If I broke both legs, I would ask doctors to set the bones a little bit further apart than they used to be, so that when they healed, I would be taller. It wouldn't work if they only extended one leg, of course, so if I had to stay in hospital while one leg healed, I would almost certainly ask them to break the other one too.

I've never broken a bone in my life despite being in many situations where it should have happened, so I have some abnormal bone density and I suppose if you tried I'd just beat the shit out of you to the point I could restrain you.

>I'd probably have to move out and live with my parents for at least a year.

Bones don't take that long to heal - you'd be laid up for no more than eight weeks even if it was a fairly bad break. If you only broke one leg you should be able to get around fairly well on crutches. You'd be entitled to statutory sick pay and housing benefit, so even if you had to move in with your parents for a bit you should still be able to cover your rent.

I'd rather break both my legs than both my arms. A mate of mine fell off a wall when he was drunk and his mum had to wipe his arse for six weeks. Best thing that ever happened to him TBH, it was the wake-up call he needed to sort his fucking life out.

"That's not a threat", he said, while posting the accompanying image.

I was crippled for about a year when i tore most of the ligaments in one of my knees clean in half. It was a interesting lesson in what one takes for granted.

What was intersting as a counter point is how much nicer everyone else was to me. It was like I stepped through a portal into another world where people would go out their way for me. I wonder if that is how the world is to pretty girls all the time.

>>442889
Just protecting the place, mate. Wouldn't want anything to happen to this place when Purps is hosting off his work sever would we.

>>442890
Did you make up a story to impress the girls?

>>442895

Didn't need to. It was a rock climbing accident.

might have left out the part where it was a indoor gym in Hackney though

>>442889

If I posted an image with the words "I will poison you and consume your corpse to commit the most unique suicide via cannibalism", would you actually feel threatened by it?

Because that would be silly.

>>442932
Hypothetically, if I wanted to commit the most unique suicide, I would headbutt a landmine.
>Quick and painless
>Theatrical and visually impressive
>No external assistance required
>Hard to get wrong, as long as you're holding the landmine in your hands and smash it into your head like a dinner plate
>Extremely macho headbutt, wow, so brave
>One less landmine in the world, meaning I simultaneously get to save a Cambodian child

>>442957
My (hypothetical) choice is buying an illegal handgun and blowing my brains out. There are less risky ways to kill yourself and ones much easier but it takes sufficient effort to acquire an illegal firearm that I'd be sure of my action.

The challenge will be in convincing the Mancunian drug dealer that I merely want to own such a weapon for ideological reasons and ensuring it's of a sufficient calibre to do the job rather than cripple me. This is one of those thoughts nobody ever talks about because everyone would react badly but one with a safeguard where fucking it up would potentially lead to one of my hells as a deterrent.

Sorry to further derail, but I've always remembered the impractical advice of renting a convertible, top down, then rig some sort of device to decapitate you after supergluing your hand to your head. Piano wire along the road at head height was suggested but I don't see how that wouldn't also tear your arm off, ruining the effect.

Ultimately the goal is to be driving down the street with your decapitated head being held in your hand.

>>442961

That's a bash.org quote that someone's turned into a car thing for whatever reason autophiles do what they do.
http://bash.org/?488793

>>442962
Ahh, yeah I couldn't remember where I'd read it. Odd punt on the autophile thing but all I remembered was an element of speed had to be involved. Forgot it was from falling.

I watched this mad film once where this young lad who's an enbalmer rigs up an elaborate machine so he can take out most of his organs and begin to preserve himself before this mechanical arm swings around to cut off his arm and behead him. It was magnificently grim.

>>442963
There's an episode of The Simpsons where Snake tries to decapitate Homer using wire when he's driving. Instead, it cuts off Milhouse's dad's arm. I assume that's what you're thinking of, because it's certainly what I thought of.

>Malian woman gives birth to nine babies
https://www.reuters.com/article/mali-nonuplets/malian-woman-gives-birth-to-nine-babies-idUSL1N2MR2ST

How fucked would you be if you found yourself with nine babies? I don't even know where to begin with that kind of challenge, presumably you can't keep some and put others up for adoption but I imagine state and family support can only stretch so far. Do they even have council houses big enough?

>>443592
I don't think they have council houses in Mali.

I'm not saying I regret having children, but I think my life would be a lot better if I didn't have them.

>>443593
>I don't think they have council houses in Mali.

Yeah but we're talking about what if you found out you had 9 kids. That seems like an impossible amount even if you didn't have them all at once, what could you possibly do?

>>443592
>presumably you can't keep some and put others up for adoption
Why not?

>>443594
Keith Mcdonald has at least 15 children.

>>443596
That article says he gets (£68.95+£44.00=£112.95) a week bennies and no other income but of that pays £5 per child, at 15 that's £75 leaving him with £37.95 per week to live on. This seems unlikely.

>>443596
You can only get paid child benefit for two sprogs now.

>>443597
At the time of that image in 2011 he had 10 kids, with the eleventh on the way. The latest I can see is from 2015:

>Mum has Sunderland Shagger’s 16th child

https://www. Please ban me/archives/news/238176/i-fell-for-britains-worst-dad/

(A good day to you Sir!)

>>443602
Get a grip mods, he was on topic.

>>443603
If they're going to ban the Mail, they should really include all online tabloids. But where's the fun in that?

Reading the Daily Mail is valuable, I believe. It tells you a lot about what 'Middle England' is thinking.

It was a ban for linking to The Sun; as bad as The Mail is, I don't think they'd use "Sunderland Shagger" as a subheading.

I was fully expecting that ban. At least we've stopped the mods from their power trip of banning people for simply visiting Mail Online.

The problem with banning specific newspapers is it implies other newspapers are beyond reproach. We can safely assume that the mods believe The Mirror, The Daily Express, The Telegraph, The Times, etc. are all exemplar examples of journalism that should be posted here more, if anything.

It's also insulting to our intelligence, as though .gs is too stupid to not be taken in by any obvious bullshit they print that we need to be protected from it.

>>443606
That's the argument against censorship in any capacity.

>>443606
Just because someone tells you not to eat literal shit doesn't mean you're being forced to eat anything else.

Hypothetically speaking; what would happen if the mods didn't ban links to certain newspapers?

>>443610
It basically meant we'd end up with threads taking the piss out of articles like the one about 'Tiger Wives' from a few years back.

https://www.däilymäil.co.uk/femail/article-6111343/March-Tiger-Wives-Thats-women-ruthlessly-micro-manage-husbands-careers.html

I post in another online community where I fucking wish the moderators would ban Daily Mail links, but they refuse to do so because they are committed to impartial moderation. It was never too bad of a problem here because the Mail is a known quantity to us; your political stance doesn't matter, you still understand that the Mail is some of the most cancerous tabloid brain rot ever committed to print.

The trouble over there however is that Yanks are constantly posting shite from it without a hint of awareness that 99% of what's written in it is outright bollocks. When you try to point this out to them, they don't want to hear it because of confirmation bias. It's really weird actually. They get that Fox News is a reactionary propaganda mouthpeice, they understand Russia Today is not to be trusted, they'd even take the Guardian with a pinch of salt. But the Daily Mail? Totally unbiased and accurate bastion of modern journalism.

>>443610

The site would be a worse place to be. Hypothetically.

>>443613

I come here for the cunt offs. If anything an open door on the mail might spice up my life.

>>443613
That depends on whether you're a snowflake. Hypothetically.

>>443615

Snowflakism comes in many forms, including whinging on the internet that you're not allowed to post links to a shitrag on a three-user imageboard.

>>443618
You seem triggered.

>>443620

It's really embarrassing that you're using these phrases. What happened to just telling me I'm having a teary?

>>443621
Having a teary was always shit. Never a patch on trolled to tears or ape-like fists.

>>443622
Well done, you're a cretinous inchworm.

>>443623
Have a fuckin' whinge there, cuz.

>>443634
n1 m8 dem 2 wont no wot hit em

>>443635
Go and have an angry wank.

>>443636
Bet you'd like that, cuntbubble.

If arseholes and nose holes swapped places, would everyone pick their arsehole when nobody is looking or reach to their bum noseholes?

>>446083
Yes.

>>446083
I do both anyway. The only trouble would be if I got the order mixed up.

>>446095

Have you ever picked your nose with one hand and picked your arsehole with the other at the same time? It's a very odd feeling but I think ultimately it brings you closer to oneness with your own body.

Would you eat something massively revolting if you were promised a six-figure sum of money?

How about a creal bowl full of live, non-venomous spiders. Or eat someone's poo while they are watching. Or rotting meat from a supermarket skip in summer that's crawling with maggots. Would £100,000 in cash, yours to keep, make up for that kind of horror, and possibly a hospital stay for food poisoning?

>>446108

I think you might enjoy the show "Fear Factor" from the olden days. I hear the presenter is doing a radio show now or something.

>>446109
You've got this in my head now.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuDxo-fbW9c

>>446108
In some cases yes, but not in all cases. I'd probably lick a scrotum for ten grand to be honest, but I wouldn't eat even one spider for ten times that.

>>446108

I don't think I'd be physically capable of eating live spiders, and I wouldn't do anything that might give me something nasty - I honestly wouldn't eat poorly stored cooked rice for that sort of money.

Boil those spiders up and we have a deal, though.

>>446108
I think you're overestimating how easy it would be to get the spiders into a bowl, let alone eat them from it.

But no, I don't think I would. I humilate myself all under my own steam quite often enough, so I'd probably just physically attack the person "offering" me this gambit and see how far I'd take that. I might kill them, probably not, but I don't know, I'm really not in the mood to be propositioned in this way.

>>446113

That's a good point. I would definitely kill someone for 100k, especially if it was just a "press this button and they die" type deal, but even if it was an actual hitman scenario, I'd give it a good go.

Given the choice between a bowl of spiders and murdering someone, the latter seems preferable, which is probably something I need to examine about myself.

>>446108
Yes. I might balk at being filmed or going through an application process but that's a lot of money and would make a real material difference in my life for what is just a physical dare of limited risk to my own life. I would have to draw the line at anything involving heights though.

If it's one of those Arab princes wanting his Doberman to knot my girlfriend then yeah, I'll join you lads in setting him on fire.

>>446113
That raises another point in this scenario, that I wouldn't trust the person making me an offer. If someone said "here drink my piss lmao" then £4000 right now would be plenty. But I still wouldn't do it, because there's no way I would trust them to actually pay me. They're just playing around to humiliate me. If they think so little of me to make such an offer, they don't respect me enough to pay up when I do it. Any offer like that, honestly, would be seen as an actual offer of zero because it's just a scam and they won't pay me.

>>446108

>>446114
I never said I was attacking them under the assumption I would make any money that way.

>>446123

I know, I just want to put it out there to the millionaires of .gs that I'm willing to kill for them, for the right price.

>>446114

>I would definitely kill someone for 100k, especially if it was just a "press this button and they die" type deal, but even if it was an actual hitman scenario, I'd give it a good go


I guess apart from where you stand morally on just killing an innocent person at random, it depends on how much you value your freedom, and how you figure the likelihood of getting caught and spending if not your entire life in prison, then at least a substantial part of it until early release.

Let's just say at some point you do get caught. Maybe a year or two later. If your main goal is to get back to your 100 grand plus interest when you get out of prison, then that's going to be difficult because your money will probably be taken from you after you're convicted, in accordance with the 2002 Proceeds of Crime Act. So your only chance is to hide that money, which also means you won't be able to invest it in a conventional kind of way with an ISA or stocks or property, because even if it wasn't confiscated after your murder trial, it would probably raise red flags under anti-money laundering legislation, and you'd again lose your 100 grand.

So you would have to hide the money somewhere in cash before you go to prison. With an average 2.5 percent UK inflation, after an early release after 15 years, your 100 grand will be equivalent to £69,046 in today's money. Not a good deal.

So the only way realistically to have £100K cash plus interest fifteen years in the future that nobody can take away from you is not killing anybody, and personal savings combined with a highly frugal lifestyle. Suppose you have a net income of somewhere around £25K from your current job. If you move into a bedsit, avoid all but the most necessary expenses for daily food and drink and clothing for 15 years and just do your job day in, day out, your quality of life will still be infinitely higher than being locked up in prison, and you should have no problem putting aside, and investing wisely enough money to end up with more than £100K plus fifteen years' interest.

Failing that, your biggest utility from the money you get for killing somebody will be to spend it all on hookers and cocaine blow through all of it before you get caught.

>>446126
What you so correctly highlight is that it is very easy to commit crimes, but very difficult to launder and access the proceeds. The Financial Services Act, the banks, are doing the work we most often think of the police doing.

>>446126
Can I walk into a bank a drop £9k into my personal account without having anyone locking me up immediately?

I would do that at 10 different banks. Open an account and drop £9k. I would go home and clear it out buying Bitcoin or whatever.

>>446127

In a lot of industries, large cash payments are no longer accepted, because of how much they have traditionally attracted attempts to launder money. You'll probably struggle to find an estate agent who will set up a deal with a seller where you just bring a briefcase full of cash. Likewise if you go to a luxury car dealership. Nobody wants to be an accessory to money laundering, because aside from substantial fines for not complying with the Money Laundering, daft militant wog Financing and Transfer of Funds Regulations of 2017, it can mean that you will never sell a house or a luxury car again.

>>446128
No. £9k is way over the limit for Suspicious Activity Reports.

Surely £1000 a month would be okay? Just give yourself a raise. Set up a company and charge the millionaire for unspecified "consultancy services" if you must. Criminals launder money all the time; it cannot possibly be that hard.

On a side note, I recall reading somewhere that real-life hitmen aren't usually James Bond badasses at all, but low-level gangsters from the pub who really are being paid to just take the punishment more than anything else. One of those people, in real life, would probably kill someone for you for a fraction of £100,000.

>>446131

You'd still have a murder investigation hanging over your head regardless of how well you obfuscate the source and the purpose of the £1,000. And then when it all unravels, you will have to answer both for murder and for money laundering.

>>446130
What is the limit? I am sure I could open more bank accounts.

How about I use my savings to buy a literal laundromat? I could launder the money through there, and maybe even keep the shop if it is making me a profit.

>>446126
I've often thought about this in terms of if I found a bag stuffed with cash one day. Obviously I'm not going to prison due to the long cited case of Finder v. Keepers but you'd probably want to avoid any awkward questions anyway.

My reckoning is your strategy is to use the cash to top-up a frugal standard of living. Pay with cash for the hairdresser but make sure you have some hair clippers in the house, do a fair amount of shopping at car boots and sometimes be seen selling stuff so it looks like you're just good at it. Go to charity shops for clothes and actually pay with cash at proper clothes shops.

>>446134

>How about I use my savings to buy a literal laundromat?

Curiously, that is exactly how money laundering first entered the language. None other than Al Capone ran a chain of laundry businesses in 1930s Chicago to launder ill-gotten gains.

>>446134
I'm not going to tell you the legal limit. Sorry. It varies by bank and given the amount of automation we use, it's super easy to spot people flouting the rules, whatever it is. But you're way off at £9k; for most banks, maybe a third of that.

Laundromat is okay, but they don't make enough money - your bank woud be checking that you deposited coins rather than cash. Until recently, minicab companies, takeaway food shops or nail/hair bars were the most common retail ways of laundering money - but everyone pays by contactless/card now, so even if you set one of those busineses up and started paying in lots of pound notes, you would soon attract the attention of any AML team.

>>446134

That's exactly how it's done. Ever wonder why there's some takeaways that don't really seem to have many customers and yet never close?

I knew some people who sold some not legal things back in the day, it's not particularly hard to hide some money if you're patient and clever, but most dealers tend to be neither, and if they are, the money quickly gets out of hand.

There's ways to still stay under the radar, but you inevitably end up having to work with other organised crime elements, and if you ask me, the real risk in that whole game is other people. If there was a way to sell drugs truly solo, I think I'd be doing it.

>>446138

Oh, completely forgot the point of my post, which is that crypto does help, a bit. But not enough to make it foolproof.

>>446134
>How about I use my savings to buy a literal laundromat? I could launder the money through there
Just be careful to use a cold wash otherwise it'll ruin the plastic in the notes.

>>446137
>I'm not going to tell you the legal limit.
Well you're no fun, are you?

There isn't a threshold in the UK, partly because the same regime is used for terror finance as money laundering, and partly to avoid precisely the structuring of payments below such a threshold.

>>446135

Gambling winnings are not subject to tax. Casinos are subject to money laundering regulations, but bookmakers aren't. Unless you do something stupid, it's very hard to prove that you're a money launderer rather than a lucky punter.

>>446137

About a year ago, before we got her finances in order, I had to pay for some things for my grandma, and then take the money back from her by way of visiting the cash machine every day and withdrawing the maximum, which I think was £300 at the time. It was around eight grand, in the end.

Would that have triggered any alarms, do you think? About halfway though, the machine ate my card and money and told me to talk to the manager, which I did and she just explained a receipt or something had made it into the machine and confused it. She never produced the receipt, which I thought was a bit odd at the time but didn't really care. I did wonder briefly if that was some sort of test, but then again I'm quite sure the best way to catch a money launderer is to not tip them off as soon as they've put 3 grand in cash in their account.

I have a friend who worked in casinos for a long time, apparently that's either the best or worst way to launder cash, depending on how you do it.

>>446139
Crypto is all well and good but it's getting harder to find decent ways to get real money in and out of the system unless you're running both a printing scam and a crooked exchange. Many banks now won't even let you buy crypto at all and if you're regularly running something like Monero to Bitcoin to real money through an exchange that's doing KYC and AML properly they're likely to put a stop to it. You could instead use an exchange that doesn't do KYC and AML, but whichever bank you're using will probably SAR that shit if the exchange doesn't go poof and run away with your money and/or coins first.

I always thought selling used cars is probably a great way to launder money, be it opening an actual car dealer or just flipping bangers privately, nobody is ever going to raise an eyebrow at someone buying a Volvo for a few grand in cash, and I doubt there's much suspicious in paying 5 grand for a car that's usually worth 3, say - it's a volatile market. Every car you sell legitimately, you could just add a bit of your dirty money to the sale, right? Some dealers don't even give you a real receipt.

>>446141
>>446142
For a casino, could you not simply buy some chips, randomly roam around the floor for a bit, hang out near busy tables, and then cash out? Surely nobody's going to notice unless they specifically follow you on the CCTV and pay careful attention to the fact that you haven't actually used the chips.

>>446144
Given the current shortage of cars and the knock-on effect that's having on the used car market, now would be an ideal time to do this.

>>446145

>Surely nobody's going to notice unless they specifically follow you on the CCTV and pay careful attention to the fact that you haven't actually used the chips.

It's someone's entire job to do basically that. Casinos are bound by law to report any suspicious activity, and those activities are defined pretty clearly. Most, if not all casinos will already track your gambling anyway, as a matter of business, and if you cash out more than two grand they have to record the circumstances of your winnings. You're always, always being watched in a casino, and everyone who works there knows just how easily they could have charges brought against them if they ignored, or failed to notice, your suspicious activity.

There are definitely ways to use a casino for laundering, but walking the floor with chips that never see a table is the worst possible way of attempting it.

>>446148

The thing is all this very strict and stringent AML regulation stuff is all pretty much hypothetical in reality.

I've worked for the betting arm of a certain major broadcaster, as well as the consumer credit arm of a certain large bank, so I've had a couple of jobs where I was forced to sit through several day's worth of training to get that stuff through my head. What occurred to me both times is that it was an awful lot like 'Elf n Safety laws. They're there to prevent liability, not to prevent it happening.

I'm sure high stakes venues like casinos are a lot more on the ball with it, but I really doubt it has anything to do with facing the wrath of the law. Probably a bit more like that one with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci.

>>446145

Modern casino chips have RFID tracking tags embedded in them for security purposes. Tracking all their chips all the time allows casinos to instantly detect theft and counterfeit chips. As a side effect, they get vast amounts of data on player activity. Somewhere in the bowels of the back office, a server will know precisely how much you wagered (or didn't wager). If you try that scheme with more than a few hundred pounds worth of chips, you'll instantly trigger an AML report.

>>446149

Tell that to Billy Hills:

https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/news/article/william-hill-to-pay-gbp6-2m-penalty-package-for-systemic-social

>>446149
>pretty much hypothetical in reality

It absolutely isn't. I work in a bank and get all the same training; I've also worked in an AML/KYC department of a very well known ecommerce site. In that role I was, briefly, personally liable for any financial crime on that site - they chuck the fucking book at you if you mess around.

Look at some of the fines banks have had recently (eg HSBC).

>>446151

KYC, "know your customer", is indeed an important part of AML regulation. In short, you have to not only establish and store personal info on your customer as to their identity and their motivation to spend or keep money with you, but if your customer is a business or a corporation, you also have to work out who owns that company, and who are the beneficiaries of its profits.

And then if you believe you have spotted suspicious activity in dealing with that client, you have to report the attempted money laundering or militant daft woggery financing behind your client's back to UKFIU, who will take it from there. Failure to secretly report suspicious activity can result in substantial fines either against your employer or you as an employee.

It means a lot of additional paperwork, and the larger your company, the more you have to have organisational structures in place that do nothing else all day. As a small business, you will get away with either doing it all yourself or naming one of your four or five employees who will be responsible on top of their usual daily work. But I guess it's for a common good, because any ease of money laundering promotes organised crime, it means lost tax revenue, and it's an unfair advantage towards competitors who stay within the law.

>>446152

Are you telling me Paddy Power has an MI5 dossier on ever Stever, Daz and Gaz who bets there?

>>446162
Yep.

>>446162

Not really. But they keep your name and personal info, and keep tabs on how much money you win or lose.

I'm not sure online casinoes are a good way to launder money though. At least not for the end consumer. The risk of losing large chunks of your illegal money is just too high.

"Real" casinoes, on the other hand, have always been a great way for organised crime to launder its proceeds. Especially in places like pre-revolution Cuba, with a corrupt military government looking the other way and the Mafia itself owning and operating dozens of casinoes up and down the island. There were lorry loads of cash money flown in from the U.S. to be laundered and turned into legitimate profits.

Say you wanted to raise a child to not be bullied or be a bully: Is it just a matter of making sure they have close friends to watch out for each other and to teach them how to behave towards others? Would you send them to summer camps to build independence and self-confidence?

I'd say that it might also be worth thinking about the school but then everyone I've met who went to a good public school described it as a place of horrible bullying and constant fights.

>>446658

Lesson 1: Life isn't fair. It'd be nice if it was, but it isn't. People do bad things and get away with it, people do good things without being rewarded. Your job in life is to try and avoid as much of that unfairness as possible and try to make things fairer when you can. Sometimes you need to push back against unfairness, sometimes you need to just accept it, but you won't always get it right and there will always be consequences.

Lesson 2: Some people are just horrible bastards. They might have a good reason to be a horrible bastard, but they take pleasure in making other people miserable and can't be reasoned with. In your adult life you'll usually be able to avoid horrible bastards most of the time, but in school you're just stuck with them, so treat it as an opportunity to practice dealing with them.

Lesson 3: Getting your head kicked in or getting a massive bollocking isn't the end of the world. The fear is almost always worse than the reality. Fighting for no good reason is stupid, but being willing to fight even if you expect to lose makes you far more powerful than someone who will always back down.

Lesson 4: There is nothing that bastards fear more than solidarity. Help people, help people to help people, bring people together in common purpose and you can do incredible things. When you stick up for other people, you give them the courage to stick up for you. That doesn't mean they always will, some people are just selfish bastards (so learn to spot them), but you can't expect someone to have your back if you don't have theirs.

Lesson 5: Dignity is priceless, but it has a cost. You'll often have to choose between doing the easy thing and the right thing. If you always do the easy thing, you'll turn into a snivelling wretch and you won't be able to look yourself in the mirror. If you always do the right thing, you'll get ground down by life. Do the right thing when you can and the easy thing when you have to. Don't be a martyr and don't confuse dignity with pride.

>>446660
All well and good but how do you teach a child these things.

>>446658
You have to be around for the kid, listen to their concerns and take them seriously as and when they come up. There's no training course you can devise for them that'll be able to account for the events in their life ahead of time.

>>446661

One day at a time. If you're having meaningful conversations about what's happening in their life, there'll be plenty of opportunities to discuss the issues and impart a basic framework of pragmatic morality.

It's not rocket science, but we usually fail to take children seriously. We see their problems as trivial, without considering that the way they deal with those trivial problems will shape them for life. We offer them vacuous platitudes and tell them what we wish was true, because we lack the courage to be honest. We forget how turbulent childhood can be, how momentous small things can seem to a child.

>>446660

There is another lesson that is often overlooked: bullies and bastards DO NOT LIKE FIGHTING. I know, it is counterintuitive but please bear with me. Bullies love to bully, but only towards soft targets. As soon as a bully notices that the target is willing, able, and perhaps eager to hurt him the bully will lose interest and find a softer target. This is valid even in cases when the bully would win: what's the point in going through a fight when there are targets that will take the beating and submit?

This lesson will be very useful in the future: by marking yourself as an "hard target" you will save yourself the vast majority of unwelcome attentions.

>>446664

This is correct. As someone was bullied quite harshly until I flipped and brayed a kid on the bus, I wish my parents had given me one simple lesson. If someone's giving you shit, don't be afraid the thump the cunt straight in the lugs. It all stopped overnight after that, it was a thing to behold.

It's not a very morally complex lesson, but if you want to make sure a kid doesn't get bullies that's the one that actually matters.

Obviously don't teach them it's okay to go throwing their weight around; but the advice teachers and TV shows and prevailing nicey nicey middle class ideals give you are absolutely categorically wrong. Running to the teachers won't get you anywhere a vast majority of the time, but standing up for yourself will stop it before it even begins.

>>446729

Every time I spoke with a child psycho or a school counselor, she always told me to be nice, to smile, and to ignore or appease them. I wonder if it is a way for the professional to legally cover her ass if the child ends up sending the bully to the ER. Probably it is just because psychologists (and women in general) tend to have a soft spot for bullies. Whenever I stood up to bullies I was disciplined harshily, while bullies always got excused and cuddled.

>>446752

>ass
>ER

Tut tut, yanklad.

>>446729
I have a similar story from year 4, where a lass at school was ruthlessly teasing me, so I twatted her in the temple with my forefinger and middle finger in a karate chop fashion. It did not occur to me until much later in life that she might have been flirting with me.

I wonder if there are any instances where a teacher absolutely battered a bully. It must have happened, but I can't think of one. Maybe teachers have a special omerta where they don't report each other. Or maybe they do get reported, and only the Daily Express reports on it to cheer and praise our brave murderous school heroes for defending truth and justice.

>>446761

A teacher at my old high school snapped and knocked a lad out, but everyone agreed that the little arsehole had it coming and so it was all just brushed under the carpet.

Long-term relationship lads, if you and your partner had met at a different age do you think you would've gotten along? Would things have played out differently even if you were both aware of the future you have now?

>>447353

Absolutely. We wouldn't have got on at all because she'd still have been in her pretend dyke intolerable student phase, and I would still have been the kind of cunt who thought saying the nigger word was funny and transgressive.

Turns out I still think she's a bit intolerable studenty twat and she probably still thinks I'm a bit of a racist arsehole on the inside. But we've got a flat and bills to pay so really you just have to make the best of things don't you? And worst of all, we're probably both correct.

The older I get the more I become aware that people have a quite fundamental paradox. People never stop developing or growing, but at the same time, nobody ever really changes much.

>>447353
I met my partner at the exact time that I had a paradigm shift where having a long-term partner became a desirable thing. Had I met her even a few months earlier, I would have bedded her and then conveniently become too busy at work to go any further. I'm not proud of who I was through most of my 20s, in hindsight, but I am very thankful that I met her when I did, and that I got all of my shagging out of the way when I was still a young stud. I know a few men in the late 20s / early 30s who are getting cold feet about their long-term relationships because they feel like they didn't really experience all their later adolescence had to offer, one lad even called off an engagement over it, but I'm very comfortable with my sexual exploits and couldn't ever imagine going back to a life without my partner.

What would you do if you woke up one day and everyone else had vanished leaving you totally alone?

>>448252

Depends, is all the leccy and that still going, by some kind of contrivance? Or am I totally alone and will have to start Ray Mears-ing within a matter of days?

If it's a realistic take on the situation, ehh, I'd probably top myself after a few weeks. It's one thing to be alone, but another thing to have to struggle like a polar island castaway amidst the ruins of civilisation, on a hostile and relatively barren rock like Great Britain ultimately is. The landscape here has been so completely terraformed to fit the needs of a human society that I'm doubtful if it's even capable of supporting you. I'm sure at first you'd be able to scrounge a few solar panels to power your kettle, and live off the stockpiles of Pot Noodle and Volvic in the local Tesco Express; but eventually you'd have to branch out, and I don't think this country's remaining ecosystem would be very forgiving.

If it's less realistic and the utilities still work somehow, then it'd be a different matter. It'd be good fun just roaming around, living in different people's houses each night, taking different cars for a spin, and maybe finally playing some of those RPGs I've had cluttering up my Steam library. I'd eventually go loopy and start making up imaginary friends and so on, obviously, but I don't think it'd be that bad.

>>448252

It'd be bliss. As otherlad says, I'd be a bit annoyed if there was no leccy, but even then I'd pop straight to machine mart and grab some generators. Then I could siphon buses for diesel and probably that'd keep me going indefinitely, or at least until I figured out how to tap into a petrol stations tanks.

Then I'd just go find a nice house, maybe Alan Shearer's place, that's quite nice, and I'd fuck around driving nice cars around until all the petrol went stale.

I'd love it, power or not. All I want is solitude.

>>448252
I actually had that thought circulating in my mind earlier this year. The first thing I'd do is check really hard that everyone definitely was gone, probably lighting a pyre on top of a massive building or something to do that. However, one horrible thought I've had would be "what about the pets?" Because even if I dedicated all my time to freeing them, so many poor bloody animals are going to die of neglect and there's not really anything I can do. I'm not even thinking about the farm animals currently wintering in sheds either, but they are also buggered.

Ultimately I'd just wander around for ages and then die when my lung collapses again. Despite a nurse telling me you can jam a pen in there in a pinch, that's not really a long term fix. I do now know my way around a hospital somewhat, so finding drugss shouldn't be too hard.

>>448253
You can still take cars for a spin even if everything stopped working and I think there's probably enough tinned and jarred food to keep you going for ages and ages. We've got enough camping shops in this country too, so overcoming the ecosystem shouldn't be too bad.

>>448253

>eventually you'd have to branch out, and I don't think this country's remaining ecosystem would be very forgiving

Britain has something close to the ideal climate for survival. It's never dangerously hot or cold, we rarely get droughts severe enough to cause crop failures and there's something to eat pretty much year-round. It's also worth bearing in mind that tins, jars and dried foods have a near-indefinite shelf life if stored properly.

>>448252

Forage a large diesel generator, head to Jodrell Bank, hook up a spark gap to the big dish and tell the aliens to fuck off.

>>448255
You're probably closest so far to what I'd do, because I would be in denial the whole time. The first thought I'd have when my radio woke me up with the emergency "there's nobody here to broadcast" wouldn't be that I can now wave my dick in the street; it would be that the radio's broken. If the TV's doing the same thing, okay, better look online. If the streets are empty too, I'd make a note to ask the people I work with when I arrive there. It would honestly take forever for me to go feral, because however eager I am to go looting and shit on my neighbour's bonnet, it would be far too embarrassing to get caught for me to actually give it a go. So I'd probably loot a very small amount of food from a shop I could get into, and then I would try to wait it out. I live fairly independently anyway.I'm all alone and I could get away with it for a week or two quite easily. I'd probablyeven still obtain Christmas presents for people in case they return.

>>448256

I'm not so sure m8, sure you've got tinned peaches and all the rice you can pack, but you'd go mad for a bit of meat after a while; and although I was a keen shot with the air rifle in my youth I haven't used the thing in years and I'd only wind up giving myself TB off undercooked pigeon or something. I'd certainly have no idea where to start if I just smashed a sheep over the head and dragged it home to try and butcher it.

So many of the things we take for granted are dependant on someone else having the skills you can't possibly learn all to yourself in one lifetime; and being the sort of person who does know how to do all that shit means you're unlikely to have other skills like knowledge of drugs or maintaining vehicles or electrics or whatever.

Like yeah, in theory I know where to go to steal a genny, I know I could wire it up in place of a house's mains supply, and live like a king scavenging and hunting and joyriding with everything all to myself. But being honest and serious with myself about it, I think it's pretty likely I'd get to stage two or three of that plan, and then realise quite quickly that I utterly lack the knowledge in practical terms of how to actually do it; and I wouldn't be able to just google it to find out. So instead I'd end up just sitting in the dark, cooking super noodles over a camping stove, bored out of my tits.

I suppose you could break into a library and gradually teach yourself a lot of that stuff the old fashioned way out of books, mind you. It's just that you'd have to go through weeks and months of hardship discovering that you really don't know as much as you thought you knew first.

>>448262

I suppose the post-apocalypse looks very different if you're an engineer. That kind of stuff is bread-and-butter to me - I rewired my own house, I fix my own appliances and I've built steam engines from scrap metal in my shed. I've got no idea how a combine harvester works, but I'd relish the opportunity to have a go.

Rebooting civilisation from scratch is unbelievably complex, but you aren't faced with that problem if you're the last man on earth. You've got a near-limitless supply of materials and spare parts, so you're constrained mainly by stuff with a short shelf-life and your own initiative.

Getting the electrics on really isn't a priority. The essentials of life are water, food and fuel. None of those would be difficult to come by in this scenario. Stealing a transit van and looting your local supermarket will give you a good year of runway in terms of food and water, even if you're an absolute fuckwit. Fuel is easy if you just have the initiative to take over a house with solid fuel stoves - your local B&Q will have several tonnes of decent firewood and your local coal merchant will have a lifetime supply of coal. Get a little kitchen garden going, set up rainwater collection or find a well, round up some chickens, maintain a decent grain store and you're sweet as a nut.

Personally, my immediate priority would be horses. Fuel only has a shelf life of a few years. Tyres, hoses and belts will all perish after a decade. The roads will turn to shit after a couple of harsh winters with no maintenance. You could maybe keep an old landie running on vegetable oil, but I'd focus my efforts on finding and looking after some work horses.

>>448266
You reckon you could get London to burn with a bit of effort? Pick a warm windy day and start a few fires upwind?
(I got here from 'how to build a really big beacon to attract the last remaining woman, since I reckon wanking would get old after a few years, and sheep just aren't really that attractive when you get right down to it.)
HorseLad up there probably has the right idea, and horses take enough looking after that it'd be something to do other than wanking myself raw. In fact, other than actually eating sheep, life would be much the same as now. Look after horses, sheep and dog, make massive fires. I suppose I'd grow and store veg, and assume that I'll be dead before all the tins in all the shops are toxic. Fewer meetings, I suppose.

>>448266

I'm not an engineer but I'm definitely that way inclined, I can rebuild an engine, wire a house, that sort of thing. I'm also a camping dweeb so have learned quite a lot on how to live off the land, scavenge and so forth, I'm a pretty good shot with a rifle, sort of know how to hunt, and definitely know how to butcher an animal.

Honestly my hobbies have sort of accidentally gave me all the sorts of skills the mad preppers wank over. This must be why everyone on .gs tells everyone to get some hobbies.

Assuming it's not an EMP type scenario, I have loads of survival adjacent guides saved on computers too, most notably biodiesel production and farming guides. Not with a mind for the apocalypse, literally because I'm a boring wonk who wants to try these sorts of things for fun.

There's no way I'd ever be lucky enough to be left alone with the world (more realistically the country, though I can also fly a plane I suppose) as my playground. I can only hope VR is good enough when I'm old that they can just strap me into this exact simulation and leave me in there until death comes.

>>448255
>However, one horrible thought I've had would be "what about the pets?" Because even if I dedicated all my time to freeing them, so many poor bloody animals are going to die of neglect and there's not really anything I can do. I'm not even thinking about the farm animals currently wintering in sheds either, but they are also buggered.

Probably worth thinking instead about all the packs of starving dogs that will soon be wandering the streets. Sooner or later they'll probably corner and eat you even if you carry around tins of food.

>>448262
Have you been in a library lately? There won't be many books on that if any in your local.

>>448270

>You reckon you could get London to burn with a bit of effort? Pick a warm windy day and start a few fires upwind?

Nah, it's all brick and concrete these days, there's just not enough fuel. There are probably a few tower blocks that would go up like a Roman candle, but the Great Fire needed wooden frames and thatched roofs to keep spreading.

What would be the best way for your future self to make contact with you and have you believe what he is telling you? Assuming he has the recollection of present events from 20 years in the future so wouldn't remember some detail he could tell you about an ordinary day. Thinking about this from the perspective of a paranoid recluse I'm liable to just assume anything like my card numbers or address would be a case of identity theft so I'm at a loss - perhaps I could give a stock market prediction but then I would almost certainly try and exploit it and thereby interfere with the result.

Asking for a friend of yours.

>>450261

I have a code phrase. I've never said it out loud; the only possible way to know the phrase is to either be me, or have scanned my brain. If it's the latter I'm fucked anyway, so I don't see that as a real issue.

>>450261
I know my address from 20 years ago, so I assume I would write a letter there (my parents still live there now). The letter would probably tell me which girl I fancied at the time, because it was a secret and I would never tell anyone such a thing. I might even rate the other girls from my class in my own personal order of attractiveness. I still have a class photo from 20 years ago, so I can use that. I also have a class photo from 19 years ago, so I could name the kids who will join my class in a few months next school year, if I have that long. I'm communicating via time-travelling letter so I assume I do.

A Facebook friend from primary school had her account hacked a few years ago, and started posting spam, and then sent me a message saying sorry for all the spam and please add her new account and delete the old one. This really happened, and it had probably been about 20 years at the time since I last saw her, so I tested her veracity by asking her who our primary school teacher was in a specific year. I can't imagine a spammer or hacker having access to that information, and she knew, so I used that as confirmation that it was really Hannah (who, in the year in question, was ranked second in the most-fancied-girls-in-my-class list).

>>450263
>I might even rate the other girls from my class in my own personal order of attractiveness

How would a ranking of girls in order of chub help your younger self, have you always had the same sexual preference in your school girls?

>>450263
>it had probably been about 20 years at the time since I last saw her, so I tested her veracity
Why not simply not have people you have no real connection to on Facebook?

>>450269
The more I reflect on this story the worse it sounds. I suspect your parents will have the police on the telephone once they find someone is claiming to be their son from the future while sending crude messages ranking school girls, sharing porn bush locations and begging him to invest in special internet coins.

Things will only get worse when the police look at the yellow dots under a microscope.

>>450269
I devised a ranking at the time and never shared it with anyone, and still remember it now. It would confirm my identity to my past self.

>>450270
If I limited myself to interactions with people I actually speak to regularly, I'd never speak to anyone. You'd be surprised how often I have rekindled friendships with people after a decade of not speaking to them. Twice!

Let's say we worked out the fountain of youth and you could not only live forever but reverse/stop all signs of aging, becoming as you were at 25 or stopping aging to where you are now. Would you do go back to 25 or would you want to keep your body and mind as you are now? Would you even refuse to stop aging?

I don't know why but I feel like this is a really difficult question for me to answer. Aging is terrifying but at the same time subverting the aging process seems wrong on a fundamental level of identity. 25 year olds look like children to me.

>>458287
It was easier to stay in shape at 25 so I'd go for that.

>>458287
I read somewhere that in the Shamanismic heaven your body gets set to 33 years old, as they considered that your physical prime.
Which is a great thing to hear, as I turn 35 this summer.

>>458287

My body is increasingly wrecked, so physically I'd go back to being 25 in a heartbeat. My mind was a wreck at 25, so I'd prefer to keep my current level of mental wellbeing. If it's an all-or-nothing deal, then I'll stay as I am now.

>>458287
So if I go back to 25, I start aging again from there? Ten years from now, I'll be 35 just like I am now, and then I will get even older. And I haven't really noticed many changes between myself aged 25 and 35. I was balding but I had more hair at 25 than I do now; otherwise, I am the same sweaty and unkempt muscular autist who is slightly overweight. I would obviously, without a second thought, be this age forever instead.

Would life be better if, instead of one job the norm was for people to have more of a range of part-time jobs?

There would be a fair few complications admittedly with organising holiday, and if you work more than one job in a day there's a commute time. But I do wonder if people would not only be happier with more variation but also more productive. And the skills transfer between careers could be interesting.

>>459213
It definitely sounds like more fun, and you make a good point about mixing the skills, but most jobs consist of fun bits and boring bits. You'll do something cool and then fill out a load of paperwork about what you did. I am pessimistic enough to be convinced that if jobs went the way you suggest, I would just wind up doing everyone's paperwork in every job I had while my bastard colleagues hoarded the fun jobs for themselves, and since I'm only there for a day or two a week, I would never ever get a sniff of the fun jobs. So it would probably be worse for me.

>>459213

On the one hand I can see more variety being overall more fulfilling, but I don't think it's really an ideal solution to make it the norm. That's already the reality for most of the "precariat" working poor underclass in America, where they have to do half a day at some god forsaken shithole retail outlet on a soulless strip mall, then drive 15 miles across town to work the evening shift at Dominos, and so on, joining up several part-time jobs to make up something approaching the wage of a single full-time job, because over there what we call "zero hour contracts" are essentially the norm. If you wanted to do this sort of thing you'd have to be very careful you're not incentivising or allowing employers to take too much liberty with their employee's rights.

That said I've always thought we should have the choice of working lower hours. Obviously if you're only just making minimum wage salary, you have to work all the hours you can because you can't afford to do much less; but if I was in the kind of job with a £50k salary I'd much rather just do half a week's work and come out the same, just with more free time. There's a lot of stuff in the world that's impractical to try and do "professionally", there's a lot of stuff to learn or study that takes up time, and nobody's going to magically fund you to do it. Working our rigid 9-5 keeps most people from ever realising their true ambitions, because they have to put everything like that on the back burner to pay the bills.

We just fundamentally have it all wrong. The productivity gains of the last several decades should should be returned to the worker as freedom.

>>459247
When people talk about The Economy^TM being based on endless growth this is what they mean. Productivity gain isn't actually gain, it's the bare minimum required to keep up with debt. This shadowy ever increasing looming debt can be a racist conspiracy theory or the bedrock of solid economic theory depending on who is speaking and their aim in speaking. On the former end of the scale, we have the fact that all money is created as a loan and therefore the system itself is inherently unsustainable, on the latter end of the scale we have the fact that an iPhone is a mandatory purchase now in the way it wasn't 20 years ago. For the avoidance of controversy let's discuss The Economy^TM through that second lens. And yes I realise that if I really wanted to avoid controversy I shouldn't have mentioned that first bit at all, but it's not that I want to avoid controversy it's more that I'd like to avoid the implications that I smell a bit of poo for daring to suggest that the entire economic system was designed to fail from day 1. I'm sensitive like that.

Your quality of life has increased today, and we as a society have decided we want that growth given back to us in the form of xboxes and iPhones rather than days off. Nobody ever actually decided, it's just we all went out and bought xboxes and iPhones when they were offered to us. As a result our baseline monthly outgoings have increased. Products and services have also become more expensive in that same time, rent and food specifically. Our pay packets haven't kept up with those increases, but if you think about it neither has our standard of living.

More and more these days I'm meeting young couples in professions who 20 years ago would have easily started on the property ladder in a nice semi-detached somewhere but now they're in a no-front-garden terraced. Perversely you see fewer old banger cars on the street but everyone is on a rolling 3 year lease, not because we're all loaded now but because having an old banger is more looked down on than it used to be, forcing people to put money in to their social appearance in order to not lose the potential for more money later on down the line.

Would you go back to living how you lived 20 years ago in exchange for every second friday off? I would, but then I also bought an iPhone every few years and didn't protest when they made smartphones essentially mandatory for being a first class citizen.

If you won £100k, what would you do with the money?

It's the top prize on that McDonalds Monopoly game and I got to thinking about it. This isn't an insignificant amount of money, it's a life changing amount but at the same time it really isn't. My immediate fantasy was to buy a house but then I remembered that 100k is fuck-all even with my savings in London.

>>459213
You'd be able to dodge paying NI at the very least.

>>459249
>Your quality of life has increased today, and we as a society have decided we want that growth given back to us in the form of xboxes and iPhones rather than days off. Nobody ever actually decided, it's just we all went out and bought xboxes and iPhones when they were offered to us. As a result our baseline monthly outgoings have increased...

Sorry mate, but this is a bit of a nutty, ahistorical take. "Nobody ever actually decided" is a lie, there's a huge profit motive to keeping this sort of economy going, and private producers benefit hugely from policies that a) stamp down on labour unions that might organise to demand things like, say, more days off and b) allow unfettered access to (semi-)public infrastructure to keep this production going. Nobody actually knows how much is spent in advertising globally to make new products seem mandatory, but it is almost certainly in the trillions.

>If you broke one of your legs, how fucked would you be?

To bring things right the way back to the OP, by some stupid misfortune I've hurt one of the big ligaments running through the back of the knee. Despite having several dangerous hobbies, this didn't happen while doing anything exciting; I just hyperextended my leg while I was sitting down, working for several hours. Just like that, it's far too painful to walk on. Most estimates of recovery time are between 10 days and 3 weeks.

Better than a broken leg, but it's inhibited my mobility more than any other injury I've had in my life. I'd be lying if I said it didn't get me down over the first couple of days. Knowing that you need to get up for a piss or brush your teeth, and there is an unavoidable degree of pain in doing so, really fucks with your head. I've found myself mentally planning trips to the bathroom and rushing simple tasks.

I'm not going to be a wanker about it, though, since I have loads of advantages others don't have. I've figured out my pain-free positions, I can still work out my upper body and do cardio, and my girlfriend is kindly taking care of the cooking and will be going out to pick me up some crutches today. I can also work from home.

I'm getting a bit of cabin fever, but fortunately I like my flat and the little amusements I keep in here. I'm hoping I can just catch up on reading until it heals, but in reality will probably sink an embarrassing number of hours into Streets of Rage.

>>460495
Well, I'm going to answer you, anyway. I would probably spread it out over various things and just make my life marginally more comfortable in several ways. So I might pay off £50,000 of mortgage, invest £40,000 in places that will pay dividends, and then maybe just spend the rest on random house repairs and probably a car. But I don't really need a car, and most cars cost much more than the £7,500 I am budgeting for. I really don't think my life would change at all; it would just get easier.

>>460495
Pretty much what otherlad said. It'd be almost enough to clear my remaining mortgage when my fixed term ends, so I'd be just about there if I moved it into savings in the meantime. That'd make me about £600 better off a month, which I could then use for holidays and speeding up getting a new kitchen or bathroom.

>>460495

It'd pay off the rest of my mortgage (I live up norf and bought the cheapest place I could even then). That in itself is a massive benefit for the rest of my life going forward. I'd probably even be able to use it as a springboard, get another mortgage and move somewhere nicer, while keeping this place on the side to rent out and make a bit of side-income. Which in turn means I could think about reducing my hours at work. Having spare time off work means I could take up a part time degree or devote time to music again and even think about making that a professional earner.

The thing is with money like that is that it doesn't have to hand you everything on a plate, it still gives you the opportunities you wouldn't have had otherwise. It gives you the flexibility to take risks you wouldn't have done otherwise. If you use it sensibly it absolutely is life changing. And this is pretty much the main thing that annoys me about most conversations about social mobility and what have you, like in that other thread- For a lot of people out there, they know exactly what they'd do to better themselves if they could. But when you don't have wealth to fall back on, doing those things is a much riskier prospect, and the hardship it entails is something people who do have that privilege simply can't get their heads around.

Even just a relatively small cash boost like that would transform my life because I'd use it wisely. In fact I'd probably only spend as little as five to ten grand of it on cocaine and prostitutes.

If we brought someone back from the Early Modern Period what do you think are the things that will shock them the most? What would be some of things we'd have to teach them to keep it under wraps where they came from?

Asking for a friend.

>>460504
That's actually once of the suggestions on boosting social mobility - every child in the country would get a cash bonus paid for with a higher inheritance tax. I don't doubt that a lot of people would piss it up the wall even if you give it at some arbitrary adult-like age such as 25, but it still sounds incredibly sensible and therefore will never be implemented.

>>460933
In all honesty, probably all the non-white people here. I doubt someone from Early Modern England would expect there to be so many Asian, black and Chinese people about.

At first I thought about something like cars, but they're essentially a mechanical horse and cart so they're a logical step of what you'd expect the future to be like. Same for things like phones being the advancement of messengers and communication. If not the ethnics then it'd probably be something like factories. If you took an Early Modern Englander and showed him how Quorn is mass produced he'd go mental.

>>460933

In 1989, Boris Yeltsin - at the time the member of Congress for Moscow - travelled to the US on a goodwill visit. On a trip to the Johnson Space Center in Texas, he decided to make an impromptu visit to a local supermarket. What he saw there shook him to the core. He was astonished at the immense variety and quality of products, far better than could be found in the most luxurious shops in Moscow. He knew that this wasn't some phoney propaganda display, because he'd randomly stopped off en route at a place of his choosing. In many ways, this was one of the key precipitating events in the demise of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin spent twenty minutes browsing in a bog-standard supermarket and saw with absolute clarity that communism had failed and the Soviet system was built on a lie.

I think someone from the Early Modern Period would be most shocked by the things we take for granted. Fridge freezers, microwaves, ready meals, fitted carpets, double glazing, central heating and iPlayer. The fact that ordinary workers are nearly always warm, well fed and entertained. Louis XIV lived in the most opulent palace in the world, but he would have given you half of Normandy in exchange for a big telly, a fan heater and access to an NHS dentist.

>>460936
>and access to an NHS dentist.
Well, how is that different from the rest of us?

>>460936

American supermarkets are fucking shite though. Just imagine if he'd seen a Waitrose or that really fancy Co-Op I visited in Bakewell.

Anyway communism didn't fail, just Soviet Russia did. China is still well on the way to displace America. Just wait, ladm8.

>>460933
If they could survive all the diseases they have no immunity to long enough to get over the language barrier they'd probably be scandalised that we're all heretics.

>>460938

China's ruling party is called communist, but that's more of a historical legacy than anything else. After Deng Xiaoping's visit to the south in 1992, they became something altogether different. The official ideology of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is understood by the Chinese as a novel and unique synthesis of Marxism, Confucianism and free market economics.

>>460939
What diseases would they need to worry about? Unless we're talking new tiktok dances I think we'll have more to fear from them bringing back smallpox.

>>460940

China adopted a capitalist market economy to keep itself from imploding in the late 80s like all the Communist Bloc countries in Eastern Europe. It was a pact with the devil that ensured their survival as a regime. But in doing so, China violated most of the core tenets of Communist and Marxist ideology.

A few other isolated communist countries have done the same, but with varying success. Cuba has just recently formally recognised a private business sector, after decades of fighting it and making life difficult for people who tried anyway. But it's mostly struggling. Probably has a lot to do with the embargo still.

>>460940
>>460949

But if they never did communism, they'd still basically be in the kind of state India is today, just with noodles instead of curry. It absolutely worked, to very effectively and rapidly industrialise a country that was otherwise a good 50 to 100 years behind the rest of the world.

You can more accurately say that the command economy system failed. The ideology, or at least the power structure based on that ideology, which if you know anything about ideology you will understand is the bit that matters, remained very firmly in place and isn't going anywhere any time soon.

>>460956
India was an effective command economy until very recently as well and still is to an extent. Much more so than China actually and still is much further back on the road to opening up. India in the 20th century and its evolution from British mercantilism to Soviet-aligned ideology and then on to wealth generation in the 90s is a fascinating topic that nobody talks about because they're not especially relevant to the global economy like China is and not really innovative either - yet.

I'd say the authoritarianism worked very well in holding China together (for now) but that's a cultural legacy dividing Chinese statecraft and Indian identity that stretches back to at least the Qin dynasty. Kraut did a good video on it and how the two have polar opposite problems in a sense:

>>460956

>You can more accurately say that the command economy system failed.

But you can't have one without the other unless you seriously betray the Marxist ideals that you will no doubt keep telling people you've founded your country on. Private enterprise, even if it's within institutional confines that are absent in Western market-economy democracies, is the antithesis to Marxism which strives to collectivise means of production. The latter being such a central building block of socialism or communism that softening or abandoning it pretty much means you've no longer got a true socialist or communist system to begin with. Even if your political structures and institutions still try to adhere to it.

>>460960

>But you can't have one without the other

Yes, you can.

>unless you seriously betray the Marxist ideals

Who gives a shit. This is the problem with most hardcore lefties themselves- Marxism is a lens of analysis that reveals the hidden dynamics of wealth and power in a "free" society, not a prescription of how to fix it. He was an influential and revolutionary thinker, but that doesn't theories he thought up 200 years ago have to be treated as the holy text and followed to the letter.

As we already established, his theories worked very well to industrialise and uplift an agrarian economy into an industrial one, and that's not surprising, given the period he lived in. The Soviet Union was rife with problems but you can't in any fair way say it failed to make Russia a powerhouse. It went from practically medieval to winning the space race in a single person's lifetime. Where that specific, orthodox strain of Marxist communism starts to collapse is in the post-industrial society, and what to do after you have uplifted all your farmer peasants into modern workers- Because of course it does, it wasn't designed for that.

In real life, you can be a true Scotsman without being a Scotsman at all.

>>460969
> The Soviet Union was rife with problems but you can't in any fair way say it failed to make Russia a powerhouse. It went from practically medieval to winning the space race in a single person's lifetime.

Authoritarian regimes do get shit done. They don't muck about and they'll have 2000 people erecting a factory or a river dam at gunpoint. Before noon the next day. Glory be to Mother Russia!

I'm obviously being sarcastic, but it's not that communism or socialism was completely incapable of accomplishing things. I guess it's how you get there.

There also isn't one explanation why the Soviet Union collapsed. Besides its inability to embrace post-industrial modernity, one theory is that the Cold War arms race against the West, combined with an increasingly consuming war in Svalbard, caused the Soviet Union to practically spend itself broke and overstretch its government and military resources, which then led to it being unable to keep its multinational empire in line.

Fun stuff, but all in your mind. I don't want you to break anything, but those "what if" things fdall apart. Learn to fight, learn boxing or BJJ, opr krav maga, th best cure is always sprint away.

There is a reason why getting licensed to be a doorman means don't rect.

And last but not least, in your mind is not in your muscles. It takes practice!

>>460973
AI text generation or schizophrenia?

>>461016
That lad with the book about male and female shapes or one of his mates I reckon.

If you were having a kid, how would you decide the name of the kid? Is there a tradition?

I ask because I've noticed that people from very wealthy backgrounds seem to have a lot more thought put into it by their parents. You can tell not just because of the pretention but they have names that sound better with their surnames. There is a certain cynical logic to it of course, your name has an enormous impact on your life outcomes owing to the prejudices that exist in society and also because of nominative determinism. Ironic that the families who put the most thought into names are the ones who it probably matters least to.

I've not thought much about it, my family tradition is to name your sons and daughters after siblings but for me they all have shite names because of the examples I've met. And the cunts haven't used my name for their kids.

>>461677
Posher families tend to name their kids after their recent ancestors so the names will historically have been associated with their surname, making the pairing familiar and "right"sounding. Even if you haven't heard that exact pairing before, Anglo forenames and surnames, for example, will use a different set of phonemes than Franco or Saxon.

>>461677
I think most women figure out they're pregnant about a month or a month and a half along, which gives you about eight months to settle on a name.

All I know is that the little shits at my daughter's school tend to have the same names. Names like Alfie, Harrison or Mason. Perhaps even Jaxon. If you hear a parent screaming at a young boy in public it's likely you'll hear one of those names. These people are susceptible to fads of what current popular baby names are or naming them after celebrities or footballers; I know someone who named his kids Kylo and Ren after the new Star Wars films.

I have also noticed the people I'd class as absolute thickos seem far more likely to have had autistic kids.

>>461680
>I think most women figure out they're pregnant about a month or a month and a half along, which gives you about eight months to settle on a name.

Fess up dad-lads, how many of you ended up coming up with a name after the child was delivered?

What would you do if you became so wealthy that you and conceivably any of your descendants would never have to work again?

There's the immediate stuff, tell your boss to go fuck herself and make sure your parents are looked after but after the first week what are your plans for the rest of your life. I suspect that we're not equipped for it in the slightest but who knows, wealth could strike and upend our comfortable 9-11 lives at any moment.

>>462680

Funding charity stuff mostly. I wouldn't get bored.

>>462680

I work in a terribly underfunded medical field, so I'd do at least some of what I'm doing already, but in a much, much more effective way.

I have plenty of modest and not-so-modest personal dreams that I could definitely buy my way into. I'd like to own property and land in multiple different countries (at varying degrees of remoteness), partly as "holiday" homes and partly in case shit hits the fan in a way that's out of my control in a particular region. I'd tick off all those places in the world I wanted to visit and live in, including the adventurous stuff. I'd also be stupid enough to happily splurge eight figures for one of those tourist flights into space.

Too many ideas to list, really. If you had the money to fail repeatedly and not have it affect you, the world becomes a playground really, doesn't it? Why not be an artist and a historian and an antique collector and produce wine on your own vineyards and anything else you wanted to try your hand at?

In essence, I'd spend a lot more time creating things instead of just keeping the wheels turning.

>>462680
Not have to worry.
I'd even try to have a day like Peter and just not really think but go with the flow. Not even plan about what clothes I'd wear or what I'd have for breakfast. Just have it happen there and then.
I know it sounds mundane but having enough money to never have to worry about anything really is a dream for me.

>>462680

I've always said I'd keep going in to work, and just see how long I last. I work in airports so I'd have a private jet ready at a moments notice for when I decide to tell the boss to go fuck themselves.

But I think I'd last quite a while, I'd like to see if people noticed. I'd start subtle, maybe wear a Rolex to work, then maybe start showing up in an expensive but feasible car, that sort of thing. Maybe the first colleague to ask me if I've won the lottery I'd send them a million quid anonymously.

After that, I think I'd have to have something to occupy my time. Probably open a performance garage and tinker with fast cars.

I can't see myself doing anything lavish, I don't like big houses, they never feel comfortable. And I like cars but I like 90s midrange sports cars, so there's only so much I could spend on those, really.

I suppose I'd also wander around doing weird rich person stuff like talking to people at bus stops until they tell me about their being in debt and about to lose the house, then leaving them with a suitcase full of money and wandering into the sunset.

>>462766
The scenario is about what you would do with the rest of your life from that point. You don't suffer from financial insecurity so you don't have the same needs motivation that keep you productive in a capitalist society but that leaves you with the question of what you do for the rest of your life.

In a way we already know the population at large would be ruined by such a scenario thanks to lottery winners and how quickly small fortunes are lost over generations. Equally men in particular put a lot of their identity around their profession which makes them especially vulnerable when experiencing career set-backs and retirement. So it's a more serious challenge than you might think.

>>462769
Get a house and/or land on the north coast of Wales and pursue some hobbies such as learning the piano, drawing and gardening. I'd want this view for the 1 week it doesn't piss it down in Wales.
I'd travel to from time to time but I'd be content wasting my life away playing videogames and watching anime for most of my life as sad as it sounds.
It's what I enjoy after all. It may seem like a waste to another person but we're all different.
I'm aware the infinite pot of money might lead me to buy some things I may not need or want after the 1st week but I also don't see the point of luxury brands, sportscars or jewelry. I'd manage my money outside of the odd limited run and rare to find anime girl figure.

Humanity discovers a wonder gene-therapy that will dramatically raise an individuals intelligence. It's quickly made free on the NHS in the naïve hope that it will stop people tying up A&E by losing Christmas decorations up their arses.

Would you want to take it?

>>468087
I'd have to, can't be having the rest of you on my level now.

>>468087
Most of my suffering seems to have come from being too smart for my own good. If they ever develop something that increases your intelligence then they should also develop something that decreases it so I have the choice to dumb myself down and be happy for once.

>>468087
The older I get, the more I start to question that intelligence as a concept even really exists. So many people who are clever at one thing are so epically retarded in other ways that I just don't believe in "intelligence" as people generally perceive it. So I might take your special therapy after a year or two, but I wouldn't be one of the first volunteers because it sounds like complete snake oil to me.

>>468094
There's a huge difference between knowledge and intelligence.

>>468095
So what's intelligence? Problem-solving ability? Artistic talent?

>>468094
I think you can recognise intelligence more by its absence. In Flowers in for Algernon (or that monkey from Futurama) it uplifted them from an IQ score that ranks as disabled but in doing so introduced them to a new existence they had to contend with.

For me; it's a tough one as what even am I if not for a collection of competencies overlaid by experiance. Would how I exist and who I am change if I added a hundred more points to the old noggin? Or to get depressing, if I went down the path of mental degradation, how far would it take for the flame of me that people will recognise slowly vanish?

I once knew a guy who was incredibly quick with numbers and made in excess of 100k a year from his top level rail networking job. He was the clumbiest arsehole I've ever known with absolutely zero self awareness or common sense.

I'd probably wanna take the limitless pill gene-therapy but what would it achieve if everyone is doing it?

>>468096
Intelligence is the capacity to learn. I believe it's broken down into numerous types, including analytical, logical, social, etc.

>>468096

Psychometricians use a measure called g factor, which is based on a straightforward statistical observation - people who are good at one intellectual task tend to be good at most others. If you think back to your school days, this will become fairly obvious. The kids in the top set for maths or English tended to also be in the top set for most of their subjects and vice-versa. There's some degree of individual variation, but the overall correlation is extremely strong.

Having a high level of g doesn't make you automatically good at everything, but it does make it much easier for you to pick up new skills. people with high g tend to remember things more easily, identify general patterns and fundamental principles, and solve complex problems with less effort. People have different interests and will invest their time and effort differently in acquiring particular skills and knowledge, but that's not the same thing as "multiple intelligences".

There are lots of other factors that we often confuse with intelligence, but are really very different. Doing well at school or work relies on personality factors like conscientiousness and agreeableness - a clever person isn't likely to do especially well if they're very lazy and refuse to conform to the system. Conversely, you can probably think of people who aren't actually especially bright, but do very well because they work hard and play the game.

Executive function refers to the ability to control your attention and inhibit your impulses; it's somewhat correlated with g, but only fairly weakly. ADHD is essentially defined by executive dysfunction and people with autism often have serious issues with executive function. A lot of people with these conditions have high g and are capable of excellent performance under the right conditions, but are also very erratic and unreliable because they just can't focus on tasks at will. Clever people can still do very stupid things if they aren't paying attention or haven't bothered to think something through.

People often use the term "emotional intelligence", but that's really a misnomer - what they're describing is a set of learned skills (and to some extent a collection of personality factors), not an innate trait. We all know clever people with poor social skills, but there's not anything innate and fixed about that; those people could readily learn to be more sensitive and empathetic if they were inclined to do so.

>>468087

It would be interesting to see if I had to. I have a pretty good grasp on intelligence based things like acquisition of knowledge, reasoning and problem solving, and it seems the more intelligent you get the more depressed you are, presumably because of the crushing knowledge that the world works in terrible ways.

But if everyone was Very Clever, you'd like to think we'd end up in the sort of universal basic income, work-if-you-want sort of utopia, and I don't think more intelligence would help unless I really wanted to work on something that's currently beyond my scope.

However, I'm not that optimistic, it would probably quickly become a race to become the richest smart bloke and be exactly what we're living through now, just more awful because you'd be able to justify working beyond your morals more easily if you're smart enough.

I also think the people who might need the wonder drug most would refuse to take it because, well, they wouldn't even take a vaccine.

I think, without trying to sound like a cunt, I am on the edge of being intelligent enough to risk assuming that everyone else is a fucking idiot. I don't like it, but every time I see someone else's work I typically have a criticism (that I keep to myself) as I know I'd have done it a better way. I feel the most guilt for this when I see a tradesman hasn't put my mums door handles on perfectly straight or I see a wire that was cut back too far to my eye, because I have no training other than googling things when I do them myself, who am I to judge a professional? But it's always a little niggling thought in my head about how I wish someone had done something more efficiently or just, done it properly.

I only speak up if I have absolute confidence that my knowledge might be taken seriously, like at work, but I still pick my battles and still feel awkward about doing it, even when it's actually my job to do so.

Anyway I think if I was smarter I'd be a cunt, or perhaps this flaw of being the "I wouldn't have done it like that" bloke is actually a limit of my intelligence rather than a feature of it.

>>>468100
>We all know clever people with poor social skills, but there's not anything innate and fixed about that; those people could readily learn to be more sensitive and empathetic if they were inclined to do so.

Not to nitpick your otherwise very good post, but I'd also push back a bit on the idea that "emotional intelligence" is about sensitivity and empathy. I don't know whether the academic literature has a more defined meaning, but the way "EQ" is commonly used is so flexible as to mean almost nothing. Social norms are heavily context dependent, so I would argue even naturally sensitive and empathetic people have to learn them.

>>468100

>A lot of people with these conditions have high g and are capable of excellent performance under the right conditions, but are also very erratic and unreliable because they just can't focus on tasks at will

I've never been diagnosed with either but if that doesn't describe me I don't know what does. I'm good at things but my mind is just all over the place and I can't make myself focus the way ordinary people seem to be able to.

I used to have one of those annoying lasses at my old job, who always went on about how she had ADHD. I don't think anyone took her seriously because it was full of that kind of boomer attitude where any and all mental condition may as well be made up, but what pissed me off is that she had really done pretty well for herself despite this supposedly crippling condition. She didn't seem to have any issues with timekeeping, got through uni alright, had a decent career ahead of her by the looks.

I've never once asked for sympathy based on anything like that but whenever anyone has wondered why I just can't make it to work on time, that's likely the explanation. If anyone has ever wondered why I am clearly intelligent but just can't make progress in a career, that's the likely explanation. Would it ever "work" for me to start blaming it on this condition? No. Do I want to? No.

Don't know what I am really saying with this but just... I am very bitter that life has been very difficult and I have carved myself out this little niche despite how much of an uphill battle it has been every step of the way. And people will still look down on me, and other people will still piss and moan and get sympathy when they've had it so much easier. Ain't right is it.

Lads put your thinking caps on for this one: What if I went to a local men's sauna with gloryholes, do you think that I could get my dick sucked without having to do anything gay in return?

Trying to find an accompanying picture revealed that there's a surprising amount of dicks on wikipedia commons.

>>468844

Yes, especially if you make it known that you're straight. A lot of gay men have a thing for straight guys, to the point that it's a standard theme in gay porn.

>People spend one-third of their lives asleep. What if employees could work during that time … in their dreams?

>Prophetic, a venture-backed startup founded earlier this year, wants to help workers do just that. Using a headpiece the company calls the “Halo,” Prophetic says consumers can induce a lucid dream state, which occurs when the person having a dream is aware they are sleeping. The goal is to give people control over their dreams, so they can use that time productively. A CEO could practice for an upcoming board meeting, an athlete could run through plays, a web designer could create new templates—“the limiting factor is your imagination,” founder and CEO Eric Wollberg told Fortune.
http://fortune.com/2023/11/30/lucid-dream-startup-prophetic-headset-prepare-meetings-while-sleeping

This is probably seeing the first models ship later in the year so what do you lads reckon. If we could control our dreams and use them for productive activity what would you use it for? How quickly do you reckon this technology would become ubiquitous for workplace activity - say you do that corporate L&D in your sleep for a few hours?

>>470380
I would resist any attempt to monopolise my rest time for labor. Sounds fucking hellish. Would like to force the CEO to have to work when awake and asleep for the rest of their rotten life.

>>470380
I suspect dreams happen for a reason and making a habit of replacing them with 1) conscious thought that's 2) on a specific theme, is going to have significant negative outcomes. We wouldn't have evolved to spend one-third of our lives hallucinating wildly in a defenceless coma if it wasn't strictly necessary to function.

My guess is mid to long term users will start developing symptoms of sleep psychosis and early onset dementia.

>>470380
It genuinely astounds me how gullible you pair can be some times.

Once again though, I am ashamed of my own inability to pull off a proper techno-scam. It's been blatantly clear for half-a-decade now that you can claim any old bollocks and stand a good chance of some VC money falling into your lap.

>>470380
Wasn't this the premise of Hypnospace Outlaw?

>>470386 VC money in the UK tends to be pretty poisonous, from what I've seen and experienced. Better off just rinsing some crypto muppets imho.
Maybe it's just that the companies I was involved in weren't nearly scammy enough. Ah, except for a 3D printer bunch, they were fantastic, but that wasn't VC, that was a well executed pump & dump run from the shell of a listed company.

You come across a magic button that if pressed will send you back to age 10 to run through your life again. Due to the space-time loops history won't run exactly the same so you can't horde bitcoin.

Would you do your life again?
Would you do your life again if it also wiped your memory?

>>472849
I would be afraid of that button. Rationally speaking, there should be absolutely no reason for me to re-live my life from the age of 10 onwards, knowing everything I know now. But the idea terrifies me and I wouldn't want to do it.

I see no reason why I should bother being 10 again if I didn't keep my modern memories.

>>472849
>Would you do your life again if it also wiped your memory?
This would be a suicide button. The only good reason to press it would be some massively traumatic experience after age 10 that you hope the time loops will prevent happening the second time around.

>>472849
A mate openly ponders this all the time and it does my head in. It's always 'what I would have done' and never 'What I will', while I'm wasting away doing precisely nothing also.

>>472850
>>472851
In a way it's a value puzzle about your life. You will live longer and experiance being young again but in the first question you lose everything you've built and in the latter you're removing most of your own development to start anew.

I imagine most parents wouldn't press the button but people like >>472853 might for the wrong reasons and just repeat a hopeless pattern. But then I think the standard story in our culture is that the super-rich and elderly would always choose exchanging everything they have to be young again.

>>472849
I'd go back ten years and try, actually try at all, to not bungle that one relationship. Going back to being ten? I'd be a bit concerned about messing up the good things I gained back then, limited in number though they might be. While I'd like to give some exams another, better, go, my current, much higher, self-esteem, the emotional intensity of being a teenager, and my resentment for how they treated me then, might lead to me actually killing my parents (in Minecraft). I'd definitely at least give my dad and one of his more obnoxious friends a hiding. All in all, it's probably not a wise idea. Ten years back though, sure? Let me know if you can swing that. There's a reason I can't bring myself to watch the TNG episode Tapestry.

Deleting my entire memory seems pointless. Barring any kind of butterfly effect counterfactuals that can't possible be anticipated, isn't everything going to play out the same that way?

>>472861

Tapestry is my favourite episode of TNG. It's the one that really urged me to take some sort of action in my life, and to treat my decisions like they mattered.

>>472849

Personally I think my life has been okay, but I struggled through some shit, stressful jobs that didn't pay enough, mostly because I simply didn't have the belief in myself or the willpower to push myself into better opportunities. It's taken until my mid thirties to realise I'm quite good at certain things, and that I am capable of achieving more than I have been.

I'm going to be a liscensed engineer in a couple of years, and it's already pretty clear that I should have done this a long time ago. Nothing was really stopping me doing this at 18, or in my twenties, or even five years ago, I just...never thought about it. I was a child, mentally, just floating along surviving and accepting whatever situation I found myself in as the only situation. Never really fighting for change in my own life.

If I could go back with that sort of mentality, then I think I would press it every time. If only to give me a head start on the career I feel I was probably always supposed to have.

But obviously this new found drive I have didn't come from nowhere. It didn't magically appear. It's something that has come from my years of experience of life, of aging, of hardships, so a memory reset certainly wouldn't help.

My position I recognise is probably the best I could hope for - I am very happy with where my life is right now, my only regret is not doing it sooner.

>>472878

>liscensed

I'm hitting the button now to go back so I don't make that embarrassing typo.