Instagram models in Dubai | Prostitution or smart business? - "nearly every guy he knows from Dubai or the UAE, travel to Belarus at least once per year to “let off some steam”. For anyone who doesn’t know Belarus is like Vegas but ten times worse if you want it to be. Anything you want is possible with the right budget including women, drugs and guns. We looked throughly through one Instagram models photos and tracked her movements for 3 months.Over the period of 3 months she traveled to Dubai, LA, Marrakech, Dubai again, Bali and Amsterdam, whilst living in London.We calculated with average flights and the price of the hotels that she stayed in, that she was spending £20,000 per month. This included travel costs, living costs, maintaining a London address and lifestyle. It also meant that she would have zero savings, so perhaps she’s earning more than what we expected each month. Either she’s getting paid a bomb from brands, which is entirely possible with her roughly 500k following, or her 4 trips to Dubai this year have been extremely rewarding.It’s strange that she’s traveled the world, yet visited nowhere more than once except Dubai. We’re not going to name-names in this article because we have no concrete evidence, but it’s hard to believe someone under 20 years old could spend £20,000 per month for a year straight from nothing but brand sponsors when Instagram marketing is dying fast... What’s the alternative — sit in an office 5 days per week earning just enough to get by, whilst getting hit on by every man in the office?Perhaps a couple of nights per year with a wealthy paying customer is worth living for the rest of the year like a millionaire."
Norwegian man who was jailed 10 weeks for assaulting cabby back in court for retrial - "Arne Corneliussen had earlier pleaded guilty to hurting Chan Chuan Heng at about 1 am on Sept 22 last year, at the junction of Circular and North Canal roads, by grabbing Chan's neck from behind and choking him after the cabby fell down.A charge of slapping the cabby's cheek was taken into consideration during sentencing. Corneliussen, 51, a Singapore permanent resident, also paid the victim $30,000 in compensation, and lost his job as a programme management director with multinational logistics company DHL.After he was convicted and sentenced, however, two Singaporean men who read a newspaper report on the case and had witnessed the altercation between Chan and Corneliussen came forward to say that Chan, 47, was actually the aggressor... the High court quashed Corneliussen's conviction and sentence, and sent the case back to the State Courts for a retrial... His lawyer Terence Seah had said that Corneliussen had pleaded guilty because he was too drunk to remember the details of the fight, and the police had eyewitness accounts that he had attacked Chan.Two passers-by, who had pulled Corneliussen away from Chan, had told police that they had seen the Norwegian chasing the taxi driver and choking him.But Mr Ayub said that he saw Chan punch Corneliussen on the left side of his head during an argument about fares, causing the latter to squat down in a daze.When Corneliussen asked the driver why he had hit him, Chan purportedly tried to run away. Corneliussen allegedly caught up with him and pinned him down, before being pulled away."
The perils of pushing for "assholes" to be repentant and to plead guilty, and of eyewitness testimony
A free man after retrial, Norwegian says: Who will hire me now? - "Corneliussen and Chan had a disagreement over the taxi fare as the cabby had wanted to charge a flat fee rather than use the meter, according to witnesses' testimonies.Judge Hamidah remarked that the two new witnesses, valet Mohamed Ayub Shaik Dawood and his friend Roslan Zainal, were "obviously more sympathetic" to the accused, but they had no reason to lie... He was fired from his previous job as a director with DHL and has been unemployed since December 2014.When he was sacked, he had been working at the international logistics company for 29 years.He also incurred a hefty legal fee and his personal reputation was affected, he said.Said Corneliussen: "Just Google my name and you will see this case everywhere. It will be difficult to look for another job as I am a convict.""
Cabby who lied about fight to police jailed - "A taxi driver was sentenced to a total of 19 weeks in jail yesterday for punching a Norwegian man on the head and giving false information to the police.Chan Chuan Heng, 48, was found guilty after a four-day trial of punching the head of Mr Arne Corneliussen at the intersection of Circular Road and North Canal Road at about 1am on Sept 22, 2014.He was also convicted of giving false information to the police the next day. Chan claimed then that Mr Corneliussen slapped him immediately after he told Mr Corneliussen that he was going to the toilet... Judge Nakhoda agreed with prosecutors that the assault was unprovoked and came after Mr Corneliussen rightfully told Chan he would report him to the Land Transport Authority for insisting on a flat fare.He also found that Chan was clearly the aggressor in the incident.The judge agreed with the prosecution that Chan's motive in giving false information was malicious, as he wanted to get Mr Corneliussen in trouble with the police.Chan also deliberately did not submit the in-car camera footage that would have captured the sound of his earlier altercation with Mr Corneliussen, and would have cast the entire incident in a different light.The fact that he did not recant despite the evidence against him showed a distinct lack of remorse on his part, said the judge.He added that the correct thing to do would have been for Chan to return the $30,000 compensation to Mr Corneliussen. But if he insisted he was still entitled to it, he should sue Mr Corneliussen for damages."
Canada's incomplete metrication - "paper sizes. Most of the world has standardized internationally on ISO 216. The common international paper format is an A4 sheet that measures 210 by 297 millimeters. This sounds like odd numbers, but there is logic in this. The height to width has a ratio that is the square root of 2 (which is 1.4142). The base A0 series has an area of exactly one square meter, and each following version (A1 through A10) is exactly one half that size. So A4 is exactly one 16th of a square meter in size. By comparison, a letter-sized sheet of paper measures 8.5 by 11 inches (or 215.9 by 279.4 millimeters). Other North American formats (legal, ledger, or tabloid) are also rooted in tradition and do not follow a particular system. Again, North America displays a strong case of "international standard aversion", just as with metrication."
A foie gras ban is long overdue – but what about other foods made from animal suffering? | Jacy Reese - "Foie gras causes understandable outrage. But there are countless other foods made from animal suffering. So which are the worst offenders?In my book The End of Animal Farming, I try to determine which foods are most unethical... Consuming smaller animals tends to lead to far more suffering per calorie because it takes far more animals, outweighing most other factors. In fact, chickens and fish comprise 95% of all farmed animals. This is worsened by the fact that small animals often endure worse living conditions because they are so easily factory farmed... One of the worst ways for an animal to die is being chewed to death while still alive. This practice is particularly common with aquatic animals like fish and octopus and relatively small animals. The biggest suffering per calorie may come from the tiniest animals, such as a popular Chinese dish called “drunken shrimp”. A large number of tiny shrimp are submerged in alcohol and eaten alive, surviving long enough to squirm in the mouth due to the alcohol. Other aquatic animals are boiled alive, ripped or cut apart, or even salted to death... Shrimp certainly have simpler nervous systems – consisting of only a few ganglia – but with our limited knowledge of how sentience manifests, can we really justify a claim that they are a thousand times less sentient?... if we’re banning foie gras, there’s a good case for banning other foods made from birds, as well as fish products, and definitely any food that involves eating live animals. Then again, with plant-based foods getting better and cheaper every year, and cell-cultured meat right around the corner, maybe it’s time to stop eating animals altogether."
First they came for the shark's fin. Then they came for the foie gras. Then they came for the bird's nest. Then they came for the veal...
So much for the 'myth' of the slippery slope
The New York Times - Posts - "The New York City Council overwhelmingly passed legislation on Wednesday that will ban the sale of foie gras in the city, one of the country’s largest markets, beginning in 2022."
In the comments, many people are calling for veal to be banned
Stoners cheered when Canada legalised cannabis. How did it go so wrong? - "the Canadian industry has been driven by vulture capitalism and wishful thinking... The main problem Canada’s smokers and growers faced was access: too few retail shops were able to open to serve the eager new market... where there was product available, the price was almost double that of the illegal market. C$5.59 to C$10.23 per gram (or over £40 a quarter ounce). That was caused by tax burdens and overheads: the legal market has to comply with regulations on fungicide and pesticide residue levels, and draconian security requirements for grow sites, such as huge vaults in which to store the cannabis and record-keeping for every person who enters these vaults.AdvertisementThe illegal market, meanwhile, is completely unregulated – and thriving because of this. Statistics Canada, a state agency, reports that just 29% of cannabis users buy all of their product from a legal source. Four in 10 Canadians told the organisation that they bought at least some cannabis from illegal sources in 2019. The next problem was that many stores sold poor-quality grass, with smokers complaining that it had been poorly dried and cured, and tasted bad. Modern cannabis users are accustomed to a range of flavours, from lemon to mango, pineapple, strawberry and pine. These flavours are derived from the plant’s natural aroma profile, which skilled growers preserve by careful breeding, correct harvesting and slow, cautious curing of the fragrant flowers.Many players in the new mass market often skipped these steps in the pursuit of profit, says David Brown, a British Columbia-based cannabis industry analyst. “Many consumers have had complaints about high prices and what is perceived as lower quality, especially the tendency of many of the legal dried flower products to be overly dried, often from a rushed or improper curing and drying process.” Why would anyone drive a few miles up the road to score bad weed from many of the government shops when your regular black-market dealer lives nearby, has better product and brings it to your door for half the price? It’s worth reflecting, also, on the psychology of some of these users. “For a long time, cannabis has been the mark of the rebel, the outsider, the outlaw,” says Brown. “A lot of the people who complain about ‘bad weed’ and so-called ‘fake legalisation’ are doing so because parts of their countercultural identity have been altered forever by this law change. Canada has made cannabis boring – and that was kind of the point.” With few shops to sell to and customers clinging to their traditional dealers, the new cannabis corporations found themselves holding a glut of product... The rollout of retail shops was left, in many cases, to inexperienced officials in provincial government department... In a stinging irony, medical patients – the very people whose decades of activism had driven the wider reforms, faced cannabis shortages and a steep increase in price after legalisation as suppliers diverted their medical product in bulk to the new recreational market rather than in hundreds of smaller deals to medical patients... The early euphoria in the cannabis stock market has been replaced by a major dose of paranoia. All cannabis stocks have tanked, with an average 50% wipeout in value right across Canada and the US in the last year... Financing has dried up for the new industry, and small-scale retail investors – often young professionals investing via smartphone apps – have lost large sums of money... What happens if you just legalise this drug? It’s a question no one other than Canada has ever really asked. My view is that we have long known that all drug laws are unworkable, illogical, unjustifiable, unscientific, counterproductive and generate countless unintended consequences – in fact, drugs laws often create the exact opposite outcomes to those desired. But ironically, and with a beautifully stoned logic, it turns out that legalising cannabis in Canada has generated just as many challenges as it solved.What Canada’s experience demonstrates is that cannabis legalisation does not instantly deliver some great social panacea. There is no promised land. But we should never lose sight of this essential truth: Canadians can no longer be jailed for growing and eating and smoking certain flowers. That is a huge, fundamental step forward, no matter what the stock market indices say."