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Monday, February 28, 2011

EZ Reads 2/28/11

  • Via Daas Torah, a very interesting inside look at London's Charedi community by The Telegraph. I haven't finished it yet, but it's quite fair through where I got up to and very intriguing.
  • Doctors in the UK are now being instructed to tell mothers-to-be that it would be safer to abort than attempt to have a baby. (The Telegraph)
  • MintLife has a really interesting piece that breaks down credit card numbers - they're not random at all, it turns out. Plus a trick to know if a card is fake.
  • Brilliant: Government spending didn't create jobs in the end at all, but now cutting that spending will somehow cost jobs?(WSJ)
    In 2009 the Obama Administration said $814 billion in stimulus spending would create three million new jobs and keep unemployment below 8%. Instead, two years later the economy has two million fewer jobs, and the unemployment rate is still 9%. GDP growth fell $400 billion short of where the White House economists promised it would be. Employment by the end of 2010 was predicted to be 137.6 million as a result of the stimulus, but instead it was 130.2 million—a 7.4 million jobs overestimate.
  •  My mom sent this great video a while back: How teaching math sparks kids' creative thinking. (WSJ)

2 comments:

  1. In regard to the "Haredei Community" (in Stamford Hill), the thing that always bothered me about articles like these, telivision shows and books that talk about "ultra orthodox" communities etc. is that it is one sided. It either talks about the hasidim/heredim or the teens "going-off". No one writes about the large majority of just regular, working, class, colored-shirt donning men, with mid- sized families, who have telivision's and internet, are avid readers of secular newspaperd, and yet are G-d fearing, observant Jews. The one sided, slanted articles, like the one referenced in the British newspaper, depicts Haradei Jews and their lifestyle, as the majority and sheds a bad light on other (orthodox) Jews, who don't rely on government hand out's, and subsidized living, and value education and working, while balancing a Torah- lifestyle, the balance is possible and is done, in many communities and should be written about more, that way perhaps we will have less "looking down upon" by those non- observant Jews, or Non- Jews, who get infuriated reading that we all rely on their tax dollars to live, so we can all sit in yeshiva and learn Torah.

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  2. Anon - I haven't finished the piece, but I didn't read it at all like that (as noted in the post). It was quite fair, and the reason it's a story is because it's so different from what the mainstream reader of the paper is used to. Talking about how a normal Orthodox Jew lives isn't particularly interesting.

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