25 January 2011 (Tuesday) - Breeding, Rating...

I have been accused of being very anti-government in my rantings lately. So to give a rounded view on our leaders, I shall agree with them for a change. Today's radio had a shocking expose on the Government’s schemes to put a cap on family credit. At the moment the more children you have, the more benefits you get. Clearly breeding can become a lucrative profession. The government has decided to put a stop to this: people who choose to breed like rabbits will not be subsidized by the tax payer to do so. And rightly so (!)

This morning’s radio show featured a looney-leftie-feminist type from a body called Family Action who seemed to think that the Government shouldn’t interfere with people’s rights to breed like rabbits. One wonders how such seemingly well-meaning bodies such as Family Action get sidelined by these crackpot ideas.

And talking of crackpot ideas, over the weekend I ordered some insoles for my shoes from eBay. A silly little thing that cost me a couple of quid. Today I got an email from the seller who asked if as well as giving her good feedback, would I also give her five stars on her seller ratings. She tried to claim that if I didn’t then I personally would be responsible for her falling sales and presumable for her having to sell her children for medical experiments to make ends meet. I was left feeling that I wanted to give her a bad rating purely for her cheek in asking for a good rating before she’d actually delivered the goods. So much for the eBay feedback and rating system having any merit.

This episode reminded me of the many failings of the pub reviewing websites which I frequent. Take for example a pub within half an hour’s drive of my house. I’ve never been to the Unicorn Inn in Canterbury. I want to go there, purely because over the last few months this place has remained in the top thirty pubs on the website of Beer in the Evening. This is a pub-reviewing website which boasts having had eight hundred new members in the last month, and which clearly receives hundreds of pub reviews every day. But the system it operates is hopelessly flawed; otherwise how else might the Unicorn Inn in Canterbury get into the top thirty. The place has only been reviewed eight times in the last year, and two of those reviews were rather uncomplimentary.

Having shown the failings of rating service providers via internet websites, it’s strange then that the Government has announced its plans to remove it’s backing to the way hotel stars are issued in favour of having some sort of on-line popularity contest…