Apparently some guy posted that he’s sick of seeing Palestinian flags being waved all over in his home country. Well, it’s Britishland, so guess what happened next?
Tag: Suckage
Things that totally suck
Supervised Charity
I got Flock’d yesterday.
Outside our local supermarket there are a couple of charity collection bins — you know the ones I mean, those dumpster-looking things with old mailbox-type swinging flaps.
Well lo and behold, as I was doing my monthly closet-cleansing routine I looked up and saw you-know-what perched on a pole above my head.
So after I’d dropped our two Trader Joe’s bags into the slot-door thingy, I waved goodbye to the camera:
…and carried on with my supermarket trip.
I know, I know: the camera is only there because some assholes persist in using the bins for garbage disposal, and the charity clearly wants to pass information of said dumpers on to the fuzz for their attention.
It didn’t make me feel any better, though. So I guess I’ll just be finding another drop which doesn’t play Eye-Spy with its donor class. And if they all start doing it, I’ll just dump our donations into a different kind of dumpster in future.
Yeah, I feel that strongly about it.
And you’ll appreciate the next post, then.
Upgrades
Via Insty, this little gem:
Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update
bricks Samsung smart fridges
Affected fridges “suddenly lost power and stopped functioning immediately after” trying to issue a firmware update through SmartThings, Samsung’s smart home platform, per Star News Korea. The SmartThings app then showed the devices as offline. Some users said that their fridge’s internal display was stuck showing the message “Checking SmartThings app during update.”
There are numerous reports on Samsung’s Korean community forum detailing the problem. Some users claim that they have owned their affected fridge for just a year or less.
“[T]he refrigeration and refrigeration functions themselves did not work normally, so all the food in the refrigerator had to be disposed of,” one user wrote.
Of course, Samsung says that this only affected Korea — like it could never happen anywhere else. Uh huh.
Here’s where all this technology — in appliances, cars, whatever — cocks things up. What has happened is that “must-have” has been largely replaced by “nice to have”, and in the nature of the human condition, a lot of “nice to have” things have become “must-have”. Let’s use fridges as an example.
Must have: maintain a constant temperature that cools or freezes foods. This is the sine qua non of any refrigerator.
Nice to have: a means whereby one may control the temperature (initially, by a manual dial inside / outside the refrigerator), and by extension, a means of notifying the customer when the fridge stops working — e.g. the little light inside doesn’t turn on when the door is opened.
So when the above “nice to have” slowly transforms away from the manual / visual of the fridge itself into “you can now check your fridge’s condition on your phone” (to give but one example), all sorts of failure points are introduced into the process. And that’s the simplest one I can think of; but of course it doesn’t stop there, does it?
Anyway, I can see that at some point you will no longer be able to get a simple fridge like the one your Mom had in her kitchen. Oh no: you’ll only be able to get one that tells you the time, sets variable temperatures inside the fridge by drawer, tells you when the icemaker level drops below a certain point, and so on and so on. All very nice to know, but nowhere close to being “must-have”. (It will also cost three times the amount that a basic fridge used to, and will yield five times the profit to the manufacturer, which is your answer right there.)
And when the upgrades come along (why?), and the whole thing falls over, you’ll be left in the same predicament as the hapless Korean restaurateurs.
I can dream, can’t I?
Oil Prices
Matt Walsh says we’re wrong to ascribe our current sky-high gas prices to the Iran/Gulf business:
According to Goldman Sachs, the price difference between diesel and gasoline in the United States is now over $60 per barrel, when it was just $3 a barrel one year ago. So there’s much, much more money to be made by refining diesel right now. And because refineries are already operating at full capacity, any effort to refine more diesel means that less gasoline will be refined.
That’s why global exports of gasoline have dropped 24% in the past year. Everyone’s switching to diesel if they can swing it. From March to August of this year, diesel yields in the United States are well above their historical averages, while gasoline yields have been cut. Meanwhile, demand for gasoline hasn’t gone down. In fact, it’s gone up, especially in Russia, since many of their oil refineries have been blown up.
So if Ukraine agreed to stop bombing Russian refineries, and allowed the world’s number-two diesel exporter to get back to refining diesel, that would be great news for the American consumer — unequivocally.
Of course, they won’t — for the simple reason that Ukraine is involved in a life-and-death struggle with the Russians and every gallon of diesel they destroy means less fuel for the invaders. Hard to argue about that. But as Walsh suggests, it’s very definitely a part of the puzzle we face as we deal with the ridiculous cost of gasoline.
Walsh’s article is a long read, but very much worth the patience required. I hadn’t thought about all the linkages in the global petroleum industry, but I should have. The Iran thing is just one part of the issue.
False Expectations
I saw this headline a couple-three days ago:
What to Expect from Trump’s Summit with Xi
…and I have to say, I think there’s little point in actually meeting with anyone from CommieChina, let alone with this little egomaniacal dictator.
I mean, seriously: whatever Xi says, it’s going to be non-committal at best, but mostly it’s going to be a series of outright lies, or else some promises that he has not the slightest intention of keeping.
So what’s the point? I know: “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war” (W.S. Churchill). Didn’t really achieve much with his predecessor at Munich in 1938, and I have the feeling that were Xi to say that the Spratley Islands are his last territorial demand (cf. our friend Adolf re: the Sudetenland), his promise would have about the same degree of credibility.
Ditto any reassurances from Xi that his regime will stop meddling in our internal politics (i.e. our elections, funding subversive organizations and so on). He might say something acceptable, but will it stop? Of course not.
I don’t have any good ideas about what to do with this asshole regime, other than waiting for Xi and his cronies to overstep — let him invade his Poland, so to speak — and then unleash hell on his ass.
The only problem, however, is that most of our brimstone has been emptied into Iran — not that this is necessarily a Bad Thing, mind you — but it does mean that any threats or bluster coming from Trump would be pointless.
We’re not even capable of waging economic warfare on China, mostly because our Treasury is not only empty, but in debt.
Like I said, I’m all out of ideas. But having some kind of meaningless “summit” is a bad one.
Unbearable
I can remain silent no longer.
Oh good grief… there is no such thing as “on accident”.
It’s BY accident, BY accident, BY accident, FFS.
It stings all the more because Stephen is one of the more erudite writers on the Internet, and should know better.