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[Akura]

No, that wouldn't work. My stepdad already complains about a smell that only he seems to have any perception of.

[Egan_BW]

If it's sealed well, it won't smell like anything until he opens it, at which point everyone else will very much be able to smell it.

[Greiger]

We have a temporary assistant manager at the store.  Our store is typically lax on coupon rules and stuff like that, with a 'if the system accepts it, we accept it' mentality, and we have a number of loyal repeat customers because of that.  The temp manager, despite that she is only going to be here a total of 2 weeks, wants to change that.  And is on a one woman crusade to do so.

3 days ago I was ringing one of those regulars up, using multiple cupons.  They were duplicate coupons, but the system accepts multiple, they were not photocopies, and they were below the cutoff limit, which this customer admittedly knows exactly where that cutoff is. Essentially this customer knows all or our rules we follow at that location. The temp manager sees me ringing them up and demands I stop, tells the customer to her face that she's no better than a shoplifter (with a long line so plenty to hear it), and then after the line is made more manageable(which took some time since the whole order had to be voided one item at a time), calls me in to the office and immediately gives me a first-and-final warning writeup for assisting in theft of product.

Today I find out that that writeup was tossed out, and that she acted out of line.  However I still have 3 new 'not satisfied' linked to that event on my cashier survey results complaining about it.  2 of them sympathize with me in the comments, but only the 'not satisfied' actually matters.  WTF how is it right an outburst by a manager, a temporary one at that, ends up counting against MY numbers?

[wierd]

Dont you know, if they started eating managers, the ooboros would eat itself completely. /snark

that is to say, Corporate is always looking for places to cut fat, EXCEPT from management. (Because if the dog starts barking up that tree, they KNOW they will be found to be quite corpulent indeed.) If they can divert attention through defacto malfeasance like this, they will.

[pikachu17]

If it's sealed well, it won't smell like anything until he opens it, at which point everyone else will very much be able to smell it.

But the skunk smell would be right under his bed then. Doesn't seem like something one would want.

[Reelya]

Stupid clickbait headlines. An article was headlined "Contents of poison cup revealed" for that Croat general who killed himself. The article reveals:

A DEADLY chemical was in the container from which a Croat war criminal drank shortly before dying, a Dutch prosecutor said Thursday, as an independent investigation into the dramatic death of Slobodan Praljak moved forward.

“There was a preliminary test of the substance in the container and all I can say for now is that there was a chemical substance in that container that can cause death,” Prosecutor Marilyn Fikenscher told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

She declined to elaborate on the exact nature of the substance.

So it was a chemical. A deadly one! No fucking shit, Sherlock, I could have told you that. Talk about fake stories. It went on to discuss more details about the case at length, but that's a clear bait-and-switch: the story's body doesn't match the headline.

[smjjames]

Not sure why it would matter what poison he took, aside from recording for history, and curiosity.

Though if he used hmlock, that would fit with the "Greek Drama" headlines in local and regional newspapers and stuff that Politico mentioned.

[Yoink]

Poor dude.

[Egan_BW]

He was standing trial for war crimes, and drank poison to get out of it. Fuck em.

[Yoink]

Hmmm. I was going to post a somewhat heated response to that, but I suppose that could be rather inflammatory. Let's just say I disagree and leave it at that.

[Reelya]

How so, man? The guy drank the poison of his own volition. That's nobody else's fault.

You can't go around not convicting any criminals because they might get upset and do something bad to themselves. fuck him, he covered up mass murder. He goes to court like anyone else.

Nobody is at fault here and I can't see how you can rationally blame anyone else.

The guy hid some poison on himself when going into court. While they do check for weapons etc, it's not reasonable to take the steps needed to prevent things like this from happening. The only logical way to make sure this never happens again would be to implement full cavity searches for all suspects - which would be a gross violation of the civil rights and dignity of all suspects entering the court.

[Yoink]

What? I'm not talking about the poison, I'm talking about the guy being convicted for war crimes in the first place. As it is, with the massive sentence he'd just been hit with the guy might as well have been dead anyway... well, I suppose that depends on what kind of prison he would have been housed in, but these tribunal-type things have a tendency to treat so-called "war criminals" rather poorly so I think it's a fairly safe assumption that his digs, so to speak, would not have been particularly cushy.

Good on him for taking his opportunity to escape. *shrug*

[Reelya]

I still don't get what you are saying? you're saying Bosnia was just a walk in the park and nobody should be held accountable? Or you have specific knowledge that makes you believe that this guy specifically should not have been charged? The massacres definitely happened. You're seeing this as some abstract crime, but imagine if one of the dead had been your mother or grandmother? Would you take the same dismissive tone of the criminal charges then?

And no, war crimes tribunals aren't treating anyone that harshly. They're not doing the shit to the war criminals that they did to others. If you spend 20 years in a cell for cutting people's genitals off, then you're not being treated harshly. It's not like he wasn't personally connected to some pretty fucked up shit:

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2017/nov/29/the-day-i-came-face-to-face-with-general-slobodan-praljak-in-the-hague

General Praljak had signed an order allowing three reporters, including your correspondent, to enter a concentration camp under his command at Dretelj, near the Bosnian-Croat stronghold of Čaplinja, where Bosnian Muslim men were being maltreated, starved and killed.
...
In one warehouse, hundreds of terrified men were packed, sitting or squatting; some time beforehand the door had been closed for 72 hours, leaving them suffocating in the heat and stench, drinking their own urine.

We proceeded to two hangars dug into a hill. The doors were open, but it was dark inside. The prisoners within were in an appalling state – skeletally thin, eyes unfocused, with skin problems. They told us how the doors were often locked and one night drunken guards had opened fire through them, killing and wounding several.

We saw gnarled bullet holes in the metal door, and impacts on the rear wall of the tunnel. Though Muslim, many of the prisoners had fought for Praljak’s Bosnian-Croat HVO against the common Serbian enemy, and were now interned and persecuted by their former comrades.

20 year sentence for running a camp like this? Basically most of the people here had fought for Praljak, but after they were seen as expendable they were rounded up, tortured and starved, basically because they weren't Christians. Fuck Praljak. 20 years is getting off lightly, even excluding all else he might be responsible for.

I really can't fathom your "be nice to the poor innocent war criminals" thing, dude. It's not something to be outraged about. These are people that ruin other people's lives, and oversee rape, mutilation and murder. They get off lightly if they're lucky enough that it's the U.N., and not somebody else, who get their mitts on them.

[wierd]

I dunno.  Some part of me niggles, and says that we need to know for certain that this general had true knowledge of the administration of this camp, and was not being fed smoke by subordinates who were sadists.

It says we need to know that before we can be cavalier in upholding sentence.  That part of me says that is what this trial was about. It also tells me that he is probably not the only one involved, or might have been scapegoated by the regime to contain the warcrimes charges. (EG, the shit is deeper than him, and he was expendable.)

I dont have all the facts, and must therefore approach it with less gusto.

That said, that this man felt he needed to kill himself rather than serve time in a prison kinda implies that he considered the kind of prison he was being tried for running was a "normal prison", and he would expect the same kinds of treatment. I then wonder about who has ultimate culpability there, if he honestly felt that is how war and warcrime prisoners should be (and are) treated while incarcerated.

So many things that might be, that everyone is tight lipped about-- so little actually stated as fact.

[Arx]

I actually have something of a sense of direction in life for the first time in years. It feels completely, utterly, absurd, but I'd like to go into teaching. I'll probably still be mulling it over for another year or so before I have to make a final call, but a lot of it feels right.

It also feels really strange, though, because this is... not where I expected my life to go. I always anticipated I'd go into engineering, up until I got towards the end of high school and decided it didn't actually interest me that much, but then I changed to a CS degree and it wasn't actually a big deal. I always kind of planned on doing a three year B.Sc. and then an Honours degree, but if I go into teaching it'll be a PGCE (teaching certificate) instead of Honours, and that's completely unfamiliar.

I've always wanted to make a difference for the good, cast my ripples in eternity as it were, and teaching is probably the best way for me to do that. Nonetheless, though, if you'd told me three years ago I'd go into teaching... I don't know what I'd say, but I don't know if I'd believe you.

My life feels like some kind of bizarre novel right now.