Why do Chinese copycats trying to pretend they have the real thing always fail so badly? Why do they make it so obvious that what they’re selling is fake despite pretending it’s genuine? To make sure their friends don’t get scammed?
I never had any special relationship with meat, although I ate it what I would call “fairly often”. So I stopped eating it for two weeks to then understand that I can live a full life without consuming it ever again.
Now I eat meat only as a last resort.
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
Bus doors should always open outwards. It’s just logic: inwards-opening doors take up space that could otherwise be filled by passengers.
Phone calls differ from messages by their urgency. If someone is calling me unexpectedly, something must have gone wrong.
But sometimes I want to send an informative message that I want to get noticed immediately. There should be a way to make a message ring like an incoming call.
Every birthday I get reminded about how many companies have collected my information.
Besides sending me distracting and soulless messages, they give discounts for their products. Some happen to call them gifts. Discounts are not gifts!
A gift is actually something, physical or not. A discount is a possibility to get that something easier.
Imagine if a friend gave you a coupon as a present. Not a gift card, but a coupon. How would you feel?
Seriously, a conditionless free cup of tea is better than a discount “as a gift”, especially knowing that most customers aren’t abusers and will probably buy something else.
When something seems like a solution to a problem, look beyond.
Greta Thunberg insists on shaming people for flying. She even forced her mother—an opera singer—not to hop on a world tour. While some voyages are faster and cheaper by rail than by plane (Genoa to Rome, for instance), others are not.
Don’t tell me to take a five-day train from Moscow to Sanremo because it’s better for the environment. It might not be. It’s a waste of time to spend five days instead of eight hours to get from one place to another. During the extra four days in Sanremo I could have invented something that would in the long-term help the planet more.
If business people were to cancel their flights to meetings “in order to save the planet” we as a society could be losing more: breakthrough ideas would not be shared, so new products would not be created, therefore the economy would not develop faster and polluting factories would exist for longer.
Death penalty as a punishment is unacceptable. Death is bad whether it’s Stalin’s or Einstein’s: a corpse can’t acknowledge own mistakes and become better.
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It’s a bad scenario when QR codes are being scanned by a human. It’s a good one a human approaches a machine that scans his or her QR code.
But the latter is just a cheaper option instead of NFC.
