Usually, you go there with a shopping list. A text-based, or minimally graphical, API is a much better way to submit a shopping list than driving miles to a big shed and walking around it and then queueing and then driving back with your stuff.
You go to a supermarket to fill a list; you go shopping for unexpected discoveries. As a result, you might as well go to town, literally. I think one thing going on here is that VR was the future of suburbia, and society started to value urbanity again.
(Also, my favourite V-force nuke story is the V-squadron leader who taxied his Vulcan out to the runway during an exercise, and then the word came to stand down. But they'd just been given a Security Lecture about the enemy's disinformation. So he refused to shut down until the Staish, the Station Commander, typically a much older, senior, and very dignified/pompous officer, walked out onto the runway, stripped naked, and gave him a direct order...)
]]>I don't. I walk around all the isles and pick off what I want. I automatically see anything new, which I would not do if I shopped online with a list.
]]>Not just in the UK (although it's certainly true that the US is geographically larger). Shortly after 9-11 some excited people were whining in public that "Everything has changed, nobody is safe!" No, it wasn't a change; that was how we grew up. I'm about Charlie's age and it was how I grew up, and what my parents lived with, and something my grandparents had to watch settle in around them. We weren't looking at the occasional nut with a bomb or gun, we were looking at the end of everything. Younger folks who came to adulthood after the end of the Cold War, by the way, completely get a pass on this.
Knowing that guys you've never met, who care nothing about you, and who you can influence very little are sitting around with the ability to kill everyone is something that must influence people and the zeitgeist of the society they live in.
]]>And I'll often check out what's reduced to clear. As the cook, sometimes I'll have no clue what we're going to eat that evening. Then I'll wander past the fresh ingredients, see that (for example) some smoked haddock is going cheap, and hey presto, it's fish pie tonight.
(I can quite easily spend much more on the stuff to go with the reduced item than the item was reduced by, but that's not a problem for me.)
The supermarket is quite happy to sell to me online, and quite happy to deliver or for me to collect an online-ordered list. But it's not going to work for me. And there's no way I trust anyone else to pick out the loose fruit and vegetables.
I'm sure there are people who do have a clear agenda before they enter — sometimes I do — but I value the pure serendipity of browsing. I think it may address that deep hunter-gatherer legacy.
]]>My usual plan is that I'm looking for X portions of protein, and then I'll sort out what I want in fruit, veg and complex carbs to make main meals from them.
As Bellinghman says, no way am I trusting anyone else to select fruit, veg, or even use by dates for me. Of course, this is slightly academic in that no-one offers on-line shopping plus home delivery for normal groceries around where I live.
]]>Directly targetting Edinburgh and Glasgow would have killed about 40% of Scotland's population, including most of the civilian workforce for Faslane and Coulport, and most of the actual or potential civil government, destroyed at least 3 Army barracks, a similar number of main TA muster points... We had lots of time to think about these things.
]]>I live about a mile away from Leith -- a ferry port (hint: reinforcements). Edinburgh also has a couple of major railway stations (hint: logistics) and an airport (hint: combat aircraft), not to mention the Forth bridges (hint: access to Fife is bottlenecked through two bridges a quarter of a mile apart), the M8 corridor to Glasgow, and the head end of the A1.
In other words, if you are a Soviet commander, worried about the UK as a resupply/logistics hub for funneling reinforcements from the USA into a European theatre, then Edinburgh offers several obvious targets: at the very least, the port, the bridges, the airport, and the oil terminal were going to get whacked. And for 200Kt air bursts, pretty much the entire city would be within the 5psi overpressure zone, which would be no fun at all even if you don't have windows directly facing most of the targets ...
]]>Aside from a couple of not that great double-track roads, it also cuts all N-S road communications.
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