MP caught playing Candy Crush at committee meeting: I'll ‘try’ not to do it again Conservative MP Nigel Mills has been caught playing the popular and addictive mobile game Candy Crush Saga for over two-and-a-half hours while supposedly actively participating in a discussion on national pension reforms. Images and a video were published (paywall) in The Sun of the politician playing the game on his iPad in a …
When did puzzle games become moron fodder?
Anyway, this article fails to address the real issue. Candy Crush Saga only gives players one life every thirty minutes unless you make an IAP, when you get given two hours of unlimited lives. If Mills was seen playing the game over two and a half hours, he must have paid to do it - and if this was an officially issued device, it would be linked to a business account so he would have frittered away taxpayer's money to do it. We're all in this austerity lark together, are we?
"When did puzzle games become moron fodder?"
When you spend weeks doing essentially the same puzzle, making it a pattern recognition exercise, rather than a puzzle. and one with no use in the real world, to boot.
Let's not pretend Candy Crush is an intellectual exercise: Judging from the requests to play I get sent on FB and who they come from, it's really not.
Yes, if one is a complete loser, but should he happened to have won any games, no lives would be lost, and friends can give lives to one another, last I checked I had a couple of hundred I could "cash" in. Likely I have so many as I never play. to busy being a Commentard.
Which is why I no longer use my real name.
Given that the job of an MP is arguably more important than mine (although also arguably much less skilled), I feel a dressing down at least is in order. If I played games during a meeting, even if it's the boring bits, and got caught doing it (ahem), I'd expect to be in the shit for it.
Who is going to give an MP "a dressing-down"? Who, exactly, is their boss?
Their party leader or chief whip? Nope, all they could do (at most) is boot him from the party. He'd still be an MP. And he won't do that over an issue like this, because of that saying about urinating into vs out of tents.
Their local constituency party? Closer. They could deselect him, but that wouldn't actually sack him from his job - just mean he'd have to work a bit harder come next election.
His constituents? They can, in theory, boot him from his job. Unfortunately the notice period is pretty long ("until the next election"), and there's no way of finding their aggregate opinion, or delivering it to the MP, before that time.
Really, the most attractive thing about the whole job is the lack of accountability...
In spite of appearances, it probably was work. He was doubtless thinking through strategies to reduce the number of unemployed / immigrants / benefit claimants / critical journalists with the app as a kind of colour-coded visual metaphor.
I can imagine Ian McGregor using space invaders in much the same way as he plotted the miners strike. Good job Blair never discovered Missile Command and wasn't good enough at Deus Ex.
Well kinda, if you spent 2.5 hours on said comment, in a meeting, while you were supposed to be engaged in decisions of national importance, and you had been elected to your job by thousands of citizens, rather than just answering a jobserve ad, and your employer actually gave you the iPad for free...
Come off it, it's what you'd expect. Obviously your and my pension aren't important matters for MPs because they have their own gold plated (and utterly undeserved) scheme. But if your and my pension don't matter, what does matter to our political elite?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11278246/Champagne-wars-grip-Parliament-as-peers-slam-Commons-vintage.html
Wasting taxpayer money playing iPad games, when he was meant to be working, on his iPad that was bought for him by the taxpayer!
http://www.parliament.uk/site-information/foi/foi-and-eir/commons-foi-disclosures/information-technology/ipad-trial-house-of-commons/
http://www.parliament.uk/documents/foi/2012-foi-mps-participate-in-ipad-trial-F12-131.pdf
Brilliant!
Yes/no - more of a chance some Luddite gets major legislation passed while the others are 'busy'. Might even feel better depending *what* games they're playing... say Clash of Clans... where you might hear statements like, 'Yeah, your TownHall ain't sh*t, you non-defense-designing bastard!, I'm 100%'ing your azz muaaahahahahah'...
;)
> “It was a long meeting on pension reforms, which is an important issue that I take very seriously,”
Not as seriously, it would appear, as moving little shapes around on an electronic toy. I'm torn between being annoyed at his lack of responsibility or being relieved that at least while he's wasting his days playing inconsequential little games, he's not doing what most politicians do: devising bad laws that neither achieve their intended purpose nor are tight enough to stop their loopholes being exploited.
Maybe we should encourage all Home Office staff to stop devising new regulations and spend all their time playing Candy Crush instead. That way we might just get to retain a modicum of our civil liberties?
"being relieved that at least while he's wasting his days playing inconsequential little games, he's not doing what most politicians do: devising bad laws that neither achieve their intended purpose nor are tight enough to stop their loopholes being exploited"
Actually I think that this is incorrect. Most laws (including the myriad bad ones) are actually drafted (and therefore devised) by government departments - and thus by unelected civil servants. The politicians set a vague strategy, argue over a handful of key points, but then let the civil servants draft some turgid, overly complex rules in hundreds if not thousands of pages of legalistic claptrap, and then the pols rubber stamp it without reading or understanding it. That's why (for example) tax law runs to thousands of pages of impenetrable nonsense, and global multinationals can drive a cart and horses through the loopholes. Or another example is the 2006 Companies Act, around 700 pages, which was passed with no MPs admitting to knowing even the full scope of the act, never mind the detailed contents.
Whilst the evidence rather suggests that civil servants and politicians interact to ensure the worst possible outcome, what our Candy Crush playing friend should have been doing is paying attention so that whatever came out of the committee was at least relevant, and in particular trying to stop bad stuff becoming law without proper oversight. If ever a group collectively suffered from ADHD then it is the occupants of the palace of Westminster.
> you never had to attend meetings where some parts had nothing to do with your work
Yup, frequently
> You never sat doodling or planning your dinner until it was your turn to present something?
I've never shown open disrespect for the people who *are* presenting or engaging in those parts of the meeting. ISTM you can either play little games (or as happens more often in my world: log onto the servers and spend the time futzing about, doing "work") or you can expand your sphere of knowledge or you can simply "sleep with your eyes open".
But since most of the meetings I attend that aren't relevant to me, are at the behest of the people who are paying my consultancy rates, I feel I owe it to them to at least feign interest and project a professional image of my employers.
"hile he's wasting his days playing inconsequential little games, he's not doing what most politicians do: devising bad laws that neither achieve their intended purpose nor are tight enough to stop their loopholes being exploited."
That would imply them spending a period more than one day coming up with the laws, I suspect that's not very likely
"Unless all you scandalised commentards spend EVERY SINGLE SECOND at work ON work, then perhaps you should STFU."
Hello pot. Have you met my water-boiling friend?
Firstly, we're discussing politics, not engaged in being hypnotised by bright colours.
Secondly, most of our jobds are pretty mundane and pointless compared to... y'know: Running the fscking country.
This won't be popular, but, MPs are representative (as well representatives of) 'the people' as a mass. They are certainly not all heros, but not *all* of them are selfish out-for-themselves scum, as with the public.
If you prefer a country run exclusively by those with inherited wealth, that is your choice. Our version of democracy is heavily flawed, attracting the power and money crazed as well as those with a genuine intention to improve the lot of the masses, but tarring them all with the same brush is a little disingenuous.
All our MPs **are** born to wealth and most are Oxbridge Etonian-oldboys.
They do not, in any shape or form, represent the public. They work for the tax evading multi-nationals who decide on what laws we get.
There is no control over MP's actions and no real choice for the long suffering British tax payer.
It gets better. This morning on the BBC World Service there was a segment on this in which a nice spokeslady said it wasn't as bad as it sounds because people do e-mail in meetings all the time on their phones and studies show that the *way* we do e-mail on our phones during meetings is in a "game-like" manner which doesn't mean we are not paying attention and like that.
If it had been in real time (New York, me) I'd have missed my train to call in and point out that having people do e-mail on a phone during a meeting is a) fucking annoying to everyone else and 2) a sure sign that the mail-fiddler is NOT paying attention.
My boss calls meetings in which all he does is fiddle with his blackberry while people try for the umptytumpth time to explain whatever it is he needed a meeting to understand in the first place. These meetings are notable for taking three times as long as necessary* and ending with the meeting convener no wiser on account of him not actually being at the meeting he called most of the time it was happening.
* given that the necessity of having this meeting in the first place is something that would go away if the boss did.
Hackers the Movie (takedown): Lowe to Mitnik via telephone:
"Dude, are you typing whilst your talking to me, you know how rude that is, right!?"
Mitnik: "Will that be window or isle?"
Lowe: "What???"
Mitnik: "Nothing, im just checking in my luggage, you know how I like to travel light, besides you cant catch what you cant see!!"
I bet he's one of the bastards complaining that the standard of champagne would suffer if the catering budget was cut.
Roll on the General Election! Time to make a positive change....
Ah hold on. We actually need an alternative that isn't a wanker, crook, racist, or idiot. Coalition again me thinks!
Hey sarge, ave you got dem youtubies on your submarine boat? time to ban all that phone tube rubbish because it maps out the Submarines! How about you wont see it coming until the next general election, where the republicans take over the floor with Clint eastwood saying "over my dead hands!" along side every other repulican, oh shit, they're in trouble now... Chuck Noris & Steven Seagal are all gunning to kick there ass!
The only acceptable outcome is the MP being dismissed and a by-election held.
MPs must be held to the same standards of any other **EMPLOYEE**.
But, of course, nothing will actually happen because MPs can do what they want without censure. Up to and including kiddy fiddling!
A decade ago when I was attending an ISO Standards meeting in Atlanta I noticed that most of the American delegates were playing various games on their laptops, I had a paper based note book on the grounds that I wasn't being paid enough to own a laptop then (poor me - ahhh) - but when they had a brown-out I was the only one not to loose my notes (yay for paper-based information systems) - but I still doodled when bored. So nothing new about this - that MP got caught thats all.
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