Month: July 2025

When The Punishment Is Worse Than The Crime

Government Thugs

Here’s an absolute classic:

Furious driver throws £50 parking ticket on the floor – and gets fined £250 for littering

Of course, this is a Britishland special (clue: currency), and to be fair, the littering thing is a real problem Over There, hence the excessive fine.

The problem, however, is that if someone is found “dumping” (Brit-speak: “fly-tipping”), i.e. someone is caught emptying a truckload of old refrigerators or tires (tyres) on the side of a road or into a field, the fine for said offense is still £250 — which I put to you is not at all excessive, but in fact is inadequate.  Of course, the effort involved in removing said litter in this case is considerably greater, i.e. more costly than simply picking up a discarded parking ticket.

I liked the response of a Brit farmer who caught someone dumping trash in his field, whereupon he put his tractor in gear and simply pushed (okay, crushed) the offender’s van against the stone wall.  In a rare instance of actual British justice, he was not fined and when haled into court for “destruction of private property”, the magistrate basically told him not to do it again and stop being a bad boy:  case dismissed, despite the anguished yowls of the fly-tipper who claimed that without his van, he was out of business.  The response from the magistrate was brilliant:  “If your business is fly-tipping, then the community is well rid of it.”  (I wish I had a link, because the judge was actually funnier than my recollection provides.)

To return to the original offense for a moment:  that excessive £250 fine for littering could be called a “spite fine”, and is very common amongst the law enforcement classes, may their socks rot and their daughters run off with rock musicians.

On the other hand, the meter maid got off lightly in that the angry motorist didn’t punch her in the face.  I suspect that Milord Judge may not have been as relaxed in his judgment.

Perfect Sign-Off

Management

It’s a good thing that a) most of the time I worked in Corporate World, there was no email;  and b) I only discovered this gem at Kenny’s yesterday:

There’s no telling how many times I would have used this as a response to 80% of the office memos I got.  (“Only once, Kim.”)

Yeah, but it would have been totally worth it.

Handing Over The Reins

Control Freaks, Corporate Fuckery, Science!

Read this story and see if you don’t get a slow burn, or even an RCOB:

An Australian small business owner says she lost about $50,000 after Instagram suspended her accounts over what she describes as an innocent photo of three dogs.

Rochelle Marinato, managing director at Pilates World Australia, recently received an email from Instagram’s parent company Meta stating her accounts had been suspended because the image breached community guidelines relating to ‘child sexual exploitation, abuse and nudity’.

The photo had been mistakenly flagged by an AI moderator which confused the image of the dogs with those of children.

She appealed the decision and sent 22 emails to Meta, but received no assistance from the global tech giant, which owns Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Messenger and WhatsApp.

Ms Marinato claimed her story was just one of many and that the problem was widespread.

She also said it was impossible to talk to a human at Meta to explain her situation.

‘I couldn’t get a human to look at it. Clearly any human that looks at this photo is going to know it’s completely innocent,’ she said. 

‘You can’t contact a human at Meta. There’s no phone number, there’s no email, there’s nothing and you’re literally left in the dark.’ 

To paraphrase Insty:  And Skynet smirks.

Dept. Of Righteous Shootings

Righteous Shootings

Oh lookee, a twofer:

One from King County WA (Seattle area!) and another in Phoenix AZ:

An alleged intruder in King County, Washington, died after a woman opened fire on around 2 a.m. Monday morning.  The woman called the King County Sheriff’s Office and told them she shot a man was allegedly trying to enter her home.

Deputies arrived to find an unconscious man lying in the driveway. The wounded suspect died later in a hospital.

Then:

A Phoenix, Arizona, homeowner shot and killed an alleged burglar Sunday morning shortly before 8 a.m. The homeowner shot the alleged burglar while on a 911 call with police.

I love the smell of dead goblin in the morning.  It smells like… justice.

Interesting Thought

Drive Time, Old Fartism

Couple nights back I had dinner with Tech Support II, who was in town for some geek convention or other, and in the course of our (long) evening together, I asked him what car he was currently driving, and was not really surprised when he said “Tesla SUV”.

Of course he would drive a Tesla (because he’s a techie), and of course an SUV (because he has a family).

But along the way something really interesting came up.  He’d recently driven the Tesla (with the family) from Florida to Houston (because he’s also a space geek, duh).  The interesting part is that by his estimation, he didn’t drive about 90-95% of the 1,600-mile drive at all;  he simply left it to the Tesla’s auto-drive program.

When I asked why, he said simply, “Because the Tesla is a better driver than I am.”

The thing about the Tesla self-drive function is that every trip made by every Tesla is recorded and uploaded to their system at headquarters (or wherever they store it).  What that means is that Tesla can not only combine all that data into a global “behavioral” database, but they can also create subsets of that to, say, a “Florida-Houston” drive, with all the characteristics of said trip — choke points, places where accidents frequently occur, speed data and so on — all combined to make the next Florida-Houston drive trip all the safer for any Tesla driver because those characteristics are then folded into the Tesla self-drive computer in the car.

All very interesting, especially for an old retired data geek like myself.

But what TS said next is what stopped me in my tracks.  When I asked him why he’d elected for the self-drive, he admitted quite simply, “Because the Tesla is a better driver than I am.”

He’s not a bad driver, just so you know;  in fact, he’s an excellent driver.

I myself have admitted on these very pages that at age 70, I’m no longer as good a driver as I once was when I was, say, 30 or even when I was 50.

And it makes me think:  would I not be better off by delegating the driving to someone (or something) else?

Of course, this isn’t limited to owning a Tesla (because #Duracell car), and in any event in my case this is purely a hypothetical “If I won the lottery dream” because I could afford neither a driver nor a Tesla.

Nevertheless, it’s a different and quite disturbing thought for me, because it goes against a whole bunch of personal philosophies, viz.  distrust of electric cars, not being in control of my driving, losing my independence of action, being spied on as I drive — to name but some.

And make no mistake:  this would not be an action born of conveeenience, but of safety concerns.

As I said, it’s an interesting thought, even if nothing ever comes of it.