Complaint to Sainsburys

Just made a complaint to Sainsburys.  I put the following:

I had a grocery order to be delivered today.  Originally it was over £40 and had a delivery charge of £1.  I deliberately chose a saver slot to minimise this delivery charge.

I did make an alteration to my order yesterday.  It shouldn't have taken me below £40.  But, I now realise that the 10 bags of jelly beans (50p each) I had originally ordered must have been taken off my order when reordering.  I never realised this as the reduction in cost was more or less disguised by a £6 increase in delivery charges.

Hence, when I received my receipt today it was claimed that everything was there that I ordered and that my delivery charge was £7 (not £1 as I expected).

I was confused by this until I noticed the jelly beans weren't there on the receipt.  And when searching the site, they are no longer available.

Why was it not brought to my attention:

a) That the jelly beans had been taken off my order?
b) That due to this, my delivery charge had increased from £1 to £7??

Now I've had to cancel my order, and reorder the very same groceries for tomorrow.  Meanwhile, I have virtually no food left in my house.  I am very dissatisfied and will be writing up about this.

I think it's a bit rich for them to cancel the jelly beans then increase my delivery charges by £6 into the bargain and not inform me of any of this!   I actually rang up and cancelled the order as they refused to rescind the £6 extra delivery charges.  I never complained at that point as I thought I must have made a mistake.  It was only after the phone call that I noticed the jelly beans are not on the receipt.  I feel irritated, and I have virtually no food left!  

My predictions regarding self-driving cars have been correct

I've just read the following article:

How self-driving cars got stuck in the slow lane

Article says:

I would be shocked if we do not achieve full self-driving safer than a human this year,” said Tesla chief executive, Elon Musk, in January.For anyone who follows Musk’s commentary, this might sound familiar. In 2020, he promised autonomous cars the same year, saying: “There are no fundamental challenges.” In 2019, he promised Teslas would be able to drive themselves by 2020 – converting into a fleet of 1m “robotaxis”. He has made similar predictions every yeargoing back to 2014.

Anyone with any sense wouldn’t take notice of anything Elon Musk says. I too started making predictions regarding autonomous cars back in 2014. But rather than saying autonomous cars are imminent, I suggested they’ll take over the world by 2060. The idea that they were about to take over the world within a few years always seemed to me to be ridiculous, although most commentators back in 2014 agreed with Elon Musk. Indeed, by 2018, I had become convinced that fully autonomous cars (i.e level 5 cars) will never be able to share the same lanes in roads with human drivers.

There’s the video of a car in FSD mode veering sharply into oncoming traffic, prompting the driver to swerve off the road into a field. The one that shows a car repeatedly attempting to turn on to train tracks and into pedestrians. Another that captures the driver struggling to regain control of the car after the system prompts him to take over.

Going back to 2017, I was leery of this claim about how safe autonomous cars were, and I hadn’t seen any of those videos!

There’s reason to believe that the videos that make their way online are some of the more flattering ones. Not only are the testers Tesla customers, but an army of super-fans acts as an extra deterrent to sharing anything negative. Any reports of FSD behaving badly can trigger a wave of outrage.

Yes, Musk fanboys. I’ve been attacked by someone saying look at what Musk has achieved in his life compared to myself. What a loser I am.  Who do I think I am, etc.  He seemed entirely indifferent to the fact I am mostly right and Musk is almost always wrong.

[I]t’s not just Tesla that has missed self-imposed autonomous driving deadlines. Cruise, Waymo, Toyota and Honda all said they would launch fully self-driving cars by 2020. Progress has been made, but not on the scale anticipated. What happened?

“Number one is that this stuff is harder than manufacturers realised,” says Matthew Avery, director of research at Thatcham Research.

Nothing happened, they were always preposterous predictions. It is a consequence of people's mistaken notion of what we human beings are (i.e essentially computers), and so it shouldn’t be that difficult to get computers to emulate and indeed surpass human behaviour, including the driving of cars. But computers are not conscious and never will be. They operate according to rules rather than any understanding. And generating rules to help navigate a real world environment that we encounter on roads in city centres will be incredibly hard.

Carmakers General Motors and Geely and AV company Mobileye have said people may be able to buy self-driving cars as early as 2024.

No, I’m afraid they won’t.

Cost of living for certain poor people will be wildly in excess of 10%

The following applies to the UK where I live.

I read the following article regarding yesterday's spring statement (mini-budget) by the chancellor. 

The article reports Paul Johnson, who is the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank, as saying:

[Those dependent on benefits will see] [t]heir benefits [rising by] just 3.1% for the coming financial year. Their cost of living could well rise by 10%.

This is simply not correct, their cost of living will rise vastly more than just 10%.

Let's take, for example, those under 25 years old who claim universal credit. According to this website, currently it's £257.33 per month or £3,087.96 a year.

Now the energy price cap is going up by 54% in a week's time (from the 1st April 2022). For an average property, this is an increase of £693 from £1,277 to £1,971.

Let's assume that only energy has/will increase in price (we'll ignore the price increases in food over the past year etc). So, in order to have the same purchasing power, their original £3,087.96 a year, will need to increase by £693. £3,087.96 + £693 = £3,780.96.

To have the same purchasing power expressed as a percentage (and don't forget, only taking into account energy price increases) it'll be £3,780.96 divided by £3,087.96 = 1.2244.  Therefore a 22.4% increase in their benefits will be required for the same purchasing power simply considering energy price increases alone. Comparable figures can be derived for the over 25's who claim universal credit.

If we then also take into account the considerable increase in price for food and petrol, then perhaps a ballpark figure of something like a 30% increase in their income is required for those on such benefits to have the same purchasing power.  This, of course, is much higher than the current inflation rate of 6.2% and higher still than the 3.1% increase they will actually be getting.  The fact that this 30% figure is so much higher than the inflation rate reflects the fact that a vastly higher proportion of poor people's incomes are being spent on energy, which has undergone mind-blowing price increases in recent months and will continue to do so.

I see this whole situation as calamitous and cannot imagine what will happen to the poorest people in our society in the coming months (not just those on benefits).   

Incidentally, after typing the above, I realised I talk about the very same Paul Johnson here!

Judging whether you like someone even though you've never met them

I hate it when x makes disparaging remarks about y to z when z has never met y, and then z forms a negative opinion about y.

z is scarcely likely to be getting an impartial objective account of y!

I never like to form firm opinions about people I've never met or heard of from a third party.

Calling Teachers A***holes

“If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. And that makes sense. If you've resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, "You're an asshole," which maybe he or she is, and if you don't say, "That's idiotic," when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job.” 

― Noam Chomsky

Ugh, no, I just can't resist the temptation. At one point at University, one of the lecturers threatened to beat me up! I never called him an ar**hole, I was just arguing with him (in private not in front of the class) that he didn't know what he was talking about (about Plato's forms I think).