fionnoh
A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: “Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theaters show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.”
"The fact that the Catholic schools are segregated on the basis of gender led to the development of a gendered-generational variant of Irish Sign Language that is still evident (albeit to a lesser degree) today."
When the Queen dissolves parliament she's just going through the motions, it's a formality. If she had refused, say, Theresa May's request for a general election in 2017, saying that there was no need as the Government had a clear majority and Brexit needed to be the focus (and she did this by either hiding down the countryside, not answering her phone or by shooting down the idea preemptively) that would be a huge deal. That would be her exercising her power.
2017: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/dec/05/sweden-gende... 2018: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/01/24/why-sweden-clears-wal... 2019: http://info.gritit.com/blog/what-is-gender-balanced-snow-cle... 2020: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2020/02/03/how-other-cities...
Not quite as many as in 2016, but mostly because a particular subset of the internet went into a frenzy about the news of Stockholm dealing with an unusually large volume of snow. Daniel Helldén, Stockholm's vice-mayor of transportation said: "We had more snow in two days than we had had for a 100 years. So the problem hadn't anything to do with gender-equal snow clearing." https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/gender-analysis-budget-snow...
In the end the change in policy resulted in less injuries and deaths, as most of these were happening to pedestrians in the first place (who happened to be mostly women, versus mostly men driving). Other cities in Sweden went on to take this approach and other countries, like Canada in the last link, are interested in taking this approach too. It turned out they did not stop "this due to how bad the consequences were" and it turned out not to be, "simply put, ideological insanity" but an interesting way to approach what appears to be common sense from a different point of view and seeing if there are ways that we can improve things (something, something... tech disruption... something, something...)
Stockholm's snow clearing policies are the subject of the first chapter of Caroline Criado Perez's book, Invisible Women, which has dozens of such examples. It's an interesting read, and I'd recommend it.