I recently joined a Mastodon instance.

I've been meaning to for a while. I was never on Xitter because it always seemed inane, and some of the people who I follow in other contexts on the internet, who are good long form writers, posted reams of uninteresting micro-guff on Xitter. But maybe Mastodon would be better?

However, within a week of getting an account and following not-that-many people, I came across EMFCamp's toot in my timeline:

https://social.emfcamp.org/@emf/statuses/01HXRZ1PRXCPNPDSFQSCMED9TB

reposting their first blog announcement from 12 years ago. The post is too long for Mastodon's 500 char limit, and presumably just linking to it wasn't "immediate" enough for their needs - they wanted to actually put the post in their followers' timelines. So instead of posting 1KiB of text, they posted a 330KiB image of text, and put the 1KiB blog post in the "alt" attribute of the image!

Also, there's Cory Doctorow's feed of 30+ toot threads most days:

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

I don't mean to pick on EMFCamp and Cory specifically, but they are the examples I ran across. And actually, EMFcamp and Cory are great examples to use as people who aren't going to be acting in bad faith, or trolls, or whatever. They're good people.

Because I've come across these posts so quickly, from such a small sample size of posts I've actually seen, I am concluding that this kind of posting behaviour is not particularly unusual. It would be very unlucky for me to have done so otherwise, right? But, you know, I could be wrong.

So, for anyone who's been on Mastodon a while, does this seem like "perfectly reasonable behaviour" to you? Do you look at this and think "Uh huh. Nothing strange or unusual about that. That's just how things work"?

Does, in fact, the Mastodon hive mind simultaneously think a) an arbitrary, artificial, self-imposed 500 char limit is a good thing; and b) posting massive threads, or images of text with a copy of the text in the alt attr, is not "weird" or "abusing the system" or just "bonkers"?

(I wonder - if someone habitually posted a 20x20 blank image, with what they wanted to say in the alt attr, and the post content being "text in alt" to get around the 500-char limit, would that be best characterised as "a neat hack" or "burn it with fire"?)

Xitter had a short character limit because it was originally SMS-based, which forced a max tweet length of 160 chars. And even when it gave up the SMS limitations, short messages were part of its DNA.

But Mastodon is supposed to be a break from Xitter, right? So, why the 500 character limit? Why "federated microblogging" and not just "federated blogging"? If someone's posts tend to be too lengthy, and you only have a 500-char attention span or hate seeing a couple of paragraphs followed by a "[Read more ...]" expander, just don't follow them! (Exactly like the current advice for if you don't like long threads is "well, just don't follow people who post them")

FWIW, I tried putting this together as a Mastodon thread. But there's no way to draft a thread. Or even save a draft of a single toot. Either you post it, or you don't. And you can't make a post "Mentions Only" (closest thing to "Private") and then change the visibility of all parts to "Public" once the thread is complete, because making posts more private might be an avenue for harassment.

Somewhat ironically, while searching for a way to draft a toot thread in a sane manner, the best result I came across was Cory Doctorow's How To Make The Least-Worst Mastodon Threads where he talks about how bad Mastodon threads are, but why he still likes them, and therefore approves of the 500-char limit. As if he couldn't post threads the way he currently does on a blogging platform that allowed unlimited characters (like on his own blog), if he wanted to?

sigh

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Parkrun has a news/blog page. This news blog has an RSS feed, at https://www.parkrun.com/feed/. Which I subscribe to with Akregator, my RSS reader of choice.

Searching for some info on Parkrun recently, I came across a couple of recent articles which hadn't shown up on my news feed. And looking at the feed closely, I noticed that the most recent fetches had failed with some kind of error.

I normally ignore feed errors, because sometimes feeds aren't available for some reason (including my computer not being connected to the internet occasionally), and it's not a problem because I'll pick up any missed posts on the feeds the next time a feed is downloaded. But these articles were a week or two old, and so I should have got them recently.

I checked the page sources to see if the feed URL had changed (which happens on some websites sometimes) and couldn't find it listed at all. Interesting. Maybe the feed had been deleted altogether? I tried accessing the feed in Firefox... and there it was. Present in its original location, and seemingly free of errors.

So I tried downloading the feed manually, in order to have a closer look at it, to see if there were any issues that might cause my feed reader to think it was broken - which would be one reason why it didn't show up.

$ wget https://www.parkrun.com/feed/
--2024-02-23 12:00:00--  https://www.parkrun.com/feed/
Resolving www.parkrun.com (www.parkrun.com)... 34.248.148.22, 52.210.236.124, 54.171.25.67
Connecting to www.parkrun.com (www.parkrun.com)|34.248.148.22|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden
2024-02-23 12:00:00 ERROR 403: Forbidden.

Huh.

That's weird. Reload in Firefox, feed is fine. Re-run wget command, 403 Forbidden. Let's try...

$ wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/123.0" https://www.parkrun.com/feed/
--2024-02-23 12:01:00--  https://www.parkrun.com/feed/
Resolving www.parkrun.com (www.parkrun.com)... 54.171.25.67, 34.248.148.22, 52.210.236.124
Connecting to www.parkrun.com (www.parkrun.com)|54.171.25.67|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 39816 (39K) [text/xml]
Saving to: ‘index.html’
index.html                    100%[==============================================>]  38.88K   200KB/s    in 0.2s    
2024-02-23 12:01:00 (200 KB/s) - ‘index.html’ saved [39816/39816]

It does the same thing with curl. So, Parkrun is blocking access to the RSS feed of its news blog by User-Agent.

It's allowing Firefox, a web browser which doesn't actually provide a useful view of RSS feeds (unless you have an extra extension installed), but blocking actual RSS readers (like Akregator) or home-grown news-reading scripts which use standard cross-platform utilities like wget or curl.

W. T. F?!?!

Edit 2024-03-09: The feed seems to be working again. Yay?

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Measurement and reporting

Inflation is measured using a basket of goods:

Consumer price inflation is the rate at which the prices of goods and services bought by households rise or fall. Imagine a large "shopping basket" containing those goods and services. As the prices of the various items change over time so does the total cost of the basket.

Inflation (or deflation) is then the amount that the total price of that basket of goods goes up (or down) from month to month.

Fairly typical examples of reporting are:

Inflation set to ease...: The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is set to reveal Consumer Prices Index (CPI) inflation dropping to 8.2% in April from 10.1% in March

Inflation falls to lowest level...: The Office for National Statistics said on Tuesday inflation fell to 8.7 per cent in April - down from 10.1 per cent in the previous month.

UK Inflation down...: The UK's inflation rate fell to 8.7% in April, down from 10.1% in March, [...] Core inflation - which strips out food and energy prices - rose to a 31-year high of 6.8% in April

What I thought inflation measured

Given the typical reporting of "The rate of inflation in April was 8.7%", I had always thought this meant that the amount prices had risen in April, i.e. from the start of April to the end of April, was at a rate of 8.7% per year.

Although the rate of inflation is often described as being "over a year" or "for a year" or "in a year", that sounded to me that while the rate was being measured for a given month, it was just being expressed in a per-year unit. This made sense to me for a number of reasons.

  1. You don't have to have been travelling for an hour to describe your speed in miles per hour. If you want to calculate your (average) speed along a given stretch of road, you just need to measure how long that stretch of road is, and how long you took to travel it. You don't have to go further back than that. And there's nothing odd about expressing a rate in units of time that differ from how long the measurement took.
  2. Inflation expressed as percentage points per month would normally only have fractional values, which isn't as easy to communicate. We could measure speeds in miles per second rather than miles per hour, but then a speed limit of 30mph would come out as 0.0083mps, which is awkward to convey or put on speedometers and signposts. Using a unit where the values typically fall from 1 to 100 is easier to get across. (Inflation could be measured using per mille points or basis points per month, but then those units would probably also need to be explained, whereas most people already know how percentages work.)
  3. The interest rates for loans, mortgages, bonds, and other lines of credit/debt are also normally expressed as percentage points per year. Being able to compare inflation rates to interest rates, and to other annual monetary changes (e.g. salary changes) is incredibly useful.
  4. Months are different lengths. If a smooth constant rate of inflation caused a basket of goods to go up by 31p in January, the same smooth constant rate of inflation would cause that same basket of goods to only go up by 28p in February. Expressing just the amount of inflation in a given month would give inconsistent rates.

After all, Economics is, like, a science¹. It uses maths, and tables, and graphs, and equations. I'd expect it to use the word "rate" in the correct mathematical sense - the slope of the graph of measurement vs. time over the interval described.

Therefore, the "rate of inflation in April" surely should be most straightforwardly interpreted as "the amount that prices rose during the month of April", expressed in "percentage points per year".

What "the rate of inflation in April" actually measures

I recently came across a few bits of reporting where the way inflation was being being described didn't align with how I understood it. There might have been a number of reasons for this, one of which was that a reporter had either misunderstood inflation, or understood it but was communicating it poorly. If you've ever read an article about which you have first-hand knowledge or expertise in, you'll recognise how feasible this is. Another, of course, is that I might have misunderstood inflation.

However, given that these separate reports seemed to have got inflation wrong in exactly the same way, I thought it was worth double-checking my understanding.

From the ONS Consumer price inflation, UK: April 2023 glossary:

Annual inflation rate

The most common approach to measuring inflation is the 12-month or annual inflation rate, which compares prices for the latest month with the same month a year ago. In any given month, the annual rate is determined by the balance between upward and downward price movements of the range of goods and services included in the index.

So "the rate of inflation in April" (or, as it is more accurately but only occasionally reported, "the rate of inflation in the year to April") actually measures "the amount that prices rose between one April and the previous April", rather than "the amount that prices rose in April".

Huh.

I learned something. Great!

Now I have a better understanding of what the reported "rate of inflation" is, that's going to help me navigate the world more effectively, right? This is a good thing.

Except...

...the more I thought about what the reported rate of inflation actually measured, the less sense it makes to me.

A thought experiment

I'm going to give an example that plays out over three years.

The first year is calm. The price of the basket of goods rises at a steady "inflation" rate of around 2.4%/year, which is roughly what modern western governments target.

In the second year, a shock at the end of April causes prices to rise suddenly between May and July, before (due to some sound government policy intervention and strong consumer protection laws against greedflation profiteering(!)²) they stabilise and fall back down to near previous levels by the end of the year.

In the third year, prices go back to rising steadily at around the original target rate.

This is a work of fiction - any similarities to actual rates of inflation (living or dead) are purely coincidental.

Yr/Mon Price Infl   Yr/Mon Price Infl   Yr/Mon Price Infl
(202)1/Jan £100.00 ?   (202)2/Jan £102.40 2.40%   (202)3/Jan £105.00 2.54%
(202)1/Feb £100.20 ?   (202)2/Feb £102.60 2.40%   (202)3/Feb £105.00 2.34%
(202)1/Mar £100.40 ?   (202)2/Mar £102.80 2.39%   (202)3/Mar £105.25 2.38%
(202)1/Apr £100.60 ?   (202)2/Apr £103.00 2.39%   (202)3/Apr £105.50 2.43%
(202)1/May £100.80 ?   (202)2/May £106.00 5.16%   (202)3/May £105.75 -0.24%
(202)1/Jun £101.00 ?   (202)2/Jun £111.00 9.90%   (202)3/Jun £106.00 -4.50%
(202)1/Jul £101.20 ?   (202)2/Jul £112.00 10.67%   (202)3/Jul £106.25 -5.13%
(202)1/Aug £101.40 ?   (202)2/Aug £111.00 9.47%   (202)3/Aug £106.50 -4.05%
(202)1/Sep £101.60 ?   (202)2/Sep £112.00 10.24%   (202)3/Sep £106.75 -4.69%
(202)1/Oct £101.80 ?   (202)2/Oct £110.00 8.06%   (202)3/Oct £107.00 -2.73%
(202)1/Nov £102.00 ?   (202)2/Nov £108.00 5.88%   (202)3/Nov £107.25 -0.69%
(202)1/Dec £102.20 ?   (202)2/Dec £106.00 3.72%   (202)3/Dec £107.50 1.42%

What is the relationship between price changes and "inflation"?

If prices fall, inflation can stay positive.

The UK Inflation down... article makes the claim: A slower rate of inflation does not mean prices are coming down - it means they are not going up so quickly. It is not the only piece of reporting to do so. I have heard similar statements by a number of other genuinely respectable commentators in the past. Those comments stood out to me previously, as they seemed so self-evidently, blindingly obvious that I was surprised that the point needed to be expressed at all.

The thing is, based on what "inflation" is actually measuring, it isn't necessarily true. I mean, it might be true, but it might not. Looking at the example from September of year 2 - prices fall every month for 4 straight months, yet "inflation" remains positive the whole time.

The reverse is true for the 7 months in year 3 where "inflation" is negative. Prices rise every month during that time.

There can be sudden shocks in inflation, even if everything is stable.

Looking again at the period in year 3 where "inflation" turns negative, it goes from a "healthy" +2.43% in April to suddenly diving to a shocking -5.13% in July! What caused this sudden, unexpected shift in "inflation" in year 3?

Nothing.

There was no change in the rate prices were rising between April and July in year 3. Prices were under control, and rising slowly and steadily the whole time. The apparent change in inflation in year 3 is actually entirely due to the sudden rise in prices in year 2. But because that sudden change in prices was not repeated in year 3, "inflation" goes completely wild.

There's no way to tell what inflation has done over, e.g. a 6-month period.

Even if you've got 10 years of worth of inflation numbers, there's no way to tell what inflation has done over any timescale other than a whole number of years.

Every April measurement only tells you about what inflation did since the previous April, and the April before that, and the April before that. Ditto for every October. There is no way of taking those numbers and figuring out how much prices have changed from any given April to the following October.

Why is inflation reported the way it is?

Seriously, why?

These inflation numbers gathered for the government and reported by the media only make sense in the right context. But not only is the right context not given, the wrong context is given instead.

Comparing the rate of inflation from month to month is pointless. If inflation in March is 10.1%, and inflation in April is 8.7%, that says nothing about what the price of goods did between March and April³. It only says something about what prices did between March and the previous March, and completely independently between April and the previous April.

It doesn't even tell anyone whether prices are currently rising or falling.

Furthermore, none of these issues would occur if inflation actually measured what I originally thought it did.

The only possible justification I can think of for reporting inflation this way is to account for periodic seasonal pricing variations. For example, if prices fall every January due to retailers always having sales then, or due to wide scale post New Year belt-tightening leading to lower consumer demand and consequently a drop in prices, then inflation could look like it's doing something weird in January when everything is actually fairly normal, historically speaking. Measuring inflation from January to January and February to February makes that kind of variation irrelevant.

But, the ONS already knows how to calculate seasonal variations in prices and account for it - because it already does that for other statistics it gathers, including other types of inflation. They could easily publish a "seasonally adjusted" measure of what inflation was really doing in a given month.

So, why is inflation measured and reported the way that it is? What is anyone supposed to do with that information? What use is it, like, at all?

Answers on a postcard...


Actually, more like from the start of April to the start of May, in order to avoid a fencepost error.

¹ Sorry, that's meant to say that Economics is like a science (but not actually one).

That's unfair. The trouble is, Economics appears to desperately want to be a "hard" science with reductionist theories and precise mathematical laws, evidenced by its models of spherical utility-maximising rational economic actors in a vacuum. But because humans are highly chaotic, being both stubbornly contrarian and also vulnerable to groupthink, this approach doesn't really appear to work. See the well-known Economic aphorisms that markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent and Wall Street indexes [sic] predicted nine out of the last five recessions!. Nevertheless, Economists seem to keep using the language of precise mathematical models anyway.

² You know, like competent governments who work on behalf of voters against the companies who would exploit or endanger them.

³ Although, unless prices fell by more than 1.4% in the previous March to April, an inflation reduction from 10.1% to 8.7% means that prices will have fallen between the current March to April. Also note, that's unless they fell by more than 1.4% in a single month, not that unless they fell at a rate of more than 1.4%/year. So, yeah, prices probably did actually fall.

A. Gary Schilling, 1986:

markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent.

Paul Samuelson, NewsWeek, September 19, 1966, p. 92:

To prove that Wall Street is an early omen of movements still to come in GNP, commentators quote economic studies alleging that market downturns predicted four out of the last five recessions. That is an understatement. Wall Street indexes predicted nine out of the last five recessions!

Note that Wall Street indices don't actually predict recessions. Rather, commentators and the authors of economic studies (mis)interpret the movement of those indices to predict recessions.

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Readers beware, this book is long. It weighs in at 109,205 words⁰ over 205 pages, spanning 12 fascicles (table of contents at the end).

This feels monumentally excessive.

For comparison, it's longer than The Hobbit (95,022 words), each of the first three Harry Potter books (Prison of Azkaban comes in at 106,821 words) and Wuthering Heights (107,945 words)¹. You might think that those are not especially long novels but, given its genre, Application is an epic work of monstrous proportions.

I challenge anyone to read all of Application in just a weekend. It took me more than a fortnight, having to take breaks between parts, but also frequently mid-part. And I normally like reading.


One of the difficulties with Application is that it uses the eccentric conceit of being written "in dialect" - specifically, a dry, long-winded, sesquipedalian variant of English known as "legalese". To be fair, this is de rigueur for the genre, and Application suffers from a relatively mild case, remaining mostly comprehensible to anyone well-versed in ordinary English. The only bit of language I was unfamiliar with when I first saw it was "wilful default" (Fs.VI pp.29-30). I initially thought it was a misprint for "wilful deceit", until a conversation with friends enlightened me. Of course, there may be other "false friends" which I didn't recognise and have unknowingly misunderstood entirely! Your personal mileage may naturally vary.


It also doesn't help that the plot is threadbare, and the characters are paper-thin. The protagonist "You" is a complete cipher, who is almost entirely passive and has very little characterisation at all; a classic Audience Surrogate trope. Whereas the main antagonist, "We", is a one-note monomaniacal control freak, who does little but demand that everything be done exactly their way, constantly. Of the handful of other fleeting characters, one going by the cryptic name "Ombudsman" appears the most rounded and intriguing. I would have liked for them to get more of a role, but from what I gather that would only happen if things started going badly for "You".

For readers that are easily confused by characters with similar names, Fs.VI Annex 5 Your Rights and Responsibilities, will really give you headaches. It discusses the relationship between "We" - referred to by their full name of "HSBC UK Bank plc" - and their close relative, "HSBC Bank plc". Now, I realise that names often run in families so the similarity here has a plot-related justification, but even so, this still feels like bad, clunky writing. Would it have been too much trouble to give the relative a nickname, like our antagonist's "We", to reduce reader confusion?


Another major problem with the length of Application is repetition. It is common in good writing to repeat a text's core themes in different contexts to make them stand out, but that works best when those themes are few, succinctly stated, and not over-repeated. As an example, "We" appears to have a strong aversion to terrorist financing and money laundering², and Application explains this, including how "We" uses the details "You" provides to combat those threats (e.g. sharing those details with others). The problem is, it does so at considerable length, and in Fs.I pp.4, Fs.I pp.8, Fs.VI pp.12, Fs.VI pp.18, Fs.VI pp.31, Fs.VII pp.30, and Fs.VII pp.37. Repeating the point three times would have driven it home effectively. Seven times is just overkill.

The themes of ISA Share Dealing Terms, Failed Trades, Best Execution Disclosure, and Conflicts of Interest are similarly repeated what feels like too many times, and at unnecessarily great length. Finally, it feels like more than half of Fs.VIII Rates and Fees was just copy and pasted from Fs.V Key Features of HSBC ID & HSBC ID+. Why? Why was it necessary to present me with those tables of numbers twice?

One of the disadvantages of the length of Application is not just in how much time it takes to actually read everything, but that the length itself is intimidating and off-putting. More than once, I shied away from reading the next few pages simply because of how many there were left to go, only to realise when I restarted that I'd kind of read those pages before, earlier, and already had the gist of them. If the amount of repetition were decreased, the text that remained would feel much more approachable.

Hence, Application desperately needs the loving attention of a viciously ruthless editor.


Ironically, one area that I thought would have a great deal of repetition, which could actually help with its reading and understanding, did not. From their titles, Fs.VI HSBC ID T&Cs and Fs.VII HSBC ID+ T&Cs would appear to have a great many parallels. I suspected that they would act like a pair of alternate timelines, where the effect of one small decision at the end of Fs.V by "You", would produce narratives that were very similar, differing in a few small but crucial ways. I thought I'd be able to read both parts in parallel, mostly skimming the second where it was identical to the first, but paying careful attention to the places where it diverged. Instead, Fs.VII is written in a completely different voice, from a different perspective, and with a totally different structure, from Fs.VI. If the reader is intended to draw parallels and notice differences between the two possible outcomes of the choice "You" makes, this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. Any such comparison is completely obscured by the decision to tell the parts in radically different ways.

(FWIW, I think structuring these parts in a "choose your own adventure" format would be much better. Having outlined the choice that "You" has to make in Fs.V, it should suffice to ask the reader to pick either Fs.VI or Fs.VII before continuing to Fs.VIII and beyond, rather than asking them to read both. Sufficiently invested readers can always go back and read the details of the path not taken later, if they so desire.)


One final issue I have (I'm nearly done, I swear) is the fixed two-column portrait-oriented page layout that Application uses. I understand the reasoning behind a multi-column layout; as the reader's eye scans back from one line to the next, it's harder to pick the correct next line if the lines are too long. Therefore, if you're constrained to A4 paper, a multi-column layout is one of the best ways to prevent this.

But, most people these days won't be reading Application on A4 paper. They're not printing out 200+ pages of electronic T&Cs documentation to flip through in a comfy chair by the fireplace. They're reading electronic documents on electronic devices, like their computer, or maybe their phone. And the kind of fixed two-column layout used here is almost-universally terrible on those displays because of the need to scroll up to the top of the next column, which interrupts the flow of reading down through the document. Not only that, but depending on the display the user might but also have to - even worse - scroll side-to-side between the columns.

What would be great, on the web, is if there were only some format for describing the structure and contents of a document, allowing each users' device to format it in the way that was best for the reader. That way, the length of Application would not be exacerbated by the way in which it's presented.


Lastly, a word of warning. Some readers may want to skip Vol I and jump right into Vol II - Apply for a Sharedealing Account - but you really can't do that here. If you've not already made it through Vol I - HSBC Bank Account Application - you simply won't have what you need to get through Vol II.


tl;dr - Too long; don't read. (Unless you absolutely have to.)

2/10 - It does what it sets out to do; it just takes way, way, wayyyyyy too long to do it.

Contents

Abbreviations

T&Cs  Terms and Conditions
ID  InvestDirect
ID+  InvestDirect Plus
S&S ISA  Stock & Shares ISA

Vol I - HSBC Bank Account Application (73 pages, 27,375 words)

Fascicle I  Privacy Notice  10 pages,
 6,273 words
Fascicle II  Personal Banking T&Cs and Charges  54 pages,
 17,677 words
Fascicle III  Digital Banking Terms for Online and Mobile Banking  8 pages,
 2,827 words
Fascicle IV  Glossary of Terms  1 page,
 598 words

Vol II - Apply for a Sharedealing Account (132 pages, 81,830 words)

Fascicle V  Key Features of HSBC ID & HSBC ID+  15 pages,
 7,561 words
Fascicle VI  HSBC ID T&Cs  39 pages,
 26,428 words
Fascicle VII  HSBC ID+ T&Cs  44 pages,
 28,846 words
Fascicle VIII  Rates and Fees for HSBC ID & HSBC ID+  5 pages,
 1,347 words
Fascicle IX  Key Features of HSBC ID & HSBC ID+ S&S ISA  10 pages,
 4,492 words
Fascicle X  HSBC ID S&S ISA T&Cs  15 pages,
 10,127 words
Fascicle XI  Financial Services Compensation Scheme information  2 pages,
 1,305 words
Fascicle XII  Best Execution Disclosure Statement  2 pages,
 1,724 words

Footnotes


⁰ By a reasonable estimate. I couldn't get word counts directly from the PDFs, so I did a Select All/Copy/Paste into LibreOffice Writer, and used the word count feature there. That may have included page numbers, or double-counted words hyphenated across line breaks, but the numbers should be in the right ballpark.

¹ Word Count Of Famous Novels

² Or so they claim, but the author does have history of being an unconscionably hypocritical douchebag in this regard, like when they were found guilty of not just failures and weaknesses in their regulatory due-diligence departments (as appears to happen repeatedly for some reason), but actively aided criminals when its international staff had stripped identifying information on transactions through the U.S. from countries including Iran and Sudan in order to evade sanctions.
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Why do cash machines have options for both "balance and cash" and "cash only", and if you select "cash only" then ask you "Do you want to see your balance first? Y/N". Or options for "cash and receipt" and "cash only", and then ask "cash only" people "Would you like a receipt? Y/N". NO! If I wanted to see my balance, or a receipt, I would have selected the option to do that on the previous screen!

Do the people who design cash machines not actually use cash machines. Do they not spend any of their time standing in a queue for a cash machine wondering what on earth the people ahead of them are taking so long doing? Why aren't cash machine UIs streamlined to make the common use case - getting cash out of a cash machine - as efficient, uncomplicated and navigable in as few steps as possible?

I mean, it's not like the checkout at a supermarket, where it's kind of understandable that some customers will want to spend five minutes talking to the cashier and holding up the line, because they're the kind of person who for whatever reason just needs to chat. There's another human being there. And if you're in a rush, maybe the supermarket is not the place for you to go today, so don't fret the queues. At least you're inside, which contrasts with the common case of queuing for a cash machine.

But who is getting personal fulfilment from interacting with a cash machine? Why does that need to on any longer than absolutely necessary for anyone involved? And what are the people ahead of you spending all their time doing at a cash machine? Seriously. Why does it take some people so long to decide how much cash to get out, and to enter that number into the keypad. It's only 2 (or very occasionally 3) digits followed by the bright green "enter" key - that is if the amount isn't on the quick selection screen first. How can someone spend a minute deciding how much money they want? Didn't they think of that before they got there?
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I've been reading and watching a bunch of stuff about Brexit. It's depressing, and probably not very good for me, so I should probably stop, but I can't seem to help myself. Anyway, there have been a couple of things which keep coming up, that stick in my head, and go round and round and round. I decided to write them down to see if that would help me make sense of them, and it didn't much.

Then I overthought a lot about whether I should post this at all. Seriously, I just wrote 3 self-loathing paragraphs about why would anyone want to read another idiotic ramble about Brexit, and then a meta-discussion about why anyone would want to read that, and it was all terrible, so I just deleted them and put the actual ramble behind a cut, so you can easily ignore it if you want.

GET ON WITH IT!!! )

I'm not a fan of the Brexit result (to put it mildly) but I don't want to be a sore loser about it. I just don't get the logic behind the call for a second vote, or behind the notion that we could change our mind even if we wanted to. Am I missing something, or can we move the Brexit discussion on to sub-topics that are a bit more constructive?
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