Feckoff.net

Brian Lenihan just delivered his Budget 2009 speech. One again, Ireland’s motorists get screwed. He’s added 8 cents per litre on to petrol, and has increased the VAT rate by 0.5%, which brings our fuel prices roughly into parity with UK prices. He’s also hiking motor tax by 4% for all cars below 2.5 litres or in CO2 bands A-D, depending on which idiotic system your car falls into. Cars with bigger engines will be hit with an extra 5%, because as we all know, big engines are the work of the devil. Tax on diesel fuel has stayed where it is, most likely because they’re trying to shove everyone over to diesel just to try and minimise their already massive Kyoto CO2 bill. Since the other pollutants in diesel aren’t counted for that, they don’t care about them.

Oh, there’s also this: “Levy of €200 on employees for car parking in major urban areas” – because our public transport system is so fucking awesome.

Pretty much the only good thing about motoring in Ireland was our relatively cheap (by EU standards) fuel, and now they’ve crushed that. We’ve got awful roads and punitive taxes on everything to do with driving.

Here’s a quick run-down of what other changes they’re making.
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Not content with making europeans wait for months after Rock Band was released in the US, the game’s distributor, Electronic Arts has decided to give us all a good hard shafting too.

Rock Band retails for $169 in the US. This includes the game and all of the peripheral instruments. Here in europe you can have it for €240. Yes. Lets do some currency conversion, shall we? At today’s rates, $169 will get you €106.65. Even when you take the difference in VAT over here and US sales taxes over there into account we’re still getting ripped right the fuck off. We’ve accepted the dodgy $1 = €1 style european RRPs for a long time now, but this is taking the piss.

Fuck you, EA.

Unless you’re able to shit gold bricks you should join me in boycotting this game. Show them that we’re not a bunch of saps that will bend over and take it in the ass just because we don’t live in the US.

There’s loads of flames being thrown on various Eurogamer comment threads about Rock Band. Feel free to throw your tuppenceworth in there too.

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RTE News (heh) tells us today to lube up and bend over in preparation for a shafting from a bunch of greedy television licence bastards:

Television is now much more than a ‘box in the corner’, and the concept of a television licence fee may have to be changed to include such developments as mobile phone streaming and websites such as YouTube, an Oireachtas committee has been told.

So they want to force people to get TV licences for things that have FUCK ALL to do with public service broadcasting? Fuck off. RTE shouldn’t get any TV licence income at all, unless they produce a service like the BBC does. RTE gets TV licence cash and advertising income, and most of its home-made output is still complete crap. Fair City anyone? Celebrity-jigs-and-complete-bollix? Please.

Here’s some more bullshit:

Technology expert Ronan Coy said television can include anything that is made visually available to the consumer, including developments such as Internet-based television stations and video blogging.

Update 15/01/2007: I had called Ronan a wanker for the above, but he informs me that RTE took his comments out of context. See his comment below. Sorry Ronan, I apologise for that.

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I found this thread over at boards.ie quite funny. People were complaining about the rip off prices being charged by Cantec computer stores, when a couple of posters obviously affiliated with the business joined in to the thread. Whilst he/they (hey, its probably 1 person behind multiple accounts) insisted they’re a “satisfied customer”, they continued to post real tow-the-company-line type crap.

Off with their heads!

Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t I be right in saying that “Cantec” shops used to all be Compustore franchises before Compustore went tits-up? Looks like nothing’s changed there then – still the preserve of customers who just don’t know any better.

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