I experienced serious trouble with my email account yesterday evening. Any attempt to send or to receive messages only returns errors. Maybe some error made by me, or errors at the ISP. And this happens when I am learning to use a new computer and had to enter all data for internet and e-mail all over again. I sent this message from the service page of the ISP but it never arrived at the USMA server. Here it comes again, now using the usual way..
These airmiles have spawned nasty sequels. There have been proposals about introducing 'road miles', 'mobimiles', 'railmiles'. This makes my position radical. It differs vastly from a system of 'smiles' indeed. I wonder what the instructions might say: "In order to get your amount of roadmiles (mobimiles, railmiles) take your covered distance and divide by 1.6. For instance: You have travelled 480 km. Simply divide by 1.6 and you get 300 roadmiles (railmiles, etc)." I see a very dangerous threat looming here. Down the slippery slide towards ifp-country. No way, not any 'miles' for me. Anyway, in order to pay 100 euro less for this computer I would have needed no less than 10 000 airmiles. For this amount one needs to buy many, many other things. I use other customer loyalty schemes. Once I read about an American PE teacher who was on exchange on a Dutch secondary school. When he had his pupils run the Cooper test, he made them choose: either run a (British/American statute) mile in the shortest time possible, or cover the longest possible distance in 12 minutes. Many pupils thought that running the mile would be less demanding and ran it. (BWMA, take note! Dutch school pupils 'preferred' Imperial to metric units!). I can tell you: I would be shamed if I ever had ran that mile, I would have chosen the 12 minutes, and I would have notified the teacher about the reason why. For Bill the situation is different. The mile in both forms is still the standard unit for distance in the USA. I also never had trouble walking distances in miles in the Four Day's Walks of Castlebar (Ireland) and receiving 'certificates of fitness', on witch the covered distance was in miles. In the meantime this event went metric some years ago. There should be no miles in any form whatsoever in metric countries. Han Historian of Dutch Metrication, Nijmegen, The Netherlands At 9:17 -0700 02/05/17, Bill Potts wrote: >I'm at a loss to understand Han's refusal, on principle, to avail himself of the benefits of what, after all, is a competitive reward system for customer loyalty. I don't care what units they use. It is, after all, a special form of currency, rather than a unit of measure. With the risk of pushing Han to an even more radical position, I confess that my wife (and consequently, myself) is taking benefit of a system of "smiles" offered by the supermarket where she is a frequent customer. I just hope that these smiles are not s-miles! Louis
