voidifremoved

I broke my phone about a year ago, and it took a few days to sort out a replacement.

In that time I went through exactly the same process I did when I quit smoking. I became aware suddenly of all the time, all the gaps, all the moments that I had filled with a quick look at my phone.

And once it passed - elation, freedom, seeing the world with open eyes and a clear head.

I was sad when my new phone arrived, and looking back I wish I had found a way to stay clean.

In real life it is possible to judge the mood of a group and avoid or defuse contentious situations. In addition, such groups are usually transient. Real people, especially friends of friends or other passing acquaintances, don't usually follow you home, and then to work the next day, and the next, constantly telling you why your opinion is wrong.

Online, there is no escape short of opting out entirely.

In all, social media gives a megaphone to strident opinions, and has a chilling effect on everyone else.

Agreed, that is the standout. I enjoyed the one about not being able to see beauty, but I felt it didn't go anywhere.

Stories Of Your Life takes the central idea of Slaughterhouse-Five and dresses it up with physics. Its good, but its like a remix more than anything.

So many possibilities, but my mind went straight to Pyramid Song. I think there is no way to objectively answer something like this. Even if you get some kind of majority in favour of one particular answer, that doesn't make it "true".

One of my personal favourites.

Years ago I worked on a stock control system for a popular clothes retailer. Where previously store managers had to spend hours on the phone ringing the depots to see what was in stock and reordering popular lines, now they could fill in orders an they would be emailed to the depots in machine readable format, with the order balanced across multiple depots depending on availability of stock.

After the system had been in operation for a year or so, managers started to complain that some orders weren’t turning up. After a bit of digging it only seemed to affect one particular depot, but I couldn’t initially see a common factor between the orders. It had nothing to do with the size of the mail, or the originating store. I could tell from the logs the emails were being formatted and supposedly sent to the depot, yet they never translated into orders. The system would silently fail after we’d handed the email to the depot with no obvious reason why.

So I wrote a quick script to collect all the orders for a day from all the stores and compile a list of all product lines that were present in the orders that went missing, but not present in the orders that succeeded, just to see if there was a pattern. This turned up a few dozen items and after a quick visual scan of the product descriptions one stood out slightly, so I phoned the depot on a hunch.

The depot had an anti-spam filter on incoming emails that silently dropped messages with pornographic words in the body or any attachments. The retailer had just received a new seasonal product line, which was selling well, and the product description was “bondage tights”.

After getting the depot to whitelist emails from our system, orders for this product line started working.

Its more than that, because mortgage repayments are typically lower than rents (or at least equivalent), and include a percentage capital repayment. At the end of the mortgage period you have no monthly payments and you own a significant asset outright, which may appreciate in value. Usually the end of repayments would coincide with a career slowdown or even retirement, but with rent you're going to have to find that money for the rest of your life.

So a mortgage is:

* Cheaper monthly repayments now (typically), part of which is effectively long-term savings

* Eventual disappearance of monthly payments and rent-free living during retirement

* Eventual ownership of a significant asset, which may be cashed in or passed on via inheritance