Meme - "When you finally realise that you probably shouldn’t reproduce with your sister"
Sreshth Shah on Twitter: """When asked how Bronco Wine Company can sell wine less expensive than a bottle of water, Fred T. Franzia famously countered, 'They're overcharging for the water — don't you get it?'" Fred Franzia, champion of affordable wine, has died"
Hamish Mitchell on Twitter - "The ‘Occupy Democrats Election Fund’ PAC’, run by Omar Rivero, raised $797K from 2021-2022. They contributed $0 to federal candidates. And they spent $577k on ‘Fundraising Consultants’. Would @OccupyDemocrats & @OmarRiverosays care to explain?"
Meme - "Any questions?"
Is Ethical Parenting Possible? -- New York Magazine - Nymag - "Parenthood, like war, is a state in which it’s impossible to be moral"
Grateful People Are More Likely To Obey Commands To Commit Ethically Dubious Acts - "Gratitude is widely regarded as a positive emotion. When we feel grateful, we are more helpful, generous and fair to others — findings that were supported by a 2017 meta-analysis, which concluded that gratitude is important for building relationships. But now a new study in Emotion suggests that gratitude has a dark side. Specifically, people who felt more grateful were more willing to accede to an instruction to prepare as many worms as possible for grinding to their death. As Eddie M. W. Tong at the National University of Singapore and his colleagues write: “The findings suggest that gratitude can make a person more vulnerable to social influence, including obeying commands to perform a questionable act.”"
Jon Davis's answer to What's the difference between freedom fighters and terrorists? - Quora - "A terrorist is someone who uses fear to motivate civilians to act in a political manner on their behalf. A freedom fighter is someone who acts on the behalf of at least some civilian population in direct opposition to a military or government...
Meme - "Singapore Debt Collection Service Since 2002
Woman shouts ‘I still love sharks’ as she's taken to hospital after getting bitten while swimming
I was seeing a compilation videos of wild animals being set free in the wild, they get to the tiger, the tiger saw the jungle and really made this face
Who dares lies | The Spectator - "Sir Christopher Lee, who died last month aged 93, knew how to play a part. One of the consummate actors of his generation, whose career spanned nearly seven decades, his versatility on stage and screen was legendary. At first glance his military career during the second world war was similarly versatile. According to some reports and obituaries in the days after his death, Lee served in the Special Air Service (SAS), Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) and Special Operations Executive (SOE). In reality he served in none. He was attached to the SAS and SOE as an RAF liaison officer at various times between 1943 and 1945, but he did not serve in them and never, as one paper stated, ‘moved behind enemy lines, destroying Luftwaffe aircraft and fields’. When asked about his service record — which it should be pointed out was a fine one, with liaison officers performing a valuable link between the RAF and special forces — Lee didn’t exactly lie, but he did lead us on, encouraging us to believe it had involved more derring-do than it actually did. Asked about his wartime exploits in an interview in 2011 he said: ‘Let’s just say I was in special forces and leave it at that. People can read into that what they like.’ Pressed on the subject, he replied with melodrama worthy of a Hammer film: ‘We are forbidden — former, present, or future — to discuss any specific operations.’ Nonsense. Wartime members of those special forces units are not — and never have been — prevented from discussing operations. A decorated wartime SAS officer, Roy Farran, published an account of serving in the regiment as early as 1948. When I wrote my own history of the SAS in the second world war, I did so with the full cooperation of the regiment, which put me in touch with more than 50 wartime veterans, all more than happy to talk. Sir Christopher wasn’t the first by any means to buff up his war record... Why do men create such fantasies? Most did actually do their bit in the war; they are genuine members of the ‘Greatest Generation’, but at some point in their lives they decided their war record wasn’t quite great enough. So they embellish it, and what is more dashing than the Special Air Service with its ‘Who Dares Wins’ motto?... Claiming to have fought in the wartime SAS is a relatively new phenomenon. Prior to 1980 it was the LRDG who were bothered by bullshitters... It was the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege that changed things. The SAS, who so spectacularly ended the siege in South Kensington by abseiling down the building in front of the world’s television cameras, became the most famous regiment in the world and the target for men saddled with unfulfilled dreams. Yet ironically this new found fame sat uncomfortably with many wartime members of the SAS, a band of modest men with no deep-seated insecurities. They didn’t spin yarns or shoot lines, and a good many told their families nothing of their wartime heroics"
‘Woman who can smell Parkinson’s’ helps scientists develop test - "The test has been years in the making after academics realised that Joy Milne could smell the condition. The 72-year-old from Perth, Scotland, has a rare condition that gives her a heightened sense of smell. She noticed that her late husband, Les, developed a different odour when he was 33 – 12 years before he was diagnosed with the disease, which leads to parts of the brain become progressively damaged over many years... academics at the University of Manchester have made a breakthrough by developing a test that can identify people with Parkinson’s disease using a simple cotton bud run along the back of the neck... “I think it has to be detected far earlier – the same as cancer and diabetes, earlier diagnosis means far more efficient treatment and a better lifestyle for people. “It has been found that exercise and change of diet can make a phenomenal difference.”... The scientists believed that the scent may be caused by a chemical change in skin oil, known as sebum, that is triggered by the disease... Milne is working with scientists around the world to see if she can smell other diseases such as cancer and tuberculosis (TB). “I have to go shopping very early or very late because of people’s perfumes, I can’t go into the chemical aisle in the supermarket,” she said. “So yes, a curse sometimes but I have also been out to Tanzania and have done research on TB and research on cancer in the US – just preliminary work. So it is a curse and a benefit.” She said she can sometimes smell people who have Parkinson’s while in the supermarket or walking down the street but has been told by medical ethicists she cannot tell them."
Caesar’s favourite herb was the Viagra of ancient Rome. Until climate change killed it off - "Of all the mysteries of ancient Rome, silphium is among the most intriguing. Romans loved the herb as much as we love chocolate. They used silphium as perfume, as medicine, as an aphrodisiac and turned it into a condiment, called laser, that they poured on to almost every dish. It was so valuable that Julius Caesar stashed more than half a tonne in his treasury. Yet it became extinct less than a century later, by the time of Nero, and for nearly 2,000 years people have puzzled over the cause. Researchers now believe it was the first victim of man-made climate change – and warn that we should heed the lesson of silphium or risk losing plants that are the basis of many modern flavours."
I’m a therapist to the super-rich: they are as miserable as Succession makes out - "Over the years, I have developed a great deal of empathy for those who have far too much. The television programme Succession, now in its third season, does such a good job of exploring the kinds of toxic excess my clients struggle with that when my wife is watching it I have to leave the room; it just feels like work. What could possibly be challenging about being a billionaire, you might ask. Well, what would it be like if you couldn’t trust those close to you? Or if you looked at any new person in your life with deep suspicion? I hear this from my clients all the time: “What do they want from me?”; or “How are they going to manipulate me?”; or “They are probably only friends with me because of my money.” Then there are the struggles with purpose – the depression that sets in when you feel like you have no reason to get out of bed. Why bother going to work when the business you have built or inherited runs itself without you now? If all your necessities and much more were covered for the rest of your life – you might struggle with a lack of meaning and ambition too. My clients are often bored with life and too many times this leads to them chasing the next high – chemically or otherwise – to fill that void. Most of the people I see are much more willing to talk about their sex lives or substance-misuse problems than their bank accounts. Money is seen as dirty and secret. Money is awkward to talk about. Money is wrapped up in guilt, shame, and fear. There is a perception that money can immunise you against mental-health problems when actually, I believe that wealth can make you – and the people closest to you – much more susceptible to them... Too many of my clients want to indulge their children so “they never have to suffer what I had to suffer” while growing up. But the result is that they prevent their children from experiencing the very things that made them successful: sacrifice, hard work, overcoming failure and developing resilience. An over-indulged child develops into an entitled adult who has low self-confidence, low self-esteem, and a complete lack of grit. These very wealthy children start out by going to elite boarding schools and move on to elite universities – developing a language and culture among their own kind. Rarely do they create friendships with non-wealthy people; this can lead to feelings of isolation and being trapped inside a very small bubble. There are few people in the world to whom they can actually relate, which of course leads to a lack of empathy... The wealthy parents I see, often because of their own guilt and shame, are not preparing their children for the challenges of managing their wealth. There is truth in the old adage “shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations”. On numerous occasions the child of a wealthy family has said to me: “We never talked about money. I don’t know how much there is or what I’m supposed to do with it. I don’t know how to take care of it. It’s all so secret and dirty.”"
Beirut bank hostage taker is hailed as hero during Lebanon's economic crisis - "A man who held multiple people hostage inside a Beirut bank in an attempt to get access to his own savings was hailed as a hero in Lebanon, which is suffering from its worst economic crisis in modern history. Bassam al-Sheikh Hussein, a 42-year-old food delivery driver, held up to 10 people hostage during the seven-hour standoff last Thursday, according to The Associated Press. He entered the Federal Bank with a shotgun and canister of gasoline, fired three warning shots, locked himself in with several bank employees and customers and threatened to set himself on fire unless he was allowed to withdraw his savings — which he said he needed to pay his father's medical bills. Like many people in Lebanon, Hussein had been unable to access his life savings because of the strict limits the government put on withdrawals of foreign currency assets — effectively freezing them — when the economic crisis started in 2019. He had some $210,000 trapped in the bank... sympathetic bystanders gathered at the scene to show support for him and rally against Lebanon's political and financial leaders, who are widely blamed for forcing much of the country's population into poverty (the World Bank has described the situation as a "deliberate depression ... orchestrated by the country's elite")."
How Telegraph readers fell out of love with 'rip-off' Airbnb - "Add on their extra charges, and it’s often cheaper to book a hotel, or book with the property owners directly."
Quality and accountability in healthcare delivery : audit evidence from primary care providers in India - "This paper presents direct evidence on the quality of health care in low-income settings using a unique and original set of audit studies, where standardized patients were presented to a nearly representative sample of rural public and private primary care providers in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Three main findings are reported. First, private providers are mostly unqualified, but they spent more time with patients and completed more items on a checklist of essential history and examination items than public providers, while being no different in their diagnostic and treatment accuracy. Second, the private practices of qualified public sector doctors were identified and the same doctors exerted higher effort and were more likely to provide correct treatment in their private practices. Third, there is a strong positive correlation between provider effort and prices charged in the private sector, whereas there is no correlation between effort and wages in the public sector. The results suggest that market-based accountability in the unregulated private sector may be providing better incentives for provider effort than administrative accountability in the public sector in this setting. While the overall quality of care is low both sectors, the differences in provider effort may partly explain the dominant market share of fee-charging private providers even in the presence of a system of free public healthcare."
Twitter Is Debating Whether Jenny Is The True Villain Of 'Forrest Gump'
The mind of God? The problem with deifying Stephen Hawking - Prospect Magazine - "the physicist’s elusive character: shamelessly self-promoting to the point of arrogance, and heedless of what others might think... Hawking’s 1988 book A Brief History of Time secured his celebrity. That it famously went unread, or unfinished, by many of its purchasers would for any other science communicator be a sign of failure. The book was like a Latin liturgy, filled with terms like the readership only half-understood. It played into the unhelpful notion that science is really hard and only for super-humans like him. As Seife shows, it only became even remotely readable through the intense effort of assistants and science writers enlisted by the publisher to translate Hawking’s dense and plodding prose. (Seife explains these ideas more clearly than Hawking ever did.) What Hawking’s book did offer was a highly marketable grandiosity, summed up in its most famous line: “If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.” It established Hawking’s image of an amazing mind in a failed body. Hereafter it was not enough to regard Hawking (accurately) as one of the top 100 theoretical physicists in the world; he had to be—“in spite of it all”—a second Newton or Einstein. It was an almost Faustian bargain: Hawking wanted to be celebrated for his mind alone but craved fame too avidly to refuse the more compromised form of it that was on offer. To duck the truth about how much his celebrity depended on his disability colludes with society’s continuing discomfort about the whole issue. Granting him guru status was not healthy. What Hawking had to say about artificial intelligence, extraterrestrial life or space travel was often banal—but to say as much was taboo, as I discovered when I reviewed his final collection of essays Brief Answers to the Big Questions. Even astronomer Martin Rees, an enduring friend of Hawking, admitted that a “downside of his iconic status was that his comments attracted exaggerated attention even on topics where he had no special expertise.” So when he pronounced in his 2010 book The Grand Design (with co-author Leonard Mlodinow) that “philosophy is dead,” philosophers felt compelled to mount detailed rebuttals of that trite act of provocation. (Mlodinow has said he suggested a more judicious wording, but Hawking was more interested in making a splash.) The picture that emerges from Hawking Hawking is of a man with a very narrow intellectual focus even before his illness restricted him. He was casually sloppy about other disciplines (his first wife Jane testified that “his contempt for medieval studies”—her own field—“was unrelenting”) and dismissive of philosophy, theology, or indeed any way to see the world except through science. He did not even seem to take much interest in physics outside his own corner of it. Hawking did not really produce any important scientific work after A Brief History; a decade later he was left behind by a new generation of theoretical physicists. Towards the end of his career, he would float half-baked but attention-grabbing ideas. In 2004, he announced that he’d “solved a major problem in theoretical physics”—the black hole information paradox. But all he’d done was to finally convince himself of what many others already believed: that he’d been wrong to think information was erased by black holes. Hawking adopted the habit of very publicly placing financial bets on scientific debates, knowing that this would create a news hook whatever the outcome. When, in 2012, he bet against the discovery of the Higgs particle at the LHC, it wasn’t because of any strong theoretical argument but because it inserted him into a story in which he’d played no part... Hawking became “as much a brand as he was a person”... This hawking of Hawking continues today: for a mere £19,000 you can buy a gold watch inlaid, like some medieval jewel-encrusted reliquary bearing a shard of Christ’s cross, with wooden disks “taken from the desk at which Hawking contemplated the mysteries of the universe.” There has been a reluctance to consider how ungenerously Hawking sometimes treated others. “He almost never gives credit to any of his collaborators when he’s interviewed,” says Strominger, who accepted his own sidelining because if you were a co-author on a Hawking paper, you would suddenly “get ten thousand times as much attention” as before. Former student Marika Taylor was less forgiving, saying of her most famous paper with Hawking that “he should have let me publish it as a single author, because the main results were mine.” ... When the work of one of Hawking’s own students at Cambridge suggested he was wrong about black-hole information, he tried to get the graduate kicked off his PhD. And he very publicly implied, without justification, that physicist Paul Steinhardt and his PhD student Andreas Albrecht had stolen an idea in cosmology from Hawking’s friend Andrei Linde—a potentially career-ending accusation... To admit all this is not to deny he was a great physicist (he might have even got his Nobel had he not died in 2018), nor that he could also be kind, companionable and fun. Rather, it is to judge him as we would any other public figure. It is to grant him his humanity. What we did instead was an all too familiar response to disability. We created a kind of “compensation cure,” much as the struggles of people with autism are obscured by the stereotype of the savant. Hawking’s life is worth celebrating, but if we make it a myth then it becomes just a story onto which we can project our anxieties and fantasies. He deserved better."
Depuis quand : Bonjour-han-CANAL+ - YouTube
The myth of bilingualism - The Hub - "I am born and raised in Toronto, the place National Geographic once called the most multicultural city in the world. But there is little need for French here and, for that matter, in most of Canada. Unless you work for the federal government. Canada parades itself as a bilingual country, but it isn’t... Canada is symbolically bilingual, but symbolism costs money and effort. Symbolism means you have French road signs across the country’s busiest highway—the 401—even though a dozen other languages are in more use than French by the motorists who drive that highway. Symbolism means federal government services are available in two languages no matter how much or how little one of them is spoken. Symbolism means Canada brands itself as bilingual when it’s not. Americans like to boast that anyone can be president, which may or may not be true, but it’s certainly more true than the case here. In the current political context, I couldn’t be PM because the poorly-taught French I had in high school never got me far, and once I left French class there was never any need for it. My daughter was in French immersion as a child but after moving to the English-language curriculum her French waned because she never used it... Prior to Pierre Trudeau, Canada had a prime minister who didn’t speak French: Lester Pearson. Before Pearson, there was John Diefenbaker and he didn’t speak French either. Back in those days, Canada was led by non-Quebeckers who spoke no French or Quebeckers who spoke both languages... For over half a century only one PM who is not a Quebecker has held power longer than 26 months: Stephen Harper. This means the top office in the land is not representative of the people in this country... Only in Quebec is such language lunacy tolerated in Canada. Only in Quebec can a government restrict what kind of religious garb civil servants can wear. Only in Quebec is it okay to have a federal party running candidates in one province. Only in Quebec does a provincial legislature call itself the national assembly."
The US military has a plan to make food from thin air. No really | Financial Times - "If this is starting to sound pie in the sky, just remember: so did mRNA research when Darpa invested in it years ago."
How banks exploit us by making services too complex | Financial Times - "Banks make money because they are better at arithmetic than their customers. They know that if they fix monthly repayments on a credit card at 2 per cent of the outstanding amount with a minimum of £5 it will take 25 years to clear a £2,000 debt and they will have been paid £3,500 in interest... And where the arithmetic could be simple the banks devise ways to make them complex. A theme that has run through my working life is explaining complex things to people in a simple way. Over the years I have come to believe that this process of making things complicated — complexification, as I call it — is deliberate. And it is anti-competitive... There are nearly 5,000 different residential mortgage products on the market. Far too many to choose from rationally. Fixed rates, discounted rates, variable trackers, extended tie-ins, cashback, discount on legal fees, high lending charge, and nearly always a fixed upfront fee of between £495 and £1,995. Which mortgage is best should be a simple question — who charges the least? But these complex deals are a mixture of bets on the future of interest rates — which even professionals get wrong — and simultaneous equations... My experience in 40 years of writing about personal finance is that firms look for ways to defeat competition rather than embrace it. The only way to force them to be fair and competitive is through rules. When you make a part payment off your credit card the bank must now take it off the balance on which it is charging the highest interest rate. In the past, payments were taken first from the debt with the lowest interest rate — sometimes as little as 0 per cent — leaving the expensive debt ticking away at 29.9 per cent. That was not treating customers fairly but that principle did not stop the practice. It took a specific rule change in 2014 to do that."
Love, Parents and Teenagers: DILF - FML - "Today, my dad and I ran into a guy I've been dating. He flipped out and accused me of cheating on him. This is now the second guy to have a similar reaction to my dad. I guess this is one of those unexpected consequences of teen pregnancy that my parents didn't see coming. FML"
Love, Games and LGBTQIA+: Connect Four (GONE WRONG) - FML - "Today, I played Connect Four with a gay guy who was clearly hitting on me for an hour. When he asked why I didn’t want to go to his place, I told him that I’m straight and married. He asked why I played with him for so long, so I told him, “My wife sucks at Connect Four.” He called me a cocktease and left. FML"
Readers reply: are there any foods that have not at some time been considered harmful in a study? - "My mother was 3st 4lbs when she died, 11 years ago. A lifetime devotee of the Daily Express and an avid reader of Top Santé magazine, she was sectioned twice, where effectively force fed. She believed what she read, had no understanding of any ulterior motive in publishing an article on the dangers of tinned salmon or toasted tea cakes. Taking it all as gospel, she cut out every foodstuff once a bad word was published about it. She died believing that statins were, or were not, the answer to everything. The sole remaining item she would willingly eat were organic tomatoes. Did she somehow overlook that article, did it postdate her death or are they still safe from the scrutiny of the Express?"
Busting the attention span myth - "there are statistics too. They say that the average attention span is down from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to eight seconds now. That is less than the nine-second attention span of your average goldfish... All those references lead back to a 2015 report by the Consumer Insights team of Microsoft Canada, who surveyed 2,000 Canadians and also studied the brain activity of 112 people as they carried out various tasks. However, the figure that everyone picked up on - about our shrinking attention spans - did not actually come from Microsoft's research. It appears in the report, but with a citation for another source called Statistic Brain... the number-lovers at Statistic Brain source all their figures. But the sources are infuriatingly vague. And when I contact the listed sources - the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the US National Library of Medicine, and the Associated Press - neither can find any record of research that backs up the stats. My attempts to contact Statistic Brain came to nothing too. I have spoken to various people who dedicate their working lives to studying human attention and they have no idea where the numbers come from either. In fact, they think the idea that attention spans are getting shorter is plain wrong... She studies attention in drivers and witnesses to crime and says the idea of an "average attention span" is pretty meaningless. "It's very much task-dependent. How much attention we apply to a task will vary depending on what the task demand is."... Some also suggest that evidence of ever-shorter shot lengths in films shows attention spans are dwindling. But the academic behind that research says all it shows is that film-makers have got better at trying to grab our attention. There's something else fishy about those attention span statistics too. It turns out that there is no evidence that goldfish - or fish in general - have particularly short attention spans or memories, despite what popular culture suggests."
A Guide to Class Action Lawsuits in Quebec - "Time and again Quebec has been said to be Canada’s “bastion of progressivism” in terms of social and legal innovation. For example, Quebec was Canada’s frontrunner when it came to enacting class action legislation back in the 1970s. In 1978, the province adopted an opt-out class action regime–again–the first in the country. Among the various class action lawsuit definitions used in Canada’s legal system, courts have considered class action lawsuits to be a form of collective remedy offering access to justice, judicial economy, and the deterrence of anti-social behaviour... Quebec’s class action procedure is unique in comparison with other Canadian provinces because it is highly plaintiff-oriented. In Quebec, class actions play an important role in access to justice and are therefore designed to be plaintiff-friendly. For instance, the bar for authorization (known as “certification” in common law jurisdictions) in Quebec is lower than in Canada’s common law provinces. Additionally, class action lawsuits are subject to mandatory case management by a Superior Court judge whose principal task is to ensure that the case will promptly proceed to authorization. To make initiating a class action lawsuit in Quebec easier, the province provides for public funding through the Fonds d’aide aux actions collectives (FAAC), which offers financial assistance to the representative plaintiff to help cover certain legal fees and expenses."
I let my 5-year-old daughter bleach her hair, trolls came for me - "whether it’s blond or pink, doctors advise against dyeing hair for children under 16. “I really don’t think it’s safe to dye or bleach a child’s hair until after puberty, and ideally not until their late teens — at least 16,” Dr. Sejal Shah, a New York dermatological surgeon, told Good Housekeeping. Children’s hair is thinner than adult hair and still susceptible to change as they age and the chemicals in hair dye may cause damage. It is recommended to speak to a pediatrician before dyeing children’s hair or using non-permanent coloring."
"How come there was a theater, swimming pool and a hospital in a place made to exterminate them?"
"Well I would think that the fact that the number of guards at the camp was over 500 and any given time, and peaked at around 3,300 in 1944 had something to do with it. As well as the fact that a large portion of those lived with their families on the premises. I mean Jesus Christ, Parker, did you think about this for even 3 minutes? See me after class"
On Holocaust Denial
A lot of this is about why helicopter parenting is bad
[Comment] I wanted to address all the people who think they are clever today in making so many comparisons to the United States military as terrorists. Please explain this picture. *Man and child behind US soldiers*"
Of course, one problem with this is that "freedom" is a fuzzy concept. People who bomb government buildings for any cause (e.g. anti-abortion) can be labelled "freedom fighters"
Our team of Debt Recovery Specialist that work round the clock
Silent Warrior
Scammer Hunter
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Thanos"
Animals Being FREED For The First Time! - YouTube
"I also dislike the check-in times of after 3pm and check-out times of often around 9am, with hefty additional bills"
"I just booked two holidays in cottages in Cornwall through a commercial cottage rental group; both were cheaper than going through Airbnb. I suspect the Airbnb commissions are finally in need of review and reduction."
"I won't, on principle, pay the service fee, cleaning fee and hand over my passport, driving licence and other documents that Airbnb thinks they need to identify me. There are far better cottages available on other websites for less money."
"In many cases an Airbnb is more expensive than a hotel, where someone else caters for me and cleans my room each day. When I go on holiday I want a break from housework and cooking. I also don’t pay an extra £150 for cleaning when I stay in a hotel."
"I will never use Airbnb again, their review system is biased towards the host. They have appalling customer service, and they pile on extra charges. I know many people who refuse to use them. Advertise on other platforms which offer a better deal and do not exploit guests."
Sur le e prépausal
Being concerned about children's health makes you a troll