Decisions about fuel purchases are often irrational, much like many food purchases or generic medicines.
I know someone who avoids their local petrol station that is 10p/litre cheaper than most others nearby (within a mile or so) as they think the cheaper fuel must be lower quality. There are weird status things going on with purchases like this.
Only the other day my father refused to buy some branded paracetamol because it was ~5 times more expensive than the local pharmacy brand that was out of stock. (£2.25 vs £0.49 for 16 500mg tablets.) I'd usually agree with him but he was out of paracetamol and has been advised by his doctor to take 2x500mg a day and there was no viable nearby alternative.
A digression but for that generation (those born in 1940s/50s) that grew up with rationing I think it is hardwired into their brain to try and minimise the cost of so many things, but with lots of random exceptions. Later on that day he ordered an extra drink but decided he was too full once it had arrived so he left it. So he was worried about spending an extra £1.76 on paracetamol but not about spending £7 on a pint he didn't drink.
Many people decide what petrol station to use based on simply how close it is, what kind of shop is attached to it (and the bits of British snobbery around that), whether it also sells whatever else they want (bread, milk, beer, etc), or even whether it is easy to drive in and out of.
Of course. I'm not talking about lack of money though here. We've all been on our last tenner until payday and need to go somewhere.
Some people seem to think that spending less at the pump means your saving money, but to save money you need to drive less. They religiously drive on £10-20 fuel stops.
My ex wife was convinced she spends less on fuel by putting less in a time, she even earnt more than me.
I put in £3 worth of fuel the other day but that's because it was a rental car that I had to return with the same fuel level as at pickup and I'd only done ~30 miles with lots of stop/start. (I would have used a Zipcar/Zipvan but they've all gone now.) I would have tried to put in less but UK fuel pumps usually mandate a minimum of 2 litres which is not far off £3 at current prices.
Out of curiosity how does that work (never been in a situation where I have to worry about minimal fuel purchases) - does the pump simply round up the price to the minimum when done, or did you actually have to dispense extra fuel, either into a jerrycan or donating it to someone else's car otherwise the pump would not actually finalize the transaction?
It's mandated by a sticker saying so. I don't think it's ever enforced.
A google seems to show that it is because the pumps are not certified to be accurate below 2 litres (or 5 litres for higher flow rate pumps like the HGV diesel pumps) so anything below this is at your own risk.
Another way of thinking about it is you have no right to complain if you think you've been short fueled if you don't dispense the minimum stated.
We have a system here in Western Australia and people use it a lot: fuelwatch.wa.gov.au
I think it's exactly that, the UK has never had this so people there either choose by brand or just convenience. But since moving to WA I've found that it's really easy to have a quick look when I notice I need to fill up, then I can head to the cheapest station nearby, and the difference can be in the range of 10-15%, occasionally 20%.
In a country where fuel is as expensive as it is in the UK, people are going to use that.
> I think it's exactly that, the UK has never had this so people there either choose by brand or just convenience.
We've had it for years (as noted in other comments there's a few different people like the RAC, AA and Petrolprices.com all maintaining their own lists - a quick check of my email has messages from the latter going back to 2011). The new part is that this is from the government and the data is freely accessible (Petrolprices in particular covered their pages in ads, so I'd be surprised if there wasn't a way to exchange money for the data).
The context to this is that, especially since the pandemic, there's been a complaint with the Competition and Markets Authority that the petrol stations were quick to raise prices, slow to lower them, and weren't competing with each other[1]:
> The CMA found that retail prices tended to "rise like a rocket, but fall like a feather" in response to increases or decreases in the cost of crude oil.
Independent petrol stations have virtually disappeared and you don't have to look too hard to see that in an area they tend to all raise or lower their prices in virtual lockstep. Gathering this data would make the case significantly easier if the next step were that some of the petrol station operators had to be broken up to encourage more competition.
But how accurate was the data on those older apps?
Petrolprices.com (for example) seems to have been built on user-reported data rather than petrol-station reported data, and it's easy to find fairly recent criticisms of the whole thing being inaccurate. And an inaccurate comparison site is fairly useless IMHO.
I lived in the UK until 2021 and I must admit I'd never heard of them. Whereas here in WA everyone uses fuelprices. There are probably other factors involved here as well, as we have a weird weekly or biweekly price cycle (though I think this has ended somewhat in the last two years) where every second Tuesday fuel was dirt cheap as they were trying to clear down the tanks ahead of the next delivery.
Is the 'new part' not that the vendors are being forced to actually publish comparison data rather than rely on third parties to gather it?
Other than a time lag (and petrol prices don't generally change often enough to matter IME), I can't say I ever noticed any of them being that inaccurate.
myAutomate (the owners of Petrolprices.com) talk about having "over 60 years combined expertise in the fuel industry", so I suppose I'd be surprised if it's all crowdsourced data - they've probably made arrangements with at least the big players, in which case the forced publication is much of a muchness?
>the UK has never had this so people there either choose by brand or just convenience
Disagree - drivers maintain a mental map of local stations and know roughly how expensive they are, and make a decision based on that. Obviously this API will help inform us better!
Yes but the real feature that makes it viable, is that petrol station in France can change price only once a day.
I forgot how it works in the UK, but in Germany they change wildly depending on the hour in the day. For example they show low price in the morning, so that workers who are late for work notice it and fill on the way back, only to find a price 10-20cents higher at 17h.
I don't see how that makes it uniquely viable in France. Germany has something very much like this too. And we've had it for nearly 13 years.
> Since 31 August 2013 companies which operate public petrol stations or have the power to set their prices are required to report price changes for the most commonly used types of fuel, i.e. Super E5, Super E10 and Diesel “in real time” to the Market Transparency Unit for Fuels. This then passes on the incoming price data to consumer information service providers, which in turn pass it on to the consumer.
As a consumer, there is no direct API by the MTS-K that you can use, but there are some services like Tankerkoenig which pass this data on to you. I have used their API in Home Assistant before I switched to an EV.
Having seen what happens with bad gas from shoddy stations, i too will bypass many in favor of the big names. I know someone who got water instead of gas when a tiny mom-and-pop gas station let thier tank run so low it started pumping decades of groundwater from the bottom of a rarely-serviced tank.
Just google "gas station pumped water" to see all the local news articles about this sort of thing.
None of these are local news articles, in fact they are all from a different continent.
A local article that I did find was from a BP petrol station in Liverpool, so I'm not sure this can be isolated to 'mom-and-pop' outfits (something we don't really have over here anyway).
In India, we have generic medicine paracetamol for 20 bucks while branded one is like 5-10 times that.
Sadly many people feel that because they are sick, they need to spend as much money as possible because that would give them best shot at getting healthly.
I once asked a guy "why don't you buy that cheap medicine. Its the same and will save you money" but they were like "naa. Its cheap. What would be inside it. I need to pay top money for best medicine"
I think you’re overstating the effect. The most volume is sold at supermarkets which have the best location for throughout but they also have the cheapest prices.
>> I know someone who avoids their local petrol station that is 10p/litre cheaper than most others nearby (within a mile or so) as they think the cheaper fuel must be lower quality
- "Top Tier gas contains higher detergent levels to prevent engine carbon"
- "Major brands use specific additives that enhance performance, while "no-name" or discount stations might only meet the minimum EPA-required detergent levels"
- "The condition of a station's underground storage tanks affects quality"
- "For the best engine performance and longevity, choosing Top Tier-certified gasoline is generally recommended."
You don't. And, for similar reasoning you don't know the more expensive fuel is "better" quality.
More importantly you know that pretty much any fuel being sold in a mainstream place in the UK is going to meet the minimum national standards which are perfectly fine for the vast majority of cars on the road.
Anyone that has a car that requires E5 rather than E10, or higher octane fuel may need to buy the associated "premium" fuels, but these are just not necessary for the vast majority of cars on the road. But we're not talking about the premium fuels here, we're talking about two garages selling pretty much the same thing for quite different prices and preying on some people's FUD.
> A 7p per litre difference does sound like the difference between local station and motorway prices though, and they probably will have factored in that opportunity cost of time...
Only 7p?
Motorway services have shocking price markups, way more than 7p. Most people don't realise this or are just too lazy to find something that isn't quite as convenient.
Unleaded is 131.80p (UK wide) and 156.80p (Motorway Service Area).
That's nearly a 20% markup.
Last time I drove into a motorway services and saw prices ~20p/litre higher I just drove through the petrol station and found a local garage to fill up at.
Petrol in the U.K. is insanely cheap. When I passed my test I could buy 4.5 litres with an hours work at minimum wage, which would get me about 30 miles. Today an hour at minimum wage gets me 9.4 litres and takes me over 100 miles.
Spending an extra £10 once or twice a year when driving a few hundred miles and thus needing to fill up at a motorway is nothing. Chances are I’m spending that much on an overpriced coffee when I do that anyway.
It’s not a matter of “quite as convenient”, it’s a matter of figuring where you are, find a nearby town, finding a petrol station in it and getting back to the motorway. This can take well over half an hour. Time that you really need to be spending getting to your destination because there’s a good chance your trip is going to take most of the day.
> I think sometime in the late 1990s FlexLM switched from dongles to "hardware identifiers" that were easily spoofed; honestly I don't think this was a terrible idea since to this article's conclusion ...
Starting in '97 I worked on some software that used Elan License Manager (elmd) that then moved on to FlexLM in a major release.
Requests for, and problems with, licensing were a considerable source of support tickets but I'm sure it also drove a reasonable amount of sales as customers wanted to play with component X but were prevented from doing so by a lack of license.
When we were acquired by IBM we replaced the licensing code with lawyers and (threats of) audits. It didn't seem to harm the revenue. The product is still being maintained and sold.
> ... if you could reverse one you could reverse the other.
I can confirm it was quite easy with gdb to either skip past the license checks or, in the case of Elan licensing at least, call the license generation function from within the binary to generate whatever licenses for whatever features you liked.
The "hardware identifiers" were a nightmare too. I ended up writing some code that would pull all of the necessary information (primary MAC, IP address, hostid for Sparc machines, hostname, etc) and give it to us in a base64 encoded blob, we also grabbed some CPU and memory information that proved quite useful in seeing how the software was deployed.
Suboptimal - likely. There is some utility: a green letter is more useful than a yellow. Checking for a in two locations when a is a very commonly used letter is __useful__. Still likely much more useful to check for the presence of a fifth letter than a chance at knowing more precisely the location of an a.
There seems to be a progression of Wordle strategies.
Playing with a set start word (or words, e.g. "SIREN OCTAL DUMPY" or people who go the "AUDIO ADIEU" route).
(Many people also go down the rabbit hole of looking for "optimal" starting words or choices based on the original word lists.)
Then, once you've played that for a while, you find it's not that much of a challenge unless you end up in one of the forms of madness like _A_E_, and you'll switch to playing in "hard code" (e.g. correct/green must be played again in the same place in all subsequent tries, yellow letters must also be reused each time).
The hard mode starting with the same word gets a bit boring, so people move on to varying the start word each day, either pulling them from a list or just using the answer for the day before.
There's no "correct" approach obviously, people can play the game however they want and extract the fun/anger however they want.
Because a wordle-in-one is meaningless. It doesn't mean you're any good at Wordle, the way a hole-in-one suggests you're good at golf. It definitely doesn't mean that you're a "Genius" as the game puts it, because you were operating with zero information and didn't employ any skill or intuition. It just means you burned some luck points on something that doesn't matter.
I used to use “stare” or “stale” as the starting guess when I played Wordle, thinking you’d want to start off with the most common letters, like R-S-T-L-N-E from Wheel of Fortune.
> Twitter famously had a "fail whale" but it didn't stop the company from growing. If you have market demand (and I guess advertising) then you can get away with a sub-optimal product for a long time.
Agreed, but there's still an element of survivorship bias there. Plenty of companies failed as they couldn't keep up with their scaling requirements and pushed the "getting away with a sub-optimal product" for too long a time.
Clever spammers (there are some!) see the presence of company@<domain> and assume the user will have similar emails for other accounts, so it might be worth trying ebays scams to ebay@<domain> or banking scams to chase@<domain> or boa@<domain>. Sending is cheap so why not, you're not trying to fool everyone, only a few.
I use a unique string per company but it's not guessable in advance, but it's obvious when looking at it and squinting a bit, for example (and these are not the exact ones I use): sundclod@<domain> or ebuy@<domain> or amzoon@<domain>
Sure I have to remember them but it's easy for me to check and my password manager is filling them in for me 99.99% of the time.
I can filter on those emails instead, and I also know that anything coming to soundcloud@<domain> or ebay@<domain> or amazon@<domain> is definitely spam as I've never used those addresses myself.
If sundclod@<domain> appears in a leak I can (hopefully) change my account email at Soundcloud to sondclud@<domain> and then confine sundclod@<domain> to /dev/null
I have three different generations of email addresses associated with United Airlines that all receive spam. Never any disclosed breaches AFAIK, but clearly email addresses got out at several points. At some point I stopped bothering to check.
As for Soundcloud, the password I had saved for it and a tiny bit of profile information tells me a lot - a manually created password saved into a password manager, probably in 2010 or 2011 and unused after grabbing a single track.
Addresses for services I actually care about also get what's basically peppering, and have all had updates much more recently than the days of Blackberry devices.
I can't imagine anyone spamming in such low quantities that they'll notice a pattern like company@<domain> and act on it.
I have regularly gotten spam emails without a to, cc, or bcc field though. So I can't tell which email they were sent to. (my host doesn't bounce/drop them for some reason)
I do regularly do misspellings of the company name though, since that often trips the "invalid email" check on signup. e.g. twitter.
The UK uses an odd mixture of both depending on context.
The use of "100ml" in airports is because using "3.519 fl oz" would be confusing to far more people. Even within the UK we use metric for small liquid measures like this (smaller liquid measures end up being weird stuff like "teaspoons" or "tablespoons").
And this isn't just because the UK uses a different fluid ounce to the US (100ml is 3.519 UK fluid ounces and 3.3814 US fluid ounces).
Anyone under the age of about 60 in the UK would had metric measurements taught to them at school as it became a mandatory to teach it in 1974. Many schools would have been teaching it already, and probably lots since the currency changed in 1971 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_Day).
The youth of today (as seen through the lens of my kids) are very metric, often defaulting to distances in meters and kilometers. Miles only seem to be used idiomatically, e.g. "he lives a few miles away".
I'm completely happy to switch between all of them not just because of my UK education covered them all, but I've lived for more than a year in the US, the UK and some European countries.
There are still plenty of examples of mixed measurement systems in the UK though.
Canned/bottled drinks are marked in ml, but a lot of that is due to the proximity to the EU and the previous ties to it. Open drinks are often sold in imperial measures (pints, etc) although spirits moved from fractions of a gill (imperial) to metric (25ml for a single, or 50ml for a double) in the mid 80s.
Of course the UK and US pints are different sizes (568ml and 473.176ml). Not just because the fluid ounces are different sizes as noted above, but also because the UK has 20 fluid ounces in a pint and the US 16 (of its) fluid ounces in a US pint.
For driving distances and speeds are based on miles, but for pedestrian distances you'll see a mixture of miles/yards or km/meters. Restricted heights (e.g. low bridges) or widths are covered in both feet/inches and meters given the number of European freight drivers on the roads here.
Occasionally you'll see some nonsense where a sign has displays both, and where the actual distance to something might be shown as "400 yards" it had almost certainly been rounded up/down to that whole number to make it simpler on the sign, but when it is converted to meters the converted value is used, so you see odd things like:
"
Whatever it is
400 yards
365 meters
"
(The UK traditionally used "metre" but that usage is quite rare now and we've mostly moved over to using "meter" like the US does.)
I'm surprised that the UK and US don't have different length miles (the US did have a different length "foot" but the "Survey foot" was discontinued in 2023).
Shots aren't necessarily 25ml, prior to metrication the legal situation had been that in England a shot was a sixth of a gill, in Scotland either a fifth or quarter depending on the establishment. The metric "Weights and Measures" legislation said each such licensed premises in the UK gets to pick, either 25ml (most common in England) or 35ml and they shall post a notice explaining to the public which volume they've chosen.
The differences in signage are because the UK's Road Traffic laws specify miles and yards still, whereas most other legislation specifies metric units, including for the waterways. So a sign legally required for an 18th century canal might say "100m" meaning metres, while an equally modern, legally required sign for a road built this century says "10m" meaning miles. This is embarrassing, but there's a strong feeling that somehow archaic unit systems are an important part of our heritage, and at least it's not as bad as when we propose getting rid of statues that celebrate slavers...
> Hmm, I once transited in Heathrow in a return flight from europe to the US and had to go through Heathrow security for whatever reason,
The US mandates that you have to go through TSA approved security before getting on a flight to the US.
Either the security at your European airport wasn't good enough, or the transit at Heathrow allowed you to access to things that invalidated the previous security screening and so it had to be done again.
The bonus is that if you get to go through US Immigration at the departure airport then you can often land at domestic terminals in the US and the arrivals experience is far less tortuous. I flew to the US with a transit in Ireland a few times and it was so much nicer using the dead time before the Ireland -> US flight to clear immigration rather than spending anything from 15 minutes to 4 hours in a queue at the arrival airport in the US (all depending on which other flights arrived just before yours).
And don't rely on the destination airport having the same rules when you fly back.
This used to get people doing EU -> London flights. The EU rules had already been relaxed, but you got bitten by the extra restrictions when you went to fly back.
Like most things, flying is a complete shitshow, but do it often enough and you get used to it and all of the foibles.
Regularly flying hand luggage only is a grind as you're at the mercy of the lowest common denominator in terms of rules on what you can carry. When I had to visit a string of customers with one or two flights a day I had to submit expense claims with various toiletries purchased several times over, it was questioned by the finance department and they asked about whether I should check in a bag next time, but they stopped pushing when I said that adding a checked bag to my tickets would have been about 10 times more expensive than just buying things as and when I needed them.
Hugely wasteful but then so is flying, and most of my trips could have been replaced with a video call if it wasn't for touchy-feely corporate politics.
Water: I use a generic cycling bidon for travel. I empty it before security and they're happy with that. Any sane airport will have places to refill it for free, if they don't I can just buy a bottle of water and refill it. No airport I've traveled through has wanted to confiscate an empty cycling bidon and if they did it's cheap to replace.
A&A is expensive for me. 1Gbps down and 115Mb/s up with a 1TB/mo quota for £75/mo. I get similar speeds (with no download limit) from BT for £34.99/mo.
Community Fibre is £63/mo for symmetric 5Gbps and "unlimited data".
I'm locked into a contract with BT for another year but I don't have any real need for anything faster than 500Mbps right now.
I'm focusing on making my homelab network 10GbE to cover the day that I do manage to get >1Gbps broadband.
I know someone who avoids their local petrol station that is 10p/litre cheaper than most others nearby (within a mile or so) as they think the cheaper fuel must be lower quality. There are weird status things going on with purchases like this.
Only the other day my father refused to buy some branded paracetamol because it was ~5 times more expensive than the local pharmacy brand that was out of stock. (£2.25 vs £0.49 for 16 500mg tablets.) I'd usually agree with him but he was out of paracetamol and has been advised by his doctor to take 2x500mg a day and there was no viable nearby alternative.
A digression but for that generation (those born in 1940s/50s) that grew up with rationing I think it is hardwired into their brain to try and minimise the cost of so many things, but with lots of random exceptions. Later on that day he ordered an extra drink but decided he was too full once it had arrived so he left it. So he was worried about spending an extra £1.76 on paracetamol but not about spending £7 on a pint he didn't drink.
Many people decide what petrol station to use based on simply how close it is, what kind of shop is attached to it (and the bits of British snobbery around that), whether it also sells whatever else they want (bread, milk, beer, etc), or even whether it is easy to drive in and out of.
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