The real fiction is that government agencies would be trying to rein them in. If Musk came up with a ray that turned people into eldrich-style horrors, those agencies would be lined up as buyers.
Austin Powers at least got phallic shaped rockets right though
Historically too, physical capabilities and social circumstances may have tended to have female killers use methods such as poisons etc rather than more blatant physical attacks etc. Medical forensic technology was also less advanced, and food safety less rigorous.
If a bunch of people died of a "bad batch" of food or a lover fell down the stairs, drowned etc after too much drink, what would the chances of an in depth-investigation in comparison to say somebody found beaten, strangled, or stabbed?
It's easy to not find something that you're not looking for, and easy to not be looking for it if you start with a biased assumption.
That said, this is a rather dark turn from the more wholesome content of the original post. I very much enjoyed the story as an example of checking one's bias and not assuming the worst of people. One should be careful, but being too much so means missed opportunities for what may end up becoming a beautiful friendship like we've seen here. Both individuals sound like the types of friends I wish I'd had when younger, and the types of adults I'd love to sit and enjoy a meal with.
As with many things, known can be a loaded word.
First of all, the large amount of known serial killers are presumably those that were actually caught, but what about those that weren't? What percentage of killers might be left uncaught simply because in other cases, the focus was on males as suspects?
It's kinda like saying "the vast number of cases where police found drugs during a search were of race X"... but if they're searching "race X" at a 5-1 ratio then yeah that stat is skewed by bias.
For every Dahmer we catch, a Lucy Letby might be running amok because we are biased towards believing that such killers belong to a particular demographic.
I'm older than Gen-Z but I agree. This sounds like it could be a really wholesome movie plot
Ya, it's more a "kinda ruined the moment but in a funny way"
My favorite is still the "I can't swallow this" pill meme
Or even the opposite analogy. A guy goes to a bar that has an ID requirement. Has a few drinks. Meets a girl. They end up having a conversation and she and he hook up.
A week later, the cops show and the guy is charged with a sex crime because the girl was under 18 even though:
So what's the liability of the bar, both towards allowing underage patrons and allowing them to hook up with older individuals while potentially intoxicated? Could they be sued and/or shut down? How does that story change if the bar was known to look the other way on underage patrons, or not properly check ID? How about if the girl in question was known by some of the staff? How about if the man knew that underage patrons were not uncommon.
Who has a case against the bar: the man; the girl or her parents; the police; or maybe all of them?
Nobody should applaud an establishment working under the rules and doing their best being shut down, but when that establishment has a known history of illegal activities on their platform/premises there's a case that can be built against them.
That said, the internet is not a bad, and as a globally accessible platform with no physical presence validating ID and policing users/content can be quite difficult. Hell, we see that here on Lemmy with a not insignificant number of people who engage in illicit activities or troll .
The common thing I've seen in more well -knowncases was the abuser striking up a relationship and pretending to be somebody younger, getting compromising details/photos from the victim, then threatening to release those to family/friends unless the victim follows their wishes (which often providing further sexual images/acts).
Not sure if that might be the case with a service like Omegle, but it was essentially what happened in the Amanda Todd case and other similar cases.
Yeah even mid-90's "the Internet" started with a doodadootdootdadadoot and wasn't exactly fast for the vast majority of little. Early 28.8kbps came out around '94-95, and real-time video of decent quality wasn't so much a thing. More like RealPlayer buffering.
That said, there was still plenty of janky stuff around. BBS's weren't uncommon even before that and generally had people uploading all sorts of stuff. Porn was plentiful, though you often had to wait upwards of a minute for that file to load and see if there were actual boobs.
Newsgroups were full of weird groups as well as fairly normal ones where the occasional troll would post nasty stuff.
You could definitely still run across predators hanging around in various places. IRC had tons of them, and A/S/L is a pretty well-known intro to this day. There were some video chats, though it would have been a pixel, low-FPS mess.
Nowadays the internet is faster, more connected globally and with more people. There's still terrible shit but I don't know that it's any more unexpected/unavoidable than back in the 28.8 days. Parents should be aware and children should be educated on how to be safe online, and platforms should do their best to stem abuse but that's not really an easy thing without style pretty strict ID requirements, which are often strongly resisted for privacy reasons.
One of the things it asks permission for when hooking up Bluetooth etc is "call history", "contacts" or "text messages"
I'd assume the system needs those to read it messages or call/redial. It wouldn't need OCR to do other things with that data
I would actually argue that the workers at the burger place have the harder job, because they would actually have to deal with people more and people tend to suck on terms of respect for those in lower-income jobs
Which is actually one reason I have the ACAB acronym. There are good cops, and they get shit from both ends either for not toeing the blue-line or just for being cops.
If somebody actually does get shot, the ACAB crew is out in full force while often ignoring the lengthy record of crime and violence of the involved - or even camera evidence - while stating it was obviously just a cop looking for somebody to shoot.
Fuckers are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where nobody in their right mind would want to be a cop