-interest loans to these applicants. The principle behind this is similar to that of student loans for university education. It has the advantage of ensuring that applicants will only take up the internship (and the loan) if its value to them exceeds the cost of being saddled with the debt.

Some of the solutions offered by the ippr report are also promising. For example, the report suggests greater transparency in intern recruitment and low-cost accommodation for interns who do not live near the organisations they intern in. On the side of the firms, efforts such as that by Internocracy to informally ‘accredit’ them are commendable and should lead to firms being more conscious of the need to be fair towards their interns and not exploit them for menial jobs. Firms should also be encouraged to produce annual reports on the state of their internships, which would make their recruitment more transparent and meritocratic.

As a footnote, I read some comments on the web claiming that in the past, people paid organisations to take them on as interns. If this were true, it would be interesting to find out how this situation turned around as well as the economics behind this. Perhaps someone could provide some insight.

Making matters worse, the McMahon Line was drawn with a fat nib, establishing a ten-kilometre margin for error, and it has never been demarcated. With more confusion in the central sector, bordering India’s northern state of Uttarakhand, there are in all a dozen stretches of frontier where neither side knows where even the disputed border should be. In these “pockets”, as they are called, Indian and Chinese border guards circle each other endlessly while littering the Himalayan hillsides—as dogs mark lampposts—to make their presence known. When China-India relations are strained, this gives rise to tit-for-tat and mostly bogus accusations of illegal border incursions—for which each side can offer the other’s empty cigarette and noodle packets as evidence. In official Indian parlance such proof is grimly referred to as “telltale signs”. It is plainly garbage. Yet this is a carefully rehearsed and mutually comprehensible ritual for which both sides deserve credit, of a sort.

The Economist, ‘India and China: A Himalayan Rivalry‘ (21 August 2010)

I came across Radiolab while listening to an episode of This American Life which featured a Radiolab story about Lucy the chimpanzee (disturbing, sad and moving all at once). I was initially unimpressed with the programme, because the sound editing gets rather annoying — the producers like weaving speech from different speakers into one track, which I think is terribly confusing  — and the hosts have a penchant for going off tangents and making lame jokes.

But the premise of the programme — interesting takes on science — kept me listening, and my assessment has since changed. While I prefer the content as well as the more traditional production of This American Life (which I wrote about last year), Radiolab will definitely remain on my iPod.

One episode that contributed to turning my opinion around is ‘Words‘, which explores language and attempts to discover a life without language. In typical Radiolab fashion, it engages the listener with stories, personal anecdotes and interviews with researchers and scholars. You can listen to the episode or segments of it here — I recommend the first segment, ‘Words that Change the World’, as a taster.

Episodes can be downloaded individually or subscribed to as a podcast from their website or from the iTunes store here.

[On the Gulf War] Trying to eliminate Saddam… would have incurred incalculable human and political costs… We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq… There was no viable ‘exit strategy’ we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish.

President George H W Bush, A World Transformed

We can therefore be sure that this election will be neither free nor fair unless there are big changes based on the pressures from the international communities, especially from the association of southeast Asian nations (Asean), the regional grouping of 10 southeast Asian states, which Burma is a member.

Burmese election: neither free nor fair | Pokpong Lawansiri | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Apparently the ‘association of southeast Asian nations’ is not worthy of capitalisation now.