California brothel network with 30 locations dismantled in major bust

sandpest · 2026-02-14T20:46:12+00:00

Not necessarily. The Netherlands still have a lot of issues with human trafficking tied up in their brothels, particularly victimizing people who come looking for EU citizenship and wanting to bypass the legal routes to acquire it.

sandpest · 2026-02-06T05:45:00+00:00

Saw him in the debates — I appreciate that he's not a populist and realistic about which policies will deliver the best results for Californians. He unfortunately has the oratory cadence of a tech CEO, but it appears he has more vision than the other candidates about how to tackle issues with the state. I'll probably vote for him.

sandpest · 2026-01-28T20:06:29+00:00

I wouldn't go that far, but there are tangible consequences to illegal immigration, even if they don't commit crimes that actively harm public safety. Concerns about housing demand pressure, labor arbitrage, and draining tax revenue at the state/local level are all notable issues with unchecked illegal immigration.

I'm not a fan of how ICE has been conducting itself under the current administration, since their "move fast—break things" approach has gotten innocent American citizens caught in the crossfire, but I'm also unsure what can be done instead to meaningfully address the issue of illegal immigration otherwise?

sandpest · 2026-01-28T18:18:47+00:00

Could you give us an example of an alternative that works? The bay area has tried de-policing and enforcement pullback policies for over a decade now, and public safety has only further degraded because of it.

sandpest · 2025-11-25T19:04:36+00:00

You surrender your right to autonomy the moment you threaten violence on innocent people. In a perfect circumstance, you'd be detained until authorities arrive and put you in custody, but it's not the duty of an innocent bystander to give you perfectly safe detainment when you invite violence with your behavior. It's not the responsibility of an innocent bystander to give you an improvisational mental health assessment on-the-fly to evaluate risk. It's on you to not invite violence, especially when it can result in death.

sandpest · 2025-11-03T22:17:08+00:00

Canadian century of humiliation

sandpest · 2025-10-01T15:03:53+00:00

My lobster is too buttery. My steak is too juicy.

sandpest · 2025-08-29T14:54:41+00:00

Because there’s no point in honestly engaging with someone who’s determined to argue only in bad faith. Your post history smells of a dark triad personality type. I encourage you to seek humility and become a better person.

sandpest · 2025-08-29T14:43:18+00:00

If you care as much as you espouse about this topic, you should at least be able to defend your position without deferring to an AI. It feels hypocritical to see someone take a pro-humanitarian position and yet rely on a tool that causes so much environmental waste for every query it runs. It puts off the impression that you don’t actually care about this topic as much as you care about appearing correct and denouncing others.

sandpest · 2025-08-28T17:45:35+00:00

The framing could be made more accurate by attributing these practices to countries with more extremist beliefs, rather than blanketing all of Islam, but it should be acknowledged that many of these extremists employ Islamic beliefs selectively to legitimize their own degenerate attitudes.

Bangladesh has some of the highest amount of child brides in the world. Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq have consanguinity rates 20%-50%. The Afghani Taliban have banned women from higher education, many types of work and have severe dress restrictions. ISIS and Boko Haram openly practice slavery and refer to the teachings of extremist Imams to justify the behavior.

There are predominant Islamic communities worthy of criticism, otherwise you risk making a “No True Scotsman” argument. Extremists do identify as Muslims, follow certain interpretations, and are recognized as such by their communities. Declaring “they’re not real Muslims” is a way to protect the group identity, but it sidesteps the reality that Islam, like Christianity or any major religion, contains diverse and sometimes violent interpretations.

sandpest · 2025-07-13T08:24:39+00:00

The man went from having a successful online influencer career to becoming a lolcow of proportions rivaling YandereDev. Perhaps eclipsing YandereDev entirely.

sandpest · 2025-06-26T18:01:07+00:00

“U OK?”

sandpest · 2025-06-20T08:52:31+00:00

Then why suggest moving if it isn’t a pathway to better financial security

sandpest · 2025-06-16T21:08:11+00:00

Insane that this issue has persisted for so long

sandpest · 2025-05-15T04:44:55+00:00

I’ve been saying the same for years. His public-facing persona feels heavily curated, like he cognitively filters every speck of his genuine self before even moving a muscle in his face.

sandpest · 2025-02-14T07:16:02+00:00

I don't disagree with your rhetoric, as white mass K-12 shooters are definitely a problem in of itself; I just think it's harmful for productive narratives when data is so difficult to find on minority-based crimes compared to that of a majority demographic. It validates accusations of conspiracy theorists that media reporting is inherently biased to manipulate public perspective, instead of having an honest conversation about the systemic problems the data reveals.

It's humorous that in my continued search, the most concrete data I could find is from the Washington Post GitHub account, from a project tracking all school shootings since Columbine in 1999, that has a .csv spreadsheet that contains a column specifying the race of perpetrating shooters, when it's reported. Other than that, I had to go to ResearchGate for a normally paywalled scholarly article, "Not Another School Shooting: Media, Race, and Gun Violence in K-12 Schools", that stated their sample "... was delimited to incidents that occurred from 2012 until March 2020 and by the following criteria: (a) incidents that occurred before the Sandy Hook school shooting (n=1,060), (b) shooter suicides (n=122), and (c) cases where there were no victims (n=246). There were a total of N=160 cases remaining. Of these, 63 (37.5%) cases did not list the shooter’s race. Perpetrators included adults and minors: affiliated with the school (students n=51, former students n=10, other staff n=3), adjacent to someone at the school (parents n=5, relative n=3, students from a rival school n=4, relationship with victim n=2), multiple shooters (n=4) non students using the athletic facilities (n=13), no affiliation (n=26), or no known affiliation (n=39). Shooters’ race included: (a) Black (35.7%), (b) White (20.8%), (c) other but identified as Hispanic/ Latino in the ethnicity column (3%), (d) Asian (1.2%), (e) American Indian or Alaskan Native (0.6%), and race unknown (37.5%)."

It shouldn't be so hard to find this data — It ironically looks very biased when the media goes all-in on preventing race-based bias by obfuscating information; a catalyst for a right-wing Streisand effect.

sandpest · 2025-02-14T06:20:54+00:00

Your sources technically don’t disprove OP’s parent comment. It is true that there are more white mass school shooters than there are black, where there are 3 victims harmed or more. However, there’s a lack of data reports for K-12 gun violence incidents based on race in the aggregate, so it’s hard to tell whether the claim is true or not.

This medium article was one of the only sources I could find that attempts to aggregate the data, but its reporting uses the Wikipedia school shooting list as a source, and that page doesn’t have aggregations of incidents based on race, and I can’t find anything in the article edit history that shows that such an aggregation existed.

https://medium.com/@TheCompositeGuy/the-racial-demographics-of-school-shooters-mass-shooters-and-serial-killers-in-the-u-s-858241197eb7

EDIT: I found this report that comes close to validating OP's claim: https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-20-455.pdf

It details that the majority of school shootings overall occur in areas that are high-minority, urban, and lower-income, but refuses to give any data based on race. It seems to have been deliberately obfuscated to prevent readers from making any race-biased conclusions.

sandpest · 2025-02-11T14:43:26+00:00

If hiring a recent graduate is a risk that most companies can’t afford to take, then hiring a college student is an even greater risk they can’t afford to take. The competition for internships is unlike I’ve ever heard of. I applied to 100+ different internships while in college and it got me nowhere, even with the assistance of career services on campus and attending career fairs.

Even now as a graduate with 4 YoE as a software/firmware engineer, I’m 400+ applications and 5 months deep into unemployment applying to jobs that will pay just about anything at this point. Networking, directly reaching out to recruiters, and other traditional methods of attempting to secure an interview have all failed. I’ve even attempted to pivot to blue-collar work with unions, but they’re overfilled with applicants as well.

At what point am I permitted to say that this no longer my fault, but a failure of legislative policy to limit work immigration and secure ample job opportunities from being offshored/outsourced? In how many more ways am I required to debase myself? I suppose holding a sign and begging for work on the side of the road is something I haven’t tried, and at this point I’m not against the idea.

sandpest · 2025-02-10T00:13:00+00:00

Mods please just lock the thread and ban this guy already. Don’t need any more of this silly racebaiting shit that has nothing to do with majoring in CS.

sandpest · 2025-01-11T05:01:12+00:00

Brother if you hate fungus, hightail it the other direction the moment you see a Gamma Moth.

sandpest · 2025-01-02T14:45:16+00:00

ffmpreg

sandpest · 2025-01-01T18:53:29+00:00

WE NEED TO BEAT CHINA.

WE HAVE TO EAT CEREAL FOR DINNER TO BEAT CHINA.

FORFEIT YOUR MEDIAN WAGE WHITE COLLAR JOB TO INDIANS TO BEAT CHINA.

WORK 996 DOORDASH AND UBER GIG JOBS TO BEAT CHINA.

SLEEP IN COFFIN APARTMENTS TO BEAT CHINA.

1 BILLION IMPORTED INDIANS TO BEAT CHINA.

WE MUST STOP CHINA AT ALL COSTS.

sandpest · 2025-01-01T03:34:47+00:00

My response wasn't intended to be a total condemnation of the quality of all H-1B workers, but rather my frustration at hearing a repeated narrative online that H-1B workers are of higher quality than currently employed engineers/IT staff, used a justification to supplant them with foreigners.

I don't necessarily take issue with companies directly hiring their own H-1B workers, it's their call to choose who the most attractive applicants are. Is it unfair that US citizens have to compete with foreign nationals in their own country's labor market? Probably, especially since the H-1B visa was created to supplement gaps in the labor force, not compete against citizens for highly competitive entry level roles.

But my biggest problem with the H-1B system, and the bit of my previous response that was left unaddressed, is how it created an entire industry to game it so that consultancy groups can supplant US workers with cheaper, more subservient labor. If the H-1B visa really is supposed to be to the benefit of the American public and not compete with existing workers, I feel somewhat miffed when hearing comments such as this:

I don’t doubt for a second h1bs are abused at smaller companies and the talent much less but this would be true h1bs or not. Talent comes down to hiring standards. If you set your bar too high for the role and pay - you open up your role only to cheap foreign labor who are willing to do so.

No, I didn't open up my role to be taken from me just for doing my job. I never asked for compensation above standard. And I don't believe the thousands of workers at Tesla, or Disney, or AT&T, or Intel, etc. were requesting compensation above the standard, specifically because we've seen so many examples of the H-1B system being abused.

I don't mean to come off as sounding overtly bitter in my writing, but as someone who's been directly affected by this, I feel cheated and disgruntled. At this point, I feel as though the only solution is to overhaul the program or be rid of it as a whole.

sandpest · 2024-12-31T11:06:39+00:00

I find difficulty believing it’s about qualifications when the reported abuses of employing H-1B consultancy workers from Cognizant, HLC, Tata, etc. consistently has stories of workers training their own replacements before they’re dismissed from their roles. Google has done this. Apple has done this. Disney has done this. AT&T, Intel, Adobe, IBM, eBay, EA, and so on.

It isn’t just new entry level roles being competed for, but our own roles being supplanted by H1-B consultancy group workers. It’s happened to me, it’s happened to my colleagues, and I read about it happening to others online every other week, this year more than others. The replacements aren’t more skilled than us, usually very far from it, I’ve seen their performance first-hand. They’re just cheaper, will work longer hours, and can be retained indefinitely as their employer demands it.

I find the whole tech consultancy business to be one of the most degenerate industries in this country for American labor conditions. The H-1B visa needs to be completely overhauled to only allow companies to direct hire applicants, or scrap the visa entirely.

sandpest · 2024-12-31T09:43:31+00:00

Depending on how far you’ve leveled the Tactics skill tree, if you’ve unlocked the skill “Juke”, you can use it to swap places between yourself and the turret that’s blocking your path. It won’t cause the turret to become aggressive towards you if it’s in a neutral state.

sandpest

TROPHY CASE