Category Archives: annoyances

annoyances

Is your body beach ready?

The UK got into a bit of a tizz about an advertising campaign which ran posters in the London Underground lately. I think they might all be gone now – I don’t live in London – but basically, the consisted of a bikini clad model and an implication that you needed to have an acceptable body to be beach ready.

This is drivel of course, but it caused much debate, many columns on websites because of course, people just want to voice their opinion on stuff, and decry other people getting professionally insulted and all sorts of related good clickbait like that.

I found it depressing. I have been known to spend a significant amount of time on the beach and for my purposes, bikinis have been less than suitable.

Here’s why.

1) if you are carrying 24kg of camera equipment, the camera bag will wind up strafing at some point. It also rubs off sun protection cream which means your black Lowe Alpine camera bag does not get sunburnt, but you do, and what’s more, at those points which the camera bag will strafe. Hurty Hurty Hurt.

2) if you are going in the water taking photographs, it gets cold, no matter how sunny. Let me tell you, being cold and sunburned at the same time is a bad thing.

3) Putting on sun cream is horribly messy; invariably you miss bits and invariably you wind up sunburned. My personal preference is to cover up.

4) if you have decent breasts at all – by which I mean more noticeable than the sound of a feather falling in the night – bikinis are low on support.

So if being beach ready bodywise means being able to wear a little yellow bikini, the likelihood is that I will never find one that I feel comfortable in even if I was several sizes smaller because the whole breast thing, you see, and in any case, being beach body ready, in my case, means covering up completely so as to avoid getting sunburned.

In the meantime, the company concerned flog a meal replacement shake thing. I’ve never understood the attraction of them and I’ve never been convinced that they are a healthy option compared to eating a balanced food diet but that’s by way of a diversion. Ultimately, companies which flog things to make you want to change the way you look operate on reducing your self esteem and arguably, that’s what this does. In my view, attacking people’s self esteem is a healthy activity either but your mileage may variable. The issue I had with the discussions is they got down to a “we should be allowed to attack people’s self esteem to make them lose weight because being obese is not healthy”. Which leads me to think that a lot of people who post opinions below the line of major UK newspapers didn’t spend enough time in school. Attacking people in this way does not work for everyone, probably doesn’t even work for many of them at all.

Then there was the argument on whether the model looked healthy or not. I am not willing to make a call on that either. And then there was the argument about feminists and how stupid they were which seems to crop up on a regular basis. Naturally it was noted that the only people who were outraged by this were people a) who wouldn’t use the product and b) who weren’t beach body ready.

In many respects, it was all very dreary. I couldn’t even get behind the anti-campaigns, of people standing next to the poster who very clearly hadn’t been Photoshopped and weren’t a size 0 or whatever. Or the ones who voiced the view that “How to be beach body ready: go to a beach”

Mostly that’s because a) I wouldn’t use the product anyway: if you want liquid food, use fruit, a hand blender and some  yogurt. Throw in some nuts if that’s what grabs you. b) I don’t wear a bikini because they’re not really designed for women with breasts per se and c) even if I did, I couldn’t because I am extremely fair and the safest occasion on which I can prance around half naked tends to involve 100% cloud cover and driving rain. Which doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to be honest, when you think about it.

If I wanted to point one thing out about the whole beach body and bikini thing it would be this: in terms of avoiding sunburn, it is nowhere near as safe as simply covering up. And if you’re going to be covering up anyway, is there any need to half starve yourself by using meal replacement drinks in a mad bid to lose a lot of weight in a short space of time?

annoyances, beauty product reviews

Choose Dove Beauty Products

Dove have rolled out a new campaign called #ChooseBeautiful. They’ve linked it with an “experiment” (ie, advertising campaign) whereby they classified two doors as Beautiful and Average and then watched what happened. Lots of women chose average, there were discussions about how it reflected how they felt about themselves, and then Dove suggested women concentrated on thinking they were beautiful. Lots of people on social media are talking about what a great campaign it is.

What people need to remember is this: Dove are not doing this for the good of women. They are doing it for the good of their bottom line. Most women get up in the morning and Are. They don’t expect, and shouldn’t have, to choose whether to go through a door marked Beautiful or Average. If it were me, I’d look at the doors and walk away. I’m not in the business of classifying myself one way or the other and the idea of a cosmetics company running an “experiment (ie, advertising campaign) where they can use my choice as a stick to beat me with (ie, you should choose beautiful, not average) and then use it as a hook for an advertising campaign makes me a bit sick. I don’t use Dove beauty products by the way. I should just mention that.

When I go to a shopping centre, I don’t expect to have to judge myself.

When I go to a shopping centre, I don’t expect to be used as a hook for advertising.

When you make people – not I am not saying women there – people choose a label for themselves, and when you only provide two labels for them, you are making them judge themselves within your framework. That is not a free choice; it’s manipulating their opinion.

Most people see themselves on a continuum, not either or .

Mashable called it a powerful experiment. If it is powerful, it is powerful in that it pushes women again to judge themselves by appearance and to judge themselves in terms of beautiful or not beautiful.

Feeling beautiful is one of those choices that women should feel empowered to make for themselves, every day.

Read more: http://designtaxi.com/news/374402/Dove-Challenges-Women-To-Choose-Beautiful-In-Social-Experiment/#ixzz3WiRKEsVq

But Dove isn’t empowering women. They are forcing women to make a choice between options which they may not on a day to day basis make. They are forcing women to define themselves in terms of their appearance within an extremely narrow choice of options.

And at the end of the day, Dove are not in the business of making women feel good about themselves. They are in the business of making women buy more Dove products.

annoyances, living in ireland

Education in Ireland

2 Comments

Eilis O’Hanlon has a piece in the Sunday Independent today which irritated me quite a lot. I don’t usually read her pieces so it’s entirely possible she usually delivers her pieces in this well-shot manner. The problem is, as a contribution to the debate, it is shallow, it misses a lot of core points, and instead of dealing with the underlying issue which is how do we best do education, she just lobs criticism after criticism at the teachers. In every sense of the word, she personifies the lack of respect which is common in Ireland for teachers.

There are coal miners in China who complain less about their workplace conditions than Irish teachers. Trawlermen in the North Sea don’t feel so hard done by. Listening to members of the teaching profession in Ireland, one could almost be forgiven for thinking the TV series World’s Toughest Job was devoted entirely to their ordeal.

This is just a great start for opening a dialogue, don’t you think? There is so much bad faith in this, any teacher would be forgiven for getting up from the table and walking away. O’Hanlon is not interested in listening if she’s using this sort of hyperpole.

The thing is, in Ireland, we need a dialogue. About the only thing you can say for O’Hanlon’s piece is that she didn’t talk about Finland. That restraint is admirable. It is possible, that unlike David McWilliams, she realises that this would lead to a wholesale restructuring on the financial side. Finland has few to no private schools, and the ones that do exist don’t get to select on their own terms. And it is entirely possible that she understands that Finland actually set out to set up an equality based system, and the high PISA scores were a side benefit.

The dialogue we need is not about teachers, or teachers’ holidays, or even reform of the Junior Certificate. The dialogue we need is around what we expect and need from education. If you step away from ranking tables – which we should – the question remains: what constitutes a reasonable level of education in this day and age. No one in Ireland discusses that in public, it seems, for all the moaning around Irish, maths, religion, funding, computer coding. There never seems to be any debate around whether the cycle system we have in place is still appropriate: we do primary school up to 12, junior cycle for three years, senior cycle for 2-3 years (it still varies). We may or may not have a transition year. We do not discuss the introduction of specialised teachers at an early stage. We castigate teachers when kids do badly; we allow parents to abscond their responsibilities.

Most of my teenage years were spent listening to kids talking about how we’d never need algebra. When would they ever need to factorise a quadratic equation.

It seems to me there is a narrative that suggests Irish people can only really deal with direct return on investment: I learn to factorise quadratic equations only because I will need to factorise quadratic equations in the future. We teach people stuff in university that can immediately be turned into money. In certain respects, the debate around education in Ireland is extremely shallow.

The thing is, I agree with Eilis O’Hanlon on a couple of points:

Our students are terrible at foreign languages. Proficiency in maths continues to slip.

She says other stuff which I don’t agree with which we will come to later. Yes, I think proficiency in mathematics is slipping. And yes, our students are terrible at foreign languages. However, I ran the numbers last week and in absolute numbers – not proportionally – in absolute numbers, we are turning out more students with higher level languages like French and German than England/Wales is at A-level.

In other words, blaming teachers is an all too facile way of looking at issues. I’d like to see a core aspiration for the education system in terms of identifying what we want out of it. Yes, I’d like people to be maths-capable. I’d like the students coming out of our language teaching systems to be functionally fluent in those languages. Where possible, I’d like to see secondary level subjects to open doors to further study, be it structured or independent.

But more on that at the moment. Eilis makes a couple of assertions:

  • Under European directives, the minimum number of days that children must spend in school is greater at primary than secondary level, when all the evidence suggests that it should be the other way round.

  • In 2010, most shockingly, pupils become the first generation in Ireland to have lower levels of literacy than their parents.

A good journalist would actually provide supporting evidence for those. Where is the evidence that children should spend more time in secondary than at primary level? And what is the evidence that the current generation has lower literacy than their parents?

Eilis O’Hanlon writes at length about how journalism has been upturned by technology. Given that I read that piece on the Independent’s website, I’d expect links to the data backing up those assertions.

At no point in the article, does O’Hanlon outline what she expects of an education system; she purely uses the piece to target and criticise teachers,

Here’s the issue: there are some core problems around Junior Certificate reform; the key one being that big bogey I’ve mentioned: how does it fit into a framework for what we want from education when we never have the conversation about what we want from education.

After that, when you read a diatribe against teachers like O’Hanlon’s one, and you understand that a lot of people don’t respect teachers to be able to teach, it becomes easier to understand why teachers particularly respect the independence and arms-lengthness of a central marking system. If we don’t trust teachers to know best how to teach, why are we demanding that they trust us to trust them to know how best to mark what we don’t trust them to teach. 

There are a lot of issues around education right now. When I was going through the school system, Facebook did not exist. Mobile phones and always on internet did not exist. Your average teenager is not spending their time exploring Wikipedia when Instagram exists.

The demands on young attention have increased massively since I was in the school system, and, I suspect, since Eilis O’Hanlon was in the education system. The extent to which teachers are allowed to be owners of their teaching space has dropped. In an era of data where the vast majority of people are clueless about statistics, there is a greater demand for things like schools tables. But none of this answers the question “What do we want from education?”

Here’s what I’d like. I’d like the product of our education to be young well adjusted people who are numerate, literate, reasonably fluent in at least one foreign language, reasonably able to read a piece of journalism like O’Hanlon’s piece above and criticise its failings effectively. People who are aware of where to find the steps to things which interest them. I’d like them to be tolerant, reasonably fit and healthy. I would like the education system to provide them with options, not limitations.

On the detail side of maths literacy and foreign languages I would suggest that the core supports for that should be in the primary system – I’d tend to suggest we start foreign languages at the age of 10 for example, and specialised maths teaching at around the same age. I suspect that with some discussion, we could look at reconfiguring the primary and secondary schooling stages but that this needs to be seen in the context of what we want each to deliver.

If Eilis O’Hanlon is really interested in improving educational outcomes in this country, starting with teacher bashing is probably one of the least effective tactics to take. A discussion which includes teachers and their concerns would be more constructive than this kind of insulting and dismissive piece of ignorance.

_____________________
PS – I am not a teacher. Just in case anyone thinks I’m a teacher railing against negative coverage.

annoyances, technology

3D printing people

Via twitter and the Guardian, I arrive at this today.

For those who want not to sully their browing history, Will.i.am, a former popstar, but now Chief Creative Officer of a 3D printing company called 3D Systems, has suggested that:

“Eventually 3D printing will print people,” said Will.i.am. “I’m not saying I agree with it, I’m just saying what’s fact based on plausible growth in technology.”

“Unfortunately that is the reality, but at the same time it pushes humanity to have to adhere to new responsibilities,” he said. “So new morals, new laws and new codes are going to have to be implemented. Humans – as great as we are – are pretty irresponsible. Ask the planet. Ask the environment.”

I’m just saying what’s fact based on plausible growth in technology.

So, here’s a quick primer: we can already 3D print human forms. We’ve been doing it for years with modelling clay, stone, metal, you name it. Even if you used a 3D printer to print a human form with a high level of exactness, all you will wind up with is a statue.

It does not matter how far 3D printing technology improves in Will.i.am’s lifetime, the fact remains that 3D printing on its own will print at most a highly detailed statue. What Will.i.am should be concerned about, if he’s getting worried about stuff on the moral plain is artificial intelligence. And that debate is already happening. Will.i.am is looking at the wrong technology in terms of ethical concerns. Unfortunately, someone in De Zeen and someone else in the Guardian gave him the platform to come across as being completely dumb about this.

Artificial intelligence does not need a human avatar to cause problems (assuming it gets to the point that it can). And while I don’t necessarily agree with Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk’s concerns at present, the point is, building a statue is of zero concern. Building a creative thinking machine on the other hand is a bit more concerning from ethical points of view. But if you ask any AI specialist, they will tell you we’re a good way away from that right now too.

In the meantime, I have to wonder how someone who makes comments like the above gets a job. If I can possibly help it, I will never have any dealing with the company that hired Will.i.am in a high profile role that allows him to mouth off like this.

annoyances

How dare people voice an opinion…

Via Stephen Kinsella’s twitter feed I got linked to this, by Noah Smith.

The piece is worth a read but the overwhelming message that I get from the discussion is that some macro economists do not want to engage in discussion with people outside the macro-economic tribe because they don’t know enough about macro economics. I think this is probably wrong.

Most people’s lives are directly affected by macro economic policy. Whether you want to claim that macroeconomics is generally descriptive, the fact remains that elements of macroeconomic research and ideas pervade macro economic policy for most governments. Those policies, with the best will in the world, can rarely be roadtested on a few people, so effectively, every time a government announces a shift in macro economic policy, it is a gamble, and that gamble directly affects people’s lives. There is no lab in which you can really experiment.

So.

I used to work in IT on operations support – this means making sure things keep working on an ongoing basis. Mostly, things kept working. It’s when things don’t work, that you find out where people’s strength’s, and where an organisations strength’s lie. Ultimately, major problems were extremely rare occurrences, and were always the cause of some learning. This is important. You could argue, for example, that if the lessons learned from the great recession of the 1930s were absolutely learned from, we wouldn’t have had the latest iteration of great recession. The narrative around that is pretty much history repeating itself, and people not learning from history. Most of the protections put in place after 1929 and its fall out were basically unpicked. Would we have had the economic crash of the 00s if that hadn’t happened? Probably not. We might not have seen a lot of the growth of the previous 20 years either. Arguably, you can question whether the growth was worth more than the ensuing cost. I don’t think there is a straight answer and if an economist told me there was, I’d question the grounds on which he made that assertion.

Macroeconomics is a large part of everybody’s lives. I think economists need to recognise this, and recognise that a key result of that is that people will have opinions on macro economics. You can, as at least one has done on twitter, argue that macro is descriptive rather than prescriptive. To do so, however, is not strictly speaking, intellectually honest. Macroeconomists do advocate for particular types of economic policies, often depending on their general ideological leaning. I am not a great fan of the labels right and left because I think they tend to be overly simplistic, but there are certainly some economists who see things from a small government, laissez-faire point of view, and some who see a certain amount of regulation being of use. Economists are fundamentally tribal. You can see it in their own labels for themselves; whether they are Keynesian or Austrian school for example. What large groups of macroeconomists often cannot do is agree on things.

If they are fundamentally descriptive in activity rather than prescriptive, from the outside, this is troubling. If, of course, they are not purely prescriptive, but biased per a particular world view, this is not surprising.

I have somewhat complex feelings about non-experts weighing in on matters requiring expert knowledge. This tends to be very troubling when it comes to assertions over various health matters (cf, vaccination, cf, nutrition as two examples of areas where non-experts (putting it kindly) have caused a lot of damage). One of the things I feel people need to learn to be aware of is where their knowledge ends and their learning needs to start. As such, I’m not sure that computer science graduates are qualified to give nutritional advice, for example. So I have some sympathy with the poor macroeconomist, a target of the great unwashed in society, daring to voice an opinion on their subject.

However, I do think that macro economists also need to recognise where their expertise ends and starts, the limitations in their field of study, the issues caused by their field of study. One of the biggest issues I have with economics as a field of study as a whole is the tendency for people’s thinking to be coloured by ideological views. I don’t know how many economists would recognise that this happens but it does. The tribalism that exists within the field could not exist otherwise. The net result is you see assertions coloured by those views rather than data, and data sweated to support those views. Historically, there is no evidence that neoliberalism is always right, or always wrong. Most neoliberalists will never understand that as a tool it is only sometimes appropriate, and at those times where it is not, they assert the problems are caused by non-pure application of neoliberal policies. People’s lives get damaged by absolutism like that.

In the meantime, macroeconomics is not the same as high level physics, nor high level mathematics. It impacts on people’s lives in a way that the latter do now. Additionally, a high level understanding of macro economics is not outside the capability of most people. I do not think that the world is helped by macroeconomists retreating into a world where they only talk to other macroeconomists about economics. In certain respects, they enjoy a position which most serious academic physicists (Brian Cox being a notable exception) do not, which is that people are interested in and have an opinion on their field of study.

Instead of fighting against it, and more importantly, moaning about it, maybe they should embrace it.

annoyances, living in ireland

Passport cards

Ireland does not have an official mandatory ID card system. If you have a recent card issued with your PPS number (or RSI, depending on how old you are and what you are used to calling it), it will have a photograph on it as well. But it’s not an official state identity card per se.

Some time ago, Charlie Flanagan made some comments about the possible introduction of a passport card which could be used to travel on. The press release regarding that card is here, was made today.

My early adult years were spent in France, Germany and Belgium, and 9 months in the UK which doesn’t count because they don’t have an ID card system either.  So I have spent time going through the process to pick up residence permits in France, Germany and Belgium. All of them required me to carry one of their official papers along with my Irish passport at all times. From the time I was 21 years old, I have carried my passport everywhere with me.

I have seen a lot of horrified looks on people’s face when they have heard this. Often the same people who were horrified when they were told to carry their driving licence everywhere they were driving.

The response has generally been of the “What if you lose it” variety.

In Ireland, people are terrified of losing their passports. I have had several friends put their passport somewhere safe, so they don’t lose it, who have also wound up having to get passports issued, often at comparatively short notice, because they’ve put them somewhere so safe, they can’t remember where that safe place was.

Charlie Flanagan is aware that we don’t have an official ID card system here, but that there is a requirement by a lot of people to produce an ID, usually, it must be said, for being allowed to buy alcohol or get into a club. He is concerned that people will lose their passports. So he has introduced this passport card on grounds of convenience.

You cannot get this passport card – which costs 35E – without already possessing an ordinary passport. It’s not clear what would happen if you lost the passport card; although already DFA in Ireland has the right not to issue you with a new one if you have a not great record in losing your passport. I really don’t understand why this card could not be issued as a separate card; there’s no obvious explanation for the requirement to already possess a passport.

But at the end of the day, perhaps it’s time we had a wider discussion around identity cards in this country and recognised that we are, de facto, introducing one courtesy of the PPS card system, already require drivers to produce identification, and, the greatest driver for this new ancillary passport card appears to be youngsters being age checked in clubs, bars and off-licences.

annoyances, being me

Not a kindness

Every once in a while, when frustration grabs me, I decide to clear out the wardrobe. Any house organisational blog (of which there are thousands) will tell you that you should do this regularly. I’ve done it a couple of times in the last 18 months. I did it again today.

One of the trials of this exercise is the section of the wardrobe given to “those clothes”. The ones someone gave you, either as a present, or because “this would look terrific on you”.

These are clothes that almost without exception, I never, ever wear. By all rules like “if you haven’t worn this since the last time you did a clear out” or “if you only wear this when times are desperate and you wouldn’t be seen alive and outside in it”, they should go. But because they were, basically, presents, they are hard to throw out. I dislike tossing out the milk of human kindness. The problem is, very often, these clothes are clothes which you are getting because someone else is passing on to you stuff which they really should be clearing out in their own right. In certain respects, by taking clothes when they don’t want; you are doing them a kindness, but when you hit the point that they need to go from your wardrobe, 3 years later, they are still coloured by “oh X gave me that, she said it would look wonderful on me”.

What X in fact did, was gave you that, because “it’s too good to throw away”.

The conversations are embarrassing as well as you frantically try to find a diplomatic way to say no to someone who is not listening. Giving people clothes which they do not want is not a kindness, it is an obligation.

Dressing yourself is a deeply personal thing. There are colours I would not, in one million years, want to buy. There are fabrics which I hate because of the way they make my skin feel. There are shapes which do nothing to accentuate my good points. I have, very painfully, over many years, learned to identify the things I like and don’t like. Other people foisting their stuff on me messes up a carefully built system of knowing that absolutely EVERYTHING in my wardrobe suits me.

It’s not a kindness. Please don’t give me clothes that I didn’t explicitly choose myself.

annoyances

Greenpeace in Peru

Greenpeace

This is Greenpeace’s apology on Facebook to the people of Peru for accessing the Nazca site without permission.

I have a lot of problems with it. I have a lot problems with the activity anyway but ultimately as an apology, this is disappointing. If you walk up to a restricted and highly fragile site with a view to using it as an advertising platform, that’s wrong. I’m not interested in Greenpeace apologising for offending people. I’d rather see them apologising for the activity of laying a [message of hope] up there. They should not have done it. The issue is not that the people of Peru got offended; it is that Greenpeace plonked an advertising hoarding up there. Sure it was temporary but also, it was grotesque. They would be the first to savage a commercial company who did the same thing, I feel.

When you are an activist organisation, you cannot afford to be hypocritical. The area where the Nazca lines lie is fragile. Land access is justifiably restricted and subject to certain organisational requirements. Greenpeace have been told by officials in the area that they have caused permanent damage; Greenpeace appear not to want to accept this.

A statement on the group’s Facebook page earlier in the week insisted that “absolutely NO damage was done” by the stunt, and that “no trace was left behind.” The activists laid out yellow cloth lettering next to the hummingbird with the group’s logo and the message: “Time for Change! The Future is Renewable.”

However, if Greenpeace were even remotely qualified to comment on this, they wouldn’t have sent people up there to do it in the first place.

And it is not a message of hope. It is a message of hectoring. It is an advertisement for Greenpeace. The fact that that Greenpeace are an NGO does not remove the commercial aspect of what they did there when they leave their trademark/brand behind them.

It seems to me, from the apology above, that Greenpeace aren’t really all that sorry about this. The actual act of plonking their advertisement up there is what is wrong and that is what Greenpeace should be apologising. Personally, I see something like this as an act of vandalism and Greenpeace’s apology should be reading:

“We are sorry we damaged a fragile landscape in our ill-educated bid to force people to think like we do. Being an environmental organisation, at least one of us should have considered that damaging a fragile environment is a bad thing to do, particularly when that environment houses a piece of humanity’s heritage which is unique in the world. It is obvious that we need to reassess our own values and stop using gesture politics to draw attention to humanity’s need to pay greater attention to environmental concerns. We are ashamed that none amongst us considered the counterproductive nature of striving for improved environmental care by damaging a fragile desert environment. Our campaign director X who was responsible for this has resigned”

Instead, we get “Sorry you were offended, Peru”.

 

annoyances, living in ireland

Whither constitution

2 Comments

So, moving on from the debacle that is Irish Water, there are now calls for a constitutional amendment to make sure that Irish Water can’t be privatised.

This is idiocy of the highest order and it is not what the constitution was designed for. Although to be fair, it’s hardly new to abuse the constitution to try and prevent legislation some people don’t like so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.

Irish Water is now a completely poisonous mess; not because many thousands of people marched in the streets on Saturday; it was a mess before that.

So, what needs to be changed to fix it? Well in the real world, the one inhabited by the people who vote and are supposed to pay this, it’s possible that it cannot, at this point in time, be fixed in such a way as it can start charging.

Here’s what I wouldn’t have done.

  1. I wouldn’t have hired John Tierney.
  2. I wouldn’t have allowed Irish Water to have access to PPS numbers.
  3. I would have had a lower flatrate per 1000L charge and no messing with household and children’s allowances.
  4. I would not have panicked and implemented a tax credit.
  5. I would not have panicked and talked about 100E rebates.
  6. I would not have done an about turn on household allowances if people don’t fill in the form. I’m not in favour of the allowances but if someone is going to be determined to implement them, they should be house related.
  7. I wouldn’t have given Phil Hogan the nomination for Ireland’s representative on the European Commission. But it’s fair to say I wouldn’t have done that anyway.

Here’s what I would do now.

Right now, the problem with Irish Water is NOT the risk of privatisation; it flatly doesn’t matter if it is or not because regardless, the problem is how usage charges were implemented, which is basically with all the finesse of an approaching fireball. Damage everywhere.

Updating the constitution really should be for key visionary changes in how we want this country to operate. Being nice to people. Banning capital punishment. It really shouldn’t be a political football used by one or other organisation, like SIPTU or the Labour Party, to stymy administration.

Fixing the problems with Irish Water now will be reputationally difficult but sometimes, hard decisions have to be taken. Fine Gael keep telling us that so it’s about time they learned that reality as well.

Irish Water, as is, needs to be abandoned. Closed down. Liquidated. It has cost money and it will cost money. But there is no way of fixing this.

Blundering on with a bad product without having the guts to deal with the reality of it being a bad product closes down companies as they throw good money after bad.

And maybe then, we can start from scratch and do it properly and efficiently.

annoyances

Rant (a bit late but fine…)

It’s ages since I did a new WordPress install, and in fact, it’s so long that I cannot remember. There’s some evidence to suggest it’s at least three years.

I did two new installs today for the lace and sketch sites and it transpires that I don’t have access to blogroll any more without installing a plugin. If I go to the plug in recommended it hasn’t been updated in more than 2 years. In fact, the blogroll was hidden by default from WordPress 3.5.

Apparently not that many people used it so it was taken out of the core product. Fine. WordPress is free and all that. But when they tell you to use a plug in instead and then don’t update the plugin for 2 years, it’s annoying particularly when, apparently, the links manager is still in the product, works for any update of existing sites. Don’t enable the widget by default, fine. Taking it off me completely, that’s annoying.

I really, really don’t like it when functionality is removed from a software product and it’s not adequately documented why it’s been removed. The only comment I can find on WordPress.org about it is under the aforementioned plugin to say “it is being removed in WordPress 3.5”. But no “because”.

Since the plugin hasn’t been updated in a couple of years, it’s safe to say that the links manager wasn’t a big coding drag on the product, and since it is still hidden in there for backwards compatibility, I fail to see why they had to hide it. I’m not very happy about that while noting that yes WordPress is free and currently every site I have runs on it. That being said. I’m not impressed by this. It was quick and simple to manage. Yes you can use a custom menu for this but…arghh.