The Gist: Pres/Ref Vote, Data Air Raid, Cable Fable
Nation, just glad its all over, votes
Its only been a few short weeks of national embaressment, appeals to the lowest impulses in the world, motivational business word-guff, holy eczema cures and explanations of how money you give away can end up back with you again. But today, the bit of the nation that gets up and votes will decide if they want it to go on like this for another seven years, or to return to the relative relief of just having Michael D Higgins be a super good President.
Polls suggest the latter is the favoured choice.
As a bonus vote, government has arranged for a special referendum on whether you want to annoy Senator Ronan Mullen. Always vote Yes when presented with that opportunity.
Flying Blind
British Airways (which is owned by the same company as Aer Lingus) has not had the best of track records minding its customer's data since the GDPR came into effect. First it demanded that customers post all their personal details in public messages "to comply with the GDPR" if they wanted their customer service through Twitter.
Then they announced they'd been hacked and about 380,000 people (by definition, pretty well-off people) now had their credit card details in the hands of the culprits. And this week, they announced that, now they thought about it, perhaps another 180,000 on top of that had also been hit.
The real interest here- for anyone not actually using British Airways to fly about the place- is to see what sort of enforcement or court compensation consequences flow from these mass breaches.
Wired to the Moon
The problem with the National Broadband Plan has always been that it took a plan that was essentially political in nature- ("Screw it, we're going to wire up every home, regardless")- and then tried to apply a profit-driven, market approach. Since wiring up every home is, basically, commercially insane but socially valuable this posed a difficulty. When the ESB went around bringing electricity to the whole of Ireland, they didn't try to find a cheap and profit-generating way to do it. There wasn't one. But they just did it anyway.
Now the effort to apply the logic of tendering to making sure that Luke Skywalker can get wifi on Skellig Michael seems to be tottering. Gov sources are talking about working on a Plan B.
Apparently, six years in, they're thinking of asking the ESB to do it.
Pic Credit: By Jerzy Strzelecki - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15821956
