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Image via Flickr user vagueonthehow.

Simon Pegg, the British auteur behind the deconstructionist comedies Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World's End, as well as the actor who portrays Montgomery Scott in the J.J. Abrams iteration of the Star Trek films, made some comments to Radio Times about the current state of science fiction. io9 posted the following excerpt from the interview:

Before Star Wars, the films that were box-office hits were The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Bonnie And Clyde and The French Connection – gritty, amoral art movies. Then suddenly the onus switched over to spectacle and everything changed ... I don't know if that is a good thing.
... Obviously I'm very much a self-confessed fan of science fiction and genre cinema but part of me looks at society as it is now and just thinks we've been infantilised by our own taste. Now we're essentially all consuming very childish things – comic books, superheroes. Adults are watching this stuff, and taking it seriously.
It is a kind of dumbing down, in a way, because it's taking our focus away from real-world issues. Films used to be about challenging, emotional journeys or moral questions that might make you walk away and re-evaluate how you felt about ... whatever.
Now we're walking out of the cinema really not thinking about anything, other than the fact that the Hulk just had a fight with a robot.

The comments caused a mild internet uproar, with Pegg becoming a trending topic on Twitter. Now, the actor has taken to his website to clarify his comments. "I guess what I meant was," he wrote, "the more spectacle becomes the driving creative priority, the less thoughtful or challenging the films can become." He added, "Fantasy in all its forms is probably the most potent of social metaphors and as such can be complex and poetic."

The whole post is worth a read, especially for Pegg's thoughts on Game of Thrones, Baudrillard, and magical elves.

Want Some In-Depth Stories About Nerd Stuff?

1. The Illogical Fighting of James T. Kirk
2. Star Wars Ordered a Drone Shield to Prevent Leaks On Set
3. Eleven Things We Know About Star Wars: Battlefront
4. Why I Am Excited for the New Star Wars Movie, Which Is for Children

Drew is on Twitter.

[body_image width='850' height='694' path='images/content-images/2015/05/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/19/' filename='scientists-have-figured-out-a-way-to-brew-opiates-from-yeast-vgtrn-body-image-1432057869.jpg' id='57705']Image via Flickr user eLife.

Scientists in California and Canada have created yeast capable of turning sugar to opiates, PBS reports. The researchers published their findings in Nature Chemical Biology.

Traditionally, opiates such as morphine, codeine, and heroin come from poppy seeds and are processed by a series of enzymes to yield opiates, but this new yeast might allow manufacturers to bypass those steps. Though as of now only a small amount of opium can be created through this new process, the researchers behind the yeast are optimistic that they can develop follow-ups that produce high amounts of opium within two to three years.

This is great news for the medical community, as well as the drug dealing and distribution community. In an op-ed accompanying the findings, MIT political scientist Kenneth Oye urged scientists to take steps to make it difficult for the black market to replicate or outright steal this miracle morphine yeast.

Want more drug stuff?

1. Heroin Holiday
2. Australia Is About to Grow Even More Opium Poppies
3. The Truth About Britain's Looming 'Middle Class Heroin Crisis'
4. My Top-Secret Meeting with One of the Silk Road's Biggest Drug Lords

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A woman wears a niqab in Marrakesh. Photo via Flickr user Jean-Louis Potier

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has received a vote of confidence from an outspoken critic of Islam for his government's plan to ban the niqab for women reciting the oath of allegiance during citizenship ceremonies in Canada.

"I do know that there's this split loyalty that is being demonstrated by people who are taking the oath of citizenship of the countries that their parents or they have migrated to, but at the same time their heart and loyalty lies with a competing set of ideologies, " Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now, told the CBC in an interview Friday.

It isn't quite the same reason that Harper cited earlier this year when he made his position known—that the niqab is "rooted in a culture that is anti-women." While most Canadians do agree with Harper on the issue, the debate is hardly over and will likely be decided by the courts.

Despite a federal court deeming the ban unlawful, the Harper government quietly re-introduced a policy requiring that the niqab be removed during citizenship ceremonies pending a Federal Court of Appeal hearing. With the hearing expected in September that could mean a showdown over a divisive swing issue just in time for this fall's federal election.

But after a glimmer of hope this February when a Federal Court ruled that candidates could perform the citizenship oath while veiled—something that Harper vowed to appeal—oath-takers will now once again be required to remove their facial coverings during the swearing-in ceremony and to choose between what they see as a part of their religious identity and becoming a Canadian citizen.

The policy was announced in a program update on Citizenship and Immigration Canada's website on April 23. It comes after the Federal Court of Appeal stayed a February judgement that deemed the ban against wearing the niqab during the oath-taking ceremony "unlawful." A federal judge ruled then that the ban goes against Canada's own immigration law and "interferes with a citizenship judge's duty to allow candidates for citizenship the greatest possible freedom in the religious solemnization or the solemn affirmation of the oath."

Doubts about legal validity
At the centre of the debate is Zunera Ishaq, a Pakistani woman who has delayed her citizenship ceremony since 2013, arguing that the requirement to remove her veil during the oath violates her rights under the Canadian charter. The reinstated policy means that unless she does so, she'll now have to wait until at least the fall for a chance to become a Canadian citizen—that is, if the case doesn't end up at the Supreme Court.

"From my point of view it's problematic because there is a judge in the federal court who has found the policy to be illegal. And while a stay means that the judgement does not come into effect, I think it casts doubt on the legal validity of the policy," says Ishaq's lawyer, Lorne Waldman.

Currently a female citizenship official can confirm the identity of a female citizenship candidate in private. But once verified, the candidate must also remove her veil during the oath ceremony in front of a room full of others. If she doesn't, she cannot receive her citizenship.

Citizenship and Immigration Canada spokesman Remi Lariviere says the policy will remain in place pending the outcome of the appeal. "Given the enormous rights and privileges that come with being a Canadian citizen, it is reasonable for a citizenship judge to be able to see and hear a citizenship candidate affirm the Oath of Citizenship," he said in an email.

The appeal court must decide if a government policy can limit a citizenship judge's power to decide how far to accommodate a candidate's religious needs.

"Un-Canadian"
On the day of her citizenship ceremony, Zakira Jogiat, 29, knew she was fortunate to be becoming Canadian. Jogiat came here from South Africa in 2005 and became a Canadian citizen in 2010. But it wasn't until a year later—when then immigration minister Jason Kenney introduced a ban against wearing the niqab while performing the citizenship oath—that she realized just how lucky she was.

Jogiat was one of the last women in Canada to take the oath while wearing her facial veil before the new rule—something that now seems like a distant possibility.

"Prior to the ban, I never had to choose between my religious obligations [or] choices and my identity as a Canadian. That is not a choice anyone should be forced to make," she says.

Jogiat says that for the government to implement a policy based on what some within it deems offensive is itself "un-Canadian." "It's like there's this long checklist; that in order to be Canadian you have to dress in a certain way and if you don't meet these requirements, no citizenship for you," she says.

For Mohammed Ayub Khan, a political science researcher at McMaster University, one thing is for sure: the niqab debate will only grow louder ahead of the federal election. He suggests it will likely force all of Canada's major political parties to take a clear position on just what it means to be Canadian.

"Multiculturalism itself might be redefined as a result of these debates," Khan says.

Championing fear
But exactly why the niqab—worn by only a tiny minority of Canadian women—has attracted such widespread attention is raising questions.

"Somehow, all of a sudden, this is a priority for Stephen Harper," says the Liberal candidate for Mississauga Centre, Omar Alghabra.

"This is part of an attempt at tapping into a suspicion and the discomfort that some people may have and embellishing them and pretending to be a champion of their fear," he says.

Whether the Appeal Court will rule to uphold or overturn Ishaq's February win is anyone's guess. But her lawyer isn't ruling out any options. He says it's quite possible that September's expected hearing won't be the last we hear about the niqab and that the unsuccessful party might appeal further.

"This is the type of case that might end up at the Supreme Court for sure," Waldman says.

In the meantime, despite the misconceptions that Jogiat says remain about the niqab, she's glad to see Ishaq isn't backing down from the chance to wear her veil when she becomes Canadian.

Ironically, she says, the very act of doing so has given Ishaq a face. "Because of this people have now started to see her as a human being."

Follow Shanifa Nasser on Twitter.

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Today, KFC posted three new videos to its YouTube channel, featuring former Saturday Night Live actor Darrell Hammond playing the iconic Colonel Sanders, founder of the chicken chain. The company has also launched a new Colonel Sanders site, featuring "The Hall of Colonels," which Hammond-as-Sanders describes as "A totally accurate internet representation of my life." The site features a video game called Colonel Quest with five different levels where the Colonel drops out of school in the 6th grade, catches babies on a small trampoline, gets in a Punch-Out!!-style brawl in a courtroom, has a shootout at a gas station, and finally makes a bunch of fried chicken, respectively.

In the introductory video, called "The State of Kentucky Fried Chicken," Sanders marvels at the developments of the modern world (The International Space Station! Double-sided tape! Cargo pants!) and reminds us all that KFC still exists. The videos have subtle notes of a Kentucky fried take on Phil Hartman's Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer SNL character.

Watch the two other videos below.

Want Some in-depth stories on fast food?

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2. The Capital of Iran Has a Burger Joint Dedicated to an IRA Hunger Striker
3. Fast Food for Thought: Chipotle's Foray Into Publishing
4. A Man Was Arrested for Allegedly Assaulting His Wife with a McChicken Sandwich

Follow Drew on Twitter.

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Image by Flickr user Don Crowley.

It's difficult for me to envision what a typical 13-year-old is like because, for the most part, I think we were all pretty fucked up. Teens in the early aughts were perhaps more complicated than our forebearers, what with Angelfire pages to maintain and AIM profiles to update all while battling the hormones thrust upon our chubby, acne-ridden faces. Personally, it was a time of self-loathing, acute sleep apnea, and listening to "She Hates Me" by Puddle of Mudd on repeat.

I wasn't bullied at school but I probably should've been. I wore my brother's hand-me-down Tazmanian Devil graphic tees, which were remarkably dissimilar to the attire of the popular girls, who wore Juicy velour tracksuits and Limited Too training bras. I wore a Limited Too training bra for a few days once until a popular girl named Jen told me I didn't need to. A low blow to my budding adolescent ego for sure, but ultimately she was right.

Luckily, I found an escape from Jen and her gaggle of rhinestone-encrusted minions. Her name was Stephanie.

Stephanie had it all—double Ds, an active sex-life, and a lucrative modeling career that was sure to take off at any moment if it weren't for her nuisance of a younger sister, 13-year-old Zoë. Stephanie and I were definitely different, practically opposites. Which is a bit strange, considering I created her.

In the beginning, she wasn't an extension of who I was, or even a representation of the person I wanted to be; her only role was to protect my precious tween identity on the internet. Over time, being Stephanie turned into an obsession, an opportunity to sidestep the training bra bullshit and be someone who was better than me, someone who even Princess Jen would be envious of. No one online knew that in my time offline I was going to Hebrew school to study my torah portion and no one in 7th grade knew I spent my evenings moonlighting online as a Hispanic model for The Gap.

I joined the site Habbo Hotel in 2002. It was perfect timing for me. My clinical depression was on the up and up and I had finally outgrown Neopets. Well, maybe I was banned, but that's neither here nor there. Habbo is a glorified chat room, where people (probably mostly teenagers lying about their age) can create avatars, walk around a virtual world, and have cyber sex with each other. In other words, it was fantastic and everything I could have possibly wanted.

I'd log on a couple times a week to check in on my new buddies, and explore the inner depths of my avatar by letting strangers comment on my google image search-sourced "b00bs." It was quite the thrill, so much so that I started doing it more and more. Sooner or later, I began making friends—a natural consequence of spending all my free time in the same place—and my fascination with being Stephanie only became stronger.

At the time my tweenaged counterparts were beginning to discover themselves and what made them happy, I had already completely given up on improving Zoë and was 100 percent focused on creating somebody new. Over the next two years, I was entirely committed to perfecting Stephanie and did everything in my power to make sure no one found out she was the diluted fantasy of a prepubescent Incubus fan.

Stephanie became an "it" girl on Habbo. When she walked into a room, people would wave. She was friends with moderators, had a "job," and a British boyfriend, Chris. Chris was 21 (or so he claimed) and blissfully unaware that he was cyber-touching a 13-year-old. Stephanie had a long history of emotionally abusive exes (a trait I added to explain my skepticism of men) and she was happy that a good man finally respected her. At six months, Chris is still the longest relationship I've ever had, and I definitely learned a lot about sex and human (avatar?) anatomy from him. So thank you, Chris. I have vivid memories of Googling phrases and words he said to me over MSN messenger, learning how to best accommodate his eBoner as we went along.

Related: The Web 1.0 Music of JeromeLOL

I knew "Stephanie" was becoming serious when I started communicating with people from Habbo on MSN and over email. People would ask me to video chat and I'd explain that I couldn't because I shared a one-bedroom apartment with my depressed younger sister, Zoë, who needed a lot of attention. So, I sent people photos of a random Hispanic woman I found while frantically Googling "Gap model" and would occasionally voice chat in a whisper to obscure my teenage white girl cadence. This act worked well—surprisingly well—and I was impressed with myself that I could maintain a character who was so supremely different from the person I was. Of course, the confidence and validation I gained through Stephanie stayed online with her and in no way improved my actual self-esteem, which was speedily disintegrating.

I felt connected to my Habbo friends. We shared an intimacy I had yet to experience in real life. These people had real problems like cigarette addictions and job insecurities and I found it completely fascinating. I made up "adult" problems for Stephanie: cheating ex-boyfriends, an alcoholic father, and an absent mother. This probably should've served as a warning sign to chill out with the Law and Order: SVU and focus on my SSRI dosage, but I cherished the support I received from Chris and the other faceless friends I had made. They talked me through the horror of having my treasured account hacked and I was convinced they could help me through even worse. I trusted them, and despite my own lies, I believed that they were who they said they were. I desperately wanted to believe them and, in retrospect, I see my naiveté as a symptom of seeking stability and support wherever I could find it.

Related: The Chinese Deep Web Takes a Darker Turn

At some point, Stephanie started transitioning into the teenager I was: emotionally unstable, impulsive, and insecure. The level of detachment I felt from her in the beginning of my Habbo Hotel journey was rapidly decreasing. I remember sobbing in my bedroom after I was hacked. Having an emotional meltdown over a fake identity, a fake boyfriend, and a bunch of fake golden elephants that I spent the past year collecting was not very 18-years-old of me, but I definitely didn't have the emotional clarity to see it that way. I found myself becoming distressed and offended when my "friends" vocalized their doubts about who Stephanie actually was. Chris and others were definitely growing suspicious of her and I expended an absurd amount of energy toward making sure that their suspicions were never confirmed. At this point I had maintained the lie for nearly 18 months and at moments I felt closer to Stephanie's online pen-pals than my real friends. My real-life emotions were becoming too turbulent to hide, even to the strangers I had consistently lied to for so long.

My life as Stephanie abruptly ended after two years when I was shipped off to spend a year in intensive therapy. I never came clean on who I was, but by the end I had fabricated so many lies they were becoming difficult to maintain. I was overwhelmed by Stephanie and her "adult problems" and instead of being an escape, she became just another obligation of mine and so did her issues. It may have been overly ambitious to think I could invent and then sustain an entirely new identity—as it turns out humans are surprisingly complicated. I have a feeling my online friends eventually learned I was nothing more than a confused 13-year-old hoping to someday model for a fashion-forward clothing company like The Gap. Poor Chris.

Zoë Klar is on Twitter.

Just how bad is the Patriot Act? If you guessed "bad enough that the ACLU and Tea Party would join forces to make an ads about how bad it is bad," then you'd be correct. Above is "Collect Call," a new TV spot from the ACLU and the Tea Party Patriots, reminding citizens that because of the Patriot Act, the government can watch you Skype with your favorite soldier, and also listen to your doctor tell you about the results of your latest medical test. The Patriot Act expires on June 1, and if it dies, so will the NSA's ability to spy on Americans. This is obviously the desired outcome for both the ACLU, which wants to preserve the civil rights of citizens, as well as the Tea Party apparently, who just generally don't like the government meddling in their business. Which is why the two groups are airing the ad in Washington, DC, as well as in New Hampshire and Iowa.

Five in-depth stories on the freedom (or the lack thereof):

1. New NSA Reform Bill Would Give the Government More Power to Spy On Your Smartphone
2. Is Congress Finally Going to Reform the NSA?
3. It's Still Pretty Easy to Break Into Airports in America
4. When Is Congress Going to Reign in FBI Surveillance?
5. The Head of the NSA Is On a Charm Offensive

Follow Drew on Twitter.

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Subway trains sit idle in the Fieldston neighborhood of the Bronx. Photo via Flickr user H.L.I.T.

Over the weekend, federal agents descended upon an exclusive enclave of New York City that they say served as the distribution hub for all five boroughs as well as Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. On Tuesday afternoon, the DEA announced that their raid resulted in the fourth-largest bust in the American history.

About 154 pounds of dope are now in police custody.

In a statement, NYC Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget Brennan said $50 million was a "conservative estimate" for the street value of the drugs. "To put it in perspective, this load was so large it carried the potential of supplying a dose of heroin to every man, woman and child in New York City," she added.

For about a year, the feds had their eye on alleged ringleader Jose "Hippie" Mercedes and another man named Yenci Cruz Francisco, whom they suspected of receiving monthly shipments of heroin from Culican, Mexico. That area is controlled by the Sinaloa Cartel; back in November, the DEA charged Mercedes's son and man named Juan Infante for their alleged roles in the enterprise.

On Saturday, agents trailed Merecdes and Francisco to Montville, New Jersey. There, the alleged drug mavens spent about an hour in an industrial lot before heading back to the city. The next day, agents pulled over Mercedes for questioning and found a brown substance in his car. They separately pulled over Francisco and found 70 kilos labelled "Rolex" in a compartment of his SUV, as well as $24,000 cash.

Later, agents searched an apartment in the exclusive Bronx neighborhood of Fieldston. The feds found the base of operations abutting a park and close to the Ivy League prep school Horace Mann. Down a tree-lined street, inside a brick building and underneath some floorboards, agents discovered $2 million in cash.

Both Mercedes, who is 46, and Francisco, who is 19, have been charged with operating as a major trafficker, along with criminal possession of a controlled substance in the first degree. They face a maximum penalty of life in prison, and are being held without bail.

Related: A heroin addict talks about Chief Keef and violent crime in Chicago.

Much has been made over the past few years about a so-called heroin epidemic, especially in the Northeastern US, and the fact that the drug has been seeping into the suburbs. A lot of that can be attributed to a recent national crackdown on prescription drugs, which often leads people to seek out heroin as a substitute. In June 2012, the New York Legislature passed a bill implementing the Internet System for Tracking Over-Prescribing—a database that quickly curbed painkiller abuse.

But addicts needed something to fill the void. In 2013, heroin use reached a ten-year high. Abuse reached such a fever pitch that in May of last year, New York City cops started carrying an antidote for the drug. Now, state police say that last weekend's raid—the biggest ever in New York state history—will cut off a major pipeline that feeds much of the Northeast.

"This case will have a significant impact on the drug trade in New York State and throughout the Northeast, by keeping this large load of heroin out of our communities," New York State Police Superintendent Joseph A. D'Amico said in a statement. "We continue to send a clear message to those dealing these dangerous and deadly drugs—you will be found, you will be prosecuted and you will go to prison."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

[body_image width='2000' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2015/05/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/05/19/' filename='black-market-proves-art-fairs-dont-have-to-totally-fucking-suck-405-body-image-1432046509.jpg' id='57596']^{Yung Jake performing at Black Market (all photos by Andrea Arrubla)}

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Some schoolkids, none of whom are racist

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Hampshire in the mid 1980s wasn't a very friendly place for black people – my schoolmates helped make sure of that. I was five years old, and our first-year class had the sum total of one non-white person in it – the first most of us had ever seen. Her name was "Janu," and a round-faced little bully in the class dubbed her "Janu the Poo."

That five-year-old bully didn't even know how to swear properly, but they did know how to be racist. I could write some easy, cynical lines here about how sorry I am for not stepping in and doing something about it, but honestly, looking back almost 30 years, I don't even recognize that toddler as me in any meaningful sense. Saying sorry now would be like apologizing to my parents for shitting my nappy.

All kids are relatively stupid. That's why we have minimum age limits for things like driving, sex or being a criminal. We don't have an age limit for being a prop in a political campaign though, which was a shame for wannabe Labour leader Tristram Hunt during the election campaign when he made the mistake of asking a kid who he'd vote for, given the chance. "UKIP," came the reply. The kid wanted to kick foreigners out of the country, which was a bit awkward.

Was Hunt unlucky? Not really, according to the charity Show Racism The Red Card, which has just published the results of a survey of over 6,000 schoolchildren and found some pretty worrying results.

The survey asked the kids a bunch of questions that people who say "I'm not racist, but..." would answer "yes" to. Do children think immigrants are stealing all their future jobs, do they think Muslims are taking over the country, and so on. They may not be overtly racist, but they signal a kind of ugly ignorance that can often lead to that conclusion.

The results are mixed. On some measures, the kids didn't seem like bigots at all—only 19 percent disagreed that Muslims make a "positive contribution" to England, and just 14 percent disagreed with the statement that Islam is a "peaceful religion."

Other results, though, suggest that our kids have more in common with UKIP's red-faced blowhards than we'd perhaps like. The average English kid believes that 47 percent of people in Britain are foreign-born, which makes them even more misguided than the average English adult, 31 percent of whom believed that stat. (The real figure is 13 percent.) They also believed that Muslims made up over a third of the population (in reality, it's 5 percent) and a third of kids agreed with the statement, "Muslims are taking over England."

Related: When is a band name so offensive it should be changed?

As for actual racism, well that's a question that's been enraging the Daily Mail for years now: Can a kid be racist? The newspaper has long been furious that schools record racist and homophobic incidents. "Teachers are branding thousands of children racist or homophobic following playground squabbles," it complained in 2011. "Schools are forced to report the language to education authorities, which keep a register of incidents."

The idea the Mail have pushed is that this adds up to something like a register of communists, where Big Government can ruin your life for some dumb thing you said as a three-year-old. In reality, though, all schools are doing is recording incidents—they're not making judgments on the children involved.

Watch our documentary about the London Black Revolutionaries, the radical black and Asian protest group.

And there's a big heap of irony in where this all started. Remember how the Mail risked legal action to campaign for the convictions of the racist murderers of Stephen Lawrence? Well, that same incident triggered this survey. The McPherson Inquiry that investigated the—and famously called the Met police service "institutionally racist"—also said: "Racism, institutional or otherwise, is not the prerogative of the Police Service. It is clear that other agencies including for example those dealing with housing and education also suffer from the disease. If racism is to be eradicated there must be specific and co-ordinated action both within the agencies themselves and by society at large, particularly through the educational system, from pre-primary school upwards and onwards."

That's the problem with loud, white-led campaigns against racism in a nutshell—it's really fucking easy to say racism is a terrible thing and should be stamped out, but as soon as the lens gets turned on our own middle-class communities and schools we squeal with outrage at the sheer bloody cheek of it all. Or simply ignore it—the latest survey of schoolchildren doesn't seem to have had any play in the right-wing press so far, despite appearing in the Mirror and the Guardian.

But homophobic and racist abuse was pretty much a fact of life at my school, as I imagine it was at many others, and it's weird that people are so reluctant to admit it.

It's information that we need to hear, too. As McPherson's report noted, racism in society starts with our kids. Clearly we have a responsibility to figure out where that racism is coming from and how to address it, and the best way to start is by collecting data so we have some vague idea of what's going on in our schools. Of course, Show Racism The Red Card's survey suggest one possible cause: 75 percent of school-children believe that newspapers can contribute to racism.

I'd love to add more detail here about why kids are racist and how to stop it, but the truth is we don't know nearly as much as we should at this point. The Coalition For Racial Equality and Rights published a report recently looking at incident numbers from Scotland, and the data is just obviously shitty. For example, 30 percent of secondary school pupils said they'd dealt with racism around school (outside the classroom) in the previous week, compared to only 6.8 percent of teachers. Think the teachers are right and the kids are exaggerating? Well it turns out that, in the classroom, 5.7 percent of teachers said they'd dealt with racist incidents but 14.4 percent of support staff hadn't.

None of this helps us get at exact figure, but it tells us that, whatever's happening in English or Scottish schools, teachers are possibly the worst people you could ask about it. Until we fix these kinds of flaws in the methodology, we have no real clue whether racism is growing, falling or staying about the same. We just know that it's common and it's basically everywhere.

Meanwhile, we could argue all day about whether it makes sense to call a five-year-old racist, but I think it makes sense to treat it the same way as any other crime. They'd be too young to be considered a criminal at that age, but that doesn't mean they can't do really shitty things or that we should turn a blind eye when they do. If kids were punching each other, I'm pretty sure parents would want it reported. The fact some of them don't want racist incidents reported in the same way just highlights how many people still aren't taking racism seriously as a problem.

Follow Martin on Twitter.

With a vote of 14-1, the Los Angeles City Council just passed an increase in the minimum wage that will bring wages up to no less than $15 an hour by the year 2020. Much of the effort behind the plan came from Councilman Paul Krekorian, who told the LA Times this week that Los Angeles "is leading the nation."

Since Seattle passed a measure that will raise its minimum wage to $15 last year, progressives in cities around the country have taken up the $15 an hour banner; San Francisco adopted a similar plan later in 2014, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has endorsed the $15 mark as well. But LA is the largest city yet to officially embrace the idea.

Related: Three people in LA are trying to trademark "emo."

According to the Times, the first phase will happen on July 1 of 2016, with wages going up to $10.50. After that, they'll increase every subsequent July 1 to $12.00, $13.25, $14.25, and finally $15 in 2020, although businesses with staffs of 25 or fewer will have an extra year to comply. After 2020, the minimum wage will continue to rise annually based on the Consumer Price Index.

Watch 'Oil of LA' for more on the Los Angeles economy.

This wage hike is going to affect a lot of people. According to a 2013 AFL-CIO report on wages in Los Angeles, 46 percent of workers with conventional wage or salary pay structures were paid less than $15 an hour, while a pro–wage raise group called Economic Roundtable puts the current number at 40 percent.

With LA's high cost of living and status as the single poorest of America's big cities the wage hike will be a huge relief for many. University of California, Berkeley, economist Michael Reich told the New York Times that "the effects here will be the biggest by far," and said that this will change wages "in a way we haven't seen since the 1960s."

"There's a sense spreading that this is the new norm, especially in areas that have high costs of housing," Reich added.

In March, the LA County Board of Supervisors formally began a study into the effects of a similar increase county-wide. That would include incorporated cities fully or partially surrounded by Los Angeles like West Hollywood, Long Beach, and Compton. Without a county-wide increase, such cities may form islands of lower wages within the borders of Los Angeles.

That analogy has also been used by critics of the wage hike, who argue that Los Angeles will become a "wage island," that pushes business into the outlying communities.

Last year, Stuart Waldman, president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Association, and a staunch opponent of the wage plan, criticized it in theLos Angeles Daily News, saying "It is crucial that our government begins gearing policy toward attracting and retaining business. Once businesses are comfortable, well-paying jobs will follow."

Only time will tell what effects the new minimum wage rules will have.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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Mission Street in San Francisco in 2014. Photo via Flickr user torbakhopper

Go to a café in Crown Heights or Harlem or Silver Lake, to the table next to the display case of charcuterie and artisanal flatbreads, and pretty soon you're probably going to overhear yet another conversation about gentrification. The dream of a white-picket fence and a lawn in the suburbs has turned into a nightmare for our generation, which means cities have become increasingly desirable destinations for young professionals, artists, and their ilk. As they move in, rents go up. And as rents go up, it gets harder for lower- and even middle-class residents to stay in their once-affordable neighborhoods.

In San Francisco, the debate about the changing city centers on the Mission—the traditionally working-class Latino neighborhood that has become a favored destination for the tech elite, including Mark Zuckerberg. It is there that Google Buses have been surrounded by colorful acrobats, where the tech bros booted local kids off the soccer field, and where anti-eviction protestors marched on Google lawyer Jack Halprin's home.

On May 5, supervisor David Campos, who represents the district, introduced legislation that would create a 45-day moratorium on the construction of multi-family market-rate housing in the Mission District. If he finds support for the moratorium, it could be extended to as long as two years under California state law. The law would effectively pause the free-housing market in the neighborhood, allowing the city to purchase land to build below-market public options.

The law is an aggressive, "big government" move that is antithetical to the actions of the business-friendly San Francisco City Hall and the free enterprise ideals of Silicon Valley. It's a move most supervisors with dreams of one day being mayor would run away from. But for Campos, it's just the first of a few unpopular steps—the next of which is legislation curtailing commercial Airbnbs—that he believes could save his neighborhood and the city as a whole.

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Supervisor David Campos via Facebook

VICE: To start, tell me about what you hope to accomplish with the moratorium?
David Campos: The reality is, in a neighborhood like the Mission, there is a limited amount of land where you can actually build affordable housing. And the way things are working right now, by the time this city gets to buying the limited land that's available, that land will be taken by market developers to build luxury housing. And so, for the city to have a fighting chance to be able to actually buy the limited amount of land that's left, a pause is needed.

The Mission has been drastically changing for at least the last half decade. What was the breaking point that finally pushed you to attempt to pass this legislation?
I have reached a point where I just feel that we are in crisis. If things continue the way they are, the community, the neighborhood, will change to the point where it's no longer recognizable. And let me say this: Change is the only constant, change is inevitable. It's not that we're trying to keep change from happening. But I think it is about a balance—striking the balance from helping the folks that are coming in and welcoming them, and at the same time, making sure the people who made this community what it is can stay here. Right now, there are hundreds of units that are in the pipeline to be built in the Mission, but 93 percent of those units are luxury. Only 7 percent are affordable. It's just not going to work.

The question is: Will San Francisco be able to have a middle class? Unless we change course, I think the answer could be no.

For a while, right after the housing crisis, the San Francisco housing market was held up as a sign of the city's unassailable appeal/wealth. Obviously, for a lot of native residents, that unquenchable desire to live here has become something much more troubling. When do you think that change occurred? Specifically for the residents in your district, what set off the alarms that the life they knew was changing?
San Francisco is a special place. It's the greatest city in the world as far as I'm concerned. But I think at some point we lost our way. In response to a bad economy, I think we went too far. And I think that we did not think about our most important asset, which is our people.

It is a tale of two cities, the same way people are talking about a tale of two cities in New York and other parts of the country, that's what's happening in San Francisco. There is one city that has unprecedented wealth. We have the highest per capita of any major city in the country. Our top 5 percent of households make more than any other top 5 percent of households in any other part of the country. And yet, we also are a city that has the fastest growing inequality of any major city. So you have another city where the vast majority of San Franciscans—and it's not just low-income San Franciscans, it's also middle-income San Franciscans—are being left out of this prosperity.

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The Mission in San Francisco in 2014. Photo via Flickr user torbakhopper

Our inequality is growing so fast that if San Francisco were an independent country—and the Brooking Institute did an analysis of this—the inequality would be at the level of Rwanda and other parts of Africa. That's how unequal this city is. And nowhere is that inequality manifesting itself more than in housing.

The question that we have before us is: Will San Francisco be able to have a middle class? And unless we change course, I think the answer could be no. I'm not happy with the answer being no, which is why we're fighting to save this neighborhood. And in trying to save the Mission, we're trying to save San Francisco.

'Right now, there are hundreds of units that are in the pipeline to be built in the Mission, but 93 percent of those units are luxury. Only 7 percent are affordable.'

The tech world in general is very libertarian in practice, if not always in name. There is an idea that free access is paramount. Obviously, your proposed moratorium is the antithesis of that ideal. It is government stopping free enterprise in order to protect those who can't afford the development. Are you concerned about the backlash from the San Francisco/Silicon Valley elite to your action?
The corporate elite—who are the ones that are actually running the show here in City Hall—don't see me as their friend. I'm not worried about them. What I do worry about is making sure the tech workers who are also suffering understand what we're trying to do.

Related: California Is Going Through the Worst Drought in 500 Years

The housing market of San Francisco has been driven by this hands-off, laissez-faire, leave-the-market-alone, supply-side view of the world. It's this idea that as long as you build, it doesn't matter that all you build is luxury housing. If all you do is build luxury housing, not just for the rich but the super-rich, then somehow the benefit of building will trickle down to the middle class and the working class even though you're not building for them. Well, that didn't work in the 1980s and it's not going to work today.

And what I'm saying is government is not the only answer, but government does have a role—when you have limited land in a small place like San Francisco—to set priorities of what should be built. I believe that the priority should be building for the middle class, building for the working class.

'We cannot be San Francisco if we have inequality that rivals Rwanda.'

San Francisco is a really liberal city, but that sounds like old-school conservative ideals.
What's ironic is that you have Democrats who are pushing for supply-side economics and Reaganomics. The ghost of Ronald Reagan is alive in San Francisco City Hall, because that's what's driving the housing policy. It's this supply-side, trickle-down, view of the world.

On the Creator's Project: Stunning Timelapse Sheds New Light on California

There's an idea that development is inherently good for a neighborhood. While it's true the Mission has become safer, that doesn't matter for the people who've been priced out. As a representative of District 9, whom do you represent? The neighborhood, the people within it, or the city as a whole?
I think I'm representing everyone. I'm representing the residents of the neighborhood, I'm representing the people who live there, the people who voted for me, the people who voted against me. I'm representing the people who work. What I'm trying to do is have a city and neighborhood that works for everyone. And that requires balance.

San Francisco cannot be San Francisco if it continues to be the most unequal city in the country. We cannot be San Francisco if we have inequality that rivals Rwanda. We need to make sure that everyone in San Francisco, across all income levels, across all groups and neighborhoods, benefits from this prosperity. Because if we lose our middle class, if we lose our artists, if we lose the people who have made the Mission what it is today, we lose San Francisco. San Francisco will no longer be San Francisco. So that's what we're fighting for. We're fighting for the soul of the Mission. We're fighting for the soul of San Francisco.

Follow Joseph on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user Glenn Harper

Last weekend I met some new people. I'm "out" as a sex worker to a friend and was meeting his pals for the first time. When he told one of them what I do for a living, I was apprehensive. If Pretty Woman were real life, the friend would try to rape me and then be very angry about a nebulous business deal involving an old man, and I wasn't sure how that would translate.

I shouldn't have worried. If there was awkwardness, I likely brought it with me, as per usual. A few times during the night, though, I realized that Friend Not Rapist was listening very closely to my answers to basic questions. Perhaps he was waiting for my eyes to go kaleidoscopic, or for my daddy issues to emerge.

Then I realized: I'm probably the first sex worker he's met socially.

This happens often. I'm open about what I do, and I'm friends with a lot of civilians. I could be more circumspect, but too many times I've been at brunch and my vague fib about being a line cook sparks 20 enthusiastic follow-up questions. I hate the taste of ever more elaborate lies. I'm lucky enough to live in New York, a city large enough that if someone disapproves, we can choose to never see each other again. So fuck it.

The unexpected thing is how often it's a non-issue. I can't tell if it's because I tend to hang out with the hyper-logical or because the world has changed, but more and more I get a "Huh. OK." I get the sense that many computer programmers have a dollar amount in their head that they would accept for every behavior they can imagine, and they believe I'm simply optimizing my time. But for everyone else, here's a few things I would keep in mind if you're introduced to a sex worker at a highly rated taco truck or karaoke bar or, hell, by Richard Gere.

YOU CAN ASK QUESTIONS

I would be an ass if I didn't understand that sex and money are compelling subjects. You would be an ass if you didn't understand that I don't want to be singled out as puerile entertainment. If you're curious, go for it! Try to keep away from nuts and bolts, and nothing too deep, too fast. Pretend I put animals to sleep for a living—not because it is a similarly sad profession, but because they are similarly touchy. No need for "Do you feel the spirit leaving the cat's body?" And if only for the sake of our mutual friends, don't ask me about STDs over food.

CHILL OUT

There are absolutely women in the world who are trafficked, who are doing sex work for reasons that are terrible and coercive and highly traumatizing. If you encounter someone with a story like that socially, do your level-best to help them. (Also, where are you partying? Good heavens.)

But if you meet a self-identified sex worker (or dancer or hooker or cam girl), especially in a big city, and you don't see someone standing behind them holding a gun, do them the favor of assuming that they have control over their own life. Do them the favor of assuming that they make decisions according to an idiosyncratic but valid analysis of their choices and consequent financial outcomes. Do them the favor of not assuming that they hate their job, or love it, or that their story is like something you read about or saw on television or even someone else's that you know. Don't make presumptions about their emotional tone. If they're chill enough about their life to buck stigma and tell the truth, they're probably about as seeking and flawed and confused and doin' it as the rest of your friends. Just like you, they would rather not talk about work all the time.

I DID SOMETHING ELSE BEFORE THIS

For me, the hardest part about being a sex worker is that it informs so many of my interactions with other people, and has a stronger effect on my perceived identity than anything I've done before. I escort because of money, just as I've done other work for money. When I was a waiter, though, people didn't assume a host of things about me because I put food on tables and picked up plates. They didn't want to pick my brain about the true meaning of food, or ask me if being a waiter was emotionally stable, or demand to know what I would do when I wasn't a waiter anymore. I didn't feel that I should be on my best behavior so that I could give waiters a good name. It's tiring.

I'm not being arch: I understand that almost everyone knows a waiter. But just as I wasn't Waitress when I was employed as one, try to get your head around the fact that I am not Escort above all else.

IF I BITCH ABOUT MY JOB, IT'S BECAUSE EVERYONE BITCHES ABOUT THEIR JOB

I have hard days sometimes, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes people are late. Sometimes I get two clients back to back who are vales of tears dressed as businessmen. Sometimes I get someone who stores cupcakes where his empathy for other humans should be, and I hate him, and I need to process that. And sometimes Gmail is screwy and I lose money and man, does that piss me off. If I bitch about these things, it's OK. I'm still OK. You're still OK. Everyone bitches about their job. It doesn't mean that to be a good friend you should worry or begin a Serious Talk. It would be nicer if you had a glass of wine with me and then bitched about YOUR job.

I'M NOT GOING TO GET PISSED IF YOU SAY SOMETHING ABOUT PROSTITUTION

This is obviously a matter of degree. If you tell a dead hooker in the trunk joke and laugh your ass off, you're a terrible person. But I would think that whether I was a sex worker or not. If you accidentally trip on a cultural trope, don't freak out—I'm probably not going to take it personally. It's like when Kanye comes on when there's a black person in your car: You don't sing along to that line, you know? But you can sing to the rest of it. He and his many eezys are part of the culture.

IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT TO SAY, ASK ENCOURAGING QUESTIONS AND LISTEN

This is baller life advice. I learned it by escorting. People bring sex workers their problems; we often joke that we're naked therapists. Because my time is expensive and, uh, something else has to happen too, people often start the story in the middle, or the emotional middle, anyway. Without background or context, I need to respond without missteps. So I just listen, and get them to keep talking. Eventually they will feel better, and I will better understand what the fuck they are talking about, and that's usually all anyone wants (conversationally, anyway).

If a sex worker brings up something that you don't understand or feel unmoored by, it can be hard to know how to react. Is she deeply upset? Is she talking about rape? Is she simply annoyed? If you can't figure it out, go with, "And then what happened?" Or just nod encouragingly! Eventually you will get the drift, and their brain will move on, and best of all, they won't feel like they tried to open up and you freaked out and then they had to calm you down.

IF YOU WANT TO KEEP YOUR KID OUT OF THE BUSINESS, START A COLLEGE FUND

I'm thinking back to my weekend with Friend Not Rapist, and I'm thinking of his questions. He has children, and I think he was trying to figure out where my cracks came from, how to keep my reality away from people he holds dear. Welp, I can tell you that all the people I know who got into sex work early had one thing in common: financial instability. They don't all have daddy issues, sexual abuse, or early childhood divorce in their backgrounds (I don't have any of those). I had a choice: hooking or drop out of college.

I'm glad I chose how I did. I would do it again.

My advice, if you want Darling Offspring never to know what I'm talking about? Get a good accountant and start saving your pennies. It's that simple, and that banal.

I'm don't want to indicate that this is one size fits all. I realize that I'm a very privileged sex worker: I use the term sex worker, have a love/hate/open your legs relationship with higher education, and discuss stigma over cleverly reimagined eggs benedict. My experience isn't representative, but I think general rules apply. Respect the decisions you haven't made, assume as little as possible, and accord people basic dignity, no matter what.

I'm not saying I'm a Hooker with a Heart of Gold, but I would like to be treated like one.

Follow April Adams on Twitter.

Just like a whole bunch of Southern European coastal towns, every summer Benidorm, Spain fills with tourists thirsty for sun, sand, and alcohol. The main difference between the Spanish resort and places like Magaluf or Ayia Napa being the age of those tourists. Instead of your regular drunken 18-year-old meatheads, Benidorm's promenade is covered in leather-skinned elderly tourists with a penchant for linen outfits and sherry.

Belgian photographer Tine Schoemaker traveled to the town just before the beginning of this year's high season to take a look at how her elderly compatriots spend their holidays. Here are some of the snaps she came back with.

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Photo by the author

Shitty summer jobs are as much a rite of passage for teenagers as forehead acne and believing the people you're surrounded by will have any real meaning in your life after high school. (Sorry, kids. They just won't.) While most teens wind up earning minimum wage in restaurants or retail stores, a certain subset of teenagers get to experience the seedy, sad life of an amusement park employee.

Before indie movies like Adventureland brought the ennui, cruelty, and angst of carnival kids to the masses, I lived it, spending the summers of my 14th and 15th year on this planet running various carnival games at Hersheypark, "The Sweetest Place on Earth." Hersheypark was founded over a century ago by chocolate baron Milton S. Hershey as a wholesome place for his employees and their broods to gallivant about between factory shifts. What started as a baseball field, park, and merry-go-round in a suburb on the outskirts of Pennsylvania state capital Harrisburg, grew over the decades to a behemoth thrill-ride zone to give the Six Flags and Cedar Points of the world a run for their money.

Growing up in a small town adjacent to Hershey, Pennsylvania, Herseypark was the de facto "first job" for my peer group. The park was a large seasonal employer that hired those as young as 14, while most retail places in the area started at 16. They had a good dozen or so school districts of pint-sized worker bees to sort through, but they weren't too discerning in their hiring processes. If you applied and were able to make it through the entire interview without dropping any casual profanity, you were all but guaranteed a position working with your friends for the next three months.

I remember walking into the park my first day, sort of nervous, but mostly excited (primarily at the prospect of chatting up girls from all corners of the Northeastern United States). By the time I'd started at the park, gone were the turn-of-the-century picnicking chocolatiers. In their place were dumpy rust-belt families and throngs of rambunctious Jewish summer camp kids from Upstate New York. That bright-eyed, bushy-tailed kid walked into the park one June morning in 2000 and emerged a jaded, piece of shit man a few years later. The following are just a few examples of things I look back on and wonder how there weren't more arrests, and even more amazing, how there weren't any deaths.

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Photo by Flickr user Michael Bentley

Your Uniform Shows Your Tribe

Any good monolithic entity will start breaking you down from day one with absurd and dehumanizing outfits. Hersheypark was no different. My first year there, I worked in the games department, which required an asymmetrical vertically striped polo shirt in grey, navy blue, and a putrid mustard yellow. Our choice of bottoms were limited to insanely starched, pleated navy slacks or shorts. At the end of each shift, I would turn in my soiled duds to the laundry department and get a new set to take home with me. On the one hand, it was nice to not have to wash my own work clothes. On the other, it meant another person had farted in these shorts yesterday. Fortunately, shoes were a relatively laissez faire issue. As long as you weren't in the food department, requiring tacky non-slip sneakers, footwear was the last bastion of individualism for us park-folk.

Besides distinguishing which department we worked in, our uniforms suggest an unspoken hierarchy within the park. The subculture of theme parks, below the dead-eyed smiles and pleasantries forced out of us by the brass, is tribal and cliquish, and the difference in our uniforms helped to galvanize that. The largest groups of employees/denizens are rides and food, followed by the slightly smaller classes of games, cleaning, and retail. There are some niche groups—like lockers, photography, and mascots—but they were small enough to not have any real status in the stratification of castes.

While the uniforms may have varied in tackiness, there was no getting around the hierarchy of jobs themselves. Even as teens, most of us knew that it would suck a hell of a lot more to spend your summer sweeping up sawdust-covered-vomit or flirting with heat stroke in a giant anthropomorphic Twizzlers costume than to stand in one spot for four hours operating a ride or serving corn dogs. This wasn't a prison, though, and you wouldn't catch any flak for fraternizing with those outside of your group. Nonetheless most employee divisions stuck to their own. These were the people they'd be spending more of their summer with than their best schoolmates, after all.

Up until mid-summer, my second year, when we switched to some dorky pinstriped Henley baseball tee, games people arguably had the worst uniforms. Others sections' looks were just drab and forgettable, ours was an assault on the eyes. Everyone seemed to agree that the photographers had it pretty great, however, with their smart, grey Kodak-branded polos and khakis they could bring from home (which meant they fit). Nowadays, I'd have enough latent hipster appreciation of irony to wear these uniforms and own them, but back then, I just felt itchier than a tweaker on an anthill and wanted to change back into my "cool" skateboarder clothes.

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Photo by the author

Free Stuff Comes at a Price

One perk of making connections with the employees in other circles was that you could walk around the park like a king, mooching free shit from all your buddies in their own respective fiefdoms. My life changed the muggy summer day I learned that I could go to any food vendor stall and say the words "magic water" to whoever was at the till, only to receive a cold, bubbly Sprite for free. If I wanted some chicken tenders, all I'd need do was approach a girl at a stand that I knew from school and say I was "here to pick up that order for the Blue Team manager" or something else I'd pulled out of my ass. This prevented guests from getting wise, while also allowing me to gorge on unhealthy food in the park. These schemes worked if I was in my uniform or civilian clothes. And if a newer employee ever looked back at me with a nonplussed expression after I said the secret phrase, I just told them what the code meant. Grateful to now be in the exclusive club themselves, they would fulfill my request and perpetuate this cycle. In all likelihood, this very well may have been something that only a couple dozen others and I participated in but, at the time, I felt like Don Corleone receiving tribute oranges from street carts.

This was all kept out of earshot of managers of course. Kids learn at such a young age how to be duplicitous. And it was the most duplicitous of us that survived. These were the summers I really honed my lying skills, skills that would serve me well into my adult career.

On Motherboard: How Far Are You Flung When an Amusement Park Ride Goes Terribly Wrong?

But not everyone got away with giving out all that free shit. I remember one coworker was operating a little magnet fishing game aimed at toddlers. The parents dropped a good $30 or so and their progeny had yet to win even the base level prize. The adults regretfully informed him, "That's it, honey. Sorry," and the child, being a child, started bawling uncontrollably. My coworker grabbed one of the chintzy, bottom-tier, two cent toys and handed it to the parents. "Hey! Looks like you won after all!" The kid brightened up immediately, the relieved parents whispered a "thank you" to the kid behind the counter.

Pretty soon, he was called in to talk to management. Upon reviewing the security footage of that incident, that kid was fired for "theft of company property." Better to let a couple of guests walk away from a game feeling ripped off than giving a 16-year-old autonomy some leeway to make someone's experience at the park better. Seeing that scenario play out in such a karmically unjust way taught me to despise the uncompromising bureaucracy of middle management. Lesson learned: While it may suck to disappoint someone, you've got to look out for yourself above all others.

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Photo by Flickr user Jeremy Thompson

There Are Always Ways to Game the System

It wasn't just sodas and keychain Pikachus that went unaccounted for. There were plenty of kids that pocketed cold hard cash as well, particularly in the games division. This was one area where there wasn't as predictable a daily income. So, while inventory could be relatively easily managed for merchandise or food, if a dollar came into a game, the player wasn't necessarily leaving with anything tangible after their attempt. For many an $8-an-hour employee, sweating away a whole summer day, this was far too tempting a doorway to not walk through. What do you expect when you put a bunch of 15-year-old kids in charge of all that money?

For more on teenagers: VICE profiles Mexican bullfighter Michelito Lagravere, who became the youngest-ever bullfighter at age 14

The main hustle went something like this: For each dollar a games employee was handed, they'd kick a little counter pedal at the baseboard of the booth and put the dollar in their apron after tendering whatever change. These pedals were the equivalent of a thumb-clicker attendance counter that bouncers use outside of clubs. The dollars kicked in would ideally match the dollars in the employees' aprons at the end of a shift. Cameras were on, but not always in the back of the booth, where bags of prize refills were stored. So, a thieving game operator would pantomime kicking this floor pedal five, ten, or 20 times in a row, then go back to the back to get a replacement of something and stuff a folded up dollar bill of value corresponding to the number of skipped clicks in their shoe. Most kids that participated in this sort of theft pocketed enough to get some food or a dime bag later, but the more brazen who had just worked cash cow games like the (non-regulation hoop) basketball challenge would sometimes walk out of the job with hundreds of dollars, as I saw first hand on numerous occasions.

This isn't to say that people weren't caught and prosecuted for this and other financial crimes, however. When someone suddenly didn't show up for work the next day, we all then found out why. There was a callousness to our response.

"Well, he obviously shouldn't have taken a wallet left by a guest at the game."

I remember one coworker dropping this line, not from a place of moral high ground, but as a seasoned grifter, aware that such a prize could've easily been a honeypot trap left by management, which, in this particular case, it had been. Another lesson learned: If a score looks too good to be true, it probably is.

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Photo by the author

Work Is More Fun When You're High

Personally, I've never been one for getting high at work. Even just a puff of a joint would have me far too goofy to handle the unending parade of customer interactions ahead of me for that shift. Plus, when I worked at Hersheypark, I had only dabbled here and there with substances. Some of my coworkers, on the other hand, were giving Charlie Sheen a run for his money when it came to functioning addiction. It's a safe (if not cliché) assumption that you couldn't throw a cat in an amusement park without hitting a THC-infused employee, but there were at least two heroin addicts in the food departments who would prep meals during their shift and then run off to the restroom to snort a little more horse so they could drowsily slog through the rest of the time before break where they would nod off in the parking lot.

Then there were the older kids who brought coke out at the end of shifts. The cool kids with the coke (wisely) didn't offer any to the underclassmen, instead offering to share it with the 20-something girls imported from Eastern Europe under the guise of guise of a "student program" but really just there to be exploited as cheap labor.

The reason for this—other than the obvious fact that teenage years are rife with drug experimentation—is that working at an amusement park is boring. The kids of my upper middle-class school district and Hersheypark had a little walking around money but no real culture, live music, or consumables on which to spend it, so naturally (and tragically for a few of my friends) some of them attempted to dull the pangs of hunger for more with drugs.

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Photo by Flickr user Jeremy Thompson

Someone Has Fucked On Your Favorite Ride

In a lot of ways, working at the amusement park was like summer camp: We were hormonal teenagers in close proximity, and there was no way we weren't going to fool around. We had an intimate knowledge of where the cameras don't see, which lead to a number of pubescent trysts in whatever nooks and crannies the park afforded us. Personally, I can vouch for wooded pathways beneath the bridge that lead to the dolphin aquatheater, and an asbestos clouded storage shack—but these were just drops in the ocean of teenage secretions that covered the entire park.

It wasn't always just sex. This was at an age where kids are at their worst, and sometimes the sex was malicious conquest. I remember a couple of guys betting at a game on which of the female employees they could sleep with. The one picked a girl he thought would be a challenge for the other to bed and they agreed on a $10 stake. Later that week the boy who'd accepted the challenge returned from his lunch break with a beaming grin to inform his pal that he'd won the bet mere minutes before.

"OK, I'll give you another $10 to go tell her you fucked her for ten bucks."

And so they left the game to do just that. While we had to be at certain areas at certain times, there were enough breaks and after shift roams around the park built into one's day to allow for such dalliances.

Another sex game of sport for the guys of the park was preying upon guests. Girls there with their friends and family would be chatted up and later met up with, post-shift, somewhere in the park, where the employee would maybe finger them on a less popular ride, or go get a blowjob in the bushes or an aforementioned dark corner. They'd part ways as she left to go meet back up with her family that had brought her and, this being just before the proliferation of social media, they'd likely never see each other again. While consensual and (usually) age appropriate, it was scummy behavior nonetheless.

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Photo by Flickr user Michael Bentley

None of It Really Matters

My favorite part of working at Hersheypark was knowing down to my marrow that it was only a temporary thing. That this was something so inconsequential to the rest of my life that I could (and did) treat it as a candy-bar-mascot-filled bacchanalia. We weren't going to end up like the "old" employees, in their early 20s, coming back for a fifth summer in a row.

This was a summer job that I could coast through with the smug confidence of a smart teen that had been told his whole life he's destined for success. This was a pre-recession throw-away job, a job that was to be one of many prescribed jobs up the ladder to middle class comfort. This was all before the harsh post-2008 world beat any idea of "guaranteed success" out of me. Before the post-college days when I was applying to this level of job again with a new sense of humility and a willingness to do whatever I needed to get by.

Hersheypark taught me not to take my job too seriously, and how to seek out the wrong sort of people while I worked there. Then, years after I'd left it, Hersheypark taught me to appreciate the job I had, and to seek out those I could rely on as opposed to just those with whom I could party with. On top of those broader ideas, however, I still have a touch of muscle memory left for the more skill-based carnival games I oversaw for weeks at a time. And keeping with the mercenary themes of this article, I've been known to use those skills for financial gains the rare occasion I find myself in a theme park or boardwalk setting. Like if I'd see a guy struggling with the revolving coil open-circuit wire game, I'd just walk up to the device next to him, win, and offer to sell him the prize for a reasonable $50.

I don't know if you'd call the little life lessons I learned from my theme park summers moralistic, but they were certainly pragmatic. Keep your head down, take what you can get (but not too much), and get the fuck out of there before it destroys you. Since those summers, I've worked a number of jobs in a number of different fields, and I've found the free "magic water" at each place. Whether it was something as trivial as dipping too heavily into office supplies or free snacks, or a bolder gambit of convincing an employer to give me a "now superfluous" MacBook Pro as I moved on to another job, I have had a long career of getting shit for free that likely took root all those summers ago. So thanks, Hersheypark. My years with you may have been sweaty and excruciating, but at least there's enough of a rose tint to my glasses to look back on you somewhat fondly. I wish I could say the same about your candy.

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Thumbnail via Flickr userStacy Arrington