Police robot told woman to go away when she tried to report crime-then sang song - "Cogo Guebara rushed over to the motorized police officer and pushed its emergency alert button on seeing the brawl break out in Salt Lake Park, Los Angeles, last month. But instead of offering assistance, the egg-shaped robot, whose official name is HP RoboCop, barked at Guebara to ‘Step out of the way’. To add insult to injury, the high-tech device then rolled away while humming an ‘intergalactic tune’, pausing periodically to say ‘Please keep the park clean.’... Local Police Chief Cosme Lozano says the robots, which cost between $60,000 and $70,000 a year to lease, are still in a trial phase and that their alert buttons have not yet been activated. He said that law enforcement have not yet started advertising the robots crime-fighting activities... Other versions of the same model have previously hit the headlines after one fell into a fountain in Washington DC. And a third HP RoboCop struck a child while patrolling a mall in California’s Silicon Valley."
Mustsharenews.com - Posts | Facebook - "Singapore ranks #4 in bubble tea spending in Southeast Asia. π Here's how we compare with our neighbours."
Too bad this isn't PPP corrected. But it does seem Singaporeans drink the most bubble tea in SEA
Wake Up, Singapore - Posts | Facebook - "Less than 50% of people support the death penalty for drug trafficking. Support for the death penalty isn't as overwhelming as we might think."
Lots of ignorant people were bashing the methodology of this poll
Meme - "Admin Warning: Using laugh reacts as a passive aggressive gesture is viewed as bullying behavior. If a pattern of rule breaking behavior is observed, you will be removed from the group. Cheers"
"I'll save you the time and remove myself. I barely post there anyway and I will laugh at what I want to laugh at. It's also really weird for you to PM me like this."
Meme - Omiroro Renee Therese Oni-Eseleh: "I bet you thought that whole "laugh at my comment and get banned from the group" thing was an idle threat, huh? Guess who's laughing now? (It's me!)
Facebook group admins are losers
Meme - @emloubarlow Dr Emma Louise Barlow: "Just saw a job ad for a Latin teacher. Ad specified that successful applicant must be a native speaker of the language. Good luck with that."
A couple used 2 pole dancers for their gender-reveal party and the mom-to-be said it was a 'magical moment' - "Cristina Scarlevschi, who found out she was having a boy during the party, told Insider it was a magical moment. Scarlevschi is the founder of Pole Addict, a pole-dancing studio in ChiΘinΔu, Moldova."
Meme - "How to Not Get Raped in India *women with cow heads*"
Meme - "I WILL NOT LIVE IN a POD *gaming chair and table with guns around*
EAT BUGS *prawns*"
Meme - "Still ended up on the back of the bus huh?"
"That shit made me laugh more than I should have. Lo! watching me from downtown ey. I see you I'm about to pull up. Gotta love optic glint. Send me a selfie."
"Ummm okay but I'm taking a shit"
πΉππππππππ π - Posts | Facebook - "Museums ask people to recreate works of art at home, and here are 30 of the best."
Leaf Sheep: The Only Animal That Can Photosynthesize - "Leaf sheep are one of the strangest kinds of animals on the planet. They look like a farm animal, act like a plant, and live in the sea! The little sea slugs are technically animals, but like plants, they get most of their energy from the sun. When leaf sheep eat algae, they suck out the chloroplasts and incorporate them into their own bodies in a process called kleptoplasty." “This process, which otherwise can only be performed by single-celled organisms, essentially makes them solar-powered slugs!”... They’re only about 5 mm long and can be found in shallow marine waters in Japan, Indonesia and the Philippines"
This Sheep Cafe In Korea Shares Viral Photos Of A Sheep Getting Washed - "The cafe opened its doors back in 2011 when the trend of animal cafes was just starting to grow. People on TripAdvisor seem to have loved their visits to the Thanks Nature Cafe, so next time you end up in Seoul, why not visit it?"
Bryan Griffin on Twitter - "New York Gov. Kathy Hochul tells Republicans to "jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong...you are not New Yorkers"" "The only type of unity the left cares about is unity of thought."
Thai couple leave their snail dinner $28,000 richer - "The man, Sittidate Chaiwan, took his 27-year-old girlfriend Patjariya Gatip to the restaurant to celebrate her birthday. While Patjariya was eating a snail, she bit on something hard, and when she spat it out she discovered a round, orange stone resembling a pearl. A friend dining with the couple joked that they might become millionaires while commenting that the stone looked similar to a Melo pearl. After searching the internet, the couple were shocked to discover that real Melo pearls can cost over 1 million baht (approximately $27,747)."
9-year-old fills lip balm tube with cheese so she can eat in class - "A resourceful 9-year-old student in St. Louis loves cheese so much, she can hardly get through a day of school without it. That’s why she decided to MacGyver a way to sneakily snack during class by filling an empty lip balm tube with a stick of cheese. Valerie Schremp Hahn shared her daughter’s handiwork on Twitter... Schremp Hahn said her daughter will actually be rewarded for her classroom transgression by the school principal, who plans to give the girl a “shout-out” in the school newsletter."
Tank.Sinatra on Twitter - "Too young for Facebook
Too old for TikTok
Too ugly for Instagram
Too stupid for Twitter
Where do I go"
Meme - "We're adding an extra free month to your Nova updates! Why? Logan, the main engineer on your (hopefully) favorite Mac text editor Nova, has been working non-stop since shipping Nova 1. He's made it an incredible app, release after release, adding so much new stuff. But... we want Logan to take a break. And we don't want him to be stressed while doing it. Our never-ending drive to add new features to Nova and make your investment even more worthwhile can make it pretty tough to, well, take a vacation. So, we had an idea. We are going to add one free month to your Nova updates, to make up for Logan's quick vacation - and to hopefully put his mind at ease while he's away. There's nothing for you to do here, just enjoy an extra month of updates."
Meme - "Story Story Story
Bad pun
Get out
Worse pun
Even worse pun
This is why I love this website"
Damn tumblr
Viral Post Generator - "Use AI to write the perfect Linkedin post"
Meme - "What a confusing time it must be for this random local weatherman named andrew tate Andrew Tate"
AndrewTateKLTV: "Showers and thunderstorms continue for northeastern counties of East Texas this evening, and more rain in on the way. A Flood Watch remains in effect for the northern half of East Texas, though southern counties could later be added."
"You fucking wife beater"
Meme - "Men will turn 4 and base their whole personality off of one of these *Dinosaur, construction tractor, truck, space rocket*"
Meme - ">Tfw France embraced the (Gallic) Vercingetorix as something like the "first 'French' hero," and all the artworks of him just show him surrendering"
Heavy Machinery Reportedly Cracked the Hagia Sophia’s Marble Floors Into Pieces, Raising Concerns About Its Preservation - "A number of marble tiles on the floor of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, which was turned back into a mosque in 2020 after serving as a historical museum for decades, have reportedly been cracked by heavy machinery used to clean the building last week. According to the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet, a tour guide on the site said, “This historic building has faced tremendous damage. When Hagia Sophia was a museum, people visited it with great respect. It’s like a fairground now.” The UNESCO World Heritage Site is considered to be one of the most important religious and cultural sites in the world, held in special regard by both Christians and Muslims alike. Built between 532 and 537 by the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I, when the city was known as Constantinople, it is one of the greatest examples of Byzantine-era architecture. It was initially the largest Christian cathedral in the world, but was converted into a mosque following the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453. Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk turned Hagia Sophia into a museum in 1935, declaring it be “open to the visits of all nations and religions.” Its recent change in status from a museum back into a mosque sparked controversy across the heritage world. It also meant an administrative change too, since Hagia Sophia went from the control of the Department of Antiquities, which is part of the Ministry of Culture, to the Department of Religious Affairs. Throughout the building’s long and storied history, countless relics and mosaics have been lost, stolen or damaged. Since its reconversion into a mosque, reports have surfaced documenting other forms of damage at the site, including to the Imperial Gate, which dates back to the sixth century. Known as the Door of Repentance, it contains an icon of Jesus alongside one of Mary of Egypt and the Theotokos, all of which were brought from the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. On 18 April 2022, a group called the Turkish Association of Art Historians documented vandalism to the 7-meter-tall gate, which the Byzantines claimed was constructed from oak beams taken directly from Noah’s Ark. In a Twitter post, the group showed gouges made deep into the wood and said: “We discovered that the historic Imperial Gate of Hagia Sophia is in such a state and we photographed it, around 20:45 tonight.”... According to Arie Amaya-Akkermans, a classicist and fervent cultural commentator based in Istanbul, the reconversion of the building into a mosque is a symbol of contemporary Turkey, “where heritage of the ‘other’ is destroyed and plundered in broad daylight to make way for uncontrolled development or simply for the pleasure of vandalism.”"
What Turkey got right about the pandemic - "Mr Erdogan muzzles the media, locks up critics and flouts some of the most basic norms of democracy. But there is another reason why he and his ruling AK party have not lost a general election in almost two decades. As even its critics acknowledge, AK works hard and gets things done."
How on earth did 'tradition' become a dirty word? - "On April 15 2019, fire raged through a great cathedral in Paris. Giving voice to the mood in France, President Macron said, “Notre Dame is our history, our literature, our collective imagination. Her story is our story, and she is burning.” Reporters covering the conflagration were startled to find Parisians on their knees reciting the rosary. Such public outpourings of faith are unusual in an increasingly secular society, but people were clearly praying for something that was both intensely personal (her story is our story) yet bigger than themselves. The Associated Press had a headline which reflected the media’s confusion: “Tourist mecca Notre Dame also revered as a place of worship.” You can practically hear Tim Stanley laughing as he typed that. Honestly, what kind of idiot thinks Notre Dame is a gift shop with an 850-year-old church attached? One who is spiritually impoverished, pretty clueless about the past and has never read Philip Larkin’s “Church Going” in which the poet described “a serious house on serious earth [...] In whose blent air all our compulsions meet.” In other words, an average citizen of a puddle-deep Western culture which lurches from crisis to crisis, “terrified that our best days are behind us” but with no idea how to fix it... “Modern culture encourages us to examine our ancestors with scepticism, even contempt,” he writes. Every day, more figures from history find themselves chucked into Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables”. Yet, Notre Dame stood as proof that the past could do things better than we could, a beautiful, silent rebuke to an angry, statue-smashing cancel culture. With quiet satisfaction, Stanley notes that all the dafter proposals for restoring the cathedral – with a crystal spire, a swimming pool, a giant gold flame nailed to the roof “that looked like the contents of King Midas’s handkerchief”, even, dear God, a zoo – were rejected and the French Senate voted to to rebuild Notre Dame to look exactly as it had before. Nostalgia has got a bad name, the author admits, because it is associated with prejudice and Right-wing fantasy, but it can also nourish “our very human need for roots and belonging”, which are too often disdained by a modern world in thrall to change and aggressive individualism... He is as likely to upbraid the Right for the way selfish capitalism scorches through the ties of tradition as he is to excoriate liberalism which, despite being a philosophy of freedom, can be “surprisingly oppressive”, with anyone who deviates from its norms facing social sanction. “Liberalism says, ‘you can think whatever you want to think, within the boundaries of what is reasonable’, which sounds generous, but it is constantly moving and shrinking those boundaries to exclude any serious alternative to a status quo that elites love because it’s what makes them elites... Somewhere within these covers, there is a great line from Gustav Mahler: “Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire.”"
Austria’s Kurz vows to fight ‘political Islam’ after Turkish teens rampage through Vienna church - "Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has said that his government will not tolerate religious extremism after dozens of Turkish youths reportedly stormed through a church in Vienna. Between 30 and 50 Turkish teenagers are said to have rampaged through the Catholic Church of St. Anton von Padua in Vienna-Favoriten. According to local media reports, the youths shouted “Allahu akbar” as they kicked benches and the church’s confessional. The youths scattered after the pastor called the police. Writing on Twitter about the rowdy flash mob, the Austrian chancellor said that all Christians in the country must be able to “exercise their faith freely and safely.”"
Experience: I lived as a wild turkey - "while living as a turkey, I discovered their communication was far subtler than I’d realised. We encountered many snakes as we explored and I was soon able to distinguish the different inflections they made to identify various species. Over time, I got better at making those sounds myself, modulating my voice to reproduce the nuances as best I could."
Chinese father breaks down after son he tutored daily for a year scores a 6/100 on math exam - "The child’s parents from Zhengzhou, Henan Province, received his test score on June 23... The man purportedly tutored his child until midnight every day for the past year. His disappointment also stems from his son’s inconsistent test results. The child’s scores had ranged from 40-50 points to 80-90 points in previous examinations... others argued that the child’s score was a reflection of the father’s inability to teach math. Some viewers also suggested that the father’s late-night tutoring may have affected his son’s ability to pay attention at school"
How Chinese private equity firms got scammed by sales staff - Nikkei Asia - "What she did not count on was for the 10 new hires to be regularly absent from work and fail to seal any deals. Worse still, they worked together to create a false sense of progress. Eventually, she learned that these employees were con artists, whose ulterior motive was to milk the business of base salaries. You's experience is shared by dozens of small and midsize private fund management (PFM) companies in China, including private equity shops, who have come forward to say they have been scammed out of salary payments -- sometimes close to 1 million yuan ($147,000) -- by people they hired to sell fund products, but did not put in any work. Unlike mutual fund companies selling to the public, PFM companies can only sell privately offered fund products to a limited number of eligible investors, typically high-net-worth individuals, and cannot publicly promote or market the products, according to Chinese regulations. Thus, a well-connected sales team is the key to success, especially for small and midsize PFM companies that try to compete for clients with well-established peers. And that is what scammers take advantage of. After failing to recover their losses through the police or labor arbitration, the companies involved have taken matters into their own hands by compiling a blacklist of "scammer employees" to alert fellow companies to the schemes. However, collecting and spreading personal information has brought about risk of privacy violations... The jobseekers seemed earnest and would offer to be on a probation period, according to the source. "They didn't negotiate salaries and were eager to sign job contracts," he said, adding that they would start exploiting loopholes in the contracts later on. It is not unusual for a new salesperson to have no sales in the first month into the job, and leaders tend to be lenient with new hires, giving them time to familiarize themselves with the products before bringing in investments. But the scammers typically sit on their jobs bringing in no funds for months while earning base salaries of up to 10,000 yuan per month... Some scammers even had people create fake clients and spent the company's budgets on sending gifts to these fake customers... During events his company organized to promote investment products, the scammers arrived and left with presumed customers... Many companies later found out that some scammers had introduced the same person as a potential customer to different companies. Even when the scammers got customers to sign contracts, no funds were received... After PFM companies came together and shared their experiences, they identified hundreds of such scammers who had stayed on the payroll of at least two companies simultaneously just to earn base salaries... In their haste to build a team and save money, many smaller PFM companies do not perform background checks on jobseekers, industry insiders said. An in-depth background check could cost more than 1,000 yuan and take around a week. Some companies also happily agreed to job applicants' suggestion that the latter pay their own social insurance fees, which are normally split between employees and employers, an industry insider said. However, without paying into the government-run social insurance system, companies will not be able to easily identify if one of their employees is also working for other companies. This makes it easier for scammers to get paid by multiple PFM companies at the same time... One thing that sets these schemers apart is that they refused to stay in the office, ostensibly to meet with clients, but the reality is that they are absent because they held multiple job positions... You hired seven more salespersons based on recommendations of the first three scammers she hired. Only about half of the 10 would show up to meetings, You said. She later learned that these people took turns to show up and cover up for the others."
Poker face busted? Our eye position betrays the numbers we have in mind, new study
More Canadian families are choosing independent schools - The Hub - "Between 2006/07 (the earliest year of available data for all school types) and 2019/20 (the most recent year available), independent school enrolment in Canada increased from 6.7 percent to 7.6 percent. The proportion is higher in some provinces. In 2019/20, more than one in every eight students in British Columbia, and almost one in 10 students in Quebec, were enrolled in independent schools... Why are families choosing independent schools? For starters, they offer a variety of pedagogical and curricular approaches that differ from one-size-fits-all government public schools. Almost half of independent schools in Canada have a specific cultural or religious focus, according to earlier research. Other schools offer Montessori, Waldorf, Emilio Reggio, or Forest School programming. For some children, smaller schools or stronger academic, arts, or sports programs are a better fit. Specialty schools comprise about 30 percent of independent schools in Canada. Many independent schools also offer tailored attention to address exceptional learning or behavioural needs. Simply finding a school that has a differing approach to bullying may also be a driving factor. Of course, many Canadians likely still believe that independent schools only serve Canada’s elite. But research has found that only 4.7 percent of the independent schools in Canada were elite university preparatory schools, meaning more than 95 percent of Canadian independent schools were not. Further research showed that when the small proportion of elite independent schools is removed from the analysis, the average income of families with children in independent schools in B.C. (the province with the highest level of independent school attendance in Canada) is essentially the same as families with children attending government public schools; only a 1.9 percent difference."
The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months - "For centuries western culture has been permeated by the idea that humans are selfish creatures. That cynical image of humanity has been proclaimed in films and novels, history books and scientific research. But in the last 20 years, something extraordinary has happened. Scientists from all over the world have switched to a more hopeful view of mankind. This development is still so young that researchers in different fields often don’t even know about each other. When I started writing a book about this more hopeful view, I knew there was one story I would have to address... Golding had a masterful ability to portray the darkest depths of mankind. Of course, he had the zeitgeist of the 1960s on his side, when a new generation was questioning its parents about the atrocities of the second world war. Had Auschwitz been an anomaly, they wanted to know, or is there a Nazi hiding in each of us? I first read Lord of the Flies as a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding’s view of human nature. That didn’t happen until years later when I began delving into the author’s life. I learned what an unhappy individual he had been: an alcoholic, prone to depression... The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer... The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other"
Once again, "literary truth" is rubbish
Hong Kong's iconic Jumbo Floating Restaurant capsizes at sea - "Hong Kong's iconic Jumbo Floating Restaurant has capsized in the South China Sea less than a week after it was towed away from the city... The Jumbo Floating Restaurant, almost 80 meters (260 feet) in length, had been a landmark in Hong Kong for over four decades, serving Cantonese cuisine to over 3 million guests including Queen Elizabeth II and Tom Cruise. It closed in 2020 due to the pandemic and laid off all its staff... The company said it planned to move it to a lower-cost site where maintenance could be carried out."
HDB flats built in 1970s had corridors over 300m: How did long common corridors become unpopular? - "One similarity between the Whampoa, Paya Lebar and Kim Keat blocks is that they were all completed within the same era — sometime in the 1970s. The earlier HDB designs featured lengthy slab blocks (albeit with corridors of varying lengths), something that was common between the 1960s to the 1980s. The point block design was also introduced during this period during the 1970s. William Ng, a Singaporean architect, said that corridors were envisioned as "social interaction spaces" in the post-independence era. Eventually, though, these corridors eventually came to be seen as a potential source of nuisance, as people tended towards an increased desire for privacy... In the late-1980s, a "buy corridor space" scheme was introduced by HDB, which would allow for "more space, better security and privacy"."
Woman in Bukit Merah, 85, denies using firewood to cook dumplings after neighbours complain of smell - "She also denied the allegations of smoke in her house, adding that the smell was due to other households burning joss paper. Speaking to the Chinese paper, her neighbour, surnamed Zhang, said that for the past 12 years or so, the woman's house would emit thick smoke during the period of the Dragon Boat Festival, resulting in the corridor being filled with the smell of smoke. In addition, the dumplings were supposedly left to simmer for over five hours"
Channel News Asia secretly deletes article after Senior Minister of State Josephine Teo skewered online for NSmen comments - "A few days prior to the article's removal, Teo's innocuously contentious comments about how NSmen recognition should not be measured in dollars and cents became a lightning rod for criticism online. Based on this forum comment thread, the most common refrain was that why should the PAP and minister's contributions be measured in monetary terms but not so for NSmen? Why the double standards? It is not known if Teo was misquoted or her statement was taken out of context as the original CNA report failed to elaborate what the original question was."
From 2015
Venture capitalists are clueless – the likes of Klarna and Uber prove it - "Sure, it is very hard to value a brand new business. No one would try to claim that it is ever a precise science. Even so, these are hardly minor mistakes. In truth, a worrying explanation is starting to emerge. One paper published this month described how the industry routinely makes completely "predictable mistakes" and even a simple algorithm could usually do a better job of picking winners than the chino-clad, MBA-touting, jargon-laden whizzes of the big VC houses. For all its expertise, it turns out that the venture capital has no idea what it is doing - and billions of pounds of investment are being burned up by the industry... Theranos has disappeared amid a storm of allegations, and its founder Elizabeth Holmes is awaiting sentencing on charges of fraud in the United States. In reality, many more extravagantly valued tech companies are almost certainly worth far less than a year ago. They are just lucky enough to have avoided a funding round - and are no doubt putting it off as long as possible. Sure, no one would deny that valuing start-ups is a difficult task. If a business has the potential to grow very fast then no one wants to miss out on the next Google, Zoom or Netflix by squabbling over the odd billion here or there. It is better to buy into the next superstar even at a very high price than to get left behind. There will always be some mistakes, but so long as there are a few big winners as well, a fund can still make spectacular profits. And yet, there is another, more alarming explanation for all the deals that are turning sour. The VC industry doesn’t actually have the faintest clue what it is doing. A paper this month from Chicago Business School crunched that data on 16,000 VC investments. It found they were making what it described as “predictably bad investments”. In fact, a simple algorithm could make consistently better investments than the VC firms could. They kept making mistake after mistake, and were not able to learn even the simplest lessons for their failures. “By comparing investor choices to an algorithm’s predictions, I show that approximately half of the investments were predictably bad - based on information known at the time of investment, the predicted return of the investment was less than readily available outside options,” the author Diag Davenport argues. In truth, three key issues are emerging. First, the venture capital industry puts far too much faith in founders. It is constantly searching for the next Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, or Steve Jobs. But entrepreneurs of that calibre are very rare, and even where they do exist, the market has to be right for them. In reality, the robustness of the business model, and the ability to get to the market quickly count for far more. Next, they all herd into the same sectors. Do we really need that many food delivery apps, 10-minute grocery services, money transfer sites, or streaming options? Almost certainly not. All that happens is that too much money pours into a sector, creating brutal competition where margins are slashed to close to zero and no one can make any money. It is great for consumers while it lasts - we have all enjoyed below cost deliveries - but terrible for the shareholders. Finally, and perhaps most worryingly, they have far too much faith in their own ability. It is starting to become clear that many of the most feted VC firms simply got lucky once - investing in Alphabet, or Meta, for example - and have simply coasted on that reputation ever since."
Fort Collins police officer under investigation over DUI arrests with 0% drugs, alcohol - "When the Problem Solvers first interviewed Fort Collins resident Harris Elias about his December 2021 arrest for driving under the influence, the team never guessed his story would lead to a much bigger story. Harris’ DUI charge would be dismissed a month later when blood results showed no alcohol or drugs in his system. “I really honestly would love to know how many times this happens to people,” Elias said. Turns out at least 10 times when it comes to Fort Collins Police Officer Jason Haferman. Fort Collins Police admit Haferman made eight DUI arrests in 2021 and another in 2022 where the blood results showed no alcohol or drugs were detected. In some cases, the blood tests were conducted even after the suspect’s breath showed zero blood-alcohol content on the breathalyzer... “We’re seeing this investigation unfold in real-time in which Officer Haverman is essentially fabricating what he’s observing in order to support probable cause to make an arrest”"
