August 4, 2007 • 11:01 am 3
Why on earth would a telco have an online registration system for prepaid SIM cards which doesn’t accept street numbers with letters (eg 29B) or hyphenated surnames?
And why on earth would a telco with such a bizarre system then advertise on their phone help service “did you know it’s even easier to register your phone online”?
IS. NOT.
Filed under: sheer incompetence
August 2, 2007 • 8:12 am 0
Crossposted on Larvatus Prodeo, where each of the previous Haneef threads has generated hundreds of comments.
Much was made yesterday of claims that Indian police believe that there are links between Haneef and extreme jihadists. To kick this thread off, from The Hindu (Online edition of India’s National Newspaper):
Meanwhile, reports in a section of the Australian media that a dossier prepared by the Bangalore police on Mohammed Haneef on his alleged links with the Al-Qaeda have come as a surprise to the police here.
Bangalore Police Commissioner Neelam Achuta Rao told The Hindu on Wednesday that they had not prepared any such dossier.
So where has the alleged Haneef dossier actually come from?
Secondly, Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Politics, authoritarianism, law, sheer incompetence
July 30, 2007 • 9:34 am 17
In response to Dr Mohammed Haneef’s interview last night on 60 minutes:
Isn’t it better to be safe than sorry?
He was only inconvenienced for 4 weeks.
Everyone makes mistakes, and it’s all been corrected now.
Sure he was incarcerated, but he was fed and safe and he must have known that if he was innocent he’d eventually be set free.
He shouldn’t have been traumatised by that, he should be happy to be contributing to the safety of society by being thoroughly investigated.
The attempts by partisans to game talkback shows are becoming more and more obvious.
The last two lpoints strike me as particularly disingenuous. They’re trying to imply that only a person with some guilty secrets would be traumatised by being investigated. As if anybody who’s been paying attention to justice narratives (both fact and fiction) at any time in their life ever doesn’t know that innocent people get persecuted all the time for cynical political gain. Why on earth should Haneef’s pofessed innocence have made him unafraid of the investigation’s intensity?
Filed under: authoritarianism, elections, law, sheer incompetence
July 18, 2007 • 11:08 pm 3
As Tigtog discussed while I had this post desultorily in draft (it’s school holidays here!), the Daily Telegraph has posted a followup on CityRail’s complete lack of any workable emergency evacuation plans for people who can’t walk: CityRail plan to abandon disabled.
The comments section is worth a look. “paul of sydney” starts assigning value to people’s lives, and guess who’s not worth anything?
OK Morris, so its unacceptable for a fellow to be stuck on a train for a few hours while they get a forklift onto the Sydney Harbour Bridge to lift him off. So lets spend $100 million or so of taxpayers money to retrofit each and every CityRail train for something that might not happen again for another 20 years.
Get this, “paul” – the trains shouldn’t be retrofitted, because they should have been built with facilities for disabled people IN THE BLOODY FIRST PLACE. Accessibility shouldn’t be an afterthought. And you, or any reader here, could next week be the person in the wheelchair who gets to sit in a train carriage alone while you burn to death, or inhale toxins, or just starve or dehydrate, forgotten, over hours or days without a means of communication.
Bob Hodge touches on this situation in “The Complexity Revolution”:
“My new friends at NSW Rail would be very unhappy with this story. It would not help much to tell them that this is a standard ‘human interest’ article, nor that it is more complex than it looks. For instance, MacCauley is not typical of standard passengers who usually concern complexity-2 planners of rail networks. He is another butterfly, whose specific needs would be hard to predict or cater for.”
“Hard to predict”? No, no, no, no, no. It’s not a complex, unpredictable trivial detail that people who use wheelchairs also use public transport. It’s not a bizarre, unforeseeable event that sometimes systems will fail and you’ll need to use your backup system. Disabled people aren’t going to go away just because you want to pretend they don’t exist. Sheesh, this isn’t even Public Facilities 101, it’s junior school level.
Can anyone with a knowledge of disability law offer their perspective? Surely “Oh, um, I guess we could say that we, er, just wait for ambulances, then stretcher them out or something, yes, that sounds ok!” can’t be a legal emergency plan?
Filed under: disability, obstreperation, sheer incompetence
• 3:54 pm 5
Lauredhel had a post a few days ago noting the plight of a quadriplegic man abandoned while the ablebodied passengers were evacuated during the train breakdown on the Sydney Harbour Bridge recently and told he would be evacuated “in two or three days”. (Luckily nearby construction workers showed some initiative and rescued him using a forklift.)
Apparently this was not just a regrettable lapse or someone’s wires getting crossed about emergency procedure, it’s standard operating procedure for CityRail: CityRail’s new generation of passenger carriages have been designed with no facility for evacuating wheelchairs at all.
A CityRail spokeswoman confirmed last night wheelchair passengers would not be able to access the evacuation ramps and must wait for a stretcher in an emergency on the new public-private partnership-funded trains.
The Paraplegic and Quadriplegic Association of NSW and Spinal Cord Injuries Australia fear the system will place wheelchair passengers at greater risk than able-bodied passengers.
They are worried that disabled travellers would be forgotten in a terrorist incident like the July bombings of the London Underground.
ParaQuad spokeswoman Deborah Schofield said evacuating wheelchair passengers from the side of the train posed a problem inside tunnels. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: disability, economics, health, sheer incompetence, technology
