Amazing news stories that don't quite deserve a thread

LexW 2018-07-02 19:35:19 UTC #823

I think there’s a pretty clear difference between doing crazy shit when you’re a teenager, especially with hormones, love (or what you think is love, certainly an extremely strong emotion), sex, alcohol, drugs and so on involved, and “spending £700 on worthless cosmetic tat shit in an in-game shop which barely has £700 of stuff in it*”. I mean to me there is. Both are entirely different mindsets.

What you’re describing is about being young, free, and bold, maybe a bit rebellious.

What that kid did, and what his dad enabled, is being a greedy little twat who knowingly steals then blames others for his greedy twat-ness (the pair of them are doing that actually). It’s doing what you feel you should do, not hurting anyone else, vs mens rea thievin’.

I can say I definitely never stole from my parents, or spent money that wasn’t mine to spend, that I hadn’t been authorized to spend. I think the worst I managed was to run the phone bill significantly higher than expected one month due to primitive internet charges (which was actually kind of complicated when we tried to work it out, because I’d spent almost as long on the month before and been charged a much more sensible amount - that wasn’t knowingly spending money on tat).

Now to be clear I don’t think the kid needs to be “punished” in some kind of terribly mean way (that stuff just makes kids bitter) but I do think he needs to feel the consequences of his actions. His dad is clearly the sort of guy who spends a lot of cash on him, so skipping 1 birthday and 1 Xmas to cover that £700 seems pretty reasonable to me.

I know REAL parents who did precisely that to their also-12 kid who spent £200 on FIFA characters. But neither of them cried about how unfair the setup was or how their bank should have stopped it, and the kid acknowledged that he knew what he was doing was wrong. So they skipped him getting anything for his birthday that year (still cake and stuff, just no presents from them), given he’d effectively got his present early in the form of overpriced FIFA characters. Which seems perfectly reasonable to me. Do you think they’re bad parents? To me that seemed exemplary.

= Hyperbole but you know what I mean. I seriously doubt there’s any way to even wear £700 of stuff at once.

alms 2018-07-02 21:48:42 UTC #824

Yes, let’s not kid ourselves: these games are made to incentivize uncontrolled spending, and a 12 yo certainly qualifies for the weaker end of impulse control zone. Hell, systems are engineered so that ADULTS have trouble controlling their spending.

And, one would guess anybody these days sets or has alerts for exceeding the usual spending thresholds, especially on a shared card.

OTOH, I have seen a societal shift for parents to be increasingly defensive of their kids, regardless of how bad and unjust is what they do, and that goes hand in hand with laxity, externalization of costs + bullshit excuses, down to using strollers as weapons and tools for blackmailing.

It’s not the rest of society who has to pay special attention to your kid, it’s your responsibility to make sure they stay out of trouble, because shit has the habit of happening, and then it’s gonna to end in tears.

somini 2018-07-02 22:13:02 UTC #825

Another one with video from a very British person.

Zephro 2018-07-03 00:04:24 UTC #826

That kid was on an Xbox right? Why the fuck didn’t the dad set him up with a restricted sub account?

BillButNotBen 2018-07-03 04:15:11 UTC #827

It’s great to have some good news from time to time.I hope they get the kids out safely.

Mostly. Although some of the ‘crazy shit’ can sometimes tip into hurting someone else… be it fighting, or breaking stuff, or ‘borrowing’ the R out of the burger king sign so that it says something you found rude and humorous at that age. Not that anyone I know would do such a thing.

I did run up a frickin massive phone bill one month by using BT dial up for far too long though… which i guess is somewhat the 90s version of spending loads on cosmetic items.

LexW 2018-07-03 12:45:29 UTC #828

It’s only equivalent if you knew you were doing it and consciously said, fuck it, I know I’m spending someone else’s money without permission, oh well!

I mean, it’d be one thing is the kid had effectively bought some time based or auto renewing service and lost track of things. That happens - I mean it’d be bad but there’s not necessarily a mens rea - a “guilty mind” involved.

But this? The only time limited possibly auto renewing service was £20 max of this. And it took place over three days. So the kid clearly get going into the shop, buying virtual coins (which have a fairly clear price next to them), spending them on tat, going back in getting more, spending it on tat and so on. And iirc the biggest coin bundle is like £60 so he did this more than ten times. Also that bundle is huge - 13500 coins - where the most expensive stuff I casually saw in the shop was 2000-3000 and most much less (I may have just missed some high roller stuff though). And her must have had like 135000+ coins spent, which would have taken a lot of time and thinking during which most kids would have gone “uh oh…” and stopped.

So I’d say unusually bad parenting was involved here, and the “fraud team should stop my son being a thief” attitude from the dad explains where that parenting came from

Matt_W 2018-07-03 16:55:46 UTC #829

More on this. It looks like the options here are to dive out with the boys through a couple km of muddy, flowing-water-filled, narrow cave passages or leave them in there for several months until the rainy season ends. I can’t imagine, after spending 10 days in pitch-black watery darkness with no food, facing the prospect of several months living deep in a cave. Really hoping for a safe rescue for everyone. Heed those warning signs, folks!

Lukasz 2018-07-12 01:23:44 UTC #830

Unsure whether you would call it amazing but
Nails in the coffin: man with world’s longest fingernails finally cuts them off

somini 2018-07-13 00:35:28 UTC #831

She was arrested for allegedly allowing a customer to touch her while on stage in a non-sexual manner

Can you touch a stripper in a “non-sexual manner”? What is a sexual touch?

An Ohio law known as the Community Defense Act prohibits anyone who is not a family member from touching a nude or semi-nude dancer.

American laws are weird. I see the lawmakers’ point, they wanted to keep it legal for parents to go into the strip joint and drag their daughters back home.

Does this mean two strippers can’t have a show together unless they are family members? Do adopted family members count? How related is “family member” defined?

BillButNotBen 2018-07-13 11:29:42 UTC #832

So touching in a sexual manner is ok?

Skalpadda 2018-07-13 13:42:33 UTC #833

And all charges were immediately dropped, and the police chief admitted the arrest should not have happened in the first place. Sure smells like pure harassment.

Reminded me a bit about the story about the NYT reporter who had a previous relationship with someone working for the Senate Intelligence Committee and had a very strange encounter with an agent claiming to officially investigate leaks but refusing to give his name (but later turned out to be hilariously named Jeffrey A. Rambo) or say what agency he worked for (San Diego border patrol).

On June 1, 2017, Mr. Rambo, 33, contacted Ali Watkins, a reporter for Politico at the time who now works at The New York Times, saying that he needed to meet her in Washington immediately. He told Ms. Watkins that he worked for the government but declined to give his name or agency.

In a lengthy conversation at a bar near Dupont Circle, Mr. Rambo claimed to be helping the F.B.I. with investigations into leaks of sensitive material to journalists. He eventually revealed that he knew the details of a trip to Spain that Ms. Watkins had taken with James A. Wolfe, security director of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who was then her boyfriend.

According to accounts Ms. Watkins provided to friends and editors, Mr. Rambo hinted that he might disclose their relationship to The Washington Post and pressed her to become his informant and report to him on other journalists and their sources.

Ms. Watkins rejected the request and returned the next day to the bar where they had talked and learned his identity from a credit card receipt.

Mr. Rambo’s actions raised several questions: What was a California border patrol agent doing in the Washington area? Was he really helping the F.B.I. with leak investigations, as he claimed? Was his anonymous approach to Ms. Watkins, which violated law enforcement standards, part of an authorized operation or the work of a rogue agent?

Law enforcement officials have said they can find no evidence that Mr. Rambo was officially assigned to work on leak investigations. Officials at Customs and Border Protection and its parent agency, Homeland Security, have declined to answer questions about Mr. Rambo’s role, citing the internal investigation.

somini 2018-07-14 23:28:43 UTC #834

Yes, that second news came out not long after I posted that. It does appear to be a low level operative that didn’t got the message.

I wouldn’t fret though, Avenatti came to the fray almost immediately like a rabid dog to fix it.

That guy is creepy. When it came out Stormy wasn’t even paying him, I honestly though the Democrats were paying him out of spite. But after that profile, I think he’s just wants the attention and is literally considering running for office.

I wondered if, given the intense highs of the Daniels case, he could envision himself going back to regular old corporate law in a full-time capacity. Wouldn’t politics be more appealing?
There was a long pause. “Never say never,”

Two weeks later, in response to a journalist on Twitter, Avenatti would go a step further, saying he’d run for president if “there is no other candidate in the race that has a REAL chance of beating” Trump.

somini 2018-07-14 23:30:09 UTC #835

Only if a third party is filming for profit.

You know it when you see it.

LordBolton86 2018-07-17 17:13:59 UTC #836

Thank you young citizen for cracking the riddle.

somini 2018-07-18 12:48:52 UTC #837

Speaking of sexual acts…

My words were spoken in anger after Mr. Unsworth said several untruths & suggested I engage in a sexual act with the mini-sub, which had been built as an act of kindness & according to specifications from the dive team leader

“He can stick it where it hurts” is now a suggestion to engage in a sexual act with a mini-sub? A truly Trumpian sorry-not-sorry apology.

Zephro 2018-07-18 13:10:09 UTC #838

That is a weirdly literalist take on “You can shove it where the sun don’t shine”… presumably nobody really talks back to him ever in his life, so he has a Trumpian ego problem. Hence his complete melt downs when anyone does it in public.

LexW 2018-07-20 07:02:58 UTC #839

I clicked on this article not expecting much, or a litany of “the usual suspects” (i.e. just the biggest, loudest fandoms, or ones that were relevant 5+ years ago), but actually this is pretty spot-on:

motorsport 2018-07-20 08:57:59 UTC #840

So Acolytes are the ones are the most defensive? Haven’t seen any fandom fights with them tbh

LexW 2018-07-20 12:53:42 UTC #841

I don’t find they intersect with nerd fandoms that much. Most nerdier fandoms tend, oddly enough, to be a bit cynical or skeptical of Musk so worship of him is rare even if he has the odd interesting idea. Thus we are unlikely to see them.

But in other places, particularly more mainstream ones, like sports fandoms, you often see some really nutso Musk hyperfans, I think because they’ve latched on to him as sort of messianic or totemic figure who they can just passively receive opinions from. And this is particularly problematic now because Musk kinda seems to be losing it.

Lukasz 2018-07-24 02:01:26 UTC #842

Tesla cars is in huge shithole and the guy seems to be overextending himself with his other projects.

Which is really really a shame because his work on tesla and spacex did really a lot of good for development of electric cars and space travel.
If his meltdowns affect spacex and prevents tesla from actually working it will be such a massive loss for all of us