Damn-Dutch

Here’s someone who’s totally and entirely right!
Having bent a few over the heads of people who thought it funny to blast them in my ears I can only agree with this man’s actions.

Fucking horns.

Possibly inspired by the woman breaking out of prison with a spoon, some burglars have decided not to break out but break into prison to steal some TVs.

Where have the days gone when petty thieves just went about stealing train tracks for the metal…

Some more hubub over cartoons.

Assuming you’ve read that snippet, should they really be fined? Why bother with it? Should we care what other people think about things that are fairly well established facts?

As far as I’m concerned we shouldn’t. If you want to believe the sky is green, go ahead. If you want to go around and claim that the Earth is banana shaped, I’d love to hear your reasoning. And if you want to go around demanding Earth is 6000 years old well, I’d rather you just shut up and go back to Staphorst but I don’t really care whether or not you believe that, you have every right to. And I have every right to ask you to not talk to me about it if I don’t want you to.

As they’ve not taken out a nation wide advert claiming this fiction, I don’t think they’re bothering anyone else with their little fictonal figment of their imagination… and even if they did, common sense and the general WW2 history education you get in primary school is enough to fight this kind of bull. Let them have their fun and get on with more interesting things in the world like fighting hunger or disease? That sounds like money and time better spent.

MPs vote in favour of a maximum markup on event tickets. The max is now a 20% markup.

Alright, on the one hand that seems a good idea. It has been a problem that lead to ridiculous developments on the ticket sales point. Like entirely dysfunctional online queue systems. The intent of this legislation-to-be is decent enough. But will this be enforced on people? Will trade not just shift to people rather than businesses, and most likely with more and more online sales, non-existant people…

We’ll see.

Parties on a national and a local level have almost nothing in common besides their logo and name. And yet the national party leaders go have a debate the night before a local election. That will never cease being weird to me.

In proper Dutch fasion the cabinet has crashed and burned. So now the Queen gets to do her job again for a bit – on her skiing holiday…

That’s not the only bad-time aspect to these, by Dutch standard, normal political proceedings though. The new elections are sheduled for may, there are local council elections in march. I think it’ll make the two bodies of government too much alike, even though local parties are mostly incarnations of the national ones in name and logo only. A few rather more interesting topics will have to be dealt with much, much later such as the whole retirement at 67 thing and plenty of other things. Everyone is now happily assuming that a new cabinet can be in place in august or september. That’s not bloody likely though. Last time the formation of the coalition took about seven months. This time around I suspect the vote will be split even more. The formation should take even longer. That’s one way to get out of taking hard decisions half the people of the country won’t like of course.

This one is going to be a little too easy but well let’s see where we end up shall we.

Here’s article. It’s in Dutch so I’ll briefly recap the main points of it.

At some point the gov.nl said local councils have to have an archaeological survey done of their soil. I don’t know the reason but I’d guess it is to roughly chart what is and what is not particularly interesting to try to preserve. Staphort is one of the more God fearing towns you can find in this country. And the Staphorst council figures that since they have to pay for this survey, they also want the biblical view of the age of things in the archaeological survey. Now here we run into a bit of a mathematical problem. For those of you who need enlightenment on this part. Science claims just over 4.5 billion years of Earth, calculations based on the bible generally say 6 000 years, though the article states that their estimates range from 6 000 to 12 000 years old. That’s a time difference not even Einstein can fix for us.

Now I don’t feel like joking around about this because it’s just too damn easy. Oh ok. The Staphorst council is so dense that their time runs significantly slower than the time the rest of us perceive.

Instead, I think I’m going to feel very sorry for them as well as any soil surveyor they approach. I doubt any real scientist will even do this. Which means, like with other Christian science (documentaries aired by the EO for example) it’ll get tweaked to suit their needs. One thing is for sure while their tweaking will be blunt, the tool they have used will probably not be a flint hand axe!

Now I’m going to agree with them for a bit. Not the age thing, of course not. But their logic makes some sort of sense. They pay for the survey, they want it done they way they want it done. Here is where the gov.nl should’ve paid for it in stead or at least making the higher power (*sigh* gov.nl over local council, not sky-ghosts!) add a set of standards the survey has to meet. You know, to prevent random assholes with dowsing rods from making a bid for such a job.

SIRE wants the Dutch to be nice to people, or people to be nice to the Dutch or something to that extent.

First off you might be thinking WTF is SIRE. And if you’re not Dutch you would be thinking that. SIRE is basically a non-profit organisation aimed at changing society for the better through advertising. Their most well known advertising campaign runs around december/january about not being an idiot when it comes to fireworks. In short they tell you what you should already know.

And they’ve now taken it upon themselves to teach us how to deal with nice people. Clearly I’m an extraordinary person for not thinking that people should be nicer. According to sire.nl 78% of Dutch think people should be nicer. What they mean of course is act nicer, not be nicer. You can act nice and not actually be nice, hence the word act. Anyway, to me this is up to the individual and that is where it should remain. You can be nice if you want but surely it isn’t a bloody crime to be in a bad mood for a change or to just ignore someone. If you don’t want to deal with people you let them know. Not engaging in their niceness seems the right thing to do. SIRE also claims people find niceness suspicious, and I honestly don’t blame them. When you want a favour, you are nice. This again makes perfect sense but apparently being a little suspicious about niceness doesn’t.

Well thank you SIRE but I’d like to decline with a nod and a nice little smile. I’ll decide when and when not to be nice thank you very much.

When it gets colder people complain about wanting a white Christmas.
When it snows people complain that the snow is causing the natural ice to be bad which lowers chances of decent ice skating.
When the snow melts and freezes over again people complain about slippery roads.
When people complain about these things it gets other people complaining about people complaining.

In short: people complain and people love it.

Obese people and airplanes, comedians love that one. Airlines not so much. Then again maybe they do. KLM figured large people can pay for two seats. Their argument, safety.

First off I’d like to say it’s up to the owners of KLM to deal with these issues and up to the passengers to cope with them. The final say most definitely is with the KLM. And it’s the passenger’s job to fight these kinds of things in court.

Having said that…
how does that work out? Last time I was in a plane the size of the seats wasn’t all that great. I’m tall enough to have my knees embedded into the tray table thing and fat enough to be just about uncomfortable between those two standard-sized arm rests made of armour plated plastic or whatever. Fine, it fits. Sort of. Let’s go ahead and put someone bigger in that seat, bigger in all possible dimensions. How would it be safer for that person in two seats? The arm rest doesn’t move. Surely it can’t be two seats next to each other. That leaves that you’re paying for your second seat ahead of you. That’d work for people who need the leg room provied they are willing to REMOVE the seat, but not if you’re a particularly wide specimen of the human species.
Ok, so I can’t work out for you why they want you to buy two seats. I also don’t know how this would improve safety.

Since you’re buying two seats, do you get two meals, two blankets, twice the amount of luggage on board? If the plane crashes and you die a horrible death, is your charred corpose with the chair number attached to it noted as yours on the passenger list? Well whatever. What the KLM is getting from this is an excuse to sell two chairs for one person if they are big, less weight on the same amount of seats (read: less fuel etc) and on the whole less uncomfortable passengers.

Here’s what I think they should do. Stop using people as a unit. Have people, just like luggage, factored in as weight. That’s all they are anyway to an airline company. At least be honest about it. That way everyone pays the same amount for the trip, since it’s based on their total weight. Add people on the luggage weigh in.

Did anyone else notice that the date when this starts is april 1st. This seems like a very well planned april fools joke to me.