Interesting Links for 05-12-2022

[andrewducker]

1. How do workers feel about unions? How about voters in general?

(tags:unions polls )

2. Before clicking this link, guess how movies there now are in the Bring It On franchise. For extra points guess how many are horror movies

(tags:movies viaNeilRodger )

3. Software horror show: SAP Concur

(tags:software ux epicfail )

4. How buying cryptocurrency ought to work

(tags:investment stupidity EpicStupidity funny )

5. Keir Starmer's new plan for a Labour Britain, explained (it's baby steps in the right direction)

(tags:labour politics uk )

6. "As a parent of a trans child, all I want is for the NHS to properly support and care for them"

(tags:transgender UK NHS LGBT healthcare parenting )

7. If you unscrew your belly button, your bottom will fall off (lessons learned from a dad)

(tags:parenting )

Comments

[cmcmck]

1. Given how few of us are now union members..............

[dewline]

That is a dangerous situation for workers, employed and un-, to be in right now.

[marymac]

Well, back in the day when I worked for SAP and they were upgrading their in-house purchasing system, when we admins asked to test it complained that it was taking ludicrously long times to load, the devs 'solved' it by taking away the blue spinny circle. They also placed the 'next' and 'back' buttons on the wrong sides for operation in a left-to-right writing system.

The subsequent tester call was...well. Nobody called the lead developer a dipstick to his actual face.

[dewline]

I am remembering a job I did for a very long time, where my fellow employees and I were all required to file time sheets and do other job-training related stuff via SAP-brand 'ware once the employer reached the point where having us file them on actual paper was not useful to them. I never really got comfortable with the change, I think.

[marymac]

An awful lot of the SAP software is horribly user-unfriendly, mostly because people were supposed to have business-specific interfaces put on the bits they were going to use and nobody ever does it.

HSCNI finally got their own skin on their SAP systems a few years back and it made interacting with the system a million times less painful.

[channelpenguin]

SAP, by default (at least up to/in 2003) used floating point numbers for monetary amounts.

Those who know, know why this is A Very Bad Idea.

[hairyears]

All contractors and external consultants end up being forced to use at least one SAP product and possibly two or three.

It could not be clearer that no-one in SAP fulfils the role of 'User Advocate'.

And it is painfully clear that their UI design team - if they even have one - are unloved, undervalued, utterly alienated from all decision-making and appallingly underqualified for their role. Filling-in timesheets is one of the textbook use-cases for the 'occasional user' and I have never seen software that supports this class of user so badly.

[bens_dad]

4. Grin.

5. “biggest transfer of power out of Westminster ever”; “reform of the centre”
I don't like the idea of doing both of those at once; far too much chance of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[poshmerchant]

The first four Bring It On movies are excellent from watching them a decade ago. The trailer for the fifth one looks decent, but the sixth one looks dire. The horror take in the 7th one could be interesting, but I'm not a horror person. There were also Fired Up! and Stick It as decent takes on the same formula

I think the Pitch Perfect movies are a more modern take on the same concept

[mellowtigger]

#4 This is also how I think people should be allowed to self-prescribe medication. We get to do it, but we have to register with a medical database and file progress updates, so everyone can benefit from learning what happens from our particular brand of foolishness. :) (Plus the occasional chance-mediated bit of actual progress.)

[calimac]

3) I can think of a way this could have been worse: downplaying or even hiding the jurisdiction, so you wouldn't know that "Los Angeles" was the one in Chile until after you'd picked it, if then. I've seen list options that work this way, hiding necessary information, though I can't think of them offhand.

[calimac]

3) I find it amusing that I've visited all six "Los A*" in the U.S., and have even lived in two of them. And my brother has lived in a third.