This is called "free market economy"

As reported by ABC Online, aged care nurses might be tempted to move into the hosiptal sector if they're offered more money.

Well, this is about the least surprising thing I have ever heard in my life. When I saw the heading "Aged care nurses neglected" I wondered which aspect of third-world wages, attrocious working conditions including regular assault by residents (sorry, clients (sorry, customers))), incompetent union, poor training and bewildering constant change in fairly hippy-philosophy-driven working practices they were talking about.

But no. All the article is saying is that if Queensland Health is aggressive about recruiting nurses into the hospital system by making the financial rewards more attractive, then aged care nurses might siddle sideways and leave aged care even worse-off than it already is.

Deal with it. Plenty of aged care nurses of the non-Registered variety are burning the candle at both ends working and studying in order to upgrade their qualifications from AIN (Assistant In Nursing - read: "shit-kicker") to EEN (Endorsed Enrolled Nursing - something about being able to administer drugs and work in hospitals) precisely in order to flee aged care at the first available opportunity. This does not make the prospect of holding onto nurses, in the face of even extra tea breaks as an incentive, look very good. Keeping aged care nursing pay in line with hospital pay will be a start, but won't benefit the Personal Carers/AINs who do most of the actual work and won't fix a system that is basically a bit broken.

Blogger needs a "Discard post" button

Well, it does.

"Turn the other cheek, that I may smite it."

Yeah, sure, Christians are peace-loving people who should have sole say over the laws in this country.

I really don't think so.

Some of the comments are especially entertaining.

That's not a malicious prosecution, that one's fine!

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha.

Psychics in the UK are pissed that new consumer protection laws will force them to try and prove that they're not fraudulent. Good fucking luck.

I love the "Other religions" comment. So it's not a medical service, it's a religious service. Frankly, I think that the "other religions" should be forced to provide a disclaimer that there is not adequate proof for the existence of the afterlife, so this should be taken into consideration when deciding whether or not to obey behavioural rules and regulations intended to avoid punishment within it.

"Our reading today is from the Consumer Protection Act..."

The year is what, exactly?

I have just started work at a new organisation, and have therefore been thrust whimpering and fearful back into the world of Windows Desktops. The XP is not so bad - if all you want to do is research and write, it's serviceable if showing its age. No, sorry, scratch that. It is bad.

Then there's Internet Explorer. In 2008, there should be a law against forcing people to use IE6. No tabs, crude bookmarks management that they insist upon labelling "Favorites" with a blatant disregard for truth or international spelling, and a general impression of being out of step, behind the times and, fundamentally, Not Good Enough.

Install Firefox? No. I don't have Administrator privileges, it seems. They don't trust me. And because the IT person is not in the same building, I'll bide my time before asking her about it. Not having administrator privileges also means that I can't install the Google toolbar. Or do anything else that might be halfway useful. It's like being stuck in the Wayback Machine.

And then there's Windows itself. Alt-M to minimise the current window: Not available. Bulk renamer within Windows Explorer: Not available. The taste of impending doom? All too present.

But, intriguingly, when turning off I was given the option of "Install updates and then shut down." There was one update after the first day, 93 the second. I wonder what I'll come back to the next time I turn it on? A web browser which looks like one?

QOTD - Saturday April 12th

Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.

"Would it still offend you if I questioned someone else's beliefs instead?"

There is a program, very famous, on Unix-related systems called "fortune". You run it at a terminal (command line) and it outputs a cookie drawn at random from its collection. For example:

"Anything cut to length will be too short"

Or:

What is tolerance? -- it is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed
of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly -- that
is the first law of nature.
-- Voltaire

I would point you to the home page of fortune, but I can't find it. I'm not even sure it's even got one any more - it may have been around for so long that it gets maintained by whoever has a spare moment, and code gets passed around by email like they did it in the bad old days when men where men and penguins still hadn't been made anybody's mascot.

Here's the thing: There's an "offensive" collection of quotes which will only be used if you explicitly tell fortune to do so. And it contains things like:

There once was a man from Sydney
Who could put it up to her kidney.
But the man from Quebec
Put it up to her neck;
He had a big one, now didn't he?

And a million more dirty limericks and risque jokes. And it also contains things like this:

"Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense, and sublime truths
are equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice
if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth."
[Eric Hoffer, _The True Believer_, 1951, section 57]

Or:

"It is the true believer's ability to "shut his eyes and stop his ears"
to the facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard which is the
source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy. He cannot be frightened
by danger nor disheartened by obstacle nor baffled by contradictions
because he denies their existence."
[Eric Hoffer, "The True Believer," response to
Martin Luther's faithful shutting-out of
contrary evidence, in Table Talk, Number 1687]

In the immortal words of a short Spanish waiter: Que?

A philosophical religious comment from 1687AD is in the offensive collection? I checked the source files, the actual cookies, and, after de-encoding them (they are still text files, but they've been rot13'd - google it - for a reason which escapes me) confirmed that not only was this quote there, but that there are cookie files called "religion" and "atheism".

Now wait one goddamn cotton-picking minute.

There are no files in the normal set called "religion" or "atheism". So does the mere fact of making quotes about religion or non-religion count as offensive, now? Yes, there are quotes included which are intended to be offensive. But there is also an awful lot of plain, simple, philosophy or theology - if you think that they're different - and I am scratching my head about the standards which see this:

"Most people's religion is what they want to believe, not what they
do believe. And very few of them stop to examine its foundations."

[Luther Burbank quoted by Edgar Waite, also in "2000 Years
of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt",
by James A. Haught, Prometheus Books, 1996]

Or even this absurdity:

"I got enough guilt to start my own religion"
[Tori Amos]

classified as offensive. For fuck's sake, what century are we living in? The whole concepts of tolerance, open debate and humour seem to be disappearing to wherever the Americans put Habeas Corpus. I'd blame them for this, as well, but it's just too easy and probably not entirely deserved.

Until people learn that there is a difference between saying "I cannot accept that female circumcision is morally acceptable" and "The religion that condones female circumcision must be expunged from the fact of the earth", I shall be found in the bomb shelter with a collection of Lenny Bruce tapes.