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The News
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I saw this come by on twitter, seems there might be some truth to this. I think for some twitter got too influential
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The “folks in charge” are actually a giant man-baby who could not stand to be criticized and thinks he is the smartest person in the room. His raging ego wanted to control things, so he severely overpaid for a platform that was already struggling. This, in turn, severely damaged the platform on so many levels. It already had a toxic atmosphere but he made it so much worse. People were already looking for the next platform. Musk just accelerated the process.
As for the “next thing”, I doubt Threads will be it. It has the same problem that Facebook and Instagram has: It is run by Mark Zuckerberg. He is far from a “hero” and “savior”.
Twitter rose to prominence mostly because it was launched at the right time in internet history (2006). It was also simple to use. It grew organically because of those things. But 2023 internet is a very different from 2006 internet. People have been asking for years, “What is the next Facebook? What is the next Twitter?” Younger generations have been moving away them for years now, mostly going to TikTok. Hell, the “next big thing” may be in its early days and barely known right now. We’ll have to wait and see.
Not everything is a conspiracy.
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Of course we are, but the thing we do know who they are and how they’re doing the screwing. It all happens pretty much out in the open. There’s no need to believe in a twitter-killing conspiracy (and thus Musk being a masterful actor who is only behaving like an incredible mess of a daft narcissist while actually being a master manipulator).
And I don’t even mean stuff like the Bilderberg Group and Bohemian Grove, but very simply this (here concerning the EU):
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Post-racial society, my ass:
Oklahoma judge dismisses Tulsa race massacre reparations case filed by last known survivors
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A good article on the future of social media:
The TL DR: Message boards are back in town.
The boards are back in town.
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A good article on the future of social media:
The TL DR: Message boards are back in town.
The boards are back in town.
Guess who just got back today? Them wide-eyed boards that have been away.
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Yeah, I think message boards are going to have a bit of a resurgence. Which is bittersweet given that the other board I frequent is shutting down this month after 24 years.
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Surprised it took this long:
Former US gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar stabbed in prison: Source
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Hey, my old secondary school has made the news.
Not for anything good, mind.
Teenage Boy Arrested After Teacher Stabbed At Tewkesbury School
Also, a prime example of how easily news can be twisted: I heard about this about half 10 this morning, while in the Post Office (which is about an hour before the media got it) and the woman talking about it was adamant that the attacker was some random man who had trespassed onto the site.
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A good article on the future of social media:
The TL DR: Message boards are back in town.
The boards are back in town.
So back to platforms made for communication rather than to keep people occupied so that they have time to see more adds?
I approve!
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When Twitter first went into meltdown last year(?), lots of bands I follow suddenly started begging people to subscribe to email newsletters.
Like, the informative, content-rich newsletters I used to love getting from you every month before you stopped them and forced me to subscribe to 5 different social media platforms? Yes please
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So the whole Rammstein thing sucks ass. We haven’t discussed it yet, but I am sure everybody is aware of the accusation against Till Lindemann. This is depressing not just because I’ve always appreciated the band as an art project (and because a lot of women have been hurt, obviously), but also because for somebody who has always argued for seeing artist and work as separate, it’s depressing to see the discussion now that a guy who has written, well, rape poetry commit actual rape. Everybody is going “Who would have though?! Isn’t it obvious after all those poems?!”, which is missing the point by several miles.
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I hadn’t heard about this at all. Disappointing to hear.
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Oh yeah, it’s a whole thing.
https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-hundreds-protest-rammstein-over-sexual-abuse-claims/a-66244998
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Twitter news:
He paid 44B for it all.
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Twitter news:
Raise your hand if you feel sorry for poor Elon.
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Raise your hand if you feel sorry for poor Elon.
Before he went for Twitter, he said he thought about some 6B effort to end world hunger.
He would have been better off trying to do that. Even from a PR standpoint.He was never serious about that, he’s just a shameless attention whore. Much like Trump, no one should believe a single thing Musk says. He almost always fails to deliver. There are probably dozens of articles all about his failed promises.
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Business genius Musk has decided the blue bird of Twitter has to go and is to be replaced by…. an X.
Yep, that’s his genius move.
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Business genius Musk has decided the blue bird of Twitter has to go and is to be replaced by…. an X.
Jesus, that fucking nerd will never let go of the idea that all of his stuff should just be called X.
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Business genius Musk has decided the blue bird of Twitter has to go and is to be replaced by…. an X.
Yep, that’s his genius move.
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Of course we are, but the thing we do know who they are and how they’re doing the screwing. It all happens pretty much out in the open.
Exactly this. It’s all in the open being obscured by client journalists and ironically the ‘deep state’ style conspiracy theories that create fake targets like human trafficking gangs in pizza shops.
In the US politicians are campaigning to defund the Inland Revenue Service. Why would you do that? To make tax fraud and evasion easier for your rich friends, rich friends you can identify because direct donations are public.
In the UK during covid the government set up a direct channel fast lane to friends to get huge contracts for PPE, much of which wasn’t suitable and never used in companies formed days before with no assets. None of them are being investigated for fraud but a black woman was handcuffed and arrested by Met police yesterday on suspicion of skipping a £1.70 bus fare (which they later admitted she’s actually paid).
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a black woman was handcuffed and arrested by Met police yesterday on suspicion of skipping a £1.70 bus fare (which they later admitted she’s actually paid).
Wait, what?!
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a black woman was handcuffed and arrested by Met police yesterday on suspicion of skipping a £1.70 bus fare (which they later admitted she’s actually paid).
Wait, what?!
As ever it’s slightly more complicated than these headline summaries suggest. Racism in the police force is a big problem but we’re not yet at the stage where they’re marching paying travellers off public transport and handcuffing them just because they’re black.
Apparently the lady in question didn’t show proof of having paid for travel when requested by an inspector as part of a crackdown on fare dodging (even though it turns out she had in fact paid), they then all got into an argument which escalated to the point where she was restrained in front of her (understandably distressed) son.
The only footage being widely shared is of the handcuffing – which is the culmination of what happened, but without any of the context or build-up which helps to explain how things got to that point.
It still seems like an overreaction and undoubtedly badly handled by the police given the unnecessary escalation from such a minor issue, but “black woman is handcuffed for paying bus fare” is a simplification of a more complicated story.
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a black woman was handcuffed and arrested by Met police yesterday on suspicion of skipping a £1.70 bus fare (which they later admitted she’s actually paid).
Wait, what?!
As ever it’s slightly more complicated than these headline summaries suggest. Racism in the police force is a big problem but we’re not yet at the stage where they’re marching paying travellers off public transport and handcuffing them just because they’re black.
Apparently the lady in question didn’t show proof of having paid for travel when requested by an inspector as part of a crackdown on fare dodging (even though it turns out she had in fact paid), they then all got into an argument which escalated to the point where she was restrained in front of her (understandably distressed) son.
The only footage being widely shared is of the handcuffing – which is the culmination of what happened, but without any of the context or build-up which helps to explain how things got to that point.
It still seems like an overreaction and undoubtedly badly handled by the police given the unnecessary escalation from such a minor issue, but “black woman is handcuffed for paying bus fare” is a simplification of a more complicated story.
There was a similar case in Sweden a few years ago, and I wish the newspapers would choose a correct description instead of trying to make it sound sensational: “idiot woman causes a lot of unnecessary fuzz by refusing to show her ticket during an inspection”!
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There was a similar case in Sweden a few years ago, and I wish the newspapers would choose a correct description instead of trying to make it sound sensational: “idiot woman causes a lot of unnecessary fuzz by refusing to show her ticket during an inspection”!
Well, I don’t know that this particular woman was an idiot as the circumstances still aren’t 100% clear. I wouldn’t assume that. I know that most of the time I couldn’t prove that I’d paid my bus fare these days as I pay contactless and there’s no ticket.
I agree with the general concerns about sensationalism though.
I think the trouble with these cases is that, often, the first we hear about them is the sensationalist headline or summary – and inevitably we feel outraged when we see “black woman is arrested and handcuffed for failing to pay bus fare even though she paid”, because we jump to thinking that this was some kind of crazy brutal police reaction and that they were victimising this woman for racist reasons.
This is then supported when we see a short clip that seems to support our assumptions – in this case, the woman being handcuffed as her kid is crying.
All of this is still relatively light on context, but it’s enough to create a strong reaction. And once that reaction is in place, it’s really hard to adjust. To the point where someone stating that it’s maybe a more complex situation than it appears, and offering a bit more background, risks looking like they’re somehow tacitly supporting the police and maybe dismissing the racism angle altogether (and coming off like that is a concern I had when writing that initial post).
Unfortunately though I think we’re all a bit hardwired to immediately assume the worst with these situations – and social media and clickbait news play to these impulses by reporting events in this way.
The trouble is that if you calmly state the known facts of a case like this, it’s not actually that outrageous or even particularly newsworthy – a difficult situation over checking a bus fare got a bit out of hand and escalated too far. I’m not sure why the woman didn’t (couldn’t?) prove she had paid, but it seems clear that she had and the whole situation was probably badly handled by the police.
Was there a racist angle? Who knows, maybe, but it sounds like the events came out of a routine check of fares as part of a specific initiative so it wasn’t like she was picked out and targeted from the off.
But that doesn’t get clicks and views, and isn’t immediately disgestible as a headline or short video clip.
And so the way it’s reported is quite deliberately designed to make us jump to those conclusions of racism and police brutality – to the point where anyone then seeking to offer a more nuanced take looks like they’re supporting an oppressive regime.
And the trouble is we see countless examples of these headlines and clips every day, and often just accept them without doing further research into the background or history of it – because who has the time? So our worldview can end up pretty skewed by this kind of calculated misrepresentation.
It’s not like this is new – news organisations have been simplifying and sensationalising stories for ever – but I do think the nature and pace of social media, and the ability to share edited photos and video that appear to confirm our worst assumptions, has made it more of a problem these days.
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None of this is meant to be a dig at Gar for sharing the story by the way, it’s something that has been doing the rounds lately and I think the point still stands about the police going after this kind of low-level stuff when corruption on a massive scale is rife.
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This is a weird story as London’s buses are contactless payment, you show your bank card as your ticket.
Back to the news story we all agree on – Twitter is now X and it looks shit.
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This is a weird story as London’s buses are contactless payment, you show your bank card as your ticket.
Yeah it’s the same here, not sure what they were expecting as proof (or how they were going about asking). A lot of detail is missing in terms of really being able to understand what’s going on.
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Back to the news story we all agree on – Twitter is now X and it looks shit.
The strange aspect for me is that he’s focusing on ditching the one thing that Twitter seems to have going for it – the brand recognition aspect.
Most brands would kill to have the kind of branding that Twitter has, with phrases like Tweeting and Retweeting having become part of the common lexicon and the bird logo being synonymous with the network.
So to replace that with an icon that has such negative connotations (X to me is usually something bad or wrong – or the icon to close an application or make an ad go away) is bizarre.
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If I suspected Elon Musk of being even a little bit smart, I might speculate that this is an attempt to make people realise how much they value the Twitter name and brand. But he’s a complete dunderhead, so it’s more a “let’s rename Coco Pops as Choco Krispies for meaningless brand synergy” type deal.
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If I suspected Elon Musk of being even a little bit smart, I might speculate that this is an attempt to make people realise how much they value the Twitter name and brand
He’s doing great if the idea is to make people realise Twitter was better off without him.
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This keeps getting funnier and funnier:
Twitter Rebrand Mocked After Users Discover Origins Of New ‘X’ Logo
Now, you might think the X in question was the end product of a lengthy process made possible by the consultants, focus groups, and graphic designers that helped develop its new identity, but it didn’t take long for people to discover the logo was simply a generic, preexisting Unicode character.
Plenty of users quickly pointed out the 𝕏 is in the public domain, and while Musk probably saved some money by going that particular route, it also means The Company Formerly Known As Twitter doesn’t have the exclusive rights to use it nor any legal options to protect the brand it’s now associating with the character.
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None of this is meant to be a dig at Gar for sharing the story by the way, it’s something that has been doing the rounds lately and I think the point still stands about the police going after this kind of low-level stuff when corruption on a massive scale is rife.
Which is essentially the point, regardless really of further context.
Yes the lady involved may have stepped back from confrontation, which would have been wiser.
It’s a luxury though a lot of us have that we can answer ‘no’ to receipts that minorities don’t have. It is mostly impossible to prove payment on London transport, the majority of payments are made via debit card and on average are deducted 24 hours later because of the daily cap. They can’t take immediately as they don’t know where your travel will end that day. If she opened up her internet banking it would be unlikely to prove payment, I would assume her later release is all down to that.
In the early 90s I did a course on ‘crimes of the powerful’ where Clement Freud had defrauded tax of a million pounds and received no sentence and a boy from a working class background got 6 months in jail for stealing an apple worth 15 pence. I don’t see anything has changed, I don’t see why resources are wasted on investigating fare dodgers for pennies. Why are the Met even doing this? An unprovable crime for small amounts irrelevant to us all while 95% of all rapists are never convicted.
I do see we don’t need conspiracy theories because our systems never stop shitting on poor people and absolving the rich. It’s there in plain sight. With that in mind I won’t really step back from using the example because the scenario to object should never exist really and I’d be arguing back if it was thrown at me.
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Just about every report says it escalated fast, the onus should be on the cops and inspectors not to do that. Especially with the gadgets the inspectors that scans the card used.
How does that work? Don’t know, haven’t had it on buses but have had a ticket check on DLR. On buses it should be easier as the fare is flat rate across, I think, zones 1-4.
So yeah, a load of people in positions of authority screwed up.
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They did as designed Ben.
Nobody has any idea why a 29 year old blonde just took a vow for the Lords for the rest of her life. Petty possible crimes will be pursued, massive million pound ones won’t.
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From one institutionally racist organisation to a self-destructing one, this is going to run and run:
You maniacs. #TwitterX pic.twitter.com/tVkf514y0v
— Marshall Julius (@MarshallJulius) July 24, 2023
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Apart fromt he self-destructiveness of scuttling that logo to go with what seems like a horrible dystopian replacement, it’s interesting that he’s trying to build an all-encompassing company universe with this. It’s not dissimilar to Zuckerberg looking for the next big thing with Meta.
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In the early 90s I did a course on ‘crimes of the powerful’ where Clement Freud had defrauded tax of a million pounds and received no sentence and a boy from a working class background got 6 months in jail for stealing an apple worth 15 pence. I don’t see anything has changed, I don’t see why resources are wasted on investigating fare dodgers for pennies. Why are the Met even doing this? An unprovable crime for small amounts irrelevant to us all while 95% of all rapists are never convicted.
I do see we don’t need conspiracy theories because our systems never stop shitting on poor people and absolving the rich. It’s there in plain sight. With that in mind I won’t really step back from using the example because the scenario to object should never exist really and I’d be arguing back if it was thrown at me.
Yeah, exactly. One recent example of this is the hilariously named cum-ex scandal. Uh, let’s wiki this first:
The CumEx-Files is an investigation by a number of European news media outlets into a tax fraud scheme discovered by them in 2017.[1] A network of banks, stock traders, and lawyers had obtained billions from European treasuries through suspected fraud and speculation involving dividend taxes. The five hardest hit countries may have lost at least $62.9 billion.[2] Germany is the hardest hit country, with around $36.2 billion withdrawn from the German treasury.[3] Estimated losses for other countries include at least €17 billion for France, €4.5 billion in Italy, €1.7 billion in Denmark and €201 million for Belgium.[4]
There’s been efforts to recover the money, there’s lawsuits happening, but of the hundreds of people involved in this only a handful have been convicted with light jail sentences.
The most bizarre part of this was when the Hamburg finance authorities deliberately neglected to reclaim 47 million from a bank that’d been part of the cum-ex con, for inexplicable reasons. They only did make efforts to reclaim the money when the federal finance authority forced them to. And hey, do you know who was the mayor of Hamburg at the time? Current German chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Olaf Scholz (SPD) appears in several parts of the cum-ex scandal. As the Mayor of Hamburg, he played an ethically dubious role. During his leadership, the German Federal Ministry of Finance had to instruct the Hamburg authorities to initiate measures against a statute of limitations for the recovery of taxes from M.M.Warburg. According to journalistic research, the Hamburg tax authorities decided in 2016 not to reclaim €47 million from M.M.Warburg that had been paid out as the result of cum-ex transactions. In 2016 and 2017, Olaf Scholz met with the owners of Warburg Bank. An inquiry committee in Hamburg is currently investigating whether he influenced the decision. Olaf Scholz’s absence from parliamentary committees on the topic in the Bundestag in 2018, despite an explicit invitation and his role as Minister of Finance, made headlines.
Once again, no conspiracy theory necessary. It’s all pretty much out in the open.
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Yeah this is the main conclusion I draw from it, whatever the complications of the situation it shouldn’t have ever been allowed to escalate in that way.
I think the whole exercise is a waste of time and resources. The video shows several police officers being paid ten times each per hour what any London bus fare is worth. I am informed most bus fares are capped at the moment between £1-2.
The deeper question is why does this operation even exist? It is pointless, paying £200 to possibly gain back £2. Like student loans it costs more to administer than it brings in. This is the what Christian was saying that we don’t need conspiracy theories. It is all laid out in plain sight that rich people work by different rules and sentences.
London is basically the money laundering capital of the world. There are residential addresses with 2000 Chinese companies registered to them. Nobody is engaged to look at them.
The most money HMRC has gained in the last few years is late fees submission fees against people who didn’t owe anything. I messed up understanding the instructions one year and paid £1500 in fines against a tax liability of zero.
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It’s all for the grand sum of…. £1.75.
(Outside London I think the £2 cap per single ticket has continued.)
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I think the whole exercise is a waste of time and resources. The video shows several police officers being paid ten times each per hour what any London bus fare is worth. I am informed most bus fares are capped at the moment between £1-2. The deeper question is why does this operation even exist? It is pointless, paying £200 to possibly gain back £2.
Obviously that’s not the true equation though – the point of these initiatives isn’t just to catch whatever fare-skippers they might pick up on the day, but to create a wider sense that anyone skipping fares might actually be picked up and fined (so maybe it’s not worth the risk).
If 1,000 fare-skippers see this operation (and let’s be honest, a heck of a lot more people have seen it now as a result of this news story) and decide to pay next time then the calculation clearly becomes quite different.
You could make the same argument about traffic wardens potentially being paid more than the fines they might impose on any given day. Obviously the point of enforcement is not just about how much money you spend versus the value of the fines you bring in, but to create an environment where people feel that there’s a realistic risk of negative consequences if they don’t follow the rules. It’s not just a straightforward profit/loss calculation for the people they catch that day.
On the point about going after more severe criminality like fraud, I don’t disagree that that should be a priority – but I also don’t necessarily subscribe to the idea that it has to be an either/or approach. I tend to think people should follow the rules at all levels, and that the police therefore need to try and enforce that at all levels.
I’m not sure these fare-enforcers could realistically be easily redeployed to tackle high-level fraud, so I don’t think that’s really an argument to stop them doing what they’re doing, the link between the ideas just isn’t that simple. But I do think the recent examples of fraud make a good argument for the people who are in a position to investigate high-level crimes to be given the tools to go after those criminals more effectively and forcefully.
It all feels a bit like the guy who gets caught speeding asking why the police aren’t going after the real criminals. Of course the answer is that they are doing that too, but that’s not to say that there aren’t ways in which that could be improved – it just doesn’t have much to do with what the traffic cops are up to.
The solution to making one area better isn’t to actively row back in another area, it’s more complicated than that and not a simple manpower/numbers game. In the case of fraud I think there are probably government-level legislative and regulatory reforms (and shows of political will) that would do a lot more good than reassigning a couple of traffic police to the fraud squad.
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You could make the same argument about traffic wardens potentially being paid more than the fines they might impose on any given day. Obviously the point of enforcement is not just about how much money you spend versus the value of the fines you bring in, but to create an environment where people feel that there’s a realistic risk of negative consequences if they don’t follow the rules. It’s not just a straightforward profit/loss calculation for the people they catch that day.
On the point about going after more severe criminality like fraud, I don’t disagree that that should be a priority – but I also don’t necessarily subscribe to the idea that it has to be an either/or approach. I tend to think people should follow the rules at all levels, and that the police therefore need to try and enforce that at all levels.
I feel like Gar’s point is getting lost there though. The problem is that the approach we’re seeing isn’t enforcing the rules at all levels, the brunt of the law’s force is being brought down disproportionally on the poor while the rich are allowed to break the law with barely any consequences. In the US, the IRS is deliberately underfunded so they can’t go after rich people stealing millions from the public while the street police are given tanks to battle a population that doesn’t trust them. In other countries, the situation is similar if mostly not quite as bad or strikingly obvious. People grow tired of the “nobody is allowed to break the rules” argument when they the people on top routinely breaking them while their family members are going to jail for years for petty theft.
This imbalance is a big part of what the Defund the Police movement and the current banlieu riots are about. The police are seen by many people not as a force for order and justice, but as a tool for the rich to keep the poor in place.
So yeah, I think it has become an either/or thing to a degree. The justice system’s solutions to petty crime hasn’t been working very well, and decriminalisation and strengthening social services would be a good answer in many areas. On the other hand, it would right now be far more important to strengthens those parts of the justice system that are responsible for corporate crime or tax fraud. And while “reassigning traffic cops” to tax fraud would be silly, yes, part of this is also manpower because wealth allows you to overwhelm the underfunded authorities with paperwork by clever lawyers. Not debating that political will and legislation would also be a huge part of it – to get back to where we started, all of this is after all part of a bigger system that is being used to keep the status quo (or evolving it even more towards a cyberpunk future of eradicating public services and replacing them with corporate rule).
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The other question is does going after some fare/welfare dodgers act as a deterrent at all? Most people pay for the bus because that’s the social contract, not because of fear of punishment. Same for claiming benefits or the dole. If we didn’t spend a disproportionate amount of time and money enforcing these rules, would more people break them? Has that been studied?
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If you want an example of variable rules in effect the whole Farage and NatWest mess is a good one.
While gloating over NatWest’s chief executive resigning, Farage can’t help but show the core aspect of the right wing Brexit attitude – nothing is ever enough, he now wants the entire NatWest board to resign.
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It would also be interesting to know how expensive it would be, relatively, to make public transport free to everybody. Financing it through taxes would mean that people would have to pay who don’t use public transport, but
1. as a society, we have a vested interest in more people using public transit because of climate change and
2. the cost of public transit is especially relevant to the poorer segments of society, meaning they are not able to afford access to mobility, which could be seen as a basic right these days and
3. getting rid of the ticketing system would get rid of at least a part of the expenses of running a public transport system.Germany currently offers a ticket for €49 a month that allows you to travel in public transport nation-wide. Fast travel trains (IC and ICE) are excluded, so if you want to go from one end of the country to another, you need to have a lot of time, but you can do it. It’s a great system, but it’s mostly great for the urban middle class who uses public transport a lot anyway and who can easily afford this (given that it’s actually cheaper than a local monthly transport ticket). For people who are actually poor, it’s still difficult to afford (if you’re a single mother and you want to take your kids on vacation to their grandparents, you have to buy three of these tickets, after all), even if it’s a vast improvement in mobility for them. I am sure this system is already making a loss financially anyway, so why do we even bother with a price whose main effect is excluding the very poor?
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I thought bus fare inspection was down to the bus company not the police.
Yes. On entry to a London bus you need to scan payment on, be it via debit card or Oyster payment card. If you refuse or don’t the driver sees it. He or she can refuse to move until payment is made or refer it to law enforcement.
To put in place an enforcement programme where the maximum fraud is unlikely (the woman had paid) and also at a maximum of £2 really does need to be seriously questioned in a city known as the ‘butler of the world’ for enabling mass money laundering.
We need to look a bit wider and outside the normal narratives here. The UK, with bumps along the way, has made as much money as ever over the past 40 odd years in GDP. What it has done is send it all upwards,
Tax money has spent hundreds if not thousands to prosecute this compete waste of time action to try and reclaim two quid which was paid anyway.
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I get that these arguments can get emotive, especially when there’s a high-profile example of poor policing doing the rounds on social media. But just because I’m not agreeing that fare-dodging enforcement should be entirely abandoned l doesn’t mean that I’m fine with harassment, racism and discrimination against the poor. Of course I’m not.
I thought it’d become clear that the fare-dodging thing was just one of many examples to me of an imbalance in policing and the justice system in general, so in my understanding when you said that “easing off on the poor” wasn’t the solution, I thought you were refering to all of it. If you’re talking specifically and only about fare-dodging, fair enough, as far as general enforcement is concerned. I think the larger issue is the penalty you get for this – for many people who are fare-dodging because they really can’t afford to pay, paying the fines is often also impossible and leads to criminalisation and jail and very high societal costs in consequence. At least, that’s what happens a lot in Germany, it might be different in the UK anyway.
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At least, that’s what happens a lot in Germany, it might be different in the UK anyway.
It isn’t.
I may appear a little radical on this. I do get what Dave is saying in that you can’t just wave away minor criminal activity. However we massively punish minor offences. That woman could dodge bus fares for her entire life (which she didn’t by the way, the police admit she paid) and come nowhere near the damage caused by offences never charged. 97% of rapes in the UK are never convicted, that concerns me more than fare dodgers.
The Guardian last week in its podcast had an expose on a massive white collar fraud around Norton motorbikes. The owner ran a scam where he used previously convicted fraudsters to manage people transferring pension money to them, tax free, which was a lie, the paid masses in taxes. Investors lost 2.5m pounds, 14 motorcycles were ever built and he walks free as a bird.
Today’s headlines in the UK papers are about jailing shoplifters yet Baroness Michelle Mone got multi-millions in PPE money for a company that couldn’t and never delivered and owes 130m to the public purse and she’s fine, no papers are interested and she’s on her yacht. Some poor git on a council estate in Birmingham will stupidly not pay for his chips and tell a copper to fuck off and get 5 years.
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