I’m not really interested in the row surrounding David Cameron’s resignation honours list (other than the oxymoron that seems to be contained in that three-word description). But it seems like a lot of people are.
I particularly like the comment from someone called “lorraine”. Here’s the full text, complete with spelling mistakes and missing grammar:
Of Course May wont interveine she is a conservative They rob the poor to feed the rich nothing will change The richest will still live of the backs of the poor May wants to stop slavery of course NOT she just wants to rename it something more fitting the description of used tortured raped beeten intimidated that is what most low paid workers are treated like Who intruduced this The Conservative.
Once more, I am left dumbfounded by the fact that people like “lorraine” are allowed to vote and have families without having to get special permission first. And don’t even get me started on the nine people who voted her comment up.
Many of you will have heard the stories about dumb labels. It’s sometimes hard to work out which end of the chain is the dumbest – the designer or the user – but whatever the reason, it is deemed necessary to state the most obvious facts in the most patronising way possible on many things that you buy.
Actually, while I was looking for examples, I came across this website with some funny ones. I particularly like the veterinary tablets for someone’s dog, with the warning of drowsiness, and not to drink alcohol or operate heavy machinery after taking them. It’s obvious that they’re mostly American – we aren’t that bad. At least, I didn’t think so until today.
I’ve joked with my local Chinese takeaway before about how their menu warns that Chicken with Cashew Nuts “may contain traces of nuts”. And it is on the subject of nuts – peanuts in fact – that an alert appeared in my inbox today.
The Food Standards Agency announced that Lidl is recalling its Alesto brand of Honey Peanuts because peanuts are not mentioned in English on the packaging. I didn’t realise things had gotten so bad. I mean, Lidl is a German company and much of what it sells comes from non-UK sources. I thought everyone was aware of that. But going a step further, what on earth would someone with a life-threatening food allergy be doing buying something to eat without knowing what was in it? Come on. We’re talking about peanuts here – or “erdnüsse” – the number one killer of humans in the UK, if you believe the media on these things.
And as if this wasn’t bad enough, another warning came through advising that Lidl is recalling its Milbona brand of Fruit Yoghurt due to – wait for it – the presence of undeclared milk! Where the hell do people think yoghurt comes from? Bees?
Food manufacturers are living a nightmare if the number of FSA alerts I see is anything to go by. Not a day passes without recalls due to undeclared milk, eggs, soya, sesame, mustard, wheat, gluten, and so on. Asda even had to do a recall a couple of weeks ago to milk “as an allergen” being incorrectly worded – I’d have though that someone who was likely to explode if they consumed milk would be aware that the word they were looking for on the label was “milk”. But it seems that manufacturers have to provide an encyclopaedic description these days, or face an expensive recall.
Still, I suppose this Lidl thing is all leading nicely toward Brexit and the New British Nationalism (if it ever happens, and let’s hope it doesn’t).
More “excellent” news resulting from the EU Referendum. Foxtons, a high-profile London estate agent, has announced a 43% fall in profits. It blames this on Brexit.
Of course, as any Brexiter knows full well, it simply is not possible for anything bad to come out of the vote to leave the EU, and the fact that Foxtons has seen its profits fall by 30% since the result must be down to some other reason. Possibly immigrants. Or Donald Trump.
The result of the referendum to leave Europe is likely to lead to a prolonged period of further uncertainty and we do not expect London residential property sales markets to show signs of recovery before the end of the year [said Foxtons CEO, Nic Budden]
But remember. Britain may collapse economically. The pound may end up being worth less than a dollar. Unemployment may rise. Inflation may also rise. Fuel prices may rise. House prices may rise, or the markets fall. The evidence suggests these things are happening, and experts suggest that they will.
Lloyds was already in the middle of cutting 9,000 jobs and closing 200 branches, but it has announced a further 3,000 job cuts and a further 200 branch closures. Brexiters can only see Lloyds’ pre-tax profits, which were up 101% on last year, and their army of Internet trolls is consequently out in force against Lloyds. In reality, Lloyds’ underlying profits fell by 5%, and their CEO foresees a “deceleration of growth” as a result of Brexit.
So, in the space of a couple of days, we have an “investment” which may generate a few dozen jobs (ironically, most of them up in Scotland), and a much more significant loss of 3000 jobs at Lloyds.
There is also the benefit of a cheaper pound when producing products bound for foreign markets.
There’s the rub, you see. GSK already has several manufacturing sites in the UK, so it’s not as if it has chosen to come to the UK ahead of anywhere else. I used to work in this industry and I know how much it would cost to shift pharmaceutical production to another site, especially if it was one in another country – the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) would make it nigh on impossible, and it would raise regulatory issues for long-standing products that had hitherto been “overlooked”.
A decision like this, reportedly worth £275 million, is not something you scrape together in a few weeks – it’ll have been years in the planning. The only outwardly visible signs for the UK economy will be a few dozen extra jobs for high-flying graduates, and if GSK are even remotely similar to the outfit I used to work for, they’ll try and keep that to a minimum anyway in order to maximise the benefit to themselves. A large part of that £275 million will pay for the internal arseing about that will be required. Basically, GSK is investing in itself.
The majority of GSK’s UK-manufactured goods are exported, and the collapse of the GBP following Brexit means selling GBP products on a USD market is highly beneficial to whoever is doing it. As long as the UK doesn’t physically fall into the sea, and as long as the GBP remains weak, GSK will coin it.
Don’t get me wrong, GSK are not doing anything that any other company wouldn’t (hell, they even offered me a job once). But they’re not doing it to save the UK. It’s for the short- to medium term benefit of their shareholders.
Just as I suspected. The day after I wrote this, I see that the toilet paper version of the Daily Mail – another right-wing, pro-Brexit misinformation machine – is trumpeting that £275m is being invested “in Britain”. It isn’t. It’s being invested by GSK, in GSK. Britain will get a few dozen new jobs out of it.
I love this story. Some bloke down in Luton found a cash & carry selling 20kg sacks of Basmati rice for £15.49. That’s a good price, so he bought 40 sacks. Trouble was, he was driving a normal car, and he somehow managed to cram all 40 sacks – totalling 800kg – into it.
Even if we assume that the average person weighs 100kg, that’s the equivalent of eight passengers plus the driver in the car.
He was spotted by police from the Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire road policing unit and told to split the load because it was dangerous. However, he obviously knew better, and chose to ignore the advice. His luck ran out when he was stopped again, and this time he was taken to a weighbridge.
He was fined £300, which meant that each sack of rice had ended up costing him £22.99 – which is roughly the normal price. Of course, he now also has a police record. The article doesn’t mention points on his licence.
This story would have been MUCH better if he’d got a bigger fine.
I’m in favour of gadgets – I always have been. But only ones that make any sense.
Getting a mobile phone made sense when they first reached a sensible size back in the early 90s. And getting a digital camera made sense when they first reached a sensible price point (also 90s). Getting a computer made sense – firstly, one of the original home computers (late 70s/ early 80s), then a PC (late 80s) once it started to assert itself. Even getting an electronic doorbell kit made sense in 1977 – OK, I’m stretching that one a bit (the original non-electronic ones had a solenoid in them with a central core which acted as a hammer. When you pressed the door button the core would be displaced to strike a metal plate to give a “ding”, and a spring would send it back to hit another plate to give the “dong” when you released the button).
There’s a lot of technology that doesn’t make sense, though, and which only appeals to children and Doctor Who fans. It includes things like Google Glass, Google Self-driving cars, and smart watches. I’ll stick my neck out and say that these will never catch on – no matter how much Google spams the media with stories about how they will.
But now we have another one – I think Amazon is trying to snatch some of the limelight back from Google when it comes to stretching the limits of reason. This article – somewhat unsurprisingly on a games website, though it is covered in other news sources – reports that Amazon is planning to use drone octocopters to deliver packages to customers.
Now, while I am sure that the Doctor Who fans out there will think it’s a brilliant idea – and it is, if you come from the planet Vulcan or are captain of the Battlestar Galactica – there are numerous real world issues to deal with down here on Earth. You can start by watching the promo video below:
Amazon reckons the drone can deliver packages weighing up to around 2¼ kg. I love the way that they clarify this for those whose DNA only contains a single helix:
[it] won’t work for larger and bulkier products, of course, like kayaks and tablesaws.
And TVs. And computers. And a lot of other things that people are likely to want.
Let’s go a little deeper into the reality of the matter. You can already get hobby quadcopters like the Parrot AR Drone. If you look seriously into buying one (all right, I admit it. I have been thinking of getting one purely for the fun value) one of the first things you would investigate after seeing and recovering from the price is flight time and range – how long do you get in the air from a single battery charge, and how far away can it fly before you lose control? Very quickly, your plans to enter the world of James Bond falter when you discover that flight time is up to 15 minutes – or half an hour if you buy the super-duper power pack – combined with a virtual tether of about 50 metres in open space. If you’re anything like me, you then start imagining what’s going to happen if the power runs out or control is lost while your drone is still airborne – and you then check out the wide availability of spare parts plus YouTube videos of how to replace the propellers, the main cross member, the main circuit board, and so on (i.e. it crashes and gets broken a lot). Of course, this assumes that you can retrieve it from the tree it’s lodged in, the roof it’s on, or the middle of the road it’s smashed into before someone runs over it. Or that you can even find it (you’ll undoubtedly have fitted it with a location beacon).
Now, I can’t see how Amazon has managed to get much beyond these technical limitations when you look at the size of its octocopter. It might be a bit bigger, but that means it needs more power because it is heavier (and it has eight motors to power plus a bigger payload). And when you consider that Amazon’s nearest fulfilment centre to me is in Doncaster, any droid would have to fly about 45 miles. Even at an average speed of 10mph that means it would have to be airborne for around 9 hours (assuming it had to get back to base after it dropped the package). The solution to the distance – autonomous navigation via GPS – just means a greater initial weight, and is firmly in Google’s driverless car territory.
That brings us to the small matter of trees, overhead telephone and power cables, lamp posts, wind, rain, snow. I don’t think GPS allows for all those – people in the USA might be able to land a helicopter in their back yard, but many UK streets have a blanket of wires radiating out from telephone poles, and going to individual houses. Many UK gardens have no clear landing zone due to small size, overhanging trees, washing lines, rusting cars and other crap, and so on.
Initially, the service is targeted at American audiences, and although I don’t want to stereotype anyone or anything, in a place where gun ownership is almost mandatory, small commercial drones automatically fall into the same group as rats and pigeons. Some nutter with a gun and a paranoid delusion about Amazon and it’s “spy planes” is bound to take one down sooner rather than later.
So although it is a good idea on paper, I think the technology and the practicalities will stop it happening for the foreseeable future. A bit like computers that can think – they’ve been on about that since the 60s, with every successive generation claiming it will be “soon”. Yet we’re no nearer having one.
Note that such deliveries in the UK are going to have to involve a very select group of people and properties.
I woke up this morning to the news that a road in Bingham is closed because there was a hit-and-run last night on a cyclist – and the cyclist died.
The motorist, a 28-year old male, is now in custody. If he is the one who was driving, he deserves to have the book thrown at him – and there is little doubt that he will have it thrown at him.
Just a couple of additional details. The incident occurred at 10.15pm (i.e. in the dark, since sunset was slightly after 9pm). From the photograph, the section of road where it happened is shrouded with trees (it is mid-summer, so the trees are in full leaf), and appears to be unlit. The cyclist was a 13-year old child (the bulletins have been updated to say he was 14).
When I was 13 (or 14), I most likely wouldn’t have been allowed out that late, and I know I would have been forced to have lights on my bike. If I had been out that late – especially without lights – the odds of being stopped by a passing police patrol (on foot or in a car) and given a talking to were miles better than 50:50. At 13 (or 14), I would have been classed as a child – not a “boy” or a “young male” in an attempt at political correctness. Even the term “teenager” was mainly reserved for 16-year olds and above. And back then, there wasn’t a culture of “cyclists rule”, which was likely to affect children and other people with attitude or maturity problems. Mind you, neither was there a culture of riding cars around as if they were bikes, either.
I’m just saying.
TV reports suggest the car involved may have been travelling “in convoy” with a 2nd car the police are eager to trace.
Make no mistake about it – the main reason many Brexiters voted to leave was down to their deep hatred of foreigners. The referendum result released the flood gates, and Brexiters immediately began showing their true colours.
The Crown Prosecution Service is currently processing “a record number of hate crimes”.
Amber Rudd, the new Home Secretary, laughably says:
…[hatred has] no place whatsoever in a 21st Century Great Britain.
Actually, Amber, your party’s idiotic decision to hold a referendum on EU membership has created a f___ing huge place for it. The vote to leave the EU has pushed us back into the mid-20th Century economically and socially, so don’t try and act all surprised at the venom people are belching up. In fact, in places where the “Leave” vote was high, and where this kind of thing was always on the back burner, they’ve moved back to the Stone Age. She adds:
We are Great Britain because we are united by values such as democracy, free speech, mutual respect and opportunity for all.
No we’re not. We’re “Great Britain” – especially in the minds of most Brexiters – because of all the foreigners we conquered during the time of The Empire. The reality is that we are a small island which has just cut its ties with mainland Europe at least a hundred years after most of Europe became strong enough to give us a punch in the mouth if we got uppity with them again.
The only way of reversing this tide of hatred (and that of financial collapse) is to stop Brexit before it happens. There should never have been a referendum, and anyone with an IQ greater than that of snot knows it.
That’s the opposite way round to how it normally works. And why is this possibly going to happen?
Mark Carney has said it is likely “some monetary policy easing” will be required to boost the UK economy in response to the Brexit vote.
If the interest rate goes to or below zero – which some experts believe will happen later this year – then interest payments switch over, and the banks charge people to hold their money instead of paying for it.
Don’t worry, though. Everything will be all right. The Brexiters say so.
All the little Brexiters are fawning over this story. 
