Sauerkraut Soup

I've lived here for more than 10 years, and only just this moment have I noticed that, unlike for all the other flats on my floor, the flap of the letterbox in my front door is installed on the inside of the door rather than the outside of the door.

Wuh?

I'm looking for something more like the Google of 1998 rather than Google today.

The instant preview thing is, I think, my final straw with it as far as clutter goes. Too many sidebars, topbars and just plain cruft now.

Just clarifying my thoughts here, due to some posts by rozk:

There are those whose goal is The Maintenance of Social Order who feel a commitment to Social Justice must obviously flow from that goal.
There are those whose goal is Social Justice and who feel The Maintenance of Social Order must obviously flow from that goal
There are those whose goal is Social Justice and who feel a commitment to Liberty must obviously flow from that goal.
These people together use the Labour Party as their political vehicle to pursue Social Justice.
Inherent moral compromise and contradiction in that alliance? Of course.

There are those whose goal is Liberty and who feel a commitment to Social Justice must obviously flow from that goal.
Those are those whose goal is Liberty and who feel a commitment to Strengthened Capitalism must obviously flow from that goal.
These people together use the Liberal Democrat party as their political vehicle to pursue Liberty.
Inherent moral compromise and contradiction in that alliance? Oh yes.

Those are those whose goal is Strengthened Capitalism who feel a commitment to Liberty must obviously flow from that goal.
There are those whose goal is Strengthened Capitalism who feel the Maintenance of Social Order must obviously flow from that goal.
There are those whose goal is The Maintenance of Social Order who feel a commitment Strengthened Capitalism must obviously flow from that goal.
These people together use the Conservative (Tory) Party as their political vehicle to Strengthen Capitalism.
Inherent moral compromise and contradiction in that alliance? Ayup.

Notes:

* Liberal Democrats only pull from 2 groups, whilst Labour and the Tories pull from 3 each. That's why the Lib Dems always come third.
* Only pulling from 1 group is the wilderness. See the Liberals from WWII to 1970 when they used to get <10% of the vote, and about 3 seats.
* Which parties pull from which groups changes over the decades, lots of movement in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
* There's an obvious four party arrangement lurking in there, but the .uk FPTP electoral system suppresses that possibility, even three parties are pushing it.
* Two parties with 4 groups each would be, shall we say, 'unwieldy', with a massive cleavage right down the middle of both parties.
* In any coalition situation the Lib Dems as currently constituted are utterly, utterly, screwed, regardless of which party they ally with. One of their groups will feel betrayed and revolt at the polls, whilst the other risks getting digested by the coalition partner. It happened to the pre-War Liberals.
* Electoral reform strong enough to support a national four-party system (AV wouldn't cut it), breaks up all three parties as currently configured, *including* the Lib Dems.

...is that you stop the development webserver using ctrl+break. And break requires fn+pgdn here on my notebook. And the fn key hasn't been working since I installed Windows 7 on it :P

When I was a young lass I wanted to know
If Elves could be physicists, and if so
Whether I would meet them if I went to University.
So I travelled far into to the Realm of Faerie
Where dwelt a Unicorn of SCIENCE!

Oh, you can take the word of Unicorn of SCIENCE!
Upon his theories you can place reliance
Well, at least at speeds below that of C
He'll know whether there can ever be,
Such a thing as an Elf of SCIENCE!

( Collapse )

Notes:

• If anything the robot voice reading out the urls of people I bought things from was even more indecipherable than normal. I think she would be more comfortable if I actually used my credit card to shop physically in actual meatspace or something. It was so indecipherable I had to press the button to be transferred to India.


• 'The computer is down. You'll need to call back later'. Actual quote, from actual Indian call-centre guy. If it was really true, lord that must have been embarrassing thing to have to say. If it wasn't true they should have thought of a more innovative and original excuse for him to use.


• I get the impression that the thing that set the robots off this time was me buying multiple games from Steam in multiple transactions. On the Steam account I've always used.


• Of course it was the transaction after those that got (incorrectly) clobbered, a regular payment that always happens for that amount, every single month on exactly the same day.


• Since they seem to be determined to keep the Antifraud bots employed, they need a 'pending check with card holder' state for online credit card transactions, rather that just declining and then leave you to clear up the resulting payments mess. Maybe they do, maybe nobody uses it.


• It's not news that the Antifraud Robots are dumber than a box of rocks. But I'm beginning to suspect that they're actually just a random number generator programmed to pull the transactions to decline out of a hat.

You should pipe the names of all your members through an Umlautify filter prior to attaching them to a Bill. This makes things much more Metal when the Bill is referred to in the Press.

Hmmmm, a TV commercial just appeared on my TV, advertising TV commercials.

Oh dear, the Federal Reserve appears to have decided that my whacky financial wheeze of a few days ago, is like the bestest thing ever, and is actually something they should be doing.

Clearly, I have now (extra) doomed us all!

Muuuuuahahahahaahahaha.

So I gather that the world economy and all of us with it, is going to seize up with rigor mortis by the end of next week (if not sooner) because everyone and their dog is calling in their short term loans to anyone who isn't the Federal Reserve or the ECB or someone similarly central banky, reducing the interest rate they offer on the loans to those central banky people to virtually nothing at all whilst pushing up their short term rate for everyone else up to a level that WILL NUKE THE SITE OF ALL BUSINESS and OUR JOBS and THE NEXT PAYMENT OF OUR WAGES EVERYWHERE from ORBIT. That's if they're prepared to still lend at all to average schmoe companies that actually do real stuff in the real world.

If that's so, why aren't the central banky guys taking advantage of this arbitrage opportunity of a lifetime by taking up these offers of loans to them at such cheap cheap prices and then turning around and lending it all back out short term to those average schmoe companies at somewhat less than the LUDICROUS KILL THEM ALL rate, but still more than they had to pay? Wouldn't that make us all (with our taxpayer hats on) some dough on the interest rate spread, whilst simultaneously saving the world BY RE-ORBITING FINANCIAL MARS TO BECOME A NEW EARTH at the same time?

Or is that what they mean when they say they're 'injecting liquidity'? Or was that what the bailout thing, that didn't pass because everyone hates it for being the slush fund of a guy who looks very undead, and also being seven hundred billion hectares of taxpayers money long, was for?

Clearly I don't really get it. Or SOCIALISM or something.