Vocal Voices

For my Orange LiveBox.

Juncker has just said he wants to make it a priority for every town and village in the EU to have free wifi by 2020. In France the usual response to that is to enable the in home routers to allow free guest access. In order to protect my bandwidth, I've disabled that and to make the router more stable I've disabled wifi too. But, in order to comply with this new ruling, Orange will probably make wifi impossible to switch off as well as public sharing impossible to switch off.

Enter the lead box. If you can't see it you can't connect to it. And that will be "up yours" Orange...

I have a couple of dead lead acid batteries, a good plumbing gas torch and the skill to hot weld the plates. In my home the wifi is provided by multiple routers which have nothing to do with Orange and that's the way I intend it to stay.

It all sounds like a sales pitch and a diversionary tactic to me, and totally unnecessary: 'Oh look, we, the EU, will give 500 million people free Wi-fi no matter who they are or where they might be.'

What the EU does not say is who will pay for all this. Will it be the EU? Will it be national governments? If it is either of those the costs will have to be met from somewhere: taxes anyone? So in no way will it be free. Will it be the ISPs forking out? Their shareholders might have something to say about that.

Meanwhile the EU looks to be falling apart. Any word on that little problem Jean-Claude, Donald?

Pretty much. Every time the natives become restless they placate them with something. I recall my son (disgustedly), talking about the Argentinian government of Kristina. He used to say "They'll be hard to beat, every time it looks bad they get the poor together, give them a pancho (hot dog), a bus trip and 100peso$ and their vote is guaranteed".

The EU is the same kind of political animal.

However it is very enlightening to see the words of the Brexit camp reiterated over and over again in the articles following the decision. In the words of the Reuters article on the Bratislava meeting

This is the first meeting of the European heads of government since Britain's decision to leave the EU. Once implemented, the Brexit decision means the group will lose its second largest economy and most powerful military state.

Amazing really, I thought it was going to lose some backwater troublemaker who was going to be insecure as a nation due to it's inability to protect itself. Whereas, in fact, the EU itself is struggling to come to terms with the massive need to upgrade it's own ability to protect itself now that it's most powerful member state has decided to leave.

Funnily enough, the EU seems to forget (or wants to avoid the responsibility of), the fact that it is protected by NATO of which most of them are members. The EU also seems to be under the striking delusion that the EU itself has kept peace in Europe and not NATO, the USSR threat and the creation of the UN to replace the League of Nations.

Funny old world isn't it.

It seems, today, that the only organisation which is fanatically trying to stick to the Cameron Osborne/EU script of Brexit disaster is the Bank of England who, it appears, are still doggedly doing their damndest to actually bring it about by undermining the confidence of foreign investors. I do wonder how many more good results the UK will have to produce before they get behind it? Because if they cut rates to 1% they are going to have to deal with the fallout of rapid inflation, sudden rate rises, massive mortgage defaults and a recession due to the sudden massive rise in the value of the pound.