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Squalling Brats

21/08/2016

About a month ago I wrote about crap parents who can’t (or won’t) control their kids, with the result that everyone else has to suffer. I mentioned how other crap parents rise up against anyone who objects, citing all manner of illnesses and disorders as possible causes of unruly behaviour, even though we all know that – in the vast majority of cases – it is just crap parenting.

Coincidentally, I was driving between lessons yesterday when movement out of the corner of my eye at lights drew my attention to a passing bus, A woman was lifting a baby/young child in the air – well, I say “child”; actually it was just a huge mouth with tears squirting out of one end and legs dangling out of a nappy the other. I could just imagine the mega-decibel buzzsaw bawling everyone else was having to endure, and I remember thinking “God help anyone who is on that bus”.

Then I saw this story on the BBC website. When you strip it down, it’s just another example of some dipshit who isn’t in contact with reality ranting on Facebook and having it go viral as a result of huge support from a load of other dipshits.

It all starts with a flight from Ibiza to Manchester.

Imagine the situation. You’ve had a nice holiday, but you’re going home in the morning. It was a package tour, so your departure flight officially takes off at something like 5.30am. Your hotel or chalet is at least an hour away from the airport, and you’ve been given strict instructions to be in the car park outside at 3am to board the bus to take you to there. You’re in Ibiza and you’re flying back to Manchester, so there’s a good chance you’ve had to put up with some teenaged yobs for the whole week. Naturally, they will have gone out last night and drunk more than they’d done on any other night. Consequently, at 3am you’ll be sitting on the bus going nowhere while the reps try to find them – at least one will be borderline comatose, and several will be puking up everywhere.

When they eventually do arrive their mouths will be turned up to 11 (the usual yob setting is 9 even when they’re being quiet). The reps will have faces like thunder – quite the opposite of their cheery bonhomie when you were freighted in last week, and you’re now going to have to put up with the loud yobs all the way to the airport (and at the airport, and all the way home). Once you get there, you will have to wait until check-in begins and the couple of dozen seats – totally inadequate for the 200 people milling around at the best of times – will be taken up by a handful of sleeping backpackers. The floor will be covered in sleeping, puking, and screaming humanity, so you’ll have to be careful not to tread on anyone.

Any cafes will be shut, even if your departure hub (i.e. shed) has any, and the vending machines will have been emptied by more yobs providing the traditional Coca Cola and crisps breakfast for their kids. When the check-in call finally comes, all the backpackers and yobs will somehow make it to the front of the queue. The check-in process will take over an hour instead of the usual 10 minutes because the Spanish authorities’ approach to an increased terrorism threat is to use half as many people to do six times as much work. Once through, none of the duty free shops will be open so you’ll have to kill the next 30 minutes watching the planes land.

An hour later, and some 30 minutes after the time you were scheduled to take off, you’ll suddenly realise your plane isn’t even here yet. Eventually, you will casually watch it come in, land, taxi over, disgorge the new intake of holidaymakers and their luggage, get loaded up with your luggage, and refuel. Somewhere around 8am you’ll flop into your seat, simultaneously smashing both buttocks on the arm rests as you do, and then spend a further 30 minutes being jostled by all the other passengers, who appear transfixed by the overhead storage compartments and that clunk-click noise they make, and block the gangway for everyone else instead of bloody sitting down.

You’ll finally take off, knowing that you have two and a half hours in the air plus any time for stop offs. Within five minutes you’ll start to get cramp as a result of the non-existent leg room, and develop breathing problems as you sit with folded arms to try and keep out of the personal space of the person next to you, who is twice as wide as the seat they’ve been given and who has no qualms at all about occupying both yours and their personal space all at the same time. If you’re lucky, the pissed yobs from your hotel will burn out, and the need for an emergency diversion to the Galapagos will be avoided.

The first $64,000 question is this. After all of the above, if someone has a screaming kid which just will not shut up sitting immediately behind you, are you going to smile and ignore it, or get angrier and angrier inside?

The second $64,000 question is: will you blow?

Well, it would appear that on the flight referred to in the story, someone did get angry and blow – if “blow” is the right word to use. When bombarded with the incessant and painful noise coming from a screaming child on a cramped and lengthy journey back to Manchester, a female passenger in the seat immediately in front (from what I can gather) shouted “shut that child up”.

I can absolutely sympathise with her.

But we are in the Facebook age, and nothing is ever that simple. The mother has taken to social media to effectively blame the irate passenger for the behaviour of her child, saying that the kid was having “a meltdown” and that the comment “didn’t help” the child’s anxiety levels. “Meltdown” and “anxiety levels” are the favoured phrases of parents who can’t control their offspring, even though it is they who usually created the environment for such behaviour in the first place. Another favoured ploy is to blame some sort of illness.

In this case, the child apparently suffered from a rare condition called Sturge-Weber syndrome, and naturally her behaviour on the plane was – according to the mother’s implied words – entirely and completely due to all the bad things that go along with that condition. The possibility that she was just acting up because of the early start and all the arseing around at 3am in Spain didn’t enter into it. On the other hand, Sturge-Weber can have some nasty symptoms, though if these were genuinely the cause of any such behaviour you’d have to ask why the child had been taken to Ibiza in the first place (she has a huge port-wine stain on her face, and my understanding is that you should avoid the sun if you have one), and why she’d gone economy (where even a full-grown adult might feel like having “a meltdown” and suffer “anxiety”).

Of course, barring any law which forbids it, the child’s parents had every right to take her to Ibiza in this manner. But then, other people – the majority, in fact – have rights too, one of which is to be able to sit quietly without someone else’s kids bawling in your ear and ruining something you probably paid a lot of money for.

So, it isn’t as one-sided as the mother with her Facebook rant would like to think.

Collision At 50mph Equal To What?

19/08/2016

DOAADI

ADI

Originally posted in September 2010.

Mythbusters is a show on Discovery Channel (and various others) which looks at various movie stunts and other things to check if they are really possible or just Hollywood licence. They cover things like “is it possible to shoot a gun out of someone’s hand without hurting them?” or one from tonight: “can you knock someone out of their socks?” (the answer was yes – if you virtually dismember them at the same time because of the force needed).

In this particular episode, they also looked at something many ADIs would be familiar with, namely:

If two cars travelling at 50mph collide head-on, the combined speed of impact is 100mph

Everyone automatically assumes that the forces exerted on the occupants of each car in such a crash are equivalent to a single car driving into a solid wall at 100mph. This is not true – as they proved in the show.

Newton’s Third Law states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction – so if a first object exerts a force on second object, the second object exerts an equal but opposite force on the first. The upshot of this is that if those two cars collide at 50mph (yes, it is a combined speed of 100mph), the forces exerted on the occupants of each car are equivalent to those that would be experienced by driving into a solid wall at 50mph.

It was quite interesting how they did it, using crash facilities and data-logging devices with real cars, and models in the lab using the deformation of lumps of clay.

Of course, a crash at any speed is likely to lead to serious injury. But it’s worth knowing the facts if anyone asks (and they sometimes do).

When Does the Men’s Olympics Start?

16/08/2016

DOAADI

News, Sport

I mean, we know that the Paralympics begins when the current ones end, but when does the one where we acknowledge that men can win medals start?

For the last week and half the BBC has been talking up every medal won by a female at the expense of those won by men – except in cases where there was no female equivalent or “alternative lifestyle” card to fall back on. Not just those won by British athletes, but overseas ones as well. They had the most pointless tagline I’ve ever seen in “Why Simone Manuel’s Olympic gold medal in swimming matters” in response to a female black swimmer breaking a world record (actually, her medal only matters inasmuch as it is a gold medal and it is not the political watershed they are suggesting).

Today, they went too far, with “Support as China’s Fu Yuanhui breaks period taboo” – a story about a Chinese swimmer who became “an overnight sensation” for competing while having her period. In actual fact, her period resulted in her under-performing, and she was apparently in agony afterwards (pain is rarely a good sign, extreme pain even less so). But it hasn’t stopped calls for “more research” into the issue. Quite frankly, I can’t help wonder why this has not been more of a problem before. But then again, when your hormones are being controlled by a state physician – which history suggests has often been the case, and not just in China – and the big question is what sex you belong to, periods don’t enter into it. To be honest, it’s not much different to allowing babies into swimming pools, and carries similar questions about health and sanitation.

Then there was the Daily Mail, who published a story last month about a teenager who’d been picked to represent Britain at skeet shooting. The girl in question is already a dab hand at promoting herself on social media, and the Mail includes a large handful of stereotypical selfies (complete with pouting and enlarged eyes). She’d gone so far as to show that she was a “girly girl” (her own words) by having pink shotgun cartridges made with her name on them in gold (the Mail identifies this as “adding a feminine touch to the sport”). In a follow up story yesterday, the Mail reports on how she failed to win a medal, along with a photo of her in an evening dress, high heels, and her shotgun over her shoulder outside some stately home.

Don’t get me wrong. Anyone who wins a medal – or even competes – at the Olympics really deserves admiration. But turning it into something it isn’t just ruins the whole thing, especially when it’s a feminist or political agenda that’s being pushed.

More Brexit Bunkum

13/08/2016

DOAADI

Brexit, News

This news report on the BBC website reports that he government is to “guarantee post-EU funds”. People shouldn’t get too excited, though that is naturally going to be very difficult for the average Brexiter, who will probably orgasm when they read it.

It turns out that the EU is funding somewhere close to £4.5bn per year in the UK.

Now, just a reminder here, but apart from being able to set fire to anyone suspected of being an immigrant and ethnically cleansing the British Isles, the second major rallying call of the Brexit camp and its troglodyte supporters was that we would save £350m by not having to pay our annual membership subs to the EU. All of that money was allegedly going to go to the NHS.

This next part is completely beyond the understanding of any Brexiter, but £4.5bn is more than TEN TIMES BIGGER than £350m. And at no point did ANYONE (except me, who has mentioned it several times) even consider the loss of EU funding and its wider effects.

Since Brexit was unexpected, no contingency had been considered for the loss of funding, and it is only now that we come to it. The report says that the Treasury will cover all funding which has already been granted, and all agricultural funding up until 2020. Ironically, UK companies can still apply for EU funding while the UK is still a member, though any grants would not be covered by the Treasury if we subsequently left.

A few idiots – one of whom is the President of the Royal Society – have “welcomed” the plan, instead of opposing Brexit. Fortunately, Scotland is still playing with a full deck, and the Finance Secretary has said:

[the announcement]…”falls far short” of what is needed… A limited guarantee for some schemes for a few short years leaves Scotland hundreds of millions of pounds short of what we would receive as members of the EU.

Yes. And that applies to Northern Ireland, Wales, and England. Why can’t people see that unless we keep up the funding, it will be a disaster when it ends – and here’s another thing you heard from me first: when it ends, like it will have to, it may well be in the middle of a catastrophic recession borne out of Brexit.

Trying to pay grants and subsidies by pretending we’re still in the EU has a much better modus operandi – STAY IN THE EU FOR REAL.

While we’re on the subject, this is the closing GBP vs USD price this week.

We’re at $1.29 – almost a new low – and unless the report above is designed to hold it steady and it works, when the markets open again on Monday the trend is clearly downwards. All those minor rises since Brexit have occurred as a result of various attempts to hold the GBP steady, and all have only worked for a short time because the overwhelming force is down.

I think we’ll see a slight recovery on Monday as a result of this announcement. But how long for is anyone’s guess.

WE ARE BETTER OFF IN THE EU THAN OUT OF IT.

Oh, and I almost forgot. Where is this extra £4.5bn going to come from? Who will suffer as a result?

Mental Blockage

12/08/2016

DOAADI

DfT, DVSA, News

I’ve just opened this month’s copy of Intelligent Instructor and one of the feature stories concerns the public consultation on proposed changes to the driving test.

One highlighted comment caught my eye. It comes from David Davies of the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS). He says:

No one gets killed making a three-point turn in a cul-de-sac

What an idiot! He – and all of his colleagues who are hell bent on feminising and dumbing down the driving test in order to get a higher pass rate – seem incapable of understanding that the skills needed to do a three-point turn (or turn in the road as it is officially known) are critical for avoiding situations where one does stand a higher risk of “being killed”.

To start with, attitude is the number one factor in most accidents, closely followed by inexperience. When 17-year old Wayne overshoots his turn for McDonalds at 1am on a Saturday night as he, Kyle, Jack, and Liam decide to go and stock up on some litter to strew all over the local retail park, he is going to want to turn around. I can assure you that if I was anywhere within a 2-mile radius of Wayne at that point, I would rather that he at least knew how to turn around properly – and that my life wasn’t being traded solely against his attitude.

Do you get that, David Davies? It’s the difference between some juvenile delinquent having the right skills and the wrong attitude versus him having no skills at all and the wrong attitude. Your job is to uphold the skills part-not to get rid of it so you can pretend you upped the test pass rate by not asking them to do something they find hard.

Removing manoeuvres from the existing driving test and replacing them with baby-exercises is going to lead to more deaths – if it has any discernible effect at all. It is certainly not going to cut deaths.

Spot The Difference

10/08/2016

DOAADI

News, World

That’s right. One of them is in colour.

The farcical American Presidential Election campaign hit a new low today. Donald Trump has made what is seen as a reference to the assassination of Hillary Clinton.

Even if he didn’t literally mean what he said, there are plenty of loonies in the US who would see things differently.

While reading that BBC story, my eye was drawn towards:

Other controversial Trump statements he later clarified

Trump denies mocking disabled reporter

Trump backtracks on Iran video

Trump backs down on abortion amid outcry

Trump denies menstruation Kelly remark

Trump’s email hacking remarks ‘sarcasm’

And this sorry specimen of a human being is still in the running for President. Worse still, the sorry specimens who support him give him a good chance of winning. And Rudy Giuliani – the guy who was New York’s mayor at the time of 9/11 – has gone right down in my estimation, as he is a rabid Trump supporter.

When you think how rapidly the world has changed during the last 12 months or so – IS atrocities, Brexit, Trump, and countless others around the globe – it is frightening to contemplate what might happen in the next 12.

Biased Olympics

09/08/2016

DOAADI

News, Sport

I can’t be doing with the Olympics. You don’t know who is competing honestly and who is… well, getting a bit of outside assistance from the pharmaceutical industry. For some countries, the latter course of action would appear to be more or less mandatory if recent news reports are anything to go by.

However, I did notice this story today. It concerns the men’s 10m synchronised diving competition, in which GB won a bronze medal. As the name suggests, the participants in this sport are not singular in relation to each country – they’re plural. You see, it wouldn’t be called “synchronised” if there was only one of them. The upshot is that two divers dive off a platform, do stuff while they’re falling – this is where the synchronised part comes in, you understand – and then hit the water together. The more synchronised they are, the better their score. And whatever the result, barring a complete cock-up by one of them, they are both equally responsible.

All of the foregoing is only true if you’re not a newspaper editor, though. You see, the GB pair who won the bronze medal consists of Tom Daley and Daniel Goodfellow. But in most of this morning’s newspapers – and as you’d expect, the Daily Mail was at the front of the queue – only photographs of Tom Daley were shown. Daniel Goodfellow’s mother is understandably upset over this, and well she might be.

In the BBC story I’ve linked to above, they quote “an expert” from the media – Bob Satchwell, from the Society of Editors – who makes the one comment (in bold) which appears so suddenly that it is guaranteed to mean exactly the opposite of what it says:

Often an editor will make a decision according to the space available, and in this case most likely needed something ‘tall and thin’.

I don’t think there’s anything more sinister than that.

Yes, Mr Satchwell. I’m absolutely certain that Tom Daley’s well-publicised lifestyle choice (which has hardly been out of the bloody newspapers since the last Olympics) didn’t enter into it, and it needed you to make that clear for everyone right out of the blue like that. The truth is that if it hadn’t been for all that coverage about Tom Daley’s sexuality over the last four years he wouldn’t have been singled out like this – his diving partner is just as photogenic. Tom Daley is what he is as far as media targets go because of the coverage of his private life – and because the world is currently trying its damnedest to show how tolerant it is. And that is somewhat more sinister than you suggest.

The saddest part is that the media and those loopy Olympics hangers-on are wetting themselves over what is only a bronze medal, after all (I know, I know – but let’s just be honest). The two people who should really should be proud and excited by it (because they won it) are Tom Daley and Daniel Goodfellow. Thanks to the Daily Mail and the rest ballsing it up because of their warped agenda, the event of a lifetime has been ruined for one of them.

Beeston Test Centre Relocation

09/08/2016

DOAADI

Assholes, Driving Tests, DVSA

I mentioned back in June that Beeston Test Centre was moving away from the Beeston Business Park. Good riddance to the place, and that stupid cow in reception who made sure that DVSA and ADIs were made as unwelcome as possible. I’ll miss the couple who run the cafe and the friendly black cat in the security building (security staff were OK, too), but that’s all.

Tests are now being conducted out of The Village Hotel in Chilwell, and after less than a week there are already problems.

Referring to my earlier report, DVSA noted:

…access to ‘The Village Hotel Nottingham’ venue is only available to those candidates attending for test; you won’t be allowed to use this site for practice either during or outside of working hours (including weekends)

My comment in the same article was:

I can guarantee that there will be some arseholes who ignore that and try to practice bay park in there.

I have it on good authority that The Village is already unhappy due to the number of complaints from its patrons about driving school cars blocking the car parks at all hours of the day, and that there is a very real risk that DVSA will get kicked out before a permanent relocation can be secured.

Let’s make no mistake here. The Village has always been a snobbish place (trust me, I used to go in there as a guest not long after it was first built) and like most gyms and health clubs it attracts chavs (albeit ones with aspirations to being middle class) who would complain about anything. But just as The Village has its sizable clutch of Village Idiots ready to exaggerate matters, I think I have made it abundantly clear over the years that the driving instruction industry – I don’t think I’ll ever be able to bring myself to call it a “profession” – is literally bursting at the seams with people who are capable of providing more than enough inconvenience to the public for complaints to be raised. I saw several the last time I was at The Village, just driving around after all the tests had gone out, and the only reason they didn’t try bay parking there and then was that you can’t find more than two adjacent bays free at a time during the day, and no ADI I’ve ever seen parks next to anyone. Oh dear no.

DVSA itself is partly to blame for this. It began at Colwick a few years ago, when ADIs were turning up to practice bay parking while tests were starting and ending and getting in everybody’s way. Sometimes, there were more halfwits practising bay parking than there were candidates on test, and that is no exaggeration. It was getting beyond a joke, so the centre manager put signs up telling people to stay away – a futile gesture, since most ADIs can’t read anyway, and it had little effect. The last straw for me came when one of my pupils picked up a serious fault during the bay park exercise for being too close to a parked car, which just happened to be one of these dickheads. I made an official complaint that these people were demonstrably influencing some test scores, and it was taken seriously at test centre level.

It was referred higher within DVSA, and then the bombshell was dropped by the idiot of an area manageress, who decreed that she couldn’t stop people coming into the test centre car park since it was a public facility (or some such description). The test centre was ordered to remove the notices telling people to keep out, and ever since then these inadequate ADIs who cannot teach properly anywhere else have been allowed to come and go as they please.

So, DVSA created a problem in not setting boundaries for ADIs. The situation is analogous to keeping a cobra as a pet – no matter how long you have it, how much you feed it, it will still bite you if you try to get friendly with it. ADIs are DVSA’s own pet cobra – and DVSA still insists on trying to get chummy with it rather than treat as the dumb and dangerous animal it is. The upshot is that whatever DVSA says ADIs should or shouldn’t do, many of them will deliberately – with malice aforethought – do exactly the opposite. And DVSA is stupid enough to let them get away with it.

Anyone who has driven into The Village car park with a pupil who is not on test is an idiot who shouldn’t be allowed to remain on The Register. Their actions are a gnat’s whisker away from having tests anywhere near Beeston suspended until a permanent site is found.

Brexit Woes Continue

05/08/2016

DOAADI

Brexit, News

Story #1 – The Bank of England has cut interest rates to 0.25%. This is the first cut since 2009 (during the major recession) and the lowest ever rate. The Bank has also said rates could go lower still if the economy worsens.

Remember that lower interest rates are all right if you owe money, but not if you are saving it. It means that a typical mortgage might be £25 cheaper per month, but the annual interest on saving of £10,000 would be £25 less. The theoretical purpose of the rate cut is that since saving money is not advantageous, people go out and spend it, thus stimulating the economy.

The GBP was immediately affected by this announcement, and fell 1.5% on the day (and it’s already a further 1% down the day after that).

Story #2 – A Survey has shown that recruitment was hit in July as a direct result of Brexit.

Job placements in July fell more sharply than at any time since 2009. I’ll remind you again that 2009 was in the middle of the great recession. Those who took part in the data gathering exercise stated Brexit was to blame.

The Bank of England has already said it expects unemployment to rise to 5.5% over the next two years. It currently stands at 4.9%, and for all practical purposes has been falling each year since 2012.

Story #3 – Nissan says it is “reasonably optimistic” that things will be all right as a result of Brexit. This is roughly the same as being “reasonably optimistic” that you’re going to win the lottery this week. The hopeful lotto winner will have invested £2 on his or her numbers, and it would be foolish not to be optimistic, otherwise they may just as well have thrown that two quid in the river. Nissan, in comparison, has invested billions in Sunderland. So you can see the parallel – it is hardly going to openly flush that kind of money down the toilet. The CEO has virtually contradicted himself by warning:

…[further] Investment [in Sunderland] depends on the outcome of UK-EU talks on Brexit

You see, Sunderland is a European plant which happens to be based in the UK. Most of its exports are to Europe. And he added that:

…there was “no doubt” that prices for Renaults, and other cars made in Europe and sold in the UK, will rise due to falling value of sterling.

Of course, report after report makes it clear that Brexit has screwed up the GBP, and what the Nissan CEO is really wondering is how the hell he is going to keep on explaining the UK’s death spiral as a reason to keep manufacturing in Sunderland.

I should also point out that they’re not very bright in Sunderland. They were the first vote in on referendum day and they voted to leave the EU by a large margin. I don’t think “irony” would be the right word to describe the situation if Nissan upped tents, particularly when you consider the existing unemployment situation in the North East.

But don’t worry, everyone. The Nissan guy is “optimistic” and I’m sure a multi-billion pound manufacturing plant and the associated multi-multi-billion pound bill Nissan would have if they needed to move it is completely irrelevant as a source of his optimism. It more likely comes from the same source as that guy at the soup kitchen in Blackpool, who thinks that foreigners are preventing him from getting a job.

Tec-savvy Divvies

04/08/2016

DOAADI

Computers & Tech, News

The media loves to redefine the meanings of words and phrases. For example, the term “tech-savvy” used to mean the person to whom it was applied had an in-depth knowledge of the technology in question. These days, it just applies to anyone who can turn their mobile phone off and then on again without breaking it.

This BBC story reports that nearly a quarter of net fraud victims in the UK last year were “tech-savvy mobile and social media users”. Erm, how does being a “mobile user” make you tech-savvy? A typical mobile user is likely to be someone who gets stuck in a cave or is arrested after stealing a boat because they were desperate to catch Pidgey or Vulpix in the middle of the night. And you only need one look at a typical Facebook user’s page to realise how wide the gulf between “stupid” and “savvy” really is, pretty much binning the concept of a “social media user” being savvy about anything, let alone technology.

It’s also funny how the media deems that someone who plasters their entire life across LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, and who uses passwords that are the names of their boyfriends, girlfriends, or pets is somehow savvy when it comes to technology.

The article says:

…Be wary of publishing any identifying information about yourself – either in your profile or in your posts – such as phone numbers, pictures of your home, workplace or school, your address or birthday

I’ve been using the Internet since the early 90s – not long after the first dial-up services became available, in fact. In all that time, I have not used my real name or identity in any context other than through e-commerce sites. I use pseudonyms and false personas everywhere else. I have not uploaded a single photo of me, ever. All my passwords are strong, with many being randomly generated and very long. I use hardware and software firewalls (personally, and on this blog), strong antivirus software, and I never click on email attachments unless I have manually scanned them first. And I build and repair PCs and other electronic gadgetry as the need arises.

So I consider it a bit offensive to be lumped in with the kind of people referred to by this comment:

Cifas said Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn had become a “hunting ground” for identity thieves.

You see, that’s the issue. This “net fraud” basically refers to hacked social media accounts or people with social media accounts who are simply too stupid to hide their identity, choosing instead to reveal secrets of such intimacy they span the entire range running from latest STD caught in a casual liaison, through date of next boob job and collagen lip injections, to bank account details including card PIN. And these are the ones who are apparently “tech-savvy”.

Being able to sign into Facebook doesn’t make you a techie. “Creating” a Facebook page doesn’t make you a techie.