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Gamal
Posts: 1283
Joined: February 26th, 2004, 8:41 am

Re: Brilliant ideas!

November 29th, 2022, 9:47 am

Lentil sabotage. Even terrorism is going to the dogs.
 
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Paul
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Posts: 6598
Joined: July 20th, 2001, 3:28 pm

Re: Brilliant ideas!

November 29th, 2022, 1:27 pm

Saving the planet, one lentil at a time.
 
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Paul
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Joined: July 20th, 2001, 3:28 pm

Re: Brilliant ideas!

November 29th, 2022, 1:48 pm

Update: A dozen cars in this neighbourhood with flat tyres, not just SUVs but also electric cars. Is the latter revenge for the former?!
 
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Cuchulainn
Posts: 20203
Joined: July 16th, 2004, 7:38 am
Location: 20, 000

Re: Brilliant ideas!

November 29th, 2022, 4:56 pm

"Flar tires matter"
Speaking of, I was in Okura hotel, Amsterdam last Sunday, Two Lambourghinis were parked at the front door.
In Joburg, parked Bentleys get a dedicated guard.
 
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Marsden
Posts: 780
Joined: August 20th, 2001, 5:42 pm
Location: Maryland

Re: Brilliant ideas!

November 30th, 2022, 10:53 am

I've just been targeted by tyreextinguishers.com! They don't like my car. (If they ever find out I have four cars, one of which does 8mpg...!)

They take the cap off, put a lentil in and screw the cap back down. The air slowly escapes, tyre goes flat. 

Their website very helpfully explains how to remove the cap in the first place, lefty loosey, righty tighty. Clearly they are as thick as planks.

And, yes, they really use a lentil! A lentil! Sorry, kat, but a lentil! I think that says everything you need to know.

Anyway, brilliant idea...removing the caps will mean they have to crouch down while the tyre deflates. Which they probably won't do. But that's not ideal for the health of your valves. So how about a dummy valve? It looks like an ordinary valve, protects the real valve like the cap, but confuses the heck out of people of low IQ.

(The regular anti-theft dust caps often use standard hex/allen keys, too easy to remove. I did think maybe smearing some dog poo...readily available at the side of the road...on the cap would be a quick solution.)

Who's in?

lentil - Copy.gif

Lentil in bottom right of photo.
Not a GREEN lentil -- ?

Disappointing.
 
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Paul
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Joined: July 20th, 2001, 3:28 pm

Re: Brilliant ideas!

January 29th, 2023, 7:49 am

A Stupid Index! Maybe it already exists. Or a Stupid Clock, like the Doomsday Clock. 

Maybe just measure how frequently Amazon drivers leave your valuable deliveries on the doorstep of a busy London street. 

I suspect it would be highly correlated with people born since the invention of the internet.
 
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Marsden
Posts: 780
Joined: August 20th, 2001, 5:42 pm
Location: Maryland

Re: Brilliant ideas!

January 29th, 2023, 5:31 pm

Maybe just measure how frequently Amazon drivers leave your valuable deliveries on the doorstep of a busy London street. 
Using that as a Stupid Index assumes they care whether your parcels are stolen or not.

Apparently UPS (do they have that in Britain? It's a delivery service, probably the oldest ongoing and the biggest in America) originally required signatures for receipt of deliveries, which meant that if no one was available to sign, they'd leave a note and try to deliver another day. And then after a few failed attempts to deliver, the note would say where you had to go to collect your package.

But they decided -- hopefully based on actual data -- that it was more efficient, even with thefts, to just leave deliveries at the door when no one was there to receive them.

Now you can request deliveries with signature required, and they require signatures to receive booze, but the standard is they just leave it.

Similarly, it can be surmised that credit card fraud is not a serious problem, because credit card companies -- and at least in America, you are generally limited to a $50 loss in the event of credit card fraud, and I think usually they won't hit you even with that -- are very slow to bother to do anything about it: in America, the chip-in-card system that was broadly used in Europe was not adopted for at least ten years after the technology was available and had been thoroughly tested.
 
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Paul
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Joined: July 20th, 2001, 3:28 pm

Re: Brilliant ideas!

January 29th, 2023, 7:12 pm

When I told Amazon about the latest stupidity and theft they told me to leave a bad review…for the product. Then they told me to stop being rude to them.
 
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bearish
Posts: 5180
Joined: February 3rd, 2011, 2:19 pm

Re: Brilliant ideas!

January 29th, 2023, 10:30 pm

I guess they did their homework and decided that you’re the kind of guy who just does what he’s told. Another AI meets the world…
 
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Paul
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Joined: July 20th, 2001, 3:28 pm

Re: Brilliant ideas!

February 25th, 2023, 9:38 am

Battery operated fire alarm problem. Battery is dying so it emits a high-pitched sound for a second. Then waits a minute before the next. Impossible to locate. So you have to stand under each alarm in your house until you identify which alarm needs a new battery.

Solution: Have a voice recorder, like on some birthday cards. “This is a message from your fire alarm in your present-wrapping room. My battery needs replacing.”
 
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Marsden
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Joined: August 20th, 2001, 5:42 pm
Location: Maryland

Re: Brilliant ideas!

February 25th, 2023, 3:34 pm

I wonder, given that LED lights don't consume much electricity, if it wouldn't be better to have an LED light on for every smoke detector with sufficient battery, so you can just walk by each and look to see if the battery is done. They finally did this with power lines in some regions of America, so if there's a problem with transmission that can be localized between two points, someone can drive along the route between the points and see where a power line pole's light is off; works better at night, obviously, but apparently doesn't take a lot of electricity to power a red light visible in full daylight.

And if that can be managed, getting back to the smoke alarms, the warning shriek can maybe be replaced with a discrete text message (have someone from England write it: "Terribly sorry to trouble you, old chum, but ..." Probably the additional jiggering to have the text tell you exactly which alarm is down isn't worth it, given that someone would have to code in which alarm went where.). Because in my experience, the worst part about the battery dying shriek is that it can happen in the dead of night.
 
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Paul
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Joined: July 20th, 2001, 3:28 pm

Re: Brilliant ideas!

February 25th, 2023, 4:54 pm

I agree about the lights. Not about the text or email. I don’t want Xi Jinping to know about my fire alarm status or that my fridge is lacking tomatoes.

I occasionally live in the countryside. Location chosen because it is so quiet. (Next to an old church and cemetery.) One night I became obsessed trying to hunt down a deep rumbling sound. I searched all over. The low frequency made it difficult to track down, like the high frequencies. It turned out it was the sound of blood in my head. Very Poe.
 
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Paul
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Re: Brilliant ideas!

May 8th, 2023, 6:58 am

Fox-proof bin bags. Is there any scent that will put them off?
 
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Marsden
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Joined: August 20th, 2001, 5:42 pm
Location: Maryland

Re: Brilliant ideas!

May 8th, 2023, 12:23 pm

You might try eating a big meal of game meat and then urinating all around the bins.
 
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Paul
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Joined: July 20th, 2001, 3:28 pm

Re: Brilliant ideas!

May 8th, 2023, 12:28 pm

It's not my bins, it's the neighbours'. I can see one or two problems.