This question offends me. Every time I hear it. It's insulting and insidious, and here is why. It comes from the self-checkout machines at Sainsbury's supermarket, if you try to pay without scanning your Nectar card. The machines at Tesco have a different strategy. They entreat, "Please scan or swipe your Clubcard." There is the same intent, the same insistence, the same assumption that I wish to be a part of their covert market research campaign and have simply forgotten. And this, I don't mind. Because I am part of the system, I do carry both cards, I will willingly surrender my shopping history in exchange for a minuscule (to the point of being imaginary) discount. But there is a subtle difference between the two. Both of these only ask for my identification in the event that I have not already tendered it. And yet J Sainsbury's have decided to phrase their request in the form of a question. Not "Do you have a Nectar card?" or "
"Snickers" (still often referred to in my house as "Marathon", no matter how long ago they rebranded) are currently running a competitive promotion. They're producing two variants, named "More Nuts" and "More Caramel"; you can probably take an educated guess at the difference between them. It's probably more apparent from the labels than it is from the contents, both of which taste like ... Well, like a Snickers bar. The "More Caramel" variant is packaged in an easily-identified tan wrapper. "More Nuts", on the other hand, is either the standard Snickers brown or so close as to be indistinguishable. Certainly shop staff appear unable to tell the difference as several times now I've seen them mixed in with the standard bars. At first I had assumed both variants differed from the standard bar. However I'm no longer certain this is the case. It's possible the wrapper colouring is intended to indicate that
On August 8th Google officially retired Latitude , and it has been largely unlamented. Probably the main issue was that it wasn't sure what it wanted to be. At times it seemed like a check-in tool in the style of Foursquare (man, is that still running?), with points awards and a leaderboard. At other times it was more like a way of just letting your friends know exactly where you were at any given moment. Most of the time it just seemed sort of pointless. I tend to imagine this confusion came about because Google were just really excited about the fun possibilities of location-aware devices and rushed in without really thinking about what the point would be, but it's entirely possible they just wanted to track your movements and came up with some half-hearted window dressing to con you into willingly consenting being monitored.
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