Yup

An old friend of mine that I’ve lost touch with is Chinese. They lived in Europe for a number of years. When they couldn’t get a new job their visa ran out and the went back home.

No problem getting a job. They had a place to live. Things were good.

But… When they left Europe they basically told their roommate, a student who was about 10 years their younger, that they were leaving and that’s it. They abandoned the apartment. This left not only rent up to the student, but also the €300 fee of changing the name on the rental contract.

If a police investigation is launched against someone in China, you can be damned sure they will turn up something. If this influencer ever saw a doobie they will find out, and if they never did drugs they will find an acquaintance who did.

I say this because one day when my friend left work there was a car waiting. It was the father of her roommate. Turns out he was a “special” police officer. He told them to get in and gave her a folder. The folder had photos of them, their friends, even me. There were notes on the friends, SMS and social media exchanges. This included references to drugs. He took them to a bank, told them to take out the equivalent of €900 (he had their bank statements already) or their family would hear about this…and then he left them there on the street.

Amazing that I can live in the country and hear nothing about this. I’ve just read the Guardian article and I guess not living in Paris or another major city might be one of the reasons.

Probably a private school thing in that case. I haven’t taught at a public uni since 2008, but parents wouldn’t have tried to get involved back then.

I cannot contact parents, but administrators will without question.

This sounds precise. My partner’s family is ultra conservative. Nothing they share is bland. It is all sensational, end-of-the-world level stuff: the immigrants are coming, the government is controlled by Illuminati, “they” gave us COVID and are making us eat insects while “they” eat like kings, economic collapse is just around the corner…

Not a thing on climate change, though…

This shocked me as well because my parents weren’t involved with my work or education after finishing high school.

In France, this is not the case. The majority of people are supported by their parents until the end of secondary education, especially when it comes to my students who are all in private institutions.

It is extremely rare for a student to have a job, for example.

Parents do get involved for even minor things, and will come stomping into the school flanked by a lawyer.

Why would they be involved?

Because they pay. That’s all.

Now, university is practically free and lots of students get a bursary (not a loan) to help them along. But, their parents will still pay rent sometimes because a full-time student with a job is seen as the most amazing thing here.

I will often bring up this stark contrast to how when I was a student I had 4 different jobs and still ended my studies 60k in debt and didn’t even see my parents during the school year, let alone get any money from them.

My partner is Spanish. Most of the news her family (from Spain) shares is fake as hell.

True! Guardian is British but still, they need a better analogy.

I am a professor as several different schools in France (business, notarial studies, agricultural engineers, communication). I would day 95% of my students are from well-to-do families. But, most of them are required to find paid internships. The notary students usually get unpaid internships.

As an internship advisor, I can confirm one thing: paid or not, they put in the hours and take the same crap as a paid employee. Sometimes it is worse. For example, if an intern is absent from work, the message gets to me, and I send it up the chain of command and sometimes parents get involved. It is stressful for the students. My business students get paid internships (about €1400/month) but still need help from their parents and many of them will be doing something they don’t really want to do (think finance instead of marketing).

Now, being a professor I am in contact with a rather large network of of profs spanning the private and public sector… My colleagues from the public sector are worried about this looming change to laws. It would lead to an overhaul of the system as the internship is counted as a credit. If it is decided that they should be paid, how many companies will want to pay when they can just hire a part-timer for the summer?

I’ve told this tale 3 years running now:

I work at an international business school. I try to stay up to day on world news. There was a paragraph written about “infectious pneumonia” in Time magazine or The Economist the last week of 2019 (so the issue published the first week of 2020, I think).

Returning to work a week later I mentioned it in class, because that year I had about 6 students from different parts of China.

They said, “it’s nothing, just a flu.”

The next week, as numbers started to be published they said, “no, it’s an exaggeration.”

The week after they were the first students to start wearing masks.

Week 4, they told us they hadn’t heard from their families in several days. This would have been February 2020.

I felt so horrible for those students that year. They were only 18 or 19 years old. Sent to France in January 2019 (they are required to come several months before classes start in order to learn French and pass some tests). They were locked down March 16th 2020 and forced to take lessons on Zoom. Unable to return home for the summer. Took another semester on Zoom, etc., etc.…

I think they finally managed to head home in the spring of 2021.

It might be politically incorrect to share it here, you’re right.

Employees would need to trust their employers quite a bit in this case. And if you tip with your card, employers probably deduct a percentage and call it a “transaction fee” and pocket that too.

North of the border, the Canadians are also getting pissed off. My 72-year-old mother accidentally press the tip button on a self-service gas pump and tipped 20%. She was livid.

Over here in the EU we don’t do the tipping. It is proposed on things like Uber Eats and some of the riders certainly take their time if they don’t get a tip. Pardon my French, but when they roll up in a car or on a scooter, they can fuck right off. I tip cash when the deliverer is on a bike.

Other foruma offer anonymization of the post. Discourse can do this and so does hacker news. You can choose to make a post, comment, or an entire account anonymized and continue posting away…

Just for clarification, in case anyone is in the same situation as me…

Clicking on that link just takes me to the MSN front-page for some reason… The French version, because I live in France. This article is from The Jerusalem Post and the lead is:

The BBC’s Spanish-language service released a program claiming that “Jewish wealth and influence” in the United States is the reason behind the United States’ ongoing support for Israel, according to a translation produced by Jewish News on October 20.

If you speak Spanish you can see the program in question here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G16Mnq93qL0

Article: https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-769435

Conclusion is that of OP: BBC are in hot water.

As a Canadian, as much as I like it when news providers stick to their guns, I think the CBC will also probably need to make some updates to the way they use the “T” words in the future.

Maps and Misinformation

Sorry, not news or updates, but also not worth creating a thread.

I’ve been seeing lots of maps on Lemmy (mostly in French-speaking communities communities). A number of them look like this:

And then I’ve seen others that look like this (usually labelled as “fact” or “reality”):

With the exception of an amazing 3-day event that took place in my school (we had some history professors/researchers come in over 3 days and present us arguments from both sides, then moderate a debate…) I received no education about this, and even if I had it would have been about 20 years ago or more.

I suspect we have all seen a version of this map before. I can read the Wikipedia, and watch the documentaries, but where should I look to be able to come to a decision on my own regarding these maps? Meaning, is one of them more factual than the other?

I can tell some of the people commenting here are holding back, but there is an undertone of something here that isn’t very Beehaw…

Anyway.

As I live in France, I can confirm that something like this was inevitable. First of all, the politician who called the ban is severely disliked. His name is used as a synonym for poop on the internet. That is just a small detail…

It was more or less decided that he cannot put a blanket ban and would need to ban case by case, but I may have missed something since yesterday.

Through migration and gentrification, France has set itself up for minor disasters such as this. Also, through education. I am from Canada, and I remember learning about this conflict in highschool in the late '90s. But, teenager me didn’t even know at the time what a Muslim was or why religion had anything to do with it. Here in France, students do not learn about it at school, they learn about it from parents. The French way of thinking is always about time, context, and place.

So, last week was the time. Context was terrorism. Place was… Israel. The media here can be quite biased. Lots of younger people have no clue what biased means. They consume lots of YouTube and prefer things to be vulgarised, meaning simplified, and will adopt the opinion of a YouTuber or influencer quite easily. This is contradictory to how the French used to think even 10 years ago.

Since Monday, a fake story about Arabs planning a djihad has been circulating on social media. It is all over French Instagram (my partner showed me) and Telegram too.

Ignorance, fearmongering, bloodlust, racism…all the bad shit could boil over. Adding fuel to the fire is the trend of calling out and doxxing anyone who criticises country A instead of county B.

I think the police will have a busy day and some looters will again take advantage of the situation.

Laura was around the time she dated Danny’s brother. Story goes she left.

Vilmer and Danny were close after the show. I think they went into business. I think they bought the Vista Cruiser from the series together? I don’t remember everything, just watched Entertainment Tonight every evening at dinner because that’s what was on.

I was the right age for That '70s Show during the original broadcast. Eric was always the character I liked the most, and Grace was the better actor of the bunch. Literally discovered at a high school play. Awesome. He did some great villains over the years (David Duke, holy hell) and when he shows up in random things, like Black Mirror, it’s like, “dang, dude is a pro”…

It was known back then that Scientology had their fingers in the pot on this series. Especially when it ended. That is how I learned about Scientology, in fact.

I am blown away by how successfully these 2 have tanked their careers in the past few days. I mean, they will continue to be in films. But, when the internet is the courtroom and the public is the jury… they’re boned. Predictable apology video? Come on! Just… don’t.

I am so disappointed that one of the defining series of my adolescence is ruined. I am not an emotional person. I am pretty cold about things, in fact. This is not a disappointment fueled by the bubbling rage of the internet. This is sincere. Most of all, I am disappointed that it has taken so long for him to receive his punishment. Those poor people that have had to wait, and retell their stories and nightmares again and again.

Vilmer and Laura will likely make statements, maybe not soon, but hopefully they will do a more believable job than these two. Both were part of the, uh, “belief system” at different points in their lives.

I feel like the police should have been able to find that truck without the help of the Google review, but I’m not a detective. Just awful how the culprit tried to use his own daughter in an alibi.