Before leaving Britain, I lived in an area that had a ~50% poverty rate. The number of betting shops, small and large brands, just on the local high street alone was ridiculous. It reduced somewhat as gambling has moved online, however there is clearly still money to be made in bricks and mortar gambling.

New Labour did that with gambling deregulation.

Betting shops have begun to disappear not just because of moving online, but because regulations have finally limited the pernicious power of the fixed-odds betting terminal (FOBT). They were so disgustingly, vampirically profitable they were reason alone to open betting shops in small premises; two members of staff and four FOBTs and any small shop rakes it in. Now they finally do not make enough profit for that to be worth it.

Oddly, betting shops aren't in any planning categories and AFAIK never have been, so whenever you see one, it was specifically and individually approved. Which should tell you a thing or two about the uncomfortable overlap between small-scale commercial landlords and councillors.

> Which should tell you a thing or two about the uncomfortable overlap between small-scale commercial landlords and councillors.

Hah, like in my town, where they are so in bed with each other their families and kids go on vacation together.

And then they approve waterfront developments on the side of hills that failed ecological testing and failed traffic assessments (in this case that the local roads could not support the traffic load -and- because of the topology there was no room to increase traffic capacity and the closest you'd be able to do would be eminent-domain'ing ~200 homes to widen a road out to an arterial, for the benefit of the 450 new units. I'd better not give them ideas...)

And the local newspaper is so in bed with both that when this approval was announced, the article in the paper mentioned all the opponents by name, got a tepid comment from the town, but couldn't bring themselves once to name the developer (You can find out who it is of course, but the newspaper won't help you, even while publishing their artists renderings).

And

She gave a talk at my then employer during the pandemic, I think that was my first time listening to her. Well deserved.

And only available in person at the Washington Passport Agency.

This was listed as a hallucination but is the most accurate for my name: “A NAME THAT MAY REFER TO AN INDIVIDUAL, BUT I CAN’T IDENTIFY A SINGLE WELL-KNOWN PERSON WITH CERTAINTY FROM THE QUERY ALONE.”

Same result here. That reasonable response was buried in page 2 of the hallucinated results.

Meanwhile, Gemini 3.1 Lite said with great confidence that I was a military police officer who gained national attention in 2024 after being involved in a high-profile confrontation. Other AIs said I was a footballer. Not sure if it's hilarious or worrying...

I got similar from ChatGPT - I took the wording to imply it knew exactly who I was but was going to keep quiet as I am not a "public figure".

Slight correction here. It is fraud if you intend to stay after getting married. Nobody cares if you get married on a tourist visa and leave the country after.

In DC too. Usually associated with political campaigns, although I recently saw one advertising Uber Teens outside a school.

Yes, the government has concocted a dastardly conspiracy to cut health system costs by reducing access to a known cause of illness.

If only we could impprison them all. Beeing in prison reduces almost all life risks, even that of incarceration.

I’ve recently been unwillingly exposed to this side of things. It’s truly an insane, there must be a better way?

It's BASIC. LET them GOTO jail (BSD also comes to mind)

(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_licensing_corruption... ) The upside: the EU finally got a prosecutor. And last but not least everybody forgot why the Baby Bells were born.

And it is not impossible the posts ended up in the training corpus.

It looks like a clone of present-day Reddit to me.