Addendum: This orphaned post was originally, from the title, for 3rd February (2), but was wrongly published on 3rd January. But there was already a post on 3rd February (2)...
An 18-Year-Old Had Consensual Sex With a 16-Year-Old. He Went to Jail for 6 Years. - "When Henry was 18, he had sex with a 16-year-old he met on a dating app who said they were 18 too. The 16-year-old's parents found out, summoned the cops, and Henry was charged with a sex offense. He took a plea: no jail time, and seven years on the sex offense registry. Henry's story is one of about 60 that appear in a new book by sociologist Emily Horowitz: From Rage to Reason: Why We Need Sex Crime Laws Based on Facts Not Fear. If you believe that our country's sex offense registries should actually make kids safer, this book will leave you shaking with frustration... After three years with little income—and several hundred dollars a year in payments for court-mandated polygraph tests—Henry moved back in with his parents. The neighbors got up in arms, so all three of them moved to Henry's grandmother's house. "Probation authorities stipulated that Henry had to post signs on each entrance of her house that read, 'no persons under seventeen allowed on this property,'" writes Horowitz. That meant his cousins could no longer visit. At last, Henry found a good job. But when he gave his probation officer his office address, he was told it was too close to a school. Many registries have location requirements that forbid registrants from living, or sometimes working, near any place kids might congregate: a school, a daycare, or a park. (These residency restrictions are worthless when it comes to enhancing public safety.) Henry begged his probation officer to let him keep this hard-won job. The officer said he could continue working until a judge ruled on his request. But when Henry got to court, writes Horowitz: "[H]e was told he was in violation of his probation. The judge said he should have quit immediately upon learning from probation that the office was located too close to a school. Henry explained that he didn't quit because of his pending appeal, as he'd been out of work for months and, additionally, it was a term of his probation that he be employed. "At this point, Henry had only three years left of probation. Due to his infraction, however, the judge issued the harshest ruling possible, sentencing Henry to six years in state prison. The only good thing, he says, is that 'the minute I went to prison, my grandma could take those signs down.'""... Despite the myth of "frightening and high" rearrests, decades of scientific studies have consistently found that recidivism for sex crimes is lower than for almost all other criminal offenses. Registration has not further reduced recidivism, according to studies... one registrant told Horowitz that he and his fellow group therapy participants were required to "report all sexual thoughts, including dreams, to their providers during group sessions." "He says he once watched a treatment provider berate someone for an 'inappropriate' dream"... "[W]e were told we couldn't masturbate to thoughts of former loved ones. Since they were no longer in our lives, it was inappropriate. We now had to write a fantasy script, with a specific two-page instruction on how to write it properly. We would then present our writing in group, of our detailed sexually appropriate fantasy, and read it aloud." After weeks of corrections and rewrites, he told Horowitz, "We would then be granted permission to use the approved fantasy script to masturbate to.""
Of course, if you oppose putting someone urinating in public on a sex offender registry, you're a creep and a pedophile
A TikToker is going viral for making 'perpetual stew,' a medieval kind of soup that cooks nonstop for days - "Annie Rauwerda is documenting her experience making a medieval soup called "perpetual stew," and TikTok is eating it up. Perpetual stew is made by constantly simmering and continuously replenishing the ingredients of a single batch of stew. According to How Stuff Works, what makes this 14th century Polish stew unique is that it's often "skimmed and strained, leaving behind only dark, rich broth." Consumers of the stew get to taste the complex flavor profile left behind by all of the different ingredients that have been added during its different iterations... "This stew changed every aspect of my entire life," a taste-tester named Tessa Bury said"
It lasted 60 days. Sadly, it was vegetarian.
Beef Noodle Soup In Bangkok Has Been Simmering For 45 Years - " There's food that's old. There's food that has gone bad. And then there's soup that has been simmering for 45 years. In Bangkok, customers can't get enough of the latter at Wattana Panich, a noodle soup joint in the trendy Ekkamai neighborhood, where third-generation owner Nattapong Kaweeantawong wants to clear up what he thinks is a popular misconception about his beef soup. "Lots of people think we never clean the pot," he says. "But we clean it every evening. We remove the soup from the pot, then keep a little bit simmering overnight.""
John Smedley on X - "The difference between a cult and a religion is with a cult the founder knows it’s bullshit. In a religion that guy’s dead - Joe Rogan"
ZUBY: on X - "The 'mental health crisis' is mostly a physical, spiritual, and relational health crisis. Until it's recognised as such, I expect it to keep getting worse. But there are people who want that because your 'depression' and 'anxiety' are lucrative... If I were a unscrupulous Big Pharma executive I would want as many people using my products for life as possible."
The Daily Beast on X - "Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was handed a $12,000 fine by the Federal Election Commission for illegally fundraising for Stop Socialism Now PAC in 2020. According to a letter from an FEC attorney, she has 30 days to pay the fine."
Oilfield Rando on X - "Hey remember the other day when Sam Bankman Fried got all his $100 million illegal campaign finance charges dropped?"
Meme - "WHEN YOU BOTH KNOW IT'LL END IN DISASTER BUT YOU DON'T CARE *crash dummies in intimate position*"
Meme - "i love how potato in french is pomme de terre, which pretty much means “earth apple.” like what stupid frenchman saw this: image and said “zis petite légume looks like a, how you say, APPLE! hmmm… but it grows in ze earth… HON HON HON! MAIS OUI! C’EST UNE POMME DE TERRE!”"
"j'adore comment ananas se dit pineapple en anglais, ce qui veut littéralement dire “pomme de pin”, genre quel type anglais a vu ça: et s'est dit : “ow cette étrange big fruit ressemble à une, how do you say, POMME! hmmm… mais plutôt une pomme qui pousse dans les pins… HU HU HU! OH YES, IT’S A PINEAPPLE!”"
michaonthemoon: yaoibutts: I love how potato... - back from the grave for more shitpost adventures - "fun fact: the word apple once described any kind of fruit. what we now call pinecones were at the time called pineapples, basically the fruit of pine trees. when English people first discovered this weird fucking spiky fruit, they decided it looked like a pinecone (which they were still calling a pineapple), so they called it a pineapple. that led to confusion since for decades thereafter no one knew if you meant a spiky fruit or a conifer’s seed pod thing. but in short order pineapple had come to more often refer to the fruit, so everyone just kind of decided a new word was needed for the other thing, and they started calling it a pinecone. this happened in the 17th century. it wasn’t until the 18th century that the definition of the word apple started being narrowed down to a single kind of fruit. this history has had some other effects, like for example the fact that the forbidden fruit in the bible is commonly imagined as an apple in the modern sense, when in fact it’s never identified as anything other than a “fruit”. pomme in French has basically the same history - it used to refer to all fruits. so pomme de terre was a “fruit of the earth” (which is not a bad way to refer to a vegetable, really). as the definition of pomme became more and more specific, pomme de terre seemed more and more strange."
To Left, ‘MAGA’ Republicans Are Greater Threat Than Hamas - "“MAGA and Christian Nationalism: Bigger threat to America than Hamas could ever be” was the original headline on a vicious article published at the left-wing website Salon.com on Thursday. The piece, written by Brian Karem, drew considerable attention on social media as many condemned the thesis and the tone of the piece... The piece itself reads like a poorly written screed of a teenage capital-“A” atheist who thinks that anyone who embraces or even respects and admires the 2,000-year-old Christian tradition that built the West is a moron. Even the editors at Salon seem to have acknowledged how ridiculous and inflammatory Karem’s initial headline was. They later changed it to the slightly less caustic “Far-right MAGA theocrats: Most dangerous threat to America.”... the Karem piece deserves a little extra attention because it reveals something the Right needs to understand about the modern Left. Some conservatives on social media were shocked that Salon published Karem’s piece, but in a sense I’m glad they did. Its mindset is becoming ubiquitous on the Left. Do they really think that traditional Americans—who, for instance, still believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman—are worse than vicious terrorists who glorify in the torture and slaughter of innocent people (and who would happily do so to their LGBTQ “allies” if they could)? In many cases, yes... The Right is the real enemy that must be destroyed. All other threats—if they even see them as threats at all—are treated with a shrug or even an embrace. The much-mocked “queer Jews for Palestine” phenomenon isn’t ignorance; it’s an alliance. Right-leaning voices have been purged from increasingly monolithic left-wing college campuses. Yet, Ivy League schools—so willing to trample on free speech in the name of preventing “microaggressions”—have suddenly rediscovered their attachment to free speech now that openly antisemitic supporters of Hamas have erupted on campus. When Republican-appointed Judge Kyle Duncan of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals appeared to speak to a small group at Stanford Law School in March, the campus Left melted down. Here’s how The New York Times described the situation: “Students frequently interrupted him with heckling. One protester called for his daughters to be raped, Duncan said. When he asked Stanford administrators to calm the crowd, the associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion walked to the lectern and instead began her remarks by criticizing him. ‘For many people here, your work has caused harm,’ she told him.” These weren’t just undergraduate students at a no-name school, they were law students at one of the most prestigious universities in the country. It isn’t just the collegiate institutional Left that thinks this way. There was a revealing moment way back during the Democratic presidential primaries in 2015. The presidential candidates were asked in a debate: “Which enemy are you most proud of?” Almost all mentioned domestic opponents, such as the “National Rifle Association,” the “coal lobby,” and “Republicans.” The notable exception was former Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., a veteran of the Vietnam War, who said, “I’d have to say the enemy soldier that threw the grenade that wounded me, but he’s not around right now to talk to.” His answer was treated as bizarre and awkward. How strange to think of an enemy on a foreign battlefield as a greater enemy than your neighbor with differing political views. In 2023, Webb’s thoughts about national reconciliation and learning the lessons from our Civil War fall on deaf ears in the Democratic Party. What’s more common to hear is angry, threatening diatribes from Biden calling “MAGA” Republicans—by which he means any Republican who isn’t actively aiding the Left’s agenda—a threat to democracy. So much for “normalcy.” The Left’s mentality is “all enemies to the Right.” When you combine that mentality with the fact that they control most of the West’s most powerful institutions, from academia and Hollywood to Big Business and Big Tech, you can see why our civilization is in such a crisis."
Screenshot of deleted tweet
When your hatred for your political enemies knows no bounds
Fake Publications in Biomedical Science: Red-flagging Method Indicates Mass Production - "Countries with the highest RFP proportion were Russia, Turkey, China, Egypt, India and China (39%-55%)."
Meme - "In the 80s did parents really just let their kids go out wherever or is this only in movies?"
"They absolutely did, and we didn't have cellphones either."
"80's kid here. Yes, I basically ran around the neighborhood until it got dark most nights. I would play in a small grove near some train tracks about 5-6 blocks from where I lived, or a city park a few blocks the other direction, or a friend's yard. We would ride bikes for miles, skateboard, play baseball, build forts, etc. And I lived in a city. My parents both worked so the kids were all "latchkey" and took care of ourselves."
"Yep. And don't try to come in the house to get food/drink or use the bathroom because you might get yelled at and forced to stay inside the rest of the day because "it's not a goddamn revolving door'. We drank hose water and ate wild blackberries."
Meme - wyatt @martsharter: "The reason it's funny is black people have created an ethno religion around the spice meme and watching a woman harmlessly refute it then becomes a giant attack on blackness. It's hilarious"
On Zoe Barrie
Religion In Remission on X - "Ever notice that most people do not “find god” when they are happy? It’s because the psychological tactics of religion work best on a an emotional and vulnerable mind. When people are at their lowest, they seek something to fill the void. Religion is the best predator."
By this logic, therapists are predators too
Meme - Roman Soldier: "Run...! Tell them Goths are comming!"
Roman Soldier 2: "Hurry..! We cannot hold much longer...! Rome must be warned..!"
*Goth girls swarming soldiers*
Meme - "I'm 23 working a dead-end job for less than living wage, my only friends are old people and I smoke a disturbing amount of weed to escape. Self-loathing is lonely, come join the party."
">Hahaha I love how many people have mentioned my lips. I got it from my Mama! I said roast me not flatter me :p
But you came here fishing for compliments, didn't you? I mean, you know you're good looking. I'm sure men are all trying to fuck you, and will be until you get a bit older and your looks fade. You lips are a huge asset, major DSL, and I'm sure you get complimented constantly on your lips and your eyes. You did everything in your power to show them off in this pic. So you gave people nothing to work with and you know it. You carefully tailored this post to be as un-roastable as possible. Then, to make it seem like that's not what you were doing, you wrote a title saying you don't make money and smoke a lot of weed, acting like it was some huge self-deprecation, except:
This is Reddit, people fucking LOVE weed around here. If anything, admitting you smoke like a chimney would only endear you to most redditors..
Pretty girls don't need to have careers. Unlike with men, it's purely optional for girls like you, since we both know you can get a man any time you want. It would be trivial for you to get a reasonably attractive man who made over $100k a year to marry you and impregnate you, at which point the fact that you have no career becomes meaningless.
The true roast here is that you have no value as a person apart from your looks, specifically your lips, eyes, halir, and face in general. Your body is almost certainly nothing special other than the fact that you're not fat, or else you would have worn something fitted to show it off. So you're flat, probably no ass either. Just a skinny chick with a meh body and a really fuckable face. It's pretty common for girls like you to drift aimlessly through life with no real goals or ambition because your life is already on easy mode and you have no fear of ending up in a bad place. You mention that you're super poor, yet you smoke tons of weed. Weed is expensive. You're obviously not paying for IE. You're getting it for free one way or another because of your face. You'l spend your 20s wasting the best years of your life in that dead-end job smoking weed all the time. You'll date lots of "Chad" guys who will fuck your face fora while and get lots of fond memories of it, but who will ultimately get bored of nutting in and on you, and move on to a more fulfiling relationship with a better long-term girlfriend. You'll ride the "dick carousel" in this way and waste your 20s on dead end relationships like your dead end job. In your late 20s to mid 30s sometime, you'll panic and finally know fear. Fear of being alone and failing at life. So you' so what all the other many, many pretty women do at that age once they realize they won't be young and pretty forever: you'll settle. You'l find a guy who makes good money who is "good enough to stand being around, and you'll convince yourself you love him and lie to yourself that you're not "setting" even though that's exactly what you're doing. So you'll get married and maybe pregnant in order to assuage your fears of aging alone and poor. But then once your fears are gone, you'll realize that setting sucks and you'll be bored. How you deal with that boredom will define your life. Do you Just smoke weed for the next 50 years? Could work. Do you cheat? Lots of drama, might backfire, or might get you an "upgrade to a guy who looks better on paper and stimulates you more. will suck for husband #1 though, as if you'd care. Do you throw yourself into spending your husband's money on things like luxuries and travel? This is the safest choice and the most popular one. Will it be all of the above? It's choose your own adventure, except this is really the only significant choice you'll be making in your life. It's not a life I'd want, either as you, or as your male partner, but then again, I don't want to waste my life smoking weed and living on my looks, I understand that we only live once, for a relatively short time, and then we die and are gone forever, so 1 place a bit more value on my ife than you do."
When you do the job but get banned
Gen Z bosses: Her tuition agency pulled in a six-figure profit in six months | The Straits Times - "Ms Brooke Lim did not have tuition as a student but now, the 19-year-old runs a tuition agency that earned her a six-figure profit in the second half of 2022 alone. She also has a waiting list of about 150 students for O-level classes that will begin only next year. Ms Lim is better known to her Gen Z peers as @sugaresque on TikTok, where she has more than 184,000 followers... she turned the mundane routine of tuition into an engaging lifestyle business, including holding a one-off lesson at a five-star hotel ballroom and a Farewell Soiree for graduating students at the National Museum of Singapore. Students pay $85 to $110 a week for a two-hour lesson, which includes a 24-hour turnaround marking service geared towards their needs, and access to Classicle Club’s online learning platform. Happy students spread the word on social media, which boosted her business. “We don’t spend on traditional marketing like Facebook or YouTube ads. We don’t give out fliers,” Ms Lim says. “We’re willing to spend on student welfare.”... While her TikTok feed is upbeat, Ms Lim admits that the life of an entrepreneur can be lonely, as much of the interaction she has tends to be transactional. “It’s not like in school where you make friends for the sake of it. I miss that quite a bit. But I’ve also come to realise that you can have genuine interaction even if it’s transactional”"
TikTok influencer and tutor Brooke Lim apologises for plagiarism in blog essay | The Straits Times
Reading self-help books can create new problems | The Straits Times - " Here’s an unpopular opinion: Life hacks may be a delusion. Searching for a quick and dirty way involving minimal effort and time to solve a complex issue can be a fool’s errand. There are few shortcuts in life. Neuroscience warns us of the importance of distinguishing between systematic/central processing – which involves methodically sieving through all possible options before coming to a decision based on assessed parameters – and heuristic/peripheral processing – essentially shortcuts to decision-making like asking friends or consulting the Internet for recommendations. You might discover a cool life hack, but fail to find the profound change only a thorough, evidence-based investigation can deliver. A counsellor or life-coach working through your issues with you might be a more effective way. The self-help genre also misses out on three things. First, most tend to attribute immense weightage to the individual and his or her ability to overcome some of our most long-standing and deeply ingrained limitations. But we are a product of the structures of our social, political, economic and historical context shaped by a multitude of factors and influences. We learn the best way around problems from our schools, family, peers and most often friends, for which the experience of one person without conclusive data on the extrapolation to a wider population may be less generalisable. So trying to follow something in a self-help guide can be pointless if one does not first discern how much of the problem is the product of one’s hard-coded belief systems, emotional and cognitive associations, and conditioning. While many self-help books do talk about breaking these preconceived associations and the now widely overused term of “limiting beliefs”, they are not a substitute for a practical reality check, which requires actually putting yourself out there, learning from failure and experiences, and essentially figuring things out according to the circumstances of your particular situation. In short, allowing life to be your best teacher. Second, the problem may not be you. Much of the genre focuses on the idea that sheer willpower can help us shape outcomes as the universal answer to most problems. This can create a problematic obsession over what’s wrong with ourselves when we fail. We assume that we can change our fortunes if we change ourselves while wholly ignoring the possibility that our environment or people around us might be the cause. Take a toxic workplace relationship as an example. You can become the best version of yourself despite the challenges and that can help you cope with the situation for a long time. You might even get very good at adapting to it, thinking you have little choice. But at some point you need to face the inevitability that the problem resides in the environment and leaving it may be the only sensible solution. We may also cling to a wholly inaccurate label but relatable label we identify with. The pandemic has upended lives and created conflicting emotions around the future. But if someone fails to recognise this and imagines the cause is their negative outlook towards life, they may fail to accept the reality that this feeling too will pass. Third, immersing yourself in the world of self-help can breed caustic habits. When the focus is on self-care, self-help, or seeking positivity and joy for oneself, that search for happiness can become toxic. We end up avoiding anything painful, hard or appearing to threaten our inner balance. Worse, we might become blind to the painful challenges others are going through when we get absorbed in our own trials and tribulations. Taken to the extreme, self-help books can feed an unhealthy narcissism that prioritises personal issues over focusing externally on altruistic pursuits and contributions to a wider society. We stop looking outside ourselves to find meaning in the world or solutions through purposeful connections. We cease to put ourselves out there"
Meme - "MY GERMAN GIRLFRIEND LIKES .TO RATE MY SEXUAL PERFORMANCE ON A SCALE OF 1-10. LAST NIGHT WE TRIED ANAL, SHE KEPT YELLING 9. THAT'S THE BEST I HAVE DONE"
"What the fuck! Take it out!"
Meme - "Looking at the night sky makes me realize how puny and insignificant 'Lam on the cosmic scale"
"I am the result of 14 billion years of cosmic evolution. I am a thermodynamic miracle. I am the waking universe looking back at itself."
Do higher government wages induce less corruption? Cross-country panel evidence - "Prior studies have lent mixed evidence on the effectiveness of increasing government wages to reduce corruption. Based on a dynamic principal–agent model, this study uses cross-country data over ten years (1999–2008) and various statistical models to present updated evidence. Our analyses show that increasing government relative wage by one unit (i.e., by the amount of the average manufacturing wage in a country) is associated with a decrease in the level of perceived corruption by 0.26 units. The effect appears to be particularly significant for non-OECD countries (where corruption is more rampant) or for countries with a relatively low government wage. The overall policy implication is: increasing government wages can help curtail corruption, but solely relying on increasing government wages to reduce corruption can be very costly. For example, to reduce the level of corruption in non-OECD countries to that in OECD countries, the government wage would have to be increased by about seven times."
Effects of public sector wages on corruption: Wage inequality matters - "The paper uses a new country-level, panel data set to study the effect of public sector wages on corruption. The results show that wage inequality in the public sector is an important determinant of the effectiveness of anti-corruption policies. Increasing the wages of public officials could help reduce corruption in countries with low public sector wage inequality. In countries where public sector wages are highly unequal, however, raising the wages of government employees could increase corruption. These results are robust to a wide range of empirical model specifications, estimation methods, and distributional assumptions. Combining increases in public sector wages with policies affecting wage distribution could help policy makers design cost-effective programs to reduce corruption in their countries."
Thread by @cremieuxrecueil on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Radiant Energy Group recently published a massive international survey of opinions on nuclear energy. It's full of some things you might already know, but it also contains some surprises🧵 For example, did you know French and German nuclear support isn't that different? Nuclear does have less support than other green technologies, but in most places, it still receives net support. This apparently low level of support looks higher when survey participants are asked about their ranked supported for different energy sources. This support increases further if you subset to people who are techno-optimists or tech-neutral when it comes to fighting against climate change. Unfortunately, most people aren't aware about nuclear is exceptionally clean. Even larger numbers think nuclear waste is a major point of worry. The Simpsons has done incredible damage to the reputation of our best energy source. Onto the demographics! In some countries, the old are the most supportive of nuclear. In others, it's the young. If you've seen other surveys on the demographics of nuclear support this one won't surprise you: men are universally more supportive of nuclear. If you've seen other surveys on the relationship between science knowledge and nuclear support, this won't surprise you either: the most knowledgeable are (almost) universally the most supportive of nuclear. Despite being the current best option for providing reliable, low-cost, and clean energy, being concerned about the climate generally predicts less support for nuclear. When climate concern is represented by nonprofit membership, there's a similar result.Despite the nuclear industry being aligned with numerous (typically) left-wing goals from protecting the environment to supporting labor unionization and high employee safety standards, it's the economically right wing that's more supportive of nuclear. There's more in the report, but I'll end this thread on a happy note: globally, there's more support for additional nuclear builds than for additional nuclear shutdowns."
Frédéric Simon on X - "French gvt just tabled a new law that basically scraps renewable energy targets in France and reinstates nuclear as the main source of low-carbon electricity."
