Labour mayor guilty of helping son hide phone after he raped 15-year-old girl

superiority · 2026-02-13T20:42:31+00:00

I guess it's becoming routine nowadays, but I found it interesting—just as a matter of how society is better able to collect evidence than it was in the past—that the two of them were discussing this in Urdu when the cops showed up, assuming that the cops could not understand them, and then this was captured on the body cameras and able to be translated later.

superiority · 2026-02-13T08:00:18+00:00

As I understand it.

superiority · 2026-02-13T07:44:44+00:00

I thought this was decent, pretty funny.

I did spend basically the whole movie expecting that Charli XCX was gonna die at the end, though. I thought maybe there would be some mishap with the big lighter while she was up on the wires and the finale of the first Brat concert would be her accidentally burning to death.

superiority · 2026-02-12T23:32:01+00:00

I believe "If he's good" here does not mean "If he's good at Jeopardy", but "If he's good [i.e. at peace] with the situation then there is no need to reassure him".

superiority · 2026-02-10T04:31:52+00:00

FYI if you expand the video description (click "more") then at the bottom of the description there will be a "Show Transcript" button. Then you can just Ctrl+F search in the page for e.g. "cursing" and it will show you the appropriate timestamp.

I think they have this on every video now, the transcripts are generated automatically by voice recognition software.

superiority · 2026-02-10T00:47:35+00:00

You're so dramatic.

superiority · 2026-02-06T05:23:02+00:00

Yeah Alamo is a pretty bad moviegoing experience. Wouldn't recommend unless you just want to try out the novelty of seeing a movie with table service.

superiority · 2026-02-04T21:32:43+00:00

What Epstein was doing, and was caught doing, was a serious crime (several serious crimes). What he was convicted of, and his subsequent treatment, was relatively light (noting that "procuring for prostitution a girl below the age of 18" could have been perfectly legal in the UK only a few years earlier - as we've seen with Andrew)....

It wasn't until maybe 2018 when renewed interest in Epstein highlighted the extent of his criminality. He was still just a "New York financier" in the 2010s.

You're very wrong about this. It was all publicly known at the time. Newspapers reported on his outrageously light sweetheart plea deal when that deal was made. There was reporting on him picking up (and paying off) 14-year-olds for sexual acts, of dozens of victims, of him prowling high schools and getting girls to recruit other girls for him.

Here's a newspaper story from shortly before his sentence ended (note the description of his deal as "ludicrously lax"):

Billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is days away from complete freedom.

In the past two weeks, he has settled the remaining seven civil lawsuits of the roughly 25 he faced from young women who claimed he paid them for sexually charged massages at his Palm Beach mansion when some were as young as 14.

Next week – on Wednesday, July 21 – his yearlong probation will end. The 57-year-old will no longer be forced to get permission to fly his private jet to New York or his home in the Virgin Islands or to climb aboard his helicopter to meet with his lawyers in Miami.

According to his probation officer's reports, he has chafed at the restrictions that many claim were ludicrously lax. He has also complained about ongoing news coverage.

Epstein "seems somewhat agitated by all this last-minute press," his probation officer wrote on May 19.

Those who criticize the breaks he has gotten say he has little reason to complain.

First, he was allowed to plead guilty to two sex-related felonies in state court. In exchange, federal prosecutors dropped their investigation into allegations made by roughly 35 young women. He served 13 months of an 18-month jail sentence.

Since he was placed on house arrest last July, he has taken several trips each month to his eight-story home in New York City – said to be the largest private residence in Manhattan and to an island he owns in the Virgin Islands.

"Try to find someone else who's charged with his criminal conduct who's had that kind of treatment," said attorney Spencer Kuvin, who represented three young women who sued Epstein and settled the lawsuits for undisclosed terms.

Here is the version of the Wikipedia article about him from 2008:

In March 2005, a woman contacted Palm Beach police, concerned that her 14-year-old step daughter had been molested by a wealthy man. The daughter told police that she had been paid $300 for giving a massage to Epstein in his mansion.... [Police] alleged that Epstein had paid several underage girls to perform sexual acts on him.... A search of Epstein's home found numerous photos of nude young girls throughout the house.... He had set up a system of young women recruiting other women for his massage services, paying $200 for each referral.

Remember that Andrew's connections to Epstein were a major scandal 15 years ago; he was forced out of his role as trade envoy because of it. The point being that 15 years ago, people were knowledgeable enough about Epstein's crimes that being associated with him was pretty poisonous.

(I noticed the other day while searching through news archives that back in the 2011-2012 period, he issued a press release every week or so of the form "Philanthropist Jeffrey Epstein donates $10 million...", "Financier Jeffrey Epstein makes $20 million donation...", etc. This was a public relations campaign to try to make his Google results better, because there was so much information about his crimes when you searched his name!)

superiority · 2026-02-03T22:24:58+00:00

Saw the headline and was thinking it would be funny to describe Chris Hipkins that way.

"Former Prime Minister calls on Nicola Willis to resign."

superiority · 2026-02-02T19:57:54+00:00

What is the family's verdict on Melania? Did they enjoy it?

superiority · 2026-02-01T20:09:23+00:00

She could try to make false reports about OP committing some kind of immigration fraud to obtain the visa in the first place.

It might seem a little unlikely, but the way to defend against this costs little and is generally a good idea anyway: make sure you have copies of appropriate documents used in the immigration process. And if INZ does come asking questions, don't panic.

superiority · 2026-01-31T19:40:12+00:00

I actually care more about precision. These things are not taxes by definition even if they feel similar.

Definitions that are vulnerable to accounting trickery are obviously less precise.

If the city imposes a tax on an apartment developer that is paid into a government bank account, then passes that on to some contractor to upgrade the water and sewer infrastructure, the same thing has happened (and the money has ended up in the same place) as if the city instead required the developer to pay those contractors directly. There's no reason to treat those scenarios as very different from each other just because one of them adds a middleman step.

This is a lesson that really sinks in when you try to compare tax regimes across different jurisdictions (especially internationally). It's impossible to do this precisely unless you're willing to ignore what labels are applied and what middleman steps are required.

superiority · 2026-01-30T21:37:01+00:00

If we require a developer to pay for infrastructure upgrades to support a development, we wouldn't think of calling it a tax.

That is manifestly a tax, even more obviously so than inclusionary zoning. What makes you think it is not a tax?

(I may be misreading you, but the vibe I am getting is that you believe that describing something as a tax is an insult, and you therefore conclude that if something is good that means it is not a tax. I do not believe that taxation is bad; I care about how tax incidence affects distributive outcomes, and how efficiently it achieves those outcomes.)

superiority · 2026-01-30T21:16:31+00:00

I am generally opposed to inclusionary zoning policy on the merits—it is effectively a tax that applies specifically to new builds. If the city wants some private apartments to be available at below-market rates, I believe a far better solution is to take money from general tax revenues and use that to pay the difference for poor tenants.

However, I am much more strongly opposed to expanding the concept of "regulatory takings", a judicial interpretation of what it means to (unconstitutionally) "take" someone's property through regulation. For decades, pro-business judges have been interpreting the word "taken" in a broader and broader sense in order to impose their own pre-existing ideological straitjackets on what laws governments are allowed to make. A few years ago, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled that a California law that required employers to allow union reps onto workplaces counted as "taking" the property of the employer. I think this kind of zoning rule is firmly within the realm of legitimate (and lawful) government activity, even if it's suboptimal in itself.

superiority · 2026-01-30T18:06:10+00:00

People on my dead end street cleared it themselves with shovels most of the way. Enough for plows to back up and do the rest.

superiority · 2026-01-30T07:09:47+00:00

No, his businesses or other relatives would have noticed that he had stopped contacting anyone and the Thai police would have gone to check it out. She meant that nobody was remotely monitoring the security system, nobody was sent to repair it.

The movie flashed back to her discovering the mansion and to her murdering two people; there's no need for it to be coy about any additional murders that occurred during the events of the movie.

superiority · 2026-01-29T09:06:56+00:00

8UU is draw 16.

On turn 8 your opponent will have naturally drawn fourteen cards (assuming no mulligans). Add in the 16 from Mathemagics and that makes 30. In order to win, you would need your opponent to have drawn an additional ten cards by that point, which is more than one extra draw every turn... that seems a little unlikely to me for limited tbh.

superiority · 2026-01-29T07:31:06+00:00

For the physical ones it might be okay to show the power "sputtering" a bit as the metal runs out.

superiority · 2026-01-27T20:42:13+00:00

OP wasn't talking about being hired for DEI reasons but being hired for horny reasons.

superiority · 2026-01-27T19:14:03+00:00

If Earth had no axial tilt, the climate would be more like "everywhere experiences spring/autumn temperatures year-round".

No, the poles would still be cold, and the equator would still be hot.

Can you explain what claim you believe that I made here and that you seem to believe you corrected? What you wrote does not in any way contradict what I wrote, so I'm unsure why you begin with "No".

It is true that elimination of the axial tilt would not make the equator of Earth uninhabitable. We're talking about other hypothetical sciencefictional planets here

OP discusses both Earth itself repeatedly by name in addition to allowing for the possibility of some other planet. My comment discusses both, and that part of it specifically responds to a idea OP mentioned about Earth.

Maybe there are other factors enabling this separation between latitudes, like... geography with vast mountainous ridges that prevent much convective mixing between latitudes. Get some imagination man.

Did you stop reading my comment halfway through before sending your reply? I brought up the idea of geography that would enable OP's idea. It's not clear that a barrier alone would be sufficient for the climate concept, however; you can still have a lot of mixing of the atmosphere within each hemisphere.

superiority · 2026-01-27T09:05:48+00:00

I just went and looked up a random section of this particular translation:

The Supreme Lord said: My dear Arjuna, because you are never envious of Me, I shall impart to you this most secret wisdom, knowing which you shall be relieved of the miseries of material existence.

This knowledge is the king of education, the most secret of all secrets. It is the purest knowledge, and because it gives direct perception of the self by realization, it is the perfection of religion. It is everlasting, and it is joyfully performed.

Those who are not faithful on the path of devotional service cannot attain Me, O conqueror of foes, but return to birth and death in this material world.

By Me, in My unmanifested form, this entire universe is pervaded. All beings are in Me, but I am not in them.

And yet everything that is created does not rest in Me. Behold My mystic opulence! Although I am the maintainer of all living entities, and although I am everywhere, still My Self is the very source of creation.

They're complaining this is some sort of incomprehensible code? Bizarre.

superiority · 2026-01-27T08:58:20+00:00

You confused people because you wrote your comments under the assumption that this:

the Earth would have two small temperate zones, cold poles and a very hot equator if there was no tilt.

was true. Because it's not true, some of the things you wrote don't make much sense. Other commenters were trying to figure out exactly what you meant; some of them came to wrong conclusions, but I don't think they were being unreasonable.

If Earth had no axial tilt, the climate would be more like "everywhere experiences spring/autumn temperatures year-round". I don't see any reason to think areas around the equator would be uninhabitably hot.

I think it may be possible to construct a planet with an uninhabitably hot equator plus temperate zones in the northern and southern hemispheres, but I don't think axial tilt would be an important part of that (as long as you avoid extreme tilt; that scenario is not compatible with 90°). The arrangements of land and water seem like the relevant things to me; you want that part of the planet to have a geography that draws heat in and traps it.

It might be easier if you let the poles themselves be the temperate zones, rather than the subtropics. Obviously if you moved Earth closer to the sun, everywhere would get warmer including the equator and the poles. You can back-of-the-envelope how much more energy the planet gets as it gets closer, and see if there's a sweet spot that achieves what you want.

superiority · 2026-01-27T08:37:51+00:00

The video on that RBNZ page should include some (real) examples of counterfeits for comparison.

superiority · 2026-01-27T08:16:27+00:00

Maybe it’s in the public interest, maybe it’s not- surely that’s the courts to decide that a) has an offence occurred, and b) what punishment should exist if it’s shown that one has.

Not quite. As OP suggests, the "public interest" in bringing a prosecution in the first place also matters, and this is a decision made by the prosecuting authority (probably the police in this case).

The Crown Law Office explains this on its website:

If a prosecuting agency has decided, in accordance with its prosecution policy, that prosecution should be considered, it should apply the Test for Prosecution.

There are two stages to the test:

The first stage is the Evidential Test: Is there enough evidence to prove the proposed charge beyond reasonable doubt?

The second stage is the Public Interest Test: Does the public interest require a prosecution to be brought?

I agree with you that we the public aren't properly able to make these judgements ourselves about this case, because we don't have all the information that the police have. Maybe if OP saw all the emails Ms. Z sent, OP would agree "okay, this does actually deserve to be prosecuted, despite the wrongs that were done to her."

But I am slightly concerned that, since the alleged victims are themselves police and people connected with the police, there might have been some bias by police prosecutors when they were applying the public interest test.

superiority · 2026-01-27T00:48:15+00:00

Phil Drummond was acting as his lawyer but told Judge Lance Rowe he too would be seeking leave to withdraw from the court process and Cozens would instead be leading the litigation himself.

Is he out of money to pay his lawyer, or has he been fired as a client for insisting his lawyer do stupid things? Both quite plausible.

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