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Drunk man stows away on truck for ride home – but run of green lights leaves him 400km up Australia’s east coast

When police arrived, the stowaway could be heard telling officers: “I’m really stressed out, I had a bit to drink.”

The man told them he was from the Sunshine Coast but had travelled from Coffs Harbour after he “got a lift with a truck driver”.

“You’ve had a big session, lost all control, ended up here somehow and now you’ve got to try and work your way back?” an officer asked.

“Pretty much,” the man replied.

“Well, that’s a good session,” the officer said.

The officers looked stunned when the man told them he travelled in the truck’s undercarriage.

“So you are actually underneath the truck, going 110km/h or whatever – no wonder you are anxious, you’re not allowed to do that,” an officer said.

Another officer could be heard laughing when the man explained he hoped to jump out at Coffs Harbour but the truck driver “got a green light the whole way through and never stopped until here”.

“So you’ve been under that truck since Coffs Harbour?” the officer asked.

“Just stupidity to be honest with you,” the man replied.

The officer said: “You were a foot off the road, it is extraordinarily dangerous.”

The man was fined $288.

“Police then transported the male to the Coomera railway station for the long trip back south,” a police statement said.

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The SPARS Pandemic Scenario is a long exercise in tedium and stupidity, which in no way predicts lockdowns or vaccine mandates

The SPARS Pandemic, 2025–2028 is the title of an immensely tedious and stupid “teaching and training resource for public health and government officials,” thrown together in 2017 by Chat GPT a collection of midlevel nobodies at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security – a pandemicist think tank good at generating publicity, but terrible at devising policy prescriptions that anybody will actually follow . . .

Aside from the novel coronavirus angle, there’s very little that is prescient or prophetic in this steaming pile of masters student-tier bullshit. It’s notable that the scenario authors abhor virus terror messaging for its potential to backfire almost as much as they do pharmaceutical scepticism. Otherwise, nobody locks down for SPARS. There is no mass testing or contact tracing, and there is no talk of border closures or shutting down schools. Masks are nowhere in the scenario, and there is not even any advice to reduce social contacts. Vaccines are offered but never mandated. Social media “misinformation” is countered not by censorship, but by press releases and clumsy social media messaging campaigns.

OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO

The OpenAI board is in discussions with Sam Altman to return to the company as its CEO, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. One of them said Altman, who was suddenly fired by the board on Friday with no notice, is “ambivalent” about coming back and would want significant governance changes.

Update, 5:35PM PT: A source close to Altman says the board had agreed in principle to resign and to allow Altman and Brockman to return, but has since waffled — missing a key 5PM PT deadline by which many OpenAI staffers were set to resign. If Altman decides to leave and start a new company, those staffers would assuredly go with him.

Altman holding talks with the company just a day after he was ousted indicates that OpenAI is in a state of free-fall without him. Hours after he was axed, Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and former board chairman, resigned, and the two have been talking to friends and investors about starting another company. A string of senior researchers also resigned on Friday, and people close to OpenAI say more departures are in the works.

Post-Covid Panic Idiocracy, or: The Phantom Lion of Kleinmachnow

At 5am on Thursday morning, a grainy video purporting to show a lioness in the woods near Kleinmachnow, a town in the district of Potsdam-Mittelmarkt near Berlin, made the rounds on German Twitter.

Authorities, who alas are also on Twitter, deemed the footage genuine and ordered a massive search for the hostile carnivore, involving at points at least two helicopters and a hundred or more policemen. Officers inquired at zoos and circuses for missing animals, but all local lions were accounted for. A local Veterinary Office explained that it was most likely an illegally kept pet which had escaped. As the search continued to come up empty – a police spokesman explained that the lion had likely found a nice wooded place to sleep – authorities extended their alarm from the southern towns of Teltow, Stahnsdorf and Kleinmachnow to neighbourhoods in south Berlin. They urged all residents to keep their windows and their doors locked, lest the clever feline awaken from its morning nap and try to open them.

Municipal officials in hardest-hit Kleinmachnow told journalists they would order no closures, at least for the moment. Day cares would continue to operate, but children shouldn’t leave the yard, nor should merchants set up their usual stands at the local Thursday market. Police reported they were happy to see residents following their recommendations, and journalists confirmed that hardly anybody was to be seen on the street . . .

Requiring surgery for gender change unconstitutional: court

SHIZUOKA [Japan] – A court has said that a law requiring surgery to switch genders on a family registry is unconstitutional, as it made a ruling on a case involving a transgender man in central Japan, his lawyers said Thursday.

This is a fascinating illustration of high context vs low context languages. The assumed context in Japanese, which is not assumed in English, is the fatal crowd crush that occurred in Korea last Halloween. Once you get that, you might be able to decipher what it’s trying to say.

And then:

Corporate America Promised to Hire a Lot More People of Color.
It Actually Did.

The year after Black Lives Matter protests, the S&P 100 added more than 300,000 jobs — 94% went to people of color.

This article was quickly taken apart as sharp-eyed readers noticed that they’d made the calculations net of retirements. All it shows is that many white Boomers are retiring.

Bloomberg!

Tickle vs. Giggle

( . . . ) Tickle vs. Giggle could be the title of a tween pillow fight, but it is the culmination of years of the legal erasure in Australia of the link between Australian women as recognised legally and the vulnerabilities of the female body.

Sall Grover is a Gold Coast businesswoman who heads a social media company called Giggle. Giggle is an app for females. The intention of Giggle is to provide a safe digital space for women and girls, where they can find a flatmate, organise socially, date (if they are same-sex attracted), and chat in an environment free of males . . .

Convenience store clerk arrested for punching customer over receipt in Hyogo Prefecture

( . . . ) The incident took place at a Lawson store at 8 p.m. on July 25 when a 73-year-old man came in to buy a can of beer. While paying at the register, the customer told the clerk that he didn’t want a receipt, but the clerk handed him a receipt anyway. This angered the customer who then threw the receipt back at the clerk, in turn angering the clerk and triggering a heated argument.

While words were exchanged, the clerk knocked over the customer’s beer can and as things escalated they moved into the backroom of the store. While there, the clerk allegedly assaulted the customer. The extent of the assault isn’t clear but according to reports there was punching involved.

Police arrived shortly after and arrested the clerk for assault. The condition of the customer and his beer are unclear but both were believed to be free of serious injury.

The other Anglo exceptionalism

( . . . ) So Anglo obesity cannot be explained by wealth, either when doing global comparisons or European comparisons. So what gives? It’s not intelligence, they don’t differ from the other north or west Europeans. It’s not climate either, as Anglos live in a variety of locations around the world from the cold winter Minnesota to nearly always warm Florida, all of which are far fatter than comparable areas in Europe. It cannot be genetics because Anglos are extremely closely related to the Dutch, Danes and French from which they recently were made out of. One would have to posit some ridiculously, somehow overlooked, fast selection. So what’s left? Well, culture broadly speaking. Many people will tell you anecdotes of their friends moving to the US and immediately getting overweight, even people who had been skinny for decades at home. When I lived in the US for a few years, I put on like 7 kilos without noticing. But calling something culture is generally just a cop-out when we don’t know specifics or won’t talk about other causes.

‘We need to see pain’: Multimillionaire says unemployment must rise

Property developer Tim Gurner says employees have become too arrogant, and that unemployment must rise substantially to lift productivity, especially in the construction sector.

Gurner told a business event on Tuesday the pandemic had a “massive effect” on productivity, especially among tradies, and that it was worsening the housing crisis . . .

“We absolutely have to have immigration,” he said. “Australia doesn’t work without immigration and if we’re not growing, we’re dead.”

( . . . ) “We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. There’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around. It’s a dynamic that has to change.”

Written by Christopher Cross, Burt Bacharach, Carole Bayer Sager, and Peter Allen, “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)” is the title theme from the1981 film Arthur starring Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli. The song won an Oscar for Best Original Song and spent 3 weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Peter Allen came up with the chorus lyric “When you get caught between the moon and New York City” while his plane was in a holding pattern during a night arrival at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

One additional theory for the 21C death of music is that the 20C produced enough for eternity. What a back catalogue that century gave us.

North Dakota man gets 5 years for running over, killing teen after street dance