Slashdot Mirror
England Starts Fingerprinting Drinkers
dptalia writes "In an effort to reduce alcohol related violence, England is rolling out mandatory fingerprinting of all pub patrons. If a pub owner refuses to comply with the new system, and fails to show 'considerable' reductions in alcohol-related crimes, they will lose their license. Supposedly the town that piloted this program had a 48% reduction in alcohol-related crime." From the article: "Offenders can be banned from one pub or all of them for a specified time - usually a period of months - by a committee of landlords and police called Pub Watch. Their offenses are recorded against their names in the fingerprint system. Bradburn noted the system had a 'psychological effect' on offenders."
In the united states we also have a system of reducing the effects of alcohol related violence. We call it prison.
how many drunk pub patrons upon being asked for their fingerprints will pull down their pants and shout "Fingerprint this?"
Law! The cure to society's failures! That's what laws are for.
Laws built civilization, at reduced price.
Got a problem with something, just get together with some of your friends and write a law against it.
No need to address systemic issues. No need to worry about whether it's harmful to individuals. Human rights? But what about civilization? Laws are above you and me they're for the greater good.
Can I get a law. Cheers to that ol' chap Hammurabi. What greater gift to pass on to future generations than a bunch of laws? Better than trying to raise 'em up with values.
I am wondering how this will affect non-citizens of England, will U.S. or foreign visitors need to be fingerprinted as well and if so, that means that our fingerprints are in a foreign system, I am wondering how this info will be used, since the U.S. has demanded that the UK and all EU countries give the U.S. passenger data, will this info be used as a counter tactic to stop this practice.
In all seriousness, I wonder how many alcoholics and repeat drunk driving offenders will look for ways to skirt the system? If employed nationwide, a cottage industry of fingerprint concealment/modification techniques could pop up that eventually could negatively impact other areas of crime prevention.
Also, how are they going to prevent people from drinking themselves into a stupor at a friend's home then getting in the car? In the end, this could be a pretty significant blow for the bars and restaurants, kind of like the smoking ban in some U.S. cities.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
So for the English out there, who does this law really apply to? I've been to London a few times and enjoy a good pub lunch, without drinking - am I still going to be printed in that case? Is it all electronic scans (the article made it sound as if it were)?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Bradburn noted the system had a 'psychological effect' on offenders.
No doubt it has psychologican effects on everyone. You know, that creepy feeling you get when you're being watched.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Well, the UK has always had new crazy, privacy-destroying laws and powers. I find the English completely irrational considering how they go apeshit at the thought of a national ID card, but let things pass like continuous camera surveillance, excessive powers to any government instance, etc. Ripe for abuse. Maybe it's an Anglo-Saxon mindset?
Continental Europe is different - they're a bit more strict on privacy laws. There's always a big stink made when some stuff like this happens, like when euro passenger data is shared with the US, or like when SWIFT Belgium was/is passing loads of info on financial transactions to the US (again).
The US on the other has one thing going for it: constitutional protections, and associated with that, pretty good transparency. Whenever there's a new law project that might touch constitutional protections, there's usually some people that will notice, and there's quite a bit more public debate about it. To the point that Europeans probably know more about privacy-related laws in the US than in their own country.
This law has a major loophole. People without hands can visit any pub they like! I'm certain that we'll soon see an increase in alcohol-related violence by people with artificial hands, hooks, stumps, and the like.
Please, please, won't someone think of the children?!?! We need to implement alternative ID methods. Perhaps something like RFID chips implanted in artificial hands. We should also consider banning artificial limbs, hooks, and the like so these people cannot drink excessively and threaten our children. If we save the life of only one child, it will be worth it.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
Were you born during the 90's or something? I only ask because you seem to have completely missed what happened during the 80's. The MADD campaign? Ronald Reagan? Are you completely unaware that we no longer even have qualms about executing people who are mentally insane or retarded, let alone intoxicated at the time of their crimes? Are you a Libertarian completely unaware of drug laws? 3 strikes and you're out?
We don't even let people off in extreme cases such as the one you cited. =p
Are you kidding me? A guy from their country wrote 1984 over 50 years ago. They have cameras on nearly every street corner. If anything I think they are qualified to "make references to Big Brother".
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Never fear, when you grow up, you can tell your children about all your fond experiences drinking with your Big Brother.
Ninjas use italics.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2033473, 00.html
As much as I agree with your "need to get verification" stance, it didn't take me more than 30 seconds to find this. And I believe the Times should be considered a reliable news source.
The real problem with any system that tracks behavior, especially vice-like behavior, is that it is only a matter of time before powerful interests secure access to that data. Fingerprint drinkers today, in the hands of insurance companies tomorrow. Fingerprint pub-crawlers today, in the hands of employment agencies tomorrow. Fingerprint drunks today, in the hands of law-enforcement and government interests tomorrow.
Abuse slowly unfolds, it does not spring into existance overnight. Almost everything that is seriously broken in America started off as an innocent (often temporary) stopgap measure to correct some issue of the day but then slowly grew, was hijacked by various interests and warped into an aberration.
I am personally against any tracking of human beings at all and I could give a god damned about the whinning of law enforcement. The simple fact is that once such data is available to law enforcement, it is also available to criminals and interests that are not working for my benefit and since I am a law abiding citizen, there is absolutely no upside for me - only increased scrutiny and loss of privacy. Only the stupidest of criminals will expose themselves through these channels anyway. The smart criminals belong to syndicates that fscking include law enforcement (and therefore have access to this *data* for nefarious purposes).
Reject tracking, profiling and surveillance in all it's guises. Demand court issued warrants for private data. Retain your rights and your personal security.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
here ya go. 15 seconds of googling.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
It mentions "alchohol-related crimes", but it seems to me that the only time you ever actually know that any particular crime was genuinely alchohol related is if you already know who the person that did it was, and it's only then that you realize that they are under the influence of alchohol. What do you need fingerprints taken beforehand for when every single time you'd be able to pin a crime on alchohol consumption you have the guilty party in custody anyways?
About the only good this might do is produce a sort of "scare tactic" effect, that might initially incline people to behave better, but I don't see this making a significant difference in the long run.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Having been denied entry to london pubs, 48% of alcoholic criminals are now committing crimes sober.
Pretty similar to any other countrys internal politics. If I had told you that for the last 5 years, the majority of political debate in Norway has been about the new opera building, you probably wouldn't believe me. It's still true, and it's like this everywhere. Once you have an outside perspective, you are more able to see how silly people can become over a non-issue.
Thanks for the generalization. Southern USA is a bit different. They usually are Ku-klux Klan members.
Surprise! The US is not the only country with a constitution. Nor is it the first country with a constitution. Nor does the constitution seem to help USians much, as the various political fractions interpret the constitution as inventively as christians interpret the bible.
As for transparency; I thought US was the country where standard political practice was bill-amendments, so that by calling the new law "Child Protection Act", and amend some minor law about mandatory ID-cards to it, everybody would vote for it, since nobody has time to read all the amendments, and we must protect our children.
Look, just because you can read about it in your newspaper, doesn't mean that everyone else in the world reads the same newspaper. The silly little bickerings you have about privacy-laws in the US, interests us about the same as you would consider the debate about Oslos new opera building interesting. More to the point, people in civilized democracies (such as most of Europe) mostly ignores american politics, except that they dislike Bush, and thought Clinton was a jolly good fellow.
Secondly, in the eyes of most people in civilized democracies, US politics has mostly been dominated by rabid right-wing capitalists, dictated by powerful companies, since at least the 1960s. It's possible we will follow, but at least untill now, we have managed to keep the battle up for a little longer. And we have privacy laws, even laws that work!
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
Thinking about how easy these scanners are to fool, someone should create a fingerprint patch and supply a copy to everyone in town. It'll look like one guy goes drinking way too much. It'd be even better if the finger print was of some semi-important or visible offical who's in favor of this legislation. I'm thinking about how the Mythbusters people lifted a fingerprint from a can and used that to create a fake fingerprint to fool a scanner.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
But basically, if you're from a major European country and here on a tourist visa, there's no fingerprinting. (Which makes the whole process pretty fucking stupid -- I mean, so now the terrorists need to get false Dutch papers instead of false Egyptian ones; great use of a few million dollars.
Don't be ridiculous. No sane Dutchman would go to the USA for their own pleasure, what with all the windmills to maintain and pot to smoke. Therefore anyone travelling to the US with a dutch passport is by definition a terrorist, a businessman or both.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Answer: there is no law that requires you to be finger printed if you want a pint. There is no government roll out of fingerprint checking before you can have a pint.
:-)
:-)
Slashdot is enjoying a nice hyped up headline, egged on by The Reg singing it up. Major towns and cities? one rural backwater population 40,000. We've had bigger towns voting for monkeys as their town mayor (Hull, go have a read). Have a sip of that nice warm beer and calm down
Reading TFA, one town has trialed a system. Little Britain jokes aside, we have more than half a dozen towns here
So we do have a law, the "Crime and Disorder Act (1998)" which requires town councils to reduce drunken disorder. One district council (in Yeovil, a nice little country place in rural Somerset, population 40,000) has decided the way to do this is to have fingerprint recognition, it's putting the pressure on pubs to install this system. It's using money from a government fund "Safer, Stronger Communities" through the Department for Communities and Local Government's Local Area Agreements. The government funder have already noted that its a local decision, not theirs, on how local town councils spend the money.
This "rollout" the article speaks of consists of ten pubs in a neighbouring small town considering it. Trust me, we have more than eleven pubs in the UK...
A couple of police forces elsewhere have "shown an interest" which suggests to me somebody's phoned up to ask how its doing. The district council representative (who you'd expect to be positive and not say "well we really wasted our taxpayers money on that one") has said the Home Office is considering trials in more towns (what does this mean? 5 pubs in each place?) - but the Home Office later in the article denies it decides how the budget is spent.
Bouncers do ask for ID for people they think are underage (under 18) in some pubs. But only those folks. I was amused when in the USA to be with a silver haired retired friend who was asked for his ID as well. I think he was quite amused and pleased that they were checking him in case he was under 21....
Not true. US immigration requires fingerprint and photograph also from all visitors from the visa waiver countries (eg all western europe, the 27 countries in the parent post). The China Daily article is clearly incorrect.
(As a frequent US traveller and German citizen I can confirm this firsthand.)
The data protection act should in theory stop abuses like that, data collected is not allowed to be used for any reason other than for what it is collected. And you have to be upfront about what the data will be used for.
yes, this would cause a bit of a fuss, if it were true. The first I have heard about this is on Slashdot. The landlord of my local has not heard about it. Publicans have a lot of freedom over who they let in or don't let in to their public house. If a publican wants to install fingerprint scanners to control access then they would have the freedom to do that. Customers have the freedom not to go to that pub if they don't like it. Publicans also have the freedom to install bouncers who won't let in people they don't like the look of. Local authorities (not national government) who make licensing decisions have the freedom to be influenced in their decision about issuing/renewing a licence by looking at how the publican maintains an atmosphere of responsible drinking. I think this will fail for practical reasons (you will need a bouncer to stand by the machine - if you have a bouncer just let them make the decision, if you don't have a bouncer then people can walk past the machine). People who are registered drinkers can still arrive drunk, and it is illegal to serve alcohol to drunks. There is no way that this will be installed in country pubs.
It's been a while, but IIRC in Pennsylvania it's not that you can't buy beer in less than a case, it's just that you have to go to a different store. They have "Beer Stores," which sell beer by the case and only by the case, but then they also have "Six-pack Shops" which sell smaller quantities (and any bar can legally sell you up to two six-packs; bowling alleys that have bars were a favored place to get late-night booze IIRC). I think they have different hours for each. And then there are liquor stores which are actually run by the state, and where you can get your distilled alcohols, and I think wine just comes from the grocery store? (I was never clear on wine there.)
Anyway, just nitpicking. It does have some of the most bizarre liquor laws of anywhere I've ever been to. I can only pity the poor coddled European who might wind up in Pennsylvania, desiring a case of wine on a Sunday, or something similarly impossible.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"More to the point, people in civilized democracies (such as most of Europe) mostly ignores american politics, except that they dislike Bush, and thought Clinton was a jolly good fellow."
"Secondly, in the eyes of most people in civilized democracies, US politics has mostly been dominated by rabid right-wing capitalists, dictated by powerful companies, since at least the 1960s."
Thanks for the generalization. Most civilized Europeans are snobs disconnected from the rest of the World.
Ha, that one doesn't really work, especially as I'm in the US. Anyway, you get my point...
That's because we're so bloody used to it from our own government. Cameras going up everywhere, constant attempts to introduce an ID card scheme, fingerprints and DNA samples held of people questioned and released without charge, airport passenger information forwarded to US authorities, numberplate recognition cameras on all the motorways, plans to satellite track cars for the road tax... The list is vast. I often wonder if there's some sort of competition between the Bush administration and Tony Blair to see who can come up with the most outrageous destruction of their citizens liberty and privacy, and get away with it.
Believe me, I'm a brit, and I'm horrified by this. I just moved next door to Yeovil, and there's no WAY I'm going for a drink and/or meal there if it means I have to be fingerprinted first. The idea is offensive. This private company holding my fingerprints and personal details, who knows who has access to that data. No. Way. I fully intend to let my next-door council know this, that they've lost my custom in all possible ways. By snail mail.
What happens when it goes national? I'll stop going to the pub for a quiet drink, which will also probably mean giving up half my friends. A good chat over a pint is a British institution, but I'm going to have to give up my fingerprints and ID to do it? Goodbye to the pub then. No doubt it's lowered drink-related crime, they've all moved to pubs in the rest of the area - or worse, drink at home and beat up their families. They did say domestic violence had risen, so they've displaced rowdy drinkers who could be arrested and stopped in public, to domestic violence at home, where there's no witnesses and no cops on speed-dial. That's so much better.
Some of the national press reported on this when it was a dinky little scheme in a provincial town far away from anywhere. I wonder what the Daily Mail and The Sun will make of this now it's going national? Getting fingerprinted to have a pint? This will hopefully be as popular as road tax and ID cards, i.e. vehemently opposed by many.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Imagine having to have your fingerprints taken just to enter a pub!! WTF
... we've moved past that here.
It is a little fascist, I give you that. Here in the U.S., we'd never allow anything so intrusive. Fingerprinting is for foreigners and criminals! We prefer more subtle monitoring. Out of sight, out of mind, right?
Here, we'll just mandate that the bars have to check ID by scanning your RFID-enabled, government issued card through a terminal. Your photo pops up on the terminal screen (built by Diebold -- don't ask what's inside!), and they see that you're 21. It's for the children, naturally. Don't want them drinking. Of course, also on file from when you applied for your ID card is your retinal patterns, fingerprints, shoe size, etc. So if they find some suspect fingerprints, it'll be a simple matter to check them against the files for everybody that's been in that pub. Superior to the Brits really, since you don't have to deal with low-grade print scanners at every bar, getting gunked up and unreliable.
From a "citizens" perspective, it's no different than today. Lots of places scan your ID when you buy booze, so most people would never notice. By putting all the changes in the backend, it's far less intrusive. Doesn't make sense to remind people of what's going on -- why not keep things looking the way they "always have?"
Actually taking fingerprints is so 20th century. Honestly
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I actually live just down the road from Yeovil. (or YeoVile). An aquiantance actually runs the main firm of bouncers in the town. He says that the fingerprint scanners started off in one of the clubs in town more or less as the owner is a gadget freak and just got a MS keyboard with fingerprint scanner. The club owner used it to get some free publicity in the local press. The regional press and tv picked it up and finally the story was on the main bbc news a few months ago. Governement has seen it and thought "Hang on a minute..."
Actually having your right index finger print taken in the clubs closed, non-government affilitated system is optional even in the bar that started it. YeoVile is a small town and the bouncers know all the main troublemakers personally by now. If someone comes in from out of town looking for trouble of course no system is going to stop them.
So all of this started out as a cheap publicity stunt by the owner of a small club in a small town and has got people the British government involved and now people all round the world are commenting on it... the guy must be laughing his head off.
another Roadkill on the Information Superhighway
If I could make a suggestion that would solve your problem: Leave Coventry.
Seriously, the place is dire.
You might find that the typical slashdotter might go apeshit over ID cards, but you misrepresent the feelings of the English. Every single poll that's ever been done in the UK about ID cards has shown the majority to be in favour.
As to CCTVs, yes the British like them because it makes them feel less at threat from crime on the street, and that there will be less vandalism. And with good reason. Crime in the UK has fallen 44% since 1995, violent crime down 43%, and vandalism down 19%.
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs06/hosb1206.
I still don't like the fingerprinting bit - it seems like it's begging for someone to abuse it.
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.
It is pretty much the only one with an unrestricted free speech clause, for example. Other countries restrict hate speech and can legally regulate the sale of violent media to children while the US constitution doesn't allow that.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Or, for a less extreme example, just try speaking anything but english in a queue in a US airport (numerous examples).
If I were the US air carriers, I'd sue the local government for turning the population into cretins through fearmongering tactics and hurting business.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
The Yeovil pilot is certainly real. It was on the BBC TV news when the scheme started. I saw it in action. The phony part of it is the "mandatory" and "national" suggestions.
How, exactly, would this work anyway? Are they proposing even longer queues to get into pubs, and mandatory security personnel at the doors of all licensed premesis? How would they determine if you've crept in (say, via the beer garden, many of which couldn't easily have access controlled without fundamental modification) without fingerprinting? If you went in to the garden, would you need to be rechecked every time you went back in? Maybe they'd need to fingerprint all customers as part of the sale, and reject if it didn't match one of their live entries - I can see that being popular with staff...
This system is for city centre or other drinking venues where troublemakers regularly go. The sort of place that already has doormen at the one or two available entrances.
So yes, the English are qualified to make references to Big Brother. But people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
At least, not if a camera is pointed in their direction.
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Suggesting that wez folks that lives in the Sounth (East I'm sure you was referrin to) USA is in cahoots with the KKKlan.. well hell thats just as silly as a one legged dog swimmin across the river at high tide on a Sunday. I live in Tallahassee and I reckon I'll take offense for my kin folk... your horse sense is scarce as hen's teeth boy. The KKKlan done moved its HQ out to the Khristian Kountry Klub and they aint let me in on account of some fancy "no shirt no shoes" rule... hell I ain't got neither! Just remember boy , Sun don't shine on the same dog's tail all the time. (FYI open office has "cahoots" AND "reckon" in its spell check database!)
As an American living in Europe, I don't think that the problem is "drunks". By American standards, almost everyone in Europe is an alcoholic, yet no other country has the the same kind of savage violence that the UK sees. Scandinavian countries have hard-core binge drinkers, and both Germany and Ireland have a higher per-capita beer consumption.
Clearly the problem is cultural. It seems to me that a reasonable approach might be to try to change the culture to be a bit more like places where you don't have to be scared of looking people in the eye lest it start a fight, or where the police don't show up in riot vans every weekend to control the carnage.
But, like almost everyone, the Brits love their culture, and are loathe to change even the ugly bits. So, instead they get cameras and fingerprint readers. It might work, but I'm still going be very, very careful in pubs there...
All those schemes you've quoted are schemes which were once trialed as pilot schemes. You haven't mentioned the, no doubt, millions of pilot schemes which were never taken any further. This idea is obviously never going to get any further than the half a dozen pubs in the small town it's currently, optionally, being used.
For a start the majority of pubs don't have bouncers or door staff and it's obviously impractical in the extreme to be fingerprinted every time you go to the bar to get a drink, secondly there are thousands and thousands of pubs in the UK all within a 10 second walking distance if people thought they were going to be fingerprinted and fail the test at one pub they would simply go to another pub which wasn't implementing the scheme.
There are areas in most towns and cities which attract the majority of drink related violence, you can normally identify them by the huge number of horrible chain pubs with loud music, bouncers and very few seats all right next to each other, these pubs have one goal and one goal only and that is to sell as much booze as they can for as much as possible, they already have bouncers to deal with the violence so why would they want to place any further barriers to selling more people more booze ? Luckily most towns also have areas where pubs aren't run along such lines and these do not generally attract any violence at all except once in a blue moon so why would these pubs wish to inflict fingerprint checks for their regulars every time they buy a pint ?
I was watching the movie "V for Vendetta" again last night - as a graphic novel that was written in 1982 it's eerily predictive. For a movie made two years ago, it's practically a documentary.
I'm a Brit who has been living in the USA for the past 13 years and it's hard to say which is more like the movie. Britain with more spycams per person than anywhere else on earth - and soon you can't even have a beer without being fingerprinted! Or perhaps it is the USA in which the faceless secret police can monitor what books you check out from the library, bug your phone without judicial oversight and swoop down on you, merely accuse you of being a terrorist (no proof required) and on that pretext lock you up, torture you, ship you off to god-knows what hell-hole - and all without any right of trial or appeal?
Hmmm - hard call. Between the two countries - it's difficult to say which comes closest to the nightmare that V opposes in the movie. As he says: If you want to know whose fault this is - just look in the mirror.
Our own fear of statistically insignificant terrorist violence (or avian flu or WMD or drunk drivers or...you name it) induces progressively higher tolerance for the State to ratchet down the human rights of the entire population. There will come a point when we realise that this has been a terrible mistake - but will we do that before or after the point where we can no longer reverse it's effects?
Better get that bulk order for Guy Fawkes masks in before the rush. Amazon have them for $5.99.
www.sjbaker.org
The U.S> has the largest prison population (over 2 million) and the highest rate of prisoners per capita at 715 per 100,000. source: NationMaster
harmonious design
Hold on - the linked article says that this scheme is proven to work because in the Yeoville area alcohol related violence had dropped 48% over the trial period. It then went on to say that over that eight month period there were only TWO major incidents. So if there had been (say) four major incidents over the preceeding eight months - which reduced to two during the trial - that would have been a 50% reduction.
(Note that one of those two major incidents wasn't even anything to do with pubs - some kids were at an under-18's disco and obtained alcohol "somewhere else" - it shouldn't even have been counted).
I have two observations:
Firstly: I would submit that whether there were two or four major incidents over a period of eight months is not a statistically valid sample. Especially because the preceeding 8 months would have included Xmas and New Year - both notable occasions for serious drunkenness. No competent statistician or conductor of scientific tests would sign up to these conclusions from such a ridiculously small sample - so we should either conclude that they are invalid - or that they were actually counting something else...which leads me to:
Secondly: For a number like '48%' to have come about, we cannot be measuring a reduction from four to two major crimes - that would be a 50% reduction. This MUST have been taken over a vastly larger sample of incidents. We must conclude then that they are not talking about 'major' incidents such as the two described (a sexual attack in the toilets and a fight between two kids that erupted into a major street brawl). So what this fingerprinting exercise is all about is reducing MINOR incidents.
So let's call this what it is. It's not about cutting down on serious offences - it's about reducing MINOR offences by banning people from pubs who happen to have lost their tempers or done any of the usual things that drunk people tend to do.
Is that worth the loss of privacy that this entails?
www.sjbaker.org
We have all kinds of tough new drunk driving enforcement over here, too. Though thankfully short of fingerprinting people going into clubs. The net effect is people who are problem drinkers drink anyway and responsible people, many of whom don't like the police gettin' up in their business, stay home. Instead we'll have private parties, where our guests can stay the night. Just like I'm guessing a lot of people will skip their pint at the pub because being fingerprinted seems sort of creepy.
You might think that's a responsible solution and you'd be right. The downside is for people trying to run a business. The more enforcement, the more responsible people stay home. It's getting to the point we don't go out on weekends at all. Who wants to run the road block gauntlet just to go out to eat and dancing for a couple hours?
More enforcement is always easy from a political point of view. It's a feel good thing to do that doesn't really work, but since when do results matter in political solutions? I'm not sure there are any easy answers. But I can say for sure, the tougher you get on enforcement, the more your business and entertainment district is going to suffer.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Pubs scan your fingerprint when you enter. This is obstensibly to be used in investigations if there is serious trouble in the area. If this were the end of the story, then perhaps it wouldn't be too big of a deal, other than you being called in the middle of the night every time you were in a pub the same night that some ruccus breaks out.
Time passes. Powerful interests, such as Insurance companies, put pressure on the government to allow them to use the pub data for actuarial purposes (obstensibly to protect the public). The government concedes... Other interests also gain access...
Time passes.
You break up with your girlfriend and spend an unusual amount of time at the pubs for a couple of months. You receive letters informing you that your automobile insurance and health insurance premiums are rising as a direct result of increased risk exposure related to your bar habbit. Your employer calls you in for review and denies your promotion on the basis of risk exposure related to your pub habbits.
Are you getting the picture yet? If not, i give up.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
"The US on the other has one thing going for it: constitutional protections, and associated with that, pretty good transparency. Whenever there's a new law project that might touch constitutional protections, there's usually some people that will notice, and there's quite a bit more public debate about it."
u st_try_voting_here.html
Some do notice, but apparently not enough. Just two examples of the effectiveness of "The US on the other has one thing going for it: constitutional protections, and associated with that, pretty good transparency. Whenever there's a new law project that might touch constitutional protections, there's usually some people that will notice, and there's quite a bit more public debate about it."
Just Try Voting Here: 11 of America's worst places to cast a ballot (or try)
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/09/j
Lie by Lie: Chronicle of a War Foretold: August 1990 to March 2003
http://www.motherjones.com/bush_war_timeline/
I won't even yet go into how rotted roofs in Houston (unrepaired because a certain governer would not release or mark funds for repairs of run down police stations) led to destruction of crime scene evidence that led to uncounted illegal or erroneous convictions of people, this under the watch of then gov geo bush. Or, how with zeal and zest he signed off on the executions orders for people because he has complete faith and trust in the judicial system.
Funny Slash image word: "canons"
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Just FYI for the non-brits, being "pissed" over there is drunk, not "pissed" as in angry in the states.
That may clarify what is a bit confusing as the slang differs.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
That's because "cahoots" and "reckon" are actual words.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
And I'm wondering... isn't the extreme extrapolation of this, oh, say, requiring all stores to fingerprint shoppers, to cut down on the number of shoplifters??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Seconded. The same people who see Bush as a dictator have no problem cloaking their city's with cameras or requiring fingerprints to enter a pub! And these are the same people who will shout bloody murder at the thought of stopping terrorists from committing atrocities - by profiling, listening to their phone calls, etc. more big government is not the solution - it the problem.
I like Mark Steyn's description of Europeans: coddled cradle to grave with unsustainable social programs - especially places like france - europeans are placed in a constant state of adolescence, taken care of entirely by their respective states. They are never required to grow to adulthood.
I think this is entirely reasonable. Only bloody idiots drive to bars / pubs anyway. If someone knows they are going to engage in an activity which will make them a bad driver yet still driver their car then they ought to be pay more.
Seriously, fuck off. What if you took the subway? A taxi? Had a designated driver? Had two drinks and then spent three hours playing pool, after which the alcohol would be completely digested? Not to mention that fact that when I legally go to the bar and legally have a drink it is None Of Their Fucking Business. When you happily hand your rights over while grabbing your anckles for state inspections, you are helping them do the same to the rest of us as well.
Actually, I question the methodology they use for the polls in the first place. The vast majority of those I've seen cited in the media are government-funded, and carried out by the kind of organisation one hires when one already knows the result required.
Having seen the full list of questions they asked in a couple of cases, it usually goes something like this:
What they fail to mention is that:
You show me a study that presents both the questions at the top of this post and the verifiable facts afterwards in a balanced way and then tells me the majority of the population wants ID cards, and I'll believe my failure to encounter a single person who speaks favourably of them is just a matter of moving in different circles. Until then, it's just lying with statistics, and you can conduct as many polls as you like but still you have no meaningful information about how the population as a whole would feel on the issue if it had a balanced knowledge of the potential advantages and potential risks.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Over here in blighty we've a number of other terms for this state of inebriation. A few of them are below
drunk
mullered
wasted
trashed
beanoed
trolleyed
badgered
rat-arsed
ratted
tight
lashed
When out drinking on can be:
on the piss
out on the lash
on the badger
on the raz
having a couple of sherberts
and many many more...
Note that I've been all over the country and some of the slang is very localised. If anyone can contribute some more to the education of the site in expressing their state of disrepair...