DutchEnery

Not being an avid reader of the Guardian Newspaper, nevertheless I do read its articles on the web from time to time. One took my immediate interest. It reported something about Technology written by Edward Helmore about Jaron Lanier. Jaron is an American comp u ter scientist known for coining the term ‘Virtual Reality’. The article reporting about using Social Media and its effects. Jaron warns about the dangers of a world over-reliant on the Internet. Something I have alluded to many times as well. Being at the mercy of these top people who run them, although not naming them. We know their names anyway. But to be clear he must have meant the likes of Messrs Musk, Gates, and Zuckerberg. Perhaps we should include this failed politician Clegg amongs them. He is Global Affairs President (Meta) . It might be a great name for what is basically a fall-guy position I think. Something he is well used to. Well, Jaron continued by saying ‘ We’re putting that fundamental quality of humaneness th

This year’s Halloween has been a rather quiet, low-case affair. No-one knocking the doors showing off hideous masks and sounding curdling screams that made your blood run cold! Now, I am not at all certain why we celebrate that as I don’t believe in such manifested portrayal of what is supposed to be evil. At least the kids like the rumpus. But it is funny that humanity has this what seems to be inborn, an inborn idea about evil. You will notice this as well in the films showing wonderful evilly aliens. Films like ‘Alien’ with Sigourney Weaver et al. Big money spinners, we sure like to be frightened. It raises a few questions in my mind, notwithstanding my religious background as a confirmed Christian following the Anglican brand of what they call Faith, I ask myself – Is there something about aliens, real or not that we equate with evil? And why would that be? First of all, I have always taken the point, as I explained in a much older post, that aliens might well exist but we will nev

We have mentioned energy a lot in previous posts. I suppose we would as it permeates all our lives. Certainly does so in the western world. I suppose the war in Ukraine does not help but that is not the only thing about energy. In this country VAT (Value Added Tax) is levied on bills. The rate at which it is levied varies but homeowners should pay 5%. Even that, when your bill is approaching £2,000 annually, it r e presents something like nearly £100 in tax. That would look better on my bank balance. I must be honest I am aware we need to pay tax but I am also aware that it is not always spent wisely! Let’s look at wind turbines. You might know I am opposed to them on land simply for two reasons, environmental problems and misuse of crop growing land or grazing land or even recreational land. The problems they cause to birds are already well-known. Besides all that, these monstrosities produce thousands of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere through production of the metals and plasti

Does anyone, perhaps all across the world, ever think what it costs to have a government? Take the government in the UK. There are 650 MPs in the UK Parliament. Each receives a stipend (salary) of £84,144 per annum. That’s a cost to the taxpayer of £54,693,600. Yes £50+ million pounds. But that’s not all, they also receive payments for certain items like stationery, subsidised drinks amongst others. Other costs like the Standard Office Budget is some £27,470 per MP (some get more because of their extra workload, like ministers etc or are living and based in London). That is a whopping £17,855,500. And yet again that’s not all. There is the upkeep of the Westminster Palace which has cost so far billions.  To cut a long drawn out calculation and trawling the Internet I can just go with the Institute of Government which stated that during 2018/19 the cost of running both Houses of Parliament in 2018/19 was £560.4 million which was nearly 8% higher than the previous year. If that would con

Is virtue-signalling the new art-form in the UK? You might know this if I put it like this - Virtue signalling is the expression of a moral viewpoint with the intent of communicating good character. But is that right? I don’t think so, at least not completely. Like everything else, it has a good side and an equally bad side. It depends entirely what you think about the words – moral viewpoint. For instance, I am certain that those youngsters who glue themselves onto the road surface or throw tomato soup onto a valuable painting in a museum, think of their moral viewpoint as the only one that counts. But then I would say, what about my viewpoint? I can tell you right now, it is NOT the same as theirs! Then we have the debating societies in Universities across the land. I recently heard a new word I had not heard before – ‘perma-offended youth’. What does that mean? It was mentioned in an article from the Telegraph and referred to a debate that took place at the Cambridge Union. You can

It is interesting to see how the world, how people, think and act. Here we have Qatar. Another country on the Arabian peninsula. Mostly sand, a few palms and for some reason bozos of the World Football system called FIFA thought it would be a nice place to stage the World Cup. Obviously knowing these boys are totally straight as far as money is concerned, the voting was all above board and Qatar came out on top. Well, it is a sunny place in summer though! At least the bath water gets to 60 degrees Centigrade if you put the bath out on the balcony. What us in the nice above board western world never realised, is the fact Qatar is not in the western world. We in the western world think the whole planet is the western world. You notice this on the discussions on TV. Here in the UK we get very worked up about the treatment of LBGT+ people, bless their little hearts. We spend hours and hours talking about the why’s and how’s. Like that is going to change things for the better. Let’s be fair

Now I am a long-standing user of Linux having ditched Windows when it was XP. I must confess using Linux has got a damn lot easier now than it was in the Seventies and Eighties. In fact it now surpasses Windows in ease of operation and security. It is no wonder that most mainframes (very large computers with petabytes of memory) are mostly running with Linux or a variety of Unix systems. If you do not know what Unix is, it is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix from the Sixties. Do not confuse this with Unox, a Unilever company that makes a type of Dutch sausage. Although sometimes I think it is exactly that! Anyway, I have run Linux Mint (one of the varieties of Linux distributions available) because it is very much like Windows in most of its operation. Recently I read the website from ‘Makeuseof.com’, titled “Ten Reasons why Windows is Still Better than Linux”. I thought that was rather interesting but completel