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ijuin

Things that make you go WTF

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Certain sorts of economical decisions. Here's a couple from Danish health services:

Hospitals need to be very clean. This is expensive. So, ways to save money on hygiene have been implemented. One, by having cleaning done by lowest bidder, which inevitably results in corners being cut. Two, if you pack patients more tightly together, there are fewer rooms to keep clean.

Of course, the implementation of these two 'fixes' results in more frequent contagions and infections that have a much easier time of jumping from patient to patient (who definitionally already have lowered or overworked immune systems), which means recovery times have gone through the roof, more patients die and increasing risk of the appearance of superimmune strains of infection that our antibiotics cannot cope with. The amount of extra money spent or lost because of this exceeds the amount of money 'saved' on hygiene by so many factors that it isn't even funny.

Another good one: the epidemics section on the biggest hospital in Copenhagen. It was once set up to handle up to two hundred patients at a time and keep them all in isolation. This was judged too expensive for something that was essentially 'only a precaution'. It was successively cut to a hundred beds, fifty, twenty-five and then eight. It should be noted that expanding the epidemics section again in case of need will be quite time consuming due to not only the special equipment required but also the training of personnel involved.

Therefore, our biggest hospital is quite well set up to handle epidemics as long as it will only involve very small epidemics. Epidemics are small, right?

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HTML5 Video playback.  Been around for 8 years now.  Supported by all the major browsers and most of the minor ones.

Why the freaking hell do I need to have both flash (remember, Adobe is dried mud) and Silverlight installed to play most videos?  I used to write web sites for a living.  HTML5 video is a freaking snap.  Setting up flash or Silverlight is a pain in the sitting area.  It's a good thing I have 2 tablets that can play Amazon and Netflix because if I tried to play them on the iMac I would be hosed.

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If you import a OVA file into VirtualBox, it makes a vmdk file.  Which can not be modified by VBoxManage in any way other than being cloned to a VDI file, which you can dink with.  VirtualBox will cheerfully use a VTI file as the "hard disk" of the virtual machine, so why the hell didn't they select VTI as the import to file type?

Oracle, that's why.

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I went looking around on Amazon for yet more books about machines that blow up carp.   I found this
The Panzer Legions: A Guide to the German Army Tank Divisions of World War II and Their Commanders
Kindle version price - $90.25
Cheapest Paperback price - $2.95
Cheapest Hardback price - $11.32
Most expensive dead tree version $95.00

Have they lost their ever loving mind?  An ebook that is only $5 cheaper than a book collector grade hard back?
 

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1 hour ago, mlooney said:

Have they lost their ever loving mind?  An ebook that is only $5 cheaper than a book collector grade hard back?

Clearly, they have decided that they do not want to make money off this particular book's e-format.

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32 minutes ago, ijuin said:

Are all of the cheap copies used ones? If so, it's probably the publisher deciding that all new copies be high-priced.

Yes, they are used.  The book in question had been out of print for a while.  The one $95 is "like new", i.e. book collector grade.  The others are "reader" grade.  While I tend to accumulate, I'm a reader, not a collector.

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Aye same here I collect to read I don't collect to collect. I do tend to be careful and not dogear, write, and eat around them but it's only so I can continue to read them for as long as possible.

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I do tend to fold down the corners of pages with important information, or for favorite scenes in favorite books.  It's my book, if I want to make a certain page easier to find, why shouldn't I?  It's a lot more rare that a favorite book winds up held together with a rubber band, but it's been known to happen.  When there were more used book shops I'd sometimes buy a new and different cover of an old favorite, too, but I don't get nearly as much chance to do that these days.

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I was watching the Macy's parade intermittently whilst reading this forum Thursday Morning, so I wasn't paying complete attention.

Apparently, neither was the broadcast crew from NBC News.

Miss Piggy, the Muppet, managed to catch Musical Legend Tony Bennett as he began to fall on a float in the Parade.  And I missed it.

http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/tony-bennett-miss-piggy-fall-thanksgiving-day-parade-1201926798/

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On 11/25/2016 at 2:12 PM, CritterKeeper said:

I do tend to fold down the corners of pages with important information, or for favorite scenes in favorite books.  It's my book, if I want to make a certain page easier to find, why shouldn't I?  It's a lot more rare that a favorite book winds up held together with a rubber band, but it's been known to happen.  When there were more used book shops I'd sometimes buy a new and different cover of an old favorite, too, but I don't get nearly as much chance to do that these days.

I'll more often either use a bookmark (the metal clip style is my fave), paper clip, or just remember the page (you would marvel on how well this works for me).

The thing the really, really, really,, makes me go WTF every time it happens is mom's ability to turn a corner when were shopping together in a store and just vanish. She doesn't move that fast, there aren't that many 5'2" ladies with auburn hair around here. She's the type of shopper to hit each and every aisle, in order. Yet every time poof, gone, vanished.

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The two-thousandth mention in the local press today of the University of Texas firing Charlie Strong. I'm not sure if the designated replacement (Coach Herman from the University of Houston) is going to be able to deal with the instant overwhelming demand for him to succeed where Strong failed..

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1 hour ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

...the instant overwhelming demand for him to succeed...

Not an instant demand.

The School, team, fans, alumni, and boo$ter$ will give him all the time and support he needs.  Until he looses a game.

I am just waiting for a team to offer a coach a "one game - renewable" contract which openly specifies that the duration of the contract is one game which the team can renew one game at a time.  Any loss or off field incident can be dealt with by terminating the coach with no cost to the school beyond the salary for one game.

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6 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Hm. This gave me the strangest mental image. Powdered coach. Instant coach, just add water.

::continuing from the "what are you ingesting?" thread::

"Real coaches should be thick enough to win games"

 

;)

 

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On 11/27/2016 at 7:20 PM, PSadlon said:

The thing the really, really, really,, makes me go WTF every time it happens is mom's ability to turn a corner when were shopping together in a store and just vanish. She doesn't move that fast, there aren't that many 5'2" ladies with auburn hair around here. She's the type of shopper to hit each and every aisle, in order. Yet every time poof, gone, vanished.

That sounds exactly like my mother, except that my mother is five feet flat and has graying hair that used to be jet black.

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5 hours ago, ijuin said:

That sounds exactly like my mother, except that my mother is five feet flat and has graying hair that used to be jet black.

Odd. It reminds me of when I and my wife are at Barnes & Noble. My wife keeps complaining that it shouldn't be possible to lose track of a 6'4" Dane who weighs above 200 lbs so fast, but it still happens. Fortunately she has a good idea of which shelves I prefer to haunt and usually manage to find me again there.

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4 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Odd. It reminds me of when I and my wife are at Barnes & Noble. My wife keeps complaining that it shouldn't be possible to lose track of a 6'4" Dane who weighs above 200 lbs so fast, but it still happens. Fortunately she has a good idea of which shelves I prefer to haunt and usually manage to find me again there.

I'm 6'4" and nearly 300lbs and people say I have the uncanny knack of being able to sneak up on them without making a sound.

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5 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Odd. It reminds me of when I and my wife are at Barnes & Noble. My wife keeps complaining that it shouldn't be possible to lose track of a 6'4" Dane who weighs above 200 lbs so fast, but it still happens. Fortunately she has a good idea of which shelves I prefer to haunt and usually manage to find me again there.

I guess you guys have the same sort of situation with bookstores as we have here?  The chains drove a lot of the independent bookshops out of business, but now online sales and ebooks are endangering what we have left, so I try hard to buy my books from real bookshops whenever I can, which often is Barnes & Noble.

43 minutes ago, Scotty said:

I'm 6'4" and nearly 300lbs and people say I have the uncanny knack of being able to sneak up on them without making a sound.

At one point a co-worker dubbed me "She Who Walks On Rice Paper" because she was always backing up into me, not having heard me moving behind her.  :-)

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I am by no means a small person, and I make almost no attempt at stealth, but people are often startled by my presence.

For several years now, I have been wearing my keys on a clip attached to my belt so that I jangle as I move.

I looked it up, a person can jingle or jangle for personal use as long as you do not profit from said jingling or jangling.  But if you jingle and jangle simultaneously you can face serious legal consequences including, but not limited to, permanent inclusion on the Naughty List.

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2 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

At one point a co-worker dubbed me "She Who Walks On Rice Paper" because she was always backing up into me, not having heard me moving behind her.

At not one, but three places I have worked I got the nick name "Ninja", in that I managed to surprise people by "suddenly" being around them and that they could never sneak up on me.

Granted at EDS it was "spastic ninja" because it seemed I would "sneak up" on people then manage to physically bounce off of them some how.  EDS was a weird place any way.

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1 hour ago, mlooney said:

Granted at EDS it was "spastic ninja" because it seemed I would "sneak up" on people then manage to physically bounce off of them some how.  EDS was a weird place any way.

So which would you say was weirder, EDS or EGS? :demonicduck:

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