Irish Freedom of Information amendment will send FOI fees to infinity

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I shouldn’t have asked the Central Statistics Office:

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Maybe we could kickstart desiging and submitting an FOI request for a breakdown of the person hours of the various grades of governement employee to answer the FOI request for that breakdown. It should be expensive, since it could impact future revenue, and hence would require attention from folk reasonably high up, but perhaps we’d come out of it with some numbers to hit them with if we don’t like the price put on an FOI. End of slightly recursive comment.

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about 10 or 12

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Please, please just repeal the law. Just be opaque and totalitarian. I’m so sick of these half-measures.

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How about we start calling them fucking FOI demands.

Request, my arse. We already pay your wages - hop to it, cunt. It’s in your fucking job description.

I’m seeing a lot more of this blatant because-fuck-you-that’s-why from governments these days… the appropriate response to this turkey-slap would be a riot, but it won’t happen…

Fucking MSM anaesthesia.

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Dude, it’s not Cauchy…

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You have opened my eyes. Your harmonic series diverges to ∞

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One units is 10ml of pure alcohol.

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I hate to be a bohr, but the equation does say to express the answer in Euros.

And if we look at the change spectrum of the Euro, we see that it is quantised in discrete packets or “cents”.
If we calculate the request, using these discrete entities, we avoid the ultra-expsnsive catastrophe completely.

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All. Fucking. Day, Comrade.

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I’ve heard from a civil servant that part of their antipathy to FOI stems from the sheer incompetence of the bureaucratic system. Information is so badly organised that a request can take workers days to answer. As usual, they respond to a problem caused by poor systems and technological backwardness by reducing transparency and undermining democratic rights.

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Maybe another crowdsource-financed query could be “Please name all individuals (and departments) who have discussed either definition or value of a unit of ‘FOI attention’, indicating which of them have warned against such definitions being made more explicit, and their reasons for so doing”.

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Yep, let’s do that one first.

Pretty sure it’s an EU requirement so they’re using lateral thinking to reduce government costs while staying in compliance. On the one hand “Freedom” of information, on the other hand they’re trying to balance a still precarious budget.

The attack on Ireland’s austerity measures is remarkably shallow, considering that they’re going to be the first EU country to exit the bailout programme. When incompetence and mismanagement causes the standard of living in a country to double and triple inside a decade and a half, is it appropriate to call them austerity measures, or a simple re-adjustment? You don’t make something better by carrying on as if nothing happened.

I’m involved in businesses North and South of the border and can see the stark contrast. In Ireland there was wage and social security inflation that was, clearly, unsustainable. It’s pointless showing people the figures, once you’ve ridden a booming economy you’re not going to be satisfied hearing that a sudden ugly crash is to be expected and that even after austerity you’re better off than if you’d had 1.5-2% GDP growth year on year.

I can’t stress this enough - if there had been no “corrupt investment bubble”, which is an accurate term, people in Ireland would be worse off now than they currently are even under “austerity”, except everyone would take it for granted as normal.

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You should have explained when you asked us to keep records that you expected to have access to them later. We would have done it all different.

The first to exist the bailout program, but not the last to enter it. What about the countries that didn’t need bailouts?

I think your analysis is, to borrow a phrase, “remarkably shallow.” Ireland has an unemployment rate of 13.6%, there is no way to claim that things are going well. GDP is a failed measure of growth and success. It allows governments to claim good economic records based on finance bubbles that produce no goods and make no one better off.

Your argument is that binging and anorexia are better for you than a healthy diet if you end up weighing less at the end of the day. It’s nonsense. The GDP may be higher, but the Irish people are not better off for having been exploited by corrupt businesses and governments.

Easy answer. “We can’t find any record of that.”

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