Damn-Dutch

Mouthwatering and a little grmblz.

I just thought WTF.

Then I thought I’ve seen shows about all sorts of far worse stuff. They didn’t moan about documentaries on whale killing or seal clubbing, hell, commercials for hardwood garden sets, and who knows what else like the airing of I don’t know, Fear Factor or for those old Dutchies among us possibly Wedden Dat…

Why now? Why at all? What will it accomplish? Are they so desperate for some media attention?

I’ll just return to my state of WTF.

Internet subscriptions should come with an additional cost for… not subscribing to a newspaper…? I don’t make this shit up, honestly. A government committee has (possibly googled) this conclusion together.

Clearly the Internet is to blame for the drop in newspaper sales. Just like TV would be the death of the newspaper a mere few decades ago. And yet your cat can still do its dirty work on the printed word. So the newspaper isn’t gone yet. Good. I like newspapers. Even if they’re a 1 time read more often then not. They’re good for keeping people off the seat next to you on trains. So is peeling an orange, but I digress.

The downfall of newspapers has come and gone several times. We’ve seen the rise of free newspapers, and not just the local rags. I don’t have anything against the free papers as such. They read well enough, all be it a bit full of advertising but hey, that’s why they’re free. I am not too fond of their public transport distribution, bunch of people stuffing free papers in your hands like you want them. But wouldn’t the free paper be the competition of a subscription paper? Sure the Internet has some impact, but why should every Internet user pay for something they don’t use? Do you charge pedestrians road taxes? And besides, if the Internet is your nemesis, use it! Be a better news site, you have the damned sources already, so in stead of going to print… let’s see if you can guess what I’m going to say next… oh yeah I remember… put them online. Oh but wait, you already are. So you’re competing with yourself and blaming yourself for it. Shit, I lost my train of thought now… but I’m sure you can see the random droplet of amusement here.

The grand scheme behind this is, apparently, conserving the diversity of the Dutch press. Which seems to me like all sorts of media. Word, image and sound. Fuck me, but I think the Internet combines those perfectly? Oh my gawd, the Internet is a medium too! That makes it part of the diversity and besides, the word and its meaning doesn’t change just because it’s no longer printed on paper. The only change is that you now have to put sheets of printed out bleached A4 paper in your parakeet’s cage! They’re not nearly as absorbant as newspaper, that’s for sure.

On top of all that, we could really do with a lot less newspapers. Is it really worth it to hang on to the lemmings of newspapers? To each their own paper, but I find a lot of the daily newspapers really hard to read. Not because they’re writting in a certain way or printed in a wonky font, but because they’re so good god damned full of advertisements and every page is complete and utter chaos. Half the pages look like the aftermath of a suicide terrorist clown after having bombed a paint store… but that’s just my 2 cents.

The Utrecht police are stepping up their fight against crime by using the internet. From Monday information on all break-ins in the city will be published online.

I wonder what this will do… Will it make people more aware of lacking security in their neighbourhoods. Probably. But then the locals chat enough with one another so that grape vine will do its job just fine in “spreading the word”. As far as I know people want to protect their fortress of sollitude, their castle, their home.

Seems to me a smart burglar can take advantage of this site in a few ways. After a burglary people tend to get more security measures. But since the time of burglary is known, you will also have an indication of the minimum age those security measures have. You can scan for probability of weaknesses. Maybe not this year, but in a few years sure. Plan ahead, why not.

But even if that’s a little far fetched, you can get a similar probability from looking around where a fair amount of burglaries has happened and with which method (they add it to the burglary posting!). This seems a likely problem with a lot of houses there. The locks and such will probably stem from the same period on most. The time they were built or last massively fixed up. Again, this seems useful to me if you think like a burglar.

And of course the plain and simple fact of “Oh I don’t need to go there to break in, they’ve already been burgled and are now without much useful things to steal.”

Who knows, maybe it will work. But I think it would work a lot better with a little less information…

Better late than never. I had fallen behind with listening to the Bommel radioplay a bit, so this weekend I spent some time catching up and I was a little saddened by the fact that the last episode was aired March 27th of this year.

Of course the podcasts are still available and that’s a good thing, because damn it, I have grown to love the stories of Olivier B. Bommel and Tom Poes. I was never really a big fan of the comic strip as it appeared in newspapers. I tried reading it but at the time I didn’t appreciate it. I read two or so of the comic books later but they didn’t work for me. More recently I’ve taken another look at the concept of text below the drawn panels (old example). It has its charms!

And what the audioplay did for me was make the stories accessible after I had discarded them in my mind back when I couldn’t appreciate them. I was used to Disney stuff no doubt! How foolish…!

All in all, I’ll enjoy these audioplays for quite some time still, but no more new stories for now. A shame.

Ex-prostitute sues school for negligence

Another lovely case of not taking responsibility for your actions. Sure, the school should have contacted the truancy people way sooner. This is where they went wrong. All the same, people, actions, responsible. But them in any order you want but the only order that makes sense is that people are responsible for their own actions… unless of course you’d like to get rid of all that freedom and have someone else make *all* decisions for you. Tends to happen when you’re not capable of doing that yourself… maybe that’s worth considering if you want to go around blaming people for things they haven’t got all that much to do with.

It just pisses me off is all.

Just a bit of a lolwut moment here. How can a government get this kind of thing wrong? At least, it seems wrong to me to block them…
Online betting firm takes government to court

Don’t you just fucking love being called day in day out by call centers? You just get home from minding your own or someone else’s business, usually on a friday, and we’re off… *ring ring* Would you like to subscribe to…? *ring ring* Your current power company, insurance, mortgage, cable package, isp, newspaper and your current life are clearly inferior to the alternatives we have to offer. Would you like to switch now?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not hating the call center employees. It’s great that they have a job and for some things a call center can be useful. It’s not the employees I mind, and I regularly wish them good luck, a good day, pleasant evening, you name it I’ve wished them it and only good things. I mind the companies that use them for sales, outgoing, intrusive calls, overloading people with information to get them to agree to something they really haven’t bothered to consider properly… No.

Along came Caller ID. Somewhere between the 70s and the 90s it became available to the public. Good, that evens the ground between companies and consumers. So why aren’t we applying to phones what we learned to use in e-mail traffic? Proper filtering… Let the end user decide which numbers can, well, FOAD. We don’t need to *know* these numbers as such, as long as some phone company knows them, which is true since a connection is established. Combined with something as easy as an online interface to set up this filter.

One seems to be able to filter one’s mail (return to sender), e-mail (block), front door (just leave it closed you git)… but not one’s phone? Not properly anyway… It sucks. It seems something that can be solved. If so, then it should be solved.

Compulsary contraception. It seems Rotterdam is discussing this for “unsuitable” mothers.

I am a little torn on the matter. On one hand it seems terrible to see a child brought into the world by infit parents. Simply my opinion on that matter, no particular facts back this up. I’m sure there are plenty of cases that can be brought forward.

On the other hand, is freedom not the freedom to do stupid things? Sort of like being a mother when you’re unsuitable for it? I wonder who sets the standard and if it might be applied beforehand or after the first (neglected?) child. I wonder if this doesn’t go against religious freedom also. Strictly speaking there is the usual bunch of Religious folk who will oppose to any kind of contraception… including this one?

An interesting debate to have, but I doubt it will ever come to any real legislation. It seems a restriction on life. It seems more viable to me if a less intrusive contraception method is used and not forced but recommended and made available.

I give you some proof of people losing it collectively.

It roughly started here. In short, deer farmed for commerce taken from their “farm” and to the island of Terschelling. Where they don’t belong, aren’t native and are a threat to the local wildlife, no doubt mostly the plantlife.

A few days later… this.
I know it’s in Dutch, let me explain the basics. Two dozen or so people, including several from the animal party, went on to the location where the first deer got shot and laid down a funeral wreath to show they don’t agree.

I hope they realise that they were raised for commercial purposes anyway and that they were endangering the local wildlife, which should be worth a lot more to anyone reading about this, since it’s an island ecology that’s very easily destabilised… anyone who thinks themselves good advocates for animals should know the delicate balance of island ecologies, even if they aren’t pristine.

What an excellent archive to keep. Bet someone took it home with them. Wonder if there are collectors basing collection on location…