which country?
Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2005 3:28 am
would you emigrate to?
looks like not just driving conditions, but quality of life in general here might be heading decisively towards the austere, authoritarian end within a few years. be good to have a reasonable idea of where's both safe and pleasant to decamp to, until either the sh*tstorm blows over or the UK becomes the next yugoslavia/zimbabwe/etc. something i've feared for a while but recent news articles aren't reassurring - in fact, the opposite.
that old bloke who survived the holocaust - and real, genuine suffering and terrorism (and i dare say far, far worse conditions than i'm being fearful of - so far) - getting roughly chucked out of a labour conference and then arrested under 'terrorism' laws (!!!?!) is only the thin and well-wiped end of the stick.
to perk your ears up more here's a couple more, particularly roadgoing ones, that you may have missed but have been in the papers and even (if briefly) troubled the radio news this week.
DVLA wants to enforce mandatory car insurance even for vehicles that are not being driven. Quite what this will mean for any number of projects and reasonably good complete frames sitting round SORNed in people's garages and in scrapyards is open to debate, but for the majority it probably means --> scrap. Totally unneccessary and heavy handed measure, won't cut crime, anyone who'd be driving like that won't have taxed their car anyway (for one thing - can't get tax without insurance) so why not just pull them up for THAT pre-existing statutory offense?
Example of how our current beaurocracy has a great lump of shelling their peanuts with a sledgehammer.
Or the number-plate chip tagging thing. Some (small, as it wasn't publicised) resistance to their satellite tracking idea, and the logistics are incredible, so this genius idea has been come up with. Microwave RFID readers on roadside gantries or even in the tarmac (the amount of rectangular/diamond shaped tar-covered-wire loops in the road where there aren't any traffic lights / speed cameras / trafficmaster transmitters makes me suspicious this has been silently in the pipes for years and the sneaky sods have only just publicised it) can pick up "upto 200 plates per second" (just in case the Indy 500 happens to roar through?!) and so pinpoint (and log) your location at various times, and of course work out the average speed between.
Supposedly a boon for tracking criminals, their movements, and stolen cars, if not for the fact that the criminal element generally involves people with a brain who are not blind to the world and it's current events - they'll just peel the plates off a target car and put unchipped falsies on, leaving the common, mostly law abiding guy to get all the needless stick.
looks like not just driving conditions, but quality of life in general here might be heading decisively towards the austere, authoritarian end within a few years. be good to have a reasonable idea of where's both safe and pleasant to decamp to, until either the sh*tstorm blows over or the UK becomes the next yugoslavia/zimbabwe/etc. something i've feared for a while but recent news articles aren't reassurring - in fact, the opposite.
that old bloke who survived the holocaust - and real, genuine suffering and terrorism (and i dare say far, far worse conditions than i'm being fearful of - so far) - getting roughly chucked out of a labour conference and then arrested under 'terrorism' laws (!!!?!) is only the thin and well-wiped end of the stick.
to perk your ears up more here's a couple more, particularly roadgoing ones, that you may have missed but have been in the papers and even (if briefly) troubled the radio news this week.
DVLA wants to enforce mandatory car insurance even for vehicles that are not being driven. Quite what this will mean for any number of projects and reasonably good complete frames sitting round SORNed in people's garages and in scrapyards is open to debate, but for the majority it probably means --> scrap. Totally unneccessary and heavy handed measure, won't cut crime, anyone who'd be driving like that won't have taxed their car anyway (for one thing - can't get tax without insurance) so why not just pull them up for THAT pre-existing statutory offense?
Example of how our current beaurocracy has a great lump of shelling their peanuts with a sledgehammer.
Or the number-plate chip tagging thing. Some (small, as it wasn't publicised) resistance to their satellite tracking idea, and the logistics are incredible, so this genius idea has been come up with. Microwave RFID readers on roadside gantries or even in the tarmac (the amount of rectangular/diamond shaped tar-covered-wire loops in the road where there aren't any traffic lights / speed cameras / trafficmaster transmitters makes me suspicious this has been silently in the pipes for years and the sneaky sods have only just publicised it) can pick up "upto 200 plates per second" (just in case the Indy 500 happens to roar through?!) and so pinpoint (and log) your location at various times, and of course work out the average speed between.
Supposedly a boon for tracking criminals, their movements, and stolen cars, if not for the fact that the criminal element generally involves people with a brain who are not blind to the world and it's current events - they'll just peel the plates off a target car and put unchipped falsies on, leaving the common, mostly law abiding guy to get all the needless stick.
