Random thoughts of the day #17

Here we go with the food prices

Last year, it was all over the news that food prices are going to go up this year. This self-fulfilling prophecy is now being materialized in a number of locations. In the past couple of weeks alone, I’ve discovered the following few examples:

• Sodexho, our blood-sucking parasite company pretending to serve us food at the office, already “adjusted” food prices last year and has now also hiked the prices of chocolate bars by 10% and soft drinks by 10 cents, which now makes them both about 50% more expensive than at the local supermarket and full 100% (or more) more expensive than at a wholesale place. They have fairly nice profit margins on those it seems.

• Subway hiked the price of their meals and large subs by 40 cents – a whopping 16% increase.

• Stadin Kebab raised the price of their lunch deal from 6.50eur to 7.20eur, another over 10% increase.

Now, considering raw ingredients still make up a tiny percentage of the final costs and hence shouldn’t really affect prices that much, I view these increases as unreasonable. They’re many times more than the general inflation rate.

Does all specialized journalism suck in such a small market?

I can say I’m fairly capable of commenting on the factual contents of news and articles on the ICT and also some other fronts – and I have to say that the general quality of such news and articles in Finland is pretty poor. Too many articles and pieces of news fall into one of the three following categories, relying completely or nearly completely on:

• .. information supplied by one company in e.g. a press release.
• .. one self-proclaimed or presumed “expert”, again with no criticism of the source and without questioning anything they say. Here’s a good example of Taloussanomat quoting Petteri Järvinen on some pretty incomprehensible opinions on broadband services.
• .. on the individual whims and thoughts and ideas of the reporter. Just because you – or I for that matter – think something is or isn’t going to happen doesn’t make it so. Presenting own opinions as industry consensus or a fact is not exactly good journalism.

Even the ones that don’t fall into any of those are often rife with inaccuracies at best and downright lies and false statements at worst. What happened to source criticism? Checking the facts? Researching? Talking to both parties of a debate? Learning your field? The most optimistic scenario that I can come up with is that all those basic rules are out the window when you have to get an article out under too tight deadlines. The more pessimistic / realistic view (take your pick) is that people, whether it’s those writing or those reading, just don’t care about good-quality work anymore.

Or maybe good-quality specialized journalism is just impossible for such a small audience as Finland is. It can’t be simply about sheer global inability to make good specialized articles as in English-speaking markets such things do exist. But in Finland? Extremely rarely.

Where are all the LED-lights?

The compact fluorescent energy-efficient bulbs are slowly making inroads – way too slowly though, thanks to the idiotically limited form factor range that stores here usually sport. However, what I’d love even more than E14-socket spot compact fluorescent bulbs are LED lights. They’d be even more energy efficient than the compact fluorescents and would last longer, too.

So why aren’t there any?! Is it just that manufacturers don’t want to sell you only one bulb in your lifetime? Are there technical issues? Why is it that we don’t have any LED lights for consumers with standard sockets yet?

2½ years is an eternity in smartphones

I had to fiddle an ancient smartphone – the Nokia N90 – for a few minutes and man, did it feel old in so many ways. Extolled for its beautiful display just some two and a half years ago, today it felt like looking at a small postage stamp glued to a brick. I wonder if current state-of-the-art smartphones will feel equally outdated in two or three years?

Speaking of mobile devices, I added my Flickr photostream to the right side over (well, up) there –> on the main page. My Flickr account only gets selected photos taken with my cellphone; some may have short comments, others won’t. Some will be geotagged with GPS coordinates, others will not be. In all cases they’ll be cellphone snaps – photos with real photographic qualities will end up elsewhere.