They didn't find that there was fraud. They just found that the World Bank has poor financial controls and a lack of transparency in determining where funds are spent.
Of course, a lack of financial controls makes it easier for people to actually commit fraud, but the Oxfam report didn't go to that next level and look for specific evidence of fraud.
I have an uncle who actually audited a large org and found evidence of fraud. Each time something weird was found, he investigated, and alsmot each time fraud of some sort was involved. Pressure increased as the time passed, from all side (especially below, as he was near the top of that bank, but from the side too).
He and his team were physically threatened and had to have bodyguards (actually, it was cops, but they acted as bodyguards). In the early 2000s he decided to call it quit, after 8 years. He told us that the weirdest fraud of all was money laundering, as it was at the same time the easiest and the hardest to prove, depending on who did it.
All that to say actually finding fraud is hard, proving it is even harder, and can be dangerous even for lower orgs, so i won't criticize Oxfam for letting it rest where it is.
I once coded a machine that could make photo-books of your neighbour's living rooms.
It was inspired by Ed Ruscha's "34 Parking Lots in Los Angeles" artist booklet from 1967, and the output looked pretty similar, but with photos of domestic interiors instead of parking lots. So far so ordinary, but the difference was that you could tweet any UK postcode at the machine and a couple of minutes later it would spit out a custom-generated, printed-on-demand booklet of living rooms in that neighbourhood.
The way it worked was when it received a postcode, it went to Gumtree (popular UK second hand listings site) and looked for second hand sofas for sale within a radius of 1km. It then scraped the photos, imported them into a document, generated a PDF on the fly and sent it to a laser printer with a built-in binding machine. The results were insanely good. Always hoped I'd get to show it to Ed Ruscha one day.
The project was commissioned by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, but still kind of pointless from a utilitarian point of view :)
The services in question are provided by the local municipality - and they don’t receive extra government funding for this. So unlike a regular citizen who registers on a real street, from whom the city typically collects taxes, a homeless citizen brings costs without bringing many “benefits” (from a purely economic perspective).
As for why they mandate the creation of these fictitious streets, it’s because Italy’s administrative system is obsessed with linking people to an address in a way that is absolutely alien to many foreigners. When you change address the police literally come round to check you
actually live there…
But in Germany you need an actual address. If you are homeless, you almost legally don't exist. You are prohibited from opening a bank account, for example, or having a job, because you do not exist.
You’re wrong, you have a legal right to a bank account (Basiskonto) if you live in the EU, even if you don’t have a fixed address. The bank literally can’t deny you ( https://www.bafin.de/DE/Verbraucher/Bank/Produkte/Basiskonto... ). You need to give them an address to send mail to, but that can be any address where you can get access to the mail (friends, family, homeless shelter…). Do you have a source for the claim?
in Hungary you also can't do anything with a lakcimkartya (=~ address card). The only difference with Italy is that it's a separate document from the ID card.
Do you have any reliable evidence to back up your assertion that the activity in question "wasn't a very common practice in earlier generations"? The fact that something isn't openly discussed rarely means it's not happening...
> The fact that something isn't openly discussed rarely means it's not happening...
Surely not being openly discussed isn't evidence of it being extremely prevalent either. And given that, it's really hard to imagine reliable evidence one way or the other. But the person you're responding to did not make an obviously ridiculous statement. We all know it's not provable, but I'll happily give them the benefit of the doubt here.
Considering the popularity of porn and its obvious impact on sexual practices (monkey see, monkey do) plus the higher hygiene standards I would imagine butt-eating is more widespread now then ever. I’d also imagine cleaning the soon to be eaten butt would lower the risk
I mean, I can't speak for what was unmentionably hot in the 19th century or whatever, but there are many many living people who were plenty free-spirited during the 20th century and are quite open about what they did and do get up to, and many graphic literary and media accounts of the same.
There are also many much older literary sources on practice and technique that are quite rich and detailed but don't really give it much attention.
You're correct that none of that can provide authoritative counter-evidence to the claim that it's always been as popular and widespread as it is today, but given that many practices do come in and out of fashion, it's easier for most to assume that the particular quiet of the oral and literary historical record about this is because it wasn't popular than that it is the one secret thing that nobody blabbed about in topical literature or ran across much in their own experience. I didn't even think it's recent, dramatic rise in popularity was contentious until you pushed back on it just now.
I'd personally put the burden of proof on demonstrating that it was similarly common rather than that it wasn't. But I would understand those determined to disagree.
There are cultural trends and fashions in intimate practice, though, whether or not you accept that this is one of them.
> It wasn't a very common practice in earlier generations, it became an increasingly common practice in newer generations
...followed by...
> I mean, I can't speak for what was unmentionably hot in the 19th century or whatever
...seems to indicate you should not have been so confident in your initial assertion. A great number of things were likely less mention-able in prior generations, including the act of hetero-normative sex; I suspect people had plenty of sex then, considering we exist at all.
Absolutely nothing that happens anywhere, to anyone, is paid for without selling or burning fossil fuels. Even solar plants reduce the price of electricity, which gives people buying fossil fuel energy the ability to buy more of it.
I don't really think so. I think they're separate issues. If anything, increased warmth, carbon dioxide and water vapor will increase the density of rainforests, ignoring any other emgstive consequences elsewhere around the world. Rainforest conservation and climate change are separate issues, though they overlap in specific ways and circumstances.
Ignoring the source of the funds used for this conservation effort, actively incentivizing rainforest conservation so that real capital is used to that end is a fantastic thing.
So if an acre of rainforest were slated to be "developed" but burning, say, 1 55-gal drum of your favorite hydrocarbon would prevent it, and instead preserve that acre for 5 years, you would be against doing so, because it involves burning fossil fuels? If no, then your statement is untrue.
Just to make sure it's clear to everyone who's commenting about how great this is - in return for UAE paying to protect Liberia's forests, it gets to burn more fossil fuels while claiming to be reducing its carbon output. Not sure whether this is bad news from a climate perspective, but it certainly isn't good news.
No kidding. I read the article, I saw the propellers. I posted because there seemed to me many commenting who thought that modern necessarily implied a jet.
It is a shipping term, it stands for deluvered duty paid. Basically, customs duties are paid by the shipper and the item is delivered directly to the customer. From a logistics perspective it is a massive PITA, but for DTC sales in the EU it's the preferred option.
It stands for 'Delivery Duty Paid', i.e. customs charges, import tariffs, taxes, handling charges are included in the price and don't arrive as an unwelcome surprise.
I see a couple other folks jumped in. It’s basically a way to estimate duties and taxes up front so the EU customer knows the full price before they order.
The reality it that most EU customers already know the price before they order (or have a good idea it’s going to be 20% more). But they like to pretend they don’t.
