When the Swedish journalist Jenny Nordberg set out for Afghanistan in 2009, she went to report a TV documentary on the progress of Afghan women since the US invasion. What she found herself drawn to, however, was a different story: bacha posh, a traditional Afghan practice in which girls are chosen by their families to live as boys.

“On a very practical level, parents do this in Afghanistan for a number of reasons,” Nordberg tells Quartz. “If there is no son in the family, you are not only perceived as weak. You are weak.”

The term bacha posh literally means “dressed up as a boy” in Dari, Afghanistan’s most widely spoken language. Nordberg spent five years researching and reporting on the phenomenon, which was virtually unknown in the West. Her work began with a 2010 New York Times feature and culminated with the release of her book, The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan, last month.

Mehran’s story

Most prominent among the characters that Nordberg follows around Kabul in her book is 7-year-old Mehran Rafaat, whose female name was Manush and whose mother, Azita, was at the time a member of the Wolesi Jirga, the lower house of Afghanistan’s parliament.

As the youngest of four daughters in a family with no sons—a non-starter for an ambitious female politician in Afghanistan—Azita and her husband changed their daughter’s identity to male at the age of five.

The conversion began with a haircut, a trip to the local bazaar to buy pants, and a new denim shirt. “In a single afternoon, the family went from having four daughters to being blessed with three daughters and a spiky-haired boy,” Nordberg writes.

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For Mehran, the perks of the situation included playing sports, dressing as she pleased, and sitting at the dinner table with her father’s guests, Nordberg says. Her three older sisters looked to her as their male guide, and she gladly filled the role. Mehran escorted her sisters to school, the market and the neighborhood playground. Her situation is largely known to the family’s neighbors and to her mother’s constituents, but “even a made-up son is better than no son,” says Nordberg.

As is typical with the practice, when Mehran reaches puberty, the plan is to change her back into a girl, Azita told Nordberg.

For some, this can be a difficult transition. Zahra, 15, told Nordberg that the freedoms she had before she returned to a female identity were hard to give up, and the change took a psychological toll. “Nothing in me feels like a girl,” she explained.

The history of bacha posh

No one actually knows when the practice began, because there is very little literature available, Nordberg says: “One guess is that it may stretch as far back as pre-Islamic times.” Few Afghan families admit publicly that they engage in it or even know someone who does.

Nordberg has asked the historians, political advisors, gender experts, and aid workers who have flooded Kabul in America’s longest war about bacha posh, she says, and many appeared oblivious to the issue or outright hostile to her reporting on it.

“These people came with the agenda of turning Afghanistan into a beacon of Western-style democracy in a country that has never known it,” said Nordberg. “The last thing they wanted was to acknowledge that something that might be perceived in the West as repressive and socially backwards actually exists.”

Why it still exists 

The debate on bacha posh is one that largely centers on gender, but Nordberg argues that for some of the children it’s really about freedom: The right to move around easily, go to school, eat and dress as they please.

American forces will finally leave Afghanistan at the end of 2016 and the prospects for girls like Mehran will likely not change. “As long as Afghanistan’s entrenched gender segregation exists,” Nordberg says, “bacha posh will continue to be a creative way to buck the system.”

For hotel guests, Wi-Fi is no longer a luxury like infinity pools, designer toiletries, or complimentary dry cleaning. Business travelers increasingly consider it a necessity, just as important as bottled water. A Hotels.com survey found that hotel guests would overwhelmingly choose free Wi-Fi over any other in-room amenity.

But not all hotels have caught on. Only 64% of hotels worldwide now offer Wi-Fi for free, according to the travel website HotelChatter’s 2013 Wi-Fi report.

And an expensive room in a fancy hotel won’t assure you the perk. In fact, some international chains are offering free Wi-Fi in their cheaper brands, but not their pricier digs. Hilton’s lower-end Garden Inn, as well as its extended stay hotels, offer free Wi-Fi to all guests; as does Starwood’s youth-focused Aloft brand, and the business-travel oriented Courtyard by Marriott. Ace Hotels, Quality Inn, and La Quinta offer it for free.

Those chains have realized Wi-Fi is a necessity for the business traveler or plugged-in millennial served by these cheaper brands, explains Donna Quadri-Felitti, an associate professor at New York University’s Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism, and Sports Management. “It’s based on who their segment is,” she tells Quartz. “Courtyard is a brand for the business traveler. Aloft is a select service that focuses on the millennial customer.”

But many of the higher end brands—even within the same companies—are still holding out, and offering free Wi-Fi only to loyalty club members. Intercontinental Hotels Group offers free Wi-Fi to all loyalty club members. And club members at Hyatt, Hilton, and Starwood Hotels get to surf the web for free if they have gold or platinum status.

Marriott recently announced it is offering free basic Wi-Fi at the company’s eight luxury brand hotels, including the JW Marriott, Gaylord Hotels, and the Ritz-Carlton—but only for members of Marriott’s loyalty program, and users still have to pay around $5 to $7 for access to higher-speed internet that works for streaming video (Gold and Platinum loyalty members get it free). (Some have dismissed the move as a PR stunt following the company’s recent $60,000 fine for blocking guests’ Wi-Fi hotspots, but John Wolf, a spokesman for Marriott, tells Quartz that the move was simply a response to customer requests.)

It might seem perverse to refuse customers the free perk they most seek, but there’s actually a pretty simple explanation for it: Luxury hotels charge for Wi-Fi because they can. Those who are traveling for business can expense the $20 daily Wi-Fi fee, or if they’re paying for their own $500 room, $20 extra for Wi-Fi probably won’t break the bank. Budget travelers, on the other hand, are more price-sensitive. And unlike budget airlines that strip down the amenities to bare bones for a cheaper ticket prices, hotels in this sector have found that the promise of free Wi-Fi helps them compete with other hotels.

Of course, nothing is really “free”—the cost of the Wi-Fi is either bundled into the room price or offered a la carte. Wi-Fi can be an expensive proposition for hotels. With more and more users using the internet to share photos and stream video, the consumption of bandwidth adds up, said Quadri-Felitti. Installing the infrastructure for Wi-Fi for a hotel can also be expensive, said Jeremy Rock, founder of the RockIT Group, a company that provides technology services to the hospitality industry: A single cable could cost from $150 to $300, and each floor would need around 10 to 30 cables, he said.

Be that as it may, the tide seems to be turning against the idea of Wi-Fi as “optional.” Like budget hotels, ritzier establishments may well find it’s in their competitive interest to let the internet flow as freely as the complimentary shampoo.

A sharply-worded screed that recently appeared in the The Telegraph put it rather bluntly—”If you’re under 30, bad luck. You’re screwed.” Meanwhile, The Atlantic (a sister publication of Quartz) explored “Why it’s so hard for millennials to find a place to live and work.”

By most economic measures, the young were hit hardest by the global financial crisis. The recovery hasn’t been very kind to them, either, particularly in relation to older generations. This is perhaps most starkly illustrated by trends in pay.

As we wrote recently, new data on average wages in the UK paint a dreary picture for British workers. When adjusted for inflation, the typical worker’s weekly pay today is 5% less than it was 10 years ago. What’s even more striking over this period is how poorly young workers have fared in relation to older ones. In fact, over-60s are the only group to see their earnings rise faster than inflation over the past decade:

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A trio of academics crunched similar numbers earlier this year (pdf) and found that real wages for Brits under 25 had fallen below what similar twentysomethings made in 1988. Put another way, young workers today earn less—after adjusting for inflation—than their parents did at the same age. No wonder young Brits are finding it so hard to buy a house, among other things that came easier to earlier generations.

This isn’t a uniquely British affliction—earnings growth shows a broadly similar trend in the US. The stats aren’t directly comparable, due to different age breakdowns, but just as in the UK, the oldest group of American full-time employees is the only group to enjoy an inflation-adjusted raise over the past 10 years. And likewise, it’s the millennials who are suffering the most:

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Uber has a public relations disaster on its hands this week. There’s nothing like threatening to dig up dirt on journalists to piss off, well, journalists. 

But there’s another disgruntled group related to Uber: the drivers themselves. Quartz spent some time on Nov. 19 riding around with one to better understand life inside the global ride-hailing service. We’re withholding his last name because he fears he would lose his job for criticizing the company. We emailed Uber for comment and will update this piece if we get any. 

Tony is 49 years old. He is an UberSUV driver in New York City. Raised in Brooklyn, Tony has been working as a driver since 1986—first at a private-luxury car company and now at Uber. Edited excerpts of what he told Quartz: 

In 2012, I lost my car to Hurricane Sandy, and I had to rent out a car to drive around. Then somebody told me that a company called Uber was giving $1,000 to start driving for them, and then a certain percent for each ride. It was 25% for a sedan, and 28% for an SUV. So I went and started working for Uber.

Basically, there’s no hiring process or anything like that. You just go there, and they give you a class in which they tell you something about Uber, and basic stuff about what to do with the customer, how long to wait, and everything I at least knew as a driver because I went there with experience.

There is no training. They basically hire people from the gutter. They don’t care. They just need bodies. They need somebody who can get their own cars, fit the best possible GPS, and start driving.

Uber doesn’t have physical contracts. Everything is electronically done. But if you don’t sign on their terms and conditions, you cannot work. So we have to sign, though it’s actually not signing. They send a link, and you have to electronically enter and accept the terms. And these terms, even Uber guys who wrote them wouldn’t understand. That’s how long and complicated they are.

But it is like a little school. It has a rating system. Though we are not supposed to be rated, Uber is supposed to be rated, the reality is different. After every ride, customers can give up to five stars for their experience.

Earlier as a driver, I could see the rating a customer gave me. For a few months now, Uber has scrapped the option, so I don’t know what I am being rated.

So, mentally, these rating systems affect us a lot. When you’re doing a good job as a reporter, you don’t want people telling you that you’re doing a bad job. If I am driving somebody who doesn’t live in New York, and they complain that I took the wrong route, how would they know the route that I should have taken? New York doesn’t have too many exits. In my 20 years of working with corporate employees, I haven’t had a single customer complaining that I took the wrong route. We have to live in the fear of losing our jobs.

Compared to my friends, I don’t have much problem because I am a VIP driver, and I have a 4.8 average. I can still get fired though, if I go below a 4.6.

Now as the company has grown so fast, our customers are more like yellow-cab trash. I have kids jumping up and down. Businesswomen putting their feet up. I never had that before. In corporate, there were only business people, where everybody behaved themselves. In Uber, I pick up drunk people at night, and they throw up. I have people who behave themselves badly, and I can’t say anything because of the rating.

You have people in Uber—starting from the top manager to the guy who washes the floors—they have the same brains because when you go to talk to them, it’s like talking to a bunch of dummies. I wonder which limousine university did they go to—because there is none.

My friend who is a driver, he is afraid of his own shadow. He would never back-talk to a customer. But he got an email from Uber that there are a lot of complaints against him, though he doesn’t remember having even one. They called him to their office and charged him a $99 fee. Uber said the money was for advertising and commercials, but everyone knew it was to save their jobs. And they did that to many of my friends. This is how sinister they are.

And if you ask them, the staff doesn’t know how to answer your question because they are told from the top that the computer tells us this. Well, what did you get hired for? To make your own decisions or you want the computer to make it? The computer doesn’t know customer relations. The computer doesn’t know the routes. The computer only gives you statistics.

They say bad ratings don’t affect the drivers getting fares, but it does. Computers are programmed by people. If they say “we have a problem from this guy, but he is still a good driver, let’s give him less work and tell the computers to give them only, say, five pick-ups a day.” It is very calculated.

On Dec. 1, they are going to automatically put those below 4.6 in UberX—whether they like it or not. [Uber X is the lower cost Uber service where the base fare is $3 as compared with UberSUV, which is a luxury service with a base fare of $14; the per-minute cost in UberX is half as much as in UberSUV.] Some of my friends will have a problem because they are 4.6. One of them owns a very expensive vehicle, and his rating system is actually 4.2. He is afraid they will transfer him to UberX.

Uber is afraid, in my opinion, that if they lose to the TLC (New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission) in court, they are going to lose customers. The rule says a driver cannot work for more than one base at once. And drivers in Uber are right now working for two or three bases, though TLC is catching them and giving them $500 tickets.

What Uber did in the summers was give out iPhones to drivers, just like you give candies to kids, and also gave $500 to whoever joined. So, anybody with that phone and the app installed in the phone could work for Uber. They completely violated the TLC rule. They wanted all the business—they are like those pigs who want to eat everything.

They hired too many drivers, so now there is more supply than the demand.

If you go to any Uber office, it is like a zoo—people come from different countries, because they heard about Uber. “Oh, we can work in Uber in New York.” But they have never driven cars here. I have a friend who came from Pakistan a few months ago, got a TLC license, and now works for Uber. And he has no knowledge of the city; all he does is follow the GPS route. And it’s not just this one guy; there are many others.

These drivers come with no experience. Of course, customers are going to give bad ratings.

I am working exclusively for Uber. But they are diverting more customers to UberX—and that takes away my fare. They told me, “Go get a good vehicle.” And I have one. I now own a Lincoln Navigator.

They promised me heaven, but I haven’t gotten that. It’s only hell for now. I am actually waiting for the TLC rule. If it does happen that drivers cannot work for more than one base, Uber will go after the drivers and get their phones back. Then they are going to lose UberX drivers—and we are going to start doing okay.

When I started working with Uber, I was never free for more than five minutes. I was busy all day long. Sometimes, I just wanted to park my car and sleep. Now, I have too much time and I make less money. Well, the company has a lot of people who have downloaded the Uber app, but that doesn’t mean all of them are regularly booking cabs. So downloading the app is half reality of the statistic. I think a lot of people just try Uber once, and once they end up paying a lot of money, they don’t want to try Uber again.

Only the payment is no problem. Every Thursday, you get your check. Only once they had a problem—and we all chimed in on the internet, and we gave them our piece of mind, so they fixed the system. That’s the only good thing, because I don’t know if they want to violate labor laws since there are going to be a lot of labor laws to violate.

Today, we got an email that they will give us a discount for health insurance, with a company called Stride Health. But we can get better discounts without Uber. We can get it for $640; with Uber, it’s $680. So which is better? I can’t pick either because my wife doesn’t work, and I have two kids to support. I am the sole provider and I cannot pay $640 dollars.

However, with 10,000 drivers in group insurance, we should get a huge discount.

I bought the car in 2013. I still have car payments. When I bought this car, I wondered am I still going to be in Uber to pay this off? Because I don’t know how long am I going to be working for them; anyone can get fired with the current rating system. Even me, as a VIP driver, I am worried. There should at least be a 10-year assurance, and if not, then at least two years. And once you’re doing good, they should forget about the rating system. If Uber were the ones to be rated, they would get the lowest rating.

Nine-year olds list what they dislike about being boys.

medschoolapplicant:

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A great find by Greg Prichard while he was browsing a 1981 issue of TIME magazine: An ad purchased by Sony announcing the finalists (yet non-winners) of a contest to redesign the Sony logo. Fascinating on so many levels.

I am both an adopted kid and the parent of an adopted child, and this topic is very important to me.

In America alone in the last ten years, there have been a half million adoptions, which is wonderful, but it still leaves tens of thousands of children in need of a loving home, and that’s just one country.

It is not a step to be taken lightly. There are many factors to consider.

But it would be wonderful if some of the people reading this will consider bringing a child into their family. 

Thank you.

MakerBot + Martha Stewart Begin Offering Custom Filament Colors and Downloadable Housewares, from SolidSmack:

…it was announced that Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc. is partnering up with MakerBot to offer their signature color palette and designs in MakerBot’s Digital Store.

The company joins other powerhouse brands including Sesame Street and Hello Kitty in offering licensed content via download to the home-based manufacturer.

“3D printing allows for cost-effective product design without compromising artisanal character.”

The lineup includes three new filament colors (Jadeite, Lemon Drop and Robin’s Egg) and an initial collection of four houseware designs including a coaster, a napkin ring, an LED votive holder and a place card holder…..

Read More.

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Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! We also offer the LulzBot TAZ – Open source 3D Printer and the Printrbot Simple Metal 3D Printer in our store. If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!

mrspoonsi writes with this excerpt from Billboard: 'On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice told a Virginia federal judge that Kim Dotcom and cohorts have no business challenging the seizure of an estimated $67 million in assets because the Megaupload founder is evading prosecution. The government brought criminal charges against Dotcom in early 2012, but he's been holed up in New Zealand awaiting word on whether he'll be extradited. The government got antsy and this past July, brought a civil complaint for forfeiture in rem, a maneuver to firmly establish a hold over money from bank accounts around the world, luxury cars, big televisions, watches, artwork and other property allegedly gained by Megaupload in the course of crimes. Dotcom is fighting the seizures by questioning the government's basis for asserting a crime, saying "there is no such crime as secondary criminal copyright infringement," as well as challenging how the seized assets are tied to the charges against Dotcom. But according to the U.S. government, Dotcom doesn't get the pleasure of even making the arguments. In a motion to strike, the government cites the doctrine of fugitive disentitlement, which bars a person from using the resources of the court if that person is aware of prosecution and is evading it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While it’s still unclear whether Obama will get to nominate another justice, the Republican gains in November make it unlikely a liberal nominee, such as Justice Thurgood Marshall, would be confirmed.

Recent concerns have arisen about Ubers highly-questionable business practices. Now it's not just the tech and media crowds who are mad — Capitol Hill is getting involved too. Read Sen. Al Franken's letter, in its entirety, here.

Bill Cosby's disastrous media blitz continues with the release of footage from an interview with the Associated Press earlier this month. Per usual, Cosby refuses to answer questions about long-time and recent rape allegations. But the AP kept the cameras rolling as Cosby awkwardly lambasts the journalist for daring to ask questions on the issue, and demands that they "scuttle" parts of the interview. Frankly the AP doesn't come off so great either, having clearly originally decided not to run the footage and only airing it now that Cosby's alleged crimes are part of the national conversation.

capteinwayfinder:

what the FUCK kind of dragon is that

hoodwinkedfool:

UPDATE: I got bored so I painted this pretty lady from Assassin’s Creed Unity.

A man feeding swans and ducks from a snowy river bank in Krakow

the contrast is insane

relevant to my interests

WAUGH!!! I'm apart of a new eBook bundle from Devastator where for $12 you can get GS vol 5 and 7 more funny books for your e-tablet!! It's a good price for the amount you get! Get on over there and look at that fuckin' thing!!!

ghostdrama:

i love old science fiction because it’s all like “IT’S THE DISTANT YEAR TWO THOUSAND AND THREE AND MAN IS EXPLORING THE DEEP CORNERS OF THE UNIVERSE” like god bless you old sci-fi you had such high hopes for us

If you want to provoke an argument among computer programmers, ask them to pick their favorite coding language. But even more contentious in an environment where engineers literally have agents, is which is the most lucrative.

Quora threads on the subject have inspired dozens of essay-length answers debating the merits of C, Javascript, Python, and Ruby on Rails.

We looked at data, compiled by Burning Glass with Brookings Institution economist Jonathan Rothwell in July, from thousands of American job ads. We separated out programming languages from a broader list of tech skills we looked at in an earlier piece.

The dataset isn’t perfect, it’s missing newer but increasingly popular languages like Erlang and Haskell, likely because they don’t turn up all that frequently on job ads and resumes. A large number of the ads also don’t list salary. But this gives a good sense of what employers are paying for different languages:

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There’s some pretty prescient advice on Quora for aspiring or early career computer scientists. Though a language currently in high demand like Ruby might get you the best salary, it might not be the best way to make a career, and might peter off over time. It’s better is to focus on being well rounded, with a firm grasp of algorithms, design principles, and the ability to pick up new languages and concepts rapidly.

Others emphasize starting with something like C or C++, a language that you probably won’t work with every day, but helps you learn others more quickly and understand the structure behind systems.

A recent episode of The Eric Andre Show, co-host Hannibal Buress closed the show by rapping as Laurence Fishburne's Matrix character. It turns out that there are a staggering number of words that kind of rhyme with "Morpheus."

Read more...

swolizard:

BUT HONESTLY WHERE DO THEY GET THE SHIT

spicyshimmy:

star trek is so inspirational. so moving. it’s about space. about final frontiers and families and the hopeful, incredible, unknowable, better future. it’s about people with ideals—and weaknesses—their strengths always edging the latter out by a hair, by just enough to make your heart swell with possibility and trust and true belief for the better. it’s about

catching that wascally wabbit

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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