tomo,

I give! I give! Enough! You win.

For serious comment on those points, words fail me, but the Hitchhiker's/Pythonesque picture — a clandestine civic beautification project with riot squad attending just in case — merits a rueful smile.

So: emigrate now, or wait a little longer so you'll be able to claim refugee status?

tomo,
Jo Nova site isn't down as such. I was able to look in just now. If you look at its DNS, it has two addresses. Both are hosted by Cloudflare. My guess is that one of the addresses goes to a good server, and the other variously to an unconfigured Apache or an offline server. Nature of DNS makes it a coin-toss whether you'll get the good one. And whichever you get will live on in your cache, your ISP's cache and who knows what other caches for some indeterminate time. Ultimate problem might be in the site-mirroring stuff.

Interestingly, bishophill.squarespace.com has four IP addresses. Should be able to cope with the traffic here!

Your Aberdeen tale: is there any explanation other than the council being drunk with power?

From all you say, I'm convinced that it's far worse in Britain than here.

It might be a benefit of such decisions being in state government hands. When the Cross-Sydney Tunnel was opened (~20 years ago), it was a worthwhile road that could easily save you half an hour if you were headed to the eastern suburbs (say). Made the toll worth paying unless you didn't value your time. To encourage people in this decision, the original main road, William Street, was pared down from 6 lanes to 2 (1 each way).

Traffic chaos ensued and there were a lot of very angry motorists around. Didn't mollify them a bit to hear that the road narrowing was part of the contract with the owners of the new tunnel. I think it was only a couple of months before all the silly planters, etc. were dragged off William Street. The tunnel owners were paid compensation by the state.

Bloody noses all around. I think the memory has stayed with them.

Meanwhile, how many British local councils are going to have to get bloody noses before they work out that bastardry is bastardry, and not likely to make you popular?

To prove I've visited Jo's this morning, here's an odd interview with a pair of witnesses to a crime. Someone suggested it might be AI generated, but it looks plausible enough to me. I used to joke with a work colleague that she was my left brain (left because of where we sat, brain because she often got the answers I was hunting for). This pair takes that sort of relationship up a few notches.

tomo,
Yeah, pretty shitty, as you say. Still, what's the point of rules if you can't use them to turn a dollar?

Local councils are beholden to the states in Aus. and vary quite a bit. Googling "Brisbane Council area" gives 1343km^2; same for Sydney gives 25km^2. Consequently, NSW local governments have no say in public transport, but the state government has definitely made a bit of money out of bus lanes and the like.

Latest wheeze was sprinkling cameras around the state looking for people not wearing seatbelts properly (another marvellous application of AI). Half a dozen people in my (quite small) circle were hit with the fine weeks before the ads started appearing on telly warning us about the new blitz (one was for the 10yo son wearing the belt through the armpit rather than over the shoulder: $400 + 3 demerit points).

In all these entrapment scams the authorities piously tell us that rules are rules and that they're there for the good of the community. Meanwhile the ordinary people just get more embittered.

Jo Nova's site seems rather temperamental at the moment. I now see there is a Monday thread, but earlier it was getting a default Apache "website working" message. The DNS entry might have the wobbles.

tomo,
That link just gives a Twitter "not found" error for me.

On the subject of anti-virus: the WHO has a new pandemic treaty ready for countries that like to have bureaucrats dictating to their governments.

And not altogether unrelated, it seems the Trump administration isn't averse to an informal "BREXIT" for EU member nations — i.e. dealing with member states while ignoring the EU superstructure.

That might be a nice answer for Australia's bloated federation too: deal state-by-state.