Sunday, 5 October 2014
Middle East - What's in a name?
Well, I don't know about you but I'd be a lot more confident of the Western world being able to help out in the Middle East if the various governments, politicians etc. could manage to agree who they are taking action against. No - not physically who they want to take action against - I think they may have managed to decide on that, but what they are calling them.... When they first started being talked about on the news they were 'IS, formally known as <something or other that I don't even remember>'. That was obviously too much of a mouthful so had been shortened to IS by a lot of the media. However, apparently IS should not be used because they are considered to be neither Islamist or a State (although I'm not sure who made the unilateral decision to stop using the term - it obviously must have taken up hours of debating time by some unheard-of and unelected body of people!). Anyway, now we have politicians and the media calling them either IS, ISIS or ISIL. And the French have decided to call them Daesh because that is what the Arabic speaking media use. You can witness interviews on the TV where one person is using one acronym and the other is using a different acronym - oh and it has happened in exchanges in the House of Commons too. It would be nice if everyone could just pick one of the names and stick to it!
Tuesday, 9 September 2014
Scotland
It's amazing how the media are so interested in whether or not Scotland are going to vote for independence. There's barely been a mention of it until last week, but the good old 'impartial' BBC are at almost fever pitch about it now. I'm not sure why their reporting should be biased towards Scottish independence but there's certainly no doubt that every report they make is slanted that way. It would be nice to get a balanced view but if you want that don't rely on the BBC - perhaps they've been promised a load of money by Alex Salmond - he seems to be good at promising money the country doesn't have.
As far as I'm concerned the rest of the union has been disenfranchised. Any media reports should be confined to regional TV stations and a very brief report on the national news. It would be a different story if the other members of the union had a say in the huge implications this vote has on them, but unfortunately it is only the people living in Scotland who can have a say. Not really democratic is it? Can you imagine if the English had decided to have a vote to eject Scotland? There would have been an outcry.
So anyway, I suppose I'll need to get my passport up to date - the way it's looking there'll be border control on the A1 soon!
As far as I'm concerned the rest of the union has been disenfranchised. Any media reports should be confined to regional TV stations and a very brief report on the national news. It would be a different story if the other members of the union had a say in the huge implications this vote has on them, but unfortunately it is only the people living in Scotland who can have a say. Not really democratic is it? Can you imagine if the English had decided to have a vote to eject Scotland? There would have been an outcry.
So anyway, I suppose I'll need to get my passport up to date - the way it's looking there'll be border control on the A1 soon!
Sunday, 6 July 2014
WiFi on Trains
An announcement on the news today (bursting with that artificial enthusiasm the presenters always use when it is supposed to be a 'good news' story which I hate).... The government has decided to use the money it has fined Network Rail to improve WiFi on commuter trains. Yeah, you know, the money taken off them for failing to improve services and thus making them even less likely to be able to improve anything as they have no money.
Well, I'm pretty confident that the last thing on a commuters mind when they are packed into a 30 year old carriage like a sardine which is running late for the 3rd time this week is "hmmm... wish there was faster WiFi on this train". Call me old fashioned, but I'd have thought trains with the right capacity which run on time would be a priority, not being able to check twitter in case some celebrity has told the world what they had for breakfast.
No doubt this scheme will go ahead for the sake of Britain needing to be on the forefront of technology (or some other trite soundbite) - and of course will benefit no-one but London's commuter trains. And will it make any difference to the normal working person? Well I suppose it means they can upload the pic they've just taken to instagram quicker, but does that really matter? Do you really need WiFi on a commuter train? I'd have thought that if anything WiFi is more important on long distance trains so that people travelling are able to work while travelling - no chance of that on a commuter train when you have your nose shoved in someone's armpit!
Anyway, it's never going to have any impact on me... I live in the North East (the region where the first steam engines came from) - no chance of any sort of modernisation for us. The North apparently ends at Leeds as far as any transport scheme is concerned!
Well, I'm pretty confident that the last thing on a commuters mind when they are packed into a 30 year old carriage like a sardine which is running late for the 3rd time this week is "hmmm... wish there was faster WiFi on this train". Call me old fashioned, but I'd have thought trains with the right capacity which run on time would be a priority, not being able to check twitter in case some celebrity has told the world what they had for breakfast.
No doubt this scheme will go ahead for the sake of Britain needing to be on the forefront of technology (or some other trite soundbite) - and of course will benefit no-one but London's commuter trains. And will it make any difference to the normal working person? Well I suppose it means they can upload the pic they've just taken to instagram quicker, but does that really matter? Do you really need WiFi on a commuter train? I'd have thought that if anything WiFi is more important on long distance trains so that people travelling are able to work while travelling - no chance of that on a commuter train when you have your nose shoved in someone's armpit!
Anyway, it's never going to have any impact on me... I live in the North East (the region where the first steam engines came from) - no chance of any sort of modernisation for us. The North apparently ends at Leeds as far as any transport scheme is concerned!
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