The Off Topic Topic

[The Brain]

Just what do you put on your cv in this situation? :HMM:

"Misc."

[Syt]

Heh, just saw that the concentration camp secretary trial is scheduled to take place in Itzehoe.

This image doesn't do it justice:



(The building used to be the post office before the court moved in, the court used to be in a different, smaller building in town.)

This panorama view of the area captures the splendor a lot better.

https://goo.gl/maps/rpAvgY41vmQ2MqVz5

[HVC]

Nut butcher

[Syt]

Nut butcher

[HVC]

Panorama has the title knut böttcher

[Syt]

Panorama has the title knut böttcher

Oh

Knut is a Northern name, Böttcher is the German equivalent to Cooper.

[Threviel]

I've been trying to get a planning permit for a thing. In Sweden every construction above a certain site needs a planning permission to be built, with increasingly complex demands depending on the thing to be built.

There are rules to this and one importan one is that the planning body has to give a response within ten weeks. It's a law and something that is very publicly stated with clear rules.

Before I sent in my papers I had a meeting with a handler in the planning office, so that I would send the correct papers and everything would be done correct from my side.

I sent in my papers in the middle of June, hoping to get a response well before winter. The ten week clock starts ticking. A week later I got a response requesting some further information. I tried to get in touch with the person that sent the request, she had gone on 5 week vacation and I was to send my response in 4 weeks. The request was unclear. I contacted the one I had had the meeting with and she explained some things but she could not, under any circumstances take over the issue.

I sent in my new information, the ten week clock is reset by that.

Four weeks go by, but I do not want to call immediately and make an enemy of the person handling my case. One week goes by and no news so I call. And get hold of the one handling my case, she'll look into it. Five weeks of my by law guaranteed maximum ten have gone by now.

She calls me the day after. Due to lack of time she cannot possibly get the case presented to the politicians actually deciding until September 23rd, well past my ten weeks limit. So she says: "Since I cannot make it in time I'll reset the time to today, that way I'll make it".

And I say, in a nice and friendly manner: "Thank you, most kind". I can do nothing else if I want success in my case.

I loathe the fuckwits working in public office. Loathe.

Two weeks ago she emailed me again. She had gotten all responses she needed from different official bodies, it was now time to send my request out for my neighbours to weigh in. Unfortunately she couldn't possibly make that in time for the September building board meeting, so she would have to postpone until the October meeting. She also sent me all responses from different bodies (local fire department, municipal health authority, transport administration and so on).

They were all dated, the latest one was sent to her the tenth of August, some twenty days before she contacted me to say that cannot possibly have time to prepare my application for the building board meeting in September.

And I say, in a nice and friendly manner: "Thank you, most kind".

That's now two months over my supposedly guaranteed response time.

Also, we own a property bordering on the relevant property, so she sent a letter to us since we are neighbours to ourselves. And the letter she sent was just some pre-prepared form and a copy of two emails I had sent her.

This issue is now concluded. We wanted to build a a camp site for motorhomes on a field a small bit from our home. It was planned as a simple thing, but it needed approval from the town council. We live in a very touristy area, our town (Varberg) is by the west coast and is almost always in the top 5 of tourist towns in Sweden. There's a huge lack of camp sites for camper vans/motor homes and we thought we had something to offer.

Every neighbour was positive and no official body had anything to say on the matter, it was up to the building office. And after this long process, weeks of stuff happening they made a recommendation to the politicians that do the actual deciding.

It's on a field, fields are important and a camp site for motorhomes is not important enough to put a field out of commission for. And that's that.

They could have told me this five minutes in. I withdrew the request.

[Razgovory]

Some dipshit coal-roller ran over half a dozen people in Texas.

Chase Ferrell was about 75 miles into a Saturday morning bike ride when a pickup truck swerved into his lane, closing in on him and other cyclists training for the upcoming Ironman Texas triathlon. Now just feet away, the driver gunned it, spewing them with black exhaust, he said.

Then, according to Ferrell, the motorist drove ahead to the lead group of cyclists. He again accelerated, the cyclist added, to "roll coal" — a practice in which drivers of diesel pickups intentionally engulf pedestrians, cyclists or other motorists in black smoke. This time, the driver got too close. He hit six of the eight riders in the group.

"I heard a lot of crunching. I heard brakes. Tires screeching," Ferrell told KRIV. "I thought someone was dead."

Around 11:30 a.m. Saturday, a 16-year-old driver allegedly hit the six cyclists with a black Ford pickup on a rural four-lane road about two miles west of Waller, Tex. The crash seriously injured three of the riders, who were taken to hospitals, the Waller Police Department wrote Tuesday in a statement; the three others had minor injuries that were treated at the scene.

Ferrell said that, after hitting the cyclists, the driver stopped, got out of his truck and surveyed the wreckage. Ferrell recalled telling the driver he had done "something really freaking stupid."

"You should go to jail," he recalled saying.

The driver didn't. Minutes after the crash, his parents showed up. Then police arrived and, after questioning him, let him go home.

Police not charging the driver with a crime has sparked an uproar among the cycling community in the Houston area and beyond. The Waller County District Attorney's Office promised to thoroughly review the police investigation and urged people to be patient.

Ferrell, however, is finding that difficult. "It's just disheartening and hard to see whenever our friends are being life-flighted [to the hospital] out there, and the [alleged] perpetrator, the kid, gets to be able to go home and sleep in his own bed," he told KTRK. "To have no injuries, to have no consequences. Seemingly, I'm sure he feels really bad, but that's not justice. That's not going to cut it."

The teenager's lawyer, Rick DeToto, described his client as "a young man in high school with college aspirations" and "a very new and inexperienced driver" in a statement to the Houston Chronicle. He said the teenager stopped immediately after hitting the cyclists, tried to help them, called 911 and cooperated with police.

In a different statement to KPRC, DeToto said the fact that police didn't arrest his client the day of the crash means they don't think he did anything illegal. "After their investigation, they decided not to charge my client and did not even issue him a traffic ticket. Clearly, they determined a crime had not occurred."

Waller County District Attorney Elton Mathis told KTRK he has assigned a senior prosecutor to the case who will work with a crash reconstructionist to figure out why the driver hit the cyclists. He plans to have his office present evidence to a grand jury sometime in the fall, with prosecutors possibly seeking an indictment for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

On Wednesday, his office released a statement saying drivers who "roll coal" are, at the very least, committing assault.

"They are causing their vehicle to 'spit' on a living, breathing, human being that is worthy of dignity and not having his or her person violated," the statement from the prosecutor's office said.

Tension between drivers and cyclists is not new in Waller County. Victor Tome killed two riders in 2017 when he intentionally plowed into a small group of them. He was convicted of capital murder and, earlier this year, sentenced to life in prison without parole, something the Waller County district attorney's office pointed to as proof that it takes attacks on cyclists seriously.

Joe Cutrufo, executive director of the advocacy group BikeHouston, called Saturday's crash "egregious" and said the driver should be charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon but isn't confident Waller prosecutors will do so.

"We are afraid that if this driver gets away with it, then other drivers in Waller County, or anywhere really, will be emboldened to attack, harass and threaten cyclists because they know they can get away with it," Cutrufo said.

[PDH]

Road rage against cyclists is becoming more and more common.  We are getting better and better at solving minor issues with major violence.

[Jacob]

But he "has college aspirations"... he can't be that bad, can he?

[DGuller]

But he "has college aspirations"... he can't be that bad, can he?

Depends on what degree he aspires to get.

[Savonarola]

In lighter news:

Shakira says she was attacked by purse-snatching boars

And this is why you shouldn't carry slop in your purse.

[Josquius]

A 16 year old getting involved in that nonsense

[PDH]

Used to be coal rollers in Laramie.  All of the folks who went to the Tech School there it seemed had a penchant for modifying their trucks.  They hadn't started killing cyclists yet, but that was 5 years ago.

[Sheilbh]

The Canary Island has now doubled in size
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/30/canary-islands-lava-peninsula-in-the-atlantic-doubles-in-size