Amazing news stories that don't quite deserve a thread

somini 2019-04-16 22:10:53 UTC #1003

This should receive an IgNobel prize.

At first, hahah Naked people are funny.

But then:

The women were caught after police managed to blow out their tires and repeatedly rammed their car. One was subdued using a stun gun and marijuana was found in the car. The women were charged with aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer, resisting arrest, fleeing to elude and indecent exposure.

So a couple of women chilling’ while naked get their tires blown out during a car chase, TASERed and charged with “resisting arrest”. Land of the free.

BillButNotBen 2019-04-16 22:19:41 UTC #1004

US police are ridiculous. Somewhere along the line their priorities and idea of reasonable/proportionate/safe response have gotten way out of whack.
I suppose I should be grateful they didn’t shoot them all in the back and then claim they thought they had a gun. Maybe being naked saved them from that.

Fumarole 2019-04-18 13:31:42 UTC #1005

C’mon now. They fled the scene at the rest stop when approached by police. What should the police do, let them leave? Had these women then gone on to hurt someone no doubt naysayers would criticize them for their lack of diligence.

Law enforcement in the US surely has room for improvement, but the fact that these women only lost their tires (and perhaps some dignity) and were tasered is a success in my book.

LexW 2019-04-18 18:18:07 UTC #1006

Understatement of the century. The US police (as a whole - it is a bit unfair as there is considerable variance) are third-world-grade in terms of behaviour and discipline.

Are you American? I ask because the “only” seems like a really weird attitude, like you’d expect the police to murder them. And yes, in the US, you kinda would expect the police to murder them, because the police murder lots of people for terrible reasons. Taser usage by US police is also extremely bad, in that they frequently use Tasers on inappropriate people (small children, old people, disabled people, people have epileptic fits, people doing nothing violent, even long-dead people etc.) or in completely inappropriate situations, often to essentially just assert dominance, or to hurt people who are already caught (typically in drive-stun mode, not the wire-trailing mode). They even invented an entirely fictional medical condition (“excited delirium” - which has no scientific basis whatsoever, just wild, untested claims) to justify all the times they Taser’d someone to death (non-lethal my ass).

In a civilized country, you’d expect this situation, even with the car chase, to be resolved without any guns being used, without any threat of people being shot, and without anyone getting tasered.

So it seems to me that some criticism of the police is justified.

Also:

They might, but many US police forces are incompetent at de-escalation, and cause chases that end with people being hurt, where police forces in other countries (or indeed other parts of the US) would manage to de-escalate the chase.

LA is an interesting example. They went from being terribly offenders at this, where they caused countless deaths by engaging in unnecessarily aggressive police chases, to learning how to back off and capture people without causing high-speed chases. Indeed, when a chase does go high-speed, the LA police (unlike many US police forces) intentionally fall back, let the helicopters take over, let the perp slow down, and so on. Sounds like the cops here didn’t understand or didn’t care to engage in de-escalation.

somini 2019-04-18 22:36:11 UTC #1007

I’m just not sure that the same tactics should apply to war zones and marijuana-smoking people in a rest stop.

Fumarole 2019-04-26 13:48:11 UTC #1008

I’m sure there aren’t many (any?) other hockey fans here, but this one deserves some views.

After coming back from being down 3-1 in the best of seven series the San Jose Sharks found themselves down 3-0 with about ten minutes left in game 7 of the first round of the NHL playoffs. Their captain takes a terrible fall and ends up on the ice bleeding from his head (he would leave the game and not return). The Las Vegas Golden Knights are assigned a 5 minute major penalty on the play and the Sharks score 4 goals in the next 4:01 to take the lead and eventually go on to win 5-4 in overtime and win the series.

Regardless of how one feels about the penalty being called, this was a hockey game for the ages.Here is video of the power play.

Skalpadda 2019-04-26 16:13:54 UTC #1009

You’ve probably seen it, but you might enjoy this classic:

Sweden Finland in the 2003 world cup quarter final, Sweden turned 1-5 around to 6-5. The Swedish commentator has a bit of a breakdown at the end, saying he’s going to quit after this and it’s impossible to carry on, his collegue calmly going “It’s fine, I’ll continue…”

And here’s the inverse experience with Finnish commentators

BillButNotBen 2019-05-29 05:05:51 UTC #1010

Not sure this counts as amazing or news, but I found it mildly interesting:

There’s also a story on there about how the forests around cherbobyl are decaying more slowly due to there being a lack of the kind of insects that’d usually break them down.

Skalpadda 2019-05-29 09:00:57 UTC #1011

Hm, I think the microbiologist has it about right for most animal species. All animal life has a generational cycle of between hours and years and would bounce back pretty fast as long as there’s enough food. If we assume a straight halving of each individual species it’s not really comparable to historical mass extinctions where certain niche species or entire habitats got wiped out, which then had knock-on effects on other species that relied on them and so on.

Some quickly multiplying species would probably be a big problem for a while due to lack of predators, but that’s happened before and tends to balance out.

A bigger problem if we assume all life is halved (plant life didn’t seem affected in Infinity War and I still haven’t seen Endgame, but that’s what the article seems to be assuming) would be the sheer loss of biomass from half of all plants, fungi and microbes in water and soil just disappearing rather than dying off. Losing half its biomass would permanently diminish Earth’s capacity to support life and probably have some very nasty chemical consequences, like drastic changes to the acidity of both soil and water. Add to that a severe drop in oxygen production and the carbon cycle collapsing and it could get really, really bad.

Lukasz 2019-05-30 06:13:00 UTC #1012

Dunno about last point.

If the snap breaks life into basic components, no real loss of biomas

So now lots of nutrients for basic life to feed on and replicate.

So they are back to normal within days and then more…

Skalpadda 2019-05-30 12:34:43 UTC #1013

Yeah, you’re right. I just checked the end of Infinity War again because I remembered them turning into a rather small amount of ash which made me think they were just deleted rather than deconstructed, but it’s enough that it might actually represent all the matter minus water dispersing, which would be fine.

Regardless I don’t think the movies show it affecting all life, so the premise of the article, which talks about microbes and all species (and if microbes are affected why wouldn’t more complex multicellular plants and fungi be?) isn’t the same premise as the movie.

If it was just humans and other highly intelligent species, well, we went from 3 billion to 7 billion in around 50 years, so halving our numbers would do little to slow us down in the long run. Technology is the main factor in human population growth and I don’t think Thanos was doing anything about that. He’d have to keep culling the entire universe every 50 years or so, which sounds like a terrible plan.

LexW 2019-05-30 18:12:52 UTC #1014

The movies keep saying “all life”, but yeah they never show it impacting plants at all and the Earth seems greener, if anything, in Endgame, and I’m not sure if we even see it hitting animals. So I agree completely - the idea that microbes, plants, etc. are affected is a different premise to the movie - show beats Thanos’ smack-talk.

Yes exactly. I remember in Infinity War I went “What the fuck? That’s a shit plan. They’ll be back in 50-100 years, tops!”. If he’d immediately then go on some sort of crusade around the universe installing people to enforce birth control and so on, then maybe that would make some vague sense. But he fucking retires to farm weird fruit.

Endgame spoilers: Might accidentally have solved climate change though - you gotta figure half the population produces vastly less CO2, there’s probably a ton of accidental re-wildling and regrowth, and even five years of that plus technological advances might sort it out.

That said, good luck ramping food production back up for the returned people after Endgame! Society have to be completely re-ordered, because all the leadership positions of everything would have been taken up by the people who still existed, yet we’d have a huge number of people coming back thinking they were in charge of stuff, but who would pretty much all have to immediately get involved in food production. With massive world-wide rationing and the whole world focusing on ramping food production back up, you might be able to prevent mass starvation. I understand Spiderman: Far From Home will look at the consequences, but I’m pretty sure it’ll massively downplay the fact that society would have to be built anew. Let’s not even get into how probably most married people would have moved on by then… (even if not remarried…).

Skalpadda 2019-05-30 18:38:56 UTC #1015

Now I really want to see endgame just for that scene. How much time is there between Infinity War and Endgame? If it’s more than a couple of months then yes, it could be very tricky if the population suddenly doubled again.

LexW 2019-05-30 18:50:37 UTC #1016

Five years before the main part of Endgame. So yeah…

somini 2019-06-05 08:35:21 UTC #1017

This is kinda the plot of the new Godzilla 2. All the big blockbusters are basically the same…

alms 2019-06-05 19:08:10 UTC #1018

I’m a knot of flaming, radioactive outrage over the story of the 17 year old Dutch girl who took her life into her own hands and starved herself to death being spun as anti-euthanasia propaganda by horrible, cynical people.

Seemingly, she was feeling completely drained, after multiple, failed attempts to resolve her PTSD, depression and anorexia (including a year of tube feeding, apparently), all of which was the result of the poor girl being sexually assaulted and abused repeatedly as a child.

somini 2019-06-06 21:21:49 UTC #1019

Linky links.

The story was reported by at least one BBC international outlet and the “fake news” went as far as Pope Francis’s social media feed.

Not even the infallible pope could resist it.

There’s also a weird hatchet job involving BuzzFeed “news” and a competing newswire.

LexW 2019-06-08 12:40:35 UTC #1020

The headline + picture combo made me laugh out loud. Also wow, yeah, what a fucking shocker right? No-one could have expected this. Also Raab trying to make out he’s never done coke is fucking hysterical. There is literally no possibility that is true given his background.

BillButNotBen 2019-06-08 14:09:37 UTC #1021

He does look like such a guppy at all times, but even more so in his pajamas.

So right now, despite the huge field, are there actually any leadership candidates who haven’t admitted to taking illegal drugs?

I would find this all very funny if it wasn’t for the fact that one of these muppets is going to be the one probably leading the UK into oblivion.

Lukasz 2019-06-23 03:52:46 UTC #1022

So in Sydney Australia, high rise residential tower was evacuated last week. In Dec 18 another tower, opal tower, in Sydney Olympic Park was evacuated. And six months later a third of apartments are not suitable for habitation

Just local news, probably happens every day somewhere on the planet. But as someone who is in process of buying own apartment this scares the shit out of me.