What goes around comes around? (THG S3 #6 of 20)
Boomerangs. NRIs missing dosas. Partners who think too much of themselves, probably.
Dear reader:
Welcome to another issue of The Hindustan Grimes, where we live, we laugh, we love, but did none of the three when we discovered Wikipedia’s List of Paraphilias.
Momo’s back.
This week talk about cars and incels.
Yours insufferably irascible,
momo & eggsy
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Geneva to Fine French Cars; Push to Put Poor Off Road
“There’s no place for ugly cars on our roads”: Mayor
Geneva, Feb 2022: Surrounded on three sides by France, and at many places just across the street, Geneva employs nearly a hundred thousand French workers. Almost half the French living near the Swiss border work in Geneva. And with French workers come their cheap, ugly, and old commuter cars, or at least that is what citizenry of Geneva and consequently their Municipal Council believes.
“The cars the French drive in are dirty and old and an eyesore,” said an elected municipal council member who wished to remain anonymous. “The Swiss drive better cars like Mercs and BMWs and Teslas. They’re slick black and look posh, just like the country. The aesthetic cars on the road accentuate the classic beauty of the Swiss paths. There’s no place for decades old Renaults and Citroens on our roads.”
“They drive the same car for almost a decade. So it’s all rusty obsolete-looking dirty cars,” said a junior apprentice to the mayor. “How would you feel if you went to watch the Titanic and found that the background score was by Cardi B instead of Celine Dion?”
The City Council, with the aid of local and multi-national consultants, presented a proposal of options for the public to vote on. The public have been given a week to choose one or more than one of the below options:
Deploy AI-assisted cameras at border crossings to detect dirty cars. Fine the drivers automatically.
Place an absolute ban on entry for cars manufactured more than four years ago.
Place an absolute ban on entry for cars not coloured black, brown, or dark blue. Exception may be granted to pure white cars on signing a CHF10,000 promissory note which shall be payable if the car is found dirty.
Place an absolute ban on entry for all French cars.
The Mayor has clarified that if all French cars are indeed banned, commuter busses from the border would increase in frequency. Rental bikes may also be made available at the border. Leaked draft proposals seeking contractors to build large parking garages at the border have also been found.
Surprisingly, there has been no outrage from the French workers. “This coming from the country that pays “undesirable” immigrants to fuck off is no surprise,” said an unsurprised cross-border French worker. Some years ago, a village near Zurich chose to pay an annual 200k fine instead of accepting 10 immigrants. Is this better or worse? Only time and twitter can tell.
Amazon Faces Pressure to Permaban The Incel Store
Shortage of Mildly Explosive Dildos and Slowly-Slimy Phone Cases Expected
Munich, Feb 2022: The Amazon Marketplace, with its long standing embrace of third-party sellers, has helped small businesses grow and find customers to sell to. After two decades of improving the ease of doing business, it might have gone a bit too far. The Incel Store, one of many such third-party sellers, have recognized and are catering to the niche customer category of incels.
The Urban Dictionary describes an incel as “someone who is celibate but doesn’t want to be” or otherwise a “Darwinian loser”.
“The collective internet mind imagines incels as broke, fat, and living in their mother’s basements. But, sometimes these fat incels living in basements also have a lot of money to spend,” said Jon Jraper, creative director of Manhattan advertising firm Cerling Stooper. “We have proposed targeting this niche to many big brands, P&G, Haier, even Nike, but none of them want to be associated with incels. It’s good that these small businesses are taking their money.”
It is not all hunky-dory though. Some of the products being sold by these third-parties have caused a lot of furore among the end-receivers. The products range from slightly inconveniencing to straight-up dangerous and gaslighty. As can be expected, the weeks around Valentine’s day are a peak period for such product sales as spurned incels put on a mask and present presents. With emotions and consequently commissions running high, Amazon has been hesitant in getting these products off its marketplace.
Many a woman in recent times has received phone cases that slowly become slimy and just stick to the phone and/or the hand holding it, keychains that make innocuous sounds at random intervals, rouge or other cosmetic powders that grow in colour intensity with time, and other such inconveniences. While the products themselves are not grievously harmful, the intentions behind their presentation may be.
Other more dangerous products available for purchase include vibrators with hidden explosives, watches that lose and gain time arbitrarily, table ornaments that can alter electronics’ internal timekeepers, faux jewellery that cause colour blindness etc.
Feminists have called on governments to enforce product safety regulations more strictly and to force Amazon to ban sale of such products. But, for now, snubbing a proposal remains as dangerous as embracing it.
Transport Ministry to Increase Car’s Minimum Ground Clearance Due to Overlaying of Roads
SUVs See a Spike in Average Wait Time From 2 Months to 1 Year
New Delhi, Feb 2022: The Ministry of Roads, Transport and Highways of India announced that by 2025, all new cars being produced by the market will need to have a minimum ground clearance of 300 mm, as opposed to the current industry standard of 170 mm in India. The decision was announced by Transport Secretary Sri. Pave M. Sadak, to instant uproar from industry actors, academia, and civilians. Additionally, the mandate also stated that cars with clearance less than 210 mm will have to be phased out from usage by 2025, with cars with less than 300 mm being phased out by 2028.
The issue with ground clearance arose due to the overlaying of roads, a practice where concrete or tar is poured over existing roads to even it out, rather than engage in repairs of the roads. As a result, cars have issues while switching roads if their ground clearance is low. Overlaying has resulted in road height also increasing with respect to buildings on many streets in major Indian cities, causing regular sedans’ chassis to hit the road while they try to get onto the road from their buildings.
The Indian Car Owners Association (ICOA), an organisation that fights for the rights of car owners, was absolutely outraged at this decision and took to every medium possible to voice their thoughts. “This is against the principles of liberty outlined in the constitution. We have a right to own whatever cars we like, they cannot impose arbitrary standards. It is unconstitutional. We have filed briefs with the Supreme Court to fight this decision,” said Mr. H. Amare Gaadiyon, head of Public Relations at the ICOA. “The phasing out of existing cars is most disturbing. Why don’t they just decrease the heights of roads and stop overlaying? This is madness,” he said in a phone interview with The Grimes.
We thought he raised an interesting question. Why don’t we simply decrease the heights of roads across the country and set standards there? We reached out to prominent Civil Engineering experts across the country, and got a reply from the IIT Madras Civil Engineering Department.
“We were approached by the government 6 months ago to propose a solution to this problem,” said Ms. S Sreeram, a masters’ student at the department. “We were supposed to provide a workable solution in 6 months, which we said would be impossible. Nonetheless, we tried.”
“We published a preliminary report recommending that setting standards for the maximum road heights was a workable solution, and more time would be required to study the problem,” she said. “They seem to have thrown that report out the window in favour of increasing ground clearance of cars.”
In the meantime, many environmental activists have lauded the move as it will potentially decrease the number of cars on Indian roads, and have moved the government to increase spending on public transport instead. The Transport Ministry was unavailable for additional comment. Nirmala Sitharaman, the Union Finance Minister, added during her press briefing that given that the economy has already gone down due to less car purchases by millennials, it would not be further affected by the move, and any damage to be done was already done.
In Other News
Govt. Recommends Skiers Blackface to Help Rescue In Case of Avalanches
Independent Commission Finds Yellowface Better
Amazon Sets Up Physical Store in Zucc’s Metaverse
Prime customers to get virtual products instantaneously
China to Place Massive Order of Old Cars From India; To Decrease Road Height
Russia Ponders Whether Scrap Metal Good Enough for WW3-Edition Kalashnikovas
Meow,
momo and eggsy