Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things
like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the
writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and
ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that
no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing.
The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on
brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this,
that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to
spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed
man doesn’t. When you are unemployed,
which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored,
and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food.
You want something a little bit ’tasty’. There is always some
cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream!
Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That
is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level.
White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don’t nourish you to
any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so)
than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man’s opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary
stimulant than a crust of brown bread.
'The Road to Wigan Pier' and 'Down and Out in Paris and London' (also by Orwell) are the starkest accounts of poverty and what it does to you I have ever read.
A QR code by itself is completely unreadable to a human. Can't this have the SSID / password too? All too often you see what should be simple textual data wrapped in this obtuse form which only specific machines can read. Text and a QR code can be read by everyone.
This is misuse of QR code; QR codes should be used to encode large data or some other clunky data that is hard for people to process that's why it is easier to look up such data/information with QR code and process/read it digitally. After all you have a camera in your pocket and a preinstalled QR code scanner(at least all new Android phones have). The main use case of QR codes that I see is simply linking you to a website. For example your favorite food brand links you to their website to explore their offering.
>Text and a QR code can be read by everyone.
Yea I agree with you that both plain text and a QR code should be shared so people can use what suits them the best at that particular moment.
Agreed. Where I used to work, IT started replacing the guest wifi (password changes monthly) with QR code instead of printing out the password on a piece of paper. It's really cumbersome when I want to join on my laptop.
I listened to a podcast which mentioned a relatively obscure topic in passing using the basic samsung music app on my phone which didn't have a SIM card in, location turned on or an internet connection.
Later that day I see an advert for said obscure topic served on a web page.
Is it possible that there is someone transcribing podcasts or at least scraping databases of their RSS feeds and somehow my music player app is broadcasting that I've listened to a particular file(after receiving an internet connection)? The alternative is that the machines really are listening.
You would have had to at some point download the podcast, so at that point before they served the download to you, they would have used your IP to serve you a relevant ad based on that location data and inserted it into the podcast. A lot more podcasts are doing this unfortunately. I don't remember the name of major platform or company enabling this.
Is having the virus without symptoms really a case? The Coronavirus act says so. However, there's only tenuous evidence of asymptomatic and presymptiomatic transmission of the virus.
Kids tested with no symptoms had the same viral load in their nasal cavities as symptomatic cases so there's little reason to believe they were less effective spreaders than a person showing symptoms.
I've been using exactly the same approach for spinning up local COVID-19 support groups around London, one nice example is at https://holloway.coronacorps.com/. Really like the branch to subdomain mapping feature from them.
