Posts by jcoc

Re: adding unnecessary steps purely for the sake of legal compliance

I think you have misunderstood the swedish rental market (I live here)

Yes. There is state housing, for which you have to apply and there is a points system. ANd in Stockholm you might be waiting 20 years to get a place, particularly if you are picky about where you live.

But it's not illegal to rent privately. Far from it.

What is different is that your building (most people in cities live in apartments) or estate will have a board (normally a mixture of residents and a holding company). And they can set their own rules about renting. E.g one of my first buildings an owner could only rent an apartment out for 2 years maximum. They would have to let the board know, and they could theoretically say no to the person moving in (very rare). But at the end of 2 years, the owner either had to move back in, or sell (their rationale is that it allowed for people moving jobs, starting relationships without having to burn all their bridges, but they wanted a mostly stable population in the building).

Then the next place I moved - no restriction - owners could rent as long as they wished. There were rules about access, and overcrowding, but that was pretty much it.

So, absolutely not the case that you can't rent privately.

What might hold back foreign "visitors" is that most places want you to have a swedish tax number. For people who are just being shipped in, but are not residing inSweden, then yes, companies might acquire their own housing stock because those people will find it difficult to rent privately.

Re: No explosives in the tech support room

Back in the day worked in a radiation protection department of a large hospital as a physicist. There were all sorts of rules about how waste should be stored, brought into our department and disposed of (as you can imagine).

One department consisting of a load of chemistry and biology post docs called down one day. The had 5 drums of liquid radiation waste

(there is a type of detection you can do called scintillation, you dissolve your sample in a powerful organic solvent and other things, and then you can count the beta particle reactions. The little vials this creates are radioactive, chemically hazardous, and potentially biologically hazardous).

The drums were really thick plastic, and could only be used for (x months - can't remember) to be safe from being dissolved by the solvent.

We told them to bring them down and we'd dispose.

Cue hell!

They weren't storing this stuff in drums, but in red biowaste bags. Not only that, but these bags were stuffed to the top (even though they are never meant to be more than half full to allow for proper closure). They were very heavy, so they DRAGGED these bags through the damn hospital to my department where they sat in a heap leaking fluid.

I was the junior physicist. I basically had a jaw drop moment as I'm trying to take in what I'm seeing. As it dawns on me that they've just contaminated many meters of corridors, not to mention contaminating a lab room with a number of experiments running.

At which point big boss man comes in - and I've never seen him give people such a hard time. How was it possible so many chemistry PhDs were unaware of the effect of toluene on thin plastic. How were they unaware of how to deal with such material. And what in the name of holy fuck were they doing dragging a wide swathe of hazardous material through our hospital.

I was told to clean it up, and he went back with them to have "words" with their supervisor.

I then spent the next x hours firstly getting the vials into drums (not easy as the bags had basically melted, so I had to gather hundreds of very slippery vials by hand) and then going through their travel route with swabs and decon 90 cleaning up the radioactive pathway.

A department of very clever people - who were also deeply, deeply dumb. Their reasoning - they though they were saving the cost of the black drums by just using the plastic bags!!!

Re: adding unnecessary steps purely for the sake of legal compliance

"I'm so fed up with the "Yes, do the thing that I really don't want" or "Ask me again next time, and every time after that" type choices. I want a "No, and don't ask me again" option."

The problem is that "don't ask me again" involves tracking you. Cookies expire faster now (ITP for example). So within a few days the cookie that has registered "don't ask me again" has expired, so they aren't asking you (original cookie) again, they are asking you (new cookie) for the first time.

They could ask for a permanent ID to register your "don't ask me again" but then you'd have to login occasionally (quite often really) to have that work.

It's what people said they wanted (in response to severe provocation from advertising and marketing abuses). This is the consequence.

You can obviously say that you just don't want any advertising - that's a reasonable viewpoint. But there is an entire industry built around ads. And companies still want to flog their wares, so they will find some way. And that means the rest of us will have to pay for what we consume in a way we currently do not (in money rather than in data).