Something odd has started to happen on Twitter for me, and it’s cutting my usage of it down quite dramatically. Why? It’s because it seems the spammers are winning…
Every. Single. Day. I get lots of these. Some disappear into the ether, others remain on the Interactions tab on Twitter. Given that these tweets outnumber genuine interactions there’s a problem, because whenever any service starts to get more than about 50% spam its usefulness drops off. Email has that, and email has suffered, but commercial spam filtering is so good that most of us have a provider that makes it continue to be useful.
What happens is that I’m powerless to stop this Twitter spam. It’s not like I can install something in my Twitter client. Marking content as spam is astonishingly clunky in Twitter.
I’ve made some great friends on Twitter, but I’m fed up of seeing the alert pop-ups on my phone, so that’ll be the first place I disconnect it from. And then it gets that little bit less useful… I’ll start to forget to check-in. Suddenly, a few days will pass when I don’t look on Twitter.
I doubt this will affect everybody, but it could be enough to mark the end of Twitter as a global and egalitarian short-form publishing platform. I remember when CIX died for me – there it wasn’t the spam, but the number of grumpy nutters with too much time on their hands driving out the useful but quiet individuals.
I know I’m using Twitter less these days, but the general level activity amongst the older Twitter community really appears to be dying down. Celebrities and the media are still busy, but they alone can’t sustain the system – it needs the grass roots using it to keep it relevant.
I hope Twitter can fix this, or soon I’ll just give up. What do you think? Are you being spammed to death on Twitter? Are you using it less and less?
Hello – here’s the refreshed blog. I’ve decided to revert to a more typical blog format, after many months of soul searching on the issue. I previously had a layout based on a framework we used at interconnect/it for a couple of clients
But not only have I opted to switch to a blog layout, I’ve decided to use an off-the-shelf theme. I’m now using Khoi Vinh‘s Basic Maths WordPress theme.
Why?
Well, it’s a lovely theme, for starters. The typography is pretty good. The archives page is brilliant (check it out) and should be the standard bearer for all themes archive pages.
But the real question for many, I suspect, is why I’m not using an interconnect/it designed theme. Well, for starters, interconnect/it hasn’t produced an off-the-shelf theme in years. It’s just not our business. So rather than use a product of ours, we’d have to spend good and valuable time on creating a new theme. And, well, why would we want to do that?
Lots of reasons, actually. I could have a theme coded at the office that really shows off what we can do. But the problem with that is that there’s not much need. My blog is not an important one. It isn’t about WordPress (most WP related content will be on our company site, not my personal one) and it just doesn’t get much traffic.
I run a business. Its purpose is to make money, employ five people, and, with a bit of luck, turn a reasonable profit. Its job is not to service my ego or make me look good. A really good theme costs the equivalent of around £10k-£20k of chargeable time to design, code, test and implement.
Given that we’re turning work away, I thought “why bother?” And decided to go shopping for something.
So What’s It Like?
It’s actually quite weird using somebody else’s theme. I actually tried a few out and here are the things I learned that will hold us in good stead.
Themes don’t do enough to make life easy.
No really, they don’t. One of interconnect/it’s biggest challenges is making sure that WP is as easy to use for clients as possible. This means following standards, but it also means using some little tricks that help out – for example, registering and setting plenty of different image sizes, and setting/over-ruling whatever the media settings say.
Migrating WP content really sucks.
There’s a fundamental flaw with the default WP export/import. If you have inline images, although the importer has the ability to download and attach the image in your new site it won’t change the links. And if you do a search and replace, and your image sizes have changes, your lost. Totally – the img tag will point to a file that doesn’t exist.
So what do you do? Well, usually if I’m moving a site from one server to another, even switching domains, it’s a non-issue. I have my tools. But if you’re starting from fresh and working like an end-user would then you have to go through every single damn post in order to fix the images. Every post with an image in it. That’ll take a while.
If you’re really geeky, you’ll sort it, but it takes time. Way too much time. This kind of stuff needs to be sorted and it’s something we may look into as a contribution to the WP project.
Some Plugins Leave Lots of Crud
The reason for a reboot was that I felt that my site’s DB had been filled up with all sorts of crud. Lots of plugins create tables, leave options, and so on. Surplus tables have little impact, but they clutter the place up. But options, lots and lots of them, do have a minor performance hit, and they add up.
Other plugins leave hooks, don’t deactivate properly and so on. And over the years, I’d been through an awful lot of plugins. The site hadn’t been redone since WP 2.0 had been set up on it. I felt it was getting sluggish.
So… there are beautiful and amazing themes out there, and WP is wonderful, but there are little things that could make life just that bit better. Better migration tools, a better system of managing images within content and their migration, and a better system for activating themes so that image sizes are better handled.
Is it a lot to ask? Well, we’ll see what we can do about that!
Here’s something… a smiling, happy and charming man who knew my father in Arica, lives just around the corner from the hotel I’m staying at.
He actually lives in the cabin that guards a car park. Just him. He’s been married twice, I believe, but that’s all I know.
So how can I tell his story?
I can’t, not really.
But it made me realise – he had many things in common with my father. Two marriages, keeps quiet about his personal life, and a very modest lifestyle. And truth is, I see people like this all the time. And they all have a story. It’s just that it is, largely, untold.
Even when it is told, you only have their take on it. Given how fragile memories and emotions can be it’s almost impossible to extricate what’s really happened.
Pushing Away
I think it’s entirely possible that anybody can end up alone and relatively marginal. Worse, some can even end up utterly destitute and on the streets. Something makes this happen to people. They destroy their personal relationships. Before too long, they are relatively alone. They have friends, for sure, but not close ones. And drinking friends, as we all know, are the ones who aren’t there when you need them.
If we look at my father, he ended up being rejected by me. If you look at the picture of me with my father, you’ll see something that I’d never noticed until a psychologist here noticed it and mentioned it to Joaquin… my father is touching me, but I’m distant. I could be just another surly teenager, but here’s the thing… I wasn’t a surly teenager. I just hand’t formed many attachments.
At the pool hall
There were two points when I pushed away from my father. When I was around 11 years old he’d split up with his second wife and I was living with my grandmother. I’d struggled to settle into the new school – a rather rough school that was failing its pupils, and the bullying and harrassment had become quite extreme. Yet some level of that had happened at every new school. So I stood firm and when my father suggested I went with him to Belgium I opted not to. Enough was enough.
Wasn’t easy.
That was the first stage. He was obviously angry with his mother who supported me in the process of requesting her to be my guardian, and consequently their relationship deteriorated even further.
He’d already pushed away from his second wife and daughter, simply by failing to cope with certain aspects of the relationship.
Then, years later, when he was demanding money from me, I couldn’t handle it. He was too hard on me. I had to reject him even more. Not so easy, really.
Suddenly, he’d lost all familial contact. Nobody wanted to deal with him or support him. He was a lost soul.
We Judge on the Negative
One thing I’ve realised is that most people form relationships with other people based on the good character traits. They find the other person attractive, or intelligent, or caring… that kind of thing. But they break relationships based on the bad. That may be stating the obvious, really, but it’s important because the bad things are usually a very small part of that person’s character.
Think about it – your average burglar probably spends no more than a few hours a week breaking into house. A wife beater doesn’t beat his wife every day. It just doesn’t happen that way. It’s why sometimes women find it so hard to break away because “he’s a good father” or “he’s so generous most of the time.”
People aren’t black and white, no matter what films and the media appear to suggest. My father wasn’t generally a bad man. Remove the mood swings and the occassional domestic violence and you had a charming, intelligent and thoughtful man. Everyone I’ve met here considered him a good man. If anything, they found him a little naive – he got ripped off and let down on a number of occassions because he trusted too much.
He wasn’t evil.
He just had flaws that made him impossible to live with.
And Juanito?
I know I made the title of this post misleading, but it’s relevant. I don’t know his story. I can’t even suggest that he was pushed away from his family. All I know is that he’s living alone, in a small hut in a car park, and that he’s a personable and kind man.
All I know for sure is that there is a story in everybody, and no matter what mistakes they or others made they’ll feel the pain of their past.
What Have I Learned?
Value your friendships and relationships. As far as I can see, they’re one of the primary things that keep us from ending up alone and in poverty like my father did. It’s important to accept that although they can be a pain sometimes, and oh so restrictive, we need those boundaries and checks that they bring to us. Being told you’re wrong, or being stupid, or hurtful… that’s something we all need to hear now and again because we can all be wrong, stupid or hurtful.
Without that, we can’t limit ourselves, and we can’t free ourselves from our mental barriers. It’s often said that children need boundaries, or they can become insecure. I believe, very much, that adults need them also.
Now, I must apologies for the random keyboard psychology above, and promise that normal service will be resumed soon!
Phew… so what a day. It started off with a cold shower and a blandly unsatisfying breakfast of a cheese sandwich, juice and tea. But whilst eating a man came up to me and introduced himself as Joaquin Alvarez… the Honorary British Consul in Arica! It was an unexpected surprise… I thought I was meeting him later in the day.
Sadly it was just a few minutes as he teaches English in the mornings. But one thing I have to remark upon is that he immediately expressed astonishment at how similar I looked, sounded and behaved like my father. He had been a friend of my father’s for years, not knowing of any family, and to see a similar, younger version standing in front of him. It was a shock to him.
Later, we met properly, and we talked. I’d brought him some union jacks and tea as a thank you for his help so far. I didn’t expect the help he was about to give.
First the formalities… he showed me the paperwork he had, and my father’s passport. This was the moment when I’d see what my father looked like recently. In the picture was a tired man looking older than his 60 years. But it was definitely him. I will take a picture and add it to this post later.
Joaquin then took me to the hospital to discuss the matter of the hospital fees. My father had been in the intensive care unit, and these had added up. The positions were argued as so:
From the perspective of the hospital, a fee would be necessary in order to secure my father’s body and to help pay their costs.
From the perspective of the consul, many Bolivians and other illegal immigrants die in the hospital and there is never any money to pay for their care.
From the perspective of the social worker, if I was rich enough, and cared enough, to travel halfway round the world then I could surely afford to pay the fees.
The discussion went on. As you may have seen in my earlier post, I had a particular position I planned on setting out. In the end, we came to an agreement… I would pay half, and there would be an unofficial agreement that should I have more money in the future I could make a donation to the hospital.
This seemed to satisfy everyone enough to make progress.
The next stage was finding an undertaker, and to choose the coffin. Now that was odd. I discovered a few cultural things:
Hearses here are white, and often just large American estate cars.
In the UK a basic coffin is a pine wood thing in what we consider to be a classic coffin shape. In Chile it’s the same shape as typical US coffins… but covered in fake fur. I’m still trying to work out how that’s cheaper than a layer of varnish, but it is.
There isn’t necessarily a church service… it’s just straight from hospital to cemetary.
Most funerals tend to take place within 24hrs of death. Over a month is extremely unusual.
Cremation is rare and therefore a very expensive option.
Once a coffin of suitable size for a six footer (people here are short) had been found we were off to the cemetary. I had to settle for a sort of beige fur, incidentally, so my father looks like he’s being interred in a poorly cut Bungle costume.
Chilean cemetery by rob-sinclair, flickr, cc-sa
And the cemetary was a real eye-opener. You can’t bury people when your town is built on rock. So instead, it’s simpler to build what look a little like mini concrete apartment blocks into which the coffins are inserted. See the picture above right. The cemetary is also surprisingly brightly coloured. In due course I will take pictures… it’s a fascinating difference in the way death is treated here.
And you know what amazed me most today? The effort put in by Joaquin, the consul. He spent six hours with me, going backwards and forwards between the hospital, banks and funeral parlours. He made a string of phone calls, and helped me way beyond the call of duty. Truly, a great man. I’m lucky, really.
I went to WordCamp UK 2010 in Manchester… this is my write-up of the event, and its controversies along with my presentations…
I’m just settling in at the office having spent the weekend at WordCamp UK 2010 which was staged in Manchester and is a community event for WordPress users and developers. I gave two presentations, one about WordPress in Big Media, and another about WordPress in the Enterprise. These followed on from presentations given at last year’s WordCamp.
The Craic
Yes, this isn’t the logo actually used, but I prefer this one :o)
I’m going to say now that one of the key elements of a good conference or unconference is the socialising – this is where you meet people, bond with them over beers/food/dancing and form alliances that in the future could prove to be very powerful. You certainly get to make friends and feel like you’re a part of an actual community, and this happens in a way that you’ll never be able to reproduce with online technology. As a consequence it’s no surprise that the awesome Thinking Digital conference has been nicknamed Drinking Digital by some wags.
As ever,Tony Scott excelled himself by getting us access to the famous Factory Manchester (FAC251) which also happens to be across the road from a magnificently geeky pub that sells good beers, has various classic 8 bit and 16 bit computers adorning the walls, and classic arcade games on free play. Awesome.
The Presentations
There was a typically varied range of presentations running across three rooms, along with other folk busy coding up for the WordHack (the fruits of their labours are online). One particular stream that particularly caught my attention was that of a sequence of involvement from John Adams of the Department for International Development. He ran a free-form discussion group on testing strategies which was followed by an interesting talk on PHP unit-testing Nikolay Bachiyski of GlotPress fame. This session showed up some of the lack of structure in general testing of WordPress core code, plugins and themes. Although the approaches used were probably fine for a publishing platform, they would struggle to gain ISO approval. In other words, you wouldn’t want to fly on a WordPress powered plane!
Other presentations that I particularly enjoyed were Michael Kimb Jones’s WOW plugins, and Toni Sant’s very underattended Sunday morning slot where he discused the way WP has helped with a range of Maltese websites.
The Controversy
What’s a WordCamp without at least a little controversy? However, for the attendees of this one, this was a biggie… Jane Wells is Automattic’s Master of Suggestion (seriously, that company has some weird job titles) and she made a suggestion that we shouldn’t have a WordCamp UK, but instead locally organised WordCamps for cities.
There’s a number of issues I have with this:
Everyone in the UK knows that quite quickly WordCamp London would be the big one with all the attention in both media and attendance. It would quickly dominate – in large helped by the enormous population density of the capital. A WordCamp UK in London would be fine and popular (also considerably more expensive) but that’s all that’s needed.
Many British cities have intense rivalries whilst we all still stand together as a nation – there are folk in Glasgow who would never attend a WordCamp Edinburgh, but would definitely be more interested in a WordCamp Scotland. End result? Cities would have small attendances by and large, and our impressive capacity for indifference for minor events would mean that they’d end up as little more than tiny, cliquey gatherings. Anyone who’s tried to run GeekUps will understand this problem.
A lot of work, energy and our own money has been spent on building up WordCamp UK. Is Jane seriously suggesting we should dump that?
What is Jane’s authority on this? She’s simply an Automattic employee. We chose WordCamp UK and its structure – it’s ours. If someone else wants to run a WordCamp UK in the country they’re perfectly entitled and there’s no real reason why we couldn’t have three or four running each year – that would be a huge success. A highly capitalistic organisation that is just one of thousands of contributors to the project and which plays no part in actually running most WordCamps shouldn’t get so involved.
The UK is also very small – 90% of the population can reach all past WordCamp UKs in less than 3hrs – there is no real problem about accessibility.
None of the UK’s key WordPress community members want to give up WordCamp UK.
Jane admitted only six or seven people had complained to her about the situation, two of which turned out to be in Ireland – which except for a small part isn’t in the UK at all. She couldn’t confirm whether they were Northern Irish or not, which was actually something of a poor mistake to make in front of 150 or so Brits.
Us Brits are a pretty apathetic bunch at the best of times – actually running a WordCamp in each major city would be surprisingly unlikely to happen – there were only two bids submitted for this year’s event – one in Portsmouth and one in Manchester.
The whole point of the *camp suffix is that it’s all free and easy with no big organisations sticking their oar in. They are inconsistent and joyful. They’re fun. Automattic should keep out.
The WordCamp name is not trademarked, and we’ve been using it in the UK for some time now. It’s ours!
Of course, there are two sides to each argument. Here’s some reasons and benefits to splitting up WordCamps in the UK:
If somebody wished to run a WordCamp for their city they may feel that the UK badge is dominating and there’d be little interest as a consequence if it was called WordCamp Bristol, or WordCamp Salford.
A national event called something like WordConf could happen.
Erm…
Thing is – we can’t necessarily win this battle here in Britain. We don’t control the WordCamp.org website – Matt Mullenweg does (he has the domain registration in his name) so if we fight to keep calling it WordCamp UK there’ll be no ongoing support for the event from Matt and his team if they wish to stop the use of the UK moniker.
Which would mean standing up to them. Do we want to? Are we prepared for a fight on this? What do the likes of Mike Little (co-founder of the WordPress project) and Peter Westwood (a UK based core developer) feel about this?
Interestingly we were told the same thing applies to the likes of WordCamp Ireland which will now face this problem – but I wonder if Matt understands Ireland particularly well (we know Jane doesn’t) and that in that country the dominant WordCamp would quickly become an expensive Dublin event. You may get one doing well in Cork, but Kilkenny, with a population of just 22,000 and which staged this year’s event, probably wouldn’t be able to sustain an annual WordCamp.
So, Jane has to really allow each country to understand its own social constructs and history and let their own communities choose how they do things. One or two may complain, but it’s not possible to please everyone.
And we showed off too…
My company Interconnect IT have released, through our Spectacu.la brand, the following plugins which you may find useful:
I can’t say thank you enough to the people who make WordCamp UK a success for no personal reward. Tony Scott leads it up, with Mike Little, Nick Garner, Chi-chi Ekweozor, Simon Dickson and many many more working hard behind the scenes. Also to Nikolay to letting me play with the fastest 85mm lens I ever saw! Thank you, you’re wonderful people.
Over the weekend just gone I made two planned presentations at WordCamp UK 2009 down in Cardiff. I also threw in a quick 45 minutes of show and tell on the Caribou Theme that runs this site and is available for download from Spectacula.
Over the weekend just gone I made two planned presentations at WordCamp UK 2009 down in Cardiff. I also threw in a quick 45 minutes of show and tell on the Caribou Theme that runs this site and is available for download from Spectacula.
I also got to mix with some very interesting, talented and cool people that know a heck of a lot of stuff about what we’re working with. In this conference were, potentially, the next generation of web creators. People who will make things happen. And this year, more than last, there was a real buzz at the potential of WordPress, its markets, and its uses.
Presenting at WordCamps
Presentation
I’ve never actually done a formal presentation in front of more than about ten people before in my life, and even then only perhaps four five in my life. I’m a techie – I would do technical discussions and demos, but never with Powerpoint and a laser pointer. I did do an unconference show and tell at Barcamp Liverpool last year where about twenty to thirty people turned up, but that wasn’t planned… it just kind of happened.
But I could also appreciate the benefits of putting myself out there in front of a room full of my peers. So in a fit of enthusiasm I volunteered for two presentations – WordPress in the Enterprise, and WordPress for News and Media. I expect one or even both might be dropped by the organisers. I have no history or background in public speaking.
Both got accepted.
Damn!
But it had some great potential too. I could play with approaches and actually ‘test’ the results. So what did I learn? Read on:
1. L-Shaped Rooms are Tricky
The main room for the event turned out to be L-shaped… or, a better description, V-shaped, with the presented at the bottom of the V. At this event three rooms were in operation, a large L-shaped room with up to 150 people, a medium sized rectangular room for up to 70 people, and a small boardroom type for about 15 people.
I had expected my first presentation on the Enterprise to be the tricky one – it’s not a fascinating subject. But it was in the medium sized room, and it proved very easy to get engagement with the audience. In the L-shaped room you’re trying to look in two different directions. It’s almost impossible.
2. Consider an Assistant for Demos
One can work the computer, the other can talk. Saves awkward silences, and it’s something I’m going to try in a future talk.
3. Get in Early
I did one of the first, and the very last, formal presentations of the event. I noticed that in the first everyone was wide awake and very enthusiastic. By the end of the conference people were flagging. Getting and keeping attention becomes trickier at this stage. You also have the advantage that nobody ever wonders off from the conference at the very beginning – it’ll never be fuller!
4. Start Funny
In the Enterprise talk I started with a humorous quote and in the News & Media I started with a pithy quote. The funny one got the mood lifted and people in a cheerful mood. It gave me a chance to relax and settle into the presentation.
5. It’s a Great Audience
I was dealing with fellow geeks. People in the same situation as me. It was, frankly, the best audience I can imagine. The few presentations I’ve done before have been up in front of a board of hardened and cynical directors, or senior management, or people who have tough deadlines to meet. This was a whole lot more relaxed. Nobody’s going to consider firing you because of a minor mistake.
6. Get Engagement
I noticed that speakers who asked for shows of hands, asked questions of the audience and so on generally had a better applause at the end than those who didn’t. It doesn’t take much to engage your audience, but I’ll admit that it’s trickier when you can only look directly at half of them at any one point.
7. Be Prepared
At conferences opportunities come up. Have business cards, listen to people, smile a lot.
8. Freebies
You can’t believe how the mood of a room lifts when you hand out gifts. Good gifts though. I remember the really rubbish calculators we got given in my ICI Systems days. What geek in the world needs a calculator? So I handed out the penknives we had made for Spectacu.la and they went down a treat.
9. Matt
I finally met Matt Mullenweg at the weekend. I’d promised him a beer months ago in reconciliation following our (now seemingly minor) argument over WordPress’s take on the GPL. So I bought him a pear cider and had a good chat. He’s an affable chap, easy going, says ‘awesome’ a lot (but he’s American, so that’s normal) and has clearly listened to the concerns of WP developers about how they’ll make any money.
Funny hat tho’ ;-)
Summary
An ace time, basically. I’d like to say hi to everyone I met, but I’m scared of missing someone – so instead, let’s just say I look forward to chatting and, hopefully, working with some of you in the not so distant future.
As part one of my campaign to introduce the concept of actually thinking to UK media, pundits and government, I’m covering the nasty little idea of automatic speed limiters being introduced to cars – so that people can, basically, stop thinking about the speed they drive at. That’ll work…
This subject has been rolling along for some years now. Basically the technology now exists to be able to instruct a car what speed it should travel at.
Now, if you’re a control freak, this is like a gift from heaven. If you’re a control freak in power (yes, that includes you Jacqui Smith) then it’s even more wonderful, because it hands you a whole ton of power.
Like everything, of course, it’s not all bad. There are plenty of good reasons for speed limiting cars, trucks and even fire engines. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea.
How The Pro Speed Limiters Present Their Argument
Slow, yet also lethal - public domain image with thanks to Wikipedia
There are currently a lot of fears in society, especially Western society. We’re scared of global warming, the economy, terrorism, and dying in a fiery ball of fire when some chav in a misguidedly tuned Vauxhall Nova comes careering head-on towards you as a result of massive overconfidence and a lack of skill. Throw those arguments into the air and you have some pretty strong arguments as to why we should introduce speed limiters.
Here’s a quick list of their key points:
Safety – you’ll hear this a lot. And it’s true. Go slower and if all else is equal safety will go up.
Economy – by being forced to go slower, you’ll drive more economically and be able to save the world from Global Warming at the same time.
Reduced need for thirsty, fast cars – true to a degree because what’s the point in a big V8 if you hit speed-limited wall at 70mph?
Reduced load on drivers – no need to think about speed, or worry about speed cameras.
It’s optional, there’s no need to fit a speed limiter if you don’t want it.
If you do have it, there’s an override button for those rare occasions you may need to go faster than strictly legal.
If only a minority of cars have this limiter, the effect will be to slow down others without it.
Lot’s of people are killed or injured daily, and anyone arguing against speed controls must be in favour of those deaths.
The arguments are mostly presented by different types of organisation. You have the emotionally irritating Brake, and the more calm but government funded (don’t forget this fact, they may sound independent but they aren’t) Motoring Forum, the UK Commission for Integrated Transport, and various other safety campaigners.
I can’t find a quote from Jacqui Smith on this subject, but I’m sure she’ll be along soon.
And The Argument Against
Well there has to be some rational argument against this, but unfortunately we’ve only got Safe Speed getting all the media attention on the other side. Holy Fucking Shit. I mean, really. Have you seen them? You wouldn’t trust these people to decorate your house, so why would you trust them with setting the agenda on speed limits and motoring policy?
Instead, why not get a psychologist who’s studied driving onto your show? Or, at a stretch, someone from the Institute of Advanced Motorists? But no, instead you get to listen to a muppet from Brake arguing with a muppet from Safe Speed. I suppose there’s only so many pundits to go round and the radio and TV stations pick the easiest ones they can find.
Sheesh.
But here we go – this is other people’s arguments, don’t forget. Mine come later.
It’ll encourage zombie behaviour, which is almost certainly true – in the US where freeways were once limited to the mind-numbingly dull speed of 55mph, you get to see a lot of this.
It’s a symptom of control-freakery – yep, almost certainly.
Speed doesn’t kill, it’s inattentive driving, which kind of cycles back to the first point.
It’s the thin end of a wedge which will end with all cars having compulsory speed limiters.
It probably won’t affect KSI (Kills and Serious Injuries) rates in the positive manner the pro side would like to see.
Slowing down can cause more accidents.
Thankfully, spokefolk from the RAC, AA and the likes are occassionally wheeled out to discuss such issues and they tend to be a bit more rational and thought out. But they’ve become rather dysfunctional resellers of insurance and recovery services these days, rather than the clubs and associations that they originally started out as. Consequently they have to toe a fine line between keeping customers (many of whom are the unthinking fools I worry about) and not upsetting the government (filled with the misguidedly thinking fools I also worry about) into adding more restrictions to both their customers and their businesses. So they tend towards making statements rather than take the risk of getting involved on radio or TV.
Of course, avoiding radio or TV is a sensible move for many. I’ve listened to myself on Radio and I’m clearly a rambling buffoon who doesn’t know when to shut up and who talks over others. Heaven knows what would happen if I found myself on TV. Of course, it’s not totally bad to be a buffoon – look how well Boris Johnson’s done out of it.
The best argument against this, so far, comes from the easy to respect Derek Charters, from the Motor Industry Research Association, who believes limiting speed automatically could cause accidents.
“The last thing you need is one car to be overtaking and then pull back in, in front of the cars in front, because that braking event will then cause everybody to start to slow down, which will then compress the traffic, which then causes an incident.”
The Dave’s Attempt to Think on this Subject
Oh Jesus, do we need the government controlling us just a bit more?
Would government controlled GPS units eventually be used to track our cars’ every movement?
A world full of cars doing identical speeds is so horrifically soporific that I suspect we’d be having massive pile-ups in no time.
The unthinking are the worst people to get this technology – they’ll just turn into motoring zombies.
Going faster is fun. Sometimes it’s good to be able to have a bit of fun, you know, even if it does make the world ever so slightly less safe.
All speeds are dangerous – being crushed to death by a 2mph Audi Q7 isn’t much fun either – stop people from realising how dangerous cars are and boom! more dead people.
It’ll probably mean the end of the fantastic Top Gear show.
It’ll make moving to South America far more appealing.
The key arguments for or against this idea are really just noise. The question we should be asking is at what point should drivers give up responsibility for the movements of their cars? Lane sensing technology has matured enough that you could conceivably place your Honda at the beginning of the M6 and drive all the way to Scotland without touching the wheel, brakes or throttle again, coming to a stop when the traffic in front does so, and accelerating to a set speed when it’s possible to do so. I remain to be convinced that all this is a good idea, but at least it’s entirely within the control of the driver – he can choose what is and is not switched on, and where.
GPS technology is constantly improving, as are sensors. It’s only a matter of time before we can simply climb into our cars, shout “take me to work, autocar!” and climb into the back for a nap. Sounds like a wonderful idea to me and I wouldn’t care what speed the car travelled at so long as it woke me up on arrival and neatly parked itself while I go for a pee.
Partial implementation, on a wide scale, of speed limiters or even smart cruise control could be lethal. Each car would end up driving at ever so slightly different speeds. Overtaking moves could be measured in miles, and it wouldn’t matter if you didn’t have a speed limiter – you’d be stuck behind those with them fitted. And those who choose to have them fitted would be sitting in a smug pool of self-superiority, knowing they’re driving at the maximum safe speed. They’d be wrong, of course. 70mph is safe when it’s clear and dry. It’s safe even when it’s wet. But in a deluge it’s lethal. But having given up the act of thinking about speed they would just keep their foot mashed down on the carpet. Until they eventually plough into the back of the car in front that they couldn’t see.
And that’s why this topic has made it into the Campaign for Thinking. Full automation is a good thing, it means you can go and think about something else. But a world full of drivers who believe thinking about speed is only for the government… God preserve us!
Now, could the government get on with thinking about things they could help us with? Infrastructure, international security, the economy, tax… that kind of stuff? The big, hard problems that they have the power to do something about? 3,000 people a year die on the roads. 60,000 people a year die from murders in South Africa. And providing assistance to unstable or impoverished countries could save the lives of millions. Unfortunately it’s hard to get elected on the promise of saving the lives of AIDS stricken Tanzanians, but you could save or dramatically improve the lives of more than 3,000 of them with the millions spent on speed limiter studies. Yes, I know it’s a straw man argument, but a little sense of perspective on the point of all this would be useful.
A lot of the Middle East is progressive, modern and sophisticated. You have freedoms and rights, life is good and so on. Yet some selective reporting does a fair bit of damage to the image we have of them. If you saw such selective views of the West, we wouldn’t look good either.I was a little uncomfortable with some entries on b3ta, so wanted something to try and show balance. Not to say I’m the only one who feels that way, of course….
The thumbnail below links to a higher quality file for those who want something sweeter:
