Category: Opinion
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Risk estimation: Cognitive dissonance
If there is one thing that people are notoriously bad at, it is estimating risk. There is nothing new about this. People are more afraid of being killed in a terrorist attack than in a traffic accident, despite the odds being significantly higher for the latter. One of the many reasons for this is the…
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Reviewed: Tesla Model S part 2: Delivery and first impressions
Following on from the ordering and pre-delivery review, here are my first impressions of the Model S. Once the car was off-loaded in Drammen, our DS contacted me, and we settled on a delivery time that suited us. Arriving at the Drammen Service Center, we were greeted by the staff, offered coffee and a seat while our…
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Reviewed: Tesla Model S part 1: Ordering and pre-delivery
Last year, my wife and I decided it was time to swap out our old car with a newer one. After a lot of discussion, dreaming, and looking for small change in the couch, we landed on ordering a Tesla Model S. This is my review of the experience up to just before we took…
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2015 roundup
For the third year running, and the fourth time overall, I am actually writing a roundup article. Not exactly the most exciting stuff I write, but useful all the same, at least for me, if not for anyone else. It lets me look back at what I have done over the past year, and take stock…
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Security questions: still a very, very bad idea
I was recently asked to update my security questions at a reputable site. They wanted three of them, and I filled them out. Once I’d done so, I became somewhat uneasy. The reason is that the questions were all pre-sets, not questions that I chose myself. More worryingly, they either had answers that frequently change…
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Reviewed: the Pentagon Wars – Reformers Challenge the Old Guard
Author: James G. Burton Publisher: Naval Institute Press Year: 1993 ISBN: 9781612516004 I came to this book having thoroughly enjoyed the movie of the same name, expecting more of the same. While the salient points are present in the book, the book is quite serious in tone, whereas the movie is comedic all the way through, making…
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On understanding a product
In a previous post, I said (about modern news outlets) “The result is a “product” that has no chance at measuring up …” I feel it is worthwhile to take a moment to discuss the understanding of what the product actually is. Ostensibly, the product of news reporting are news articles. If that had been…
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Newspapers and revenue streams
The last sentence of my previous post may seem strange to some. Comparing, or rather contrasting, news reporting and take-out fast food may seem strange, but I think the analogy serves, in that it is very much like comparing apples to oranges. I opened that post by saying that “It used to be that newspapers made…
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News reporting in a profit-driven world
It used to be that newspapers made money in order to produce news. Sadly, this is for a large part no longer true. These days most newspapers produce news to make money. This has spawned such “innovative” ideas as the paywall, clickbait articles and listicles. The result is a “product” (and I use the term…
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Cancel service
Why making it hard to leave your service makes regaining lost customers even more of an uphill battle Most of us use a number of online services. Be it e-mail, social media, or online banking (to mention but a few). From time to time, we also decide to leave a service. For some reason, a number of…
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Facebook – Missing Feature: Close thread
As a Facebook page admin, you have a number of tools. You can delete posts, threads and users, you can add users, and you can pin threads to the top, just to mention a few examples. One thing you can’t do, is close a thread. As admin for several pages, this is becoming a bit of…