Views from the Reading Room

It's "spot the connection" time.

1. At the street at the end of my road there are some shops I use regularly, and opposite them there's a Tesco. I assume the Tesco is open later than anywhere else and sells a variety of useful everyday items.

I've never been in there. If I needed any of those useful everyday items after regular shopping hours, I'd walk 3 or 4 times as far to the Spar on the High Street and see how late that's open.

I'm not Spar's biggest fan, but I don't know anything against Spar.

2. I don't have an Amazon account, for several reasons, and then there's the latest. It's not all over the blogs any more, and I don't Twitter: are people still talking about #amazonfail?

I used to be a programmer; I still would be if the IT industry hadn't decided I'm too old to retrain (whereas the Govt. thinks I'll still be fit for work in 12 years' time *hollow laugh*).

Even if Amazon reinstate the sales rank on everything that was wrongly deranked, and fix all the other problems that surfaced as a result, and apologise already, I won't be able to use the site without remembering them saying [free translation]:
"When we realised we needed a safe search, it didn't occur to us that anyone would want to turn it off, and we couldn't think of a better way to implement it than to lie about our sales figures; also, our tagging system depends on third-party metadata because we forgot we had more than one supplier ... or maybe that's all a lie and we'd rather you thought we were imcompetent than tell you the real reason."

3. Anything I might say on the latest iteration of RaceFail (naraht is doing the archiving this time) has already been said by people closer to the action. But I was struck by a particular derailing technique that I've spotted before (and which I'm sure goes back further than I've been paying attention): the spurious conflation of choosing what to spend your time, money and emotional energy on with boycotts, and the completely spurious conflation of boycotts with censorship.

Instead of just going "Reading comprehenshun, can u haz it?" and offering to send people dictionaries, I'll quote some coherent responses:
( cut for length )