Tag Archive for: Ridiculous

Teen fined by airline over ridiculous clothing baggage hack

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This “runway” attire wasn’t going to fly.

Another day, another traveler with a bold new way to game the luggage fine system. An Australian teen was slapped with a fine after attempting to circumvent an airline baggage fee — by donning more than 13 pounds of clothing, as seen in a video blowing up online.

“I looked like a bear. I’m small and petite but I looked like the exact opposite,” Adriana Ocampo, 19, told South West News Service of her backfired travel hack, which she attempted to pull during a Jetstar Airways flight from Melbourne to her hometown of Adelaide.

The teen, who had just been on a girls’ trip with pal Emily Altamura, also 19, said she knew her luggage was over the airline’s 15-pound limit after she could “barely close” her bag in the hotel room.

Nonetheless, the duo schlepped their oversize load to the airport in the hopes that the crew wouldn’t have time to check — which proved not to be the case.

“When we went to board, we saw them pulling out a trolley with a scale,” rued Ocampo.


Adriana Ocampo.
“They said the fine was $65 and we didn’t feel like spending $65 so we went back and put more clothes on,” said Adriana Ocampo.
Kennedy News & Media

Adriana Ocampo and her friend Emily Atalmura.
Ocampo (right) and her friend, Emily Altamura.
Kennedy News & Media

That’s when she got an unorthodox idea.

“We thought the only way we can take the weight off our bags is if we put it on ourselves so we started putting on our jackets and coats,” said the gal, who was forced to do this routine a second time because her bag was still over the limit.

In the aforementioned footage, the Aussie can be seen laughing hysterically as she yanks all her clothing out of the suitcase and dons it until she’s wearing 15 different things, including an iPad stuffed in her pants.

Her friend, meanwhile, follows suit, until the two resemble Ralphie’s jacket-swaddled little brother from “A Christmas Story.”

“As well as layers of jackets and jumpers, I had baggy trousers on and I was stuffing t-shirts and my iPad in them,” described the human garment rack. “I had about six layers on and stuff in my pockets.”


Ocampo with an iPad stuffed in her pants.
Ocampo with an iPad stuffed in her…

Source…

Georgia election official debunks Trump’s ‘ridiculous claims’

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  • Georgia Voting System Implementation Manager Gabriel Sterling fact-checked a wide range of President Donald Trump’s new and old baseless election and voter fraud claims on Monday. 
  • Sterling’s weekly news conference came after multiple news organizations published audio of a stunning hour-long call where Trump pressured Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to reverse the election results.
  • Sterling said that he “screamed into his computer” and “screamed in his car” when he heard Trump repeating debunked conspiracies about ballots being tampered with at State Farm Arena.
  • “Again, this is all easily, provably, false. Yet, the president persists. And by doing so, undermines Georgians’ faith in the election system, especially Republican Georgians,” Sterling said. 
  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

In a news conference Monday, Georgia Voting System Implementation Manager Gabriel Sterling tried to fact check as many of President Donald Trump’s election and voter fraud claims as possible.

Monday’s press conference was the latest in a series of news conferences that Sterling has dubbed “anti-disinformation Mondays” or “Groundhog Day Mondays” of refuting the same general falsehoods and misconceptions about the November election. 

Sterling, at times appearing exacerbated, emphasized that the state has conducted a thorough audit of its results and that voters should not “self-censor” by refusing to vote in Tuesday’s Senate runoff elections because of Trump’s mischaracterization of the November election as fraudulent.

 

The news conference came on the heels of a leaked phone call between the president and Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, where Trump urged him to “find” thousands of votes that would retroactively flip the Peach State’s results in his favor.

Read more: Secret Service experts are speculating in group chats about how Trump might be hauled out of the White House if he won’t budge on Inauguration Day

Sterling was flanked on Monday by a large chart showing Trump’s accusations juxtaposed with facts on how Georgia conducts its elections.

“We see nothing in our investigations…

Source…

California Cities Voting On Ridiculous Resolution Asking Congress For Section 230 Reform… Because Of Violence At Protests?

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I attended an Internet Archive event (virtually, of course) yesterday, and afterwards one of the attendees alerted me to yet another nefarious attack on Section 230 based on out-and-out lies. Apparently the League of California Cities has been going around getting various California cities to vote on a completely misleading and bogus motion pushing for Congress to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It was apparently put up first by the city of Cerritos, which is part of Los Angeles County (almost surprised it wasn’t started in Hollywood, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that the impetus behind it was Hollywood people…). Basically, cities are voting on whether or not the League of California Cities should officially call on Congress to amend Section 230 in drastic ways… all because of some violence at recent protests about police brutality. The process, apparently, is that one city (in this case Cerritos) makes the proposal, and gets a bunch of other cities to first sign on, and then various other cities take a vote as to whether it becomes official League policy (after which they’d send a letter to Congress, which Congress would probably ignore).

And, if you just read the nonsense that the originating proposal put out there, and had no idea how Section 230, the internet, the 1st Amendment or the 4th Amendment works, it might sound like a good idea. Except that what the proposal says is utter nonsense, disconnected from reality.

This resolution states that the League of California Cities should urge Congress to amend Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) to limit the immunity provided to online platforms where their forums enable criminal activity to be promoted.

Ultimately, the policy objectives proposed under this resolution, if enacted, would incentivize social media companies to establish and implement a reasonable program to identify and remove content that solicits criminal activity.

Except that Section 230 already says there’s no immunity for platforms if they enable federal criminal activity. So this is a made up concern. Second, if you changed 230 in the manner they want, they’re simply wrong that it “would incentivize social media companies to establish and implement a reasonable program to identify and remove content that solicits criminal activity.” Because every major social media platform already has such a program. The problem is not that they don’t have incentives. The problem is that not everyone will ever agree on what the “right” moderation is.

Incredibly, the proposal handwaves away the idea that putting more liability on internet websites might lead to more censorship:

While there is certainly an argument to substantiate concerns around censorship, the use of social media as a tool for organizing violence is equally disturbing.

Tomato, tomahto.

Also, the proposal seems to blame violence that broke out at various protests this summer… on social media, claiming that’s why 230 must change.

Although the majority of protests were peaceful, some demonstrations in cities escalated into riots, looting, and street skirmishes with police. While much of the nation’s focus has been on addressing police misconduct, police brutality, and systemic racism, some have used demonstrators’ peaceful protests on these topics as opportunities to loot and/or vandalize businesses, almost exclusively under the guise of the “Black Lives Matter” movement. It has been uncovered that these “flash robs” were coordinated through the use of social media. The spontaneity and speed of the attacks enabled by social media make it challenging for the police to stop these criminal events as they are occurring, let alone prevent them from commencing altogether.

As these events started occurring across the country, investigators quickly began combing through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram seeking to identify potentially violent extremists, looters, and vandals and finding ways to charge them after — and in some cases before — they sow chaos. While this technique has alarmed civil liberties advocates, who argue the strategy could negatively impact online speech, law enforcement officials claim it aligns with investigation strategies employed in the past.

So, let me get this straight. First, we should blame social media — and not police brutality and militarization — for the cases where violence has broken out at a few protests. And the way to deal with violence organized on social media is to… hold the social media platforms liable rather than those that engaged in or encouraged the violence? Are these people for real?

Also, the full proposal goes way beyond what is described regarding violence at protests. This is what it says:

  1. Online platforms must establish and implement a reasonable program to identify and take down content which solicits criminal activity; and
  2. Online platforms must provide to law enforcement information which will assist in the identification and apprehension of persons who use the services of the platform to solicit and to engage in criminal activity; and
  3. An online platform that willfully or negligently fails in either of these duties is not immune from enforcement of state and local laws which impose criminal or civil liability for such failure.

That would be a massive and problematic change to Section 230. First, as it stands, websites already have tremendous incentive to identify and take down content which solicits criminal activity — and many of them try to do exactly that. Changing 230 will not change that — but will lead to fewer places for people to communicate and put tremendous limits on the ability to speak freely online.

The second prong has nothing to do with Section 230 and raises significant 4th Amendment concerns about when a website should have to hand over private information on someone without any warrant or judicial review. That should be frightening to everyone.

This entire proposal is horrifically authoritarian, and is questionable on both 1st and 4th Amendment grounds, but a bunch of cities are signing onto it because the proposal is extremely misleading about how the internet works, how Section 230 works, and what this all means. While I’m not sure that Congress really gives a shit what the League of California Cities has to say about Section 230, it’s yet another way in which people from all over the place are attacking the law that made the internet, because they’re mad that people they don’t like are doing stuff they don’t like.

Thankfully, at least one California city has rejected the proposal. Last night the city of Hayward rejected the proposal, despite it getting support from the local police chief and the city attorney who, I’m told, used the totally bogus “fire in a crowded theater” line, suggesting that was the law of the land (it’s not) and other wrong and misleading cliches, including “freedom of speech isn’t free.” Thankfully, some on the city council (and the mayor) seemed to recognize that this was a dangerous, half-baked proposal and voted it down. I hope other cities do the same.

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ISU Student Groups Changing Names En Masse To Protest School’s Ridiculous New Trademark Policy

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You will recall that over the past few years, we have been discussing how Iowa State University essentially did everything wrong concerning an alumni group running a pro-marijuana organization that made use of school symbols and iconography. After initially approving the group’s use of school trademarks, several members of the state’s conservative legislature got involved, leading to the school rescinding that authorization. NORML, the name of the group, sued the school, claiming all of this was a violation of their free speech rights. The courts agreed, eventually to the tune of a $ 600k judgement, meaning that school wasted over half a million dollars of taxpayer money to fail at trademark bullying.

You might have expected that this would serve as a delightful education for the school as to the reasons why they don’t want to be a trademark bully. You would be wrong, of course. Instead, the school’s next step was to immediately rewrite its trademark use policy, making it laughably restrictive and essentially attempting to give the school broad oversight over all uses of its iconography by student groups. This, predictably, has led to a full on revolt both by many of the school’s student organizations and its student government.

To start with the student organizations, they are largely dropping ISU connections from their name and branding like a hot stone.

A year ago, Iowa State University’s student chess club was easily tied to the university through its name. Now, it’s the Ames Collegiate Chess Club. The student aviation group had been the Flying Cyclones. Now, they’re the Ames Flyers. And the student space club, which had had “Iowa State” in its name, is Ames Space Teaching and Recognition Association.

Why the changes? University administrators over the summer tightened Iowa State’s trademark policy by limiting most student organizations’ access to trademarked references to the institution.

As noted elsewhere in the post, ISU has a habit of puffing its chest out over its large roster of student-led organizations and clubs. Yet, because of its heavy-handed new policy, those ties to the university are being severed, taking those bragging rights away. Where ISU once could be seen as having a rich tradition of clubs and organizations reveling in student participation, a separation line has now been drawn. All because the school wants to choose control over culture.

And the students are pissed.

The policy so riled student government members that they unanimously approved a resolution this week requesting the administration, at least temporarily, backpedal from the guidelines that were posted Aug. 1 on ISU’s Trademark Licensing Office website.

“The administration went about this poorly,” Michael Tupper, an ISU student government member, said at this week’s meeting. “They implemented the change in the middle of the summer, when there were no students on campus.”

In addition, Tupper said during the meeting, “We’ve been told multiple times that the change was not in direct result to the lawsuit. … That is not true.”

A school spokesperson states that the school will review the resolution and then meet with the student government, but it’s painfully obvious that it would rather have avoided student interaction altogether through sheer timing. Making such a policy change where the primary effect will be felt by student groups when students weren’t even on campus isn’t particularly subtle. Meeting with the student government now is CYA, not some kind of olive branch. And that’s likely why the student government is not screwing around here.

Some at this week’s student government meeting suggested that if university officials don’t follow through on any requests in the resolution, other actions could be taken, including votes of no confidence or censure.

It’s a problem entirely of ISU’s own making. And, given the culture that is supposed to be fostered on college campuses, this is about as wholly unnecessary as it gets. As entertaining as it is watching an institution like ISU learn absolutely all the wrong lessons from a well-publicized trademark dispute, it has to be just as frustrating for the students on campus.

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