Note that the Astrazeneca share price is about the same now as it was before the pandemic. So if there is some fortune to be made out of the vaccine, it seems the stock market has not yet noticed.
Biontech and Moderna apparently are the only pharma companies with a higher stock price. But this is probably unrelated to the COVID-19 vaccine and more related to the mRNA process.
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.
The cynic in me feels like they wouldn’t care. The deal they have with your phone provider allows them to identify you by the phone you signed up with. The deal they have with Amazon facial recognition let’s them identify you with the cameras you walked past every time you go in the store. The deal they have with the state let’s let track where your license plate was seen this month. And of course they have what they want which is the card in your pocket giving them all of your purchases in one easy column.
I certainly wouldn't install an app to go shopping at a specific store to obtain specific advantages.
No company deserves loyalty through a scheme like this. Only through decent customer service and reasonable pricing.
As for shopping elsewhere, yes. I use Asda now which does not require a loyalty card to get the discount prices and is generally cheaper and better stocked despite being smaller here.
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.
I recently interview with netflix and talked with the director that manages the subscribe/cancel flows. He said it's an absolute priority to keep the cancel experience as easy as possible. He even talked down an idea to add an extra content or modals before the cancel experience.
I wish more companies followed this pattern. In order to cancel my gym membership I had to write a letter. They didn’t respond to my first one, so I had to send a second via certified mail and then it was done.
Sirius is also pretty scummy about cancelling, although they keep luring me in.
A lot of print publications will require a phone call or email to cancel even though you can manage all other aspects of your account digitally.
It's a great way to ensure I'll never return as a customer.
On the other hand, the "pause subscription" feature that many services are implementing pretty much guarantees that I'll resubscribe (even if just for a little while) in the future - because inevitably, they'll have something exclusive that I want to watch.
I would think this might be triggered by a decline in revenue. When Netflix can't continue to grow organically into new markets and the share price starts to suffer, they might resort to less friendly tactics for increasing the revenue per customer.
It might also come from detecting recurring patterns and trying to facilitate them.
Before the simplified version, we already used to only register to Netflix during long vacations, binge watch whatever we wanted (typically Black Mirror and Sherlock) and cancel the rest of the year.
Now that it’s way easier, there’s less friction in reenabling the account when there’s a series we want to watch and set the subscripting to cancel again at the end of the month.
Netflix joined the Motion Picture Association not so long ago. I'd recon they are well into the transition from startup mentality to dominant bureaucracy-driven business mentality.
I think they joined the MPAA so they could influence it towards their more liberal views on how content should be released. If anything I think it will mean other companies relax their rules.
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.
> 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/
Just as much a feature. Right click ->paste-as-plain-text is available in chrome, notepad++, Word (don't know if it is available during a right click though) and many many others.
I'm curious - heve you ever been a juror? I've only done it once, but for that trial any correlation between justice and what the jury decided was purely coincidental.
Yes, but in Brazil only crimes against human life (murders and attempts) are decided by juries. What you describe is a good reason for judges to be cautious about what they admit the jury to see.
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.
I have been as frustrated as anyone by trying to plug in USB plugs both ways. Or by finding that USB plugs make a rather neat fit in RJ45 jacks.
But really, looking back on the history of common connectors (DB plugs, DIN plugs, 10BASE2, etc.), USB looks really simple, safe, cheap, reliable, and easy-to-use. I've never had a USB socket go bad. I've never shorted out any equipment by brushing a USB plug with a conductive object. I've never needed to clean a USB connector to get it to work properly. But all those things have happened to me with USB's predecessors.
Probably because it's just really, really simple. Short of audio jacks, it's one of the simplest computer plugs in existence. That's a good thing when you're trying to achieve universal adoption.
I'd love to see a more natural feeling interface. Why, for instance, can't we have magsafe-esque connector for USB? Or hell, maybe even a TRS connector (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS_connector) with 2 or 3 additional ring contacts? Seems like both would be much more user friendly.
Anything in the TRS configuration is prone to shorting when connecting/disconnecting. Not at al suitable for an interface that includes powered conductors.
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)
(1) Healthfulness of food is a continuum, not a boolean. (2) "Ready made" meals covers almost the full spectrum. (3) Achilles heel of the best (really, all) frozen meals (say, Gardenburger with side of broccoli, or vegetable-centric Amy's) is high sodium. (4) If you cook healthfully (say a reasonably faithful version of the Indian or Italian traditions), your meals will have a much better balance of nutrients and especially more micronutrients than the median frozen prepared meal. (5) Plain frozen vegetables (as opposed to frozen prepared dishes/"meals") are excellent food. (6) See Michael Pollan for more.
Pre-made meals aren't intrinsically bad for you; it's the preservatives and other questionable ingredients (and quantity of) that the manufacturers may add that is detrimental to your health.
To give a specific example: many preservatives and industrial techniques can alter the flavor of a dish in unpleasant ways, so industrialized food just covers up those flavors with salt. The worst examples would be the "flavor packet" that comes with ramen noodles: some of these deliver a full gram of sodium. But most frozen meals have unreasonably high levels of sodium as well. If you prepare your food from raw ingredients, you at least have the option of using less salt, to the betterment of your blood pressure.
I believe the parent post is referring to the "Meals For Two" that some grocery stores are offering these days. In my area, two chains--Market Street and Central Market, for reference--have hot food restaurants/delis in the store. They use the same stock that is sold in the store and prepare lunch and dinner servings prior to the store opening and then throughout the day. Those are then packaged in containers, placed into a paper bag, stapled closed and put into a refrigerated display case.
Functionally, these are no different from preparing food at home. They are naturally more expensive than cooking the food yourself, but I can't tell a big difference. There are even services around here now that prepare, freeze, and deliver fresh-cooked meals from a nearby commercial kitchen on a weekly basis.
If you think that stuff doesn't taste like total crap, you are kidding yourself. In the last two years my wife and I moved from Portland (where you can get healthy tasty restaurant food) to the Bay Area (where you can't) and so we started cooking at home all the time.
Anything that isn't a home cooked meal tastes like industrial crap to me (even most restaurants). Once you have tasted sauteed greens, rice and home-roasted chicken, all those prepared foods you thought were normal will reveal themselves to you as suddenly not even worth the category "food".
