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.
Well last year in london alone there were 120000 recorded non crime hate incidents by the police even if they only took an hour each and only one policeman involved then thats the full work for a year of about 58 policeman. Of course they don't all just involve 1 officer and take an hour
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.
Interesting that for a miscarriage of justice you have to look back to a famous one from 20 years ago, when the internet was still relatively new to the public and the Police. Miscarriages of justice happen regularly, and happen regarding cash too.
Yes all the transfer of money has on it is details of the transaction, not what the transaction was for, which removes most of what you claim the "snooping" is about. A ledger of transactions is not a be all and end all, and while I'd rather the state not have access to it, especially not without court orders, I'm not against it existing.
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.
Ha! That's where the poster has been clever. Really he was only doing 123mph.
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.
Well last year in london alone there were 120000 recorded non crime hate incidents by the police even if they only took an hour each and only one policeman involved then thats the full work for a year of about 58 policeman. Of course they don't all just involve 1 officer and take an hour
You're right there's no way they'd spend an entire hour on that, an hour would be an extremely long time, if my experience of the Police is anything like typical you'd be lucky if they spent 2 minutes working on each recorded incident before giving an incident number and closing the log.
After losing the Penrith and Solway selection to Mark Jenkinson, Neil Hudson seems determined not to make the same mistake again as he faces Tory members in West Suffolk on Sunday...to make sure he doesn’t repeat his failure to be selected somebody has been cleaning up his Wikipedia page. Who could it be?....
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.
A car isn't a great example because the government already knows who owns cars, so they already know Pagan2 bought one from a pimp, although harder to find out how much for if they paid cash. Though I would have thought paying with something other than cash would actually arouse less suspicion.
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
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
He’s not an incel, he is a man who has sex
Hard not to feel sorry for you reading that, but I managed.
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.
Ha! That's where the poster has been clever. Really he was only doing 123mph.
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.
Well last year in london alone there were 120000 recorded non crime hate incidents by the police even if they only took an hour each and only one policeman involved then thats the full work for a year of about 58 policeman. Of course they don't all just involve 1 officer and take an hour
You're right there's no way they'd spend an entire hour on that, an hour would be an extremely long time, if my experience of the Police is anything like typical you'd be lucky if they spent 2 minutes working on each recorded incident before giving an incident number and closing the log.
They only spend 2 minutes a issue an incident number in my experience if you are the victim of a real crime. They don't want to bother with those except rape and murder and increasingly not even rape.
As to just a ledger, sorry you are being naive if you don't think they will have access to all the sales ledgers of every business you use for example the tesco's club card etc. I could name lots more recent operation ore is the most famous one that turned into a scandal is the only reason I mentioned that one.
Now I see you have also changed your tune from the purchase from the guy who turned out to be a pimp they will see it was a car to they will only have a ledger of who and how much. That ledger only shows paid gary the pimp 500£. You really think they wont be going over you with a fine tooth comb and it wont be reflected on an enhanced dbs when even an uncorroborated allegation of a non crime hate incident shows up?
For a libertarian you seem mighty trustful of the state and want to give it more power.
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.
Well last year in london alone there were 120000 recorded non crime hate incidents by the police even if they only took an hour each and only one policeman involved then thats the full work for a year of about 58 policeman. Of course they don't all just involve 1 officer and take an hour
You're right there's no way they'd spend an entire hour on that, an hour would be an extremely long time, if my experience of the Police is anything like typical you'd be lucky if they spent 2 minutes working on each recorded incident before giving an incident number and closing the log.
They only spend 2 minutes a issue an incident number in my experience if you are the victim of a real crime. They don't want to bother with those except rape and murder and increasingly not even rape.
As to just a ledger, sorry you are being naive if you don't think they will have access to all the sales ledgers of every business you use for example the tesco's club card etc. I could name lots more recent operation ore is the most famous one that turned into a scandal is the only reason I mentioned that one.
Now I see you have also changed your tune from the purchase from the guy who turned out to be a pimp they will see it was a car to they will only have a ledger of who and how much. That ledger only shows paid gary the pimp 500£. You really think they wont be going over you with a fine tooth comb and it wont be reflected on an enhanced dbs when even an uncorroborated allegation of a non crime hate incident shows up?
For a libertarian you seem mighty trustful of the state and want to give it more power.
Sorry Pagan but you're full of bovine manure.
The state already knows you bought a car from Gary the pimp even when you paid cash. DVLA knows and tracks all this information anyway, whether cash or card is used.
If you think cash is some form of cloak of invisibility that hides your life from the state then you are woefully naïve and no wonder you're afraid of progress.
I don’t believe a word of this. If this individual really is a high profile politician the plod are going to look twice at “I let the handyman borrow the car.” I mean, seriously…
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.
For a moment I thought you were talking about marsupial nether bits.
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
He’s not an incel, he is a man who has sex
Hard not to feel sorry for you reading that, but I managed.
I am afraid to say I have at least seven and possibly eight of these qualities
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
He’s not an incel, he is a man who has sex
It’s not a question of “needing” to. As you say, you just have to be depraved enough. Mike Tyson had loads of money, sporting prowess, and global fame, yet chose to force himself on someone. Harvey Weinstein was clever, excellent chat, global fame. Epstein…need I go on? The idea that a man who doesn’t “need” to commit sexual assault means they don’t is balderdash. A lot of men just get off on it.
I hasten to add that there is no suggestion that the initial topic of this thread has ever done so. Neither, as you say, is he an Incel under the definition I understand it to be.
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.
Well last year in london alone there were 120000 recorded non crime hate incidents by the police even if they only took an hour each and only one policeman involved then thats the full work for a year of about 58 policeman. Of course they don't all just involve 1 officer and take an hour
You're right there's no way they'd spend an entire hour on that, an hour would be an extremely long time, if my experience of the Police is anything like typical you'd be lucky if they spent 2 minutes working on each recorded incident before giving an incident number and closing the log.
Ah - two minutes 'actual time', 5hrs 'billable time'.
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.
The thought of, say, Hypermarket plc having my facial details, as I contemplate the facial ID system on my mobile ... what's their IT security like?
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
He’s not an incel, he is a man who has sex
Hard not to feel sorry for you reading that, but I managed.
I am afraid to say I have at least seven and possibly eight of these qualities
Can any PBer beat that?
10. Would have been 11 but I quit the Communist Party.
Conclusive proof: my weirdly chic hotel is WELL DODGY
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
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.
Well last year in london alone there were 120000 recorded non crime hate incidents by the police even if they only took an hour each and only one policeman involved then thats the full work for a year of about 58 policeman. Of course they don't all just involve 1 officer and take an hour
You're right there's no way they'd spend an entire hour on that, an hour would be an extremely long time, if my experience of the Police is anything like typical you'd be lucky if they spent 2 minutes working on each recorded incident before giving an incident number and closing the log.
They only spend 2 minutes a issue an incident number in my experience if you are the victim of a real crime. They don't want to bother with those except rape and murder and increasingly not even rape.
As to just a ledger, sorry you are being naive if you don't think they will have access to all the sales ledgers of every business you use for example the tesco's club card etc. I could name lots more recent operation ore is the most famous one that turned into a scandal is the only reason I mentioned that one.
Now I see you have also changed your tune from the purchase from the guy who turned out to be a pimp they will see it was a car to they will only have a ledger of who and how much. That ledger only shows paid gary the pimp 500£. You really think they wont be going over you with a fine tooth comb and it wont be reflected on an enhanced dbs when even an uncorroborated allegation of a non crime hate incident shows up?
For a libertarian you seem mighty trustful of the state and want to give it more power.
Sorry Pagan but you're full of bovine manure.
The state already knows you bought a car from Gary the pimp even when you paid cash. DVLA knows and tracks all this information anyway, whether cash or card is used.
If you think cash is some form of cloak of invisibility that hides your life from the state then you are woefully naïve and no wonder you're afraid of progress.
I am not afraid of progress, I do fear the state because the state does not have mine or yours or anyones best interests at heart. I am sure the jews in germany were like you when asked for religion on the census, whats the harm etc.....well that worked out well.
And yes the state will know if the car is registered, that it has changed ownership however they will not know how much was paid or who too necessarily. The car might for example not be in Gary's name. I may choose not to register it as I did not the last car I brought as I only bought it for parts. In which case the state knows nothing about the transaction or the shift of the car.
Insight into all financial transactions is far to powerful a tool for the state to have. You want to hand them a weapon to use against us all. What was it richelieu said "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him". I suspect even our bumblers could do that with a lifetime list of every financial transaction you ever made
@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.
The horseshoe notion depends on notions of left and right. It's simpler than that. It is simply that yes, the British Tories are birds of a feather with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This was recognised on the Soviet side too. Khrushchev said if he were British he'd vote Conservative. Even back in the early 1920s the Bolsheviks told the British CP to avoid stirring up the coalminers in Britain because miners' strikes would interfere with the need for a trade treaty.
Ask which foreign regimes the Tories in the last 50 years have had most admiration for. The dictatorship known as Singapore and the dictatorship in Chile under Pinochet have got to be on the list. Strong states. None of that libertarian or liberal namby-pamby stuff. Blood on the floggees' backs and in the football stadium.
The "freedom" crap doesn't mean freedom of action for those who want (and need) a redistribution of wealth and who want to achieve it collectively and openly, believing that it will help humanity as a whole, rather than achieving it only on a personal level by beginning by stealing bikes, selling drugs, or breaking into their neighbours' houses (showing "enterprise"), followed by working their way up to golf club membership and an account at Coutts. Against those in the great unwashed who combine to help society as a whole, Tories have always backed the strong state.
Tories are usually quite open about believing that the Tory party is the natural party of government in Britain. Gotta ask what that's about. (As if we don't know.)
Doubtless a similar argument could be made about an affinity with the Chinese Communist Party.
Another point that goes beyond the Tory party stricto sensu is the exclusivist mentality in the British ruling class, and the hatred for the "plebs". It's similar to is that man a member of the party (CPSU) or is he not a member of the party.
Conclusive proof: my weirdly chic hotel is WELL DODGY
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
Or, wealthy Ukrainians moved to that part of the country furthest from the front lines, and took their posh cars with them.
Conclusive proof: my weirdly chic hotel is WELL DODGY
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
Indeed some people love this war for that very reason. Good interesting comments today Leon from Ukraine.
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.
All well and good until you get that fateful email saying 'Evri: Great news! We've got your parcel!'...
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
He’s not an incel, he is a man who has sex
Hard not to feel sorry for you reading that, but I managed.
I am afraid to say I have at least seven and possibly eight of these qualities
Can any PBer beat that?
10. Would have been 11 but I quit the Communist Party.
Fair play. I’m guessing “the moustache” is number 9
Conclusive proof: my weirdly chic hotel is WELL DODGY
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
Indeed some people love this war for that very reason. Good interesting comments today Leon from Ukraine.
Do you have any thoughts about the covid vaccine?
I'm hoping for the one about BA pilots. It's been a while since we had that one and it was very funny.
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.
Will it still be acceptable in 5 years? In a decade? A group attack on an individual is unpleasant to watch
'The press watchdog has ruled it was not inaccurate to refer to Matt Hancock as a “failed health secretary and cheating husband who broke the lockdown rules he wrote”.
The Daily Mirror piece from November 2022 was among four articles the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) has said did not breach the accuracy clause of the editors’ code of practice, after it investigated a complaint made by Hancock. [...]
Ipso also dismissed Hancock’s complaints in respect of three other articles in the same paper. In one, a brief summary of his career, it was reported that he “presided over PPE contracts being handed out to acquaintances of ministers and officials, including his ex-pub landlord” during the Covid-19 pandemic.'
Conclusive proof: my weirdly chic hotel is WELL DODGY
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
Indeed some people love this war for that very reason. Good interesting comments today Leon from Ukraine.
I think Ukrainian men are just more virile than Russian men and are becoming more so as western aid increases. A side effect of the Pfizer Covid vaccine is that it makes you twice as strong and a better fighter. Couple that with the fact that the Russians are at heart effeminate there is no way that Putin can win.
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
He’s not an incel, he is a man who has sex
Hard not to feel sorry for you reading that, but I managed.
I am afraid to say I have at least seven and possibly eight of these qualities
Can any PBer beat that?
10. Would have been 11 but I quit the Communist Party.
Fair play. I’m guessing “the moustache” is number 9
Conclusive proof: my weirdly chic hotel is WELL DODGY
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
Indeed some people love this war for that very reason. Good interesting comments today Leon from Ukraine.
Do you have any thoughts about the covid vaccine?
I'm hoping for the one about BA pilots. It's been a while since we had that one and it was very funny.
I hope you all recognise the conyribution Leon makes to this site. Excellent info today on ukraines struggles. Admirable they want to fight on but that of course also depends on further western support.
The problem is, as Russia's war effort implodes they just get more and more obsessed with Ukraine.
We don't get any entertaining conspiracy theories any more. The best we can hope for is when they get a bit confused and say Putin's a CIA agent dedicated to undermining Russia.
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.
Will it still be acceptable in 5 years? In a decade? A group attack on an individual is unpleasant to watch
However, Nadine Dorries is in a pretty distinctive position. From the accounts I've seen, she has basically stopped doing anything that might count as "being MP for Mid Bedfordshire" but is also blocking anyone else from doing those things.
If she wants the quiet life of a private citizen, super. She gets that the moment she actually resigns. Until that, her position can and should be mocked.
Conclusive proof: my weirdly chic hotel is WELL DODGY
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
Indeed some people love this war for that very reason. Good interesting comments today Leon from Ukraine.
Do you have any thoughts about the covid vaccine?
I'm hoping for the one about BA pilots. It's been a while since we had that one and it was very funny.
I hope you all recognise the conyribution Leon makes to this site. Excellent info today on ukraines struggles. Admirable they want to fight on but that of course also depends on further western support.
Conclusive proof: my weirdly chic hotel is WELL DODGY
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
Indeed some people love this war for that very reason. Good interesting comments today Leon from Ukraine.
Do you have any thoughts about the covid vaccine?
I'm hoping for the one about BA pilots. It's been a while since we had that one and it was very funny.
I hope you all recognise the conyribution Leon makes to this site. Excellent info today on ukraines struggles. Admirable they want to fight on but that of course also depends on further western support.
I think there it should be settled by Zelensky and Putin single combat. I've witnessed bare knuckle boxing, in a barn in Somerset, about 3 years ago. And it was a sorry sight to see men goading them on in such a barbaric fashion, and I'm rather ashamed to say I was party to that goading. And 2 men fighting, as I saw in the barn that night, naked as the day they were born. Fighting the way God intended. Wrestling at points. I don't know if you've seen Women In Love? The marvelous scene by the fire?
Conclusive proof: my weirdly chic hotel is WELL DODGY
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
Indeed some people love this war for that very reason. Good interesting comments today Leon from Ukraine.
Do you have any thoughts about the covid vaccine?
I'm hoping for the one about BA pilots. It's been a while since we had that one and it was very funny.
I hope you all recognise the conyribution Leon makes to this site. Excellent info today on ukraines struggles. Admirable they want to fight on but that of course also depends on further western support.
The problem is, as Russia's war effort implodes they just get more and more obsessed with Ukraine.
We don't get any entertaining conspiracy theories any more. The best we can hope for is when they get a bit confused and say Putin's a CIA agent dedicated to undermining Russia.
There are rumours that he is also a gay nazi. I've heard it from reliable BA pilots. The one's who are still able to talk after their jab.
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.
The thought of, say, Hypermarket plc having my facial details, as I contemplate the facial ID system on my mobile ... what's their IT security like?
Well, the hardware is made in China, the software written in St Petersburg, and maintained by the lowest bidder in Mumbai.
So I’d say, professionally speaking, that you are fucked.
Conclusive proof: my weirdly chic hotel is WELL DODGY
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
Indeed some people love this war for that very reason. Good interesting comments today Leon from Ukraine.
Do you have any thoughts about the covid vaccine?
I'm hoping for the one about BA pilots. It's been a while since we had that one and it was very funny.
I hope you all recognise the conyribution Leon makes to this site. Excellent info today on ukraines struggles. Admirable they want to fight on but that of course also depends on further western support.
The problem is, as Russia's war effort implodes they just get more and more obsessed with Ukraine.
We don't get any entertaining conspiracy theories any more. The best we can hope for is when they get a bit confused and say Putin's a CIA agent dedicated to undermining Russia.
There are rumours that he is also a gay nazi. I've heard it from reliable BA pilots. The one's who are still able to talk after their jab.
Is that a rumour? I thought it was a fact. After all, he's an out-and-out Nazi and he's obviously gay.
The rumour is the one about the *age* of his sexual partners.
Conclusive proof: my weirdly chic hotel is WELL DODGY
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
Or, wealthy Ukrainians moved to that part of the country furthest from the front lines, and took their posh cars with them.
Yes. Also possible of course
Sadly I’m not going to find out because I’m not particularly inclined to approach these heavyset muscled wealthy men with the tattoos and the 19 year old blond model girlfriends while saying “hah, you’re a wartime profiteer? Aren’t you? ADMIT IT!”
Conclusive proof: my weirdly chic hotel is WELL DODGY
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
Indeed some people love this war for that very reason. Good interesting comments today Leon from Ukraine.
Do you have any thoughts about the covid vaccine?
I'm hoping for the one about BA pilots. It's been a while since we had that one and it was very funny.
I hope you all recognise the conyribution Leon makes to this site. Excellent info today on ukraines struggles. Admirable they want to fight on but that of course also depends on further western support.
The problem is, as Russia's war effort implodes they just get more and more obsessed with Ukraine.
We don't get any entertaining conspiracy theories any more. The best we can hope for is when they get a bit confused and say Putin's a CIA agent dedicated to undermining Russia.
You never made much sense but thats a ridiculous comment. If Ukraine was suceeding we would see it on western media every night. But radio silence.
We do, on account of being in the West.
I realise you may not get Western media where you are.
Those who run the entity formerly known as Twitter will have to be careful to distinguish 𝕏 from the usual X meaning "close this window", especially with it being in monochrome. The following is not good UX at all:
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.
The thought of, say, Hypermarket plc having my facial details, as I contemplate the facial ID system on my mobile ... what's their IT security like?
Well, the hardware is made in China, the software written in St Petersburg, and maintained by the lowest bidder in Mumbai.
So I’d say, professionally speaking, that you are fucked.
The mobile? Not from there. Actually, I don't use the FR system at all; and am even less likely to now.
Conclusive proof: my weirdly chic hotel is WELL DODGY
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
Indeed some people love this war for that very reason. Good interesting comments today Leon from Ukraine.
Do you have any thoughts about the covid vaccine?
I'm hoping for the one about BA pilots. It's been a while since we had that one and it was very funny.
I hope you all recognise the conyribution Leon makes to this site. Excellent info today on ukraines struggles. Admirable they want to fight on but that of course also depends on further western support.
The problem is, as Russia's war effort implodes they just get more and more obsessed with Ukraine.
We don't get any entertaining conspiracy theories any more. The best we can hope for is when they get a bit confused and say Putin's a CIA agent dedicated to undermining Russia.
You never made much sense but thats a ridiculous comment. If Ukraine was suceeding we would see it on western media every night. But radio silence.
1) If a plane crashes on the Ukraine/Republic of China border, which side do you bury the survivors?
2) which is more legendary - @TSEs modesty, or the quietness of his taste in shoes?
3) why is it that “I was there for The Nick Palmer moment” is more coveted than the Order of The Bath?
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
He’s not an incel, he is a man who has sex
Hard not to feel sorry for you reading that, but I managed.
I am afraid to say I have at least seven and possibly eight of these qualities
Can any PBer beat that?
You mean you don't have much else going for you? You are no doubt in the prime of your life too - don't forget that!
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
He’s not an incel, he is a man who has sex
Hard not to feel sorry for you reading that, but I managed.
I am afraid to say I have at least seven and possibly eight of these qualities
Can any PBer beat that?
Perhaps you reach seven or eight of these because they're somewhat bogus criteria you have created?
It's also a rather old-fashioned list in some areas; one where the man has control. For instance: "Good at looking after kids" might well be added. Or, (and this is one I don't have) able to do some good DIY.
Or most of all: "Doesn't need to buy sex because he's a decent human being."
The world has moved on from Cro-Magnon times. Perhaps you should.
(And yes, I'm expecting a range of poor insults, including Zeta man and some verbal diarrhoea where you try to make running into a bad thing.)
Conclusive proof: my weirdly chic hotel is WELL DODGY
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
Or, wealthy Ukrainians moved to that part of the country furthest from the front lines, and took their posh cars with them.
Yes. Also possible of course
Sadly I’m not going to find out because I’m not particularly inclined to approach these heavyset muscled wealthy men with the tattoos and the 19 year old blond model girlfriends while saying “hah, you’re a wartime profiteer? Aren’t you? ADMIT IT!”
Conclusive proof: my weirdly chic hotel is WELL DODGY
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
Or, wealthy Ukrainians moved to that part of the country furthest from the front lines, and took their posh cars with them.
Yes. Also possible of course
Sadly I’m not going to find out because I’m not particularly inclined to approach these heavyset muscled wealthy men with the tattoos and the 19 year old blond model girlfriends while saying “hah, you’re a wartime profiteer? Aren’t you? ADMIT IT!”
What language are they speaking?
Ukrainian, for sure
You wouldn’t last long speaking Russian in this town. It is full of soldiers on leave in fatigues. Some of them obviously injured
You’d get torn to pieces I suspect. Especially if you swanked around in a £300k super car
The future of the High Speed 2 (HS2) railway is in question after the official infrastructure watchdog warned the “successful delivery” of the multi-billion-pound project “appears to be unachievable”.
In a report issued last week, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) applied a “red” rating to plans for the construction of the first two phases of the troubled rail line, from London to Birmingham and then on to Crewe in Cheshire.
It comes as a leaked document separately showed that a plan to strip back its proposed Euston terminal would still result in a £1 billion overspend.
The IPA said its red rating means that “successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable. There are major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable. The project may need re-scoping and/or its overall viability reassessed.”
The future of the High Speed 2 (HS2) railway is in question after the official infrastructure watchdog warned the “successful delivery” of the multi-billion-pound project “appears to be unachievable”.
In a report issued last week, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) applied a “red” rating to plans for the construction of the first two phases of the troubled rail line, from London to Birmingham and then on to Crewe in Cheshire.
It comes as a leaked document separately showed that a plan to strip back its proposed Euston terminal would still result in a £1 billion overspend.
The IPA said its red rating means that “successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable. There are major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable. The project may need re-scoping and/or its overall viability reassessed.”
The future of the High Speed 2 (HS2) railway is in question after the official infrastructure watchdog warned the “successful delivery” of the multi-billion-pound project “appears to be unachievable”.
In a report issued last week, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) applied a “red” rating to plans for the construction of the first two phases of the troubled rail line, from London to Birmingham and then on to Crewe in Cheshire.
It comes as a leaked document separately showed that a plan to strip back its proposed Euston terminal would still result in a £1 billion overspend.
The IPA said its red rating means that “successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable. There are major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable. The project may need re-scoping and/or its overall viability reassessed.”
Conclusive proof: my weirdly chic hotel is WELL DODGY
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
Indeed some people love this war for that very reason. Good interesting comments today Leon from Ukraine.
Do you have any thoughts about the covid vaccine?
I'm hoping for the one about BA pilots. It's been a while since we had that one and it was very funny.
I hope you all recognise the conyribution Leon makes to this site. Excellent info today on ukraines struggles. Admirable they want to fight on but that of course also depends on further western support.
The problem is, as Russia's war effort implodes they just get more and more obsessed with Ukraine.
We don't get any entertaining conspiracy theories any more. The best we can hope for is when they get a bit confused and say Putin's a CIA agent dedicated to undermining Russia.
This is a new twist from Russias foreign office. Ukrainians fight so hard because they secretly love Putin and want him as president:
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
He’s not an incel, he is a man who has sex
Hard not to feel sorry for you reading that, but I managed.
I am afraid to say I have at least seven and possibly eight of these qualities
Can any PBer beat that?
You mean you don't have much else going for you? You are no doubt in the prime of your life too - don't forget that!
I was going to put “have a good sense of humour” on this list, but I actually removed it, because I remembered you are on the site, and I didn’t want to upset you even further and make you feel even more excluded
Conclusive proof: my weirdly chic hotel is WELL DODGY
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
Indeed some people love this war for that very reason. Good interesting comments today Leon from Ukraine.
Do you have any thoughts about the covid vaccine?
I'm hoping for the one about BA pilots. It's been a while since we had that one and it was very funny.
I hope you all recognise the conyribution Leon makes to this site. Excellent info today on ukraines struggles. Admirable they want to fight on but that of course also depends on further western support.
The problem is, as Russia's war effort implodes they just get more and more obsessed with Ukraine.
We don't get any entertaining conspiracy theories any more. The best we can hope for is when they get a bit confused and say Putin's a CIA agent dedicated to undermining Russia.
This is a new twist from Russias foreign office. Ukrainians fight so hard because they secretly love Putin and want him as president:
The future of the High Speed 2 (HS2) railway is in question after the official infrastructure watchdog warned the “successful delivery” of the multi-billion-pound project “appears to be unachievable”.
In a report issued last week, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) applied a “red” rating to plans for the construction of the first two phases of the troubled rail line, from London to Birmingham and then on to Crewe in Cheshire.
It comes as a leaked document separately showed that a plan to strip back its proposed Euston terminal would still result in a £1 billion overspend.
The IPA said its red rating means that “successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable. There are major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable. The project may need re-scoping and/or its overall viability reassessed.”
Conclusive proof: my weirdly chic hotel is WELL DODGY
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
Did you ever dip your toe in on Servant of the People? It definitely portrayed a post-Soviet country of many oligarchs pulling the strings and much graft and Westernisation is a work in progress (or on hold) and by no means guaranteed.
The sitcom could be an slightly strange mix of Allo Allo, Bless This House and The Thick of It at times, but worked overall. I enjoyed the full 25 hours, but the film covering the early part of the second series, a road trip where the idealistic pres & wily Sir Humphrey with kickbacks PM affront the corruption whilst the pilock Foreign Minister holdsc the fort with the IMF in Lviv (a scream!)
Conclusive proof: my weirdly chic hotel is WELL DODGY
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
Did you ever dip your toe in on Servant of the People? It definitely portrayed a post-Soviet country of many oligarchs pulling the strings and much graft and Westernisation is a work in progress (or on hold) and by no means guaranteed.
The sitcom could be an slightly strange mix of Allo Allo, Bless This House and The Thick of It at times, but worked overall.
EDITING
Presumably it would be super easy to identify the owner of that car. How many Ukrainians have bought a new dark blue Rolls Royce Cullinan in the last year or two? My guess is maybe 1
You could use a Yorkshire pudding as a sweet. After all it's essentially pancake batter, just roasted rather than fried.
Yes, but if it is to be a true "Yorkshire" pud it has to be taken round to the local gasworks and cooked in the retorts there.
What's weird with a Yorkshire Pud as a dessert?
It's perverse that it should be suggested not. Where have you lot been all your lives? (Not in Yorkshire?)
You are cooking a tray of Yorkshire puds made from a slightly different pancake mixture (or heating up the frozen ones from Waitrose - PB, or Aldi - Bart and me), so you put in three or four extra for dessert.
Best way - as with pancakes, either with blackberry or raspberry vinegar, or with maple syrup.
[Update. Oh I see. Someone read a cookery article by the Guardian's film correspondent.]
Conclusive proof: my weirdly chic hotel is WELL DODGY
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
Indeed some people love this war for that very reason. Good interesting comments today Leon from Ukraine.
Do you have any thoughts about the covid vaccine?
I'm hoping for the one about BA pilots. It's been a while since we had that one and it was very funny.
I hope you all recognise the conyribution Leon makes to this site. Excellent info today on ukraines struggles. Admirable they want to fight on but that of course also depends on further western support.
The problem is, as Russia's war effort implodes they just get more and more obsessed with Ukraine.
We don't get any entertaining conspiracy theories any more. The best we can hope for is when they get a bit confused and say Putin's a CIA agent dedicated to undermining Russia.
This is a new twist from Russias foreign office. Ukrainians fight so hard because they secretly love Putin and want him as president:
Conclusive proof: my weirdly chic hotel is WELL DODGY
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
Did you ever dip your toe in on Servant of the People? It definitely portrayed a post-Soviet country of many oligarchs pulling the strings and much graft and Westernisation is a work in progress (or on hold) and by no means guaranteed.
The sitcom could be an slightly strange mix of Allo Allo, Bless This House and The Thick of It at times, but worked overall.
EDITING
Presumably it would be super easy to identify the owner of that car. How many Ukrainians have bought a new Rolls Royce Cullinan in the last year or two? My guess is maybe 1
Somewhere, in the twilight, a Tu-95 jumps 10 meters as missile drops away. The crew are thankful that the motor ignites and doesn’t explode. It arches through the sky, towards Western Ukraine…
You could use a Yorkshire pudding as a sweet. After all it's essentially pancake batter, just roasted rather than fried.
Yes, when you think about it profiteroles are essentially Yorkshire pudding with cream and chocolate.
Could I suggest (discussion a couple of days ago) that the government bans the purchase of Yorkshire pudding ingredients in combination with cream and chocolate so that we can all get thin.
Conclusive proof: my weirdly chic hotel is WELL DODGY
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
Indeed some people love this war for that very reason. Good interesting comments today Leon from Ukraine.
Do you have any thoughts about the covid vaccine?
I'm hoping for the one about BA pilots. It's been a while since we had that one and it was very funny.
I hope you all recognise the conyribution Leon makes to this site. Excellent info today on ukraines struggles. Admirable they want to fight on but that of course also depends on further western support.
The problem is, as Russia's war effort implodes they just get more and more obsessed with Ukraine.
We don't get any entertaining conspiracy theories any more. The best we can hope for is when they get a bit confused and say Putin's a CIA agent dedicated to undermining Russia.
This is a new twist from Russias foreign office. Ukrainians fight so hard because they secretly love Putin and want him as president:
We've finally found an official of the Russian government who has hit the vodka harder than you have.
Maria Zakharova is going through an Oscar Wilde phase: "Each man kills the thing he loves".
I propose the Dmitry Medvedev Award be created.
For public statements so bug fuck insane that your first thought is the Dmitry Medvedev wouldn’t say that, even if they salted the crack he dissolves in the vodka with PCP.
Could I suggest (discussion a couple of days ago) that the government bans the purchase of Yorkshire pudding ingredients in combination with cream and chocolate so that we can all get thin.
What Casino Royale says when people tell him to stop eating beef.
You could use a Yorkshire pudding as a sweet. After all it's essentially pancake batter, just roasted rather than fried.
Yes, but if it is to be a true "Yorkshire" pud it has to be taken round to the local gasworks and cooked in the retorts there.
Three generations of us (aged 2 to indeterminate) will be having Yorkshire puddings tomorrow lunchtime in the usual way. I am sorry to say that not a trace will remain. Crumble (possibly blackcurrent) and custard to follow.
I was there for the 8/15. The Aussie batsmen were laughing. They had no idea where the ball was going. Not sure even Stuart knew but it was doing hoops. I saw a couple of majestic KP centuries but that was still the most incredible thing I have seen live at a cricket match.
The future of the High Speed 2 (HS2) railway is in question after the official infrastructure watchdog warned the “successful delivery” of the multi-billion-pound project “appears to be unachievable”.
In a report issued last week, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) applied a “red” rating to plans for the construction of the first two phases of the troubled rail line, from London to Birmingham and then on to Crewe in Cheshire.
It comes as a leaked document separately showed that a plan to strip back its proposed Euston terminal would still result in a £1 billion overspend.
The IPA said its red rating means that “successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable. There are major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable. The project may need re-scoping and/or its overall viability reassessed.”
The future of the High Speed 2 (HS2) railway is in question after the official infrastructure watchdog warned the “successful delivery” of the multi-billion-pound project “appears to be unachievable”.
In a report issued last week, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) applied a “red” rating to plans for the construction of the first two phases of the troubled rail line, from London to Birmingham and then on to Crewe in Cheshire.
It comes as a leaked document separately showed that a plan to strip back its proposed Euston terminal would still result in a £1 billion overspend.
The IPA said its red rating means that “successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable. There are major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable. The project may need re-scoping and/or its overall viability reassessed.”
The DfT strategy of deliberately sabotaging it through making it impossible pays off to the extent of Telegraph leaks at any rate.
But I do not see how the stretch from Old Oak Common to Crewe can be stopped at this point. Quite a lot of it has actually already been built.
And it'd be fucking stupid not to then build it into Euston too, unless they want to totally destroy its business case.
No-one is going to shuttle out into a random place in the middle of outer West London to catch a train.
I suspect - although you've had more dealings with them than I have - that the whole idea is to make it into a white elephant so the DfT doesn't have to give in to building more railway lines.
Unless the project managers really do have the intellects of stuffed rabbits after ingesting about half a pound of heroin.
The future of the High Speed 2 (HS2) railway is in question after the official infrastructure watchdog warned the “successful delivery” of the multi-billion-pound project “appears to be unachievable”.
In a report issued last week, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) applied a “red” rating to plans for the construction of the first two phases of the troubled rail line, from London to Birmingham and then on to Crewe in Cheshire.
It comes as a leaked document separately showed that a plan to strip back its proposed Euston terminal would still result in a £1 billion overspend.
The IPA said its red rating means that “successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable. There are major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable. The project may need re-scoping and/or its overall viability reassessed.”
The DfT strategy of deliberately sabotaging it through making it impossible pays off to the extent of Telegraph leaks at any rate.
But I do not see how the stretch from Old Oak Common to Crewe can be stopped at this point. Quite a lot of it has actually already been built.
And it'd be fucking stupid not to then build it into Euston too, unless they want to totally destroy its business case.
No-one is going to shuttle out into a random place in the middle of outer West London to catch a train.
From what I've heard (on the jungle drums) a lot of the work that was taking place for the bit between Birmingham and Crewe has been quietly shutdown...
The future of the High Speed 2 (HS2) railway is in question after the official infrastructure watchdog warned the “successful delivery” of the multi-billion-pound project “appears to be unachievable”.
In a report issued last week, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) applied a “red” rating to plans for the construction of the first two phases of the troubled rail line, from London to Birmingham and then on to Crewe in Cheshire.
It comes as a leaked document separately showed that a plan to strip back its proposed Euston terminal would still result in a £1 billion overspend.
The IPA said its red rating means that “successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable. There are major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable. The project may need re-scoping and/or its overall viability reassessed.”
No surprise - if you change a project like that the only outcome is going to be higher costs.
Give people a spec and then leave them to deliver it..
The trouble with HS2 was that they totally misspeced it (for ultra high speed) at the start so it's heavily overengineered. Then, they pork-barrelled it all the way to assuage various politicians. On top of it the way the contracts were scoped and let were possibly the stupid I'd ever seen - all the contractors are on cost-plus and have a licence to print money. Land costs ended up being prohibitive. And they barely thought about integration until several years in.
It's a total failure of sponsorship (HMG/DfT side) and the CEOs leading the delivery of HS2 Ltd. who've been both arrogant and stunningly inept.
The future of the High Speed 2 (HS2) railway is in question after the official infrastructure watchdog warned the “successful delivery” of the multi-billion-pound project “appears to be unachievable”.
In a report issued last week, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) applied a “red” rating to plans for the construction of the first two phases of the troubled rail line, from London to Birmingham and then on to Crewe in Cheshire.
It comes as a leaked document separately showed that a plan to strip back its proposed Euston terminal would still result in a £1 billion overspend.
The IPA said its red rating means that “successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable. There are major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable. The project may need re-scoping and/or its overall viability reassessed.”
The DfT strategy of deliberately sabotaging it through making it impossible pays off to the extent of Telegraph leaks at any rate.
But I do not see how the stretch from Old Oak Common to Crewe can be stopped at this point. Quite a lot of it has actually already been built.
And it'd be fucking stupid not to then build it into Euston too, unless they want to totally destroy its business case.
No-one is going to shuttle out into a random place in the middle of outer West London to catch a train.
From what I've heard (on the jungle drums) a lot of the work that was taking place for the bit between Birmingham and Crewe has been quietly shutdown...
No one wants to get from Neasden to Crewe in a hurry.
The future of the High Speed 2 (HS2) railway is in question after the official infrastructure watchdog warned the “successful delivery” of the multi-billion-pound project “appears to be unachievable”.
In a report issued last week, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) applied a “red” rating to plans for the construction of the first two phases of the troubled rail line, from London to Birmingham and then on to Crewe in Cheshire.
It comes as a leaked document separately showed that a plan to strip back its proposed Euston terminal would still result in a £1 billion overspend.
The IPA said its red rating means that “successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable. There are major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable. The project may need re-scoping and/or its overall viability reassessed.”
The DfT strategy of deliberately sabotaging it through making it impossible pays off to the extent of Telegraph leaks at any rate.
But I do not see how the stretch from Old Oak Common to Crewe can be stopped at this point. Quite a lot of it has actually already been built.
And it'd be fucking stupid not to then build it into Euston too, unless they want to totally destroy its business case.
No-one is going to shuttle out into a random place in the middle of outer West London to catch a train.
I suspect - although you've had more dealings with them than I have - that the whole idea is to make it into a white elephant so the DfT doesn't have to give in to building more railway lines.
Unless the project managers really do have the intellects of stuffed rabbits after ingesting about half a pound of heroin.
The DfT aren't able to exercise that sort of grand-scheming competence.
Comments
Yes all the transfer of money has on it is details of the transaction, not what the transaction was for, which removes most of what you claim the "snooping" is about. A ledger of transactions is not a be all and end all, and while I'd rather the state not have access to it, especially not without court orders, I'm not against it existing.
After losing the Penrith and Solway selection to Mark Jenkinson, Neil Hudson seems determined not to make the same mistake again as he faces Tory members in West Suffolk on Sunday...to make sure he doesn’t repeat his failure to be selected somebody has been cleaning up his Wikipedia page. Who could it be?....
Whoever it was who was so keen to clean up Hudson’s past did a poor job of clearing up their own digital tracks. The Soviet-style censor seems to have edited and removed various facts on Hudson’s page … and nothing else...
https://order-order.com/2023/07/29/carpet-bagging-tory-mp-neil-hudson-edits-his-wikipedia-ahead-of-selection-meeting/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/27/tick-bite-red-meat-allergy-ags-cdc
As to just a ledger, sorry you are being naive if you don't think they will have access to all the sales ledgers of every business you use for example the tesco's club card etc. I could name lots more recent operation ore is the most famous one that turned into a scandal is the only reason I mentioned that one.
Now I see you have also changed your tune from the purchase from the guy who turned out to be a pimp they will see it was a car to they will only have a ledger of who and how much. That ledger only shows paid gary the pimp 500£. You really think they wont be going over you with a fine tooth comb and it wont be reflected on an enhanced dbs when even an uncorroborated allegation of a non crime hate incident shows up?
For a libertarian you seem mighty trustful of the state and want to give it more power.
The state already knows you bought a car from Gary the pimp even when you paid cash. DVLA knows and tracks all this information anyway, whether cash or card is used.
If you think cash is some form of cloak of invisibility that hides your life from the state then you are woefully naïve and no wonder you're afraid of progress.
Jacob's Creek-Mogg
Can any PBer beat that?
I hasten to add that there is no suggestion that the initial topic of this thread has ever done so. Neither, as you say, is he an Incel under the definition I understand it to be.
Saturday night and it’s rammed with people spending money like this is St Tropez, and there is literally a Rolls Royce SUV parked outside, along with lots of other ostentatious cars
Some people are making money in this war. They are spending it here
And yes the state will know if the car is registered, that it has changed ownership however they will not know how much was paid or who too necessarily. The car might for example not be in Gary's name. I may choose not to register it as I did not the last car I brought as I only bought it for parts. In which case the state knows nothing about the transaction or the shift of the car.
Insight into all financial transactions is far to powerful a tool for the state to have. You want to hand them a weapon to use against us all. What was it richelieu said "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him". I suspect even our bumblers could do that with a lifetime list of every financial transaction you ever made
It's simpler than that. It is simply that yes, the British Tories are birds of a feather with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This was recognised on the Soviet side too. Khrushchev said if he were British he'd vote Conservative. Even back in the early 1920s the Bolsheviks told the British CP to avoid stirring up the coalminers in Britain because miners' strikes would interfere with the need for a trade treaty.
Ask which foreign regimes the Tories in the last 50 years have had most admiration for. The dictatorship known as Singapore and the dictatorship in Chile under Pinochet have got to be on the list. Strong states. None of that libertarian or liberal namby-pamby stuff. Blood on the floggees' backs and in the football stadium.
The "freedom" crap doesn't mean freedom of action for those who want (and need) a redistribution of wealth and who want to achieve it collectively and openly, believing that it will help humanity as a whole, rather than achieving it only on a personal level by beginning by stealing bikes, selling drugs, or breaking into their neighbours' houses (showing "enterprise"), followed by working their way up to golf club membership and an account at Coutts. Against those in the great unwashed who combine to help society as a whole, Tories have always backed the strong state.
Tories are usually quite open about believing that the Tory party is the natural party of government in Britain. Gotta ask what that's about. (As if we don't know.)
Doubtless a similar argument could be made about an affinity with the Chinese Communist Party.
Another point that goes beyond the Tory party stricto sensu is the exclusivist mentality in the British ruling class, and the hatred for the "plebs". It's similar to is that man a member of the party (CPSU) or is he not a member of the party.
"Is he sound" ~ "Is he наш?"
'The press watchdog has ruled it was not inaccurate to refer to Matt Hancock as a “failed health secretary and cheating husband who broke the lockdown rules he wrote”.
The Daily Mirror piece from November 2022 was among four articles the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) has said did not breach the accuracy clause of the editors’ code of practice, after it investigated a complaint made by Hancock. [...]
Ipso also dismissed Hancock’s complaints in respect of three other articles in the same paper. In one, a brief summary of his career, it was reported that he “presided over PPE contracts being handed out to acquaintances of ministers and officials, including his ex-pub landlord” during the Covid-19 pandemic.'
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-review/rolls-royce/cullinan
I didn’t even know Rolls Royce DID an SUV
We don't get any entertaining conspiracy theories any more. The best we can hope for is when they get a bit confused and say Putin's a CIA agent dedicated to undermining Russia.
If she wants the quiet life of a private citizen, super. She gets that the moment she actually resigns. Until that, her position can and should be mocked.
That's very generous of you, but it's a bit silly. When you're invading a country the last thing you want to do is give them cash.
Remember your Cicero - money is the muscle of war.
So I’d say, professionally speaking, that you are fucked.
The rumour is the one about the *age* of his sexual partners.
Sadly I’m not going to find out because I’m not particularly inclined to approach these heavyset muscled wealthy men with the tattoos and the 19 year old blond model girlfriends while saying “hah, you’re a wartime profiteer? Aren’t you? ADMIT IT!”
Peterhead than dickhead.
I realise you may not get Western media where you are.
2) which is more legendary - @TSEs modesty, or the quietness of his taste in shoes?
3) why is it that “I was there for The Nick Palmer moment” is more coveted than the Order of The Bath?
It's also a rather old-fashioned list in some areas; one where the man has control. For instance: "Good at looking after kids" might well be added. Or, (and this is one I don't have) able to do some good DIY.
Or most of all: "Doesn't need to buy sex because he's a decent human being."
The world has moved on from Cro-Magnon times. Perhaps you should.
(And yes, I'm expecting a range of poor insults, including Zeta man and some verbal diarrhoea where you try to make running into a bad thing.)
Interestingly there is always a comment on RCS’s earnings so either the same person or RCS is a legend amongst trolls for his wealth.
You wouldn’t last long speaking Russian in this town. It is full of soldiers on leave in fatigues. Some of them obviously injured
You’d get torn to pieces I suspect. Especially if you swanked around in a £300k super car
In a report issued last week, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) applied a “red” rating to plans for the construction of the first two phases of the troubled rail line, from London to Birmingham and then on to Crewe in Cheshire.
It comes as a leaked document separately showed that a plan to strip back its proposed Euston terminal would still result in a £1 billion overspend.
The IPA said its red rating means that “successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable. There are major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery, which at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable. The project may need re-scoping and/or its overall viability reassessed.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/29/hs2-future-in-doubt-plan-unachievable/
But I do not see how the stretch from Old Oak Common to Crewe can be stopped at this point. Quite a lot of it has actually already been built.
Give people a spec and then leave them to deliver it..
https://twitter.com/SythUK/status/1684928521259347968?t=1bEdZUXgV0DFPahoRBEInQ&s=19
We've finally found an official of the Russian government who has hit the vodka harder than you have.
Yorkshire puddings: three weird, delicious ways to eat Britain’s favourite regional delicacy
Using a yorkshire pudding as a lunch bowl
Using the yorkshire pudding as a burrito
Then worst of all.
Using the yorkshire pudding as a sweet dish
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/jul/26/yorkshire-puddings-three-weird-delicious-ways-to-eat-britains-favourite-regional-delicacy?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
Some years ago, a chap I worked with, sneaked a contract past a government dept.
There was no way to change the spec. - according to the contract. So he delivered a smallish project on budget and on time.
He especially enjoyed the horror, when the first attempt was made, hours after the signing to add some pointless bullshit to the spec.
The sitcom could be an slightly strange mix of Allo Allo, Bless This House and The Thick of It at times, but worked overall. I enjoyed the full 25 hours, but the film covering the early part of the second series, a road trip where the idealistic pres & wily Sir Humphrey with kickbacks PM affront the corruption whilst the pilock Foreign Minister holdsc the fort with the IMF in Lviv (a scream!)
I think Yorkies with a sweet filling works well too.
Would describe the driver better.
It's perverse that it should be suggested not. Where have you lot been all your lives? (Not in Yorkshire?)
You are cooking a tray of Yorkshire puds made from a slightly different pancake mixture (or heating up the frozen ones from Waitrose - PB, or Aldi - Bart and me), so you put in three or four extra for dessert.
Best way - as with pancakes, either with blackberry or raspberry vinegar, or with maple syrup.
[Update. Oh I see. Someone read a cookery article by the Guardian's film correspondent.]
meters as missile drops away. The crew are thankful that the motor ignites and doesn’t explode. It arches through the sky, towards Western Ukraine…
Could I suggest (discussion a couple of days ago) that the government bans the purchase of Yorkshire pudding ingredients in combination with cream and chocolate so that we can all get thin.
Coming soon to a primary school picnic near you ...
For public statements so bug fuck insane that your first thought is the Dmitry Medvedev wouldn’t say that, even if they salted the crack he dissolves in the vodka with PCP.
Only louder.
No-one is going to shuttle out into a random place in the middle of outer West London to catch a train.
Unless the project managers really do have the intellects of stuffed rabbits after ingesting about half a pound of heroin.
It's a total failure of sponsorship (HMG/DfT side) and the CEOs leading the delivery of HS2 Ltd. who've been both arrogant and stunningly inept.
Rabbit in the headlights is more like it.