F*cking N.I.M.B.Y.'s

When browsing the web today I couldn't help but get wound up about yet another bunch of w@nkers who've raised a planning objection against what seems like a good idea.

If you can't get planning permission on a derelict site to build an environmentally friendly power station that will provide renewable energy to homes in the region whilst at the same time disposing of their refuse then you have to start wondering when exactly everyone in this country lost the plot?

To be fair, no planning decision has been made yet but why do people even lodge a complaint about something like that?

We live about a mile away from a landfill site that serves the whole of Plymouth and the surrounding area. Normally the prevailing winds keep the smell away but when the wind changes direction it smells like someone has opened a sewer in our street.

If someone offered to build one of these biomass power stations there or just an incinerator I would be absolutely overjoyed. There is no way I would lodge a complaint and I would do whatever I could to hinder anyone else's objections.

Landfill is by far the most stupid way of getting rid of waste. Can you imagine the meetings that must have taken place?

"Well everyone we seem to have three waste treatment options.
We can either burn it, recycle it or shove it onto a huge pile and leave it to rot"

Planning laws need a seriously big re-write. It seems bizarre that "spoiling my view" can be classed as a legitimate objection when considering a planning application for housing. At the end of the day, unless your house magically grew out of the ground, you're a f*cking hypocrite.

It's the same when people complain about the noise made by aeroplanes landing and taking off.

If you don't like the noise, don't live next to a f*cking airport!

Supermarket sweep

I'm glad to hear that someone has been arrested for the rape of an eleven year old girl in the toilets at Sainsburys in Leamington Spa.

I was quite shocked when I heard about the attack on the news a few months ago.

I mean if it was Lidl or Aldi then I might have understood but Sainsburys?

That's where the 'right sort' go!

Striking a Chord

It took me quite a while to figure out exactly who in the public sector was on strike yesterday. Which is quite embarrasing considering I'm a civil servant.

I for one think it truly appalling that the government wants to back out of its pension deal.

You can't say on the one hand that people should have employer pension schemes as they can't rely on what the state gives them but then say as an employer that in order to have the pension you have paid into over the last 25 years (or more) you have to work for five more years than you agreed. It just doesn't add up.

By all means reform the pension arrangement for future employees but you can't expect existing workers to be treated in the same way. Not without some kind of compensation.

Naturally Joe Public was interviewed and came out with the usual crap about private sector vs. public sector and wasting tax payers money on cushy pensions.

Point 1 : More private sector employees retire at 60 than public sector ones

Point 2 : The public sector workers are claiming from the pension they have paid into for at least 25 years. Although this may come from tax payers money, it would only be the case if the books didn't balance (Like they don't in many private sector companies). This isn't the responsibility of a public sector employee any more than it is for a private sector one.

Point 3: The state is more than just something you put your taxes into, it is an employer just like any private sector company and it has an obligation to honour its pension schemes just like any private sector company that has them.

Point 4: The government is perfectly happy to take money from workers pensions but isn't quite so happy to do the same with its own. On a similar note, M.P.'s (Ministers especially) continue to receive pay rises way above inflation but their minions are lucky to get anything over the base rate. Hardly what you would call 'Leading by Example' is it?

To put it bluntly, if the government were to stop wasting money on:

Ridiculous new schemes like the National Identity Card,
Pointless public enquiries that gather lots of damning evidence but find no fault with anyone,
Illegal invasions of other sovereign territories,
Subsidies to privately owned rail companies that deliver a less reliable and more expensive service than the public company they replaced,
Expensive military equipment that we stopped needing before it was even built,
Government Advisors, Consultants and PR

Then it would have enough money to be able to effectively manage its supposedly useless workers and provide them with a fair salary and the pension they have worked for.

Wat-er Carry On!

I'm really starting to get a bit fed up with the BBC national news' insistance that water shortages in the South East are down to a lack of rainfall.

Last night on the national news, a reporter was taken down into an underground reservoir and shown how low the water levels are.

Amusingly enough, on the local news (I live in the South West) they showed footage of the Burrator Reservoir on Dartmoor. It was full!

The shortage of water in the South East can't possibly have anything to do with the lack of investment in the piping network, could it?

The fact that Thames Water has sold off seven reservoirs to property developers (which now seem to have dried up and had houses sprout up in their place) is merely a coincidence.

We may well have had a dry winter but the extremely wet summer and autumn made up for that... Has anyone actually noticed that whenever there's a hurricane on the other side of the atlantic, we get a high winds and heavy rain soon after? Last year was an all time record for hurricanes.

If you point out the floods, downpours etc. to water companies they'll very quickly point out that it's 'not the right kind of rain'. Bullshit! The problem is they haven't installed the 'right kind of drain'

To be perfectly honest I don't give a toss about the water shortages. It'll mean that bills in the South East will go up but they'll still only be a fraction of the extortionate amounts we pay down here.

The reason ours are higher is because we have to keep the beaches clean so that the parasitic second home owners can migrate from the South East to wreck them again in the summer.

Hmm

I was too busy watching Villa lose last night to go online and talk about this.

The point made in the article that I like the most is that if a woman gets drunk she is incapable of consenting. Does this automatically imply that men are immune to the effects of alcohol? After all it says nothing about a man being incapable of consenting whilst under the influence. If so, every man convicted of drink driving in the UK should have their sentance quashed.

Having gotten drunk and made some 'regrettable' decisions in the past, I don't see why women should be the only ones who can have a lapse in judgement under the influence of alcohol. It's perfectly conceivable (bad choice of words) that a man could be plied with drink by a woman and then taken advantage of. Something like this happened to me, it didn't go too far thankfully but I certainly felt it wasn't entirely fair.

Rape is a terrible ordeal/assault/violation that no-one should ever have to experience. But to target merely young single men in a government backed campaign is wrong to the core. It doesn't protect women from rapists, all it stands to do is make an already un-level playing field worse. Why not have similar adverts aimed at young single women saying 'Don't get so drunk that you end up doing something you'll regret' or 'Flirting with strange men for free drinks might get you more than you bargained for'.

Where does this leave the young single men in question when they want to go out on the pull?

Do they have to take a legally binding contract out with them and get the lucky girl in question to sign it? They'd still need a couple of witnesses to make it stand up in court (bad choice of words again).

Alternatively they could have a video camera in their bedroom so that they could record the events and submit it as evidence.

This gender imbalance is like the change in stance for government road safety adverts:

When I was a kid, the adverts focused on teaching children not to cross roads without supervision as it was dangerous. Around my teens I noticed that these adverts had disappeared and all I was seeing were adverts telling drivers to slow down and not to kill children.

The reality is that whilst it is horrific that there are a small number of careless drivers out there that put pedestrians at risk, this risk can be reduced by pedestrians using more caution.

It doesn't send out an endorsement to dangerous driving (or rape in the above campaign). It merely aims to protect those who are most at risk.

Saying you'll prosecute rapists is all well and good but surely preventing people from being raped in the first place is better?

F.A. Cup Exit

Bollocks!

Stealing from the Villains

I watched the Blackburn game tonight and I am well and truly gutted. I always say that I wouldn't mind loosing if we played well but to be honest I think that makes it worse. At least if you sucked then you got what you deserved.

As no doubt those in the media will start apportioning the blame to two (really quite bad) blunders by Sorenson and Milan Baros squandering three absolute sitters, I would like apportion some of the blame elsewhere.

Firstly I would argue that Dermot Gallagher gave us nothing all match. This isn't surprising as it's what we usually get from him but it pisses me off all the same.

Secondly how can David O'Leary possibly think that two substitutions in the 82nd minute can have any impact on the game? This seems to be a trait of his. When I was at the West Ham game back in January, everyone could see the equaliser coming and that the problem was that the forwards weren't keeping the ball when it went up-field. However DO'L didn't bring on Villa's only striker that can hold up the ball (Angel) until after West Ham had taken the lead. He held up the ball alright but by that point they were chasing the game and Baros had given up.
One of John Gregory's main strengths was that if he saw something wasn't working, he'd take action - quickly. Jose Mourinho is the same, he doesn't seem to have done too badly out of it.
Don't get me wrong I think DO'L is doing a great job with the resources he has got but he has to be more pro-active in making changes.

I for one would like to see Phillips and Angel up front together. Angel can hold the ball up and put the ball through for Phillips to chase. Alternatively Angel in the hole with Baros AND Phillips playing off him could work. That would mean that you'd either have to lose a midfielder or (my preferred option) you could play three at the back. With our injury problems in the back four, surely cutting the numbers would help?

My ideal XI (excluding long term injuries):

Baros, Phillips;
Angel ;
Barry, Davis, McCann, Milner;
Bouma, Mellberg, Delaney;

This is obviously the ideal line up as Delaney is currently injured, I have to say that I haven't been all that impressed with what I've seen of Hughes. Bouma is a better defensive option than Samuel when he's fit but I do think JLloyd has improved immensely from how he was playing last season and the 'fans' that boo him should lay off. You're supposed to jeer the opposition players, not your own.

Winning formula

For the first time in what feels like years, I watched a Formula 1 qualifying session today.

For those that don't know, the format has been changed.

Instead of having an hour to produce the fastest lap, drivers now have two fifteen minute knockout phases with no set fuel load, where the six slowest cars are eliminated at the end of each phase.
The remaining ten cars then have a further twenty minutes to produce the fastest lap time with their fuel loads set to the same level as they intend to start the race with tomorrow.

Whilst I would have to agree that the two fifteen minute knockouts have made the qualifying session far more exciting, I find the final twenty minutes a little pointless as it seems to be more of a case of who can burn the most fuel in about fifteen minutes.
The drivers know that a car laden with fuel cannot lap as fast as one that is nearly empty, therefore they'll burn as much of their race level fuel as possible before completing a flying lap. Although formula 1 has never really been the ecologists friend, even this seems a tad wasteful by its standards.

I understand that the policy encourages teams to be more tactical (Renault are believed to have qualified slower because they intend to have more fuel at the start of the race) but it seems an awful shame to waste a ton of fuel just to encourage more gamesmanship.

Why not have the same rule for the last phase (starting grid fuel levels) but limit the number of laps that the drivers can complete?

If they only had (for example) four laps this would still give them two attempts to set a fast time (which is the number of 'flying laps' that most of the final ten cars put in) whilst having to offset this against the fuel level tactics for the race.

I'm sure it won't have Greenpeace nominating Bernie Eccleston for a humanitarian award but something is surely better than nothing?

Public Information

There was an interesting article in yesterdays Grauniad about publicly owned organisations charging for data.

As someone who works for one of these theiving public sector trading funds (HM Land Registry) I would argue that the article doesn't quite paint the picture accurately.

My employer (to my knowledge) receives no tax payers money. The article quite accurately pointed out that these state owned companies were trading funds but they didn't point out that a trading fund receives all of its money through the fees it charges (The clue is in the name 'Trading Fund' i.e. you get funds via trading). HM Land Registry does make a profit, most of which is returned to the treasury where it can pay for services used by the very tax payers that are supposedly being ripped off.

I particularly liked the comment that

'The civil service is too inflexible to cope with the speed of change in the commercial sector.'

As someone who is both a civil servant and a software developer I would like to argue that this is utter crap! The Land Registry alone has several major projects in the pipeline. The most notable being the e-conveyancing project which hopes to bring some efficiency and transparency to the unregulated private sector business of property transactions.
In fact I would argue that one of the main reasons why the civil service tends to get a bad reputation is because of the piss poor computer systems that have been delivered by the wonderfully dynamic commercial sector.

The article spends most of its time making a scathing attack on the ordnance survey. Clearly whoever wrote it has never used the Getamap function on the OS website that provides you with a FREE map of an area of your choice. Naturally the maps are restricted to a larger scale as otherwise this service could be abused by commercial competitors.
The Land Registry also publishes free information about house prices but again this information is restricted in detail to larger areas rather than specific locations.

Don't get me wrong I don't want to get into a (somewhat biased) rant about public sector vs. private sector. I just wish people would get rid of these out-of-date assumptions that everything publicly owned is inefficient, run by paper-pushers and a waste of tax payers money.

And I too would like to see more free information being made available, the tidal times suggestion is a good example of this. However anyone living in my area (South Devon) that fancies going for a climb on a cliff tends to watch the weather forcast on the local news the night before. It tells you the times of the high and low tide .

Elderly update

I want to go and watch Chelsea downstairs in my centrally heated lounge (Well someone else's lounge that I rent) so I'll have to keep this short.

I was watching Panorama on Sunday night and it seemed to enforce my core belief about care for the elderly (See 'Knocking on heavens door' post below).

While I find it truly appalling that the elderly are forced to sell assets they have worked all their life to accumulate (My grandmother did not own her home so she did not have to sell anything) I did also notice that the elderly patients shown in the program were still receiving medical care.

So I would like to reinforce my earlier stance that when an elderly person has deteriorated to the point where they are no longer capable of looking after themselves, we shouldn't seek to extend their lives further through drug treatments, life support systems etc. but we MUST instead provide them with all the necessary social care (I referred to this in my previous post as physical care, this was an incorrect term) to keep them comfortable until the point where their body gives up... FREE OF CHARGE.

Feeding a patient (Via I.V. if necessary) and supplying them with pain relief is not what I would regard as medical care as it does not prolong the inevitable. Starving someone to death is not the same as a Do Not Resuscitate policy, in my opinion it is barbaric in comparison.

On a completely different note, I was pleased to see that the European Court of Human Rights upheld the decision for Natalie Evans not to be able to proceed with IVF treatment without the would-be father's consent.

As anyone reading this blog may have noticed (all one of you), I have somewhat of a bug-bear about the enormous gender inequalities in our society and particularly in how the media reports stories.
I would have felt the same way about this issue if a women wanted to refuse her ex-partner from having her child (via a surrogate mother) because he lost his fertility through cancer treatment. I don't see why this hasn't been pointed out as a comparison.

My wife and I plan to have children in the future but does this mean that if we were to divorce I could be taken to court for breaching an oral agreement? (No jokes please)

Whatsmore, if Ms. Evans had been allowed to proceed with the treatment without Howard Johnston's consent would he still have been liable for child support when the baby was born?

Anyway gotta go, I've already missed the first half an hour of the game.