I think this is meant to sound like one of those "haha, what a crazy story" stories. But some young bloke's died and as I understand it South Africa has massive problem with alcoholism, so I'm not really feeling it.

We need to look at removing alcohol from Schedule 1 of the Psychoactive Substances Act.

>>38792

I enjoyed it when I had it, but then I heard it was supposed to taste like lasagne, and that thought ruined the second one I tried.

>>38794

A lasagne sandwich was the low point of my Year of Sandwiches. I'm sure it would have been delicious, but the lack of friction left me with a two-sheets-of-pasta-and-a-bit-of-bechamel-sauce sandwich and stained trousers.

>>38795
>my Year of Sandwiches

Explain yourself.

>>38797

Inspired by the Olympic spirit, I tried a new sandwich on every day in 2013. Faster, Higher, Stronger, Fatter.

September was slightly derailed by arguments over whether hot dogs count as sandwiches, but otherwise it was a celebration of human ingenuity and the determination to put things between slices of bread. I recommend the tortilla de patatas stottie with brown sauce, served with a side dish of pickled onion Space Raiders.

>>38790

>I never know whether to be happy or sad on this day. Happy it's the highlight of Summer, or the beginning of longer nights.

That's exactly the sentiment when Swedes celebrate Midsommar. It's the height of the light season, which carries some significance in a country which is badly deprived of sunlight in the winter months, but it also marks the return of shorter days, if ever so slightly. So there's always a hint of sadness because you know it's not going to last.

I was on holiday in central Sweden once, and despite the inconvenience of having 11°C there in early July during most of our stay, it was fascinating that the entire night, it never got fully dark. You could almost read a book on the porch at 2 am with no additional light.

>>38766

I'm not sure where you got that number, but does it seem entirely impossible to you that someone makes up rape charges?

I'm not talking about somebody who actually got raped. I'm saying that as with any crime, there needs to be evidence. I'll acknowledge that evidence can be difficult to establish when a crime solely hinges on verbal assurances or lack thereof, but you can't just convict somebody on a hunch that they may have done something.

There are other equally or more serious offences like murder or grievous bodily harm where we wouldn't accept a lack of concrete evidence, and rightly so.

>>38768
There's not a court in the world that would convict a man of rape if both parties agree that verbal consent was provided during the act but the woman later regretted it. You're talking absolute bollocks.

A minute ago you were saying it's impossible for a man to exonerate himself by proving what was said in private. Yeah, it is. Now you say the onus should be on the accuser to prove what was said. Yes, it should. And it is. And that's why nearly all rape accusations go nowhere.

Here's my citation by the way. You'll have to muster the intellect to read past the headline and also employ division. (2019 numbers)

https://www.thelocal.se/20200616/how-swedens-new-consent-law-led-to-a-75-rise-in-rape-convictions/

Fun fact, make of this what you will: most people convicted of rape in Sweden aren't European. I'd speculate that much of the increase in convictions can be explained by ignorance of the law and people self incriminating.

>>38767

>One camp which believes in the concept of innocent and proven guilty and that overly trigger happy laws will lead to false convictions, which is overall worse than letting a potential rapist go unpunished;

I had this exact conversation with the wife of a good friend who is a dyed in the wool fisherperson, to the point that I wonder if she shits purple turds. Anyway, she said, well, even if a man is fasely convicted of a rape, he still goes free again if either he is proven innocent after all or in some cases if the real rapist is found. So I said, no, you're essentially arguing that it is okay to lock somebody up, potentially for many years, who either didn't commit a rape or was misidentified as an attacker in the first place. You're destroying someone's life who shouldn't spend a single day in jail at all. While, by chance, the real rapist may still be at large and hurt more people.

It's true that the requirement of evidence beyond reasonable doubt to convict somebody of a crime can lead to unsatisfactory results in a court of law. Murderers and rapists, but also fraudsters will occasionally go free. On the other hand, in most countries, rape and murder have very long statutes of limitation, if they expire at all. So not just technically, a murderer or rapist can be brought to justice years after their crime, when there is by whatever turn of events new evidence to convict them after all. So why drag an innocent person into it, just so you'll have somebody to pin a crime on. The latter is the way a lot of law enforcement in the U.S. functioned for decades, especially in rural areas or urban areas with many minorities. It's only now with DNA sequencing being abundantly available that many of these prisoners are exonerated, some of them having spent three or four decades locked up for something they never did. Is that the way our justice system should function here in the UK?


>because women never ever lie, and sometimes even goes as far as saying that false convictions are a price worth paying for the overall good.

Two things there though; both men and women have lied egregiously about all sorts of crimes in court since time began. Why should it be impossible for somebody to make up rape charges for whatever motive, if just to damage somebody's reputation or to exact revenge.

Also, I don't know if Sweden still does this, but for a while, men (and only men) accused of rape got their written criminal charges mailed to them in a distinctive red envelope which was only used by authorities for this purpose. It goes without saying that if somebody saw you receive a red envelope like that, your reputation as such either on your street or in your block of flats was ruined beyond repair. I remember reading that one of the politicians who came up with this measure was asked if that wasn't fraught with problems, especially if either somebody was mailed such an envelope by sheer mistake, or if their rape charges were later found by a court to be completely unfounded, and they said that that was ok, because men needed to acknowledge their "collective guilt" in facilitating a climate of rape culture in Sweden.

Message too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>38769

>There's not a court in the world that would convict a man of rape if both parties agree that verbal consent was provided during the act but the woman later regretted it. You're talking absolute bollocks.

You're misunderstanding my point. Yes, obviously, regret after the fact doesn't constitute a lack of consent. If you were to bring a case like that before a court, it'd get thrown out in less than five minutes. But the point isn't if somebody says they consented but later regretted it, but if somebody consented, to the point that you could reasonably assume they meant it during that moment, but later that person says in court that they never did.

As Swedish rape law stands, the doors are wide open for that to happen. Even if somebody told you to fuck their brains out loud and clear, you could still be at their mercy because they could very simply end up telling a court that that never happened, and that you bonked them against their will.

>>38773
What a surprise, the first case study I found involves the accused presumably pleading not guilty but having admitted to conduct that's now illegal.

https://www.thelocal.se/20190712/negligent-rape-has-swedens-sexual-consent-law-led-to-change/

Just don't admit to doing sketchy shit. Especially if you haven't done sketchy shit. It's not hard and your screeching that women are empowered to have any man they sleep with carted off to prison is absolutely bizarre.

Spend less time on r/thesissify or wherever the fuck you're getting this nonsense from.

>>38456
Those poor innocent lads,it must have been awful to be fitted up for a murder that they totally didn't do and definitely weren't recorded boasting about.

>>38457

Your ignorance of the justice system is not an excuse for the press to create narratives based around unresolved cases.

>>38458

It couldn't be done without people willing to pay money to read all about it.

>>38459

I'd pay money to watch you get buggered by an elephant against your will, that doesn't particularly mean it should be allowed.

>>38458
You'll notice he was neither a rich person nor an MP, so the press ran with his name with glee, unlike the mysterious bribe facilitator ZXC or the Tory rapists Mark Francois and Andrew Rosindell.

>>38369

Private loans are never a good idea. And not just because you may be paying extortionate interest on them. They also tend to ruin friendships if you're in any way close to the would-be lender.

But not being able to repay £1.2m when your net worth at one point used to be 100 million euros is just human tragedy. Not saying it can't happen to the best of us, but to get to a point where you just blew through 100 million and can't repay a loan of 1.5 percent that, interest or no, you're either a cocaine addict with a heavy habit or you simply never should have been allowed to handle your own finances.

They're saying he lost £10m by investing in Nigerian oil wells.

Did he not know that all those e-mails from imprisoned Nigerian princes are fake?

But cheap laughs aside, that deal was apparently shilled by one of Becker's aides who was Nigerian. The fact that he invested such a large chunk of his already dwindling fortune in a country with rampant corruption and political instability at all levels shows that he was really out of his depth handling his money.

>>38371

That does bring up an angle I hadn't considered before actually. If I were to just inherit 50 million quid out of the blue one day off of my long lost great uncle Laurence Cholmondley-Cribbingsworth's vast rural estate, would I know who to turn to and actually be able to trust with investing that money safely?

It's easy for me to talk out of my arse here about hiring a financial adviser and going to an investment broker and what have you, but I think the reality is more likely I'd suddenly become extremely paranoid everyone was out to scam me out of my newfound wealth, because let's face it, a great deal of people would be out to scam me out of my newfound wealth.

I'm sure Hargreaves Landsdown are a very reputable business, but is phoning them up and saying "Hello, yes, I just inherited fifty million quid, what do I do with it?" painting a target on your forehead, the same way taking your car to the garage and saying "I don't know anything about cars, but it's making a funny noise, fix it please?" is?

>>38372
>painting a target on your forehead

Once you have over a certain amount of money, many of the investment, banking, loan protections that us paupers have fly out the window - in the UK, different banks have different limits, but the one I used to work for was you earn over £300k per year and/or have £3m in liquid assets, you're treated as a professional investor and not so much as a private individual.

So when you're at that level, you go to a thing called a Private Bank, and they look after you. Obviously because you're now a professional investor, they can sell you almost any financial product or investment they like, they don't have to read you all the terms and conditions, you don't have to sign all the papers, or get any of the protections that you or I would get. Target acquired.

>>38373

I guess there's somewhat of a fine line between recommending a slightly dodgy investment to a large account holder, and investment fraud.


>Obviously because you're now a professional investor

They're sitting ducks because from having rubbed shoulders with their likes both professionally (not a banker) and leisurely, my perception is that there's often plenty of hubris involved there. They think that because they for some reason have (single-digit) millions to their name, investment mistakes don't happen to them. It's normally just daytraders on Wallstreetbets who succumb to the delusion that they're the next Warren Buffet just because a heavily leveraged trade improbably goes their way, but small-time millionaires like that can almost as easily gamble much of it away.

Wouldn't such consorship encourage underground networks to develop? Amazon would then require an intelligence branch of its own to monitor out of work activity (or is that covered by Human Resources?)

>>38184

>Amazon would then require an intelligence branch of its own to monitor out of work activity

Companies like Wal-Mart have pretty much already implemented something like that, where they have a phone number where employees can snitch on each other about any behaviour that is against company statutes. Which also include a ban on romantic relationships between employees, both off and on the job.

Fucking puritans.

I got round all this by buying a decent water filter. Has changed my life, I drink more water during the day and tea tastes fantastic.

The American version called a Big Berkey seems better quality than the Doulton British Berkefeld, but is twice the price. Comes with water filters that filter out almost everything, you can optionally buy flouride filters too depending on where you live; they're not recommended for my water area, but some areas of the UK they are. Expensive but worth it; filters last about five years with normal use.

>>37882

>In certain groups of chemicals, individual chemicals used by industry are regularly put forward to government regulators with sufficient evidence of causing harm to warrant a ban on their use, but every time a chemical is banned industry switches to a slightly different molecular structure which is almost functionally identical but is not controlled by the regulation.

I'm not sure that's entirely fair. After the PCB ban, transformer oil either went back to mineral oil or used synthetic esters. Industrial use of volatile solvents has been massively reduced due to the introduction of ultrasonic cleaning, deionised water and a variety of other alternatives. R-12 did get replaced with R-134a which has no ozone depletion potential and far lower global warming potential, but even that is being replaced with hydrofluoroolefins with almost no global warming potential.

The big petrochemical firms can be aggressive lobbyists, but the regulators aren't totally daft.

>>37884

My grandparents used to have a filter tap, and I remember it massively improving the taste of our hard tap water. I never really thought about getting one of my own as an adult until you just prompted me.

I don't know how much these sorts of things are, but knowing my grandad it was probably a ludicrous expense that he justified by installing himself. I think I'd want to go full ultracunt and get one that dispenses the water ice cold, though.

The apocalypse side of my brain likes the idea of having that big tank that I presume you could fill with rainwater, though.

>>37893
I've always fancied one of these https://www.quooker.co.uk - but this is decidedly lower-tech.

>rainwater

>>37910
Where does all the manky shit go once it's been removed? Do you have to pour a bucket of AIDS down the sink every couple of weeks? Because if I had to look at that, it might well put me off the water that comes from the same machine.

>Yes, this means you can and should put this on all your meals to feel like royalty.


More like a dole queen.

Putting ketchup on all your food to me is just a signifier of lower class.


>Has the monarchy officially jumped the shark?

No, but unless it's spectacularly good, it is a shameless money grab at 285 grams for seven quid. You can get a 1 kg bottle of Heinz ketchup for half that.

>>37030
Don't set them off.

>>36817
>Having no interest in gaming or Japanese culture and only a passing interest in tech I found Tokyo pretty boring

I can sympathise with that. But Tokyo is fucking giant, obviously, and the Japanese are experts at doing something incredibly specific and niche very well - so nearly everything you want IS there...

But as a foreigner, knowing A) where to go and find this obscure thing on the 8f of some random tower block, and B) even being let inside as one, is another thing.

There are also neighbourhoods for any and every taste you could want, they just aren't always immediately recognisably distinct as you would expect, because most of the sprawl looks very similar.

As for the schoolgirl vending machine thing, well I don't know about that one specifically, but I would not in the slightest bit be surprised. I didn't see one myself when I lived there. But again, a lot of stuff is very closed off to foreigners or even those just not in the know. I've had friends work in very high profile positions in the most traditional Japanese company imaginable, and there are some VERY freaky establishments that open their doors to you with the right company.

I really fucking miss Japan actually, I would love to go again soon.

>>36819

Japan has an age of consent of 13. And it is not part of closeness in age laws that you have in other countries where a 16 year old can consensually bonk a 14 year old without legal repercussions, while an adult can not. Technically, a 40-year-old Japanese man can legally bed a 13-year-old girl.

No idea how common that is, but I guess when a society considers 13 year olds sexually mature, a lad perving teenaged schoolgirls from his car isn't a very outrageous thing to do.

There was a guy who seemed to be doing the same thing outside my niece's school in Essex. He was approached by police one day because it kept happening, and it turned out that he had a prior conviction for online solicitation.

I guess you can't really tell somebody not to park outside a school along a public road, as long as he's not accosting pupils and endangering their wellbeing. But in light of his past offences, he was given to understand that police and authorities would take a much more aggressive tone with him if he didn't stop doing it.

>>36822
IIRC the age 13 law is just a sort of backstop set nation-wide so that no individual prefecture (that sets its own laws for certain things) could, say, roll the age of consent back to like six or something. In reality each prefecture sets its own minimum age and I think they're all between 16 and 18 or so.

>>36826
Do you happen to know what the refund policies are when it comes to cancelling with Japan Airlines?

>>36826

Even if you go to a country where it's legal for you to have sex with somebody who is far younger than the UK age of consent, you can still be prosecuted upon your return based on UK law, which expressly forbids underage sex tourism with the intent to exploit lower ages of consent in other countries.

Countries like Norway are even harsher nowadays. As a Norwegian citizen, you can get nicked for illegal sex tourism if you go abroad to another country where adult prostitution is perfectly legal. Prostitution is banned completely in Norway, even over 18, and the law is not only aimed at forbidding it within Norway's borders, but also at punishing Norwegian citizens who travel abroad to have sex with a legally adult prostitute.

Not sure how that law is really enforced. They can't seriously expect Norwegians to answer the question truthfully when they come home from a weekend bender in Latvia's red light districts.

>>36511

I would very much like to make a pilgrimage before I/this place dies. Maybe a selfie next to a sign, with my cock in a cup of tea.

>>36512
I would very much like a real flag. I wish I knew someone at the BAS - there used to be an army base there, but not any more. I do have a radio contact on the Falkland Islands, where the SGSSI "government" is based. Might just write a random email and see where it gets to.

>>36512
https://www.quarkexpeditions.com/gb/antarctic/south-georgia

Cheapest cruise I can find is 8 grand. Looks great though.

We're in the news again, sort of: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-60010608

>South Georgia: The museum at the end of the world reopens for business

>On the icy, southern edge of the Atlantic Ocean, just above the Antarctic circle, is a British island, a ghost town, and a museum.
A British island, a ghost town and a museum? I guess you could say we're like that.

>The island is a tough place to work. The nearest airport is a four-day boat ride away. Fresh food is rare, the internet is "poor to non-existent" and, at times, the wind is strong enough to tip over helicopters.
Your mum is poor to non-existent m8

>There are no permanent residents on South Georgia, just 20 or so workers, from scientists to maintenance staff.
Okay now this is getting creepy. I'd better stop.

>>36680
Order of magnitude over-estimation of the population.

>>36601

>In my experience, every single time a person or an organization has used that "boo hoo hoo forgive me please I am just dumb" excuse, it was a lie to cover for something much worse than that.

Really? Then you must live in a much more competent world than I do. Horrendous fuck-ups happen all the time, because a) human beings are very fallible and b) most organisations are at least somewhat dysfunctional and lacking in accountability.

Where malice is involved, it's frequently in the form of a cover-up of incompetence rather than a deliberate intent to cause harm. The Post Office scandal is an obvious example of this - nobody wanted to wrongly prosecute nearly a thousand people for fraud based on completely false evidence, but lying to the court for a decade was easier than admitting "we spent a billion quid on a useless IT system and we don't know what to do about it". The worst miscarriage of justice in British history was just a schoolboy lie taken to extremes.

The bleak reality is that most people are actually quite shit at their jobs and we've created a culture that allows powerful people to evade accountability. There's no grand conspiracy, just a tacit omerta. Nobody in a position of power wants to hold anyone else to account, because they might be next in line. Some people really do have terrible skeletons in their closet, but the secret most people are hiding is simply that they have no idea what they're doing and spend most of their working hours trying not to get caught out.

>>36601

Are you by any chance the sort of person who wholeheartedly believes and accepts the accuser's story in every big sex scandal, because "I knew he was one of 'em"? The sort who can spot a carpet-bagger at forty paces?

The sort who is frequently wrong, is what I'm getting at.

>>36603

You will have to admit that UK has a lot of carpet-baggers in its ruling caste. I wonder if we will see a British Epstein in our lifetimes.

>>36604
>I wonder if we will see a British Epstein in our lifetimes.

Jim'll?

>>36602

Cyril Smith and Jimmy Savile were quite competent at their job!

>>36499

I just don't see a world in which they're an unhinged deviant and playing three dimensional idpol chess at the same time.

>>36500

Then you are very naive. It's barely even one dimensional. It's a plain simple "But but, I belong to [protected group], you have to go easy on me!" plea that wrong 'uns like that have been using since forever.

>>36500
It's a bloke in a dress mate, snakes and ladders is a push.

>Russia, China, Britain, U.S. and France say no one can win nuclear war

>China, Russia, Britain, the United States and France have agreed that a further spread of nuclear arms and a nuclear war should be avoided, according to a joint statement by the five nuclear powers published by the Kremlin on Monday.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/russia-china-britain-us-france-say-no-one-can-win-nuclear-war-2022-01-03/

>>36558>>36559
I'm fairly certain if they polled middle-aged people and boomers their results would be even worse due to the heightened brain power on Facebook.

>>36560
>heightened brain power

Oh, mods! You little scamps!

>>36561
What did you originally say?

>>36562
Brain-rot. It wouldn't surprise me if mind worms was filtered as well.

Hivemind?

I'd really quite like to give that 'rescue a stray' thing a go, but as far as I'm aware we don't really have a problem with feral animals in the UK - though I did encounter a very thin cat last night, assumed lost from home.

Why have we sided with the monkeys on this?

>>36355
> though I did encounter a very thin cat last night

It just has cat aids. Or that thyroid problem they get.

https://sambadenglish.com/monkeys-kill-250-puppies-in-act-of-vengeance-after-dogs-kill-one-of-their-infants/

>A troop of revenge-driven monkeys has killed at least 250 puppies by throwing them to the ground from high places. The motivation for such fury is said to have stemmed from an incident in which a pack of dogs mauled a baby monkey to death.

What would happen if one of these revenge driven monkeys bit a human?

>>36368
Covid-21.