I have spent some time drafting notes to your customer service over the last day and to be honest, the response I have gotten suggests they don’t actually read the messages they get properly.

I don’t own a Kindle, but I do have Kindle software running on an iPad, I access Kindle via webapp from time to time and I have Kindle software running on my laptop. I have spent more money on books via the Kindle store on amazon.com in the last 6 months than I have on music via iTunes. This is saying quite a lot.

I live in the Republic of Ireland. This means you compel me to use the US Kindle store to buy Kindle ebooks. As far as English language publications go, this is not a huge big deal to me although in certain respects, I might prefer having access to amazon.co.uk as they tend to have more culturally useful special offers than amazon.com does. Additionally, I have been a book buyer from amazon.co.uk for years. So it’s not great to be forced to use the American store for ebooks.

However, I have a greater problem than that. I read French and German and would like to be able to get Kindle ebooks in these languages onto my Kindle software. The range of said books on the amazon.com Kindle store is not great to be honest, but that’s fine, because you know have amazon.de Kindle stores and especially, amazon.fr Kindle stores. So yesterday I contacted your customer support to enquire whether I could also use my Kindle software via either or both of these stores.

The response they came back with was that it was only possible to connect a Kindle to one store at a time.

They then helpfully gave me instructions on how to switch from amazon.com to amazon.co.uk Kindle store if I lived in the United Kingdom.

I say helpfully but of course, I don’t mean that. I had made it very clear in the original message that I lived in the Republic of Ireland.

So I sent them another message and asked if it were possible, as a resident of the Republic of Ireland to sign up with the amazon.fr Kindle store (bearing in mind that I could only connect to one store at a time, and identifying my greater need).

They wrote back and said if I were a resident of France, Belgium, Luxembourg or Switzerland I could sign up to amazon.fr and the prices were in euro so I wouldn’t need to even have currency conversions.

I quote:

Existing Amazon.com customers with France, Belgium, Switzerland or Luxembourg as their country of residence have the option to switch to the Amazon.fr Kindle Store for future purchases. If you’re eligible, you’ll receive a letter sent directly to your Kindle with details on how to make the switch.

All Kindle content in the Amazon.fr Kindle Store is priced in Euros (EUR) so there are no conversion charges on your credit card.

This is useful information. It makes it clear that as I live in Ireland, I can’t sign up to amazon.fr.

Additionally, of the four countries I could live in and connect to amazon.fr, one of those countries is not in the European Union, and it does not use the Euro as a currency so the blanket statement about euro prices not causing conversion charges is inaccurate for your customers who live in Switzerland.

However, this problem would go away if the full range of Kindle ebooks available through amazon.fr and amazon.de was available via the amazon.com store. Given that some of the books I already was looking for on amazon.fr yesterday are not, I know the full range of French language Kindle ebooks is not available through amazon.com.

I live in the European Union. I cannot understand why a country not in the European Union has access to a book market in the European Union that I am not able to access.

I think however made the decision of tying Kindles to a specific Kindle store rather than a specific amazon account made a serious error.

I’d be greatful if you either made the full range of Kindle ebooks available via the different Kindle stores available to ALL kindle stores, or, made it possible to buy books from the different kindle stores based on your amazon account details rather than a specific store or made it possible for people outside France, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Belgium to get an amazon.fr account on their Kindles because as far as I can see, I’d get ALL the English language books via amazon.fr when I can’t get all the French language books I want via amazon.com.

Your in some frustration,

Treasa Lynch, Kindle customer.

I’m sick of bad news. I realise things are far from perfect, and that I am going to have to pay for fixing the economic things that are perfect but in the name of all that’s holy, you need to give me something to continue living for.

There’s a scene in the second Lord of the Rings movie where they’re lining up for another battle with the Orcs, and a youngster asks Aragorn if there’s any hope they’ll hold out against the Orcs. “There is always Hope”, is Aragorn’s response. Enda Kenny is no Aragorn, and frankly, he’s not instilling much hope in me.

This is utterly disheartening. I have a local FG and a local Labour TD. Neither of them give me any hope for the future. If I have any hope at all, I draw it from some of the people around me; and interestingly enough, mainly the older people. People like my parents for whom the Emergency and the rations, and the 1950s are memories, not chapters in a history book. They have a different view on how bad things are versus how bad they could be. It’s rather educational.

I’m particularly irate and stressed lately because I am surrounded by a lot of deeply cynical and negative people. I wish, for example, that people demonstrated some thoughtfulness towards others. That they did not take pleasure in other people’s disappointments because it suits them to do so. That they started being positive about their lives rather than being negative about other people’s lives. That they stopped feeling they are qualified to decide who has the right to aspire to what.

I want to live in a country where there isn’t this feeling that people are lesser beings for being less economically successful. Where people don’t feel the need to decide what other people’s priorities should be. Where working people are supported in being working people. Where people who want houses to live in are not screwed over by people who have more houses to live in than they need. Where everyone is equal before the law.

I want to live in a country where mostly, it’s not scary to walk the streets. Where people don’t need drugs to give them some illusion of pleasure against the reality of pain. Where I can count on my health service enough not to have to pay for additional private health insurance. And I spend quite a bit of my time trying to work out how to create that reality around myself.

But I can’t do it on my own and when I see my local representatives standing up and taking credit purely for pretending that they are creating jobs, for adding more flatrated transaction taxes, confiscating pension funding and not showing me the future they are building with all this, why should I buy into it? This is not visionary. It’s reactionary, it’s stupid and it’s blind. You can’t create a load of jobs by creating government paid internships. Where is the innovation? Where is the can do attitude here.

I moved back to Ireland in 1999. At that stage, it was a country with a future. Right now, it’s a country with a past.

Right now, I’m learning to make my own bread. Our politicians don’t see the practical or the metaphorical value of this.

I really don’t now how to unblind them.

The overwhelming majority of them completely failed to foresee the economic disaster which befell the country. Their absolute inability to read their own crystal ball ill behoves them to be wheeled out to voice any opinion on what to do next because if they knew what they were doing and had any balls, the vast majority of them would not have been talking about soft landings and how there was no bubble. When push came to shove, only Morgan Kelly managed to forecast the likely property value falls and even now I suspect he’s not close to fully right, and only David McWilliams who in my opinion is not an economists but a commentator, managed to voice the opinion that putting so much of our economic eggs in one basket was maybe not a good idea.

The simple fact is this. If people have to borrow more and more and more money to be able to afford less and less and less house, there is something wrong. You do not need a PhD in any university in the world to work this out. But if you have people with said PhDs and calling themselves economists swearing it’ll all be okay and no one is going to get burned, it’s hard to blame normal people who want houses to live in the question how qualified they are compared to the economists who are supposed to know more about this.

So I’d have to say most of the economists who get any media time in this country are not fit for purpose. Unfortunately, now that the disaster – which was foreseeable from 2001 and was screamingly obvious from 2003 – has befallen the country, they are getting even more media time to review newspapers, comment on the radio, and get quoted in internet fora all over the shop. As a result, the quality of discourse has fallen again.

When I eventually got there, it had already become the University of Westminster and I fought my way through the course. I was told not to work part time because it was so intensive. I ignored that because otherwise I couldn’t afford to do the course. I was sick the day of the final exams. One of the examiners afterwards told me they thought I was going to faint. But I passed.

I found out – via the wonder of LinkedIn – that the course has been cancelled. Changes to funding for third level education in the UK and the fact that the course is not profitable have killed it. I have some regrets about this. It’s 10 years or more since I did anything related to interpreting – but deep within me there’s this vague disappointment that it’s gone. I worked very hard for that diploma and I do honestly believe that improving communications between cultures is important.

that being said…I don’t now work as an interpreter.

He has, however, been a TD for well over 30 years at this stage. His seat in Mayo may well be rock solid safe. While I could – with some reservations – consider some merit in holding a position like this open for one term as a politician, I find it difficult that a job would be held open for what must be at least 6 terms at this stage. So that element of things stinks to the highest heaven as far as I’m concerned.

Also stinking – and it must be a real knife in the stomach to all the teachers now who find themselves paying pension contributions to “pay their fair share” and the fact that we have a lot of temporary teachers because permanent jobs don’t free up very often, and many of our teachers, particularly our young teachers, have a very, very uncertain future in the profession – is the fact that he still gets a pension on the basis of those four years.

He is – according to the Journal – entitled to a lump sum of 100,000E and an annual pension of 30KE. Here’s the link in which it is announced he will defer the pension until he quits politics.

30KE is more than the minimum wage at present – this by way of information. Enda has not worked as a teacher since the mid 1970s. He will get a TD’s pension and probably a Ministerial pension and if things go according to FG’s plans, he will at some stage pick up a Taoiseach pension as well.

FG are pushing an agenda of political reform including abolition of the Seanad which I do not agree with in principle although I strongly believe the way that the Seanad gets elected needs monumental reform so that no failed candidate for Dail such as Dan Boyle or Ivor Callely gets a seat in the second chamber, unelected having failed to win election. However, if we want real engagement with the public, and some alleviation of general cynicism about politicians amongst the voters, the whole question of privilege needs to be looked at. Because of Enda Kenny’s saga involving his role as teacher, and his continued access to a pension for  a job he has not done in 30 years, I find it hard to believe that FG are serious about political reform.

In my view, if you are a career politician – and Enda Kenny really should not claim to be anything else – you should be resigning your day job. The fact is, were Enda Kenny working in the private sector, he would have had to do so.

I gather – again I am far to young to remember and I’m not in the mood for reading his biography – that Enda was also a school principal when he quit teaching to be a politician. At the age of 25. And I also gather – that Enda’s daddy was a TD too.

I realise that this is 2011 and things are different, and times change. But they clearly have a lot more changing to do before there is any element of fairness. This story is not fair. It is far from fair. Enda may well be able to find some way of saying that it’s not illegal, and that according to prevailing legislation it was his entitlement. I don’t know. All he’s said is he’ll not bother collecting until he quits politics and that doesn’t really fix things.

Just because something is not illegal or is part of some entitlement does not make that something morally fair. For years, it was not illegal for men and women to be paid different money for the same work. No one would argue that this was morally acceptable now however hard they tried in the 1970s.

If FG really and truly want to put political reform at the heart of people who vote, then they need to reform the system so that people like Enda Kenny do not get to hold on to their posts and pension rights in this way while drawing a TD’s salary. They either do the TD or they do the other job. They do not exploit the system in this way. How can you take Enda Kenny seriously as a political reformer when he has this in the background? How can anyone in Fine Gael stand over this?

My local TD is Richard Bruton. I haven’t yet met a canvassing team from his party. I am deeply sorry about this.

I’ve one primary question for anyone from Labour, Fianna Fail or Fine Gael who comes knocking on my door and it is this:

Is there any chance at all you would consider going into government with Sinn Féin following this election?

I just happen to think Sinn Féin’s economic policies are lunacy; I despise Gerry Adams’ walking out on his loyal electorate in West Belfast and getting himself parachuted into Louth and that is before you start looking at, you know, the history stuff which they keep reminding us is History.

If Sinn Féin come looking for my vote I will not engage with them. I do not want to see them in any position of power at all.

If the Green Party come looking for my vote I will ask why they think that they achieved anything major of note in government. I despite John Gormley’s position on the incinerator in Ringsend; I have abhorred their changes to motor taxation and I am absolutely appalled at just how badly their ministers have done despite having two ministries where they could have made a real difference to the future of this country. Also, I find that Dan Boyle is somewhat detached from reality if his twitter feed is anything to judge by.

I am very much afraid that when the dust settles, however, that despite any assertion to the contrary, political expediency may see some negotiating with Sinn Féin. That alone would cause me to consider emigrating again.

The Green Party have pulled out of government. Am I sorry? No. I don’t think they should ever have been in government; it was weasle words and activities got them there, plus Trevor Sargeant’s resignation. So that John Gormley could lead the Green Party into coalition with Fianna Fail when Trev said he wouldn’t.

That is the basis on which our current government was built One of dishonesty. A lot of people I know who voted Green at the time were irate. I didn’t vote Green Party at the time because their health policies were insane.

Yesterday, Brian Cowen resigned as leader of Fianna Fail and called a general election for 11 March. There are – the last time I checked – 4 possible candidates for leader of Fianna Fail.

In the meantime, this country has taken on monumental debt on its shoulders which has to be paid by Mr and Mrs Ordinary so that the banks in Europe who clearly didn’t do anywhere near adequate due diligence either can be protected.

I’m a voter. I have spent the last week slowly watching the political snake in this country try to eat itself. I’m also a tax payer. This is not what I pay my taxes to watch.

All I can hope for now is an election so that this festival of incompetence, sanctimoniousness and sheer stupidity can be bypassed as quickly as possible.

so it’s all over and you’ve prevailed. I’m interested in this, however, which thejournal.ie has livetweeted from your “I’m a terrific victor” confidence vote winning speech:

Position of our country would be even more perilous if we hadn’t taken the economic decisions we needed to

I disagree, Brian, and vehemently so. You and your party have held the lion’s share of power in this country since I returned to live here in 1999. The position of our country would be far less perilous if, instead of inflating the property bubble, you had sought to keep a lid on it. There were easy-ish ways to do this. Some claws applied to the financial regulators would have done a lot to reduce the amount of credit sloshing around the residential property market. Which would have damped down speculation and demand for housing which no one really needed and which would have put the kibosh on the behaviour of some of the developers. We are in a perilous position right now, Brian, because of Fianna Fail policy. You are forcing us, the people of Ireland, to reap the seeds which you and your party sowed.

However, we are where we are and now, the decisions you and your government have taken included guaranteeing bank bonds for a bank which is not systemically important and never was. It wasn’t enough to guarantee the deposits, was it? And calling in the IMF. Yes, all of that was accidental, not. No, it all happened directly because of short sighted idiot Fianna Fail policy.

You deserve no credit for the hard economic decisions being foisted on us, that are preventing us from being in a perilous place. You deserve all the credit for driving the country into a place where it was necessary to do this. I cannot praise someone for doing a dirty job the necessity of which they caused in the first place. It’s like praising a man for trying to clean a bathroom over which he vomitted copiously.

Unfortunately for the people of Ireland, the Green Party are hardly following through on their decision to bring down the government either and even if they did, we’d wind up with either Enda Kenny or Eamon Gilmore dancing around the Maypole. It truly is unimaginable.

Meanwhile, you called in enough favours to convince a bunch of people who will probably lose their seats next time round to keep you in place. Inspiring stuff.

regards,

wnb

Boots yesterday announced that they would be making the morning after pill available over the counter in their stores in Ireland. It comes at a cost, yes, and the figures I heard bandied around include 45E. In wnb measurement terms, that’s at least 2 CDs worth of money, with two bottles of diet 7-Up thrown in for good measure. It’s not cheap. It is, however, less expensive than going to the doctor and anyway, and possibly more importantly Boots opening hours are a little more consumer friendly. They include Sundays, for example which is very possibly the day – anecdotally – there might be most call for access to emergency contraception

Somewhat unexpectedly, this has done more than raise a few eyebrows. In one way I am surprised, in another, it’s just another demoralising feature of Ireland which is that social progress, particularly with respect to the position of women in Irish society, has to be applied from beyond Irish borders. Sometimes, by commercial companies looking to turn a profit. Your right, as a woman, to emergency contraception in this country has just been made a whole lot easier by a UK company who are going to charge you quite a bit of money for the privilege. And yet, I am glad they are doing it. Because a story like this appeared in an Irish newspaper as recently as August 2010. Less than six months ago.

One woman said she had to travel to Cork the following day after she was refused the contraception at SouthDoc in Tralee and couldn’t find any other GP surgery that was open on a Sunday.

For anyone wondering, there are branches of Boots in Killarney and Tralee in Kerry by the way. And according to the Examiner, SouthDoc did not comment on the story at the time.

Whether you need or want emergency contraception or not should really be a matter for you individually. There are any number of reasons women might want it and they can’t all just be summed up as “only women who are sluts would need it anyway”. But then, that’s the same excuse as some people give against women going on the pill in general. If you were a good girl, you wouldn’t need it. And “you should have been using condoms anyway”. Those things split, you know. If you don’t know, then perhaps you’re not qualified to pontificate at people how they should behave in their privacy of their own lives.

In summary, it can be said that I’m favour of what Boots has decided to do and it will have the effect of dragging Irish society kicking and screaming into a place where a lot of people wish it was already – where we don’t necessarily judge people so harshly for making mistakes and where we don’t necessarily care what they do next door – and that is no bad thing. It is sad, however, that it is necessary in this day and age to force issues like this.

ETA.

Okay, since I wrote this, David Quinn wrote this in the Independent. You’ll find an answer in the Anti-Room here but I have one or two comments.

The category most likely to show up at a family planning clinic on a Monday morning looking for their morning-after pill are young, single women who were out on the tear over the weekend.

This is because young, single men cannot get pregnant. When they can I daresay the stats will change somewhat.

So if you want to reduce demand both for abortion and the morning-after pill — encourage committed relationships.

No. If encouraging condom use isn’t going to work, I don’t see how encouraging committed relationships will be more effective. I’m all for them myself but I face the reality that not everyone wants them at a given time.

This is probably what was really driving my pals on Twitter bananas, the suspicion that behind any concern or worries about demand for the morning-after pill is moralism.

No. What drives me bananas is David assuming he can compel me to have the same moral standards as he has. I don’t. I don’t, for example, think David has any right to say whether wider society should have access to emergency contraception or not; only whether he wishes to avail of it or not.

Any sane person would opt for a society in which there is little or no demand. Demand can only be high where there is a high level of self-defeating, self-destructive behaviour.

But restricting supply and access, to date, has been completely ineffective. I’m not sure what the answer is; I’ve long felt that demystification at an early age and some education would go a long way towards improving things – it certainly seems to work in France, Germany and the Netherlands anyway. Why it doesn’t work so much in Ireland and the UK is open to debate.

Either way, again, my view is that David Quinn is entitled to his opinions, but not to compel others to behave by them in private matters. And sexual activity is largely a personal concern, not a social concern.

If you want me to take you really seriously, there are a few things you need to understand.

1) no photographs are better than lots of photographs of the surrounding scenery but none of the house

2) out of date information sucks. If you’re selling a property in Clongriffin where a DART station is due to open in autumn 2010, I’d like to know whether it opened or not

3) I hate all capitalised sentences that include the words “REDUCED TO SELL”. I don’t believe them for one thing and anyway, a sale gets made when me and some vendor find a price acceptable to both parties. How much it was reduced before I started negotiating is very unimportant to me.

4) the term 2/3 bedrooms is…how shall I put it….sickening. Either it has 3 bedrooms or it has 2 bedrooms. If it in fact has a third room that doesn’t quite fit legal definitions of a bedroom, then it is not a bedroom. The Slash/Extra Bedroom is not something that sells the house to me. For me, a 2/3 bedroomed house is a 2 bedroomed house.

5) misuse of wide angled lenses does not improve your chances of selling the property because the first thing on my list to check with the property when I see it is what size it actually is.

6) Excessive use of the word “stunning” also reduces your chances. Put simply, very, very few properties in this country are in the realm of “stunning” and if it is in fact, a one or two bedroomed apartment, there is no way it’s “stunning”.

7) pixellated photographs. Please. Do you know how bad this makes you look?

Do not use clichés like “Early viewing is advsied” and “Must be seen to be believed”.

Things I think should be clear in ads:

1) BER rating. You cannot sell a property without this.

2) Current management fees for properties where a management fee falls due.

3) Current state of ownership of the management company where there is one in place. In other words, if the original developer still has an interest, I want to know about it so as not to waste your time, my time or your vendors time. If you think I will continue with a sale where I discover this to be the case, you are mistaken. If there are onerous local rules in place regarding – for example – satellite dishes and clothes lines I want to know about it.

4) Nearest public transport options in time walking and accurate times please. I don’t consider a 25 minute walk to be walking distance for a bus stop.

5) Addresses should be accurate. This means not mixing up postcodes and postal areas.

6) list of contents included in sale.

7) floorplans. Is that so hard in this day and age?

I’ve been renting in this country for more than 10 years. You would not believe what I know to look out for.