Lynne Kosky's office to have seats removed

Like Melbourne's trains, the office of notoriously incompetent and universally reviled Victorian Public Transport Minister Lynne Kosky will have seating removed in a bid to squeeze more complaints from angry Melbourne commuters onto the already bursting piles of hate mail on her floor.

Ms Kosky said the removal of all the seats in her office would "make a huge difference in making me seem slightly less of an insensitive hypocrite".

"Presently in my office there's sufficient seating that I and my visitors can take a seat rather than standing for hours at a time, like we're intending making more Melbourne commuters do. Obviously that makes me look like a complete twat," she said.

"In peak periods when my office fills up with angry constituents, hassled staffers fielding angry telephone calls and the piles upon piles of correspondence demanding my resignation from everyone who has to use the public transport system I never wanted to administer, this will make it possible to move in here."

The changers are expected to be similar to those enacted in education minister Bronwyn Pike's office recently when, in keeping with her announcement that air conditioning was unnecessary in schools, she had [people suggest she should have] the air conditioning ripped out of her office as well.

Meanwhile, referring to the Minister's similar recent adjustments to passenger trains in the city, Opposition Transport spokesman, Terry Mulder, slammed the new seat arrangement, saying "passengers are paying more, getting less, going slower and are now being asked to stand". He said some trains from Pakenham could take up to 77 minutes to reach the city.

"So you are looking at 2½ hours standing on public transport," he said, before confirming his party's firm commitment to slash funding for public transport even further if they were ever elected, just like they did last time.

You haven't asked me, but...

Dear undemocratic Democrat "Superdelegates",

You have to see it's over. Tell Hillary she's out. Don't let her take you all with her.

Cheers,

Irrelevant Australian Person.


Dear Hillary.

If you keep going and cause Obama to lose to McCain in November, you are going to be the most hated person alive. Even though the reason the world will hate you is that you gave the presidency to McCain, you will (admittedly quite illogically) be even more hated than he will be, and probably just as hated as the appalling President you wanted to replace. I know that's not fair, but fresh anger trumps well-worn contempt. You're already reviled by the righties - very soon you'll be reviled by everyone. Offer to be Obama's Vice President. Do it now.

Cheers,

Irrelevant Australian Person.

GTA 4 has some pretty major flaws

Our anonymous nerd correspondent writes:

While we're on the subject of nerdy things, I'd just like, for the record, to list three problems with GTA 4 on Xbox 360 that are incredibly frustrating and annoying - and which make me question the integrity of every reviewer who gave the game a 100% rating.

1. Thoroughly irritating prolonged loading times, placed unnecessarily at stupid moments, such as when you've just died and want to reload a save (you have to wait till it loads you back at the hospital before you can do that, as they suddenly and pointlessly disable the start menu), and when you are trying to find a multiplayer game (it loads for thirty seconds and then tells you you've been disconnected, and spends another thirty seconds loading you back into the singleplayer before you can try again).
   
   
2. The staggeringly clumsy multiplayer interace. The multiplayer game is amazing. It's just that to get to it you have to wait patiently while GTA IV loads, tries, loads, loads, tries, loads etc. Then, unlike say COD4, it doesn't let you know which other player is speaking into your headset - so if you get an irritating person just singing or making other disruptive noises, you can't figure out which one they are so you can mute them. And there's no quick way to check your online stats while you're waiting for a match.
   
   
3. The fact they're still making us endure imprecise third person controls in an era where precise control is available - the now well-established first person two-analog-stick system. Forcing you to use old-school controls means you regularly die because of Nico's frustrating inability to change direction quickly, and as you wait for the camera to catch up. You can't hold the camera in place so you can look to the side while running, either - it keeps automatically moving behind your character. It's annoying! They've built this amazing virtual city but you can't explore it like you would any other 3D environment, with proper 3D FPS controls. (Which would be extremely easy for any halfway decent programmer to implement, by the way.)

In the interests of fairness, I have declined to mention the repetitive gameplay in the missions (it still mainly boils down to drive to contact, be told to drive somewhere else, kill someone, drive back), because that's just the GTA formula. That's not really something you can fix without it becoming a completely different game.

The other stuff, though - that's stuff that should have been fixed before the game shipped.

99% aggregate scores? Come off it, you fawning sycophants.

These are all serious enjoyment-limiting problems with the game which indicate either no-one tested it, or nobody cared what those people said. It is all fairly easy stuff to fix in a patch (except perhaps the last one, which should still be possible), but of course it's sold so well that nothing of the sort will ever happen. Unless Rockstar take pride in their work and, somehow hearing the complaints over the clamour of money and awards, decide to actually make the game worthy of the unprecedented high scores it's been getting.

That probably didn't interest you at all, but it felt good to vent.

PS Don't worry, I'll bury this and the previous entry with an actual lefty post in the morning.

There is a limit, okay?

My anonymous UK friend who's entitled to have seen the following writes:

Dear Dr Who writers,

Say for the sake of argument I could suspend disbelief long enough to accept that 400 million cars could somehow spew out a sufficient volume of a toxic Sontaran gas such that within a day or so it could replace just less than 80% of the atmosphere. (If I can just repeat that for a second - eighty percent of the entire Earth's atmosphere.)

Please explain to me how the Doctor igniting 80% of the atmosphere could conceivably NOT kill most of the planet's population and destroy almost everything.

Yours sincerely,

Seriously That's Just Ridiculous, UK.

Heartwarming story of drug dealer's family getting what's coming to him - that'll learn the bastard!

It is of course staggeringly easy to come to the conclusion that every single person involved in the provision or consumption of drugs that have arbitrarily* been defined as illegal is, by definition, an appalling human being, a waste of space, and deserves anything the state can do to them (or their family).

You do it by the following process:

1. Addictive drugs cause medical harm to weak people;
   
2. So we should make them illegal;
   
3. Which makes them expensive;
   
4. Which deters people from trying them in the first place;
   
5. Although those who through weakness or stupidity do try them and get addicted are now left having to find ever-increasing amounts of money they don't have to keep up their habit;
   
6. And I'm damn well not going to support my taxes going to help these people quit their habits, particularly not if the Herald Sun can describe such measures as "free drugs", they can go cold turkey (I'm sure based on no personal experience that's possible);
   
7. But they keep doing it even despite my entirely reasonable position of expecting them to do something painful, medically dangerous and difficult of which I most likely would not be capable in the same situation, particularly if I were weak or stupid enough to have begun the habit in the first place;
   
8. Which means they break into my house or car to get that money;
   
9. Which both surprises and outrages me;
   
10. And makes me want vengeance;
    
11. Against them;
    
12. Against the criminals who provided them with the drugs on which they were dependant because we've made them illegal and prevented them from getting them any other way;
    
13. Terrible, terrible vengeance;
    
14. I want them to suffer.

So what if the end result of my easy, self-righteous, compassion-free "tough on drugs" approach is entirely negative - pain for all the people involved and considerable waste of taxpayers' resources? That's the whole point.

As long as the people who are suffering are the ones I've decided don't deserve my sympathy (or their families), who cares?

My only concern is that the police are too soft on these scumbags/innocent associated people.

* I presume no-one's going to seriously try arguing that there's a defensible reasoning process behind which addictive drugs that are bad for you we proscribe as "illegal" and which ones we don't.

Age of unrestraint

You're what's known as a "leading teacher" - ie, one of the poor mugginses on which the schools rely to run their extra-curricular programmes - and you've done poorly out of the new pay deal. So poorly, in fact, that your wage will effectively decrease as it's been locked in below inflation, just to punish you for taking on extra work to give kids a comprehensive education.

(If only you'd said "no, sod the kids and the music programme, I'm not a monkey, and I'm not taking on all that extra work for the peanuts you're offering". Well, don't worry - now you're taking it on for even fewer peanuts.)

So how do you, as a role model for the kids, diplomatically describe this state of affairs to the media?

"Leading teachers are the ones who are supposed to drive through all the education reforms the Government wants, and yet we're being royally screwed," said Mr Wakham, Carwatha's personnel manager.

The Age describing certain people as "religious nutjobs". Teachers complaining that they've been "royally screwed". I expect next we'll see lawyers savaging judges on the grounds that a particular result was "a crock of shit".

I love this new age of ordinary professional people unashamedly resorting to childish insults and sexual innuendo in newspapers. Bravo, good sirs. More! More!

FIFTEEN TO FIFTY THOUSAND people killed over weekend in Burma; toll likely to rise

Burma's official figure is now 15,000 dead, but there are fears the real number of casualties is closer to 50,000:

Up to 50,000 people may have been killed and millions left homeless by the worst natural disaster in living memory in Burma, a Western aid worker fears.

Millions left homeless. Millions. Why is this not prompting the outpouring of concern, support and offers of assistance that followed the tsunami in 2004?



That link again - World Vision Australia Myanmar Appeal. It's working fine now

UPDATE (Thurs): Looks like it's at least ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE DEAD. You know what? That's a staggeringly large number of human beings who were alive last week and who are now not. And that's not mentioning the (literally) millions of people in Burma who are suddenly without food, shelter, water and so on.

TEN THOUSAND people killed in Burma over the weekend

First a brutal military dictatorship that shoots monks, and now a devastating cyclone that kills an unfathomable number of people. The poor, long-suffering people of Burma. At least TEN THOUSAND dead. No-one knows how many injured and still dying.

The regime is at last appealing for help, which is a relief, as they were previously declining to give such permission to aid agencies.

There is no angle to this post. But obviously help if you can.

UPDATE: The toll has risen, with 10,000 dead in just one town. And Penguins have regained the headline spot on The Age site, after that depressing Burma business had it for two hours or so this morning.


Okay, so it's third (fourth if you count the penguins), and after a story on Wayne Carey, but at least it's highlighted a different colour. That's just because I'd clicked on it? Oh.

Meanwhile, how to help - World Vision says it has got aid through, so click here to donate to their appeal. (I'm having some difficulty getting the button to work, but I presume they'll fix that fairly quickly.)

An expensive stamp duty cut will not help first home buyers

Does anyone seriously believe this rubbish?

HOUSES are expected to become thousands of dollars cheaper for first-time buyers in Victoria under a cut to stamp duty in today's state budget.

They are? Expected by whom? People who've never been to an auction? Since buyers - particularly first-home buyers who haven't built up equity in the overheated property market - have been bidding up to the maximum the bank will allow them, won't this cut simply be absorbed at auctions? In which case the extra money will actually go to pre-existing house-owners, and help them outbid first home-buyers in subsequent auctions?

The Opposition has been hammering the Government on the record figure, claiming the levy is pushing Melbourne towards becoming the least affordable city in Australia in which to buy a home.

That's because of all the people who own more than one home, and the lack of sensible transport infrastructure to new developments so that people can live further out and still commute to work in the city. Stamp duty has nothing to do with it - if it has any effect, it's discouraging property speculation, which is surely to the advantage of first home buyers as they compete with the bidding power of existing owners' equity.

But of course they'd pretend a duty cut which helps the people who already have homes is actually in the interest of "housing affordability" for the people they've excluded. Please tell me voters aren't stupid enough to buy it.

Meanwhile, what a lazy bit of reporting by the Age. They couldn't even get anyone to cost the proposed discount. That money's coming out of the budget somewhere - either a service is being cut or some other tax is being raised. Or a surplus is being squandered. Which is it?

About time that line was crossed

Good to see a mainstream newspaper finally feeling able to use the expression "religious nutjobs" in print.

I wonder how many years before it'll be before they feel comfortable with "gibbering f*ck-knuckles". I can't wait!