How can two drive together unless they are agreed?

Historically, the rules of the road embody the consensus of experts (and some non-experts) about how vehicles should drive to avoid collisions, and ensure reasonably efficient transport in a variety of conditions. A standard side of the road is used, the speed limits are set according to what is reasonably safe in a wide range of weather conditions, and one gives way at a yield sign and stops at red lights.

Historically, government has codified the rules of the road as law, and provided means to enforce these rules: a licence test to ensure familiarity with the rules, and officers to enforce at least some of the rules.

Historically the driving public has agreed with the consensus of the experts, as reflected by law, and implemented their regulations with minor improvements: adjusting the speed limit upwards by 10% and from 100km/h to 120km/h, trundling through stop signs in 1st gear, stopping in no-stopping areas and loading zones for only a short time, and reluctantly paying fines.

However, the consensus is slipping.

Have a look around Johannesburg. The median speed of cars in a 60km/h zone is 82km/h. 80km/h translates to 117km/h. 120km/h means 135km/h. The emergency lane and the pavement are fair game, as is driving in the oncoming traffic for short distances and sometimes more. Adding extra turning lanes, driving over solid lines and painted islands, having fictional or absent licence plates, bribery and non-payment of fines is no longer the exclusive preserve of the taxi industry.

At some point, the reasonable man must admit that the old consensus no longer exists, and the “full force of the law” is of no force at all. We are almost there.

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When I am king …

There is a problem with democracy: over time, people choose the most corrupt, lazy and inefficient people in the country to be rulers. Here’s how it works: people of good character who are skilled in their work are busy: they are working. They have no time to waste in the uncertain business of getting elected. Beggars and swindlers end up getting elected for specious reasons. Once in government, they monopolise communication in the country, so that the most outrageous liars and storytellers can entrench themselves in power: they can move the national debate from real issues to fantasies that they make up – and cover the wise in the the foolish noise of their choice. As Douglas Adams pointed out, “Anyone who is capable of getting themselves elected President should by no means be allowed to hold the office.”
I have a solution: election by lot. It would work something like jury duty, but with statistics that do not lie instead of lawyers that do.
Every year, 1 fifth of the representatives would be retired (leaving 80% to maintain continuity). Replacements would be chosen. To elect a representative, the election would run like this:

  • The voter’s roll would be numbered, from 0 to the number of eligible voters (less 1). The one thing they will not be doing is voting. Maybe we can tweak it a little, and make it only taxpayers, but that may unnecessarily exclude people that do not have means.
  • Each political party can nominate a a number of a person on the voters roll. Don’t worry: they won’t get their number.
  • To the sum of the numbers given by the political parties the electoral officer publicly adds a random number to the choices of all of the parties, and take the remainder after dividing by the number of voters. This is our representative: some random dude. Poor bloke. We took everyone’s numbers, we added them together, we added our own random number, and he’s toast. We’ll need a few spares too.

The person that is nominated, besides being alive, and of proper age, must serve in government. He has no choice (well, almost). As this task will take him away from his day job, the governing authority will supply and pay for as many people as it takes to fill his place: to mow his field, to run his business, take care of her children, weed his garden, etc. He can refuse this offer and accept compensation instead, equal to his personal income plus some generous percentage.
There will be some people who simply cannot leave their work, or who don’t particularly care for working in government. These people must be fined some significant percentage of their annual income – some powerful disincentive to turning down the responsibility without proper reason. Also, if they wish to retire from office early (e.g. before 2 years), they must pay the fine. If someone is chosen who is ineligible, the fine can be waived (e.g. if they are the accused in a long running criminal case).
What happens if we elect a bunch of criminals and gangsters to office? Well, this is hardly different from what we have now, except that there is the advantage that when they start in office, they are not experienced in political subterfuge.
Is it stupid? Maybe, but so what! It solves so many problems:

  • Representation: people who are excluded can be represented
  • A lying politician says he will plunder the coffers of the government, and give to the majority. If he’s elected by lot, he has nothing to lie about.
  • The election is done and dusted, and the loser in power declares himself to be the winner (it happens all the time in Africa, these days). If he’s elected by lot, there is really no question about the process. It is simple: he was on the voter’s roll, and he was not the one chosen.
  • A political party becomes corrupt and doles out favours to office bearers and nephews, or those that can throw chairs best. They rotate term limits between the most corrupt. If their members are elected by lot, they can lobby the authorities just like anyone else.

When I am king, I will implement this system. It will be easy: we start with a small proportion chosen by lot, and we expand it to be the majority (90%). The last 10% is to throw a bone to the political parties, who do occasionally have worthwhile ideas. The only sticky bit is getting myself out of power and leaving the system in place. How long will that take? I might have to be king for a while …

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How to change the oil on your car

I changed the oil in my car. Not only that, but I also changed the air filter and spark plugs. It was great. Here is how you do it.

You will need the following supplies. Most of these are readily available at good retail outlets:

  • 1 car
  • 1 air filter
  • 4 spark plugs
  • 1 oil filter
  • 2 large cans of motor oil
  • 1 large bowl, or the cut-off bottom of a bucket
  • some building sand and a wheelbarrow
  • decomposing stuff
  • 1 compost heap

These are the steps you take:

  1. Place a bowl under the sump.
  2. Use a size 19 spanner to remove the sump plug. Note with satisfaction how the oil drains into the bowl.
  3. Take off the old oil filter by punching a hole in it with a screwdriver, and put on the new oil filter – only hand tight, as per the instructions.
  4. While the oil drains, put in the new air filter.
  5. Take out the old spark plugs and put in the new ones. (Is that oil on plug number 4? I wonder if scraping away the muck on the outside of the plug will make it seat better?)
  6. Answer the phone and do stuff.
  7. Tip out decomposing stuff into the compost heap.
  8. Put in the new oil. This takes most of one of the cans of oil, so you can do what I did and pour most of the can of oil into the engine. Don’t forget to put the engine cap back on.
  9. Finish putting in the spark plugs – being careful not to tighten them too tight.
  10. Look under the car, and discover that the new oil has drained through the engine. Put in the sump plug with a size 19 spanner.
  11. Find some more oil and fill up the engine.
  12. Check the price tag on the oil: R156.00.
  13. Move the car, and bring the building sand in the wheelbarrow, and spread the sand so that it absorbs the oil. Find places around the garden where you don’t want grass to grow, and distribute the oily sand there. When you move the car, if you have one available, you can park the car under a shady tree, where well-fed birds rest, to relieve themselves during the heat of the day.

You may find that by improvising, you can do without the wheelbarrow. I need a permanent marker to write something about this on my forehead.

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Installing ruby on rails, or not

Well, I thought I would install ruby on rails, and run it as a user under apache’s mod_fcgi. This is entirely possible: the user account can run any code, and installing an entire library of ruby scripts should be straightforward, with write access to the user’s home directory. For good measure, the collected wisdom of the Internet says it can be done. And I have root. Cool.

The first obstacle was rewriting the fcgi wrapper so that it will launch ruby scripts with appropriate limits so that they will not kill other processes in the shared environment. That went well – three lines of new code in the existing wrapper. It is a wonderful piece of work. We will run ruby on rails. Life will be sweet. Customers will be happy.

Then I downloaded a rails-based CMS from radiantcms.org, extracted it, installed ruby for CentOS, and fired it up. Surprise! It didn’t work. I found the public/dispatch.fcgi program, and ran it. It complained about missing include files. Aargh. Time to read the instructions. Oh look, the installation instructions say to compile the config/database.yml file with “rake db” or whatever.. That’s pretty horrid, since rake was not in the CentOS ruby package. Where to get it?
Oh well, the current version of rails demands ruby 1.9.2, and not 1.8.7 as shipped with CentOS, so it looks like I’ll either have to trust some flaky package from some helpful person out there, or compile it from source. It looks like this particular project will require a script when I need it on another machine. Not to worry, I thought, we’ll cross that bridge when we come back to it, and I downloaded the current version of ruby, and compiled it from source. That should sort out all the troubles. Hey, look there, I got rake.
So I raked according to the instructions. No joy. So I installed the gem version of rails, or radiant and a few version-specific dependencies. Suddenly I’m running as root, since gem does not understand the concept of installing code for a user.
gem install mysql
gem install rails
gem install i18n
gem install rails
gem install i18n -v 0.4.1
gem install -y rails
gem install RedCloth
gem install fcgi
gem install radiant

And after all this I got this:
bash-3.2$ ./dispatch.fcgi
Could not load extension from file: archive_extension.
#
Could not load extension from file: smarty_pants_filter_extension.
#
:29:in `require': no such file to load -- fcgi (MissingSourceFile)

Oh dear. How about I just install the fcgi gem?
# gem install fcgi
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing fcgi:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
/usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb
checking for fcgiapp.h... no
checking for fastcgi/fcgiapp.h... no
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers. Check the mkmf.log file for more
details. You may need configuration options.
Provided configuration options:
--with-opt-dir
--without-opt-dir
--with-opt-include
--without-opt-include=${opt-dir}/include
--with-opt-lib
--without-opt-lib=${opt-dir}/lib
--with-make-prog
--without-make-prog
--srcdir=.
--curdir
--ruby=/usr/bin/ruby
--with-fcgi-dir
--without-fcgi-dir
--with-fcgi-include
--without-fcgi-include=${fcgi-dir}/include
--with-fcgi-lib
--without-fcgi-lib=${fcgi-dir}/lib
Gem files will remain installed in /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/fcgi-0.8.8 for inspection.
Results logged to /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/fcgi-0.8.8/ext/fcgi/gem_make.out

Huh? Now, everyone with the most basic knowledge of rails or radiant or ruby knows exactly how to fix this. However, I will never acquire this basic knowledge, as I have no more patience with this series of continual roadblocks. After a few hours of trying, I’m sick of it. It is a horrible system.

My feeling about ruby on rails:

  • It is immature. Mature technology just works. It does not just work.
  • It will never come near to replacing the horrible monstrosity that is php – not in this form.
  • You absolutely require root access to be able to get it going, and therefore to maintain it as well. This means it is not suitable for a shared platform.

This is calculated to attract angry attention from those that love and/or wrote ruby on rails (or maybe read a glowing HOWTO about it). They will say things like I did not pay for it, they will point out how thankless and ungrateful I am for their hard work. They will say “if you want help, you should have a better attitude.” They might even notice that I am stupid. They might be right, but I should mention that it was not entirely my idea to install their junk.

So what now?  If anyone asks, we (the folks I work for) do support Ruby on Rails.  We will provide you with a dedicated server and you can install it there.  Hang, if you ask nicely, we might even install it for you.  You can manage your own private dependency hell on your own private server, and not break anyone else’s dependency hell.

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SMTP innovations for virii

It took a long time, but finally an email-borne virus has bypassed the MX records for a domain, where there is an anti-spam, anti-virus and anti-mail scanner, and delivered itself directly to the target server. This was a very obvious thing to do, but for some reason, it hasn’t happened before – presumably because virus writers have been busy reaping the low-hanging fruit, or just maybe because they didn’t realise just how many domains deliver mail to a server with an easily guessable name.

This is what the virus smelled like:

Subject: [virus Win32/Merond.O worm]
You have received A Hallmark E-Card!
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2010 09:27:45 +0200

In the mail log, it looked like this:

2010-11-17 09:28:01 [15397] 1PIcQq-00040L-2X <= e-cards@hallmark.com H=(hallmark.com) [4.3.90.120]:61593 I=[19.3.40.91]:25 P=esmtp S=686941 T=”You have received A Hallmark E-Card!” from for shaun@it.co.za

Avira has a nice rundown of the virus – http://www.avira.com/en/support-threats-description/tid/5101/worm_merond.o.html They don’t seem to have noticed this about the SMTP engine though.
How do we work around this, and encourage our visiting viruses to send themselves via the well armoured front door, with its scanner, and avoid the back door which has no protections?

  • We could add some rules to accept SMTP only from the scanner (pretty complex rules those would be). That’s not going to happen
  • We could firewall port 25, but there is enough mail that delivers directly to make this impractical.
  • We could drop the A-record for the domain, which might be what the SMTP engine used, but the www. and mail. records would work just as well.
  • We could move the mail server to a different address that is not as easy to guess
  • We could put in a transparent proxy server of some sort to enforce the policy

All of those ideas work well for one or two domains, but for a few thousand domains all of them are a stack of work, so none of them work. So what we will probably do is wait for all the windows desktops in the world to catch viruses and die …<sigh/> Alternatively, it is just possible that the virus did an A- record lookup after failing the MX record lookup, and this posting serves only to let the cat out of the /bin.

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The tooth mouse drops in

So the cousins have a tooth mouse. It delivers a toothbrush in exchange for an appropriately placed tooth, and lives in a drain pipe at their house. They have seen it – if not the tooth mouse, then the drain pipe. So when we visited, the idea was exchanged. The meme sprouted wings, and eventually our six year old asked “will the tooth mouse bring me a tooth brush for my tooth” (or some paraphrase of the same).
We don’t like father Christmas, since he’s really not Jesus, and we’re against the Easter Bunny for very much the same reasons, but there is no namespace collision when it comes to compensation for milk teeth in good condition, so we said to give it a try.
The tooth was wrapped in tissue paper … no, loo paper … and place in a shoe under the bed.
In the dead of night, an exchange occurred: the tooth vanished, and was replaced with:

  • A note
  • More loo paper
  • R3.00
  • A toothbrush
  • Lots of funny little black things: in the note, in the paper, in the shoe

The note apologised that the toothbrush was second hand. Interestingly, the child’s own toothbrush simultaneously disappeared from the bathroom, and the second hand toothbrush bore a remarkable resemblance to it. The funny little black things were carefully treasured. No comment could be extracted from the child as to what they were. We didn’t take any photos, but they looked a lot like pearled wheat which had been painted black with a marker pen.
Around this time we got some silk worms. These critters eat up mulberry leaves at almost the same rate that they dry out, and eject tiny little black crumb like things.
“What are those?” we asked.
“It’s silk worm poo,” said the elder.
“Really?” said I.
“Yes, like the tooth mouse poo!” said the younger.
We are carefully evading questions of whether the tooth mouse really exists. I’m expecting a pearled wheat plant to come up in the garden some time, but I’m not sure where to look.

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Jungle and tree poetry

So Grace, being six years old, wrote a poem. She doesn’t write so well, so her mother wrote it down. This is how it went:

Over in the jungle lived a mother tiger
with a little tiger too
Climb said the mother
We climb, said the two
So they climbed and they climbed
Until the night broke through

Not to be outdone, Sharon, who is four, produced this poem:

Once upon a time there was a tree.
The end
And there was a little house.
The end
And a mother squirrel and a tree squirrel
And the mother squirrel said,
“Gather food, gather food,”
and they did say,
“We gather food, we gather food,”
The end

Not only this, but it turns out that Grace’s poem is also available in a variation using less dangerous non-tiger cats:

Over in the meadow in a little warm tree
lived an old mother cat
with her little catties three
Climb said the mother,
“We climb!” said the three
So they climbed and they climbed to the tippy tippy tree.

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Vet your pet doctor carefully

So we had this cat – it was called Nyip.  Having a cat meant that we did not have birds in our garden, which was bad, but more specifically, we did not have birds in our fruit trees, which was rather nice. One Sunday morning, our cat Nyip got run over in the road.  As the daughter put it, “it was crossing the road, and a car came, and bonk! ran it over”.  So we didn’t have that cat anymore.  Well, at least, not in working order.  We were almost late for church.

Right on cue, evidence of mice appeared in the garage, chewing up everything except rat poison, so we need to replace the cat.

Now, I should mention, that when we got this cat Nyip, it was a girl cat.  Girl cats are nice, because they have cute kittens, and they get all aggressive with you when you try to play with the things, not to mention how aggressive the little things themselves are.  Anyhow, as time went by, we wondered increasingly whether “it’s a female, I think” was more “I think” and much less “it’s a female”.  So, when we came back from the vet, we had this cat, this boy cat, called Nyip.  Years later he became a flat cat, and then we only had his mortal remains, which didn’t control rodents in the same way that they did when they were alive.

So, we organised this other cat.  We decided that we should get a girl cat.  The same little girl that wanted to see how rabbits lay their eggs said she would like to see how cats have kittens.  This is an important learning experience that we fully support.  Besides this, being six is a full time job, and any distraction on the side is welcome.

So we got the cat.  She came with lots of complementary fleas.  We washed ten off it in the sink on the first day, and another 4 the next day, and another 3 the next week, and then we gave up.  Silly cat doesn’t like being bathed. The wife stopped objecting to the darling animal being called “fleabag”, even though her proper name is Astrophe.

Astrophe is a great name for a cat, you have to admit.  It even sounds like a girl cat.  We took her to the vet, to get vaccinated.  This reminds me – I wonder about people who don’t vaccinate their kids (you know who you are), whether they vaccinate their pets, sheep, cattle and goats ….  Anyhow, the vet vaccinated the cat.  He washed her in vicious viscous flea-repellant stuff, and mentioned, with great compassion that there was something to tell us about. She is a boy cat.

So, that is the sad tail of our cat Astrophe. This has been a learning experience for all of us. Was it the vaccination that did it? We’re not quite sure, but the next time we take a cat to the vet, we are going to make sure that we do not let the animal out of our sight, and so, hopefully, avoid a recurrence of this sex change. If you are considering vaccinating your cat, please be careful.

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Pineapple beer

I mentioned at work that I had made some pineapple beer, and it had gone mouldy, and the consensus opinion on this was “WHAT!?” and “do you drink beer?”  Well, as it happens, the answer to both of these questions is the same: “huh?”  Firstly, pineapple beer is kind of like ginger beer, and secondly, it’s not particularly difficult to make.  Today I looked up the recipe for pineapple beer on the Internet, and found, lo and behold, that I make it all wrong.

According to the Huletts sugar recipe, the pineapple skin should be scrubbed clean. Another recipe said the pineapple should be boiled. All of the recipes I saw say you must use yeast.  And raisins.  And maybe you must crush the pineapple.

So, to rid the world of these misconceptions, here is the simple recipe for pineapple beer: a family “secret”:

Ingredients:

  • A pineapple
  • A few cups of sugar
  • A big plastic mixing bowl

Method:

  1. Buy a pineapple. Take it home. Doing this kind of thing in a pineapple shop is seriously anti-social.
  2. Peel the pineapple. Throw away the spiky leaves, but keep everything yellow – but don’t throw anything away right yet
  3. Eat the inside of the pineapple. If necessary, share it with your family, or use it in a salad. This is really important. If your kids are anything like mine, they will explain that little children don’t drink beer, so now is a good time to let them have some benefit from the pineapple before you monopolise it. It will make them stop complaining, and once there is only peel left, you’ll be ready for the next step.
  4. Fill up the mixing bowl to mostly-full with luke-warm water.  Not boiling water.  Really — believe me — you want this water to be a nice gentle temperature.  I get my luke-warm water from the geyser, and add a bit of coldish water. Update: yeast does not like chlorine and detergent – so if you have a mixing bowl that was rinsed properly after being washed, and water that has boiled from which the chlorine has evaporated, that will work best.
  5. Throw in the pineapple skins.
  6. Cover the pineapple skins with sugar.  That should take about three or four cups of sugar to do.  See what you can do to submerge the pineapple skins in the water.  Don’t try to dissolve the sugar in the water.
  7. Cover the bowl with a cloth — something that will let some light in, but not fruit flies or flies.  A baking drying rack and a couple of pegs can help.  The most common way of losing your batch of pineapple beer is that the cloth sags into the water.  Also, don’t do what I did, and cover with another bowl.  Nobody makes light pineapple beer, and covers it with a bowl, because that’s dark enough for mould to grow.  Update: Ants love pineapple beer, and carry mould.  To keep ants out, put your brewing container in a basin of water, or on glasses swimming in bowls of water.  Ants dislike swimming somewhat.
  8. Leave it for two to four days at room temperature.  If your room is really cold, maybe look for a warmer room.
  9. After 2 days, check that the water is still sweet.  Add another cup or two of sugar.
  10. When it starts to look bubbly and disgusting after two to four days, fish out the pineapple skins.  If you are foolish enough to taste them, you will notice that they have lost all of their sweetness.  If it doesn’t bubble, then throw it out, and don’t use that pineapple again.  If you’re feeling adventurous, you can add some yeast, but I don’t know where you’re going to get it.
  11. Strain the mixture through a sieve, and put it in the fridge to chill.

And that’s it. So, where’s the yeast? Well, it turns out, that if you’re in a flaming hurry, you can add your own yeast. It also turns out that the yeast was on the pineapple all along, trying to eat it up. It wasn’t doing particularly well at this task until you cut it up, and dunked it in water. If you boil your pineapple, you kill the natural yeast that was eating it, and also your chances of bubbles in your pineapple beer. If you wash your pineapple thoroughly, you’ll probably get rid of that yeast too, and your pineapple beer won’t fly.

What about chopping the bits up?  Well, you can, I suppose, if you want to.  Chances are you did enough chopping when you served the pineapple to the family.  Also, if the yeast is hungry enough, it will disassemble your pineapple skins for you, and chopping is going to make a very small difference to that.

Disclaimer: being made with random yeasts, this pineapple beer may or may not kill you. It hasn’t killed me yet.  Have a good sip, and wait for the headache.  YMMV.

Alternative ending: after 3 days, you find that your pineapple beer has no sugar, so you hastily add some in the hope of rescuing it.  After 5 days, you forget to check it, and after 7 days, you discover it, and to avoid a household incident, you throw it down the sink.

Note:  I picked out the mouldy chunks of pineapple, and drank the rest.  The family seems scared …

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Mr van Sitttert, I presume

The “problem”: On our Johannesburg roads, there is a grand tradition of tailgating. Big cars sit on the tails of little cars. Little cars sit on the tails of big cars. Huge hulking trucks sit on the tails of anyone they can catch up with. Taxis sit on the tails of those who go too slowly, and hoot cheerfully, as they hurtle along well above the speed limit together. Everyone is in on it. I think they are one happy family — the Van Sitterts — want hulle hou van sittert op het stert van het motor voor hulle.
At 80 km/h to 120 km/h, a typical tailgater keeps a following distance of 2 to 3 metres. This is a following distance of 0.090 seconds (90 milliseconds). This is a little less than the recommended 3 seconds, but do not fear — the people who drive like this all have razor sharp reaction times, so this seldom causes accidents. However, on the rare occasion that the driver in front needs to brake or swerve, the man behind has no chance at all. Ditto the man behind him. If anything at all happens to which they need to react, they don’t have time. However, this seldom happens, except when there are accidents. I wonder if this could lead to a multi-car pile-up?
The “motive”: I have worked out the motivation of tailgaters, and along with it the secret to removing tailgaters. It doesn’t work for everyone — just the “habit” tailgaters. The “angry” tailgaters are just upset with you, and anything you do, short of driving over the car in front of you, or leaving the road in dust and flames, is an inadequate response.
Why does the habitual tailgater drive so close? Are they just mindless people who insist on doing as stupid does, and insist on courting injury and death? Are they angry with entire classes of people that are not themselves? Are they unaware of the danger? Probably.
The tailgater wants to get there faster. If he is on someone’s tail, he is doing as much as he can get to get to the next stop as fast as he can. The closer he is, the more he is doing to get there. For some reason, you are more likely to get tail-gated when you are exceeding the speed limit than when you are driving at or under the speed limit ….
The “solution”: If you keep a constant speed, your response to his driving is neutral. If you speed up, you affirm him, and he gets a reward — he is going to get to that important traffic jam faster. If you touch the brakes, you are threatening him, and you’ve got a fight on your hands. If you slow down ever so slightly — by just 2km/h per 15 seconds or so — you are telling him (very subtly) that he’s not going to get there faster. You are telling him that the longer he sits on your stupid and slow and decelerating tail the longer it is going to take him to get to the tail of the person in front of you. You are telling him that you are a slow and stupid person. This is not really a change — Mr van Sitterert thought this already when the came to sit on your tail. I get the impression that most tail gators don’t realise when the car in front of them decellerates — since they are in the habit of getting as close as they think is “safe”. They suspect, I suspect, that they have subtly varied the pressure on their lead foot.
So now you’re slowing down, and at this point, Mr van Sittert has a choice. He can slow down and continue to sit on your tail and hope that you repent of your evil slowness, and be less of a octogenarian driver, or he can make a plan. He can get closer, but since your speed is suddenly variable, this increases the chances that he will have to put his foot on the dreaded brake pedal, and your habitual tail gater doesn’t like this. The exertion of varying the petrol supply to his fine vehicle is more than enough exercise. If you time slowing down with a gap for Van Sittert, he will go around.

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