Dear Sir/Madam,
I am writing to complain about a frustrating mis-feature of your website, which degrades my online shopping experience to the point where I often choose to shop at my local corner shop instead, despite the increased cost.
I am referring to the fact that if I forget to "save" my shopping trolley, the items I've selected disappear from it without any warning or indication that this has happened. I often spend up to half an hour making sure I've remembered everything, only to get distracted by something else and leave the computer. If I forget to "save" then that previous half-hour of work is erased. There is no reminder, nor any possibility to undo. Worse, there is no warning or indication that this has happened, so I often don't notice until the point when the lorry turns up and I realise that I've only ordered a fraction of what I thought I had.
There cannot be a technical reason for requiring me to "save" my trolley, since your server is obviously involved in all the selections I make - so it must be a deliberate feature that someone at some point decided to implement. However, I cannot see a single case in which such a feature would be useful. Why would I ever want my last half-hour's worth of shopping to be erased? And even if I did, why would I want it to be the default option, happening automatically unless I specifically say otherwise? It just doesn't make sense.
Other web sites do not work in this way, for good reason. If I add a book to my shopping cart on Amazon, for instance, it stays there, regardless of whether I log out, leave the computer, close the window, etc. I don't have to do anything specific to "save" my Amazon shopping cart, because Amazon know that if I've added something to my cart it means I want to buy it, and if I don't then I'll remove it from the cart myself. This makes it very hard to remember that I do need to go through an additional step to make things stay in my Sainsbury's shopping trolley.
It's also a horrendously mixed metaphor, which is another reason it's so hard to remember to do. Shopping trolleys in real life are not the sort of thing that need to be "saved." When I put something in a trolley I expect it to stay there until I'm ready to go to the checkout.
Today I've started writing down everything I add to my trolley, so that I can add it back if I forget to save. But I don't think I should have to do this. It partially defeats the point of doing my shopping on a computer.
I cannot be the only person who is regularly confused and frustrated by this. For all the reasons I've mentioned I implore you to change this feature, so that things added to a shopping trolley stay in the shopping trolley, even if the customer goes away mid-shop without saving.
Yours sincerely,
Nathaniel Virgo
P. S. I am glad that I copied-and-pasted this message into an external text editor, because when I finished it and clicked "send" I was told that my account had timed out and I needed to log in again. Perhaps the message was sent anyway, although there was no indication to me that it was. If so you will receive it twice; if not then it would have been lost if I hadn't "saved" it, along with all the shopping I did before writing it.
rantyThe decline of ideology in politics is a great loss. But the old ideologies - socialism and conservatism - are obsolete. We're going to figure out what works and do it. This is our new ideology.
When we say "what works" we don't just mean "what works to increase GDP," we mean what makes things better for people living in Britain and in the world as a whole. We will not forget that economic measures play an important role in this but we will also not forget that they do not represent the whole picture.
Where free markets work we will use free markets. Where regulation works we will use regulation -- but we will always strive to use the right kind of regulation. We will develop markets that serve not only their participants but also the people as a whole. We hold that this does not happen automatically - it is not an in-built feature of free markets in general - but neither is it impossible. Where markets cannot work we will use good management that integrates local knowledge in an effective way.
In order to know what works we must do the research, we must gather evidence and arguments that will allow us to truly understand in advance the effects that our actions will have on the complex system that is our country's (and our world's) economy. So one of our first acts will be to increase funding to universities, particularly for the study of economics and development. We will fund economists from a variety of backgrounds with a variety of approaches and points of view, because in the end we care about what can be shown scientifically to work and not about a particular ideological view of how economics should work. Making Britain's universities the world's leading institutions for the study of economics will give us the intellectual tools we need to make the right economic decisions.
We will explain our policies not with sound-bites but with full-blown economic explanations. We believe that the public are capable of understanding the true reasons for our decisions and we see no reason to insult their intelligence by "dumbing down."
We will solve social problems and unemployment not by "being tough" or "cracking down" except where it's truly necessary, but by introducing economic policies that will re-invigorate deprived areas.
We will not measure our public services with league tables, because that doesn't work. It's a failed experiment that has only led to people playing the system and a decline in the real value of our services. Neither will we measure our services only by the revenue they can generate, because that is not always the appropriate measure of their value - if such a measure were applied to the roads then there would be a toll to use every one. Instead we will simply hire good people to run our schools and hospitals. We will empower these people to use their detailed local knowledge to make decisions that are appropriate for the specific local situation. Above them we will hire good managers, who will have the freedom to communicate with the people below them, allowing them to allocate resources to each area in an appropriate way, and so on up to the national level. Good management, not ideology, is the key to good public services.
We understand that our economy is linked in a complex and inextricable way with the global environment. We are not afraid to make sacrifices today to ensure the world is healthy decades into the future, long after the next election. It goes without saying that our decisions on the environment will be informed by science and not by the wishes or beliefs of politicians or big business.
We understand that we have a responsibility to the world as well as our own country. We will not pursue policies that increase our own country's wealth at the expense of poorer nations, whether the cost be monetary or social. Instead we will steer a path that benefits everyone, encouraging global development in a form that empowers all the world's people rather than concentrating wealth in the hands of the few. The people of Britain can only benefit from making the world a better place for everyone.
We will work hard to stem the influence of big business on politics. We understand that the interests of business and the interests of the people coincide sometimes, but not always, and our duty will always be to the people.
We believe that big businesses should be held accountable for their actions. While we will not pursue policies that would cause multinationals to leave Britain, we will work hard to achieve a world where business serves the interests of the people as well as its own.
Every policy here is subject to revision in the light of new research. Our promise is to do at all times what is right for the people, and to listen to reality and not ideology in order to determine what is right. This promise we will not break.
We will listen to the electorate, but we understand that this conversation should not be one-sided. We will not listen exclusively to focus groups but will instead engage in a dialogue: people cannot be expected to make up their minds about policy without understanding the science behind it. For this reason, communication with the public is of paramount importance to our new ideology. Under our government you will no longer be drip-fed a dumbed down half-explanation of our economic policy but will instead receive the full, frank and honest explanation that you deserve. In this way you will be empowered to truly participate in our national democracy.
With this new ideology - the ideology of no ideology, of evidence, pragmatism, communication and honesty, we will create a new and better Britain, and a new and better World.
Dear David Lepper,
I am writing to you in response to a BBC news article (link below)
which states that the government has "published new measures that could
see people who illegally download films and music cut off from the
net."
I feel very strongly that, if this were allowed to happen, it would be
a violation of criminals' human rights.
Access to the internet in the 21st century cannot be seen as a
privilege which can reasonably be withheld as a form of punishment.
Increasingly, people rely on the internet for income, social
interaction, shopping, finding employment and many other essential
aspects of modern life. I can only imagine that this dependency of
ordinary people on internet connectivity will increase in the future.
As the dependency of British people on the internet increases, denying
access to it becomes less and less like denying access to an optional
form of entertainment, and more and more like denying access to an
essential resource such as education or the press.
I therefore believe that denial of internet access should be seen as a
"cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" under the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights. It is degrading because it denies access to the
internet's social functions and inhuman because it denies access to the
internet's economic functions. These functions will be an increasing
important part of British life in the 21st century.
I am not arguing against strong piracy laws in this letter. I am
simply saying that the punishment for such crimes should be in keeping
with the punishment for other crimes of a similar magnitude. The
invention of an entirely new type of punishment for this type of crime
is not acceptable, especially when its social effects are likely to
become so much worse in future years.
I hope that after reading this you will help to prevent this form of
punishment from becoming part of British law.
Yours sincerely,
Nathaniel Virgo
P.S. the link to the BBC news article is
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technol…
i_am_the_atom(*) about the government trying to turn private security firms into a police force, I've just heard that they're also trying to turn the police force into a private security firm - by charging community events for the cost of policing. That's right, if you're thinking of putting on some kind of event for your community you will now have to pay the police to come and police it for you. How unbelievably disgusting is that? i_am_the_atom is kind of what passes for my proper blog. It's where I tend to put anything I say that might actually be interesting, so that this journal can be reserved for inane drivel about my life. I'm not quite sure why I do that any more - I'll probably change it all around again some time soon.