Shareholders are Evil

Thursday 1509hrs

I’ve said many times to many people that the system of “Shareholding” is the root of almost all evil. See, my logic is that if someone is involved as a purely financial shareholder (And not as a founding director, for example) then their only interest in the company at all is the financial performance of the company. This leads to many things. Support for wars, calls for shameless exploitation of children in the East, rapacious polluting of local rivers and streams to save expenditure on those pesky environmental regulations.

Why? For profit, of course. Altruism and decency go out of the window when an abstract EPS (Earnings per Share) becomes your sole interest.

So it’s no wonder I regard with some frustration our wonderful government turning over of essential, national supplies such as water, gas and electric to private shareholder motivated corporations. “Competition will keep prices down”, they hark, without realising that they’ve simply established a co-operative monopoly with only one interest: Profit.

See, the energy companies have a complete monopoly, even if they are acting as individual corporate entities. Why? Well the vast majority of the population have no means by which to adequately generate their own power, pump their own clean water, or supply their own clean, burnable gas. There is simply no competition, which means energy companies can do what they want with the prices and justify them however they please. In the case of these rapacious shareholders they’re claiming that freezing Grandma to death this winter is because, quote:

“This is a business that has got a million shareholders – a lot of pension funds and people have got their savings invested in British Gas shares and we have to look after them”

So clearly, their intention is to look after those people who have a stake in their company at the expense of the quality of life of the citizens of Great Britain. Is that really the attitude we want to see from the providers of essential services? The components of national infrastructure that contribute to basic qualities of life should never be placed in the hands of people who have no interest in the good of the people, it’s madness.

A democratic government has an obligation to its electorate, the majority, not the wealthy elite, yet time and time again we see them sacrificing essential public services in the name of “financial competition” and profits. As we charge headlong into plutocracy my advice to anyone out there is to get wealthy or learn how to survive without Oxygen, as sooner or later they’re going to start charging for air.

Just thought I’d share this gem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeTIv9UkY8c

It’s a bloke standing up for himself against the Thought Police / Brown Shirts / NAZI Enforcement Squad / UK Security Policy.

You go mate, I just hope the rest of the mindless sheep that inhabit this green isle take to heart your example and start fighting back against the continual persecution of innocent people and the erosions of freedom within the UK under the shoddy and two-sided banner of anti-terror legislations.

If we cannot be free people in our own land under our own democracy, then I can only conclude that the terrorists, if they’re out there, have won.

I draw your attention to this article on Plans to Allow Corporate Theft of Personal Works. I’m sure the bill has another name but this one will do just fine for me.

Please read the article, but for those with short attention spans or tight time constraints I’ll sum it up. Essentially it plans to make any work not registered for copyright “orphan”, whereby its copyright can be collected by someone else, or simply used without permission or financial compensation. How do you register something for copyright, I hear you cry? Well, you do so through a new, private and untested agency which, you will no doubt be completely shocked and surprised to discovered, has financial strings attaching it directly to those pushing this bill through. Conspiracy? Nooooo, of course not. Just business and, as with 99.9% of all big business, designed only with profit in mind.

Anyone out there from the US reading this, please shake down your local congressman. This is something that we do NOT want to see used as a role model in the rest of the civilised world. Political apathy is allowing those with the bankrolls to tighten their grip on the politic and that surely has to give out soon. One should have to choose to release a work into the public domain and be protected by default. Any other system is just completely insane. It gets even better in that anyone at all could register your work and, unless you respond to contest it within a defined period of time, wham, now it’s theirs.

It is so ridiculous at first I thought it was a joke. Honestly, if the government here try to pull this kind of stunt I’m moving to Canada.

UK Health Ministers are acting beyond their stations this week, calling for powers to mass-medicate the UK population with Fluoride. I can’t help thinking that depriving people of a choice and pumping (more) chemicals into the water supply is a bit, what’s the word… crazy? Yes, I’m well aware that it’s been going on in certain regions of the UK for a long time now, but I’m fortunately living in one of those areas where it doesn’t. If I want fluoride, I’ll go get some. Oddly enough, it’s the same approach I otake with antibiotics. Or chocolate. Or anything else I decide to consume. Furthermore there’s increasing evidence, trotting out of China no less, that is particularly damning when it comes to fluride in water supplies. We’re not talking dodgy tooth enamel and swiss cheese bones here people, no, we’re talking about fluoride causing brain damage. In truth, it’s lowering IQ’s, but the link text is king and I fancied some sensationalism.

The gist of the study is that, in two villages distinguished only by the flouride content in their water supply, children from the high fluoride areas were found to have test-provably lower IQ’s than the children from the low flouride village. Most of the safety studies performed in the past, you see, were performed on rats and, judging from the results of those trials it seems to me that they were only watching to see if the rats dropped dead. They weren’t tasking them with calculus, or even basic addition. Had they done so they’d have long ago realised that it was indeed making the rats more stupid. Or less intelligent (If the glass is half full for you. Of low-flouride water, of course.)

So this study may be flawed, but the fact is that there isn’t any damning evidence to the contrary and, in that condition, it’s alarming that the government is considering a mass medication programme of this nature. Perhaps they haven’t read this report out of China, or perhaps they’ve just taken another fat bung from British Aluminium.

See, Fluoride is what happens when you electrolyse sodium-aluminium-fluoride. Gory details toward the end of this little PR page on aluminium production. So what happens to the waste product?

Fluoride was originally pursued as a rat poison but, faced with having to get rid of huge quantities of the stuff, far more than RentoKill could chew through in a decade, the aluminium industry turned to local legislators and convinced them dumping the stuff into the water supply would be good for childrens teeth. Everyone knows that Britons have bad teeth, so the move was considered genius and approved. Everyone wins. Governments get a kickback from the Aluminium producers, the Aluminium producers get rid of their waste and the children of the UK grow up with shiney teeth and an IQ so low that they are unable to question the system.

Bravo.

The absurdity of all this is compounded by the fact that the only positive reason cited for adding toxins to the water supply is that it helps your teeth by hardening them. Well, excuse me, but isn’t brushing your damn teeth a simpler alternative? If your child is too stupid or too lazy to brush its own teeth then you’re either a bad parent or natural selection is guiding your kid toward a soft food diet.

EVGA 8800 Problem

Thursday 1519hrs

I have an EVGA 8800GTS OC 320mb.
I purchased it from Overclockers.co.uk and I urge anyone reading that they do not make the same mistake.

Overclockers firstly lied to me about the product, falsley advertising that it was elegible for the EVGA “Step Up” program, which it is not. The 90-day bullshit was even printed all over the box, something I was later informed was the result of EVGA shipping products in whatever boxes they had available. Way to go you theiving fraudsters. I don’t like being lied to, especially when the trained monkey retard on the end of the phone “umms” and “errs” blankley on the end of the phone when confronted with the facts. Maybe I just don’t get shitty enough with people on the phone to ‘get things done’, but I don’t see why one should have to resort to crude behaviour and legal threats. Maybe that’s how one has to take these pillocks on, I should make a note to try this in future…

Anyhow, the card is defunct. It causes glitching and crashing symptomatic of overeheating yet the temp sensors report everything to be normal. RMA time. Overclockers basically deny all knowledge of ever dealing with me, saying if it’s an EVGA product to RMA it direct to EVGA. EVGA initially say to try dealing with your supplier. Fat chance. So the arrogant arses at OCUK just say “Deal with EVGA” and provide me with a mobile number (!) for the only person in the UK working for EVGA. Great start. I call the guy who listens to me, seemingly ignores everything I say and gives me the email addresses of some people in Germany to contact.

I contact them.

Twice.

I get no responses. I don’t even get a response from the guy on the mobile phone. If i could rememeber the sodding number I’d put it up here for people to prank call and flagrantly abuse, because frankly they deserve it. I discover I can raise an RMA request by email, I try this but am once again ignored. I raise an RMA request using their RMA ticket system thingy, I am once again ignored. I receive NO feedback from EVGA about anything, at all. Basically they’re operating under the umbrella of “You were stupid enough to buy our product from a bunch of crooks, so hahahaha sucks to be you.” and are not uphlding any part of their warranty claim which, as far as I am aware, is illegal. It’s worth noting that EVGA Europe is based in Germany and all RMA requests need to be shipped back there, with ALL shipping costs (To and from) payable by the consumer. Not even EBuyer is this bad and it’s fairly plain how pissed off I am with their level of “Service”.

Do me a favour and boycott the punks at EVGA and the crooks over at Overclockers.co.uk. There are other more respectable and worthwhile computer suppliers like CCL who don’t lie, cheat and all out swindle you out of your hard-earned with dubious returns policies and inaccurate falsified advertising.

Even if EVGA ever do issue an RMA I just know I’m going to feel like Neville Chamberlain coming home from his pow-wow with Hitler, waving that pretty little appeasement paper.

Hitler was (an honourary…) German too. I wonder if EVGA inherited his customer service principles. Certainly bloody feels like it.

Serious and Organized

Sunday 1205hrs

Once again the window into our beloved Big BrotherState, the BBC, brings us a harrowing peice about two desperate and dangerous criminals, determined to endanger the lives of our beloved parliamentary doo-gooders.
Obadiah Marius was arrested under the “Serious and Organised Crime Act”, another one of those policies dashed through to provide blanket powers to the police under the guise of doing something useful to protect us from, well, Serious and Organised crime. He had in fact just gotten himself a little lost which, I’d always though, was allowable. It seems now however that “Inability to Navigate” has been added to the list of henoius and sinful crimes alongside “Speaking your mind near Whitehall”. Interestingly enough his girlfriend was released, though her name wasn’t. I wonder if Obadiah was “White British”, or perhaps his girlfriend? She was released, afterall, even though it’s well known that women can be at times both very serious and organised.

Don’t get me wrong, I think with the jokes the UK government is pulling off on a global scale they really do need that security, but do they genuinely believe that Obadiah Marius was either serious, or organised? Just make sure you don’t stop to ask a copper for directions in The Smoke any time soon, else you might find yourself sharing a cell with genuinely serious and organised criminals… 😉

Much as I hate criminals, chavs, thugs, louts, hooligans and doley scum who do nothing but destroy this precious isle and the best intentions of its noble and proud inhabitants, I’m also not a big fan of the state. Having privacy slowly stripped away and our right to do whatever we want on our own time is not on, by any measure. A lot of people get agitated by the notion that if you’ve got nothing to hide then what’s wrong with other people having a look. I say that’s nonsense, as anyone who’s ever read a Philip K Dick novel will tell you. Once you give an authority the power to collect and catalog and monitor everything, you’ve essentially surrendered your entire life to them. Now, so long as you play nice and don’t rock the boat you can live out your 80 years (approx) in blissful oblivion under the impression that all is good with the world BUT, if you’re unfortunate enough to slip through the cracks you’re going to find yourself in a world of hurt when “The computer says no.”

What if the kid you bullied at school gets a job at the “Ministry of Information” and decides to get back at you? What if all of a sudden the government makes drinking milk illegal and can trace every purchase of milk everyone has ever made, ever? Sounds ridiculous, but then the Nazi’s rounded up people with long noses. In the USA they want to make mobile phones the centre of your retail experience so you make purchases based off centralised phone credit. Cashless societies are flawed for many reasons, but a cashless society which can track your movements as you make your purchases…? The mind spins at the utter wrongness of it. Sure all that information in the hands of a noble and un-corruptable force would be of no danger to anyone, but sadly we don’t have Lensmen and western governments have already proven that they don’t give a crap about human rights. (Apogies to Opera users, Amnesty Internation evidently need to hire a proper web developer!)

Anyway, back to the title of this mini-rant. You all should remember Robocop and the infamous ED-209 (If you don’t then shame on you, it’s a film history icon). You should also know what happens, then, what happens when the system malfunctions or, more critically, the system creators want to subvert the otherwise noble intentions of an automated law enforcement system. Just a good job that Murphey remembered he was human afterall…

You might be wondering if someone slipped me something in my tea but no, this was all kicked off by another BBC article about Flying Police Death Drones. Ok,so I might be leaning a little heavy on the drama here, but you can see where I’m going with it. How long before they have automated drones that “Automatically detect suspicious behaviour”, how long before they’ve got tazers or tear gas?

I’m all for rounding up the undesirables, the thugs and retarded goons who stab children and have anger mangement problems that would make Adolf Hitler look like a nice guy, but I can’t help feeling that it’s going to go down in a way that’s good for Government and very, very bad for the public.

Out Numbered and Out Thunk

Wednesday 1237hrs

The bastion of reliable, unbiased and journalistically adept reporting the BBC brings home a little gem today about how woefully optimistic UK educational establishments have become. You can read it by clicking the following sarcastic and search engine optimised link text: High Standards for UK Universities.

One could argue that as I made it through the whole system without dropping a grade that this was already painfully obvious, however I’m sure you’ll agree that the comparison in entry test questions really slams it home. The Chinese one has so many lines! Now at first glance you might think that this is OK, as the Chinese language has lots more lines in it than English so naturally, they’re used to dealing with such problems. However on inspection you see that the problem reaches further than simply counting the number of lines, though in fairness the UK questions isn’t really a lot more developed. Some people could quite honestly sort that one out without the aid of a logbook or calculator in no time flat.

There is more, though, even beyond considering that the Chinese question is set for people not even into University yet and the British one is set for first year students. At Loughborough University (UK) I’m told that maths was causing such a problem for entry students to Engineering that to remedy the problem they simply dropped A-Level maths as a requirement! Maybe they realised that A-Level maths was a joke beyond help and that it really didn’t matter anyway, or perhaps they’re suffering from the same disease as the rest of the system, slackening standards to boost pass rates and make everyone feel jolly good about themselves. Looking back, our A-Level maths was a damn sight easier than that of 5 years before and the current offering, in A or AS form, is down at the O-Level standard of years gone by. Should we just get over it and outsource our education too?