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Dog Bites Man

Men & Women

According to !SCIENCE!, all these “new” apps are making it easier for hookers:

Apps like Facebook and Tinder are fuelling the “soaring industry” of online prostitution and sexual exploitation, according to a worldwide study published by a French anti-prostitution group on Tuesday.
Prostitution has moved “from the street to the Internet”, where pimps recruit young girls via Snapchat and Instagram before prostituting them in apartments rented on Airbnb, said anti-prostitution group Fondation Scelles.

No shit.  Here’s the DUH! statement:  every time technology improves, one of the first beneficiaries is nookie.  Always.  A couple of examples should suffice:

I have no way of proving this, but I bet that Photographer #3, back in the 19th century, took some nudies of his girlfriend.

And we all know how long it took before the old Polaroid cameras were used to take nudie pics, right?  (Rough guess, about 15 seconds after the things went on sale.)

Moving from static- to motion pictures:

…and I’m not even going to mention home movies.

Next, when the Intarwebz came along and made in-home porn just a click away, and cell phone technology made it portable, I think my point has been made.

So of course  modern apps have made things easier for the porn industry;  and if it’s easier for porn, it’s easier still for prostitution — and we sure as hell didn’t need any studies to tell us that.

Speaking of technology, as sexbots improve and (inevitably) go down in price (so to speak), even prostitution looks like becoming passé.  But that’s a topic for another time.

No Ice Floes In The NHS

Bad News, Gummint, Health

…which is probably a Good Thing, or else the oh-so compassionate NHS (Australia version) would have pushed this granny off on one long ago.  Simple details are as follows:

Ms Manley was informed on May 12 that her application for an aged parent visa was rejected because she does not fit the criteria due to her poor health.
The health criteria state that an applicant must be free from disease and must be free of any condition which would cost the health sector more than $40,000 (£22,000) in total.
Ms Manley’s full-time care would cost about $145,000 (£80,000) for the next three years.

In case anyone’s interested, this is known as “rationed care”, something the supporters of nationalized health care always deny will happen, but which always does.

Read the whole story for the full rage to take effect.

BFD

Food & Drink, Gummint

This from TexGov Greg Abbott:

Well excuse me if I don’t turn a few cartwheels and stuff.  Fifty years ago, you could see liquor stores’ delivery scooters putting around all over every city and town in South Africa, painted in the various stores’ livery.

And, just so everyone understands my scorn, you could order beer and wine for home delivery.  Also gin, vodka, brandy, Scotch and rum.  Fifty years ago.  In South Africa.

I once noted that as one moves south from the northern states in the U.S., the gun laws become less stupid, and the liquor laws become more so.  In Chicago, I could buy single-malt Scotch at the supermarket, but I couldn’t buy a gun anywhere.  Down here, even oh-so-cosmopolitan Plano became a “liquor” retail area (as opposed to just beer & wine) only about five years ago, but I have about fifteen gun stores within a couple miles of my house.

There are a lot of things to like about the South, but their liquor laws are not among them.

So:  wake me up when I can order my favorite Scotch and gin from Total Wines or Spec’s, and have them delivered to my front door.

Actually, check that.  Wake me up when I can buy my booze from Amazon.  Like you can in Britain (where you can’t buy anything made by Colt).

And one last thing:  I don’t enjoy the paternalistic tone of government “allowing” me to do anything, and being advised to do something “responsibly“.  Fuck you, fuck your responsibility, and thanks for nothing, you paternalistic asshole.

Now send the Texas State Guard down to police the Rio Grande, and stop pissing around with chickenshit like this.

Road Destruction Season

Drive Time, Travels

If anyone is planning a road trip in Britishland over the next 3-4 years, be warned that the Brits have released their planned scheme of major roads to be affected by construction, improvements, closures etc.  Here’s the map:

It’s been a while since I looked at a U.K. roadmap… but isn’t that map essentially ALL the major roads in Britishland?

Looks like the M6 is going to be cataclysmic;  however, as said highway leads to both Liverpool and  Glasgow, I can’t see why this would be a problem for all right-thinking drivers.

No man should.

Getting Attacked

Two-Minute Hate

I see this:

A man suffering from acute Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) went on an anti-Trump rampage at the sight of Trump supporters at a rally in Los Angeles on Sunday. The unidentified man, who was later arrested, was so enraged at the sight of the MAGA hat-clad rallygoers that he parked his car in the middle of the street and charged them. The man’s shocked family watched from the car as he assaulted and spat on the Trump supporters.

…and I can’t help but think that if anyone spat in my face in the street, his next spit would contain a lot  of blood.

And yes, that also applies to this action:

Trump supporter is viciously attacked and doused in milkshake by America-hating activists yelling ‘Nazi scum’ outside Parliament minutes after Corbyn’s speech.

I note that in the above incident, the police just stood and watched.  I bet that if I’d floored a couple of those milkshake tossers [sic], the fuzz would be there like a flash to arrest me, however.

I don’t care.  It’s time we put an end to this shit.  The Left is always preaching violence, and some day soon they’re going to find out exactly  what it’s like.

Not Known At This Address

Technology

A little while ago, Reader Sam D. had this thought about Amazon’s Alexa:

“Why would anyone WANT his own personal Stasi agent in his home, AND be paying for it?”

Indeed.  Somebody remind me again why I’m not wired into the Internet Of Things:

If you’re a Google user, you probably noticed some trouble last night when trying to access Google-owned services. Last night, Google reported several issues with its Cloud Platform, which made several Google sites slow or inoperable. Because of this, many of Google’s sites and services–including Gmail, G Suite, and YouTube–were slow or completely down for users in the U.S. and Europe.
However, the Google Cloud outage also affected third-party apps and services that use Google Cloud space for hosting. Affected third-party apps and services include Discord, Snapchat, and even Apple’s iCloud services.
But an especially annoying side effect of Google Cloud’s downtime was that Nest-branded smart home products for some users just failed to work. According to reports from Twitter, many people were unable to use their Nest thermostats, Nest smart locks, and Nest cameras during the downtime. This essentially meant that because of a cloud storage outage, people were prevented from getting inside their homes, using their AC, and monitoring their babies.

Don’t think you can escape this bullshit by jumping in your car and getting out of town, either:

Governments are collecting lots of data on the people using roads, trains and buses, and without proper oversight, that information could easily be misused.

(I’ve often wondered, by the way, if my movements are being studied by way of my phone location software.  As I drive for Uber, I bet it’s interesting reading:  “He goes to the airport three or four times a day and never seems to drive back… WTF?”)  And speaking of which:

I wonder why they bother to warn us anymore.

And then there’s this:

Sleep Number, one company that makes beds that can track heart rate, respiration and movement, said it collects more than 8 billion biometric data points every night, gathered each second and sent via an app through the internet to the company’s servers.
“This gives us the intelligence to be able to continue to feed our algorithms,” CEO Shelly Ibach told attendees at a Fortune Brainstorm Health conference in San Diego last month.
Analyzing all that personal data, Ibach continued, not only helps consumers learn more about their health, but also aids the company’s efforts to make a better product.
Still, consumer privacy advocates are increasingly raising concerns about the fate of personal health information — which is potentially valuable to companies that collect and sell it — gathered through a growing number of internet-connected devices.

What I’d like to do is hack into this system, and publish a Wanking Hard Incidence Ranking Report (WHIRR!) for every member of Congress.

Maybe then someone  would take this loss of privacy thing seriously.