Posts by CrazyOldCatMan 6355 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2015
it's better to have a sane dictatorship
The problem with those is that they very rarely stay that way (especially on historical timescales - you might get a Vespasian followed by a Domitian[1]..).
In fact, history is littered with examples of 'good' autocratic rulers being followed by very, very bad ones.
[1] Yes - I know he was followed by Titus but he didn't last very long (a process possibly hastened by Domitian)
In this case AirBnB isn't the party doing the subletting
However, AirBnB are knowingly assisting an offender - it's can't be that hard to check the rental zip code and realise that, unless the renter is the owner, they are not allowed to enter a sub-let agreement.
So, even if the action is to pop up a box that says "you must prove you are the owner as properties in your zipcode are not allowed to be sublet by a tenant" it would be a start.
But again, that would add real-world complexity and cost to the process which might damage profitability and (potentially) open up AirBnB to action elsewhere when they don't do something similar in other jurisdictions so it ain't gonna happen.
You might not care if they take pictures
Well - when you consider that it's illegal (especially now the upskirting laws have come in in the UK[1]) it's not a matter of your personal preference but law..
[1] And I'm sure that most jurisdictions have some sort of invasion of privacy laws.
To be fair to AirBnB I don't think they can be held responsible for people doing this
Maybe not legally, but they have an ethical duty of care to ensure that people who books rooms via their service do not have their privacy and security violated.
But actually doing anything other than passively taking money would mean lower profits so it doesn't get done.
rebreathers and none of the major manufacturers have ever tested on but it's cheaper so I'll use it
Strikes me as being one of those things (like motorbike tyres and brakes) with which you do not mess..
(I've known fairly well-off people buy the cheapest possible motorbike tyres or brakes - and then get shirty when I ask them why they value their lives so little..)
Mostly the messages on my old Citroen XM consisted of various hydraulic failure warnings. Mostly after the bit of rotten cheese that they laughably called a 'rear ride-height adjuster' blew (again) and dumped all the hydraulic fluid over the road.
At which point the brakes no longer work (apart from the cable-operated parking brake) and the steering gets very, very very heavy (you try turning a 1.4 tonnes car with quite wide tyres without the hydraulic power steering working). The major design flaw was that three systems (hydropneumatic suspension, power steering and brakes) all shared the same hydraulics. So, if one blew[1], it took the others out.
[1] In the year or so we had that car, it happened three times. Twice in the rear ride-height adjuster and once in the steering..
What happened to "The buck stops here."
Too many bucks (in the dollar sense) stopping there - so manglement no longer wants to hear about something that might (in the short term) impact their stas or bonuses.
Besides which, there's always a few rouge engineers that can be blamed.
should be both a HDD light and a LAN activity
On my Mac I have two little application that provide exactly that (albeit on the menu bar since the gods of style apparently don't allow anything as plebian as an LED in the case..).
Yes, I'm old. Yes, I'm cranky. Dammit!
Same thing with automobiles
For a while I had a Chrysler Grand Voyager (3.3L v6 petrol engine, auto box). It was comfortable, moved fairly swiftly when driven with my usual method[1] and was generally not too bad a car. Until (at about 70k miles) the auto box failed - it would randomly change ratio and/or not change gear at all.
Which, according to me reading, meant that one or more of the 9 clutches in the auto box had failed. The local Chrysler shysters wanted to charge me £2000 to change the auto box (on a car that was worth, at most £1500). To rub salt into the wound, they then charged me £250 for their investigation[2] that basically said "your auto box has a fault"[3].
I came very, very close to just leaving the car with them as payment of the debt and just walking out. It was only the fact that my wife was with me at the dealership that stopped me.
[1] Accellerate quickly up to the desired speed and then cruise. Which, happily, is the recommended method for driving my current hybrid at peak efficiency..
[2] I had specifically instructed them to spend no more than £100 on investigation and watched the sales type write that on the job sheet. Oddly, the job sheet that I picked up with the car after the work had no mention of that. And the service manager told me to my face that they had no record of my request. Which is why I'll never, ever go back to that garage again. In fact, I'll never buy a Chrysler or Merc again since that dealership has the local franchise for both of those marques. My next car was a Honda (that we had for 10 years) and now I have a Toyota - becuase (in general) their dealerships at least try to gain some customer satisfaction..
[3] Which was why I took it to them in the first place. I wish I could charge £250 for telling the customer something that they already know..
The "winners" start by finding the nearest dictionary to use as a final arbiter
Or, as we used to call them in the D&D/wargaming world - rules lawyers. AKA "the people who don't get invited back for the next game.."
Nothing quite so annoying fot a GM as someone insisting that they can do so-and-so because "the rules don't say you can't" (while ignoring the bit in the manuals that say "the GM is the final arbiter - what they say goes..").
And the very worst is the GM who is a rules lawyer. Mind you, they tend not to attract players to their games more than once.
Trump is that incompetent boss that comes up with an impulsive idea
To be fair to Trump[1], the US Senate has mandated a minimum aircraft carrier force number and, if HST were to be decommissioned, the numbers would fall below the mandated minimum.
I doubt very much however if El Trumpo had that (or any other rational reason) as the basis for his decision..
[1] Words I never thought I'd write!
They can then link arms in solidarity with China's GFW like a hands across the universe
Up until recently, China and Russia (and before that the Soviet Union) were very definately best buddies.
Wrong sort of communism on the line :-)
(That and being geographically next to each other as rivals with a long land border fired paranoia on both sides of the line..)
I suspect now all that binds them together is having the same set of enemies. At some point they'll revert to realising that the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend..
I really really want to see how Putin earned that 2 billion
It's quite simple - that's the value of the bribes paid to his 'family members and close friends' so that contractors can get the job.
Also, I would imagine that his accountants favourite phrase is "what would you like the figures to be sir?" and then their major task is to make his accounts appear exactly how he wants them.
No so much a second set of books - more an entire libraries-worth of them.
Saw a banner proclaiming proudly "sign in to our free wifi*"
The small script says *using your email address
In one of the local pubs they have a sign proudly announcing that you can now use your Farcebook credentials for logging onto their free guest wifi.
Which takes the whole wrongness and adds several other barrels of very stinky fish.
I have trust issues.
Of course you do - you (presumably) work in IT. The ones to worry about are the ones lacking cynicism and who trust too easily..
Client informs me she doesn't buy anything online
Neither does t'missus. Although her excuse is "that's what I keep you around for.". At least I'm useful in one sense.
I'm quite partial to liver and bacon
What a horrible thing to do to innocent bacon. The only way you could make it worse would be to serve it with onions..
(The only time I've ever enjoyed eating liver it was cut into very thin strips, rolled into seasoned flour and flash-fried. It meant that you couldn't actually taste the liver.. And if you are going to try to make me eat lamb, you need to make sure you have a fresh jar of mint sauce - because I'll probably use the whole thing up ensuring that I don't taste the lamb..)
But the British food..? Spleen?
When I was but a nipper[1], we used to buy melts (spleen) and lights (lungs I believe) to cook up and add to the dogs food. They loved it.
To this day, I can remember the stench of them cooking.
[1] In the 1970's. By the 1980's such plebian 'foodstuffs' had disappeared. Probably being added to the mechanically-recovered meat that then went into burgers and sausages.
...I've heard that sailors can be quite immoral...
So you've been on Union St in Plymouth on a friday night then? With the added bonus of sailors, marines and a few tanked-up[1] army types too..
(T'missus comes from Plymouth. Was warned (at school) to never go to that area..)
[1] And not in the Challenger II sense either. Although that would have saved them from a few beatings & D&D charges.
I found out Rome invaded Britain only from reading I did myself
Pah! They did nothing for us!
Apart from roads. And aqueducts. Oh, and a standardised currency and weights. And red wine.
the shocking amount of Soviet casualties
To be fair, quite a few of those were done by the Soviets themselves with their combat tactics.. And shooting their own troops.
this is when the USA handily beat Great Britain
With a very large amount of assistance from the French (I find most US people are ignorant of that fact).
country which saved the UK in the 1940s
What - you mean the Soviet Union? Once Hitler decided to do a Napoleon v2 he was always going to lose. Or do you mean by providing equipment under Lend Lease? The Lend Lease that we only finished paying for recently? Sure, the US helped, but we paid through the nose for it.
The USA sacrificed more than 400,000 lives
And how many of those were in the Pacific Theatre? Yes, the US assisted in the European Theatre but only with great reluctance and long, long after the major risk of invasion had passed.
The US was certainly of great assistance - but the Allies would have eventually won without them since Germany was incredibly resource-constrained and couldn't have sustained the war long-term. Victory would have taken a great deal longer though and so lives were saved.
looking after someone with dementia
Dementia != CJD. CJD is a specific condition caused by malformed prions of a certan type accumulating in the brain after being eaten in meat infected with the prions.
The real stupidity of Gummer in feeding the beef to the girl was that the science hadn't been done (at that point) to determine conclusively the prevalence and severity of mad cow disease. So he took a risk with a child all in order to appear to be in control and get some publicity.
Ivar, the Boneless, that's him as a Viking
Except that Ingvar (an alternative form of his name) the Boneless was a pretty effective leader, right up until he disappears from the record.
(He was one of the leaders of the Great Heathen Army that conquered most of northern England)
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