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dylan62

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dilbert.com 13y ago

Selling an idea

dylan62
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Tesco removes 20M items of plastic from Christmas range 6 years ago

Very annoying, but if you want to play the game you can use the app on your phone to sign up and give completely false details (name, address etc). Nothing is posted to you so the false address isn't an issue. And you have the satisfaction of polluting their database with garbage.

Or you could just shop somewhere else, but that is a worse option in my case.

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Netflix stops charging customers who never watch 6 years ago

Netflix impressed me recently with how easy they made it for me to cancel my subscription. It means I will have no hesitation to re-subscribe in future, should I feel the urge.

I just wonder how long it will last. It sometimes feels like all the big successful consumer companies become accountancy-driven scumbags sooner or later. Fingers crossed Netflix can buck the trend and stay a nice company to deal with.

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Why do people put on differing amounts of weight? 10 years ago

I have a lot of time for Michael Moseley, but recently his "Trust me, I'm a Doctor" TV show has been falling into the same traps as the medical establishment, making concrete claims based on the flimsiest of evidence.

In a recent show one of the presenters (admittedly not Moseley) claims "The good news is that we have shown that Olive oil really is good for us", which was a ridiculous claim based on the evidence presented.

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Death to MS Word 14 years ago

> Forcing someone to save a file and open it in another > application just to paste the text is just plain terrible.

That's a general problem with copy/paste, not specific to Word. A great workaround is PureText, which configures WINDOWS+V to paste as text. http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/

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Eric Schmidt criticises education in the UK 15 years ago

> How can this be true when our exam pass rate has been climbing for yonks?

If anyone wants to see grade inflation UK-style in black and white, take a look at these two pages:

http://www.bstubbs.co.uk/gcse.htm http://www.bstubbs.co.uk/a-lev.htm

The bottom table on each page gives the overview across all subjects.

For those not familiar with the British system, GCSEs are taken at age 16, A-levels at 18.

So, for example, in 1989 when I did GCSEs 45% of grades were in the range A-C. This year it's 69.8%.

When I did A-levels in 1991, 78% of grades were in the range A-E. This year it's 97.8%.

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An USB plug that goes both ways 16 years ago

I've always wondered why the USB port is the way it is. It seems such an unbelievably stupid design, but I assume there must be a reason for it. Does anyone have a link, or brief explanation?

Incidentally a search for "why is the usb port such a stupid design?" (without the quotes) brings up nothing remotely relevant on any of the major search engines. Strange.

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By becoming a cook, you can leave processed foods behind 16 years ago

I eat lots of supermarket 'ready meals'. There seems to be an assumption that this is worse for my health that if I prepared and cooked the ingredients myself. Can someone point me to some concrete scientific evidence that that is true, or at least some convincing theories on why it might be true? (Ready meals are really convenient - if I'm going to motivate myself to give them up, I need some concrete evidence that they really are bad for me)

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Scott Adams: Shiny Objects 16 years ago

The difference between gold and fiat currencies is that gold cannot be devalued through inflation. We don't have a machine that can manufacture gold, but central banks can 'manufacture' as much new fiat currency as they like.

I imagine that's why Scott's friends are buying gold. Not because they think the end of the world is nigh, but because they think the dollar is going to have to be devalued to sidestep the crushing debts that have been run up.

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