Category Archives: Rants

Me complaining. This category will, of course, be empty.

Politics, Rants, Technology, The stupid it hurts

Cash is King

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As the rise of cashless payments continues, the memes against it with certain types continue.

They’re all pretty much of a muchness, and the only valid point any of them make is “what do you do if the payment networks fail”.

Cash is king, they say, which I can’t help but agree with. There’s much in common with insisting on cash and having a monarch:

* It annoys some people
* It causes inconvenience
* It costs money, and the costs are largely hidden from you
* It’s an example of tax avoidance
* It’s an anachronism

I’m not suggesting we eliminate cash (yet?), but I would like to pick apart some of the myths that surround this cash is king idea.

One image doing the rounds on Facebook recently is a blackboard that says:

PLEASE USE CASH IF YOU CAN LAST WEEK OUR CARD MACHINE CHARGES WERE EQUAL TO A DAY’S WAGES FOR A MEMBER OF OUR TEAM.

So, let’s assume they only pay minimum wage. UK minimum wage, currently, costs the employer £102 per day, including all legally required employer costs, assuming a 40 hour week.

A relatively expensive pay-as-you-go card transaction deal- with someone like SumUp- takes 1.6% fees, with no other charges. A really good merchant account will have a rental charge for a machine, but much lower percentage fees.

My arithmetic isn’t that good, so you’re welcome to correct me, but if I have this right, to run up £102 in card payment charges you’d have to take around £6000 in card payments alone. Every day, which seems like a pretty good turnover.

The biggest error, of course, is the assumption that cash is free to handle. This is an assumption many make, because the charges for card fees are visible, but the costs of handling cash are largely hidden.

we pay commission fees on every card sale,lowering profits. No commission on cash

as one poster said.

If you take cash, you have to maintain a float (with change). You have to count and bag the cash, take it to a bank, and pay it in- paying a fee to do so, risking getting mugged, and spending time, and probably fuel/parking to do so.

The exception, of course, is if all your outgoings are cash, which I’m told is very convenient for minimising your tax burden, as they say, but obviously no-one would wish to avoid declaring income, huh?

There’s also the ones that say

The government and banks can track what you’re spending your money on

and while there’s truth here, seeing as how this government are just so incompetent, the chance of them competently tracking my purchases and finding anything worthwhile are pretty fucking minimal, even if they have access to the point-of-sale data from my local convenience store (because if they don’t, all they know is how much I spent, at what time).

Oh look- this guy has bought 4 cans of lager, a bottle of wine, and an Indian takeaway. Best we keep an eye on him.

A loosely connected bit of bullshit is this one:

First and foremost, using cash is a great way to support local businesses. When you pay with a banknote, that money stays within the community and can be used by others for a wide variety of purposes. For example, imagine you have a £50 banknote in your pocket that you use to pay for dinner at a local restaurant. The owner of the restaurant can then use that same note to pay for laundry services, and so on. After multiple transactions, the banknote will still retain its original £50 value, benefiting everyone who has used it as payment.

Which is the biggest load of toss. Unless every single transaction remains as cash and none of the businesses use a bank or a credit account, or have a mortgage or bank loan, it isn’t true. Obviously, the note retains value- but at the point it re-enters the banking system, someone is paying for it to be deposited, and often far more than 1.6%. As to the local business angle, people will either use local ones or not, and the cash isn’t simply a factor.

The only valid reason to insist on cash is to hide transactions: i.e: to avoid tax. And you’ll be turning away customers who can’t be arsed going to an ATM.

By all means accept cash. Hell, don’t take card payments if you like, but don’t kid yourself it’s saving money, helping local commerce, or is a great statement of freedom.

Rants

Directionless

This is a minor whinge, but I’m sat with nothing else to do and it’s something that bugs me.

Ahead of my surgery, I had a pre-op check. All very normal, so they can evaluate how fucked you are beforehand and what will be required to minimise risk before and after.

I look at the map and enter at the main entrance of Zone A- note that this isn’t the hospital main entrance (any more?) which is now way over in Zone D.

I now note that A18, what I was after, is actually missing from the map, which is point number 1, but, logically, it must be nearby. So I continue in, follow the signs, and come to a dead end at A18 with a printed bit of A4 paper, with a photo of another building and “A18 has moved to the old swab area, next to the old A&E” (forgive meif this is innacurate, this is from memory, but you get the idea).

In what way is this useful to anyone who has never visited this part of the hospital before?

I stopped a passing member of staff.

Oh, yes, it’s moved. Go out of that entrance behind you, turn right, it’s very nearby, it’s a glass box that sticks out from the building.

Those were good, clear directions.

Why couldn’t that have been on the A4? Why are some people so bad at giving directions, and why, in particular, is the NHS so good at failing to update signage, or leave big gaps in it? This is the 4th or 5th time at New Cross I’ve just thought “OK, where now?”. I’m singling out New Cross here, but Heartlands, with miles of corridors, is also challenging at times, and the less we say of Good Hope the better. Some of this is the nature of hospitals of course, huge, sprawling sites that have organically grown and changed over time.

The key start is that people assume you know the landmarks they refer to. It’s not just the NHS, to be fair; I once had problems finding an ex-colleague’s house:

But it’s easy, you just go to Edgbaston Cricket Ground and turn [direction]

That’s all well, if you actually know where that place is. I didn’t, because I have no interest in it.

I’m fairly regularly asked directions to Walsall Wood Football club- we live near to it (sadly, when they choose to play their shit music over a PA). This situation would be like me saying “Yeah it’s easy, it’s just past that house where someone drove into the wall”. I know where that is, the person asking hasn’t a clue.

For directions to be useful, they have to define an unambiguous starting point, and have a clear direction. Unlike this post.

Rants, The stupid it hurts

Twenty

I’m starting to draft this well before the date, just to get some initial thoughts down.

Another year gone: anniversaries of this blog coincide with the end of the year, because, twenty fucking years ago(!), i started using a little-known bit of open-source blogging software, fired up the might of an old Pentium PC running Debian, and changed some firewall rules.

Every year since then, I’ve remarked on that and tried to sum up the last 12 months. It hasn’t always been good.

So, last year was one of those, and I gave 2023 a stern warning. It didn’t listen, of course, and 2023 proceeded to be somewhat of a twat. It was worse for others, of course- but some of those others are good friends and family.

While in 2022 we avoided deaths both human and feline, 2023 saw us lose 2 humans from extended family, one close, and for a moment looked like it might give us a double-tap result with things looking shaky for another close member. It wasn’t to be, though, so the count is only one down in closer family. We have lost someone else in more extended family, but neither of us have seen him in well over 30 years (but having seen his will, it’s rather a shame I never met invisible uncle Geoff, the legend).

Those events, and others I won’t go into have made it a stressful end to the year, though we did get away to the sun, something that looked doubtful at one point- and in fact, we had two good holidays this year.

So then, a summary of 2023? Health issues continue- for us, for family, and for good friends alike. We continue to age, we lose people. Conversely, we persist. We have cats (thank fuck for cats), we have friends (similar) and family (likewise) who are there and who we are there for. We have a warm, safe home, we have a stable income, we have (albeit reduced) family and the friends continue to be the type of people you want around you and we try to reciprocate. The health issues are either accepted, or slowly being dealt with. Too slowly, of course, but this is the NHS after 13 years of Tory control, so waiting is normal.

Talking of which, the country, of course, is still fucked.

Only the dimmest (and I include in that the architects of it) now think Brexit was a good move (and forgive me while I quote Stuart Maconie again, writing about how the North East voted for it in their droves):

what becomes apparent is that the large Brexit vote was not so much anti-EU as anti-Westminster, with Mackem after Mackem repeating the charge that London politicians of every stripe were cossetted, out of touch and self-serving but barely mentioning the European Union

Now that’s a fair comment, but for fuck’s sake people, fix the right problem. We all know things aren’t right, but this made it worse.

Our economy is in tatters, our NHS is broken, our social care is struggling, our politicians are largely inept and corrupt, but we seem unable or unwilling to do anything about this, preferring to blame a few desperate people from other countries, and we still continue as a country to vote in these fuckers, and to accept a deeply flawed political system because that’s how it has always been done.

It’s funny to look back on 20 years of blogging. When I started, I was soon to change job, and I’m still in it, the new organisation seemingly suiting me. Blog posts have got longer, as social media takes the short stuff- even if Twitter is now practically dead. I was in my thirties back then, and the world is a different place now. How the actual fuck did I get so old? Mid-fifties? Fuck. Better than the alternative though.

There’s fewer people blogging now: I was a relatively early adopter, before the peak in 2008 or so, and I’ve no plans to go anywhere, as long as I can keep annoying the right people. Some have left us, sadly, some have decided it has run its course. The good thing is that WordPress, the little-known bit of software I thought was cool back then is now powering a lot of the web, so that would be one of my good choices.

2024? I’m fucking well watching you, you fucker. I’ll switch my gloomy music choice to Gift, specifically Giving Ground for this year.

Now I know you will not see
The madness we have seen

Vodka and slimline tonic, please, for health reasons (because obviously switching to spirits is the healthy choice) but light on the tonic, please, we’ll still be needing a drink. I’ll stay up to make sure 2023 has gone. Black clothing is still de rigeur, obviously.

Rants

No Experience Required

I’ve been mulling over how we got into the current shitshow this country finds itself in, and it got me thinking: a political career (more specifically, Member of Parliament) appears to be the only one where lack of qualifications, experience, or talent is no restriction of being paid over £80k per annum.

There seems to be literally no subject that our politicians cannot spout about while knowing literally nothing about the subject: be it Reese-Mogg on phone chargers, Liz Truss on trade deals, Nadine Dorries on the internet, Dominic Raab on the channel tunnel, Priti Patel not knowing the difference between terrorism and counter-terrorism, or that fuckwit Johnson on literally anything; this is barely scratching the surface of the idiocy. They’re collectively denser than a boxing day turd.

Of course there’s much evidence that here in the UK, so long as you’re a “character” and can come out with some over-simplified promises you don’t have to keep, people will vote for you. If you talk a bit posh, all the better. We all love bowing down to a posho.

This isn’t to say that all MPs are thick, talentless morons, it’s just that they seem to outnumber the capable, sane ones by a large margin.

If you want a demonstration of how bad this is, listen to, or read the debates; pick a subject you know about, and see how much sense is spoken, and how much of it is conjecture, inaccurate, or just plain lies.

TV interviews are soundbites full of triggers to appeal to the demographic that relentlessly vote these idiots in. Populist crap about keeping out immigrants, controlling crime, and rewarding hard workers, when in fact they do nothing of the sort. Throw in a bit of jingoistic support for armed forces veterans and you’re there (when actually, government support for veterans is minimal and they rely on charities to take up the slack, essentially abandoning them).

A recent TV interview with Jonathan Gullis and the head of the RMT Mick Lynch just showed the class of recent intake: hopelessly out of his depth and left repeatedly saying “no apology for the veterans” like it’s a magic phrase while the union leader remains calm, and pulls him apart. You can see more of this in this clip where he repeatedly remains calm, states the facts, and makes culture war reporters and Conservative MPs look like fools.

Now, I’m sure that Mick has shortcomings: in fact I know he does: he supported Brexit, for a start, but I think the key here is that he’s confident: he has the support of his members, he knows the subject area he’s talking about, he doesn’t start waffling about stuff he knows nothing about, and isn’t interested in providing a show- and the result is that the interviewers looking to provoke reaction, and the politicians with nothing useful or even truthful to say have nowhere to go and all of a sudden, the leader of a trade union looks like a genius in comparison to our elected servants.

Why can we not have political leaders like this? Seemingly quiet, competent, knowledgable? At what point did the politicians exhibit such a strong Dunning-Kreuger effect?

As someone said on Twitter:

I make no secret of my political leanings: I’m left of centre and I believe that public services should be public, businesses need regulation, people should pay tax, and trade unions are a requirement. I’m predictably targeting the Conservatives here, mostly, but while there’s less of this with the other parties, they’re just not challenging this hard enough: there’s the odd outbreak of challenge from the likes of Ed Milliband (thank the Lord we voted for stability with the Conservatives, rather than chaos with him eh?) but generally, this government of literal fuckwits go along unchallenged and can happily pontificate on how we all have to cut back and the food banks are just fine, while some of literally complain that the over 80k they are paid just isn’t enough. (and let’s not forget, that 80k/year- which puts you in the top 5% of “earners”, comes with an impressive expenses package too.)

As a Twitter follower said, when asked what job he’d like to try out:

MP, talk shite for an hour, jeer someone else talking shite, then off for a massive subsidised dinner followed by loads of cheap booze.

The question is, how do we fix this? How do we make it so that our government (and the opposition) is no longer dominated by people that you wouldn’t allow to run a bath unsupervised, never mind a country? If we accept that leaders should be a bit more Mick Lynch and a lot less Boris Johnson, should it be a requirement that people have to have a real job before entering a political career?

Problem is, some of the ones I’ve mentioned did have actual jobs. Wikipedia will show you that some of these people had jobs outside of politics for several years.

Still, I guess we’ve all known people that are incompetent but succeed anyway.

[edit]
The 2019 intake of MPs seem particularly bad. Take this example, where Mark Jenkinson blames Labour for something happening right now, after a mere 12 years of Conservative control.

One final word from the RMT that illustrates this perfectly: it’s a long Twitter thread, but again, it sets out the problems in plain speech- the issue of putting people in a position of power and control who quite simply lack the experience, skills, honesty or intelligence to fully understand what they’re doing.

Politics, Public Transport, Rants

Unreliable

Regular readers (reader?) will know that I’m a regular public transport user, and given the places I go, this often means buses. I’ve ranted before now on the shortcomings of our bus network and how privatisation has failed it, and now we have to face a new problem, or at least one that is harder to fix now.

The bus services around here, particularly those operated by the Walsall depot- have been increasingly unreliable in recent months, for what was, generally, a quite reliable service- it’s left us stranded in Brownhills, unable to get to Lichfield, and it’s left us stranded in Walsall multiple times.

It goes like this: the bus you’ve gone for doesn’t turn up. Then the next doesn’t. All the live times disappear from any app you happen to use.

My increasing difficulty walking any great distance has meant that this has meant a taxi: at last count I was about £45 down.

This clearly isn’t good enough: I’m only using buses for socialising^W drinking; but time and time again, while we’ve been waiting, we’ve seen people on their way to or from work, and it’s not a giant leap to say most of these will be lower-paid.

So, anyway, I complained to National Express. they said:

I have asked the manager at the operating garage to ascertain what went wrong on this occasion. Our records show that the service did not run due to no drivers available to operate the service, which unfortunately is caused by the UK driver shortages.

Although this is far from ideal service, we are going through an ongoing program to recruit more drivers in order to increase service levels, and we will continue to monitor the service over the coming weeks in order to make necessary adjustments where possible.

I have also noted that you have forwarded your taxi receipt to us. Therefore, I am delighted to reimburse you in the form of a cheque. Please allow up to 4-weeks at the latest for the cheque to be processed by our finance team and sent to your home address.

I’m still waiting for that cheque.

i also wrote to Councillor Richard Worrall, who is vice-chair of the WMCA Transport Delivery Committee. Rchard has been an excellent local councillor for many years and has been a local champion of public transport. He answered my email promptly and personally, too, which was great.

He had this to say:

Thank you for getting in touch and I am sorry, but not surprised, to hear of recent problems. I use the Brownhills services (and others), a lot, and your experience mirrors mine.

You may have seen notices posted recently at bus stations regarding driver shortages and the effect this is having on providing the timetabled level of service, and you will be familiar with the issue, which appears to be that bus drivers and would-be bus drivers are being attracted away by better pay in the haulage sector, so I imagine that will be at the root of our problem.

That said, I shall take the matter up, both with Transport for West Midlands as the public body to represent us, and with NXWM as operator, and then come back to you with the responses I get, hopefully with news of steps being taken to improve matters.

Then later:

I have feedback now and this is my understanding of the position. NB: please don’t shoot the messenger!

1. As I thought, the issues we are experiencing with our bus services are down to driver shortages (better rates of pay in haulage sector, significant numbers of East European drivers leaving the UK to return to their home countries, etc).

2. In order to increase reliability. NXWM are revising their timetables w.e.f. 5 June, which will mean reduced frequencies on some routes so that, the company say, services can be delivered more reliably than now, as they’re matched to actual driver availability levels.

3. In the case of the Brownhills services 10 and 10A, I understand that frequencies will reduce to four per hour.

I think that, as my recent experience in West Sussex shows, this is a national problem, and it actually needs a national solution which, if the Government is serious about promoting public transport (which they’d say they are, but which I rather doubt!), it needs some kind of effective action to recruit more drivers. I will seek to promote some lobbying to this effect through Walsall Council and West Midlands Combined Authority channels.

So, another Brexit Bonus. The pandemic has played its part, obviously, but unlike when this last happened, we’re not able to easily recruit Polish drivers, because we told them all to fuck off home. Meanwhile, the haulage industry, also missing EU drivers, has upped its rates, meaning more competition for drivers.

I do have a bit of sympathy for National Express here: they’re faced, like the rest of us, with rising costs, and they have a driver shortage and no hope of recruiting any in the short term, so they’ve had to cut services and adjust timetables to match that.

Doesn’t exactly give you hope for public transport, does it? We’ve consciously adjusted our behaviour to take this into account, by either not going out, or staying closer to home where the cost of a taxi is lower if we need it.

Meanwhile, I get my socialising disrupted, which is just an inconvenience, but this also hits disproportionately at the lower paid workers, already struggling with escalating food and energy costs, by making their working day even longer, harder, and potentially expensive by hitting their travel options.

Rants, Technology

Drowning in Superfast 5G Hype

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I could have maybe just done a search-replace on this 7 year old post, watching tonight’s Midlands Today, where they visited Worcester Bosch’s factory to show how 5G was letting them monitor production.

*Presenter points an white box on wall*

With this 5G we can monitor our machines more effectively and fix them before they fail.

So, once again, it’s bollocks. Just like what my colleague was fed by Vodafone at a corporate shiny 5G event to flog 5G, of how it might enable remote surgery.

DESPITE THE FACT BOTH THESE SCENARIOS TAKE PLACE IN BUILDINGS THAT COULD BE CONNECTED MORE RELIABLY AND FASTER (and RIGHT NOW) WITH FIBRE.

5G will, like 4G before it and 3G before that and GPRS before that transform mobile communications. In 5 years, it will be commonplace, and we’ll wonder how we managed without it, but trust me; for local networks, wifi will be the solution, and for fixed connections that demand reliability and low latency, you won’t be using a 5G network. In fact, even though 5G networks will mesh to some degree, somewhere there will be backhaul, and that’ll be fibre. The thing here is the right solution for the right problem, oh, and cut the damn hype.

Life, Rants

Zero Commute

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I’m spending a few days virtually back at my desk rather than physically, and it makes a nice change; a good hour and a half more in bed, and a walk to the dining table (or indeed the garden) with a laptop, a mobile and my USB headset compares favourably to pumping the air full of hydrocarbons and NOx on the M5. My usual commute is a particularly wasteful exercise in many ways, taking over 2 hours out of my day at least, and costing both cash and the planet, but my employer is mostly OK, my colleagues are great, and the money isn’t bad. I could do a lot worse, basically. My recovery sees me moving better, but not quite ready to drive to work, so I’m at home with VPN, IP Softphone, and a mobile. That means I get to choose Planet Rock (over Internet radio rather than DAB), get pussy cat company, and get a shorter walk to the kettle and toilet. Oh, and my productivity has gone up, at least on the specific tasks I’ve got to do at the moment, due to fewer interruptions. What’s not to like?

Well, some employers are doubtless concerned that if their employees are out of sight, they’ll be fucking about all day watching Homes Under The Hammer, sloping off to the shops, sleeping, wanking, whatever, but then in this post I discussed that happening right under their noses anyway; this is a fairly simple management question: if your employees aren’t producing, you should be able to tell. People who work for themselves have to be organised about this, and it’s perfectly possible for a wage-slave to do the same: I’ve done a full day’s work, just removed the pollution at time-wasting of the commute.

I know I’ve whined about this before, and I also recognised that telecommuting doesn’t work for some people- in fact, at times it won’t work for me.

But as journey times increase and our roads gridlock more and more, just why do we all travel like this all the time?

Evil Overlord, Politics, Rants

Bloody Useless Council

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Against my better judgement, I’ve become more active on Facebook. Under a pseudonym. I’ve got drawn into local groups, and there’s a predictable theme in many of them, something that reminds me of an old Alexei Sayle joke that I can’t find a Youtube clip for.

I’ve been using this toilet for 6 weeks and no-one from the council has been round to flush it for me.

The theme is largely “it is all the council’s fault”, where “it” could be anything from bus price rises, homeless and beggars, crime rates, to empty shops, to anything fucking else, to be honest.

I’m all for taking Walsall Council to task, but let’s be realistic here. People imagine that the council is rolling in cash from “all our council tax” (oh, apart from the proportion of that spent in overseas aid, apparently, despite that being proved as bollocks from the accounts), people think the council can approve or deny planning based on a whim, and that they control rent and business rates.

So then. Here we go:

1) Buses. Buses are run by private companies. National Express, mostly, round here, with a few others- notably Arriva in Staffordshire. They set the fares, and buy, maintain and run the vehicles. The bus stops are maintained by the West Midlands Combined Authority.

2) Homeless People. There’s no council housing. Thatcher sold it off, and councils haven’t been able to build houses for years; the only social housing gets built by housing associations. You can thank the Conservative government’s austerity measures and the bedroom tax for the fact that social housing is in short supply and expensive, and for the cutting of social care too,so the council’s powers are very limited. As to taking over empty buildings- as they don’t own them (see below), why should they take them over? If you owned a empty office lock, would you want it taken over and used as a shelter, or would you want the opportunity to rent it at a market rent?

3) Empty Shops. Shops shut down because there’s not enough money being spent to sustain them, plain and simple. The reason that you don’t have enough shops, or the wrong sort of shops (fast food, charity shops, pound shops etc etc), or no shops at all is called capitalism and market forces; if there’s not enough money coming in, then they can’t pay the rent and rates and their staff. (see 4 below) The shops that do survive survive precisely because people use them, enabling them to make money. You might want a nice focaccia bread and olive shop in Park Street, but unless it stands a chance of making money (hint: it doesn’t), then you’ve got fuck all chance of that. Retail is in decline and changing everywhere. There’s fewer butchers and bakers because we all buy from the supermarket; there’s fewer record shops because of Amazon, iTunes, and Spotify; the list goes on.

4) Rent and Business Rates.

The council should cut the rents and rates so shops could afford it.

The council do not own most of the shops. They do own the Saddler’s Centre (and they will in all likelihood be criticised for buying it, in the future, when the shops are all empty), but that’s about all. The majority of shops are owned (and therefore have rent set) by property investment firms like London & Cambridge. Business rates are set by Central Government, so no chance there, either. Also:

They built all those new shops at [location] and they’re all empty. Waste of council money.

Whoever built it, it sure wasn’t the council.

5) Begging. Again, the cuts in social care, the reduction in addiction support programs, and the basic all-round selfishness of our society means that some poor fuckers have nowhere else to turn. It’s funny how the people most offended by this are so often a close intersection with the bastards that voted for it.

6) Planning.

They shouldn’t allow planning permission for [x] because there’s too many of [x] and [optionally] I don’t like [x].

Typically, X will be a fast-food outlet or a takeaway.

Thankfully, councils don’t have the power to refuse planning on the basis that you don’t like something.

They granted planning for [y] and that ruined [z]

[y] might be an out-of-town shopping centre, for example.

Since national government reduced council’s powers on planning, they couldn’t refuse a reasonable request, so the developer of [y], if he’s clever, can just do it. All that troublesome red tape that we got rid of, see? Red Tape. That stuff that stops people doing exactly what the fuck they like, regardless off the impact on others? Better off rid of it.

I’ve not done an Evil Overlord post for a while. Evil Overlord 22: people who mindlessly blame the council for stuff they aren’t responsible for get to man the phones there for a few months.

It feels wrong to be be defending Walsall MBC, but I just wish people would get their facts straight and perhaps just think.

Life, Rants

Hearing You Loud & Clear

1 Comment

I’m going to whinge, like the miserable, middle-aged man I am, with a first-world problem.

On Friday, I had an afternoon off, so we went into Walsall, and for a change to The Fountain.

I used to love The Fountain, but my last few visits have resulted in a change of heart, and it’s people that are the problem. Jeebus, I hate people 🙂

Further people to hate materialised when we went for something to eat. We went to Golden Moments, a Indian restaurant that’s been there forever, and that we’ve used for some 30 years now. It’s a step above the ordinary curry house- not expensive or overly posh, but relaxed, pleasant, and a nice place to be, which made their behaviour all the more…irksome.

It’s something I’m increasingly seeing, and it seems really odd to my late 40s mind: not just taking a phone call in a quiet restaurant, but using speakerphone to do so, and having it loud, and shouting, seemingly oblivious that the whole place can hear the conversation.

What is this? Is it learned behaviour from The Apprentice or countless other “reality” TV programmes (where there is at least a reason for it), or is it just total ignorance?

I’m not the only one to wonder this: from Mumsnet to Reddit, via Digital Spy, people are mystified.

My opinion? Some people are just entitled, inconsiderate fucks.

Politics, Public Transport, Rants

Independent Thought

1 Comment

I picked up this article on Unherd via Twatter, bemoaning the loss of bus services in rural areas, and the general loss of non-profitable bus services, especially outside the capital.

It’s a good article, and you can see the impact, even around here, with a good, sensibly priced bus service. As I’ve commented before, some close-by areas in Staffordshire are now unreachable out of peak hours, even if we have gained a service to Lichfield.

Now, my blog was kind-of focused on my restricted opportunities for going on the piss, but also mentioning less well-off workers: the people that are out working for a living but can’t afford the considerable expense of a car.

The article mentions those, and adds another category: pensioners who either can’t afford a car, or indeed can’t drive (perhaps they never learned, perhaps medical conditions prevent it) even if they can afford it.

All of these people are being hit by reduced services and increased prices as subsidies are reduced and the non-profitable routes are stopped or limited. Getting to work, the shops, the job centre, medical appointments etc, and yes, the pub, suddenly gets harder, more expensive, and more time-consuming. People are getting isolated.

All of this because a route doesn’t stack up on a balance sheet. The real social cost of poor public transport acn’t be measured in cash terms. The private-sector model has its place, but it’s not here.