David Gillon

Bonfire of the Accessibilities

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 15:34:31 GMT

Oh god, I've been poking at Jacob Rees-Mogg's 'dashboard' of Retained EU Legislation which is on some woowoo 'visualization' tool called Tableau Public, or possibly Public Tableau, it can't seem to decide. This is the set of several thousand pieces of EU legislation still in force in the UK that our new Glorious Leaderene* is proposing to consign to a bonfire by the end of 2023 - and if she leaves Rees-Mogg in charge it'll be an auto-da-fe, not a bonfire. Rees-Mogg, often called the Minister for the 17th Century, clearly missed his calling, he'd have been completely at home in the Spanish Inquisition.

So anyway, this 'dashboard' has a search function that only does exact matches and doesn't allow combined search terms. In 2022? I have games I bought in beta that have better search functionality. Which effectively means you can only find which retained EU laws affect disability if you actually know exactly what they're called already, and if you don't know they're out there, you're stuffed. Just searching for 'disability' got me four matches, two about copyright and two about where benefits can be paid. So that's bugger all use if you want to poke it for a list of every retained law related to disability rights and accessibility.

I was doing this poking because I knew from the Civil Aviation Authority's website that EC 1107/2006, the PRM** legislation that covers disabled people's right to fly on the same terms and conditions as non-disabled folk, plus passenger assistance, plus compensation etc is retained legislation and therefore up for replacement/burning at the stake, and wondered if the same was true for the rest of public transport. At least EC 1300/2014 the PRM-TSI legislation that does the same thing as EC 1107/2006 for trains is listed as replaced by the EU Withdrawal Act (but if they replaced the trains legislation, why not the planes?), but mindbogglingly the other set of trains accessibility legislation (EC 1371/2007) wasn't replaced at the same time and is still retained legislation.

On top of the whole set of conceptual idiocy that makes up Brexit, I'm beginning to think the whole thing is an utter shambles at the detail level.

As Rees-Mog was virulently opposed to reasonable adjustments in Parliament during Covid, the idea of our accessibility rights in his hands sends a cold shudder down my spine.

And if that thing is accessible to people with visual impairments I'll eat my wheelchair cushion (lots of 'hover the cursor over the visualization for further information')

* God, I haven't used that one in thirty years

** Passengers with Reduced Mobility

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Internal Passports? How Very Soviet

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 16:55:07 GMT

Unfortunately I'm not making it up. Boris and his chum Gove have decided that the way to ensure they don't have 7000 heavy goods lorries queuing through Kent to get to Dover is to stop them entering Kent unless they have a "Kent Access Permit". To make it worse, the system to issue them, and do all the other new post Brexit customs stuff, won't go into public beta until late November, or possibly December, despite needing to be live on 1st January. This is all part of their strategy for insuring we won't have an internal border through the Irish Sea come Brexit going live. Whoops.

I'm particularly worried that given Gove's involvement, as Education Minister he expressed a wish for all schools to be 'better than average', they'll have forgotten you can't get to Medway (where I live), without going through Kent, and that they won't have scaled Smart Freight, the new export control software suite, for all the traffic trying to get into Kent without actually wanting to go to Europe.

Twitter is finding #KentBorder a source of great hilarity. My personal contribution was to declare that it was time for the Cinque Ports to reassert their traditional leadership and international dominance.

*Headdesk* *Headdesk* *Headdesk* *Headdesk* *Headdesk*

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Linkspam: Farage cowers and the Women of Chaos

Wed, 22 May 2019 20:13:32 GMT

Farage refused to get off his bus in Rochester because of two people prominently standing with milkshakes. Well done Rochester, begins to redeem you for electing Mark Reckless as UKIP MP after he had responded to my experience of disability hate crime with "people are entitled to be angry".

The co-director of MIT's Lorenz Center was preparing for a symposium on Lorenz's discovery of the butterfly effect at MIT in the '60s and noticed something he'd skipped over previously, two women thanked for "numerical calculation" in his seminal papers. Some research turned up that Margaret Hamilton (who went on to be belatedly famous for her work on Apollo and Skylab, and popularised Software Engineering as a term) and Ellen Gille nee Fetter, who ran into the male-imposed computer science glass-ceiling post raising kids, had done basically all of the computational/programming work for Lorentz's work and would be listed as co-authors if the paper was published today.

The Hidden Heroes of Chaos

When Gille's daughter was later interviewed for a place at MIT in the 80s, one of the questions she didn't get, but others did, was "How would you explain chaos to your mother?" {Sigh}

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Fascinating Aïda - So Sorry Scotland

Sun, 09 Oct 2016 18:39:07 GMT

Fascinating Aïda nail Brexit

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Pissed off...

Fri, 29 Jul 2016 18:59:52 GMT

... with a friend of mine.

I posted a link on FB to the Indy's long and depressing article on the scale of post Brexit racism.

His immediate response, 'I voted Leave and I'm not racist and I'm sure the majority of leave voters weren't racist.' Followed by a po-faced line about how free movement of labour isn't working.

I never mentioned Leavers, or free movement, and neither did the article.

And what makes his post doubly hypocritical is half his friends work in the EU.

I reminded him that the kind of people who launch racist attacks are precisely the same the same kind who attack people like me, or him, for being disabled in public.

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It occurs to me...

Sun, 26 Jun 2016 15:40:25 GMT

... this may be my fault.*

One of the novel concepts I've been intermittently noodling about involves a UK separated from Europe and willingly dominated by an ultra-right wing, intolerant America.**

The last time this happened we got Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Syria. "The Arc of Fire, nation set against nation from the foothills of the Himalayas to the shores of the Mediterranean." Me, circa 1990.

Dear brain 1) stop it, 2) restore universe to save point 22-Jun-2016

* Solipsist much.

** Okay, Orwell got there first.

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Petition demanding Brexit supermajority already well past 2m signatures

Sat, 25 Jun 2016 19:53:25 GMT

A petition demanding a 60% supermajority* on a Brexit vote with a turnout of under 75% is already at 2.29m** signatures. I've signed, and I hope Parliament has the guts to grab it and run with it, but it will be horrendously divisive if they do.

*How could Cameron be so mind-numbingly stupid!

** And in the time it took me to write this it jumped to 2.31m

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