Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

Folded¶

454 words

Via 2lmc articles in The Guardian on supermarket loyalty cards that nicely outlines most of their dangers and even mentions their future as I saw it in California a few years ago: separate prices for card holders, differing by as much as a factor of two. So what to do about it? Rather have no cards at all or take all of them, give wrong data and occasionally swap them with your friends?
I had to chuckle when reading the following passage in aforementioned article:
British retail, especially supermarket retail, is among the most competitive on the planet.
To me British supermarkets always seemed like particularly uncompetitive incompetent businesses: Many poor quality products for extortionate prices. And strictly no more fresh full milk after four in our local Tesco's. Probably the next sentence explains this:
Merlin Stone, business research leader at IBM, explains: "Grocery retailing in the UK is a classic oligopoly, with the top three or four firms accounting for around 60% of the market."
Ah, oligopoly sounds a bit like most competitive with a lower bound on profits agreed upon throughout the industry.
An article on bad dishwasher UI. I never understood those 'sophisticated' UIs on simple appliances. All you want of a dishwasher is switch it on. Usually you'll need a round dial for some kind of programme setting for that and a power switch. Our simple dishwasher has quite a good UI: the dial doubles as a status indicator. My mom's dishwasher is more sophisticated, has status LEDs, but still a simple easy-to-use dial for setting the programme used – needless to say that we always use the same programme anyway.
Microwaves are another example for this. All you'll ever want to do is set the power and a time. The latter preferably using a round dial. For the power most people would probably be happy with a switch having the settings 'full' and 'defrost', relieving them of the question what exactly the difference between 600 and 800 Watts of microwave power might be. The microwave we had in halls at Warwick had so many nasty buttons plus a badly working electronic knob that it was very hard to use. In fact it took us two weeks to realise the thing was broken rather than us being too stupid to use it after moving in.
Supposedly this shows you how to fold a sheet of A0 paper in a way that you can put it into an A4 binder, unfold it while staying in place while seeing the sheet's title all along. I didn't try it.
This looks a bit aged but could be useful: How to make your own bootable OS X CD. Haven't tried it either.