Finally that smellty, filthy little brothel to the west has come up with a quality court tuling that will serve its people well. A court has not only found the ruling PPP party guilty of vote fraud (not to mention the vast corruption its already well established for), its banned its leaders and junior coalition parties from politics for 5 years.
Thailand for too long has accepted a level of ruling corruption that festers and ruins the country. While neighbours like Malaysia and Singapore have reinvented themselves as modern democracies with proper industry and well educated people, Thailand has been mired in the 1960s R&R psuedo-prostitution industry in pretty landscape and sunshine. They need to move on, and hopefully now there will be a chance.
The country needs serious anticorruption measures to ensure no repeat of Thaksins abuses and investment in proper business, not simply ip service. If Thailand is to survive as a modern nation, it needs to put aside the old corrupt ways and learn new ones, otherwise, it will, even in tourism, be eclipsed by Malaysia and Vietnam.
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Monday, November 10, 2008
Networking for Gay Women in Ireland
I was at a community meeting a month or two ago and heard a lady there who was interested in there being a professional networking group in my city area. So well, now I am trying to start one.
One thing that came out of that particular meeting was that to me it was clear that there was a level of "anything and everything" that had crawled into the resource centre involved because of an obsessive committment to everything being on a "drop in" basis. As a result not only was every group reduced to the lowest common denominator and creative groups effectively neutered by the impossibility of committment and overemphasis on the "social" nature of events, but I also got an impression that some people had been uneasy at some of the characters who had "dropped in". I felt that in order to build an effective and strategic group, it would be necessary to be discriminating in the groups membership.
Let me explain why I feel this way. It is not out of exclusiveness but a desire for real quality and excellence. At the end of the day a group is not a pub or a night club. Its not there for everybody: its there to serve the ends of its members.
For this reason I am proposing to appropriate friends that we start such a group and veto out potential members who would not be in the best interests of existing or future members. Discrimination, yes, but necessary discrimination. If we are to be an effective networking group, we must concentrate our membership on the people who are going to be of most benefit to other members, and not allow individuals to hijack or destroy an organization, which is what I have been looking at lately.
One thing that came out of that particular meeting was that to me it was clear that there was a level of "anything and everything" that had crawled into the resource centre involved because of an obsessive committment to everything being on a "drop in" basis. As a result not only was every group reduced to the lowest common denominator and creative groups effectively neutered by the impossibility of committment and overemphasis on the "social" nature of events, but I also got an impression that some people had been uneasy at some of the characters who had "dropped in". I felt that in order to build an effective and strategic group, it would be necessary to be discriminating in the groups membership.
Let me explain why I feel this way. It is not out of exclusiveness but a desire for real quality and excellence. At the end of the day a group is not a pub or a night club. Its not there for everybody: its there to serve the ends of its members.
For this reason I am proposing to appropriate friends that we start such a group and veto out potential members who would not be in the best interests of existing or future members. Discrimination, yes, but necessary discrimination. If we are to be an effective networking group, we must concentrate our membership on the people who are going to be of most benefit to other members, and not allow individuals to hijack or destroy an organization, which is what I have been looking at lately.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
The Bullshit factor takes over
Quite amused by the outstanding level of bullshitting by Minster "Retard" Lenihan speaking on RTE regarding two very serious issues facing the Republic - the issue of mass migration across the border to avail of considerably cheaper shopping, and the complete mess that Revenue face in the light of a proposed tax on employee parking spaces in "urban areas."
Firstly, Lenihan responded to the high cost of shopping south of the border, which aside of being already unfairly treated by predatory pricing caused by a slowness in passing on the fall of sterling against the Euro some time ago by many retailers (who now in all honesty make up probably 2/3s of the retailers on many retail centres), are also forced to charge higher prices since the rate of VAT here is also higher, thus establishing higher prices, even if the retailer does charge the latest conversion rate. Lenihan's response? To punish consumers even further by hiking up VAT even further, and thus driving even more consumers across the border for yet more loss of income to the south.
It reminds me of the bad old days in the 1980s, when we all flocked to Newry for cheap drink, despite the very troubled times they were up there then. I have a sneaking feeling that the exodus will in fact be worsened by this latest move.
The second issue is the parking tax. I find it incredibly that Lenihan has not only no idea how this was going to be administered, but that its not even cleared specified where it will apply. Papers this morning suggest the city areas of Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway, which is remarkably interesting, since pretty much the only employers who still provide free onsite parking in these areas are....guess who?.....the government and its agencies. So the government is planning to tax itself. A curious dichotomy.
A further point made about this issue was the unfairness of taxing shift workers, who have no such luxury, since even in Dublin there is no such thing as 24x7 public transport (unless of course, you want to go from Dublin airport to Belfast). So in a country with 220 days of rain a year, and public transport so poor we have the gall to create 24 hour buslanes in areas with no 24 hour services, we are now going to punish ordinary working people by making them pay for the privilige of a parking space? I have a feeling this will either enormously backfire or end up being paid by the state itself for its own employees, who are the biggest group of beneficiaries of city employee parking.
Firstly, Lenihan responded to the high cost of shopping south of the border, which aside of being already unfairly treated by predatory pricing caused by a slowness in passing on the fall of sterling against the Euro some time ago by many retailers (who now in all honesty make up probably 2/3s of the retailers on many retail centres), are also forced to charge higher prices since the rate of VAT here is also higher, thus establishing higher prices, even if the retailer does charge the latest conversion rate. Lenihan's response? To punish consumers even further by hiking up VAT even further, and thus driving even more consumers across the border for yet more loss of income to the south.
It reminds me of the bad old days in the 1980s, when we all flocked to Newry for cheap drink, despite the very troubled times they were up there then. I have a sneaking feeling that the exodus will in fact be worsened by this latest move.
The second issue is the parking tax. I find it incredibly that Lenihan has not only no idea how this was going to be administered, but that its not even cleared specified where it will apply. Papers this morning suggest the city areas of Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway, which is remarkably interesting, since pretty much the only employers who still provide free onsite parking in these areas are....guess who?.....the government and its agencies. So the government is planning to tax itself. A curious dichotomy.
A further point made about this issue was the unfairness of taxing shift workers, who have no such luxury, since even in Dublin there is no such thing as 24x7 public transport (unless of course, you want to go from Dublin airport to Belfast). So in a country with 220 days of rain a year, and public transport so poor we have the gall to create 24 hour buslanes in areas with no 24 hour services, we are now going to punish ordinary working people by making them pay for the privilige of a parking space? I have a feeling this will either enormously backfire or end up being paid by the state itself for its own employees, who are the biggest group of beneficiaries of city employee parking.
Sunday, October 05, 2008
Applauding on landing aircraft
I was just thinking today about the 19th century gorillas who still applaud when charter aircraft land (generally it is people whose life experience doesn't go far beyond what Falcon or Sunway have to offer). I was just thinking that they should be labelled and restricted from having a full part in normal life, since apes like that clearly haven't noticed that clearly, unless there is an emergency, we generally do land.
Friday, September 26, 2008
A photo I like
I took this photo of these guys who were sitting on the onpitch seats at the West Terrace in Musgrave Park a couple of weeks ago. I hope somebody passes it on to them because its actually a really nice group photo that somebody might look back on fondly in a few years time.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Gmail Spam Mania
I've had a Gmail account for a couple of years now, one which I rarely use. I had a couple of odd things happen to me with it. Firstly, some idiot in Asia accidentally put it down instead of her own email account for Friendster, and to be honest, I think this twit is the cause of my spam problems.
The point is, anyway, I am now receiving more spam to this address that has existed for less than 2 years than I am to my main email account which I have had since 1999.
I decided to experiment, after some time of enthusiastically clicking the "report as spam" button every time an unwanted advertising mail arrived.
Instead of deleting the spam cache every week or so, I will leave it for the full 30 days and see how bad it gets.
I was shocked to notice after just 24 hours that already more than 200 mails were in the filter. After 48 hours, this had increased to 577. In this time I had just received 1 genuine email to my inbox. Tempted to delete, I didn't. I decided to continue with the experiment. At the bottom of the page, Google tells me that I am using 4MB of my total allowance.
I checked in after a week and found that by now my spam is up to a glorious 1024 emails. It now takes up 100MB or 7% of my entire allowance. I'm resisting the tempation to hit the delete key. I haven't had a genuine email for over 3 days now. I bite my tongue and persist.
3 weeks later I am now the proud owner of a vast cache of unwanted email totalling 8,310 emails. Thats a full month of spam, or to put it in context, about 277 unwanted emails a day or a mammoth 12 emails per hour. To put this in context, I have received just 6 genuine emails for the same period - that is a ratio of about 1300 spam mails for each genuine email I have received.
While the spam settings on gmail are pretty good - although at least once a week I still have to "train" the filter with at least 20 new mail types, its still frustrating to receive spam on this level. I have 2 work email addresses and both do a pretty good job of cleaning out the very tiny amount of spam that gets to me. The reality is - it was extraordinarily annoying that some idiot in the far east thought my email address was hers and signed me up to rubbish sites, and probably in the process, a load of spam-merchants. I thought most genuine sites would have immediately refused to continue her attempt to register an account if there was no confirmation from the email she sent (which there was not).
Either way, its a poor indictment of what could be a quite good service. I suspect a large part of the problem is "catch-all" addressing (as I have with my godaddy email account) where once the domain exists, you get spam. Either way, I am less than impressed.
The point is, anyway, I am now receiving more spam to this address that has existed for less than 2 years than I am to my main email account which I have had since 1999.
I decided to experiment, after some time of enthusiastically clicking the "report as spam" button every time an unwanted advertising mail arrived.
Instead of deleting the spam cache every week or so, I will leave it for the full 30 days and see how bad it gets.
I was shocked to notice after just 24 hours that already more than 200 mails were in the filter. After 48 hours, this had increased to 577. In this time I had just received 1 genuine email to my inbox. Tempted to delete, I didn't. I decided to continue with the experiment. At the bottom of the page, Google tells me that I am using 4MB of my total allowance.
I checked in after a week and found that by now my spam is up to a glorious 1024 emails. It now takes up 100MB or 7% of my entire allowance. I'm resisting the tempation to hit the delete key. I haven't had a genuine email for over 3 days now. I bite my tongue and persist.
3 weeks later I am now the proud owner of a vast cache of unwanted email totalling 8,310 emails. Thats a full month of spam, or to put it in context, about 277 unwanted emails a day or a mammoth 12 emails per hour. To put this in context, I have received just 6 genuine emails for the same period - that is a ratio of about 1300 spam mails for each genuine email I have received.
While the spam settings on gmail are pretty good - although at least once a week I still have to "train" the filter with at least 20 new mail types, its still frustrating to receive spam on this level. I have 2 work email addresses and both do a pretty good job of cleaning out the very tiny amount of spam that gets to me. The reality is - it was extraordinarily annoying that some idiot in the far east thought my email address was hers and signed me up to rubbish sites, and probably in the process, a load of spam-merchants. I thought most genuine sites would have immediately refused to continue her attempt to register an account if there was no confirmation from the email she sent (which there was not).
Either way, its a poor indictment of what could be a quite good service. I suspect a large part of the problem is "catch-all" addressing (as I have with my godaddy email account) where once the domain exists, you get spam. Either way, I am less than impressed.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
