My nearest grocery store installed automatic tills (as I guess you call them) some months ago. Three comments:
1. That store (part of a small local chain) chose machines that only take credit and debit cards, not cash. (The machines in other stores in the area take both.)
2. A friendly checkout guy told me that, as one would expect, theft has gone up, and sometimes customers over pay, not understanding how to operate the machines.
3. And then there are the Kroger stores in the area (QFC and Fred Meyers). They are, apparently, under severe rules on alcohol purchases, requiring everyone not to just show an ID, but to take it out and have it scanned. (Since my hair has turned mostly white, it has been many years since I was asked to show an ID.)
(I don't know what the Kroger stores did wrong, and, so far, have not asked any employees why they are doing this, and whether they can go back to the old procedures any time soon.)
Are there any plans to drop the drinking age to 18 in your state?
According to the cliche, Americans don't understand games that end in a draw. However it increasingly seems like that is what they want out of the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Russia weakened but predictable. Ukraine? I'm not sure they really care very much about them. No doubt the sheer number of mines and now drones that Russia is using makes things more difficult. So why doesn't the US at least provide weapons where Ukraine would have a distinct advantage i.e ATACMS?
As for the Black Sea situation, perhaps they want to leave it to Erdogan to sort out? However given that Turkey alone has more naval ships in the Black Sea than Russia why on earth should it not be possible to escort commercial ships out of Ukrainian waters? Instead we have the nauseating spectacle of Putin beneficently handing out grain to various African leaders in St Petersburg having recently been bombing silos in Ukraine. Nato reaction quieter than a pin dropping. Here's John Chipman Director General of the IISS:
'A further point on the reason why sending a humanitarian flotilla into the Black Sea comprising a coalition of the willing including some NATO nations is as sensible as it is needed by the rest of the world: Putin would not dare threaten it. If he did an aggressive air patrol over one of the ships, it would be shot down and the coalition would say so in advance. A key element of good strategy is keeping 'escalation dominance'. The West has instead been so frightened of escalation that it has under-perfomed against its huge balance of power advantage. Putin should fear escalation more than the West: Russia is losing to Ukraine. The military is disgruntled. The command is divided. No one in Moscow thinks they would win a war against NATO. A peaceful escort of ships taking grain and fertiliser to Africa and Asia is the provision of an international public good delivered by actors with good intentions. So the international community should proceed with strategic determination and quiet resolve. The ancillary advantage of this humanitarian mission would be that it could accelerate the end of the war in the victim's favour.'
It’s been suggested that Turkey will flag grain ships, and send them into Ukrainian ports escorted by Turkish warships.
If nothing else, this would raise Turkeys prestige in a number of third world countries to the stars. And Erdoğan loves that kind of applause.
Hardly any of the journalists covering the greatest logo-'n'-brand story of our time seem to have even heard of blackboard bold. It's getting a mere five hits at Google News:
My nearest grocery store installed automatic tills (as I guess you call them) some months ago. Three comments:
1. That store (part of a small local chain) chose machines that only take credit and debit cards, not cash. (The machines in other stores in the area take both.)
2. A friendly checkout guy told me that, as one would expect, theft has gone up, and sometimes customers over pay, not understanding how to operate the machines.
3. And then there are the Kroger stores in the area (QFC and Fred Meyers). They are, apparently, under severe rules on alcohol purchases, requiring everyone not to just show an ID, but to take it out and have it scanned. (Since my hair has turned mostly white, it has been many years since I was asked to show an ID.)
(I don't know what the Kroger stores did wrong, and, so far, have not asked any employees why they are doing this, and whether they can go back to the old procedures any time soon.)
Are there any plans to drop the drinking age to 18 in your state?
Any state that drops the drinking age loses Federal Highway funds.
Which is why everywhere in the US now has a 21 year limit.
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
When facial recognition is notoriously bad at correctly identifying the faces of ethnic minority people for a start they will be getting hit by a high profile case under the equalities legislation as disproportionately misidentifying ethnic minorities as criminals.
It will be a pr nightmare waiting to happen to any store that tries it. We as customers should also boycott the first store to implement it for the simple reason that it could be anyone of us misidentified as a shoplifter and barred from stores due to it for no other reason than "computer says you are a shoplifter" and good luck getting it sorted out.
There'll be an outbreak of funny makeup.
The other question is the ratio of false positives versus actual crims. It would have to be very small for the legal and reputational hassle to be even worth considered.
The error rate for false positives seems mostly quoted as 1 in 1000. There is a big however here though. Those are calculated using good photo's vs good photo's.
The picture of a shoplifter they have will be an image captured by cctv and probably unless very lucky not face on to the camera. They will be comparing this with a picture of you captured by cctv probably not face onto the camera either. This is bound to affect accuracy for both false positives and false negatives.
In addition while 1 in a 1000 sounds tiny imagine tesco's has 5 million customers....well now you just banned 5000 totally innocent customers on the grounds they are shoplifters. I would be guessing that they would have a case for defamation there.
Then you expand it to all supermarkets if it takes off you now have 40,000 odd people in the country that have done nothing wrong but can no longer use a supermarket. Then smaller shops start taking it up and tying into the network suddenly those 40000 can no longer enter a shop at all. Despite being innocent.
According to the cliche, Americans don't understand games that end in a draw. However it increasingly seems like that is what they want out of the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Russia weakened but predictable. Ukraine?
The latest polling shows three quarters of US voters - including 70% of Republicans - think it important that Russia loses.
He has a phenomenal career in media to come. Articulate, funny, intelligent, he's got its all.
Still a melancholy moment. I’m gonna miss him bearing down on the wicket, with his iconic headband, of loafing about in the bucket hat at close of play
Gah. So many of these great England players deserved this Ashes series win. FUCKING MANCHESTER and STUPID MCC/EWCB
According to the cliche, Americans don't understand games that end in a draw. However it increasingly seems like that is what they want out of the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Russia weakened but predictable. Ukraine? I'm not sure they really care very much about them. No doubt the sheer number of mines and now drones that Russia is using makes things more difficult. So why doesn't the US at least provide weapons where Ukraine would have a distinct advantage i.e ATACMS?
As for the Black Sea situation, perhaps they want to leave it to Erdogan to sort out? However given that Turkey alone has more naval ships in the Black Sea than Russia why on earth should it not be possible to escort commercial ships out of Ukrainian waters? Instead we have the nauseating spectacle of Putin beneficently handing out grain to various African leaders in St Petersburg having recently been bombing silos in Ukraine. Nato reaction quieter than a pin dropping. Here's John Chipman Director General of the IISS:
'A further point on the reason why sending a humanitarian flotilla into the Black Sea comprising a coalition of the willing including some NATO nations is as sensible as it is needed by the rest of the world: Putin would not dare threaten it. If he did an aggressive air patrol over one of the ships, it would be shot down and the coalition would say so in advance. A key element of good strategy is keeping 'escalation dominance'. The West has instead been so frightened of escalation that it has under-perfomed against its huge balance of power advantage. Putin should fear escalation more than the West: Russia is losing to Ukraine. The military is disgruntled. The command is divided. No one in Moscow thinks they would win a war against NATO. A peaceful escort of ships taking grain and fertiliser to Africa and Asia is the provision of an international public good delivered by actors with good intentions. So the international community should proceed with strategic determination and quiet resolve. The ancillary advantage of this humanitarian mission would be that it could accelerate the end of the war in the victim's favour.'
It’s been suggested that Turkey will flag grain ships, and send them into Ukrainian ports escorted by Turkish warships.
If nothing else, this would raise Turkeys prestige in a number of third world countries to the stars. And Erdoğan loves that kind of applause.
Turkey PLC has been doing quite well for itself. Inflation is down to ~40% from ~80-90% in October. Argentina PLC had a similar rate in October and is now up to ~110-120%.
According to the cliche, Americans don't understand games that end in a draw. However it increasingly seems like that is what they want out of the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Russia weakened but predictable. Ukraine?
The latest polling shows three quarters of US voters - including 70% of Republicans - think it important that Russia loses.
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
When facial recognition is notoriously bad at correctly identifying the faces of ethnic minority people for a start they will be getting hit by a high profile case under the equalities legislation as disproportionately misidentifying ethnic minorities as criminals.
It will be a pr nightmare waiting to happen to any store that tries it. We as customers should also boycott the first store to implement it for the simple reason that it could be anyone of us misidentified as a shoplifter and barred from stores due to it for no other reason than "computer says you are a shoplifter" and good luck getting it sorted out.
There'll be an outbreak of funny makeup.
The other question is the ratio of false positives versus actual crims. It would have to be very small for the legal and reputational hassle to be even worth considered.
The error rate for false positives seems mostly quoted as 1 in 1000. There is a big however here though. Those are calculated using good photo's vs good photo's.
The picture of a shoplifter they have will be an image captured by cctv and probably unless very lucky not face on to the camera. They will be comparing this with a picture of you captured by cctv probably not face onto the camera either. This is bound to affect accuracy for both false positives and false negatives.
In addition while 1 in a 1000 sounds tiny imagine tesco's has 5 million customers....well now you just banned 5000 totally innocent customers on the grounds they are shoplifters. I would be guessing that they would have a case for defamation there.
Then you expand it to all supermarkets if it takes off you now have 40,000 odd people in the country that have done nothing wrong but can no longer use a supermarket. Then smaller shops start taking it up and tying into the network suddenly those 40000 can no longer enter a shop at all. Despite being innocent.
Those kind of numbers don’t seem to have inconvenienced the banks, in denying accounts.
I've said before that I think Nadine is a huge bonus for the Opposition parties. Her remaining an MP is perfectly within the rules but is obviously ludicrous and rather mirrors the current zombie Government shambling around to little or no obvious purpose
Stuart Broad retiring, despite being 4 years younger than Jimmy Anderson.
Both of them are the leading all time pace Test wicket takers. Broad's just got his 600th Test Wicket which is quite some milestone. Significantly more than even McGrath ever got.
Jimmy has a stellar record but may want to take 10 more wickets before he retires, rather than retiring on 690.
Unfortunately, I think that not only is Nadine Dorries an out of touch politician who don't know the price of milk, but is entitled and shows no remorse, no contrition, and no passion to want to understand the lives of others, she wants to focus on her non peerage, and that is her crime.
Unfortunately, I think that not only is Nadine Dorries an out of touch politician who don't know the price of milk, but is entitled and shows no remorse, no contrition, and no passion to want to understand the lives of others, she wants to focus on her non peerage, and that is her crime."
My nearest grocery store installed automatic tills (as I guess you call them) some months ago. Three comments:
1. That store (part of a small local chain) chose machines that only take credit and debit cards, not cash. (The machines in other stores in the area take both.)
2. A friendly checkout guy told me that, as one would expect, theft has gone up, and sometimes customers over pay, not understanding how to operate the machines.
3. And then there are the Kroger stores in the area (QFC and Fred Meyers). They are, apparently, under severe rules on alcohol purchases, requiring everyone not to just show an ID, but to take it out and have it scanned. (Since my hair has turned mostly white, it has been many years since I was asked to show an ID.)
(I don't know what the Kroger stores did wrong, and, so far, have not asked any employees why they are doing this, and whether they can go back to the old procedures any time soon.)
Are there any plans to drop the drinking age to 18 in your state?
Any state that drops the drinking age loses Federal Highway funds.
Which is why everywhere in the US now has a 21 year limit.
Yours truly turned 18 during brief interval, when that was the legal age to buy and consume alcohol in many American states. Was after 18-year old got the vote, and before the drunk-driving stats attracted widespread public outcry.
On a family vacation in another state, we were unsure if it was legal there for me to get a beer at a bar. So my dad asked the woman behind the bar, "Excuse me, but what's the drinking age here?"
Her reply, in raspy voice dripping with sarcasm: "Don't worry, honey - I think you're plenty old enough."
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
When facial recognition is notoriously bad at correctly identifying the faces of ethnic minority people for a start they will be getting hit by a high profile case under the equalities legislation as disproportionately misidentifying ethnic minorities as criminals.
It will be a pr nightmare waiting to happen to any store that tries it. We as customers should also boycott the first store to implement it for the simple reason that it could be anyone of us misidentified as a shoplifter and barred from stores due to it for no other reason than "computer says you are a shoplifter" and good luck getting it sorted out.
There'll be an outbreak of funny makeup.
The other question is the ratio of false positives versus actual crims. It would have to be very small for the legal and reputational hassle to be even worth considered.
The error rate for false positives seems mostly quoted as 1 in 1000. There is a big however here though. Those are calculated using good photo's vs good photo's.
The picture of a shoplifter they have will be an image captured by cctv and probably unless very lucky not face on to the camera. They will be comparing this with a picture of you captured by cctv probably not face onto the camera either. This is bound to affect accuracy for both false positives and false negatives.
In addition while 1 in a 1000 sounds tiny imagine tesco's has 5 million customers....well now you just banned 5000 totally innocent customers on the grounds they are shoplifters. I would be guessing that they would have a case for defamation there.
Then you expand it to all supermarkets if it takes off you now have 40,000 odd people in the country that have done nothing wrong but can no longer use a supermarket. Then smaller shops start taking it up and tying into the network suddenly those 40000 can no longer enter a shop at all. Despite being innocent.
Those kind of numbers don’t seem to have inconvenienced the banks, in denying accounts.
Tell that to Alison Rose, and I suspect now the subject is out in the open banks are going to increasingly find themselves in an uncomfortable situation.
Denying an account is one thing as well its an inconvenience and the banks have been able to hide behind not having to give a reason, denying someone the ability to buy food is going to come to a head a lot faster especially as it will be blatantly obvious when you are swooped on by security as you walk through the door and ejected which will also be quite a public spectacle whereas turning you down for an account is done by mail.
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
When facial recognition is notoriously bad at correctly identifying the faces of ethnic minority people for a start they will be getting hit by a high profile case under the equalities legislation as disproportionately misidentifying ethnic minorities as criminals.
It will be a pr nightmare waiting to happen to any store that tries it. We as customers should also boycott the first store to implement it for the simple reason that it could be anyone of us misidentified as a shoplifter and barred from stores due to it for no other reason than "computer says you are a shoplifter" and good luck getting it sorted out.
There'll be an outbreak of funny makeup.
The other question is the ratio of false positives versus actual crims. It would have to be very small for the legal and reputational hassle to be even worth considered.
The error rate for false positives seems mostly quoted as 1 in 1000. There is a big however here though. Those are calculated using good photo's vs good photo's.
The picture of a shoplifter they have will be an image captured by cctv and probably unless very lucky not face on to the camera. They will be comparing this with a picture of you captured by cctv probably not face onto the camera either. This is bound to affect accuracy for both false positives and false negatives.
In addition while 1 in a 1000 sounds tiny imagine tesco's has 5 million customers....well now you just banned 5000 totally innocent customers on the grounds they are shoplifters. I would be guessing that they would have a case for defamation there.
Then you expand it to all supermarkets if it takes off you now have 40,000 odd people in the country that have done nothing wrong but can no longer use a supermarket. Then smaller shops start taking it up and tying into the network suddenly those 40000 can no longer enter a shop at all. Despite being innocent.
Those kind of numbers don’t seem to have inconvenienced the banks, in denying accounts.
Tell that to Alison Rose, and I suspect now the subject is out in the open banks are going to increasingly find themselves in an uncomfortable situation.
Denying an account is one thing as well its an inconvenience and the banks have been able to hide behind not having to give a reason, denying someone the ability to buy food is going to come to a head a lot faster especially as it will be blatantly obvious when you are swooped on by security as you walk through the door and ejected which will also be quite a public spectacle whereas turning you down for an account is done by mail.
All the more reason to get rid of stores, and cash, and all that other nonsense.
Order stuff online, pay for it online, have it delivered. No theft happens then, you get your goods, problem solved.
According to the cliche, Americans don't understand games that end in a draw. However it increasingly seems like that is what they want out of the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Russia weakened but predictable. Ukraine? I'm not sure they really care very much about them. No doubt the sheer number of mines and now drones that Russia is using makes things more difficult. So why doesn't the US at least provide weapons where Ukraine would have a distinct advantage i.e ATACMS?
As for the Black Sea situation, perhaps they want to leave it to Erdogan to sort out? However given that Turkey alone has more naval ships in the Black Sea than Russia why on earth should it not be possible to escort commercial ships out of Ukrainian waters? Instead we have the nauseating spectacle of Putin beneficently handing out grain to various African leaders in St Petersburg having recently been bombing silos in Ukraine. Nato reaction quieter than a pin dropping. Here's John Chipman Director General of the IISS:
'A further point on the reason why sending a humanitarian flotilla into the Black Sea comprising a coalition of the willing including some NATO nations is as sensible as it is needed by the rest of the world: Putin would not dare threaten it. If he did an aggressive air patrol over one of the ships, it would be shot down and the coalition would say so in advance. A key element of good strategy is keeping 'escalation dominance'. The West has instead been so frightened of escalation that it has under-perfomed against its huge balance of power advantage. Putin should fear escalation more than the West: Russia is losing to Ukraine. The military is disgruntled. The command is divided. No one in Moscow thinks they would win a war against NATO. A peaceful escort of ships taking grain and fertiliser to Africa and Asia is the provision of an international public good delivered by actors with good intentions. So the international community should proceed with strategic determination and quiet resolve. The ancillary advantage of this humanitarian mission would be that it could accelerate the end of the war in the victim's favour.'
It’s been suggested that Turkey will flag grain ships, and send them into Ukrainian ports escorted by Turkish warships.
If nothing else, this would raise Turkeys prestige in a number of third world countries to the stars. And Erdoğan loves that kind of applause.
Turkey PLC has been doing quite well for itself. Inflation is down to ~40% from ~80-90% in October. Argentina PLC had a similar rate in October and is now up to ~110-120%.
It'll be interesting to see if they can normalise things completely. Their approach has been to turbocharge the economy and completely (afaics) disregard the interest rate/make everyone feel poor method of tackling their inflation.
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
When facial recognition is notoriously bad at correctly identifying the faces of ethnic minority people for a start they will be getting hit by a high profile case under the equalities legislation as disproportionately misidentifying ethnic minorities as criminals.
It will be a pr nightmare waiting to happen to any store that tries it. We as customers should also boycott the first store to implement it for the simple reason that it could be anyone of us misidentified as a shoplifter and barred from stores due to it for no other reason than "computer says you are a shoplifter" and good luck getting it sorted out.
There'll be an outbreak of funny makeup.
The other question is the ratio of false positives versus actual crims. It would have to be very small for the legal and reputational hassle to be even worth considered.
The error rate for false positives seems mostly quoted as 1 in 1000. There is a big however here though. Those are calculated using good photo's vs good photo's.
The picture of a shoplifter they have will be an image captured by cctv and probably unless very lucky not face on to the camera. They will be comparing this with a picture of you captured by cctv probably not face onto the camera either. This is bound to affect accuracy for both false positives and false negatives.
In addition while 1 in a 1000 sounds tiny imagine tesco's has 5 million customers....well now you just banned 5000 totally innocent customers on the grounds they are shoplifters. I would be guessing that they would have a case for defamation there.
Then you expand it to all supermarkets if it takes off you now have 40,000 odd people in the country that have done nothing wrong but can no longer use a supermarket. Then smaller shops start taking it up and tying into the network suddenly those 40000 can no longer enter a shop at all. Despite being innocent.
Those kind of numbers don’t seem to have inconvenienced the banks, in denying accounts.
Stuart Broad retiring, despite being 4 years younger than Jimmy Anderson.
He was not going to get to 700 wickets, nothing more to go for. Jimmy could have had he had a better series, and one more series might manage it for him.
He's still good enough to justify a place for another series, especially with Broad opening up a slot.
Not at all a fan of Dorries but do we have any idea why she, an MP for 15 years and an ex-minister, is not deemed suitable by the Lords Committee when Charlotte Bloody Owen, a junior SPAD for a couple of years, is?
According to the cliche, Americans don't understand games that end in a draw. However it increasingly seems like that is what they want out of the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Russia weakened but predictable. Ukraine? I'm not sure they really care very much about them. No doubt the sheer number of mines and now drones that Russia is using makes things more difficult. So why doesn't the US at least provide weapons where Ukraine would have a distinct advantage i.e ATACMS?
As for the Black Sea situation, perhaps they want to leave it to Erdogan to sort out? However given that Turkey alone has more naval ships in the Black Sea than Russia why on earth should it not be possible to escort commercial ships out of Ukrainian waters? Instead we have the nauseating spectacle of Putin beneficently handing out grain to various African leaders in St Petersburg having recently been bombing silos in Ukraine. Nato reaction quieter than a pin dropping. Here's John Chipman Director General of the IISS:
'A further point on the reason why sending a humanitarian flotilla into the Black Sea comprising a coalition of the willing including some NATO nations is as sensible as it is needed by the rest of the world: Putin would not dare threaten it. If he did an aggressive air patrol over one of the ships, it would be shot down and the coalition would say so in advance. A key element of good strategy is keeping 'escalation dominance'. The West has instead been so frightened of escalation that it has under-perfomed against its huge balance of power advantage. Putin should fear escalation more than the West: Russia is losing to Ukraine. The military is disgruntled. The command is divided. No one in Moscow thinks they would win a war against NATO. A peaceful escort of ships taking grain and fertiliser to Africa and Asia is the provision of an international public good delivered by actors with good intentions. So the international community should proceed with strategic determination and quiet resolve. The ancillary advantage of this humanitarian mission would be that it could accelerate the end of the war in the victim's favour.'
It’s been suggested that Turkey will flag grain ships, and send them into Ukrainian ports escorted by Turkish warships.
If nothing else, this would raise Turkeys prestige in a number of third world countries to the stars. And Erdoğan loves that kind of applause.
Turkiye dominates the Black Sea too, far more than Russia does. Plus an attack on Turkish ships would be an attack on NATO.
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
When facial recognition is notoriously bad at correctly identifying the faces of ethnic minority people for a start they will be getting hit by a high profile case under the equalities legislation as disproportionately misidentifying ethnic minorities as criminals.
It will be a pr nightmare waiting to happen to any store that tries it. We as customers should also boycott the first store to implement it for the simple reason that it could be anyone of us misidentified as a shoplifter and barred from stores due to it for no other reason than "computer says you are a shoplifter" and good luck getting it sorted out.
There'll be an outbreak of funny makeup.
The other question is the ratio of false positives versus actual crims. It would have to be very small for the legal and reputational hassle to be even worth considered.
The error rate for false positives seems mostly quoted as 1 in 1000. There is a big however here though. Those are calculated using good photo's vs good photo's.
The picture of a shoplifter they have will be an image captured by cctv and probably unless very lucky not face on to the camera. They will be comparing this with a picture of you captured by cctv probably not face onto the camera either. This is bound to affect accuracy for both false positives and false negatives.
In addition while 1 in a 1000 sounds tiny imagine tesco's has 5 million customers....well now you just banned 5000 totally innocent customers on the grounds they are shoplifters. I would be guessing that they would have a case for defamation there.
Then you expand it to all supermarkets if it takes off you now have 40,000 odd people in the country that have done nothing wrong but can no longer use a supermarket. Then smaller shops start taking it up and tying into the network suddenly those 40000 can no longer enter a shop at all. Despite being innocent.
Those kind of numbers don’t seem to have inconvenienced the banks, in denying accounts.
Tell that to Alison Rose, and I suspect now the subject is out in the open banks are going to increasingly find themselves in an uncomfortable situation.
Denying an account is one thing as well its an inconvenience and the banks have been able to hide behind not having to give a reason, denying someone the ability to buy food is going to come to a head a lot faster especially as it will be blatantly obvious when you are swooped on by security as you walk through the door and ejected which will also be quite a public spectacle whereas turning you down for an account is done by mail.
All the more reason to get rid of stores, and cash, and all that other nonsense.
Order stuff online, pay for it online, have it delivered. No theft happens then, you get your goods, problem solved.
Well if you want to throw your freedom on the bonfire of state surveillance and don't mind telling the 2.7 million in the country that have no bank account and the 3.6 million people without internet in the uk....tough you can starve sure....other than that great idea
He has a phenomenal career in media to come. Articulate, funny, intelligent, he's got its all.
Still a melancholy moment. I’m gonna miss him bearing down on the wicket, with his iconic headband, of loafing about in the bucket hat at close of play
Gah. So many of these great England players deserved this Ashes series win. FUCKING MANCHESTER and STUPID MCC/EWCB
This is nice from the Guardian: ...Millions of words will be written about him in the next 48 hours. I’ll offer a detail that sums up his career more than any other. Nobody, not even Sir Ian Botham, has been player of the match in three Ashes-winning victories. Broad has: the Oval 2009, Durham 2013, Trent Bridge 2015.
He’s right; he couldn’t end his career against anybody else...
Not at all a fan of Dorries but do we have any idea why she, an MP for 15 years and an ex-minister, is not deemed suitable by the Lords Committee when Charlotte Bloody Owen, a junior SPAD for a couple of years, is?
IIRC it's not that she was not good enough (a reasonably lengthy period as an MP and admittedly brief career as a Cabinet Minister is certainly more than most of those elevated have), but a rather technical refusal around not committing to going earlier enough for them to make their call.
Which makes it understandable she is so miffed, but her flouncing and moaning about not getting a reward she feels entitled to does not help her case.
According to the cliche, Americans don't understand games that end in a draw. However it increasingly seems like that is what they want out of the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Russia weakened but predictable. Ukraine?
The latest polling shows three quarters of US voters - including 70% of Republicans - think it important that Russia loses.
So no, it doesn't look increasingly likely.
I'm referring to the Biden administration.
You can rightly criticise them for an excess of caution. But I think you're wrong about their not wanting a Ukraine victory.
Bullies don't have enough people speaking up for them
Which is ironic when you think about it
Nadine Dorris didn’t get a promotion she wanted.
Let’s all point and laugh at her.
She's a bully herself.
She's been caught out again.
Lest we forget she tweeted vile far right propaganda about Sir Keir Starmer and when she was caught out she deleted her tweet and didn't apologise.
Doesn’t make it right.
She’s an irrelevance. Leave her be.
No.
She has debased public standards, she deserves the whirlwind coming.
Sure. She should lose her seat. That’s just the operation of democracy.
Repeatedly mocking an individual is just unpleasant. She played. She lost. Move on.
She keeps bringing it up (especially given her resignation and non-resignation is based around it), it's a live issue because she is making it one, so it's fair game.
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
When facial recognition is notoriously bad at correctly identifying the faces of ethnic minority people for a start they will be getting hit by a high profile case under the equalities legislation as disproportionately misidentifying ethnic minorities as criminals.
It will be a pr nightmare waiting to happen to any store that tries it. We as customers should also boycott the first store to implement it for the simple reason that it could be anyone of us misidentified as a shoplifter and barred from stores due to it for no other reason than "computer says you are a shoplifter" and good luck getting it sorted out.
There'll be an outbreak of funny makeup.
The other question is the ratio of false positives versus actual crims. It would have to be very small for the legal and reputational hassle to be even worth considered.
The error rate for false positives seems mostly quoted as 1 in 1000. There is a big however here though. Those are calculated using good photo's vs good photo's.
The picture of a shoplifter they have will be an image captured by cctv and probably unless very lucky not face on to the camera. They will be comparing this with a picture of you captured by cctv probably not face onto the camera either. This is bound to affect accuracy for both false positives and false negatives.
In addition while 1 in a 1000 sounds tiny imagine tesco's has 5 million customers....well now you just banned 5000 totally innocent customers on the grounds they are shoplifters. I would be guessing that they would have a case for defamation there.
Then you expand it to all supermarkets if it takes off you now have 40,000 odd people in the country that have done nothing wrong but can no longer use a supermarket. Then smaller shops start taking it up and tying into the network suddenly those 40000 can no longer enter a shop at all. Despite being innocent.
Those kind of numbers don’t seem to have inconvenienced the banks, in denying accounts.
Tell that to Alison Rose, and I suspect now the subject is out in the open banks are going to increasingly find themselves in an uncomfortable situation.
Denying an account is one thing as well its an inconvenience and the banks have been able to hide behind not having to give a reason, denying someone the ability to buy food is going to come to a head a lot faster especially as it will be blatantly obvious when you are swooped on by security as you walk through the door and ejected which will also be quite a public spectacle whereas turning you down for an account is done by mail.
All the more reason to get rid of stores, and cash, and all that other nonsense.
Order stuff online, pay for it online, have it delivered. No theft happens then, you get your goods, problem solved.
Well if you want to throw your freedom on the bonfire of state surveillance and don't mind telling the 2.7 million in the country that have no bank account and the 3.6 million people without internet in the uk....tough you can starve sure....other than that great idea
Shopping at asda.com is not state surveillance any more than shopping in ASDA with massive banks of CCTV everywhere is.
As for those without the internet or a bank account, they should catch up with the 21st and 20th centuries respectively. And if there's any barriers on them getting them, those barriers should be removed.
If people want to live an Amish lifestyle they can farm and be self-sufficient as they please. We don't organise society around those who don't want to have electricity or running water, or banks or the internet nowadays.
Still alive on my phone and iPad, so stick that up your flabby, incel arse Elon.
Er, I don’t think he’s an incel. Quite the opposite
He’s an incel who can pay for as much sex as he wants, so still an incel. No argument on the flabby arse I note, though he’s probably considering buying a new, enhanced one.
@Nigelb Oddly, I think that some people who view themselves as right wing, would feel entirely at home in the Soviet Union, a socially conservative, nationalistic, militarised, and somewhat egalitarian state.
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
When facial recognition is notoriously bad at correctly identifying the faces of ethnic minority people for a start they will be getting hit by a high profile case under the equalities legislation as disproportionately misidentifying ethnic minorities as criminals.
It will be a pr nightmare waiting to happen to any store that tries it. We as customers should also boycott the first store to implement it for the simple reason that it could be anyone of us misidentified as a shoplifter and barred from stores due to it for no other reason than "computer says you are a shoplifter" and good luck getting it sorted out.
There'll be an outbreak of funny makeup.
The other question is the ratio of false positives versus actual crims. It would have to be very small for the legal and reputational hassle to be even worth considered.
The error rate for false positives seems mostly quoted as 1 in 1000. There is a big however here though. Those are calculated using good photo's vs good photo's.
The picture of a shoplifter they have will be an image captured by cctv and probably unless very lucky not face on to the camera. They will be comparing this with a picture of you captured by cctv probably not face onto the camera either. This is bound to affect accuracy for both false positives and false negatives.
In addition while 1 in a 1000 sounds tiny imagine tesco's has 5 million customers....well now you just banned 5000 totally innocent customers on the grounds they are shoplifters. I would be guessing that they would have a case for defamation there.
Then you expand it to all supermarkets if it takes off you now have 40,000 odd people in the country that have done nothing wrong but can no longer use a supermarket. Then smaller shops start taking it up and tying into the network suddenly those 40000 can no longer enter a shop at all. Despite being innocent.
Those kind of numbers don’t seem to have inconvenienced the banks, in denying accounts.
Yes, funny makeup, and wig-mask or hat-mask combos. On the retailers' side, they could reduce the false positive rate by requiring people to look face-on to camera, as at e-passport gates. Also a company like Tesco's or Sainsbury's holds or surely could access a lot of data that could get them a long way towards identifying who a person is or making a good guess as to whether he might be a shoplifter even before they start using live facial image data. (It's said about some very strong chess programs that nobody even knows whether they use a standard scale for assessing piece value.)
For 1-2 years there'd be lots of stories and fuss kicked up about this or that angle, focusing on "It doesn't work so well" and "It has hurt x thousand innocent people".
But it wouldn't be in the category of stupid ideas ditched for unfeasibility. It would be superseded by something far more steely and effective, involving microchips whether on cards or somewhere else. The fundamentals of the social change that we're living through indicate this very strongly.
Is part of Jimmy Anderson's problem taking wickets in this series that he is now so so respected and feared as a wicket taker that batsmen now Boycott him?
@Nigelb Oddly, I think that some people who view themselves as right wing, would feel entirely at home in the Soviet Union, a socially conservative, nationalistic, militarised, and somewhat egalitarian state.
I saw on Twitter the other day of the contortions the GOP are engaging in today regarding Russia.
Basically Trump is Reagan and Putin is Gorbachev.
So Trump is honouring the legacy of Reagan by reaching out to a Russian leader.
@Nigelb Oddly, I think that some people who view themselves as right wing, would feel entirely at home in the Soviet Union, a socially conservative, nationalistic, militarised, and somewhat egalitarian state.
I don't even think it is that odd. Left and right are inadequate labels anyway, and with the horseshoe as it is it makes sense they would given neither they nor the Soviet Union would be as ideologically consistent as they think they would be.
Still alive on my phone and iPad, so stick that up your flabby, incel arse Elon.
Er, I don’t think he’s an incel. Quite the opposite
He’s an incel who can pay for as much sex as he wants, so still an incel. No argument on the flabby arse I note, though he’s probably considering buying a new, enhanced one.
Every man pays for sex, one way or another
Or is there something intrinsically more virtuous in getting sex because you are tall, or famous, or have a massive dick, or weirdly good hair, or can play backgammon like a demon, than there is in getting sex because you are very clever and rich?
All sex is a transaction of some kind: on both sides
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
When facial recognition is notoriously bad at correctly identifying the faces of ethnic minority people for a start they will be getting hit by a high profile case under the equalities legislation as disproportionately misidentifying ethnic minorities as criminals.
It will be a pr nightmare waiting to happen to any store that tries it. We as customers should also boycott the first store to implement it for the simple reason that it could be anyone of us misidentified as a shoplifter and barred from stores due to it for no other reason than "computer says you are a shoplifter" and good luck getting it sorted out.
There'll be an outbreak of funny makeup.
The other question is the ratio of false positives versus actual crims. It would have to be very small for the legal and reputational hassle to be even worth considered.
The error rate for false positives seems mostly quoted as 1 in 1000. There is a big however here though. Those are calculated using good photo's vs good photo's.
The picture of a shoplifter they have will be an image captured by cctv and probably unless very lucky not face on to the camera. They will be comparing this with a picture of you captured by cctv probably not face onto the camera either. This is bound to affect accuracy for both false positives and false negatives.
In addition while 1 in a 1000 sounds tiny imagine tesco's has 5 million customers....well now you just banned 5000 totally innocent customers on the grounds they are shoplifters. I would be guessing that they would have a case for defamation there.
Then you expand it to all supermarkets if it takes off you now have 40,000 odd people in the country that have done nothing wrong but can no longer use a supermarket. Then smaller shops start taking it up and tying into the network suddenly those 40000 can no longer enter a shop at all. Despite being innocent.
Those kind of numbers don’t seem to have inconvenienced the banks, in denying accounts.
Tell that to Alison Rose, and I suspect now the subject is out in the open banks are going to increasingly find themselves in an uncomfortable situation.
Denying an account is one thing as well its an inconvenience and the banks have been able to hide behind not having to give a reason, denying someone the ability to buy food is going to come to a head a lot faster especially as it will be blatantly obvious when you are swooped on by security as you walk through the door and ejected which will also be quite a public spectacle whereas turning you down for an account is done by mail.
All the more reason to get rid of stores, and cash, and all that other nonsense.
Order stuff online, pay for it online, have it delivered. No theft happens then, you get your goods, problem solved.
Well if you want to throw your freedom on the bonfire of state surveillance and don't mind telling the 2.7 million in the country that have no bank account and the 3.6 million people without internet in the uk....tough you can starve sure....other than that great idea
The state and its agents, the police, don’t want to protect shops.
Laws have been passed to make private security unable to do the task - private security guards laying hands on shop lifters is, effectively, banned.
Do you expect the shops, collectively, to say “Verily, there is nothing we can do!” ?
Still alive on my phone and iPad, so stick that up your flabby, incel arse Elon.
Er, I don’t think he’s an incel. Quite the opposite
He’s an incel who can pay for as much sex as he wants, so still an incel. No argument on the flabby arse I note, though he’s probably considering buying a new, enhanced one.
We need a new word for an incel who can buy as much sex as they want. "Elon" seems to be a good one. Or "tate" perhaps.
Bullies don't have enough people speaking up for them
Which is ironic when you think about it
Nadine Dorris didn’t get a promotion she wanted.
Let’s all point and laugh at her.
She's a bully herself.
She's been caught out again.
Lest we forget she tweeted vile far right propaganda about Sir Keir Starmer and when she was caught out she deleted her tweet and didn't apologise.
Doesn’t make it right.
She’s an irrelevance. Leave her be.
No.
She has debased public standards, she deserves the whirlwind coming.
Sure. She should lose her seat. That’s just the operation of democracy.
Repeatedly mocking an individual is just unpleasant. She played. She lost. Move on.
She keeps bringing it up (especially given her resignation and non-resignation is based around it), it's a live issue because she is making it one, so it's fair game.
Does she? When was the last time she said anything about it?
The local council launching a political attack is different because that’s not personalised. (“She’s not focusing on her constituents” vs “she’s a idiot”)
Still alive on my phone and iPad, so stick that up your flabby, incel arse Elon.
Er, I don’t think he’s an incel. Quite the opposite
He’s an incel who can pay for as much sex as he wants, so still an incel. No argument on the flabby arse I note, though he’s probably considering buying a new, enhanced one.
We need a new word for an incel who can buy as much sex as they want. "Elon" seems to be a good one. Or "tate" perhaps.
Sugar Daddy although I prefer the term Glucose Guardian.
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
When facial recognition is notoriously bad at correctly identifying the faces of ethnic minority people for a start they will be getting hit by a high profile case under the equalities legislation as disproportionately misidentifying ethnic minorities as criminals.
It will be a pr nightmare waiting to happen to any store that tries it. We as customers should also boycott the first store to implement it for the simple reason that it could be anyone of us misidentified as a shoplifter and barred from stores due to it for no other reason than "computer says you are a shoplifter" and good luck getting it sorted out.
There'll be an outbreak of funny makeup.
The other question is the ratio of false positives versus actual crims. It would have to be very small for the legal and reputational hassle to be even worth considered.
The error rate for false positives seems mostly quoted as 1 in 1000. There is a big however here though. Those are calculated using good photo's vs good photo's.
The picture of a shoplifter they have will be an image captured by cctv and probably unless very lucky not face on to the camera. They will be comparing this with a picture of you captured by cctv probably not face onto the camera either. This is bound to affect accuracy for both false positives and false negatives.
In addition while 1 in a 1000 sounds tiny imagine tesco's has 5 million customers....well now you just banned 5000 totally innocent customers on the grounds they are shoplifters. I would be guessing that they would have a case for defamation there.
Then you expand it to all supermarkets if it takes off you now have 40,000 odd people in the country that have done nothing wrong but can no longer use a supermarket. Then smaller shops start taking it up and tying into the network suddenly those 40000 can no longer enter a shop at all. Despite being innocent.
Those kind of numbers don’t seem to have inconvenienced the banks, in denying accounts.
Tell that to Alison Rose, and I suspect now the subject is out in the open banks are going to increasingly find themselves in an uncomfortable situation.
Denying an account is one thing as well its an inconvenience and the banks have been able to hide behind not having to give a reason, denying someone the ability to buy food is going to come to a head a lot faster especially as it will be blatantly obvious when you are swooped on by security as you walk through the door and ejected which will also be quite a public spectacle whereas turning you down for an account is done by mail.
All the more reason to get rid of stores, and cash, and all that other nonsense.
Order stuff online, pay for it online, have it delivered. No theft happens then, you get your goods, problem solved.
Well if you want to throw your freedom on the bonfire of state surveillance and don't mind telling the 2.7 million in the country that have no bank account and the 3.6 million people without internet in the uk....tough you can starve sure....other than that great idea
Shopping at asda.com is not state surveillance any more than shopping in ASDA with massive banks of CCTV everywhere is.
As for those without the internet or a bank account, they should catch up with the 21st and 20th centuries respectively. And if there's any barriers on them getting them, those barriers should be removed.
If people want to live an Amish lifestyle they can farm and be self-sufficient as they please. We don't organise society around those who don't want to not have electricity or running water, or banks or the internet nowadays.
It is not shopping at asda.com that is the problem don't be silly. It is the fact that when all monetary interactions are done electronically you know full well that the state will have access to every single one of them....all your purchases at asda, the money you gave to your mate tom, the money great aunt agatha gave you, the transaction where you bought an old car via and advert from a guy down the road. I don't want them to have that much power to pry into my life at whim.
Now for example that guy you sold the car too....well you didn't know it but he is a pimp pedalling underage girls. They look at who gave the guy money now you are suspected by the police of hiring those girls, well thats enhanced dbs checks failing from now on.
Still alive on my phone and iPad, so stick that up your flabby, incel arse Elon.
Er, I don’t think he’s an incel. Quite the opposite
He’s an incel who can pay for as much sex as he wants, so still an incel. No argument on the flabby arse I note, though he’s probably considering buying a new, enhanced one.
Bullies don't have enough people speaking up for them
Which is ironic when you think about it
Nadine Dorris didn’t get a promotion she wanted.
Let’s all point and laugh at her.
She's a bully herself.
She's been caught out again.
Lest we forget she tweeted vile far right propaganda about Sir Keir Starmer and when she was caught out she deleted her tweet and didn't apologise.
Doesn’t make it right.
She’s an irrelevance. Leave her be.
No.
She has debased public standards, she deserves the whirlwind coming.
Sure. She should lose her seat. That’s just the operation of democracy.
Repeatedly mocking an individual is just unpleasant. She played. She lost. Move on.
She's a hypocrite.
She campaigned on wanting to take back control from our unelected rulers and yet she wants to just become one of those.
Then debate policy - an unelected second chamber. Don’t attack an individual on a personal level.
I don't think that is a sustainable or sensible position. Don't people deserve personal criticism sometimes? Especially over matters such as hypocrisy, professional standards (more others than her on that one), or silly/stupid behaviour and comments?
Attacking people for personal characteristics(race, age, sexual orientation etc) is wrong, but attacking them on a personal level is not the same thing at all. Leaving her out of it, if someone is rude, arrogant, out of touch, idiotic, hypocritical, corrupt, or many more, that would justify criticism on a personal level and not on a policy level.
Yes, personal criticism can become unfair or unreasonable, but it is not inherently unwarranted.
Still alive on my phone and iPad, so stick that up your flabby, incel arse Elon.
Er, I don’t think he’s an incel. Quite the opposite
He’s an incel who can pay for as much sex as he wants, so still an incel. No argument on the flabby arse I note, though he’s probably considering buying a new, enhanced one.
We need a new word for an incel who can buy as much sex as they want. "Elon" seems to be a good one. Or "tate" perhaps.
Men have been buying sex since Homo sapiens evolved on the plains of Tanzania
It used to be hunted antelopes - he’s a good hunter, a provider! - now it is private jet flights and a massive house in Mayfair
The idea this is a new thing which needs a new word is remarkably dim
Bullies don't have enough people speaking up for them
Which is ironic when you think about it
Nadine Dorris didn’t get a promotion she wanted.
Let’s all point and laugh at her.
She's a bully herself.
She's been caught out again.
Lest we forget she tweeted vile far right propaganda about Sir Keir Starmer and when she was caught out she deleted her tweet and didn't apologise.
Doesn’t make it right.
She’s an irrelevance. Leave her be.
No.
She has debased public standards, she deserves the whirlwind coming.
Sure. She should lose her seat. That’s just the operation of democracy.
Repeatedly mocking an individual is just unpleasant. She played. She lost. Move on.
She's a hypocrite.
She campaigned on wanting to take back control from our unelected rulers and yet she wants to just become one of those.
Then debate policy - an unelected second chamber. Don’t attack an individual on a personal level.
I don't think that is a sustainable or sensible position. Don't people deserve personal criticism sometimes? Especially over matters such as hypocrisy, professional standards (more others than her on that one), or silly/stupid behaviour and comments?
Attacking people for personal characteristics(race, age, sexual orientation etc) is wrong, but attacking them on a personal level is not the same thing at all. Leaving her out of it, if someone is rude, arrogant, out of touch, idiotic, hypocritical, corrupt, or many more, that would justify criticism on a personal level and not on a policy level.
Yes, personal criticism can become unfair or unreasonable, but it is not inherently unwarranted.
At the time sure.
But saying “a few weeks ago someone said something stupid” is not constructive. It won’t achieve anything. It’s just a personal attack
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
When facial recognition is notoriously bad at correctly identifying the faces of ethnic minority people for a start they will be getting hit by a high profile case under the equalities legislation as disproportionately misidentifying ethnic minorities as criminals.
It will be a pr nightmare waiting to happen to any store that tries it. We as customers should also boycott the first store to implement it for the simple reason that it could be anyone of us misidentified as a shoplifter and barred from stores due to it for no other reason than "computer says you are a shoplifter" and good luck getting it sorted out.
There'll be an outbreak of funny makeup.
The other question is the ratio of false positives versus actual crims. It would have to be very small for the legal and reputational hassle to be even worth considered.
The error rate for false positives seems mostly quoted as 1 in 1000. There is a big however here though. Those are calculated using good photo's vs good photo's.
The picture of a shoplifter they have will be an image captured by cctv and probably unless very lucky not face on to the camera. They will be comparing this with a picture of you captured by cctv probably not face onto the camera either. This is bound to affect accuracy for both false positives and false negatives.
In addition while 1 in a 1000 sounds tiny imagine tesco's has 5 million customers....well now you just banned 5000 totally innocent customers on the grounds they are shoplifters. I would be guessing that they would have a case for defamation there.
Then you expand it to all supermarkets if it takes off you now have 40,000 odd people in the country that have done nothing wrong but can no longer use a supermarket. Then smaller shops start taking it up and tying into the network suddenly those 40000 can no longer enter a shop at all. Despite being innocent.
Those kind of numbers don’t seem to have inconvenienced the banks, in denying accounts.
Tell that to Alison Rose, and I suspect now the subject is out in the open banks are going to increasingly find themselves in an uncomfortable situation.
Denying an account is one thing as well its an inconvenience and the banks have been able to hide behind not having to give a reason, denying someone the ability to buy food is going to come to a head a lot faster especially as it will be blatantly obvious when you are swooped on by security as you walk through the door and ejected which will also be quite a public spectacle whereas turning you down for an account is done by mail.
All the more reason to get rid of stores, and cash, and all that other nonsense.
Order stuff online, pay for it online, have it delivered. No theft happens then, you get your goods, problem solved.
Well if you want to throw your freedom on the bonfire of state surveillance and don't mind telling the 2.7 million in the country that have no bank account and the 3.6 million people without internet in the uk....tough you can starve sure....other than that great idea
Shopping at asda.com is not state surveillance any more than shopping in ASDA with massive banks of CCTV everywhere is.
As for those without the internet or a bank account, they should catch up with the 21st and 20th centuries respectively. And if there's any barriers on them getting them, those barriers should be removed.
If people want to live an Amish lifestyle they can farm and be self-sufficient as they please. We don't organise society around those who don't want to not have electricity or running water, or banks or the internet nowadays.
It is not shopping at asda.com that is the problem don't be silly. It is the fact that when all monetary interactions are done electronically you know full well that the state will have access to every single one of them....all your purchases at asda, the money you gave to your mate tom, the money great aunt agatha gave you, the transaction where you bought an old car via and advert from a guy down the road. I don't want them to have that much power to pry into my life at whim.
Now for example that guy you sold the car too....well you didn't know it but he is a pimp pedalling underage girls. They look at who gave the guy money now you are suspected by the police of hiring those girls, well thats enhanced dbs checks failing from now on.
What a load of crap. So you want to keep cash because you want to be able to give pimps money without arousing suspicion?
If you buy a car, you buy a car, that is what the transaction shows. Can you show me anyone, anywhere, who has ever failed a DBS check because they bought a car?
Do away with pimps and have legalised prostitution which can go down using 'discrete' names on the bank records in case you're concerned about that, that's the liberal solution.
Your conspiracy theory nonsense falls apart because it doesn't actually match reality whatsoever. It is 10 + 10 makes a donkey level of thinking.
Still alive on my phone and iPad, so stick that up your flabby, incel arse Elon.
Er, I don’t think he’s an incel. Quite the opposite
He’s an incel who can pay for as much sex as he wants, so still an incel. No argument on the flabby arse I note, though he’s probably considering buying a new, enhanced one.
We need a new word for an incel who can buy as much sex as they want. "Elon" seems to be a good one. Or "tate" perhaps.
Men have been buying sex since Homo sapiens evolved on the plains of Tanzania
It used to be hunted antelopes - he’s a good hunter, a provider! - now it is private jet flights and a massive house in Mayfair
The idea this is a new thing which needs a new word is remarkably dim
I didn't say it was a new thing. I said we needed a new word.
An mp clocked driving at 124 mph has asked someone else to take their points (which would actually be a ban). Every Reddit-reading traffic copper in christendom will soon be checking their records for drivers clocked at 124 mph this summer and there will not be many; probably only one.
So police will soon isolate the incident, identify the car and MP, identify the poster who works for the MP, and charge at least one of them with conspiracy to copy Chris Huhne. Moriarty he ain't.
Bullies don't have enough people speaking up for them
Which is ironic when you think about it
Nadine Dorris didn’t get a promotion she wanted.
Let’s all point and laugh at her.
She's a bully herself.
She's been caught out again.
Lest we forget she tweeted vile far right propaganda about Sir Keir Starmer and when she was caught out she deleted her tweet and didn't apologise.
Doesn’t make it right.
She’s an irrelevance. Leave her be.
No.
She has debased public standards, she deserves the whirlwind coming.
Sure. She should lose her seat. That’s just the operation of democracy.
Repeatedly mocking an individual is just unpleasant. She played. She lost. Move on.
She keeps bringing it up (especially given her resignation and non-resignation is based around it), it's a live issue because she is making it one, so it's fair game.
Does she? When was the last time she said anything about it?
The local council launching a political attack is different because that’s not personalised. (“She’s not focusing on her constituents” vs “she’s a idiot”)
Oh please, that is very weak. She made a splash about going immediately and then changed her mind, tying her not going to how angry she is about not getting her peerage. Therefore her very presence as an MP keeps it a live issue because that is how she explained her continued presence. How often would she have to bring it up verbally to make it ok to mention in your eyes? If she doesn't mention it for a week no one can say anything? Two weeks? Why the distinction?
If she didn't want to face mockery for her decision she did not have to do any of that. On what basis does she get a free pass from mockery for her actions?
If it is not abuse, then we are allowed to mock our MPs as much as we damn well please for whatever reason we like. Is that not that free speech stuff we hear so much about?
Still alive on my phone and iPad, so stick that up your flabby, incel arse Elon.
Er, I don’t think he’s an incel. Quite the opposite
He’s an incel who can pay for as much sex as he wants, so still an incel. No argument on the flabby arse I note, though he’s probably considering buying a new, enhanced one.
Every man pays for sex, one way or another
Or is there something intrinsically more virtuous in getting sex because you are tall, or famous, or have a massive dick, or weirdly good hair, or can play backgammon like a demon, than there is in getting sex because you are very clever and rich?
All sex is a transaction of some kind: on both sides
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
When facial recognition is notoriously bad at correctly identifying the faces of ethnic minority people for a start they will be getting hit by a high profile case under the equalities legislation as disproportionately misidentifying ethnic minorities as criminals.
It will be a pr nightmare waiting to happen to any store that tries it. We as customers should also boycott the first store to implement it for the simple reason that it could be anyone of us misidentified as a shoplifter and barred from stores due to it for no other reason than "computer says you are a shoplifter" and good luck getting it sorted out.
There'll be an outbreak of funny makeup.
The other question is the ratio of false positives versus actual crims. It would have to be very small for the legal and reputational hassle to be even worth considered.
The error rate for false positives seems mostly quoted as 1 in 1000. There is a big however here though. Those are calculated using good photo's vs good photo's.
The picture of a shoplifter they have will be an image captured by cctv and probably unless very lucky not face on to the camera. They will be comparing this with a picture of you captured by cctv probably not face onto the camera either. This is bound to affect accuracy for both false positives and false negatives.
In addition while 1 in a 1000 sounds tiny imagine tesco's has 5 million customers....well now you just banned 5000 totally innocent customers on the grounds they are shoplifters. I would be guessing that they would have a case for defamation there.
Then you expand it to all supermarkets if it takes off you now have 40,000 odd people in the country that have done nothing wrong but can no longer use a supermarket. Then smaller shops start taking it up and tying into the network suddenly those 40000 can no longer enter a shop at all. Despite being innocent.
Those kind of numbers don’t seem to have inconvenienced the banks, in denying accounts.
Tell that to Alison Rose, and I suspect now the subject is out in the open banks are going to increasingly find themselves in an uncomfortable situation.
Denying an account is one thing as well its an inconvenience and the banks have been able to hide behind not having to give a reason, denying someone the ability to buy food is going to come to a head a lot faster especially as it will be blatantly obvious when you are swooped on by security as you walk through the door and ejected which will also be quite a public spectacle whereas turning you down for an account is done by mail.
All the more reason to get rid of stores, and cash, and all that other nonsense.
Order stuff online, pay for it online, have it delivered. No theft happens then, you get your goods, problem solved.
Well if you want to throw your freedom on the bonfire of state surveillance and don't mind telling the 2.7 million in the country that have no bank account and the 3.6 million people without internet in the uk....tough you can starve sure....other than that great idea
The state and its agents, the police don’t want to protect shops.
Laws have been passed to make private security unable to do the task - private security guards laying hands on shop lifters is, eventually, banned.
Do you expect the shops, collectively, to say “Verily, there is nothing we can do!” ?
Well currently there are no laws preventing guards laying hands on shoplifters and they regularly do. But in short I want the police to start doing their job. A good example is the time they went to that bar with the golliwogs.....now not saying police shouldn't have gone but did it really need 6 of them.
If the police are going to send 6 officers for things like that then frankly its no wonder they are short handed. They also seem to have a lot of time to investigate non crimes such as someone being misgendered on twitter.
Still alive on my phone and iPad, so stick that up your flabby, incel arse Elon.
Er, I don’t think he’s an incel. Quite the opposite
He’s an incel who can pay for as much sex as he wants, so still an incel. No argument on the flabby arse I note, though he’s probably considering buying a new, enhanced one.
Still alive on my phone and iPad, so stick that up your flabby, incel arse Elon.
Er, I don’t think he’s an incel. Quite the opposite
He’s an incel who can pay for as much sex as he wants, so still an incel. No argument on the flabby arse I note, though he’s probably considering buying a new, enhanced one.
We need a new word for an incel who can buy as much sex as they want. "Elon" seems to be a good one. Or "tate" perhaps.
Men have been buying sex since Homo sapiens evolved on the plains of Tanzania
It used to be hunted antelopes - he’s a good hunter, a provider! - now it is private jet flights and a massive house in Mayfair
The idea this is a new thing which needs a new word is remarkably dim
Today started out with a discussion on wine and sharpening knives in holiday chalets, and has now moved on to Elon Musk and incels. A normal day on PB.
Bullying is bullying regardless of whether the victim is a nice person or not.
I abhor the mob mentality
People being mocked does not automatically equal bullying, especially when they are a public figure. I abhor bullying, it's why the defences of the likes of Patel and Bercow can be so infuriating, because bullying can happen to grown ups, it need not be ostentatious, and people of serious demeanour and responsibility can still be subjected to it, but there is a wealth of cases that demonstrate the principle that people, especially in public life, need some level of thick skin. They do not deserve abuse, but the nature of political discourse will included invective, exagerration, mockery, and condemnation. It is not bullying to face that on its own.
But making a very entitled moan about not getting a peerage and getting mocked about it? Get off.
It diminishes the real problems of bullying, and the dismissal of the less obvious kinds of it, to tie that into someone being mocked for her own silliness.
Still alive on my phone and iPad, so stick that up your flabby, incel arse Elon.
Er, I don’t think he’s an incel. Quite the opposite
He’s an incel who can pay for as much sex as he wants, so still an incel. No argument on the flabby arse I note, though he’s probably considering buying a new, enhanced one.
Why are you using incel as an insult.
I would imagine because Incels are a collective who blame the fact they can’t get a girlfriend because of everything else on the planet except their own behaviour and attitudes. They don’t have a girlfriend because they spend all day gaming, they are unfit, unsocialised and think that porn is how sex in a relationship is. They don’t get that women are their equal if not betters and need to make an effort and it’s not the 1950s. That’s why incel is an insult, a deserved insult to those who are Incels. Whether Musk is is another question.
An mp clocked driving at 124 mph has asked someone else to take their points (which would actually be a ban). Every Reddit-reading traffic copper in christendom will soon be checking their records for drivers clocked at 124 mph this summer and there will not be many; probably only one.
So police will soon isolate the incident, identify the car and MP, identify the poster who works for the MP, and charge at least one of them with conspiracy to copy Chris Huhne. Moriarty he ain't.
Maybe. That depends rather on a dodgy account, not on oath, being accurate and verifiable WRT quite a number of facts. And then on being provable to a criminal standard. Wait and see. The chances are this dies a death.
Bullying is bullying regardless of whether the victim is a nice person or not.
I abhor the mob mentality
Let's not despair for her - that's not much better than mocking her. Dorries is a knockabout politician who has had a bit of a knock (one of many in her life). She'll find a way to bounce back and decide what she wants to do with the next stage of her life.
Still alive on my phone and iPad, so stick that up your flabby, incel arse Elon.
Er, I don’t think he’s an incel. Quite the opposite
He’s an incel who can pay for as much sex as he wants, so still an incel. No argument on the flabby arse I note, though he’s probably considering buying a new, enhanced one.
Every man pays for sex, one way or another
Or is there something intrinsically more virtuous in getting sex because you are tall, or famous, or have a massive dick, or weirdly good hair, or can play backgammon like a demon, than there is in getting sex because you are very clever and rich?
All sex is a transaction of some kind: on both sides
What about paying for love? I daresay Elon gets enough of the fawning, ersatz sort from his employees and the fashy fanbois doing the xeets.
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
When facial recognition is notoriously bad at correctly identifying the faces of ethnic minority people for a start they will be getting hit by a high profile case under the equalities legislation as disproportionately misidentifying ethnic minorities as criminals.
It will be a pr nightmare waiting to happen to any store that tries it. We as customers should also boycott the first store to implement it for the simple reason that it could be anyone of us misidentified as a shoplifter and barred from stores due to it for no other reason than "computer says you are a shoplifter" and good luck getting it sorted out.
There'll be an outbreak of funny makeup.
The other question is the ratio of false positives versus actual crims. It would have to be very small for the legal and reputational hassle to be even worth considered.
The error rate for false positives seems mostly quoted as 1 in 1000. There is a big however here though. Those are calculated using good photo's vs good photo's.
The picture of a shoplifter they have will be an image captured by cctv and probably unless very lucky not face on to the camera. They will be comparing this with a picture of you captured by cctv probably not face onto the camera either. This is bound to affect accuracy for both false positives and false negatives.
In addition while 1 in a 1000 sounds tiny imagine tesco's has 5 million customers....well now you just banned 5000 totally innocent customers on the grounds they are shoplifters. I would be guessing that they would have a case for defamation there.
Then you expand it to all supermarkets if it takes off you now have 40,000 odd people in the country that have done nothing wrong but can no longer use a supermarket. Then smaller shops start taking it up and tying into the network suddenly those 40000 can no longer enter a shop at all. Despite being innocent.
Those kind of numbers don’t seem to have inconvenienced the banks, in denying accounts.
Tell that to Alison Rose, and I suspect now the subject is out in the open banks are going to increasingly find themselves in an uncomfortable situation.
Denying an account is one thing as well its an inconvenience and the banks have been able to hide behind not having to give a reason, denying someone the ability to buy food is going to come to a head a lot faster especially as it will be blatantly obvious when you are swooped on by security as you walk through the door and ejected which will also be quite a public spectacle whereas turning you down for an account is done by mail.
All the more reason to get rid of stores, and cash, and all that other nonsense.
Order stuff online, pay for it online, have it delivered. No theft happens then, you get your goods, problem solved.
Well if you want to throw your freedom on the bonfire of state surveillance and don't mind telling the 2.7 million in the country that have no bank account and the 3.6 million people without internet in the uk....tough you can starve sure....other than that great idea
Shopping at asda.com is not state surveillance any more than shopping in ASDA with massive banks of CCTV everywhere is.
As for those without the internet or a bank account, they should catch up with the 21st and 20th centuries respectively. And if there's any barriers on them getting them, those barriers should be removed.
If people want to live an Amish lifestyle they can farm and be self-sufficient as they please. We don't organise society around those who don't want to not have electricity or running water, or banks or the internet nowadays.
It is not shopping at asda.com that is the problem don't be silly. It is the fact that when all monetary interactions are done electronically you know full well that the state will have access to every single one of them....all your purchases at asda, the money you gave to your mate tom, the money great aunt agatha gave you, the transaction where you bought an old car via and advert from a guy down the road. I don't want them to have that much power to pry into my life at whim.
Now for example that guy you sold the car too....well you didn't know it but he is a pimp pedalling underage girls. They look at who gave the guy money now you are suspected by the police of hiring those girls, well thats enhanced dbs checks failing from now on.
What a load of crap. So you want to keep cash because you want to be able to give pimps money without arousing suspicion?
If you buy a car, you buy a car, that is what the transaction shows. Can you show me anyone, anywhere, who has ever failed a DBS check because they bought a car?
Do away with pimps and have legalised prostitution which can go down using 'discrete' names on the bank records in case you're concerned about that, that's the liberal solution.
Your conspiracy theory nonsense falls apart because it doesn't actually match reality whatsoever. It is 10 + 10 makes a donkey level of thinking.
Simple question
Do you want the state to be able to look through every transaction you ever make? You keep going on about being libertarian. If the answer is no cash has to stay.
By the way your transfer of cash won't actually say anything but the reason you enter. If I was buying schoolgirls I could just put in buying a car so the police certainly are not going to be believing that reason just because you typed it in.
And yes people fail dbs checks all the time because they unwittingly associate with someone that is dodgy. Also things done with their cloned credit card because the police traced a transaction back to them that the never even made. Operation Ore. So yes the police have a history of not believing people over electronic transactions.
Still alive on my phone and iPad, so stick that up your flabby, incel arse Elon.
Er, I don’t think he’s an incel. Quite the opposite
He’s an incel who can pay for as much sex as he wants, so still an incel. No argument on the flabby arse I note, though he’s probably considering buying a new, enhanced one.
We need a new word for an incel who can buy as much sex as they want. "Elon" seems to be a good one. Or "tate" perhaps.
Men have been buying sex since Homo sapiens evolved on the plains of Tanzania
It used to be hunted antelopes - he’s a good hunter, a provider! - now it is private jet flights and a massive house in Mayfair
The idea this is a new thing which needs a new word is remarkably dim
I didn't say it was a new thing. I said we needed a new word.
No, we don’t. The word is “man”
Men exploit their individual advantages to get sex. These advantages can be one of these, or a combination of them: good looks, a fine physique, a clever brain, excellent chat, loads of money, noble blood, military prowess, sporting prowess, local fame, global fame, musical talent, political power, social influence, hunting skills, dancing skills, a massive cock, an ability to induce orgasm with a twitch of your toothbrush moustache, being a “good listener”, religious charisma, being a brilliant liar, being a senior member of the Communist party, or being - sad to say - in a position to successfully commit rape, and depraved enough to do so
As I see it: Musk exploits at least three of these, and does not need to rape anyone
The Oakland NAACP does something brave — and wise:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – The Oakland NAACP has called on city leaders to declare a state of emergency due to rising crime, calling the situation a “crisis,” and has urged residents across the city to speak out against it.
Ever since I worked in a slum school on the west side of Chicago more than 50 years ago, I have known that most of the victims of black criminals are also black*. And that crime often causes poverty. But those are things you won’t hear said by the leftists on Martha’s Vineyard.
(*That is true of other groups. According to reports I’ve seen, most of Bernie Madoff’s victims were other Jews. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Mafia mostly vitimizes Italians. And so on.)
Cross posted at Patterico's Pontifications.
And of course particularly with things like high retail crime, shops will just close, with means few jobs in those neighbours, which means more poverty, which means more crime, rinse and repeat. And we are already seeing it as the likes of Walmart exits completely from some cities.
The laws put in place whereby steal less than $800-1000 bucks from a store and it is effectively a parking ticket has to be some of the most stupid laws ever thought up....and of course employees are not to try and stop this, otherwise they get sacked and the police, well they have been defunded and told they are all racist, so ain't going to rush there to issue the citation.
Guess what happens when you defund the police, and elect useless state prosecutors who think it’s racist to charge people with theft?
Commendable indeed from the NAACP, who see how things are on the streets, rather than how wealthy policymakers think they should be.
And this cancer has spread outside of the traditional high crime areas / cities. Portland, was always a bit weird and wacky place, but safe and prosperous. Now downtown is like a scene from the Walking Day, and whenever the far left (and less so the far right) turn up and smash the place up, the moronic Mayor and local prosecutors, don't want to charge people because whatever -ist and historic oppression you want to choose.
So businesses are just shutting up shop.
Perhaps if the police could stop standing on the necks of people they arrest for petty crime, politicians might be more in favour of arrests for petty crime.
Incompetently administered capital punishment in the street looks bad.
In Portland they haven't been charging people for much more serious crimes than shoplifting.
And of course the police officers responsible for administering capital punishment were correctly jailed. Despite the often touted claims that any young black unarmed man might get murdered by the police, the figures don't hold up. The numbers of individuals killed by the police is very high compared to say the UK, but it is armed criminals....lead to heavily armed police...lead to many more situations where its life and death decisions. And with the introduction of bodycams, police can't get away with anywhere near as much dodgy stuff as perhaps they did before.
The issue of shoplifting not really being properly enforced has been on the books in some cities from before George Floyd and was causing trouble with organised gangs. But the word spreads and now it is a total disaster in quite a few US cities.
Shoplifting is becoming a huge problem here too where it is unconnected with America's bizarre racial politics. Just this week the Co-op warned it might have to pull out of some areas. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66323140
The reason that the police are doing nothing about shop lifting is related - they see little upside in arresting Da Yuth, a chance of being stabbed, a claim of racism and released on bail as a cherry on the pie.
Bit like not cracking down on the patently illegal electric bikes or the building sites which are visibly breaking the law.
What could the police do about shoplifting? Uniform aren't there and CID are not going to spend days going through cctv searching for two miscreants who stole goods worth, what, a couple of hundred quid. At best police might mount a special operation, flooding an area for a couple of weeks but then the money will run out or the mayor of the next town over will call.
It may be the shops will need to organise something themselves, from more security guards, through shared intelligence, all the way through to prosecutions, as betting shops had to do.
Or people on tills, and don't rely on an honour system of payment. I know this is a revolutionary concept from the future but it might just work.
Or indeed go back to the traditional method of shopkeeper behind the counter, handing over stuff when you ask for it...
Perhaps in Waitrose stores in the Zone Alpha towns that all got gated in 2026.
Elsewhere, just check ID at the door.
Wait...there's an epidemic of desperate people acting in concert. One of them enters on their real ID, grabs stuff, vaults the barrier to get out, and shares the stuff around the corner with his (often her) friends. The police can't arrest them because they don't know where they live. (Feed the line to certain audiences that this is something to do with race, woke, single mothers, or not flogging offenders like they do in Singapore.) The ID gets banned, but then somebody else in the group takes over as the person who enters and grabs. OMG what are we going to do? Easy solution: chip almost everyone and track them 24/7. That's what happened in 2028. Shoplifting's a thing of the past now.
Simpler. Secure door entry on all shops. Facial recognition. If you ever been filmed shop lifting in any store in the network, no entry to any participating store. Ever again.
Yes - that's the kind of thing I think will happen first. It's a kind of ID check.
Facial recognition is nowhere near good enough, it provides tons of false negatives and worse tons of false positives. It is even more unreliable on black and asian faces. Anyone touting facial recognition as a solution in its current state does not know what they are talking about.
Why would the stores care. If they can cut shop lifting by 95% in problem areas, why are false positives a problem? For the stores?
When facial recognition is notoriously bad at correctly identifying the faces of ethnic minority people for a start they will be getting hit by a high profile case under the equalities legislation as disproportionately misidentifying ethnic minorities as criminals.
It will be a pr nightmare waiting to happen to any store that tries it. We as customers should also boycott the first store to implement it for the simple reason that it could be anyone of us misidentified as a shoplifter and barred from stores due to it for no other reason than "computer says you are a shoplifter" and good luck getting it sorted out.
There'll be an outbreak of funny makeup.
The other question is the ratio of false positives versus actual crims. It would have to be very small for the legal and reputational hassle to be even worth considered.
The error rate for false positives seems mostly quoted as 1 in 1000. There is a big however here though. Those are calculated using good photo's vs good photo's.
The picture of a shoplifter they have will be an image captured by cctv and probably unless very lucky not face on to the camera. They will be comparing this with a picture of you captured by cctv probably not face onto the camera either. This is bound to affect accuracy for both false positives and false negatives.
In addition while 1 in a 1000 sounds tiny imagine tesco's has 5 million customers....well now you just banned 5000 totally innocent customers on the grounds they are shoplifters. I would be guessing that they would have a case for defamation there.
Then you expand it to all supermarkets if it takes off you now have 40,000 odd people in the country that have done nothing wrong but can no longer use a supermarket. Then smaller shops start taking it up and tying into the network suddenly those 40000 can no longer enter a shop at all. Despite being innocent.
Those kind of numbers don’t seem to have inconvenienced the banks, in denying accounts.
Tell that to Alison Rose, and I suspect now the subject is out in the open banks are going to increasingly find themselves in an uncomfortable situation.
Denying an account is one thing as well its an inconvenience and the banks have been able to hide behind not having to give a reason, denying someone the ability to buy food is going to come to a head a lot faster especially as it will be blatantly obvious when you are swooped on by security as you walk through the door and ejected which will also be quite a public spectacle whereas turning you down for an account is done by mail.
All the more reason to get rid of stores, and cash, and all that other nonsense.
Order stuff online, pay for it online, have it delivered. No theft happens then, you get your goods, problem solved.
Well if you want to throw your freedom on the bonfire of state surveillance and don't mind telling the 2.7 million in the country that have no bank account and the 3.6 million people without internet in the uk....tough you can starve sure....other than that great idea
The state and its agents, the police don’t want to protect shops.
Laws have been passed to make private security unable to do the task - private security guards laying hands on shop lifters is, eventually, banned.
Do you expect the shops, collectively, to say “Verily, there is nothing we can do!” ?
Well currently there are no laws preventing guards laying hands on shoplifters and they regularly do. But in short I want the police to start doing their job. A good example is the time they went to that bar with the golliwogs.....now not saying police shouldn't have gone but did it really need 6 of them.
If the police are going to send 6 officers for things like that then frankly its no wonder they are short handed. They also seem to have a lot of time to investigate non crimes such as someone being misgendered on twitter.
If the Police are going to raid an establishment that's committing an alleged offence where alcohol may be involved then 6 people is probably light-handed not heavy-handed for that versus what might normally happen. Just 1 officer going in alone outnumbered by potentially drunk patrons may not be the best idea, plus of course sending in multiple officers makes it easier to secure any evidence of the alleged offence rather than having it disposed of.
How many Police man-hours in total do you think are used for "misgendering" people on Twitter? I doubt its many whatsoever.
Bullying is bullying regardless of whether the victim is a nice person or not.
I abhor the mob mentality
Let's not despair for her - that's not much better than mocking her. Dorries is a knockabout politician who has had a bit of a knock (one of many in her life). She'll find a way to bounce back and decide what she wants to do with the next stage of her life.
Comments
I don't think we'll need that many
If nothing else, this would raise Turkeys prestige in a number of third world countries to the stars. And Erdoğan loves that kind of applause.
https://www.google.com/search?q="blackboard+bold"&biw=1291&bih=660&tbm=nws
Which is why everywhere in the US now has a 21 year limit.
See:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aWYJugVTs4
Or he's involuntarily sexually active?
The picture of a shoplifter they have will be an image captured by cctv and probably unless very lucky not face on to the camera. They will be comparing this with a picture of you captured by cctv probably not face onto the camera either. This is bound to affect accuracy for both false positives and false negatives.
In addition while 1 in a 1000 sounds tiny imagine tesco's has 5 million customers....well now you just banned 5000 totally innocent customers on the grounds they are shoplifters. I would be guessing that they would have a case for defamation there.
Then you expand it to all supermarkets if it takes off you now have 40,000 odd people in the country that have done nothing wrong but can no longer use a supermarket. Then smaller shops start taking it up and tying into the network suddenly those 40000 can no longer enter a shop at all. Despite being innocent.
Should be longer than 6/1?
England win
THERE. I’ve jinxed it. Sorry
He’s an inspiration to Aspie nerds across the world: all you need is $250 billion, and you too can get the girls
Let’s all point and laugh at her.
So no, it doesn't look increasingly likely.
He's been a fine servant to English cricket though.
She's been caught out again.
Lest we forget she tweeted vile far right propaganda about Sir Keir Starmer and when she was caught out she deleted her tweet and didn't apologise.
Gah. So many of these great England players deserved this Ashes series win. FUCKING MANCHESTER and STUPID MCC/EWCB
How selfish is that?
Argentina PLC had a similar rate in October and is now up to ~110-120%.
Jimmy has a stellar record but may want to take 10 more wickets before he retires, rather than retiring on 690.
On a family vacation in another state, we were unsure if it was legal there for me to get a beer at a bar. So my dad asked the woman behind the bar, "Excuse me, but what's the drinking age here?"
Her reply, in raspy voice dripping with sarcasm: "Don't worry, honey - I think you're plenty old enough."
All you need to do is invest in MalmesburyCoin - backed by ownership of the best portfolio of bridges in the world.
Denying an account is one thing as well its an inconvenience and the banks have been able to hide behind not having to give a reason, denying someone the ability to buy food is going to come to a head a lot faster especially as it will be blatantly obvious when you are swooped on by security as you walk through the door and ejected which will also be quite a public spectacle whereas turning you down for an account is done by mail.
Order stuff online, pay for it online, have it delivered. No theft happens then, you get your goods, problem solved.
She’s an irrelevance. Leave her be.
He's still good enough to justify a place for another series, especially with Broad opening up a slot.
She has debased public standards, she deserves the whirlwind coming.
Interesting thread...
Which is Stuart Broad's most iconic Ashes moment?
Repeatedly mocking an individual is just unpleasant. She played. She lost. Move on.
...Millions of words will be written about him in the next 48 hours. I’ll offer a detail that sums up his career more than any other. Nobody, not even Sir Ian Botham, has been player of the match in three Ashes-winning victories. Broad has: the Oval 2009, Durham 2013, Trent Bridge 2015.
He’s right; he couldn’t end his career against anybody else...
Which makes it understandable she is so miffed, but her flouncing and moaning about not getting a reward she feels entitled to does not help her case.
She campaigned on wanting to take back control from our unelected rulers and yet she wants to just become one of those.
As for those without the internet or a bank account, they should catch up with the 21st and 20th centuries respectively. And if there's any barriers on them getting them, those barriers should be removed.
If people want to live an Amish lifestyle they can farm and be self-sufficient as they please. We don't organise society around those who don't want to have electricity or running water, or banks or the internet nowadays.
No argument on the flabby arse I note, though he’s probably considering buying a new, enhanced one.
But I will stop criticising Nadine Dorries when she stops moaning about the non peerage.
For 1-2 years there'd be lots of stories and fuss kicked up about this or that angle, focusing on "It doesn't work so well" and "It has hurt x thousand innocent people".
But it wouldn't be in the category of stupid ideas ditched for unfeasibility. It would be superseded by something far more steely and effective, involving microchips whether on cards or somewhere else. The fundamentals of the social change that we're living through indicate this very strongly.
Basically Trump is Reagan and Putin is Gorbachev.
So Trump is honouring the legacy of Reagan by reaching out to a Russian leader.
Or is there something intrinsically more virtuous in getting sex because you are tall, or famous, or have a massive dick, or weirdly good hair, or can play backgammon like a demon, than there is in getting sex because you are very clever and rich?
All sex is a transaction of some kind: on both sides
Laws have been passed to make private security unable to do the task - private security guards laying hands on shop lifters is, effectively, banned.
Do you expect the shops, collectively, to say “Verily, there is nothing we can do!” ?
The local council launching a political attack is different because that’s not personalised. (“She’s not focusing on her constituents” vs “she’s a idiot”)
Now for example that guy you sold the car too....well you didn't know it but he is a pimp pedalling underage girls. They look at who gave the guy money now you are suspected by the police of hiring those girls, well thats enhanced dbs checks failing from now on.
Attacking people for personal characteristics(race, age, sexual orientation etc) is wrong, but attacking them on a personal level is not the same thing at all. Leaving her out of it, if someone is rude, arrogant, out of touch, idiotic, hypocritical, corrupt, or many more, that would justify criticism on a personal level and not on a policy level.
Yes, personal criticism can become unfair or unreasonable, but it is not inherently unwarranted.
It used to be hunted antelopes - he’s a good hunter, a provider! - now it is private jet flights and a massive house in Mayfair
The idea this is a new thing which needs a new word is remarkably dim
https://news.sky.com/story/nadine-dorries-accused-of-spreading-fake-news-after-sharing-doctored-video-of-sir-keir-starmer-11988228
But saying “a few weeks ago someone said something stupid” is not constructive. It won’t achieve anything. It’s just a personal attack
If you buy a car, you buy a car, that is what the transaction shows. Can you show me anyone, anywhere, who has ever failed a DBS check because they bought a car?
Do away with pimps and have legalised prostitution which can go down using 'discrete' names on the bank records in case you're concerned about that, that's the liberal solution.
Your conspiracy theory nonsense falls apart because it doesn't actually match reality whatsoever. It is 10 + 10 makes a donkey level of thinking.
So police will soon isolate the incident, identify the car and MP, identify the poster who works for the MP, and charge at least one of them with conspiracy to copy Chris Huhne. Moriarty he ain't.
Bullying is bullying regardless of whether the victim is a nice person or not.
I abhor the mob mentality
If she didn't want to face mockery for her decision she did not have to do any of that. On what basis does she get a free pass from mockery for her actions?
If it is not abuse, then we are allowed to mock our MPs as much as we damn well please for whatever reason we like. Is that not that free speech stuff we hear so much about?
If the police are going to send 6 officers for things like that then frankly its no wonder they are short handed. They also seem to have a lot of time to investigate non crimes such as someone being misgendered on twitter.
But making a very entitled moan about not getting a peerage and getting mocked about it? Get off.
It diminishes the real problems of bullying, and the dismissal of the less obvious kinds of it, to tie that into someone being mocked for her own silliness.
I daresay Elon gets enough of the fawning, ersatz sort from his employees and the fashy fanbois doing the xeets.
Do you want the state to be able to look through every transaction you ever make? You keep going on about being libertarian. If the answer is no cash has to stay.
By the way your transfer of cash won't actually say anything but the reason you enter. If I was buying schoolgirls I could just put in buying a car so the police certainly are not going to be believing that reason just because you typed it in.
And yes people fail dbs checks all the time because they unwittingly associate with someone that is dodgy. Also things done with their cloned credit card because the police traced a transaction back to them that the never even made. Operation Ore. So yes the police have a history of not believing people over electronic transactions.
Men exploit their individual advantages to get sex. These advantages can be one of these, or a combination of them: good looks, a fine physique, a clever brain, excellent chat, loads of money, noble blood, military prowess, sporting prowess, local fame, global fame, musical talent, political power, social influence, hunting skills, dancing skills, a massive cock, an ability to induce orgasm with a twitch of your toothbrush moustache, being a “good listener”, religious charisma, being a brilliant liar, being a senior member of the Communist party, or being - sad to say - in a position to successfully commit rape, and depraved enough to do so
As I see it: Musk exploits at least three of these, and does not need to rape anyone
He’s not an incel, he is a man who has sex
How many Police man-hours in total do you think are used for "misgendering" people on Twitter? I doubt its many whatsoever.