Seemingly trivial things that elicit an emotional response of some kind

[Pblakeney]

TBH, Amazon should withdraw the listing, as it's fraudulent. I looked back at their photos, and I can see why I bought them. Even if stainless steel isn't your thing, they are smart enough. What I received was a totally different thing... didn't think I'd have gone for the floral design.

View attachment 12738

Small but relevant question. Who was selling the cups?
I have been informed by one company that if it is direct from Amazon then it is kosher. If it is 3rd party, buyer beware.

 

[C R]

TBH, Amazon should withdraw the listing, as it's fraudulent. I looked back at their photos, and I can see why I bought them. Even if stainless steel isn't your thing, they are smart enough. What I received was a totally different thing... didn't think I'd have gone for the floral design.

View attachment 12738

I don't use Amazon at all any more. For tat eBay is just as good.

 

[briantrumpet]

Small but relevant question. Who was selling the cups?
I have been informed by one company that if it is direct from Amazon then it is kosher. If it is 3rd party, buyer beware.

Interesting, says 'dispatches from Amazon', but sold by 'SR Swami Enterprise'

@C R Yes, I'd often buy simple tat from eBay, but it's one of those curious things that are all over Amazon and eBay in particular designs, then all of a sudden they disappear from both. This was closest (I thought) to what I wanted, but the listing is just fraudulent, so I've reported it to Amazon as such, as they take the money, so are legally responsible, AFAIK.

 

[briantrumpet]

Yes but the railways are subsidised.

Re the railway and my quip... if you have 20 minutes, this is worth a view. Seems like the resilience work at Dawlish actually did exactly the job it should have done, so my friend who did a lot of work on that operating a big yellow tracked machine will be pleased. The small failures were either side of the new work, and were essentially repaired in 24 hours.



If you haven't got 20 minutes, the views of the people on the video is that essentially that alternative routes just aren't viable (cost c. £1bn for the Okey option, even before really going into some severe engineering challenges), and that with ongoing work the £130mn so far spent has proven its worth, and that the odd day of the line being shut isn't an unreasonable problem, given that many lines will shut in extreme conditions (remembering the flooding north of Exeter this time, and at Exeter Cowley Bridge for an extended period earlier, which has now been somewhat mitigated).

 

[First Aspect]

Re the railway and my quip... if you have 20 minutes, this is worth a view. Seems like the resilience work at Dawlish actually did exactly the job it should have done, so my friend who did a lot of work on that operating a big yellow tracked machine will be pleased. The small failures were either side of the new work, and were essentially repaired in 24 hours.



If you haven't got 20 minutes, the views of the people on the video is that essentially that alternative routes just aren't viable (cost c. £1bn for the Okey option, even before really going into some severe engineering challenges), and that with ongoing work the £130mn so far spent has proven its worth, and that the odd day of the line being shut isn't an unreasonable problem, given that many lines will shut in extreme conditions (remembering the flooding north of Exeter this time, and at Exeter Cowley Bridge for an extended period earlier, which has now been somewhat mitigated).

I don't think I can stand 20 minutes of blokes talking about trains, but having seen the state of the remaining viaducts around part of that route, and comparing to the £350M cost of the borders railway a decade ago (which had a single arboreal viaduct to repair, some embankments and a few small culverts to bridge), £1Bn seems quite conservative to me. I don't even think Tavistock will ever get connected (which is something of a careful what you wish for thing anyway, unless you want it to turn into another horror show of new.builds like Okehampton).

 

[briantrumpet]

I don't think I can stand 20 minutes of blokes talking about trains, but having seen the state of the remaining viaducts around part of that route, and comparing to the £350M cost of the borders railway a decade ago (which had a single arboreal viaduct to repair, some embankments and a few small culverts to bridge), £1Bn seems quite conservative to me. I don't even think Tavistock will ever get connected (which is something of a careful what you wish for thing anyway, unless you want it to turn into another horror show of new.builds like Okehampton).

Don't blame you, though TBF once in a while I enjoy a bit of nerdiness (and trains certainly attract more than their fair share of nerds).

The Tavistock case will be an interesting one to see play out, as I imagine that Okey will be seized on by both nimby and yimbi camps. Personally I'd be in the yimbi camp: at least as far as Okey is concerned as it'll reinvigorate businesses in a town that's felt like it was in decline. The rail service is such a transformation: it's an easier rush-hour commute by train than driving in from Exmouth (though you'd be mad to do that). I can see Okey turning into a thriving hub by itself over the next 50 years (though obviously I won't actually *see* it in 50 years, as I'll be dead by then).

 

[briantrumpet]

Forgot to post that... and since then...

Relieved that the new one hadn't be nicked from my doorstep (which is literally on the road) for five hours (not even a pavement, as the road's not wide enough).

You can tell that this smaller one is lower spec, in that it took a couple of hours to go through all the commissioning and updates with the CPU on 100%, but now that's done, all seems to be working fine, and no sudden restarts. Even better, I found I had a spare 128Gb Micro SD card which is now being formatted so it can be extra outboard memory. TBH, not that much gets saved onboard now, apart from photos after editing, so I suspect the 128Gb of onboard memory won't run out soon, but it's nice to have auto external backups anyway.

Follow up to this...

Amazon life lesson learnt: check the one-star reviews.

After a few OK days with the replacement laptop, the touchpad went freestyle, jumping all over the place and right-clicking all by itself, to the extent that only way I could regain control was by getting the laptop to reset Windows (via shift + Esc on forced restart). All fine for a couple of days, then last night it started playing up again. Sent an email to customer services, and only then read the 1* reviews, and it became apparent that my woes with both the first laptop and this one were pretty common, so I've now left another 1* review and will return the laptop when the Post Office is open on Monday. Serves me right for looking at the spec, price, and 5* reviews, and not the 10% 1* reviews. Rookie mistake.

tl;dr Don't ever ever think about buying a Fusion laptop.

 

[Pross]

I tend to ignore the 1* and 5* reviews. One star tend to have lots of ridiculous things like “I didn’t actually buy it as I wanted pink and they don’t do it in pink” whilst I reckon most 5* reviews are fake.

 

[briantrumpet]

I tend to ignore the 1* and 5* reviews. One star tend to have lots of ridiculous things like “I didn’t actually buy it as I wanted pink and they don’t do it in pink” whilst I reckon most 5* reviews are fake.

Well, that's been my kinda response up till now, but it seems like it has its drawbacks... it's when I read 1* comments that exactly echoed my experience that I thought "hmmmmm". TBH, the 10% of them should have alerted me (despite the overall 4.5* rating)... normally the number of 3*, 2* and 1* reviews decline, but on these products there were more 1* reviews than 3* or 2*. Now I know why. I'm guessing the 5* reviewers got lucky, or wrote their reviews before the things started going wrong.

For comparison, the tiny Asus notebook I'm on at this moment has been going for about 8 years, has been upgraded via the backdoor to Windows 11 despite its low spec, and still works fine, despite the toast crumb collection that's probably under the keyboard. That's my kinda machine... just that I really could do with something a bit better/faster for photos/videos etc., plus I suspect this Asus will either give up the ghost eventually or refuse to update Windows any more.

 

[Psamathe]

Follow up to this...

Amazon life lesson learnt: check the one-star reviews.

Generally I find internet reviews useful but I ignore the overall star rating (averages), ignore the better reviews and look at the specific reasons people were giving bad reviews. You always get a number of poor reviews "delivery was late", "didn't fit so returned", etc. which I ignore. It's if there are significant numbers of eg "knock-off" or specific quality issues that I consider.

 

[briantrumpet]

Generally I find internet reviews useful but I ignore the overall star rating (averages), ignore the better reviews and look at the specific reasons people were giving bad reviews. You always get a number of poor reviews "delivery was late", "didn't fit so returned", etc. which I ignore. It's if there are significant numbers of eg "knock-off" or specific quality issues that I consider.

Yep, a lesson learned for me.

Also sometimes the reasons for bad reviews are comically irrelevant.

 

[Psamathe]

Also sometimes the reasons for bad reviews are comically irrelevant.

Some years back travelling Bolivia staying in one perfectly adequate hostel I happened across an online review for the place and they had a terrible "complete disaster" review all just one person who was finding that you have to put toilet paper in a bin rather than flush down the toilet (she thought "uuugh". Universal across the country (then) their sewerage systems couldn't cope with toilet paper but she hadn't understood that and landed the hostel as rated only 1 start. Very unfair on a quite adequate place.

 

[briantrumpet]

Some years back travelling Bolivia staying in one perfectly adequate hostel I happened across an online review for the place and they had a terrible "complete disaster" review all just one person who was finding that you have to put toilet paper in a bin rather than flush down the toilet (she thought "uuugh". Universal across the country (then) their sewerage systems couldn't cope with toilet paper but she hadn't understood that and landed the hostel as rated only 1 start. Very unfair on a quite adequate place.

You can see why providers sometimes use the 'reply to comment' function when it's available.

OTOH, I was amused when I started the return process for Amazon that there was a prominent "contact seller" button, as obviously they were trying to head off 1* reviews. Having given them a chance to redeem themselves with the first laptop then getting another dud, they'd blown their chance in this case. I've no idea if it's using dud components, manufacturing flaws, or software glitches/incompatibilities, followed by lack of quality control, but Fusion deserves a dodgy reputation. With any luck, the AI bots will pick up my comments. Maybe Fusion is like the Ryanair of laptops: they don't care about bad reviews enough to change their business model, if they still can make money despite the number of returned laptops. Maybe they just turn them round and send them out again in a new box and keep their fingers crossed.

 

[Blazing Saddles]

Some years back travelling Bolivia staying in one perfectly adequate hostel I happened across an online review for the place and they had a terrible "complete disaster" review all just one person who was finding that you have to put toilet paper in a bin rather than flush down the toilet (she thought "uuugh". Universal across the country (then) their sewerage systems couldn't cope with toilet paper but she hadn't understood that and landed the hostel as rated only 1 start. Very unfair on a quite adequate place.

That was a shitty thing to do doos.

 

[PurplePenguin]

There are Amazon review checkers that tell you how fake they are and adjust the rating accordingly.