What's wrong with this picture...?

BBC News: 'Sugar daddy' dating site fined for promoting prostitution

"The Norwegian businessman behind a "millionaire dating" site has been handed a six-month suspended sentence for promoting prostitution.

A court in Belgium handed the sentence to Sigurd Vedal, the investor behind RichMeetBeautiful, which connects wealthy older men to young women.

Mr Vedal was personally fined €24,000 and his company €240,000 (£207,000).

The site caused a scandal in 2017 after advertising "sugar daddies" to Belgian university students.

Mobile billboards from the company toured areas near the Free University of Brussels campus encouraging students to register for the service for financial gain.

Alongside sexualised imagery, the ads invited students to "improve your lifestyle" or have a "zero euro student loan" by dating a "sugar daddy" - a term for older wealthy men interested in meeting younger women.

Similar adverts caused uproar in France where they advertised "romance, passion and no student loan". Mr Vedal is also accused of "aggravated pimping" in that country."

Not being picky, but the photograph at the top of the article clearly shows that the billboard - of the "student loan" variation - clearly states both "SUGAR DADDY" and "SUGAR MOMA." Now, I'm sure the former greatly outnumbered the latter, but it's bizarre for the article to pretend that it's only about wealthy men and younger women, yet illustrate it with a photograph that plainly shows otherwise.

Planes you'd never heard of

I have an odd an unexplained fascination with military aircraft. I'm not really sure why. I think it's because they tend to be cutting edge and because I'm fascinated with the reasons they haven't really become any faster in the last 50 years or so.

Preamble aside, I simply wasn't aware that this thing (nearly) existed and it's one of the most stunning airplanes I've ever seen.

I give you, the Martin P6M SeaMaster

http://www.aviation-history.com/martin/p6m-8a.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...ight_c1955.jpg

Look at it!!!



If anyone wants to tell me about any others of which I may be unaware, that'd be cool :)

Corporate Monopolies in the US

Quote:

I was once a stock analyst at Morningstar, where the Warren Buffett-inspired approach begins with analyzing a company’s competitive position, and assigning a “moat” rating to it. A castle with a protective moat around it is Buffett’s metaphor indicating a company that is protected from competition. Superior technology, a name brand, a network effect, or high customer switching costs can all underpin moats. But there are other sources of advantages in an economy where competition is supposed to keep them to a minimum. Companies can achieve special arrangements with government or influence legislation, entrenching their positions. The government can decline to enforce antitrust legislation, allowing mergers to occur until a few players dominate an industry. These sources of moats, especially the failure of antitrust enforcement, are the nefarious hallmark of today’s economy, according to Jonathan Tepper and Denise Hearn in “The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition.” (John Wiley & Sons).

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ho...ism-2019-05-06

I have read argumetns about the US no longer being a proper market economy here before but not seen a thread about it.

So... Problem? No problem? Solutions? Despair?

SpiderFab: Space based construction

I just heard about this new developing technology:

http://www.tethers.com/SpiderFab.html

I'll let them explain:

Quote:

TUI's Firmamentum Division is currently developing a revolutionary suite of technologies called "SpiderFab" to enable on-orbit fabrication of large spacecraft components such as antennas, solar panels, trusses, and other multifunctional structures. SpiderFab provides order-of-magnitude packing- and mass- efficiency improvements over current deployable structures and enables construction of kilometer-scale apertures within current launch vehicle capabilities, providing higher-resolution data at lower life-cycle cost.

Seems pretty cool to me.

Another huge gun collection seized in California

We had another one of these incidents last year.

More Than 1,000 Guns Found in Bel-Air, California Home During Investigation Into Selling, Manufacturing of Weapons

Quote:

Originally Posted by KTLA 5 News One person was detained at the home in the 100 block of N. Beverly Glen and is cooperating with authorities, police said. Police only described that person as a "he." Los Angeles Police Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives officials were conducting a joint investigation when a search warrant was served about 4 a.m. Aerial video from Sky5 showed federal agents and police examining thousands of guns laid out in a courtyard area of the home. The property is in an upscale area of multimillion-dollar homes... Public property records for the address being searched indicate it's a five-bedroom, 8,200-square-foot home that last sold in 2001. Its value is estimated at more than $7 million, according to real estate website Redfin dot com. It is unclear who owns the home, or if the homeowner is the person in custody...

https://ktla.com/2019/05/08/hundreds...area-home-lapd

Attached Images

guns-side.jpg (138.8 KB)

Lies, Damned Lies, and Politicians

Can we just clear something up here? Do those that keep repeating that Trump "lies all the time" believe that most other politicians, not least HRC, don't lie? Or that they "don't lie as much"?

These were split from the Mueller Report thread. They were just off topic enough to be moved out of there to here.

Posted By:kmortis

Evita - 100 years today

María Eva Duarte de Perón - or Santa Evita to adoring fans - would have turned 100 years old today.

All but a brief falling star in world politics, she burst on the scene at the age of 24 when she met and enthralled the Argentine Secretary of Labour, Juan Domingo Perón in January 1944.
In 1945, they were married.
In 1946, he was elected President and she became First Lady of Argentina.
In 1947, she became an international star when she embarked on the "Rainbow Tour" to European heads of states.
In 1948, she founded the charitable Eva Perón Foundation and became its first president - and a national saint to the poor and destitute.
In 1950, she fell ill to cervical cancer.
In 1951, she voted, hospitalized, in the first Argentine presidential election open to women.
In 1952, she was dead at the age of 33.

She was descibed as talented, shrewd, dependable, a hard worker, but also cold, lacking all sex appeal, greedy. A most controversial figure even today - her biographies couldn't be more at odds with one another!

I remember I picked up two history books in about 1987 or 1988, at university, and read (despite my very limited Spanish) about the events of 17 October 1945, when Juan Perón was interned by the then President who feared Perón's rising popularity with the working masses and a crowd of around 300,000 people demonstrated in front of the presidential palace, the Casa Rosada in Plaza Mayor, Buenos Aires: One book gave credit to Eva for organizing the protests and uniting the crowd behind Juan - the other claimed the crowd was very ambiguous, favoring Juan but being much against Eva, who had no actual part in the protests.

What strikes me today is the fact that she was born only a hundred years ago! Not few people today live at 100 years or more - but Evita has been dead for almost 67 years! She was long history when I discovered the Lloyd Webber musical for myself in the mid '80s, and yet, in that brief period of fame, she made big imprint on Latin America.

Ever since her moment of fame, Latin American leaders have used their wives as would-be Evitas, where formerly politics was thoroughly a men-only affair. It is debatable if Evita had much of a hand in bringing women's suffrage to Argentina, but she surely did a lot to empower women. It is very much debatable if her initiatives to ease the plight of the poor was effective, smart, helpful, sustained, but she surely made social welfare a staple of politics in Argentina and elsewhere.

Anyway, here's a monument to Evita, even if it is only an unfinished pedastal. Cheers!