I, too, went through like 18 months in the UK with the big stores not selling any until one reintroduced it recently. Alternatives on the internet were like 3+x the price, at least. It was incredibly frustrating. I now stock up and have 2-3 boxes of the stuff, in case it does vanish again.
Doubly frustrating since mine is a small, single-drawer dishwasher, so pods are even worse since I can't break them down. It leads to me having way too much detergent in the dishwasher and I end up with residue on the dishes.
That Sainsburys one is the one I have now but it wasn't showing up on its website for the longest time. Thankfully, that changed.
I did find the Waitrose one and it was going to be my next buy, but my local didn't have it and I never got around to ordering it before Sainsburys came back in stock. Interesting that it's now cheaper, maybe I'll check again...
The tabs I had to buy for a while could be broken fairly easy by hand. This 1/3 2/3 worked noticeably better than just putting the whole tab into the dispenser.
I thought about it but wasn't sure if it would really do the trick. I kinda don't wanna buy more detergent right now because I'm stuck with a lot of pods
I work often in China. I somehow haven’t had my WireGuard VPN back to my own home server blocked, yet. It’s pointed to a domain that also hosts some HTTPS web services so that might help.
Prior to this, pre-Covid I used to use shadowsocks hosted on a DO droplet. Shadowsocks with obfs, or a newer equivalent (v2ray w/ vmess or vless protocol) and obfs (reality seems to be the current hotness) will probably work within Indonesia given their blocking will be way less sophisticated than China. The difference here is that it’s a proxy, not a VPN, but it makes it a lot easier to obfuscate its true nature than a VPN which stands out because obfuscation isn’t in its design.
Hosting on big public VPSs can be double edged. On one hand, blocking DO or AWS is huge collateral. On the other, it’s an obvious VPN endpoint and can help identify the type of traffic as something to block.
If you have access to reddit, r/dumbclub (believe it or not) has some relatively current info but it’s pretty poor signal to noise. Scratch around there for some leads though.
Note that this stuff is all brittle as hell to set up and I usually have a nightmarish time duct-taping it all together. That’s why I’m overjoyed my WireGuard tunnel has worked whenever I’ve visited for a year now.
One other left-field option, depending on your cost appetite, is a roaming SIM. Roaming by design tunnels all data back to your own ISP before routing out so even in China roaming SIMs aren’t blocked. It’s a very handy backup if you need a clear link to ssh into a box to set up the above, for example.
i have a few chinese friends and they say it's always easy to get a working vpn. that might not be true in a Tien An Minh type crisis, i dunno, but month in month out year upon year they surf western sites, exchange winnie the pooh pictures, etc. i suppose the people i know could be relatively upper class, i have no idea what type difference that could make. i had a chinese gf in LA who would send... my >cough< pictures... to her mother in china because she enjoyed them
The way you phrased this makes it sound like your ex was sending your dick pics to her mom, which I'm not sure is the intended reading (but more power to them...?)
> They assume they know more than everyone else. Got a guy who has had a problem for 5 years and tried 20 different solutions? The engineers will spend 10 minutes thinking about it, come up with a solution (that won't work, but they insist it will) and dismiss the problem as "trivial", and think the guy is an idiot.
I call this the load-bearing 'just' - as in, 'oh, why don't you just...'
If I catch myself saying or writing that word, I kick myself and think about why I'm doing it. Usually I stop and reapproach my input.
Unless I’m mistaken (and that’s quite possible!), this should be trivial to test. Sous vide some meat for an overly long time to a precise temperature, then cut each piece at set intervals.
If you sous vide for a long time, the entirety of the steak will be at the same temperature, while pan searing cooks the outside to a higher temperature than the inside, which results in the core temperature going up a few degrees during resting.
Yes exactly. It all has to do with the thermal conductivity of the meat. Meat tends to be a fairly good insulator which means it takes a long time for heat to conduct through a thick piece of meat (such as a large roast or a pork shoulder). This means that cooking at a temperature above your target internal temp (most conventional cooking methods, not sous vide) will produce a fairly steep thermal gradient between the outside of the meat and the core. Resting the meat allows heat to flow down the gradient to bring the overall temperature closer towards equilibrium.
Another important effect during cooking is the breakdown of collagen fibres (present in tough connective tissues which make some cuts of meat very tough to chew). This occurs in the presence of moisture at temperatures above 170F. When collagen breaks down the meat tenderizes and the collagen itself turns into gelatine which absorbs moisture and retains it within the meat. A gelatine-rich cut of slow-cooked meat (such as oxtail) can be very sticky and packed with flavour. This is one case where food can taste juicier with longer cooking times.
This is not a very quick test because you can hold sous vide food up to 4 hours at the target temp. So you will need to account for that 4 hour gap in all the testing before it starts to break down.
I had my backpack - with (work) laptop, both passports, wallet, house keys, etc. - stolen from a pub in Euston a couple of years ago. All that remained in my pockets was my phone & power bank, and airpods. It was stolen by a guy who went into the pub we were at, sat at an adjacent table, pretended to study the menu, deposited a dummy backpack to the communal pile under our table when we were standing to greet people, then picked up the heaviest one (mine) and walked out. Unlike the author, I wasn't black-out drunk, we were just distracted and someone was able to do a sleight of hand when we weren't paying attention.
The author is very lucky to get theirs back. I had to replace it all. As they say, replacing the UK one wasn't too bad - though I hadn't been in the UK for 2 years by that point so I had to get extra guarantors to sign photos and write a declaration. The other one was a nightmare, and by pure luck the embassy could look up my last application and pull the birth certificate reference number for me. Again, 2 guarantors and I was very lucky to have a friend from that country visiting.
I reported it as stolen, hoping that they'd steal the laptop and wallet and then ditch the rest. Unfortunately, either nobody found it or nobody turned it in. Of course, the CCTV that was in the pub was 'too blurry' to be of any use. CCTV has a funny tendency of being useless in that regard.
In my case, I crashed at a friend's place that evening, and then went down to my local makerspace for lack of wanting to pay a locksmith £fuckloads to unlock my door on a Sunday. By pure luck, there was a lockpicking nerd there and they came and slipped my door for me. Thankfully, that was enough to help offset a lot of the negativity of the whole affair. I felt like I got off lucky a bit, and didn't dwell so much on it as a result.
Lived in London for over 40 years. Never let your stuff out of sight for a minute. My foot always goes through a loop on my bag. Had at least two attempts to grab it which was stopped dead by this. I use a knackered looking Osprey daylite plus bag which has straps around the zips that stops people casually having a go at it as well. Mostly no issues in the last 10 years but I know people who are careless and have been done a few times.
My general travel experience, outside the UK, is that if you dress down, use a knackered looking bag and a shitty no brand knackered phone case and people will leave you alone. Passport goes on you in a zipped inner pocket anywhere on the planet. Same with wallet, keys, anything. Never wear anything that indicates you have an iPhone worth nicking. Apple Watch / Airpods make you a target.
Wow, I have to say it's a bit crazy that you have to go through all this effort in what I think of as quite a safe city. I was recently in London for a week of meetings and someone said be careful about having your phone out in case someone snatches it but I thought they were being hyperbolic.
Why isn't there a bigger crackdown on such petty crime? I guess people think they can get away with it, but it feels like one of those creeping issues that might seem small at first but deters important activity (tourism, business relocation, etc.) longterm if not addressed.
> Why isn't there a bigger crackdown on such petty crime?
Many reasons.
1. UK prisons are already overflowing. Even violent criminals like rapists and murderers are only serving half of their sentences. When there were riots recently the government had to let many criminals go early just to make room for rioters. There is basically no room for petty criminals. The police know this which is why they don't even bother arresting petty criminals since they will just be let go free anyway.
2. U.K. police has been underfunded for decades at this point. There were severe cuts under the earlier Tory regime and now under the Labour regime it continues to be underfunded with the police chief suggesting to cut the number of police forces from 43 to 12. At this point the police basically do not care about any property crime since they prioritize violent crimes (rightly in my opinion).
3. British legal system and British society in general has trends that favor increase in crime e.g. loosening of social controls (loss of social stigmas etc) increased movement, freedom of movement (people move around more freely instead of staying in the same village their entire lifetime) lack of tracking, lack of interest in tracking (e.g. London has about same number of CCTV cameras as China yet Chinese government is able to use its camera to track criminals much more effectively than the British).
Could also talk about changes in society (loss of social capital aka Bowling Alone), increased immigration, changes in parenting (single parents etc) but those are topics of discussion for different time.
They routinely get away with it, it's a cottage industry of sorts. See [1].
> Why isn't there a bigger crackdown on such petty crime? I guess people think they can get away with it, but it feels like one of those creeping issues that might seem small at first but deters important activity (tourism, business relocation, etc.) longterm if not addressed.
Because the police don't care, and these crimes are generally impossible to solve.
There are stories of people finding their stolen bicycles, motorbikes or cars, and when informing the police they're told to 'steal it back'.
The phones thieves are generally youths riding around the city on electric bikes, fully balaclava'd up. There's little chance of catching them. Even if they were caught nothing would happen to them.
London has apparently gone to shit since I lived there 5 years ago.
> Because the police don't care, and these crimes are generally impossible to solve.
Because they don't care is correct. These crimes are actually trivial to solve. The devices are tracked, there is a clear money trail, people are doing this routinely as a business.
As you said people routinely track their stolen property and nothing is done about it.
They don't care because it's "petty" crime. And they will "get to it after they solve all the murders."
Yes. The police have the ability to find and arrest the perpetrators pretty quickly, if they prioritise it. There was a phone theft which (unusually) turned into a stabbing/slashing a couple of years ago when the victim fought back. Perpetrators escaped on bikes before police arrived, but were arrested only 3 or 4 days later.
One thing that really struck me in Dubai: I watched a group of girls leave their designer purses and phones unattended on a table. They just left the coffee shop and came back over 10 minutes later.
I had a similar experience in Korea recently. Going for lunch in a shopping mall, many people were routinely placing their phones on tables to "reserve" them while they walked off (out of sight of their phones/tables) to collect their food. I couldn't quite believe it!
From your and other comments in the thread, it sounds like the main deterrence then is 1) that it's likely you'll be caught and 2) that if caught, the punishment will be quite harsh.
I wonder if the UK and other cities are struggling more with the first or second
I've travelled to a majority of countries across the globe (exploration geophysics, mostly in the air or deep backcountry, rarely in major cities) and Dubai is another city within a city location; two state; the rich are rich and have no need to steal, or are brazen about it, while the poor are segregated, curfewed and routinely castigated.
These are not places were you want to fall the wrong side of the invisible barrier.
This dynamic exists in many expensive locations around the world, but Dubai stands out for its remarkably low crime rate. Take San Francisco, for instance. More expensive to live and greater wealth inequality, yet riddled with crime.
It isn't the expense; it is the segregation. The poor just aren't allowed to exist or mingle with the rich in Dubai. If you are poor, you are only near the rich while you are at work, performing a job.
What do you mean by that? It's the same kind of segregation that exists in San Francisco: expensive areas are out of reach to those without money. There aren't actual laws enforcing segregation. In fact, it's almost the opposite - it's pretty easy to come and live in Dubai.
I can safely walk around the streets at 2 am in a "bad" neighbourhood in Dubai or Singapore. Can't do the same in most Western cities.
I'd gladly trade a little bit of freedom (the freedom to criticize a government that isn't even mine) in exchange for this massive improvement in security. Apparently a lot of Western entrepreneurs are feeling the same way lately.
On a side note, a friend who used to work in the Dubai Police told me that even they're getting swamped with the rapid increase in population, and even they're getting subjected to budget cuts of late. There used to be a time when part of the police force was even foreign, but those positions were eliminated in favor of a UAE-nationals-only force.
I was encouraged to leave my wallet and phone on the table of time out, while we went and got food. My friends rationale was: there are CCTVs everywhere and thieves are dealt with very harshly. So eff it
Even in Singapore, I recall the protocol being to leave a napkin or whatever at a Hawker Center to indicate the chair/table was taken. Been a few years though.
Being somewhat familiar with both, there are probably areas of both cities that are more and less safe. Without looking at numbers, there are probably areas of NYC that I'd be less inclined to wander into than areas of London. Though, as you say, bias. There are areas of London that were sketchy a few decades back that are pretty gentrified today, especially in East London.
20 years ago I had a somewhat similar experience - a pub off The Strand in central London.
My bag/briefcase was under a (high) table, and in that case the pub was able to view CCTV and work out the guy who sat nearby and hooked his leg to grab my bag - while I was distracted.
Luckily for me, while it contained laptop and passport, I got a call 20 mins later from my wife, who had been contacted by someone 100m away in a different pub. The thief had taken my bag with laptop, not realised there was also a passport in there, gone to another pub, stolen another bag, switched my laptop into said bag, and gone off. The owner of other lost laptop had found my (empty) bag/passport, rang my wife, and we met and at least I got bag (and passport) back...
Net result, lost laptop, but not lost passport. Much less hassle, although still a wake up call...
As an aside, a friend in Tokyo only a couple of years ago suddenly realised he had lost his passport. A couple of hours of searching bags later, panic when he realised it was mid afternoon Friday, consulate was going to close soon, and not reopen until Monday - with his flight scheduled Monday early!
Rang the consulate to ask advice: "oh yes, police station XXX rang us to report they had had your passport handed in - please go and pick it up!". So we did!
Lovely country Japan in many ways! It had just dropped out of his bag onto pavement, been found and handed in...
A smallish city in Pennsylvania. Dropped my wallet/id and work badge rushing to catch the bus to work. Someone picked it up, googled me, found an article from the local newspaper announcing my wedding, all with my home address, dropped the items in my mailbox and called my office to let me know. That was when I knew that my local paper still publishes marriages, divorces and bankruptcies, complete with all personal details. That was scary.
Wasn't the whole point of blanketing the country with CCTV to catch criminals? If it's too low res to even work out someone's face to the point where you can identify him, then what are all those cameras achieving?
Anarcho-tyranny. It's not so much to catch the career criminals as it is to make sure that no political organizing can happen on any scale major enough to disrupt the machine. The criminals are encouraged in order to terrorize the public so that they beg for bigger government, higher taxes, and more centralized control structures. The elite running the show don't actually care about "little people." Any care that actually takes place is incidental, more up to the local constabulary or local officials who aren't completely on board with the bigger picture.
> CCTV has a funny tendency of being useless in that regard
I don't think it's safe to depend on this by default.
I know a few business owners who have video (and audio) recording set ups in their business where 100+ customers come and go daily.
There might be 6 motion activated cameras saving everything to a local box in the store. That box might have let's say 1TB of disk space. Even with motion activated cameras it could fill up in ~3 weeks to where it's no longer recording.
Once it gets filled up, it gets permanently deleted with no backups. This could be a manual and adhoc process, it depends on the owner.
I never had any say in how they operate, just repeating what I've heard and seen.
This idea of trusting that companies record and save all interactions and calls indefinitely is no way something I'd trust for anything important.
> This idea of trusting that companies record and save all interactions and calls indefinitely is no way something I'd trust for anything important.
In many jurisdictions, it is against the law to record and save all interactions and calls indefinitely.
Often, law says you can only make video recordings for a given, legal, purpose. If the goal is to deter crime and help solve crimes, keeping recordings around for a few weeks is allowed, but keeping them forever typically isn’t.
> Even with motion activated cameras it could fill up in ~3 weeks to where it's no longer recording.
What are the legal aspects to it? In Switzerland e.g. the recommended duration to store recordings are "up to 72h, or as long as required to fulfil their job" (afaik, the law isn't very exactly defined) . I could see it difficult to argue "as long as the disk is not fill" as a valid duration.
I'm not sure, they are in NY. I did a quick Googling and it says there's no specific legal mandate on the storage period for a restaurant. For any recording in NY, there is a legal requirement to post a sign that there's a camera recording both video and audio (which they have). I do see that all over the place in general. The sign needs to be in clear view.
heh someone broke into a house i was staying at in Costa Rica and stole my backpack while i was working in the next room! I go back to get something and there's footprints in/out of a sliding glass door and no backpack. Fortunately, the only thing they got was my ADHD medicine. Sorta sucked for my employer for those 3 weeks I was without but it could have been much worse.
Interestingly, i did my best to follow the footsteps which led to a trail that went up through the jungle. Maybe 100 yards up a hill there was a little spot that definitely looked well used by humans overlooking the house and straight through a large window. I suspect whoever it was had been watching us for a while and when my wife/kids left, leaving me alone, just walked in, grabbed the backpack and left. (wife was not pleased as you could imagine)
Why did you miss your meds? It would have been trivial to consult any generalist / psychiatrist and walk out with your prescription. Doctors charge $50 - $100
People in Costa Rica tend to be nice and helpful, and smart.
I witnessed almost the exact same thing on an adjacent table; someone crouching down pretending to do their shoelaces for a suspiciously long time. Unfortunately I didn’t click what was going on until after they’d left.
> had my backpack - with (work) laptop, both passports, wallet, house keys, etc. - stolen
I’ve made a similar experience a while back. Since then I’ve completely reduced the number of important items I carry around simultaneously in the same bag/location.
I genuinely can't think of any sites I come across that are broken, at least visibly enough for me to notice. I think that speaks more to the variety in browsing habits than anything else. I'm sure they exist and I don't think it's a taboo. People who don't share that impression probably just don't visit any of those broken sites, e.g. me.
reply