The joys of modern aviation

A retard terrorist wannabe gets to board a plane with his undies full of explosives. Meanwhile my bottle of water is getting confiscated by the airport security, because clearly it poses a lethal threat.

Ah, the joys of modern aviation.

Limo madness

The Swedish taxpayers paid 3,5 million kronor to transport the fat, lazy delegates to the EU European Development Days 2009 in Stockholm in limos to and from the airport.

Unfortunately that's just pocket change compared to the costs of closing down E4 repeatedly during those days just so these overpaid bastards could get their fat asses to the conference without any interference from other traffic. Way to throw taxpayers money out the window and annoy the hell out of them.

My personal favorite was the Stockholm police refusing to let motorists know exactly at what time they would close E4, "for security reasons". More like "for annoyance reasons" if you ask me. How could knowing the closure time and therefore avoiding complete chaos be a threat to security? If I wanted to blow up one of these pompous bastards I wouldn't abandon the plan just because I didn't get the exact time for when this stupid idiot would show up in his limo, would I?

My God, the stupidity...

Plotting new evil

The "axis of evil" are gathered in the White House and plotting new evil in collaboration with the US government. What kind of insanity can we expect as an outcome of this meeting? More censorship? More oppressive legislation? More "guilty until proven innocent"?

Among those expected are Sony's Michael Lynton, Warner Bros.' Barry Meyer, Viacom's Philippe Dauman, NBC Universal's Jeffrey Zucker, Warner Music Group's Edgar Bronfman, Harper Collins CEO Brian Murray, Universal Music Group's Zachary Horowitz, the MPAA's Dan Glickman, the RIAA's Mitch Bainwol, IATSE's international president Matthew Leob, AFTRA'S Kim Roberts Hedgepeth, DGA president Taylor Hackford, DGA exec director Jay Roth and SAG's David White.

Yup, the whole "family" is here, ready to take on new acts of extortion, threats, bullying and corruption. In more civilized countries these bullies are actually convicted for their crime instead of given a carte blanche by the government to do whatever they want. Well, I guess if they refuse to give the "family" this carte blanche at this point they'll each receive a friendly reminder in the middle of the night, consisting of a severed horse head or something.

And why does it come as no surprise that there's no-one from the consumer and human rights side present at this meeting? Goddamn criminals the lot of them.

Damn choos!

My wife insisted to buy me a pair of Jimmy Choo by H&M shoes, and while I tried to resist I lost the fight and she ordered them on the Internet. So the first pair of shoes arrived a couple of days ago. The first impression was good, except the very notable smell of glue, they fitted nicely, but I soon noticed that the leather that was glued to the sole (I have to say I'm wondering how long these shoes are meant to last anyway if they're only glued to the sole...) was wrinkled at one point on one of the shoes. Back they went.

The next pair arrived today, they too reeked of glue, but imagine my surprise when I felt the leather and noticed several really rough patches, in addition to several visible wrinkles, like they had been worn for quite a few weeks (which they hadn't, they looked absolutely mint except for the irregularities in the skin). It basically looked like the skin from a very old, wrinkly cow with a rash. Not very nice, and obviously they're going back as well.

Now the question is how many times are we supposed to try before forgetting about it and finding some other shoes in some other store? How poor of a QA process does H&M really have, and how badly does this impact the Jimmy Choo brand? After this experience I'll always think of Jimmy Choo shoes as poor quality and overpriced. Unfair, perhaps, but this cooperation with H&M hasn't proven to be great PR for the Jimmy Choo brand.

Restrictions, restrictions...

Politicians never get tired of trying to restrict people's freedom, in any way possible. The latest, and probably least serious although extremely annoying, pointless and unnecessary is banning smokeless tobacco, snus, for council workers during working hours. This has been introduced by a number of municipalities in Sweden lately.

I'm struggling to understand how these municipalities are justifying this completely pointless invasion of people's personal life.

• Snus doesn't make workers less productive, as they are able to continue working while using it. Also, the users' mental state isn't altered in any way that could possibly affect work.
• Snus doesn't bother any third parties, unless looking at a person with a snus under his or her lip bothers you (in which case you should have your head examined).
  
• Snus is a legal substance.

What will be next? Banning coffee during work? Banning looking through the window during work? You can't just go and ban something because you don't like it. Stupid, ignorant bastards.

Who cares about consumer rights?

Swedish minister of infrastructure, Åsa Torstensson (Centerpartiet) expresses surprise and disappointment in that Vänsterpartiet-politician Eva-Britt Svensson says she is willing to knock down the EU telecoms package altogether if the Council (or "The Evil Empire", if you want) insist on throwing basic human rights out the window by adopting the completely bizarre amendment 138 that would allow oppressive regimes such as the UK and France to punish people without a fair trial.

Torstensson:

– Det är beklagansvärt. Parlamentet har varit för de flesta delar av telekompaketet och bejakat att det är bra för konkurrensen och konsumenterna. Jag är överraskad att hon uttrycker att hon vill att det ska falla, säger hon till SvD.se.

Now, excuse me Mrs. Minister of Infrastructure, but who the hell cares about competition or consumer rights when basic human rights are at stake here? Would you amputate your foot because it was itching a bit? Are you really that dumb, Torstensson, or do you just think your voters are?

Social democrats say no to children getting in debt

So the socialist democratic party, Socialdemokraterna, have hatched yet another brilliant idea: Providers of loans via text messages ("SMS loans") will be prohibited to provide loans to anyone under 18 years of age. Wow, that must have taken them a long time to agree on.

And here I was thinking that the law already protected people under the age of 18 against taking loans or any kind of credit really, whether it's approved via SMS, e-mail or in a store or bank. What's the bloody point of making these regulations depend on specific technology that exists today but might very well be gone tomorrow? When will Socialdemokraterna insist that we ban Facebook-loans for people under 18? Or MySpace-loans? Or iPhone app loans?

My god these people are dumber than breadsticks.

Reversed "pay per click"

When it comes to retarded suggestions on how to regulate the Internet in order to maximize the profit of the media industry nothing surprises me anymore. Not even the insane suggestion from the media industry in Germany who want to get paid from anyone linking to (meaning generating traffic to) their websites in "commercial use". A sort of reversed "pay per click" policy, where the websites generating traffic to the media websites will have to pay for the traffic they generate. Just like if the newspapers had to pay the advertisers money for every person who bought a product from these advertisers after reading the ad in the newspaper. Because, clearly:

"Intenet kan inte längre vara en upphovsrättsfri zon"

Yeah, right.

This ludacris suggestion is apparently backed up by severily technologically impaired German politicians.

Why road tolls are the work of the devil

I've already written about how the Swedish politicians are increasingly adopting the terrible Norwegian way of financing basal infrastructure, where billions of kronor are wasted every single year in administration of toll roads and interest on loans.

It seems Socialdemokraterna are prepared to take this even a step further, because obviously increased income and housing taxes and a new net wealth tax that they've already promised isn't enough:

Kongressen fattade på torsdagen beslut om att i högre grad än i dag låta
bilisterna själva betala nya infrastruktursatsningar med så kallade brukar- och
trängselavgifter.

We need more road tolls, and we need to finance the roads in the worst possible way, both from a social point of view and from an economical point of view. If you're still wondering why this is such a bad idea, let me explain:

Socially
Road tolls are anti-social in nature, as they are a flat-rate tax on transportation that will hit low-income citizens unreasonably hard in comparison to the wealthier citizens. Would any social democratic politician dare to suggest a flat income tax of 100.000 SEK a year, no matter how much you actually make? Probably not.

Furthermore the tax hits you not based on income or wealth but solely based on where you live in relation to your job, the kindergarten, shops and public services.

I have to say I'm particularly shocked that a party claiming to be socialist is proposing something like this.

Economically
Now this, on the other hand, isn't really the socialist democratic party's strongest skills, but still... Collecting road tolls costs a lot of money. In 2008 the road tolls in Stockholm cost 380 million SEK, approximately 50% of the total income. In Norway, a country where they have made the collection of road tolls into an artform, 15,5 billion NOK out of 46 billion NOK that has been collected in road tolls during 1990-2007 was spent on administration and interest on loans. That's more or less 30% of tax payers money wasted on nothing. In one particular example the motorists are forced to pay 3,79 billion NOK in road tolls on a road that only costs 3,5 billion NOK to build...

There is absolutely no good reason to remove the building of new roads from the national budget and increase the costs of these dramatically by turning them into toll roads.

Public enemy number 1

Enemy of the Internet and the free world, Monique Wadsted, is taking the absurd rounds in the Pirate Bay farce one step further. She's once again used her comradeship with some rotten apples at Stockholm tingsrätt in order to get what is arguably one of the most bizarre court rulings I've ever heard of here in Sweden:

Nu tvingar Stockholms tingsrätt Pirate Bay att stänga ner. De har vänt sig mot personerna bakom sajten och har bestämt att de ska betala totalt 1 miljon kronor i böter om de fortsätter driva sajten.

Mind you it has not yet been established whether The Pirate Bay is illegal or not, and there is no proof that these two gentlemen are actually involved in the website anymore. I guess if I had a friend in that corrupt institution called Stockholm tingsrätt (or a lot of money to bribe one to be my friend), I could accuse Svenska Dagbladet's website of being illegal, and force them to shut down way before the case had actually been settled. Also, I could just point out a random person who I believed was responsible for running Svenska Dagbladet's site and make this person legally responsible for shutting the site down or pay the consequences. For instance, this person could be my nosy neighbor that I dislike. He'll never know what hit him.

Reminds me a lot of The Trial.
Mrs. Wadsted herself is obviously happy as a clam, as she has once more demonstrated the absolute power of the entertainment industry over the court of law, and the complete and utter contempt of basic human rights that this industry stands for. Money über alles.

– I somras fick vi ett förbud mot Black Internet och nu har vi fått ett förbud mot Fredrik Neij och Gottfrid Svartholm säger Monique Wadsted, som företräder Hollywoodbolagen juridiskt i rättegången om The Pirate Bay.