Bullying is not

acceptable at any time and it does not matter whether the person is a child or an adult.

I was sent an email yesterday. "Is this okay?" I was asked. The person sending it was forwarding yet another email, one they had received.

That email contained details of an "annual general meeting". It is for a group of "units" (condominiums to Americans). Under the law people are required to attend it, send a proxy or somehow participate. It is not something which, like many other "AGMs" can be ignored.

Some groups of units have an external management company handling many matters. Meetings are generally held at those headquarters and at their convenience. Small groups do not always have any external management. They can manage their own affairs provided the relevant legislation is being abided by.  Meetings for such groups, perhaps a group of three to around seven units will usually be held in the unit belonging to one of the residents.

And that is where the problems for this group of units has suddenly become even more serious. It is a small group. It has been well maintained and there should not be any problems but there are. One owner is not an occupier. The unit is rented and the owner clearly sees it as an investment. That is fair enough but the owner is not making life easy for the other three owners. 

They have taken on the role of "presiding officer/secretary" for the group. It is not a popular job with most people but they were keen to take it. An attempt to have a management company handle the affairs of the four owners failed because this person made so many demands of the company they refused to continue working with them.

What they do not seem to want to accept is that it is does not give them the right to do as they wish or bully others into doing their bidding. They have tried to demand access to the unit belonging to another owner on the grounds they are "permitted" to check on what is there and the condition it is in. There is no such right under the law. It has to be by invitation or an actual emergency. They have objected to a legal, council approved addition which was there before they bought their unit. They have objected to a legal fence between two of the units even though the fence is not on common property. It is not even visible from the unit they own or any neighbouring property. 

They have clearly decided to take matters further. The email informed the other three residents of when the AGM would be held. It would not be held at the units. It is proposed to hold it in a board room belonging to a legal firm which specialises in issues around groups of units. The email mentions the cost charged per hour.  Yes, it is a steep cost. All this has been done without consulting all the other owners. 

A query has been made. Yes, the law firm will have someone present as "an observer". The observer only has the right to speak if the presiding officer allows this to happen. The presiding officer also has the power to prevent other observers attending the meeting. They cannot prevent a proxy from attending but using a proxy raises other issues. 

The email also states "offensive, disruptive and disrespectful behaviour will not be tolerated". I doubt that came from any lawyer but it is there and the intention is clear. 

There is more of course. The relatively new and very quiet owner of one unit is feeling understandably frightened, especially as her command of English (while generally excellent for everyday purposes) does not extend to a quick understanding of legal terms and applications. 

I do not have to deal with this situation and I am for that I am thankful. My response to the content of the email forwarded to me however was, "No, this is not okay. It is likely it is intended to intimidate."

"Was he old?"

or perhaps "Do you know how old he was?" or "Was he too old?"

There were some comments this morning about one of the American Senators. He has died very suddenly and he was "only 71".

Seventy-one is not "old" now. The expectation of "three score years and ten" has increased - at least in the minds of most people. We no longer wonder so much at those who live to a hundred or more. 

Not everyone does of course. I knew someone two years younger than I am. They died recently and a death like that does make me "stop and think". 

But there is also the other age related issue. When do you become "too old" to do something. There is legislation which is supposed to prevent age related discrimination but there are also other regulations which require "retirement" at certain ages. There has been some recognition that it might be wise not to permit people continuing to work beyond a certain age. It can give younger people a chance to take on those roles as well as ensuring people do not continue to do work they are no longer fit to do. 

I know one organisation where people on "the council" are required to retire at seventy-five. Bringing younger people is essential to the smooth running of the organisation and a major state event.  What they need is the "overlap" to allow information to be handed on. 

One of the local retired priests spends a greater part of the week sitting in a small coffee area in the shopping centre. He will drink coffee and read the paper. He is also available not as "the priest" now but simply as someone with whom to talk. The talk might be about anything. It could be the weather, sport, something happening in the community or, just occasionally, it might be a problem. That does not happen often and he is very careful not to interfere in anyway but he is there. The owners of the coffee area welcome him. He brings in business and they know he is still performing a welcome service to the community. 

I know of someone else who volunteers at a charity. She can no longer do the "running around" but she can sit at the cash register and deal with the customers. Some of the customers can be "difficult" in that particular location. More than once she has rung me to say someone has "forgotten their glasses" and could I "pop in and read some forms" to them. At eighty-nine she is still able but she has made a firm decision to "retire" on her ninetieth birthday. "I need a bit of a rest dear. The garden needs attention." I would very much like to be that able at that age.

There are rules about judges retiring here. They need to go at seventy but they can be called back for "inquiries". I once had to appear in front of one. He was in his later seventies by then but still sharp. It was one of those occasions when I was very glad I had done my homework. His predecessor was another one who did not simply give up working. He spent many hours helping young law students through the intricacies of constitutional law.

And there was the American senator who died so suddenly. No cause of death had been given at the time I started to write this but of course a "heart attack" comes to mind. I know very little of the man's politics but I wonder about his personal life. If he could suddenly return would he wonder if he should retire? Was there anything he wanted to do when he finally "retired" or was he simply someone who had no reason to retire?

I am still doing some work but I no longer work the very long hours I was once expected to work. I have refused. It has not always been easy. I can still put in more time than I would like but I try not to do it because, selfishly, there are things I want to do as well. I hope those things might give some others pleasure but they are not vital. Is this the way it should be or should we expect to go on working while we can? 

Oh the outrage

because a Senator "claimed an elderly person had died as a result of the recent telecommunications outage". There are demands for her resignation. The Senator apparently told a reporter to leave her property. 

It is a little more complicated than that of course. The Senator apparently "tweeted" something that was an error of judgment. It would have been better left unsaid but it was said. The Senator was "acting on information given her at the time" and she has apologised for that and for any distress caused to the family.  

Apparently that is not enough for her political opponents or the media. They want her resignation. Why? I would not have thought it was a hanging offence.

The "boss" of the telecommunications company is being faced with similar demands to be "held to account". She just happened to be in Europe on a long planned and legitimate break but somehow she is responsible for something going wrong and it not being fixed immediately. That she is not a technician and has not set the system up is beside the point according to the government and the media. The system has to work flawlessly. The country depends on it.

Any Downunderites old enough to read this will also remember a previous Prime Minister being out of the country on holiday when a number of serious fires broke out. Now the fires were not started by him. It is the responsibility of the state's to fight fires. There was absolutely nothing he could do. Unlike another former Prime Minister he was not a volunteer fire fighter. He was much more likely to get in the way and take away time from those who were organising the ground operations. None of that mattered to the then Opposition or the media. He was excoriated by the Opposition in the media and snide comments were made about his fire-fighting predecessor as well. It was as if all the volunteer hours of the latter counted for nothing. He was not there for "just a couple of hours" as the media tried to suggest.

All this is interesting because in the past week or so our present Prime Minister has made more than one very serious error of judgment. Yes, he was criticised. There were some suggestions he should resign but the "outrage" has simply not been there. 

I was told, "Oh it's because they (the media) don't want to upset the visit from the Indian Prime Minister." Really? Is that all there was to it? 

I suppose it has nothing at all to do with the size of the Indian community in a state which has an election coming up, an election  both the state and federal government are concerned about. They may not lose the election but they are still worried about the potential size of the drop in support. 

The Senator at the beginning of this made an error of judgment. We all do that. I am guilty of many. Hers was not a hanging offence. She does not need to resign. The same goes for the head of the telecommunications company. She cannot be held responsible for a technical problem outside her area of expertise. It is like asking the administrator of a hospital to be responsible for a failure of a well   qualified surgeon when something goes wrong. The Prime Minister is however responsible for the two deliberate and inappropriate choices he has made recently. They could and should have been avoided - but where is the "outrage"?

  

Getting vaccinated or avoiding it?

There was an article in our state newspaper this week about the way in which some parents are deliberately failing to vaccinate their children. They are also finding ways around the requirement for children to be vaccinated before they go to day care, pre-school, school and more. Some of them are boasting about their refusal to vaccinate their children and informing others of how they get around the rules.

The damage done by Andrew Wakefield and the false claim that "autism" was caused by the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine is ongoing. There are still people who believe the completely discredited claim. It has apparently gone even further than that because another short article in the same newspaper was attempting to debunk the claim a common painkiller, Panadol, also caused similar harm.

The MMR vaccine was not available when I was child. We had to go through measles, mumps and "German measles" (rubella). Children died of measles. I went to school with someone whose sibling died. He may have been health compromised as well but had he not caught measles he may still be alive today. 

Brother Cat and I are too old to have had the MMR vaccine. Middle Cat had it rather late. Only the Black Cat had it at the time it became available. Brother Cat and I also went through the measles, the mumps, rubella and the usual influenza.  

I am acutely aware of the vaccine issue because my mother did not believe in vaccinations. This was part of her "Christian Science" upbringing. We had vaccinations that became available and as recommended entirely because the Senior Cat or my grandmother took us and my godmother (a triple-certificated nursing sister) informed them of when it should be done.  When we were ill it was my paternal grandmother who nursed us.  I suppose we were fortunate in that we did not become so seriously ill we needed to be in hospital with any of those things. It did not mean we would not have welcomed "Mum" being available when we felt so miserable.

I know Mum also claimed that her cousin was intellectually disabled because his parents had him vaccinated. This was not true but it was used as a more acceptable excuse than the reality. She had no contact with him. It is possible she genuinely believed he had died although he was much younger and outlived her by many years. Later  I came across another family who told others the same thing. Everyone said how dreadful it was that vaccination caused him to be intellectually disabled and non-speaking. In reality, like my mother's cousin, he had not been vaccinated until after his disabilities were evident. 

I have had various vaccinations since then. I could not have visited the Senior Cat without them. The same still applies to my occasional visits into aged care now.  I see far too many very elderly people (90 years plus) in the local shopping centre or the library or just around and about to risk passing something on. Our GP insists on Middle Cat and I being up to date because she knows we see so many older people.  

And it seems to me that it is the same at the other end of life. Very young children do not have the same immunity. Middle Cat still has not seen her youngest nephew-by-marriage for that reason. His mother, rightly or wrongly, is not having visitors until he has at least some level of immunity.

So why would you refuse to allow your child to be vaccinated? Are vaccines really that harmful? Sri Lanka is going through a measles outbreak right now. It is a disease which, like polio, could be wiped out. Do we really want children to spend seventy-three years of their lives in an "iron lung" because they have not been vaccinated? I think the recently deceased woman who endured that would say "Get vaccinated."  

Artificial imagination is

not a "thing". It does not exist. It cannot exist.

There has been more than one post about a magazine changing their publication policy. In order to save money they will no longer pay authors for short stories. Instead they will use "artificial intelligence" to write the stories and readers will be told they come from "the fiction team". 

Yes, it is possible to ask "AI" to write something but what will it produce? There is an enormous amount of material out there AI can draw on. Does this mean AI can produce something genuinely creative? Will it be the sort of writing people will want to read?

As mere kittens my brother I went through quite a lot of Enid Blyton and Biggles and other "series". We mostly borrowed them from friends because our parents were not keen on them. We read them because we read anything we could get. Did we enjoy them? Yes, of course - in an surfeit of sugar type of way. We grew into more serious writing very quickly. The Senior Cat made sure we could borrow from the Children's Library and then the children's section of the Country Lending Service. I will be forever grateful that he knew how important reading was and how much it meant to us.

I looked at a couple of Enid Blyton books recently. I was waiting for a friend whose daughter is young enough to be "going through that phase". Both the books I looked at did not appeal at all. The characters were flat. The action non-existent or ridiculous.  They might well have appealed to me as a child who was desperate to read but they no longer interested me. The same is probably true of many adults now. 

I suspect the stories produced by AI will be much the same as those written by Enid Blyton.  They will be written to a formula. They will be predictable. There will be variations on the "beautiful" and the "handsome" but they will still end "happily ever after".  

This is not good writing. It is not writing at all. It will not flow and take the reader along with it. I do not see how AI can ever achieve those little things which allow us to see the world in new ways.  All AI is really doing is drawing on what is already there. It cannot imagine. It may seem as if it can but it cannot. 

I know I am not explaining this well but I cannot help hoping AI cannot "imagine" my cathedral cats. If AI can do that then there is nothing left for us to create...and I think we were born with the capacity to create. 

There was an "outage" yesterday

and it seems there was chaos with it. A major communications network was "down" and it seems we could not cope. 

The transport system was badly affected. Some train services were not able to run. Buses had problems too. Traffic lights were "out" everywhere. (At least one lot was flashing red though so I imagine patience was what was really needed in many places.)

People could not make or receive calls, not even 000 was working. They apparently missed about three hundred and thirty calls. Yes, I do consider the latter to be serious. It is serious, very serious. At the same time I suspect many other phone calls could wait. This is the school holiday period so traffic was lighter than usual and not so many people were dropping their children off.

It was not possible to look at the internet on your phone on the way to work. No, it was not the internet that was down. It was the phone network. That is a problem. What on earth do you do? Sit on the bus and stare at the scenery? Read an actual book? Talk to your neighbour? I suspect most people just stared impatiently ahead of them. 

The supermarkets and other shops had problems because people could not pay for goods. Most people do not seem to have any cash. All sorts of other transactions were also halted. People could not phone an order to a business.

Yes, there were major problems and I do not want suggest they were not serious. They were serious. It was alarming to realise just how vulnerable we are when a major system fails. This is why the "renewable energy" ideal is not the answer to everything. When did you physically last check on someone during an outage?

For those of you in Upover, here is Spooner's cartoon showing our "renewable energy Minister" trying to dial the emergency number in Downunder. 

 

 

"Highly inappropriate"

does not even begin to describe the Prime Minister's words on that "podcast". He should not even have appeared on the podcast. It is not an appropriate forum for anyone who wishes to be taken seriously. 

I do not pretend to understand the podcast idea very well. I do not  "have the app on my phone" or "follow" any. Perhaps I could, perhaps I even should - but I don't. 

I did not even need to do it to learn about "what the Prime Minister said". It has been reported on television, on radio and in the press. I saw the incident on the news service I (rather reluctantly) watch. Friends in other countries, and not just English speaking countries, have inquired about it. 

Politicians know how to avoid answering questions they do not wish to answer. Journalists know how to ask those questions in an effort to make them squirm even when they know the question will not be answered. 

So, why did the Prime Minister answer the very inappropriate question in an even more inappropriate way? If he had simply avoided the question most people would never have known he was even appearing on that podcast. Was that why he did it? Did he want to be seen as a "good mate who just happens to like a very popular singer"?

Our Prime Minister keeps reminding us he "grew up in public housing" and did it with his "single" mother. That story is just a little more complicated than he makes it out to be. Most children in council housing whose mothers are on a "disability support pension" do not attend expensive fee paying schools. They do not go on to university without excellent scholarships and outstanding results. There is no evidence of these things here. He is unusual in what he has managed to keep quiet about. His emphasis on the council house and the single mother is what he needs people to concentrate on.

The remarks on the podcast have been described as "lewd", "crude", "disrespectful", "misogynistic", "vile", "embarrassing", "smutty" and "disrespectful" as well as "inappropriate".  They were all those things and more - and his "apology" has not gone down well. 

Our state newspaper apparently emailed every member of his party who has a seat in the Lower House for comment. Only one of them has apparently replied - and that was with what is described as a "cryptic, thumbs up emoji". Of course they have not replied. Some of them might be feeling uncomfortable, even very uncomfortable, but they are not going to criticise the boss. That they have demanded the resignation of members from other parties for far less is of course irrelevant. They believe "the other side" would do the same given the chance. There would be demands for a resignation or, at very least, removal to the back bench. 

In this instance I am not too sure about that. My radical left wing neighbour has just informed me he is "disgusted" but "he's a great man really". Really?