Why “Improve” stuff so it no longer works.

Why is it that people who write software work on the premise that if it works fine…flaming well break it to the extent that it adds completely unnecessary bloated crap because they can, not because it improves anything!

I look at Facebook.and Windoze and Firefox,only three of many software programmes bloated out of usefulness and ease of use. and feel like screaming as they tell me what I must do.or ask me if I’m sure I want to do something.or just ask me silly questions they really don’t want me to answer!

The Family Search site has joined the waste of space facilities on the Internet…and prompted this whine.  I’ve been on the internet since the mid 1990s and been using Family Search almost from day one…and it was ace. As long as I remembered that submitted info wasn’t proven info, I could look for, say, a marriage….and get a list of marriages referencing the appropriate name and dates if I had input dates as a start point for my research..  Now, in the bogging new set-up, I can put in a name..and dates, request marriage details for that name. within those dates ….and get  pages of census info from  anywhere  somebody has input their birth place as Scotland,;children born to someone  with that name,; birth details for someone with that name;….and  interspersed among the pages of  information I didn’t ask for, the occasional marriage. Why anyone would think that I am prepared to check through up to 15 + pages which, Family Search kindly tells me.. “are not what I’m looking for but may be of interest” I’m damned if I know.  If it isn’t what I requested..why show me it?

 

Campaign for Scottish Independence Launched…Unionist View

Now why am I not surprised, given the media/press focus on being much more than fair to the Union to the extent of blatant lying, and much less than fair to those of us who want to get out of the Union, that  the Daily Failograph’s headline is Campaign for Scottish independence launched and follows it’s header (which almost reads reasonable) with The campaign to break up Britain today urged a million Scots to sign a new declaration of independence but admitted it will not provide any details of how a separate country would operate.

Let’s examine that absolute crap!  Firstly we are not breaking up Britain…..we are trying to remove ourselves from a treaty signed 305 years ago (much as so many want to get out of the EU signed a lot more recently by other politicians without a brain among them)…and a treaty which, says that England gets to dictate to us…to suit English aspirations. We are not sending out JCBs to divide us from  England physically..so Britain will always exist…even though Great Britain, the political entity,  may not.

I’m not inclined to think that  the numbers objecting to/in favour of anything makes a lot of difference to a UK Government wedded to their own mindset. How much difference did the anti-Iraq war online impetus/subsequent march make to even getting Government to think twice about that currently ongoing big fail?   Seems to me, nothing at all!

Any Unionist..any one at all, care to provide any details as to how the Union will be working after 2014?  No? I thought not.  We know what the Union will do from now until at least 2015 and the next election..and we know what the Tories will do if they get a majority next UK election round….but we don’t know how any of it will work and what difference it will make re reducing borrowing, repaying debt. and cutting austerity . After all, what UK Governments trying to improve anything  from the time of the economic melt-down, have managed  to improve anything so far?

At the end of the day, voting for Independence is a gamble….but staying in the Union is just as much a gamble.   So I guess if you don’t buy lottery tickets or scratchcards,, you won’t be inclined to pay £1 for independence..(or the £2 to which it appears to have been increased.)

 

Living Out of Time….Running Out Of Patience Part 1

You’re out of touch my baby     My poor old fashioned baby   I said baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time ……..part of the lyrics of Chris Farlowe’s 1966  hit..and a perfect description of my mindset in 2013.

All the rest of this is going to be a generalisation which, if anyone ever reads it but me, is likely going to get up noses. Sorry about that, people.

As an early Baby Boomer, six months older than the NHS, I was brought up to believe, by Labour voting/activist parents, that the Welfare State, started before WWI and enhanced by the post WWII NHS, was a blessing for those in circumstances not of their own making and to be used for only as long as those circumstances pertained.

I was a child in the later days of rationing; I lived in the days when clothes were passed down through/across the generations until they became threadbare but they were not sold for money on ebay or handed over  to sell in a shop staffed mostly by volunteers who work for nothing to ensure there will always be money to pay the salaries of the shop managers, office staff and high heid bummers of charities.and maybe…with a bit of luck and no expenses claims., some left to do the good the volunteers  thought they were supporting.

l Iived in the days when neighbours, friends and families helped out with child-minding  without expecting payment, though they did expect some reciprocity where necessary. In them days we did “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”.  There was nobody getting rich  in them days by charging for monetary profit to replace neighbours, friends and families re childminding..but then in them days there was no government who had latched on to informal child-minding set-ups as something to be legislated against and controlled  in order to make profit for private companies.

I lived in the days when you gave stuff you no longer needed to people who needed it, and didn’t SELL it to them!  I lived in the days when women had acquired equality under the law..and so we got child benefit for the first child, as well as all our subsequent children, and maternity benefits..and maternity pay if in employment…and maternity pay lasted  then for a relatively short time in the scheme of thoroughly hacking off those who are obliged to cover for their absence. because Governments made replacement cover for their absence optional.and companies who pay wages don’t do optional if that reduces profit.

In my day feminists were fighting for equality under the law..which they got…..nowadays they are fighting to, and succeeding in, absolving women from having any responsibility for their actions. So nowadays you get a male and a female drunk..and only the female drunk gets a free pass to be a complete and utter arsehole!

I never wanted to live under a patriarchal society….but then, the only other thing which scares the crap out of me, as a woman, is the idea that we are getting to the stage of replacing the patriarchal crap with feminist matriarchal shite! If we can’t have equality both of us can agree is adequate for both our purposes…and that appears less and less possible as the feminists continue to find something they can whine about , I’d as soon go back to patriarchal, because men seem a lot less vituperative about women than feminists do about men.

The UK before Thatcher was generally  a pretty decent place when comparing it with life now. Maybe everything didn’t work the same in all areas, but over the whole, the UK was a country with a Government which generally drew the line at dictation and rank stupidity and only legislated to correct perceived problems. The UK became absolute shite to live in when the problems perceived by Government  were that a mixed economy, with a public sector they did not have the intelligence/ability to control was not working..and that capitalism was all and capitalism on the same lines as embraced by the USA was the ideal.

So then we got a drastic roll-back of everything which made the UK an almost  decent place in which to live.  We got ATOS and G4S and Serco and all those companies predicated on making money for the directors and shareholders with the treatment of joe punter becoming a useful money earning point, depending on the contract agreed (and we all know how really bad our brain-dead politicians are at drawing up contracts. Think the  building of the Scottish Parliament..think the security for the Olympics……in fact.just think the Olympics and the swingeing costs over and above the theory presented to us originally.)

There is poverty of the kind that the Welfare State was originally set up to ameliorate…the poverty which meant that without the Welfare State input you had no income at all coming in to do anything to meet your very basic needs of life…and then there is being poor in your own mind, with your only point of reference being the level of unnecessary luxuries you can’t  afford to fund. The latter is the relative poverty so beloved by Governments scratching for votes.

Maybe I have a weird mind..but is “relative poverty” and the basing on benefits for some (as  in not  for the single unemployed  with homes or the single under 25 pariahs who don’t live with parents who could support them ) predicated on the concept that those who can’t afford to buy unnecessary consumer goods, like mobile phones, Wiis, PS3s etc are poor in the eyes of those who can afford them…..like our well off politicians (and all those who get a decent income from running/participating in quangos, focus groups etc) on the dime from our seemingly bottomless taxpayer pocket.

And is it only me who thinks that relative poverty is the benchmark.because our Governments are fixated on making sure that some (and only some) of us can afford to buy all the pointless but well advertised, and thus desired, crap that businesses have to sell so they can be assured of a profit to send out of the UK, or off-shore and manage to keep enough cash in their own pockets/bank accounts to enable them to donate large amounts of cash to the political parties to ensure they will continue to be favoured above the other 99% of the population?

I lived in the days when the Big Society, that Cameron is frantically trying to resurrect from the dead place to which  Maggie Thatcher consigned it, really existed. I can see that aspiration being another big fail by the Coalition, along with reducing the UK debt levels, coming across the moral compass they appear to have mislaid and understanding that “we are all in this together” means sod all when the only ones being shafted are the poorest and/or most disadvantaged.

 

 

 

Ethnic diversity..or..Reaping What you Sow and Whining About It.

Been reading a lot of posts by members of forums to which I belong about the deleterious effect of ethnic diversity on Western society. Mostly applied in the context of raised crime rates, ethnic and religious conflict/terrorism, raised unemployment levels, cost of welfare benefits etc.

What is ethnic diversity in countries in which have been ethnically diverse for centuries….and have never been ethnically homogeneous bar at the time of the first colonists? As far as I can ascertain every one of us in Western countries is descended from immigrants/invaders even though some of our ancestors arrived a long time ago and those of others arrived relatively recently?

We in the UK have been whining about immigration, since long before we started turning half the world pink. Watched a TV programme on “Yesterday” about “Ipswich Man” and saw that nothing much in the UK had changed re antagonism to any individual perceived as different, whether because of race, colour, sexuality etc since about the days of the Domesday Book…and we have, in 2013, political parties like the BNP promulgating attitudes 400 plus years old.

Way I look at it is that we got rich on the backs of the poor, both in our own country and in countries all over the world and it seems more than hypocritical to complain when people we have trashed for decades, if not centuries turn up and say “Where’s mine!” And now the rest of the West is starting to reap the whirlwind…and they have only themselves to blame.

Anyway is ethnic conflict really because of ethnicity or is it more because of the attitude of the people who have lived in a country for ten minutes objecting to those who arrived two minutes ago getting the benefit of what they had paid in to benefit themselves over that ten minutes? Ethnicity, whatever it is in this mongrel world, has nothing to do with anything really…..the problem in the Western world is the growing and more vituperative sense of greed, self interest and entitlement by people who just don’t want to share their good fortune with people less fortunate….or are maybe just chuffed to bits to always have people arriving they can blame for all their life’s problems, to save them having to wonder if they should be taking some responsibility for their own lives?

Ethnicity isn’t the problem….Friedman’s version of capitalism ruling the West is the problem….and our Western propensity for pushing that interpretation of economics onto other countries under the guise of democracy, with the help of the World Bank and IMF. I find it hard, tbh, to be against immigrants who come here because we in the West haven’t left them with enough food and resources to get a life as good as the one they see some of us having on what should have been available for them to have a minimal standard of living in their own countries.