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On Freedom of Speech, Religion and so on…

In the last several days we’ve seen quite a few very visible examples of people harshly criticized for expressing themselves publicly.  I think it’s a worrying trend, and I think we’re in a period of declining tolerance.

Salman Rushdie, who’s famous for his 1988 novel The Satanic Versus, gave an interview to the BBC a few days ago as he prepares to publish his memoires.  One of the interesting things he said is he didn’t think such a book would be published today.

An editor in Ireland was just suspended for publishing topless pictures of a member of the UK royal family.

There’s a band named Pussy Riot in prison in Russia for criticizing the government and religious institutions.

Now in the news are violent attacks on foreign missions over a film trailer made in the US criticizing Islam.

I live in The Netherlands, a country thought to have one of the highest legal standards of free speech almost anywhere in the world.  The other day I was physically threatened and intimidated, in part over what I’ve written on my Dutch language blog.  Anyone familiar with Bifurcated Carrots will know I’ve written some very provocative things in the past, especially targeting large agricultural and food companies.  I’ve made a lot of people mad for sure, but so far no one has threatened me.  Indeed many of the provocative things I’ve said have been the basis for further constructive discussions.

An interesting inconsistency with the notion of freedom of speech here, is it’s very socially unacceptable to express yourself in a visible or confrontational way.  This is something I reject completely.  I discussed these threats with the police, and they were very negative.  Yes, they agreed I had the right to say what I wanted but their position was, short of a clear threat to my life or serious injury, I had to take full responsibility for what I said myself.  They strongly discouraged me from saying provocative things in the future, not from a legal point of view, but from a cultural one.

Bifurcated Carrots is not about religion.  Except for maybe something very small in passing, you won’t find any criticism of Islam, Judaism, Christianity or any other religion.  I personally don’t think criticizing religion is very constructive, and in particular I find the recent YouTube videos which are the source of unrest in the middle east very distasteful.  Pictures that violate the privacy of individuals are also wrong.

Reacting violently or with aggression towards someone else for what they’ve said or written is even more wrong.  Trying to demand something that’s been published be retracted is not constructive, especially with the modern Internet where things can be rapidly duplicated and widely distributed.  The violent events in the middle east and elsewhere are wrong.

If you disagree with something someone said, you should say so — publicly.  You should demonstrate on the street if you want.  You’re always free to say something just as compromising about them!  The Internet and news publications of the world cannot have too many opinions, and yours are always welcome.   As long as you are reasonably on topic, not unreasonably disruptive and don’t intend to promote a product commercially, your comments are always welcome here.

Maybe most importantly, if someone says something that makes you mad, it’s also important to look within yourself and understand what it is that makes you mad.  If something makes you mad like this, it’s because of weakness.  If someone says you’re racist, it’s time to reconsider the way you treat other people.  If someone criticizes or makes fun of your religion, it’s time to reconsider your beliefs and think about how you can better coexist with the world around you.  If you’re a royal family who’s privacy was violated, it’s wise to consider how you can make yourself less of a target.  If you’re a government or business, you should think about how to incorporate the criticisms, and improve what you do.

Freedom of press is an important way the world improves itself.  If you don’t view freedom of press as a positive thing, and attack it instead of using it to improve things, all that happens is even more confrontational things are published later.

Above all else, if you don’t like what you see on YouTube, you don’t have to view the videos.  If you don’t like what you see on this blog or any other, you don’t have to read it.  If you’re offended by a book, you don’t need to buy it.  If you don’t like what you see in the paper or on TV, you don’t need to watch.  We are all free to choose the websites we visit, or the sources of news and other media we use.

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Mobile Phone Service in the Netherlands

Okay, every once in a while I post completely off topic, and this is one of those times. The contract on my mobile service is coming up for renewal in a few months, and I’m looking for a company to switch to. I’ve been learning enough in the process, that I thought I would share some of it with the world.  As well as those of you who might be looking for mobile service locally, maybe it’s interesting to others to compare the situation here with your own.

First of all, we have three main providers:

KPN: The former state phone monopoly, who thinks they’re still in charge.

Vodafone:  Who has frequent complaints of outages; there have been a few cases where service was down in the entire country for a day or more, and several months ago had a fire in their data center.  Statistically speaking, most companies who have a such a fire are gone within a few months.  Vodafone is still around.  Rumor has it they only have a cobbled together production system, and are just barely functioning.  Existing customers do still have service.

T-Mobile:  Originally called Ben, when they started here their systems were very overloaded, calls were dropped and service was very poor.  After heavy pressure from consumer organizations, they finally admitted they had a problem, spent millions in upgrades and gave some customers a refund.  This is the former German state phone monopoly.

There used to be a forth provider, Telfort, but this was bought early on by KPN and the infrastructure of the two companies were combined.  This is probably one of the reasons the infrastructure of KPN is pretty reliable.

Beyond these three main providers, there are dozens of resellers who resell service under their own brand names.  KPN in particular owns a large number of these resellers, and if you buy resold mobile service in the country, it’s probably still fully owned by KPN.

Honestly, all the choices are crap.  There’s lots to choose from, but it’s known we pay higher rates for poorer service than other Europeans on average.

In my case, my existing service comes from Telfort.  I was an original Telfort customer when it was taken over by KPN.  Telfort used to be a discount service, and for some time KPN maintained this, offering a discounted full service product.  Recently however, they’ve been raising prices and changing terms and conditions.  In particular, if you do anything out of the ordinary, for example call, SMS or use data outside of your prearranged bundle, there are often  unreasonable costs.  In addition prices are set to increase sharply after my current contract expires, so it’s time to move on.

Basically what I was looking for was some sort of bundle that would cover most of my phone use costing about €10 or less, and to not face unreasonable costs if I should use my phone beyond this.  A common way this is offered now is with a ‘500 bundle’ of some sort, in other words a minute of call time, an SMS or a MB of data are all ‘units’ in a common bundle, and such a bundle of 500 units are being offered by a few places.  As an alternative, I was looking for an inexpensive data bundle, because then I could place calls over the Internet (VoIP) with Skype a similar service.  Some of these services offer calls much cheaper than mobile phone companies, and with an app on my Android phone I could easily place calls through them.

Okay, since buying services directly from one of the three main providers is generally more expensive, I started looking to the resellers.  There are two kinds of resellers, those directly affiliated with one of the three major service providers above, or foreign owned resellers, that operate across a number of countries and are not affiliated with a particular Dutch provider.  Some resellers charge a small amount to send you a SIM card with a value on it, and others send it for free but then you have to add money later.

Initially, I tried two resellers, Delight Mobile (foreign owned) and Hollandsnieuwe (owned by Vodafone and resells their service).

The Delight Mobile SIM came within a few days.  The offer from them I wanted was a prepaid €10 Dutch bundle with 500 minutes/sms/Mb.  Since it came without any money on the SIM, the first challenge was going to be putting exactly €10 on it and buying the bundle without incurring any other costs, then seeing if this ‘all-inclusive’ bundle really covered all costs.  That all mostly went to plan, I bought the bundle, but then couldn’t access voicemail.  Voicemail it turns out costs a few cents, and it’s not included in the bundle.  I was able to get around this by using the direct (06) phone number for voicemail instead of the 4-digit fast dial number, then it got charged as a normal phone call within the bundle.

I quickly noticed my Internet wasn’t working however, and set about to troubleshoot it.  According to the web page, you have to set the APN (access point name) before you can use Internet.  Every other provider seems to preconfigure this in their SIMs before sending them, but for Delight you have to do this by hand.  As an alternative to doing it by hand, you could download and run a simple script.  Both the manual instructions and script set the APN to different values, and when I surfed the Internet for more information I found yet a different value.  The website says I can call customer service, but at least until now I haven’t been willing to do this for something that should just work, possibly with instructions off their webpage.  I did send customer service an email, and they never answered it.  That’s not a very good sign either.  I was never able to get the Internet to work.

The Hollandsnieuwe SIM never came, a reseller of Vodafone.  After about 2 weeks I sent customer service a message via their webpage, and several days later I got the automated response they promised within a few minutes.  After another week, I got another automated message saying they were still working hard on answering my support request, but were just too busy.  They promised to get back to me as soon as possible.  I don’t suggest anyone waste their €2,50 on ordering a Hollandsnieuwe SIM.  I think they are the only company currently reselling Vodafone, and I think they are just unable to handle any new orders because of their data center fire I mentioned above.

Then I ordered an Ortel SIM, a company owned by KPN.   Ortel in particular had some very cheap prepaid data bundles, and I thought I could use it for calling over the Internet.  At first everything went well, and the SIM came very quickly.  The Internet worked very well at first, and was very fast.  The problem was VoIP (calling over the Internet) seemed to be blocked.

It’s illegal by the way in the Netherlands for Internet providers to block VoIP.  The Dutch government was very eager to pass a Net Neutrality law, and this was part of it.  Before the law was passed, KPN attracted a lot of attention by blocking VoIP on mobile phones, and had to back down.  On my Telfort service which is owned by KPN, I don’t have any problems with VoIP.

I sent an email to customer service, got a very fast and friendly response, verifying my APN settings, which were correct.  I have the impression they have very few customers, because I was corresponding with them via their info@ortel.nl email address.  Anyway, in answer to my follow up email, they told me it wasn’t their fault, they use KPNs network, so I should contact KPN.

This is like a time warp.  When KPN was initially split up and forced to accept competition, this is what used to always happen.  KPN would block something, often for example porting a phone number, and would blame the other company.  The other company would tell you to call KPN, because it was their fault.  This would go back and forth, until you finally gave up.  Anyway, trying to convince Ortel or KPN that they were breaking the law by blocking VoIP was something I wasn’t going to get started on.

It seems if you get data service through a KPN company, and aren’t paying enough for it, VoIP will be blocked by KPN, in spite of it being illegal.

Considering I was leaving Telfort, owned by KPN, because I was feeling manipulated by them and I certainly felt disappointed by Ortel, owned by KPN, I decided to look more seriously for non-KPN alternatives.  Vodafone didn’t seem like an alternative either, because of my experiences above with Hollandsnieuwe.  This left either a foreign owned reseller without Dutch affiliation, or T-mobile.

None of the remaining foreign owned resellers seem to offer very good prices or interesting package deals, so I decided to try T-mobile.  As far as I can see the only resellers for T-mobile in the Netherlands are Tele2, Ben and Simpel, and they don’t have very good deals either, so I decided to order a SIM directly from T-mobile.

My T-Mobile SIM came very fast, the next day.

They are really heavy on the marketing, and this can be very annoying!  They have a very confusing range of packages, most of which are kind of expensive and sometimes very restrictive (for example if you read the fine print, some of their ‘minutes’ can’t be used to call mobiles from other companies and/or expire after a week).  It’s eye-wateringly expensive to use any service outside of a package, so you have to choose something.  I spent about €2 initially configuring my voicemail without a package.  If you’re a little careful about packages and how you use your phone, take advantage of some of their marketing ‘opportunities’, it’s possible to buy reasonably priced service from them.  With the prepaid service, it’s possible to buy a lot of bundles on the fly, only as you need them.

I decided to start with them on a prepaid basis, and for this the data service is very slow.  They don’t block VoIP, but it’s so slow VoIP is not really usable.  Skype is okay, but my other VoIP accounts have too much delay in the conversation.

I’m not really completely happy with them, but I’m probably going to eventually switch to them on a year contract basis, assuming the data quality will then improve enough to use VoIP.

If you have other experiences, let us know below!

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PC Olive Oil

I was at a local market last Sunday and bought some politically correct olive oil.

We have this bit of very seriously contaminated land in Amsterdam, the ‘Westergasfabriek’.  It was formally a natural gas processing plant, and they’ve all but given up on trying to clean the ground.  They’ve decided it’s just too contaminated, and since much of the contamination is underwater (well below sea level), trying to clean it up will only spread it.  What do you do when you have a piece of land like that in the middle of the city?  You build a park on it and call it a recreation area!  That’s what we now have, and one Sunday a month they have an open air market there.  It’s been growing in recent months, and now it’s quite large.  It’s always this strange mix of mostly hand crafts, mixed in with cheap plastic crap from China that sort of looks like a hand crafts.

Recently there’s been quite a lot of growth in stands offering food, quite a lot of it hand made or direct from the farmers, and it’s quite possible to get a nice lunch there now.  Or, if you do what I do, you can get a free lunch by working your way through all the free samples the different stands offer.

Anyway, I found myself trying to quietly grab a dried out piece of bread dunked in olive oil at the Groene Griek (the green Greek) stand, and I was caught.  Behind the bread and olive oil there was an eager sales woman, ready to talk with the people taking samples.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch!

“It comes from a Greek farmer you know!”, she said pointing to it.  “We put the picture of the farmer on the front of each bottle.  You know farmers in Greece are having a hard time right now, and it’s important to help them.  You know there’s a euro crisis, and they’re having a hard time selling their products for a fair price. When you buy their olive oil, we try to give them a fair price”.

“You see this one is Maria.   It’s an organic family farm, and at first they didn’t know who to put on the label.  They decided on the older woman.  She’s 72 years old.”

“If someone like you doesn’t buy oil like this in a market in this way, it won’t get sold as Greek Olive Oil.  There’s no direct market for Greek olive oil, and instead it gets mixed together with olive oil from other European countries, labelled as Spanish or Italian, and sold in supermarkets”.

“The big bottle is a recycled wine bottle you know.  It saves a lot of energy to recycle a wine bottle over melting the glass and remolding it.  It can just be washed and reused”.

I had to admit after tasting it, it was some of the best olive oil I’ve had in a long time.  They had some other kinds, but I decided on a wine bottle of Maria.  It was reasonably priced, and even though I didn’t plan on buying anything that day, I’m glad I bought this.  I wonder if that sales person realized how effectively she was pushing all of my buttons that day…  She probably did.

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Seedy Penpals

Mel and her friend Carl Legge are organizing Seedy Penpals.  The basic idea is to match you up with someone for a seed exchange.  The details are laid out here.  Importantly, this is mostly for people in Europe, but if you live other places she might be able to put you in touch with something similar happening locally.  I think she’d like to hear about similar initiatives in other places, so she can find ways of cooperating.

One of the best things about this is Mel is in Amsterdam!  Woohoo — another garden blogger in Amsterdam!  That makes two of us.  Amsterdam doesn’t seem like such a lonely place anymore.

Actually Mel has been around a while, I just never noticed her before.  It’s not like we’re welcoming a new blogger, but I still hope you stop by and say hi to her and Carl anyway.