No Good Deed…

Here’s a story from the Land Down Under.

Kenan Basic, a 36-year-old carpenter, stopped to help a nineteen-year-old woman by the name of Caitlyn Gray, whose car had broken down. He repaired her car, they hugged each other, and she went on her way.

She then went to the police and swore out a complaint accusing him of stalking her, asking her for sex, and groping her.

Mr Basic was then arrested and and charged with indecent assault, and jailed. He was denied bail. He was in jail for a week. He lost his job, and his wife filed for divorce.

Who is this paragon of pulchritude that Mr Basic risked his very liberty to proposition and grope? What does she look like?

When the police could not find any surveillance video or any other corroborating evidence to support her story, they became skeptical. Finally, she admitted that she had made the whole story up.

He was vindicated and released. She was found guilty of “knowingly making a false statement.

She has been jailed for nine months, five of which are mandatory before parole… but unlike him, she was immediately granted bail.

Apparently the presumption of innocence only applies if you are female.

He plans to sue. And he should.

Just Believe

Just believe that Christine Ford was raped! sexually assaulted by Brett Cavanaugh. Even though:

• She can’t remember where it was…
• …or when it was…
• …or how she got there…
• …or how she got home afterwards…
• …and she can’t produce one single witness to corroborate her account of what happened…
• …or answer any of the above questions.

Just believe her.

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Just believe Jussie Smollet when he says that he was set upon by white supremacists wearing MAGA hats who beat him, put a “noose” around his neck and poured bleach on him. Even though:

• No surveillance video in the area showed the crime…
• …or the perpetrators approaching or leaving…
• …but they found a pair of Nigerian bodybuilders…
• …who were associates of Mr Smollet…
• …who were paid by him (by check) for “personal training”…
• …and were caught on video buying bleach and rope.

Just believe him.

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Just believe the authorities who say that that Jeffery Epstein committed suicide. Even though:

• He was supposedly in a “suicide-proof” cell…
• …while on suicide watch…
• …which had been rescinded less than a week after he last attempted suicide…
• …with no working cameras in the cell…
• …and a pair of sleeping guards…
• …who subsequently falsified the records…
• …shortly after he agreed to a plea deal where he would agree to name prominent pedophiles.

Just believe them.

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Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it.

Parental Controls Done Wrong

Or: Why Nintendo is not your friend

I have a Godson. He spends his summers with Her Ladyship and I. He is thirteen, and this year he arrived with a Nintendo Switch clutched lovingly in his hands. Hand-held gaming devices like this seem to come as factory standard equipment with every teen-aged boy (the girls all seem to want an iPhone and a boyfriend… but that’s another story).

Over the first few days he was here, he spent his every waking hour either playing Fortnite on his switch, or watching other people playing Fortnite on YouTube (oh, the ads! But that’s another story), while the switch was recharging.

I did a little research and found that a parental controls app was available for the switch, so I installed and set it up. And that’s where this cautionary tale begins.

First up, the philosophy of the app is all wrong. Instead of allowing parents to allocate screen time for good behavior, the app allows the parent to grant a daily limit that is fully available at the start of the day.

The practical application of this is that if you give your little “angel” three hours a day, then left to his own devices, he will burn through those three hours by 10AM… and be in an abominably foul mood for the rest of the day as he suffers from withdrawal symptoms. And this is precisely what happened until we discovered the “Suspend Software” option.

The “Suspend Software” setting is what actually allows the app to actually stop the Switch in its tracks. The default option for this setting is “OFF”, and this is just plain wrong, as this setting means that it does not disable the switch when the time is up. This is the equivalent of a “STOP” sign but with no cops around to enforce it; most of us will not stop… and neither will he, as he blows straight through the stop sign on his way to however many hours a day he wants. And he did. One day he racked up nearly nine hours before we realized what was happening. The default setting is effectively “Parental Advisement” or “Parental Control without control“. So make sure that you familiarize yourself with the “Suspend Software” setting and turn it ON.

For me, the real problem with this app is with its design philosophy: instead of rationing time out throughout the day, the this app is designed to deliver the whole allotment up front. This is analogous to the two models for “pocket money”: allowance, or commission.

• An allowance is given to a child irrespective of behavior, and leads to entitlement thinking.
• A commission is given dependent on behavior, demeanor and helpfulness.

Nintendo have gone with the “Allowance” model.,

The only way to implement the “commission” model of game time is to reset the time allowance to zero every morning. If you forget, there is nothing to prevent him from taking advantageous your forgetfulness, and that’s on you.

But there is another, more serious problem here:

You cannot set the daily allowance to zero!

The lowest amount is fifteen minutes. This means that there is no effective way to use this app to “ground” a rebellious or misbehaving child.

Another issue is that the communication between the parental control app is done through WiFi. This means that if a switch is out of the range of WiFi, parental control updates cannot be pushed to the device. It is my understanding that the switch features a version of Bluetooth that is deliberately made incompatible with open standards (to prevent non-Nintendo wireless products from being used); perhaps this should be extended to the app to prevent kids from avoiding updates.

I strongly suspect that Nintendo designed this app based on a focus group comprised of fifteen children and one adult.

Here’s a list of the changes I would make:

1. Allow the starting allotment to be set to zero.
2. Add a big red “You’re Grounded” button, which immediately stops a switch dead in its tracks.
3. Add buttons for “Add Time”, with 15/30/45/60 minute buttons to allocate time.
4. Implement a “please-please-please-please-five-minutes-more” button.

Until they do these things, or something like then, I have to assume that Nintendo is not your friend.