• Reasons to Be Cheerful (Ep. 417) - Freakonomics Freakonomics
    https://freakonomics.com/podcast/reasons-to-be-cheerful

    Well, it’s still really important to pay attention to bad things when you’re in, you know, because getting along with people, the bad stuff matters much more. It’s important to pay attention to that. But life has gotten so much safer than it ever was. It’s so much more peaceful than it ever was. And yet we still have this ancient reaction to catastrophize and imagine the worst. And the worst effect is that we live in a high-bad environment. We’re just surrounded all day by people trying to get our attention on various screens. And they know the easiest way to do that is to scare us, to tell us bad news, to tell us there’s a crisis. So the merchants of bad, as we call them, are just going at us around the clock trying to sell us their wares. And our ancient brain just immediately reacts.

    #bonheur #freakonomics #biais_de_négativité #psychologie #négativité #audio

    • Il est aussi question de filtrer l’info pour les personnes que ça déprime et de mettre des #trigger_warning s. Le TW, c’est ce truc à la mode pour les jeunes adultes, qui vient de la psychologie et du constat que les victimes de violences peuvent connaître des chocs traumatiques bien après les faits, liés à leur expérience de la violence et déclenchée (triggered) par un rappel de cette expérience. En mettant un TW on peut éviter à chacun·e de se confronter à ces déclencheurs. Mais ça devient un peu tout et n’importe quoi et j’ai passé un chouette article sur le sujet ici.
      https://seenthis.net/messages/807820
      La BBC commence à mettre en place un dispositif sur son site qui ne cache pas mais floute les infos liées aux triggers des gens et qu’ils ont préalablement renseignés (pédophilie, viol, violence sur animaux, climat, etc.). Leur justification, c’est que les personnes qui vivent trop mal certains types de mauvaises nouvelles finissent par ne plus s’informer et que ça pourrait leur redonner accès aux infos. Et il semblerait qu’on puisse s’habituer doucement à recevoir ces infos... même si après tout il est assez normal de déprimer en regardant tout ça.

  • Who Gets the Ventilator ? (Ep. 413) - Freakonomics #Freakonomics
    https://freakonomics.com/podcast/covid-19-ventilators

    So: how do you decide who gets priority? Should it be first-come, first-served? Should it be the very sickest people? Or perhaps the least-sick of the very sick, since they’ll have a better shot at survival? Should it be older people, who may be fragile; or younger ones, with more life left to live and, theoretically, more to contribute to society? Should the wealthy and powerful have privileged access to this life-extending equipment, as they have access to most other resources? Or should it be reversed, with priority going to the poor and powerless?

    Question d’#éthique en #médecine sur le #tri #triage. Très intéressant.
    #audio

    • Pardon, j’ai confondu avec cet autre podcast qui est aussi très très bon et qui parle de PQ dans toutes ses dimensions, pas seulement comme une marchandise marketée comme produit domestique et produit de collectivité et avec les usages actuels il manque du premier et il y a du second en trop (ce qui était le sujet du Freakonomics). Il est question aussi de pourquoi on trouve que c’est plus sale de toucher son anus pendant un rinçage que d’étaler la crotte autour avec du papier (tout doux, on a du bol, d’ailleurs on apprendra ici le nom de l’inventeur du PQ).

      https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/wipe-out

    • L’homme par qui le malheur est arrivé dans les chiottes de l’Occident :

      Joseph C. Gayetti Joseph C. Gayetty (unknown, c. 1810 or c. 1827 Pennsylvania - unknown after 1890s or May 2, 1895) was an American inventor credited with the invention of commercial toilet paper. It was the first and remained only one of the few commercial toilet papers from 1857 to 1890 remaining in common use until the invention of splinter-free toilet paper in 1935 by the Northern Tissue Company.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Gayetty

      Mais aussi (extrait de la page mise en lien dans le post précédent) :

      Blumer credits a man named Joseph Gayetty as the first person to actually sell toilet paper in the Western world. In the 1850s Gayetty made a pitch that using corncobs and old newspapers was actually bad for you. “He decided to make this a form of paper, which was thin, and sold it as [being] more gentle on your rear end,” says Blumer, “and presumably that had some connection with not hurting your delicate membranes and helping if you had hemorrhoids. But we probably wouldn’t recognize this toilet paper as the same kind we use today, it was probably closer to tissue paper, but it was thin and would get the job done.”

      Gayetty’s paper came in a box like tissues and was made of hemp. It wasn’t a very popular product because it was very expensive and only the rich could afford it. Most never saw the use for this paper anyway. But one other invention changed the need for Gayetty’s paper—indoor plumbing.
      Feeling Flushed

      Toilets were moving inside of houses and they were now being connected to sewer systems that flushed with water. But the problem was that indoor toilets were very finicky, and if you were going to flush with what you wiped with it had to be very delicate like Gayetty’s paper. Gayetty pivoted the marketing for his paper entirely, rather than focusing on health, he focused on the sensitivity of indoor plumbing.

      But a competing businessman named Seth Wheeler is the one credited with creating toilet paper as we know it today — in a roll and with sheets. “Wheeler came up with the idea of perforation first, and it wasn’t in connection with toilet paper. It was in connection with wrapping paper,” Blumer explains. “He thought that it would be very convenient for stores to be able to pull off a sheet of paper and rip it along a perforation.”

      Wheeler would go on to patent all sorts of toilet paper-related innovations, some more sensible than others, including a role with hexagonal sheets, which he thought would be easier to tear.

      But it was yet another competitor that turned toilet paper a ubiquitous household item—the Scott Paper Company—the very same one we see on shelves today. Scott started making toilet paper around the same time as Wheeler, but they had a lot better marketing. They actually took Gayetty’s original strategy as toilet paper as the solution to hemorrhoids but did it better by putting doctors in their ads and saying that other brands had wood chips and splinters in their product. Meanwhile, they played up their own paper as delicate and dainty. And it worked! Scott ended up owning the market share of the industry throughout the 1950s.

      Now toilet paper is a $31 billion industry. With people fighting over toilet paper in supermarkets and queuing up for hours to buy a supply, it probably feels like there’s a shortage of bath tissue. But we probably aren’t in danger of running out of it in the long run. Unlike a lot of other products, most of the toilet paper supply chain is entirely in the US or North America, so manufacturing hasn’t shut down at all, and people are not consuming any more toilet paper than usual. The bottleneck lies in the difference between how quickly people are buying it in stores and how much production can be ramped up. The other reason for the shortage is that away-from-home suppliers like Roses –that normally sell to larger, institutional clients — need time to arrange contracts and shipments to stores that sell directly to consumers. There is a limit to how fast they can pivot, and how quickly their machines can actually run, but eventually, the supply should be able to catch up to demand. In the meantime, there’s always Roses’s factory kiosk…

      … or water. Somewhere around 70% of the world still uses water instead of toilet paper, and for good reason. Some studies have actually shown that toilet paper isn’t as sanitary as we think it is and does very little to protect us from bacteria as opposed to water and, unlike Galetty claimed, toilet paper is not good for the treatment of hemorrhoids. When it comes down to it, toilet paper isn’t necessarily that essential of a product. It’s something humans have lived without for thousands of years. But if it brings people comfort to have in this extraordinary situation, by all means, go buy it. Just make sure to wash your hands!

      C’est dingue, non ? Ou quand la créativité est mise aux service des muqueuses et de la plomberie... Y a des jours où je m’dis que certains « créateurs » sont quand même des grands-malades.