WhiteRabbit's Braindump

Freshmeat accepted my submission for Goat. There is now an entry for it. Soon I'll be rich and famous, and then I'll proceed to take over the world.

I'm now happy my GOAT package is close to being useful. So here's the first release for it, which I expect will be followed by some more in 6 months after we've found 200 bugs in it.

Funny that, the latest World Trade Organisation summit ends up in a failure, with 'rich' countries apparently bringing an end to the whole negotiation on opening the food markets. The idea was to ask developed countries to reduce (or, better, stop) subsidising of their farming industry to give developing countries a chance to sell to those markets fairly.

Why is it funny? It's funny because what the WTO wanted is basically to apply the rules of free market to farming, and it's the United States that refused to stop subsidising their farming. So the message is: we'll support free market when it's good for us, but we'll be damned if we let others compete in our country.

To be fair, I personally think opening farming markets is a bad idea. There are a few things in which I think the state needs to intrude, namely defense, education, healthcare and... food supply. Keeping your population fed does sound like something that the government must do, lest you see your populace beheading people asking for bread when you have nothing but brioche to give them.

Toulouse, being a growing city, has the usual growing city pains. Probably the most usual one is traffic. Toulouse has a large by-pass, that we affectionatly call the Rocade. That's what it was called 20 years ago when it was but a short part of a highway protuding a couple of miles past the toll.

With summer coming up, the city council has decided to lower the speed limit on the Rocade from 110km/h to 90km/h. As with any government decision, this one was, of course, heavily criticised, although no-one seems to care enough to strike about it. Of course, no-one strikes during summer, striking during the holiday period would go against union regulation, thus you'd have to strike against the strike, which would result in endless confusion.

Now, the arguments I've heard against that limit are actually quite funny:

Because of the slower limit, people don't respect the safety distances anymore.

Well, that's true, but it's sort of an ostrich argument (one that doesn't want to look at the actual truth): people didn't respect the safety distances when driving at a 110 either. Generaly speaking, the distance between vehicles averages 5m, irrespective from the speed.

It's harder to merge into that dense traffic

Harder than merging into a faster traffic?

Now trucks can do the speed limit, so you see them overtaking other trucks and blocking all the lanes

Right, so they prevent you from speeding?

90 is sooo sloooooow I am bored

I actually agree with that one. Then again, 130 on highways feels a little slow, and I remember reading that argument when they changed the limits from 180 to 130. Yet I don't think anyone still seriously suggests we should push the limit up to 180 (thus defying logic: Germany has no limit at all on a portion of their highway system, yet a lower death toll on the roads).

Or should that be: France, Home for Kafka's trial? I don't know.

Either way, Narelle's "carte de sejour" is coming close to expiry (about 6 months after she got it), so we need to get it renewed. Because we have moved to Toulouse, we can no longer use our local townhall in St-Orens, which is a shame because the ladies there are nice and it's really quite quiet. I mean to say, how many Australians in need of carte de sejour can you find in St-Orens? 2, that's how many. Unfortunately, when you are in Toulouse, you must deal face-to-face with the mighty Prefecture.

The Prefecture deals with a fairly large number of administrative tasks. They deliver driving licenses, vehicle registrations, carte de sejours, visas, licenses to make cassoulet, and so on. The result is a large building with many waiting rooms, queues, and people running around. It's not quite as bad as the offices in Terry Gilliam's "Brasil," but it's close.

So, where shall we queue up to get a carte de sejour, we ask the policeman. It's that queue over there, he points at a queue that's 20m out of the building. Ah. It's actually reaching the corner. Ah. The queue goes on for another 100m in the next street. Holy fucking crap. The policeman then confirms it's like that every day, and the only way to get in really is to come and queue up an hour before the opening time.

Isn't France a great country? People are so eager to come here that they're ready to queue in the street, under the rain or in a 30-degree heat (that's 82 for you Americans). I remember, a long time ago, some politician saying how he'd seen a British woman be called in first in a French consulate, before a line of Africans, and how that was a scandal. Stupidity, that is: every shopkeeper knows that a sure way to reduce a long queue is to get the quick and easy ones out first. That's also how Unix works: short jobs have higher priority so you can get them out of the way quickly. That's also how supermakets work: shoppers with few items have a line dedicated to them. It's the same here: the British woman is a no-case, she has the right to remain in France, and her application will be dealt with in about 6 minutes, so there is no point in making her wait all morning. Each Africans' application will take an hour. If you don't like it, you need to work on reducing the processing time for the Africans' application.

This is more or less the case here: Narelle already has a card, is still married to me. Her case is a trivial one. Yet it looks like queuing for 6 hours is the only cure. Me thinketh we'll be moving to St-Orens right tonight.

To finish my rant, I'll say that I haven't seen queues like that for immigration since we were passing the lines of Indonesians who were queuing to get legalised, in Kuala Lumpur, in 2003. That's the level of our administration: somewhere around Malaysia's, on a bad day. But here, it's every day like that. And no-one seems to want to change anything.

Now, it wouldn't be that hard to get closer to the level of developed countries:

• Accept mail applications, at least for straightforward applications
• Put a list of required papers on the Web site (as it is, our list is guesswork: we'd have to queue up to find out what papers to bring, then queue up again to bring them)
• Get more people in? (as in: accept more immigrants, by simplifying the process, AND get more workers to process the applications)
• Get an estimate of how many people apply, and build the processing chain in function of that.

There are probably other things that could be done as well. As it is, the system is, to put it mildly, a load of crap. I now know I'll never again want to move to a big city where I'd have to deal with the prefecture.