The HUDWAY Glass Heads Up Navigation Display, a simple and fairly cheap (49.95/46.45) way to turn any smartphone using any app into a safer navigation system while driving.
Yearly Archives: 2017
Running Gag
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In Extremis
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From top: Mosque shooting in Quebec, Canada on January 29, 2017; Dan Boyle
We have allowed a myth to take hold that doing things differently, and radically differently, is the only alternative to doing things better.
Dan Boyle writes:
We hear a lot of talk these days of us all living in a social media bubble. Our debates, such as they are, being conducted in echo chambers.
It’s something I try to avoid through following people I knowingly disagree with, on the social media platforms I choose to inhabit.Lately I’ve been wondering about the value of this in the seeking of honest, informed debate.
What I’m increasingly coming across is not such debate, but instead the reflection of the echo chambers where these voices are heard constantly in shrill-like tones.
A case in point is the reaction to the recent Quebec mosque killings. I could sense among some of a rightward bent, a palpable elation quickly followed by deflation on learning that a Moroccan who had been arrested, was instead a witness to the tragic event.
At first there seemed, with some, an almost orgasmic delight at the thought of Muslim on Muslim violence, in a country with a humane migration policy. The thought of a young man poisoned by the invective they believe to be truth, will not be accepted nor will responsibility for it be admitted. The failure to confirm the bias gets ignored.
Those on that side of the political spectrum are not isolated in this behaviour. Often they find unlikely bedfellows among the trendy lefties, those who never lose any opportunity to tell us we deserve what we are getting.
In their world view Trump/Brexit, the inexorable rise of hate is an inevitable consequence of the failure of liberal democracy. Clinton would have been worse. Obama was as bad. Them, others – Europe, immigrants, Arabs, Mexicans are the source of all our problems. We have let down, we have been told, those who came to believe these ‘truths’.
Like their hard-right counterparts, what trendy lefties won’t ever countenance is that the failure hasn’t been not to listen or to understand these ‘fears’, but not to confront them much earlier and far more strenuously.
The social media bubble has exaggerated the strifes of the Western World. We are agonising over first world problems. We have allowed a myth to take hold that doing things differently, and radically differently, is the only alternative to doing things better.
This is a bubble which seems to defy physics as well as logic. Bubbles tend to expand before eventually exploding. This is a bubble which traverses inwards, choking us with its contradictions.
And yet I will continue to try to listen and understand. I block infrequently. When I do it is against those whose most frequent form of argument is abuse. I’ve come to learn that time is too precious, in discussing issues of such seriousness, to placate those who refuse to be coherent.
By nature I am an incrementalist. I worry that revolutionary zeal can become misplaced, and even more worryingly that the cloak of revolution can be used to justify the most abhorrent of views.
Trump and his acolytes claim to be revolutionaries. It is justifiable for them to so claim. The problem for the many of the rest of us is that we don’t share the rabid belief that this how the wheel should be spun.
Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD and Senator. His column appears here every Thursdyay. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle
Seb Dance (left), a Labour MEP for London, protests Nigel Farage’s address to the European Parliament yesterday
In Europe a chap called Seb Dance
Decided he would take his chance
To alert the news wire
About a large fire
That had started inside Nigel’s pants
John Moynes
Valentine’s Day cards for single people by offensive postcard vendor and artist Mr Bingo, who sez:
If nobody else is gonna treat you, fuck it, you may as well treat yourself. Each Valentines card is a bespoke piece of hand drawn art, signed and created (with love) by Mr Bingo.
Choose from 1. Romantic 2. Creepy or 3. Filthy. Pay £40.
And be quick about it, you dateless horror.
MORE to folly
Meanwhile….
Tomorrow’s UK Daily Mail
Daily Mail, January 3, 1973
Fight!
Thanks Comic Rocker
This afternoon.
At a meeting of the Joint Committee on the Future Funding of Domestic Water Services.
The committee discussed the matter of ‘public engagement and transparency’ with officials from the Commission for Energy Regulation, Irish Water, and the Public Water Forum.
It also held a vote on whether to hear from representatives of the Right2Water group.
It’s being reported that Fine Gael lost the vote 6-12 with the committee’s other members grouping together to ensure Right2Water representatives could speak next Tuesday.
The six Fine Gael TDs on the committee are: TDs Colm Brophy, Jim Daly, Alan Farrell, Martin Heydon, Kate O’Connell and Senator Paudie Coffey.
Government beaten in vote over future of water services (The Nationalist)
The 1937 constitution is outdated and beyond repair. It s not a template that will serve us going forward nor achieve national reintegration. It is corrupt and flawed. And you know it.
Antoine D’Alton writes:
As most people know a hardware device cannot work without software. Take for example your laptop, tablet or mobile phone, all of which require software to function. Put simply without the software, the device is useless. To make your device work, you need an operating system
The operating system is made up of code which enables the device to work. This working device then allows you to run programmes and applications.
Pretty simple – but as you know, every now and then your operating system needs an upgrade to function properly.
We’ve all had some experience where a device doesn’t work as well as it should. Sometimes, its due to a flaw in the operating system, and consequently the programmes and applications we rely on cease to function or work properly.
I need not remind you how infuriating it is when your device doesn’t work as well as it should. Periodically, you get a notification of a system patch or upgrade which you need to install to ensure the device functions. It’s anecessary evil, but something you’re used to.
You rely on these patches and updates to fix the code and thus enable the operating system, the programmes and applications to function. As a paying customers you expect no less.
The sad reality is that the system will work for a while before it has to be ‘fixed’ again.
Now imagine for a moment that your hardware device is Ireland, and our operating system is the constitution. Now consider for a moment that your applications are government departments that are supposed to provide you with the services you pay for. As an end user you expect the device to work.
But does it?
Remember, you are paying good money for this device, some of you are paying a lot more than others and the truth is you’re getting very little in return. Basic services aren’t quite what they should be, and yet no matter how many times the system is updated or you install anew patch (constitutional referendums) the operating system doesn’t quite deliver in the manner it should.
Which of course is infuriating!
In order to get the services you pay for, you have to go to the system administrators whose job it is to ensure the system functions. Occasionally, after leaving you on hold for a while they sort the problem out for you, but quite often they don’t. Instead you are left confused and not a little short-changed.
Looking objectively at the device, you know there is a problem, you know it’s not working. Some of you seek out an alternative but most of you put up with a device that should work but it doesn’t because the operating system is essentially flawed
You see the underlying code (law, custom and tradition) is fine and the hardware (Ireland) too. The problem is, the system architecture is not fit for purpose having been designed to meet the needs of Ireland in 1937.
To put it simply, it was poorly programmed to begin with, by limited people with a limited knowledge of how the device should operate. Some of them for ideological reasons inserted code that was nonsensical at the time, the problem is we are still stuck with this malware today.
If you as the enduser look at Ireland objectively, you know instinctively no amount of patches are going to ‘fix the problem’. Our operating system shows all the fault signs of age and system fatigue.
It has become ‘infected’ and some of our programmes are clearly outdated and corrupt. The antivirus software doesn’t work, and the device consequently is clunky and certainly not user friendly for the majority of endusers.
It sometimes feels that the only people the device actually works for are those who ‘work the system’, namely the insiders. The insiders consists of public representatives, bureaucrats and the suppliers who live off the system.
These are the people we pay to administer our operating system which was supposedly designed for our benefit. Unfortunately, those insiders have confused our needs with theirs. Remember, they know how to ‘work the system’ and the rest of us just have to make do. It seems that they are self-perpetuating, and that whatever benefits should come from the system, seems to go their family, friends and favoured clients.
But there is something they forgot….
They don’t own the system. We do.
Without us, the system has no power and therefore cannot be turned on to their advantage
The question is when are we going to turn the power off? Remember every insider lives in fear of being on the outside, and every five years we get the opportunity to kick them out.
The problem is, a very significant proportion of the population are quite content to do nothing, namely stay at home, particularly the young end users. This suits the insiders who know they can always rely on their ‘clients’ to keep them in power.
Now we all know, we need a working system. We all know we need system administrators (civil servants) and programme managers (Ministers). What we need is a new operating system, and one that works for 2021 and beyond.
As all good system architects know, the underlying code is largely the same for all devices (democracies) the operating system (separation of powers) should have checks and balances to ensure no overlaps and also to make sure that the executive branch doesn’t monopolise the centralpower unit as has been the case for too long in this country.
Indeed, in this new system, the architects would identify that one of the old system failures arose because of overcentralisation. Thus, they come up with a model whereby power is given to certain regions enabling them to ensure programmes and services are delivered locally in a timely and cost-efficient fashion.
This is designed to ensure that peripheral users are not disproportionately represented and thus clog-up the operating system with matters that could be and should be dealt with locally.
Remember, all the expertise to create a new system exists. We have the code, we have identified the problems, and we have the system architects who if left to get on with the job can deliver a system that works. The only problem is inertia and the reluctance of the insiders from doing what is expected of them.
Steve Jobs famously said ‘People don’t know what they want until you show them‘.
The insiders and their supporters will give you a thousand reasons not to change the system. But never forget, they are creatures of the system and in that regard it’s your duty to disrupt them out of their complacency and demand they give you what you are paying for.
We need a new constitution to make our system of government fit for the 21st century. A system that is fit for purpose and one which will work for you.
The 1937 constitution is outdated and beyond repair. It s not a template that will serve us going forward nor achieve national reintegration. It is corrupt and flawed. And you know it.
You deserve a new constitution that works and you deserve it now.
Image via Antoine