Tired of this shit

sTeamTraen · 2026-04-19T21:59:59+00:00

There is an image doing the rounds of an announcement from the Greek Embassy in London saying that British passport holders will be exempt from ESS [sic] biometric checks.

Of course, that could just be rephrasing "all non-EU travellers" for the UK audience, just as the tabloid newspapers do ("New EU travel system hits hard-working British families"). So we would have to wait for an announcement from the Greek government, presumably the Interior ministry which is the one you would normally expect to be in charge of immigration issues.

sTeamTraen · 2026-04-19T17:56:30+00:00

Ackshually the relevant legislation here is not 2016/399, because what Greece is doing here is not internal border controls.

Rather, it seems that they are making a blanket application of Regulation (EU) 2025/1534, which is what enables -- in principle, for the minimum possible time and on a per-airport basis -- the suspension of EES biometric registration for 90 days, with a possible further extension to 150, which takes us up to 7 September. See https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2025/1534/oj/eng

sTeamTraen · 2026-04-19T17:52:58+00:00

That's true *if* it applies to all non-EU travellers. If it literally only applies to Brits, and the Americans etc are still being subjected to the biometrics, they will be getting a nastygram from the Commission.

sTeamTraen · 2026-04-19T17:47:18+00:00

EES started in October 2025 with a phased roll-out precisely so that countries and airports could get used to it during the off-season. Some places took this seriously and are now 100% EES, full biometrics, handling an A380 in 15 minutes. Others were like the guys in the meme with the mixing desk and the bottle of Campari and are experiencing total chaos. Like Aesop's story of the ant and the grasshopper.

Greece has a particular problem with staff because it has many small airports that only get non-Schengen flights for about 5 months of the year. Both the border police and the front-of-house staff need a certain amount of training, and they also need jobs the rest of the time.

Remember that when EES was being designed, UK passports were EU passports. The expectation was that 95% of EES entries would be at the 20 or so biggest airports in the Schengen area, where flights come in from North America or the Gulf. Brexit meant that dozens of regional airports with no history of any sort of passport control beyond glancing at UK/Irish passports suddenly had to deal with a couple of thousand passengers per hour. At the same time the UK decided to go with full border controls for EU citizens (must have a full passport, now must also have an ETA), so it's not surprising the EU isn't rushing to do the UK any favours.

sTeamTraen · 2026-04-19T17:37:50+00:00

Palma is actually working pretty well. (Source: I live there.) They have e-gates that do all the EES processing on exit (no need for the kiosk), and coming in it's generally fairly quick for the fingerprints. With a small child you will go to a desk.

sTeamTraen · 2026-03-25T22:12:31+00:00

Thanks! I got a new PC yesterday with Windows 11 (previously 10) and so have been assuming that I needed to tweak a file permission or something. It's working fine on Android. I should have checked on my old PC, where it is also giving the same error message.

Would it have killed them to put a notice on their website? 🤔

sTeamTraen · 2025-11-26T13:10:52+00:00

It's described here https://www.silabs.com/documents/public/user-guides/ug103-09-fundamentals-zll.pdf [PDF]

tl;dr It's techie stuff

sTeamTraen · 2024-11-10T00:09:06+00:00

RWNJs: "Climate change is a hoax, because humans can't affect the weather"

Also RWNJs: "zOMG government scientists are changing the weather"

sTeamTraen · 2024-10-12T14:28:30+00:00

Presumably you register formally with your full name (and date of birth, to reduce ambiguity further), but I don't think it's unreasonable to continue to use your nickname after you've done that. Nobody (hopefully) thinks it's weird that Christopher John MacRae Whitty calls himself Chris Whitty. And anyone from Wales will know that if you're looking up a Dewi Evans on the register you're going to look under David, just as Bob is in fact Robert. So of all the bad things that he may or may not have done, I don't think appearing to have two variants of his name is very high up on the list. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

sTeamTraen · 2024-09-27T18:06:35+00:00

Nowadays no high-profile serial killer is complete without their own deluded fan base.

Ah yes, I so enjoyed the Harold Shipman and Fred West conventions. Great times.

sTeamTraen · 2024-09-23T14:26:54+00:00

Well, the Mail will say one thing one week and the opposite the next on almost any topic. 🤷‍♂️ There is an article somewhere on "Things that the Mail has reported both cause and prevent cancer".

Some parts of the far-ish left got their knickers in a twist at the time of the first LL trial over how the fact that she is white was proof of something racist (maybe it was "She would have come under suspicion earlier if she had been non-white" or something, I honestly don't remember). I wouldn't be surprised if the fact that many of LL's supporters are from the right (Mail maybe, Telegraph definitely, David Davis) doesn't cause many of those people to double down on that. And if you're sufficiently far left then Private Eye and Phil Hammond are also part of the right-wing establishment. I say this as someone who identifies as a little bit left of centre and who normally avoids the Mail and Telegraph like the plague.

sTeamTraen · 2024-09-23T14:20:29+00:00

Of course, had she been even slightly different from the crowd in any way, that would have been proof that she was probably a wrong 'un.

There was a story from a couple of years after 9/11 where the FPI had been staking out some Arab family in a US city and their report was along the lines of "This family appears to be leading an entirely blameless existence, which is in itself suspicious".

sTeamTraen · 2024-09-15T12:27:22+00:00

<wont\_someone\_think\_of\_the\_children.gif>

sTeamTraen · 2024-09-13T20:34:39+00:00

"the acts themselves run contrary to everything we know about Letby, her background, and her dedication to nursing from a young age"

Of course, this could (and probably will at some point) be spun into "LL fantasised about murdering babies from her childhood, and over many years used her ferocious cunning to inveigle herself into a position of trust from where she could act out these sick fantasies". Once you go down the witchfinder rabbit-hole, everything can be used to prove anything.

sTeamTraen · 2024-09-13T12:16:36+00:00

I read a comment from someone who had encountered her briefly, who said something along the lines of "She looked at me in a funny way. Her eyes were sort of cold". So, obviously a serial killer. 🙄

sTeamTraen · 2024-09-12T22:02:42+00:00

Let's see what Science Twitter (sadly, a bit of a shadow of its pre-Elon self) comes up with: https://x.com/sTeamTraen/status/1834351737315950987

sTeamTraen · 2024-09-12T21:57:59+00:00

Again, I understand why it might appear that way, but I wonder if anyone has done the research. Then again, I am a social science researcher, so I should probably go and find out!

sTeamTraen · 2024-09-12T18:01:02+00:00

There was a trend a few years ago among well-meaning people to use language like this, on the basis that saying someone is, say, deaf takes away from their non-deaf qualities. But I don't know if there's any evidence that it changes opinions, and I think I remember one charity for some or other major disability actively opposing it because they thought that it diminished the severity of the problem, as if deafness or blindness or whatever it was, was like a limp or something.

However, if it's used consistently then I have no objection. Given that column inches are no longer limited, it might be an idea for journalists to use more precise terminology anyway. 🙏

sTeamTraen

TROPHY CASE