Category: Bad News

Horrible, unpleasant stuff

News Roundup

Bad News, Good Stuff

…wherein I’m too lazy to make a full post about stuff:

1)  Valerie is saved! — Thank goodness.  Now I can continue to add inches to my waistline by eating their pastries every time I go to Britishland.

2) Rio cops execute violent choirboys on the spot — Now quit that cheering and applause.  And no, I have no idea when ICE are going to implement the same policy when faced with armed cross-border drug smugglers.

3) “If [an active shooter] walks onto this campus, they’re going to be shot and killed.” — It’ll be interesting to see if school shootings ever occur in these schools from now on.  And if any of my south Floriduh Readers are looking for a part-time gig…

4) Sexbots could be hazardous for your health — Oh puh-leeze.  I know more than a few women (including some ex-girlfriends) who would pose a far greater threat than a collection of latex and transistors.  Think:  Terminator, with tits.  (Yes, Cheryl, I’m thinking of you.)

5) Amazon tells NYC to fuck off — These are the perils of trying to do business in a Socialist environment.  Frankly, I think Amazon should breathe a sigh of relief, because they just dodged a BIG bullet.

Spamming Response

Bad News, Technology

I am totally unsurprised by this situation:

Robocallers and spam callers are getting quite good at masking their identify. They do this partly by “spoofing” local numbers, making it seem like a legitimate local number is calling to increase the likelihood that you’ll answer. That’s the reason, according to Hiya, that around 9 percent of spam calls a month actually get answered by phone owners even though they don’t recognize the number calling.
Nine percent might not sound like much, until you consider the fact that 26.3 billion robocalls were made to American phones in 2018.

Result:

The nearly 50 percent of phone calls that go unanswered jumps way up to 76 percent of calls left unanswered — a little more than three out of every four — when the call comes from an unidentified or unfamiliar number.

In my case, that would be 100 percent.  I never  answer a call if the caller is unidentified (i.e. isn’t among my saved contacts).  As a result, I always tell people to email their phone numbers to me first so I can add them to my contact list.  Otherwise, their calls will be met with indifference.

Sucks, but that’s what happens when people use technology indiscriminately and unprompted.

Varmints

Bad News, Wildlife and Hunting

This report comes out of Florida, but we face the same issue:

Coyotes have learned to thrive in the same urban development that has caused other predator populations to decline. They can cross bridges, swim canals, and navigate sidewalks while hunting for food.
A coyote’s dream home, though, would be in a suburb like Bloomingdale, where densely packed developments are surrounded by farms and pastureland — a small taste of the open range prairies they used to roam.

In Plano, there’s an abundance of wild rabbits about the place, so where there’s food, there will be predators.

My apartment building lies less than a hundred yards from a heavily-wooded creek, and I must have seen coyotes crossing the road bridge about half a dozen times since I moved here.

This is somewhat problematic because I go for walks along a trail which follows said creek bed for over a mile.  Needless to say, I never walk unarmed — I never leave home unarmed, period — and even though coyotes prefer to be out and about at night time or at least dusk / dawn (when I don’t walk), I like the feel of the S&W Airweight in my pocket anyway.

I have a .38 Special shot shell lined up for trigger-pull #1, and hollowpoints for the other four.

  

(The shot shell is in case I get close to a snake — we have rattlesnakes, cottonmouths and  water moccasins in the creek area, and I hate the bloody things.)

Of course, it’s illegal to discharge a firearm in city limits, but I’d rather argue with a judge than be bitten by a rabid coyote or fucking snake.  Don’t even mention the chances of encountering some choirboy who might imagine that this fat old man is a ripe target for a little involuntary financial redistribution.

Tragedy

Bad News, Business, Food & Drink

As Longtime Readers may know, one of my favorite stops when I’m in Britishland is Patisserie Valerie, which makes some of the best pastries I’ve ever tasted (along with outstanding croissants at breakfast time).  Apparently, quality merchandise hasn’t been enough:

Patisserie Holdings plc announces today that, as a direct result of the significant fraud referred to in previous announcements, it has been unable to renew its bank facilities, and therefore regrettably the business does not have sufficient funding to meet its liabilities as they fall due.
As a consequence, the directors have appointed partners at KPMG as administrators to the company and its various subsidiaries.
The Chairman Luke Johnson has personally extended an unsecured, interest-free loan to help ensure that the January wages are paid to all staff working in the ongoing business.
This Loan will also assist the administrators in trading as many profitable stores as possible while a sale process is undertaken.

Needless to say, stores will be closed and people will lose their jobs.

This after one of its senior executives siphoned money out of the place to support his jet-set lifestyle.  And if I could get hold of the asshole, his legal and financial problems would be the least of his problems.

Yes, I take my pastries that  seriously.

Opting Out

Bad News, Technology

According to this report, our household appliances are about to become snitches on just about every aspect of our lives:

One day, finding an oven that just cooks food may be as tough as buying a TV that merely lets you click between channels.
Internet-connected “smarts” are creeping into cars, refrigerators, thermostats, toys and just about everything else in your home. CES 2019, the gadget show opening Tuesday in Las Vegas, will showcase many of these products, including an oven that coordinates your recipes and a toilet that flushes with a voice command.
With every additional smart device in your home, companies are able to gather more details about your daily life. Some of that can be used to help advertisers target you — more precisely than they could with just the smartphone you carry.

And the news just gets better and better:

Despite the fact that there’s plenty of information available showing how these devices collect data about every aspect of your life and the manufacturers both use and sell that data on the open market, the majority of people seem to either not care or are willing to accept this “new reality” as part of living in the modern world.

Once again [sigh], it appears that I’m in a minority.

No doubt, there will appear at your local drugstores condoms which measure the number of thrusts, such data sent back to the manufacturers of K-Y “Duration” gel, said antidote for premature ejaculation to arrive at your bedside by special delivery within two strokes of initial insertion.  And that’s a benevolent  outcome for such intrusiveness.

Never mind that.  Here’s a situation already in being:

T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers’ location data, and that data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and others not authorized to possess it, letting them track most phones in the country.

I don’t often agree with church leaders about, well, anything much.  But I’m in absolute agreement with this man.

Allow me to offer a suggestion for a brand-new industry.  When a new generation of “smart” phones arrived on the market and appeared to be “locked” to a specific carrier, within days we saw phones being unlocked by street vendors, sometimes right outside  the stores selling the damn things.

I’m calling on all privacy-minded geeks of the world to unite, and to design apps or hacks or whatever to bypass the Big Brother mechanisms of these new infernal fink machines so that people (like me) who aren’t interested in letting Global MegaCorp Inc. snoop into the most intimate areas of our lives may avail themselves of their inventions.

I will be at the head of the fucking line to buy them.  I promise.

Criminal Beliefs

Bad News, Freaks & Loonies

Oh, here’s a good one:

A couple who fed their daughter an extreme vegan diet have admitted causing her serious injury.
The mother and father, aged 32 and 34 respectively, who cannot be named for legal reasons fed the girl oats and rice milk.
The girl’s diet was so restricted that she developed rickets, a degenerative bone disease caused by malnourishment.
This diet resulted in severe deficiencies in nutrients across the board for the infant, including a lack of calcium, phosphate, vitamin B12, vitamin A, iron and zinc.
Her levels of vitamin D — which can cause bone disease if found to be too low — were ‘undetectable’.
The infant had fractures scattered throughout her tiny body and her bones were so brittle doctors believed they could have been broken by ‘normal handling’.
The treatment of the girl was only brought to the attention of doctors in March this year, when doctors attended to the infant after she suffered a seizure.
One doctor described her as ‘floppy’ and noted how the diminutive one-and-a-half year old didn’t crawl or talk during the month in care.

And here’s the best part:

The daughter and her two siblings have since been taken into foster care.

Under the reign of World-Emperor Kim, the parents would also receive daily floggings and an all-meat diet during their ten-year prison sentence.  And if these two fanatics were to starve themselves to death rather than eat that eeeevil meat, so much the better.

Fucking bullshit.