money – Dan Q

£4,803.40 a Year for Water?

When we picked up the keys to the rental house we’ll be living in while our home is repaired following the flood that forced us to evacuate, I took an initial meter reading then got in touch with super-reputable water company Thames Water to let them know the situation.

A digital water meter showing the value 381641. — The Chicory House’s water meter, found in a cupboard, is so much easier to read than the one at our regular house, which is found down a frequently-flooded manhole on the busy road outside.

Unfortunately, Thames Water had fucked-up¹ and created an account for us already with the wrong information², so by the time I’d reached out to them they were already getting themselves into a pickle.

It turns out that, presumably because of some shortsightedness on the part of their software engineers, their computer systems wouldn’t let them change the information to correct the problem. Nor could they simply delete the account and create a new one³. Instead, the had to close the account they’d erroneously set up such that the start and end date of the contract was our moving-in date… and then set up a new account starting from the day after.

Sigh. Fine! So long as it’s sorted, I didn’t even care. Until, that is, the bill arrived for the one day of the first (incorrectly-created) contract:

A Thames Water bill dated 18 April, for an account being closed '04/09/2026', covering a billing period of 9 April - 9 April, for £13.16. — This looks pretty low for a metered water bill, until you realise that it covers a period of *literally only eleven hours* from us moving in (and taking a meter reading) until the end of that day. And that during most of that time the water was switched-off because a pair of plumbers were installing a new bathroom!

That bill:

is for £13.16.
covers “9 April 2026 through 9 April 2026”, i.e. one day.
- (which means that our estimated annual bill would be £4,803.40 (£13.16 × 365) – about eight times the national average)
states that our account closure was/will be “04/09/2026” – the only date on the letter that’s in “short” date format and which would appear to be 4 September (in UK date format) even though 9 April would make more sense (but would require interpreting it in US date format, which would make no sense).

Let’s see how that breaks down:

Breakdown of the '1 day' bill covering three cubic metres of water at £2.7346 (usage) and £1.4721 (sewerage), plus fixed charges, totalling £13.16. — The rates are standard, albeit a little on the high end: Thames Water need to raise funds right now to fix all of the leaks in their pipes, apparently. What’s odd is the volume of water they claim has been used.

According to this bill, we used three cubic metres of water between collecting the keys (at around 1pm), moving in, and taking a meter reading… and the end of the day. That’s three thousand litres of water.

Is it possible to achieve that level of water usage in the nine hours of billable time that this bill covers? I guess, if you really tried, you could:

completely fill and then drain our 100-litre bathtub, three times an hour, taking a five-and-a-half minute bath in each before draining it again, for the rest of the day⁴; or
run the kitchen tap – the highest-pressure tap in the house – continuously for six hours and forty minutes; or
repeatedly flush all three toilets, on “full-flush” mode, once every 79 seconds until midnight⁵, for example.

Dan, a white man with a blue ponytail, wearing a green t-shirt, watches a stopwatch timer on his phone while filling a measuring jug from the kitchen sink's tap. — Some science was involved in the writing of this blog post.

Obviously this is all ridiculous. I’m being ridiculous.

But then again, so is this bill, which claims that three adults spent 11 hours in a house and somehow used the amount of water that’s the recommended amount to drink in a day… by 1,500 adults. Despite the water being shut-off to install a shower and toilet for some of that time.

But then again, so is Thames Water’s computer system, which disallows the correction of mistakes even by their own staff and instead requires the creation of one-day contracts. And also can’t decide which country’s date format to use. And, possibly, doesn’t allow them to obey data protection laws.

The whole thing’s ridiculous. Which I’ll be letting Thames Water know. Let’s see if they agree.

Footnotes

¹ This may be no surprise to anybody who’s ever dealt with Thames Water before, or who follows the news about their seemingly endless inability to keep clean water in its pipes and raw sewage out of our rivers, for example, while taking out loans in order to pay bonuses to their self-back-patting executives.

² They used information provided to them by the estate agent and failed to connect it to the information they already had for us… which thanks to quirks of their information systems resulted in bigger problems down the line. Amusingly – and for a change! – none of the problems were related to my unusual name, this time around.

³ Curiously, these initial mistakes on the part of Thames Water left them processing personal information about me – an email address – that I’d never given to them, and allegedly unable to delete or correct it for six months after being asked to. This is the kind of thing that normally gives me an excuse for a field day of DPA2018-related letter writing, but this time around I’ve been too busy dealing with the bigger problems they’ve created to have a chance to stop and think about that: that’s how much of a mess they’ve made.

⁴ It’s only barely possible to repeatedly fill the bath this quickly, you need to use both hot and cold water: the cold inlet alone doesn’t have the pressure to fill it fast enough, but the hot water tank has its own separate inlet which makes all the difference. Also, a cold bath would suck, even if you’re only allowed five minutes in it before it’s time to drain the tub and start filling it again.

⁵ I once had a really rough night after a particularly dodgy curry, but I’ve never needed to be flushing a toilet twice a minute for eleven hours.

My Salary History

Jeremy Keith posted his salary history last week. I absolutely agree with him that employers exploit the information gap created by opaque salary advertisement, and I think that our industry of software engineering is especially troublesome for this.

So I’m joining him (and others) in choosing to share my salary history. I’ve set up a new page for that purpose, but here’s the summary of its initial state:

Understand

A few understandings and caveats:

For most of my career I’ve described myself as a “Full-Stack Web Applications Developer”, but I’ve worked outside of every one of those words and my job titles have often been more like “CMS Developer” or “Senior Engineer (Security)”.
My specialisms and “hot areas” are security engineering, web standards, performance, and accessibility.
When I worked multiple roles in a year, I’ve tried to capture that, but there’ll be some fuzziness around the edges.
The salaries are rounded slightly to make nice readable numbers.
I’ve not always worked full-time; all salaries are translated into “full-time equivalent”¹.
I’ve only included jobs that fit into my software engineering career².
If the table below looks out-of-date then I’ve probably just forgotten to update it. Let me know!

History

Year	Employer	Salary	Notes
2025 – 2026	Firstup	£80,000	Remote. + Stock (spread over four years).
2024 – 2025	Automattic	£111,000	Remote. + Stock (one-off bonus, worth ~£6,000).
2023	Automattic	£103,000	Remote.
2021 – 2022	Automattic	£98,000	Remote
2019 – 2020	Automattic	£89,000	Remote.
2015 – 2019	Bodleian Libraries + Freelance	£39,000	Hybrid.
2011 – 2014	Bodleian Libraries	£36,000	Practices salary transparency! ❤️
2010 – 2011	SmartData + Freelance	£26,000	Remote.
2007 – 2009	SmartData	£24,000
2004 – 2006	SmartData	£19,500
2002 – 2003	SmartData	£16,500	Alongside full-time study.
2002	CTA	£18,000
2001	Freelance	£4,500	Ad-hoc and hard to estimate. Alongside full-time study.

What does that look like?

I drew a graph, but I don’t like it. Mostly because I don’t see my salary as a “goal” to aim for or some kind of “score”.

It’s gone up; it’s gone down; but I’ve always been more-motivated by what I’m working on, with whom, and for what purpose than I have been on how much I get paid for it³. But if you want to see:

I’m not sure to what degree my career looks typical or not. But I guess I also don’t care! My motivations are probably different than most (a little-more idealistic, a little-less capitalistic), I’d guess.

Footnotes

¹ i.e. what I’d have earned if I had worked full-time

² That summer back in college that I worked in a factory building striplight fittings doesn’t appear, for example!

³ Pro-tip if you’re looking at my CV and pitching me an opportunity: mention what you expect to pay, sure, but if you’re trying to win me over then tell me about the problems I’ll be solving and how that’ll make the world a better place. That’s how you motivate me to accept your offer!

I guess I’m never paying DreamHost back

About twenty years ago, after a a tumultuous life, Big.McLargeHuge – the shared server of several other Abnibbers and I – finally and fatally kicked the bucket. I spun up its replacement, New.McLargeHuge, on hosting company DreamHost, and this blog (and many other sites) moved over to it¹.

I only stayed with DreamHost for a few years before switching to Bytemark, with whom I was a loyal customer right up until a few years ago², but in that time I took advantage of DreamHost’s “Refer & Earn” program, which allowed me to create referral codes that, if redeemed by others who went on to become paying customers, would siphon off a fraction of the profits as a “kickback” against my server bills. Neat!³

A year or so after I switched to ByteMark, DreamHost decided I owed them money: probably because of a “quirk” in their systems. I disagreed with their analysis, so I ignored their request. They “suspended” my account (which I wasn’t using anyway), and that was the end of it.

Right?

But the referral fees continued to trickle in. For the last seventeen years, I’ve received a monthly email advising me that my account had been credited, off the back of a referral.

About once a year I log in and check the balance. I was quite excited to discover that, at current rates, they’d consider me “paid-up” for my (alleged) debt by around Spring 2026!

I had this whole plan that I’d write a blog post about it when the time came. It could’ve been funny!

But it’s not to be: DreamHost emailed me last night to tell me that they’re killing their “Refer & Earn” program; replacing it with something different-but-incompatible (social media’s already having a grumble about this, I gather).

So I guess this is the only blog post you’ll get about “that time DreamHost decided I owed them money and I opted to pay them back in my referral fees over the course of eighteen years”.

No big loss.

Footnotes

¹ At about the same time I moved Three Rings over from its previous host, Easily, to DreamHost too, in order to minimise the number of systems I had to keep an eye on. Oh, how different things are now, when I’ve got servers and domain registrations and DNS providers all over the damn place!

² Bytemark have rapidly gone downhill since their acquisition by Iomart a while back, IMHO.

³ Nowadays, this blog (and several of my other projects) is hosted by Linode, whose acquisition by Akamai seems not to have caused any problems with, so that’s fab.

Note #27196

Today, for the first time ever, I simultaneously published a piece of content across five different media: a Weblog post, a video essay, a podcast episode, a Gemlog post, and a Spartanlog post.

Must be about something important, right?

Nope, it’s a meandering journey to coming up with a design for a £5 coin that will never exist. Delightfully pointless. Being the Internet I want to see in the world.

🔗 https://danq.me/the-beer-token

The Beer Token [Video]

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The Beer Token

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1979

The novelisation of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy came out in 1979, just a smidge before I was born. There’s a well-known scene in the second chapter featuring Ford Prefect, an alien living on Earth, distracting his human friend Arthur Dent. Arthur is concerned about the imminent demolition of his house by a wrecking crew, and Ford takes him to the pub to get him drunk, in anticipation of the pair attempting to hitch a lift on an orbiting spacecraft that’s about to destroy the planet:

“Six pints of bitter,” said Ford Prefect to the barman of the Horse and Groom. “And quickly please, the world’s about to end.”

The barman of the Horse and Groom didn’t deserve this sort of treatment, he was a dignified old man. He pushed his glasses up his nose and blinked at Ford Prefect. Ford ignored him and stared out of the window, so the barman looked instead at Arthur who shrugged helplessly and said nothing.

So the barman said, “Oh yes sir? Nice weather for it,” and started pulling pints.

He tried again.

“Going to watch the match this afternoon then?”

Ford glanced round at him.

“No, no point,” he said, and looked back out of the window.

“What’s that, foregone conclusion then you reckon sir?” said the barman. “Arsenal without a chance?”

“No, no,” said Ford, “it’s just that the world’s about to end.”

“Oh yes sir, so you said,” said the barman, looking over his glasses this time at Arthur. “Lucky escape for Arsenal if it did.”

Ford looked back at him, genuinely surprised.

“No, not really,” he said. He frowned.

The barman breathed in heavily. “There you are sir, six pints,” he said.

Arthur smiled at him wanly and shrugged again. He turned and smiled wanly at the rest of the pub just in case any of them had heard what was going on.

None of them had, and none of them could understand what he was smiling at them for.

A man sitting next to Ford at the bar looked at the two men, looked at the six pints, did a swift burst of mental arithmetic, arrived at an answer he liked and grinned a stupid hopeful grin at them.

“Get off,” said Ford, “They’re ours,” giving him a look that would have an Algolian Suntiger get on with what it was doing.

Ford slapped a five-pound note on the bar. He said, “Keep the change.”

“What, from a fiver? Thank you sir.”

There’s a few great jokes there, but I’m interested in the final line. Ford buys six pints of bitter, pays with a five-pound note, and says “keep the change”, which surprises the barman. Presumably this is as a result of Ford’s perceived generosity… though of course what’s really happening is that Ford has no use for Earth money any longer; this point is hammered home for the barman and nearby patrons when Ford later buys four packets of peanuts, also asking the barman to keep the change from a fiver.

A pint of light-coloured beer on wooden board, with the sea in the background. An orange towel sits alongside. — Beer’s important, but you also need to know where your towel is.

We’re never told exactly what the barman would have charged Ford. But looking at the history of average UK beer prices and assuming that the story is set in 1979, we can assume that the pints will have been around 34p each¹, so around £2.04 for six of them. So… Ford left a 194% tip for the beer².

1990

By the time I first read Hitch-Hikers, around 1990, this joke was already dated. By then, an average pint of bitter would set you back £1.10. I didn’t have a good awareness of that, being as I was well-underage to be buying myself alcohol! But I clearly had enough of an awareness that my dad took the time to explain the joke… that is, to point out that when the story was written (and is presumably set), six pints would cost less than half of five pounds.

But by the mid-nineties, when I’d found a friend group who were also familiar with the Hitch-Hikers… series, we’d joke about it. Like pointing out that by then if you told the barman to keep the change from £5 after buying six pints, the reason he’d express surprise wouldn’t be because you’d overpaid…

Stock photo of a barman serving two patrons, annotated with speech bubbles. One patron says "Keep the change." The barman, smiling, says "What, from a a fiver. Fuck you sir." — In his defence, Ford’s an alien and might not fully understand human concepts of inflation. Or sarcasm.

1998

Precocious drinker that I was, by the late nineties I was quite aware of the (financial) cost of drinking.

Dan, then with long black hair, sits with another young white man in a garden, in front of a table laden with several bottles of wine and around 80 cans of beer. — Sure, this seems like a responsible amount of alcohol for a party thrown by a couple of tearaway teenagers. Definitely nothing going to go wrong here, no siree.

And so when it was announced that a new denomination of coin – the £2 coin – would enter general circulation³ I was pleased to announce how sporting it was of the government to release a “beer token”.

With the average pint of beer at the time costing around £1.90 and a still cash-dominated economy, the “beer token” was perfect! And in my case, it lasted: the bars I was drinking at in the late 1990s were in the impoverished North, and were soon replaced with studenty bars on the West coast of Wales, both of which allowed the price of a pint to do battle with inflationary forces for longer than might have been expected elsewhere in the country. The “beer token” that was the £2 coin was a joke that kept on giving for some time.

Close-up of a 1998 £2 coin; bimetallic, with an inner ring of cogs expanding outwards into several interlocking spirals. — The one thing I always hated about the initial design for the bimetallic £2 coin was – and this is the nerdiest thing in the world with which to take issue – the fact that it had a ring of **19 cogs** to represent British industry. But if you connect a circuit of an odd number of cogs… it won’t function. Great metaphor, there. Photo courtesy of the late Andy Fogg, used under a Creative Commons license.

2023

As the cost of living rapidly increased circa 2023, the average price of a pint of beer in the UK finally got to the point where, rounded to the nearest whole pound, it was closer to £5 than it is to £4⁴.

And while we could moan and complain about how much things cost nowadays, I’d prefer to see this as an opportunity. An opportunity for a new beer token: a general-release of the £5 coin. We already some defined characteristics that fit: a large, heavy coin, about twice the weight of the £2 coin, with a copper/nickel lustre and struck from engravings with thick, clear lines.

And the design basically comes up with itself. I give you… the Beer Token of the 2020s:

It’s time for the beer token to return, in the form of the £5 coin. Now is the time… now is the last time, probably… before cash becomes such a rarity that little thought is evermore given to the intersection of its design and utility. And compared to a coin that celebrates industry while simultaneously representing a disfunctional machine, this is a coin that Brits could actually be proud of. It’s a coin that tourists would love to take home with them, creating a satisfying new level of demand for the sinking British Pound that might, just might, prop up the economy a little, just as here at home they support those who prop up the bar.

I know there must be a politician out there who’s ready to stand up and call for this new coin. My only fear is that it’s Nigel Fucking Farage… at which point I’d be morally compelled to reject my own proposal.

But for now, I think I’ll have another drink.

Footnotes

¹ The recession of the 1970s brought high inflation that caused the price of beer to rocket, pretty much tripling in price over the course of the decade. Probably Douglas Adams didn’t anticipate that it’d more-than-double again over the course of the 1980s before finally slowing down somewhat… at least until tax changes in 2003 and the aftermath of the 2022 inflation rate spike!

² We do know that the four packets of peanuts Ford bought later were priced at 7p each, so his tip on that transaction was a massive 1,686%: little wonder the barman suddenly started taking more-seriously Ford’s claims about the imminent end of the world!

³ There were commemorative £2 coins of a monometallic design floating around already, of course, but – being collectible – these weren’t usually found in circulation, so I’m ignoring them.

⁴ Otherwise known as “two beer tokens”, of course. As in “Bloody hell, 2022, why does a pint of draught cost two beer tokens now?”

Halifax Shared My Credit Agreement!

Remember that hilarious letter I got from British Gas a in 2023 where they messed-up my name? This is like that… but much, much worse.

Today, Ruth and JTA received a letter. It told them about an upcoming change to the agreement of their (shared, presumably) Halifax credit card.

Except… they don’t have a shared Halifax credit card. Could it be a scam? Some sort of phishing attempt, maybe, or perhaps somebody taking out a credit card in their names?

I happened to be in earshot and asked to take a look at the letter, and was surprised to discover that all of the other details – the last four digits of the card, the credit limit, etc. – all matched my Halifax credit card.

Carefully-censored letter from Halifax, highlighting the parts that show my correct address, last four digits of my card, and my credit limit... and where it shows a pair of names that are not mine. — Halifax sent a letter to me, about *my credit card*… but addressed it to… *two other people I live with*‽

I spent a little over half an hour on the phone with Halifax, speaking to two different advisors, who couldn’t fathom what had happened or how. My credit card is not (and has never been) a joint credit card, and the only financial connection I have to Ruth and JTA is that I share a mortgage with them. My guess is that some person or computer at Halifax tried to join-the-dots from the mortgage outwards and re-assigned my credit card to them, instead?

Eventually I had to leave to run an errand, so I gave up on the phone call and raised a complaint with Halifax in writing. They’ve promised to respond within… eight weeks. Just brilliant.

Note #25345

My Three Rings volunteering this International Volunteer Day isn’t all technical work. It’s also time to process the incoming postal mail.

Our time as volunteers may be free, but our servers aren’t, so the larger and richer charities that use our services help contribute to our hosting costs. Most send money digitally, but some use dual-signatory accounts that require they send cheques.

eBay Balance

eBay UK have changed their terms to (a) remove seller fees for most private sellers, but (b) instead of paying-out immediately, payouts are four times a year (or on-demand).

That sounds like they’re trying to keep money in their ecosystem. The hope is, I guess, that by paying sellers in virtual “eBay Pounds” rather than actual money in the first instance they’ll encourage those sellers to become buyers again (either of other listings, or of eBay’s postage and other services). You can cash out anytime you like, but you can never leave.

You see the same technique used e.g. by the National Lottery, who pay out “small” winnings into your online account, knowing that the vast majority of winnings are on the order of only a few times more than the value of a ticket, and so players will be more-likely to “re-invest” if they’re not paid-out directly.

Or maybe I’m just being cynical.

We’ll Pay You to Go (so we’re confident in who stays…)

This week has been a wild ride at Automattic. I’ve shared my take on our recent drama already¹.

Off the back of all of this, our CEO Matt Mullenweg realised:

…

It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions.

So we decided to design the most generous buy-out package possible, we called it an Alignment Offer: if you resigned before 20:00 UTC on Thursday, October 3, 2024, you would receive $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher.

…

HR added some extra details to sweeten the deal; we wanted to make it as enticing as possible.

I’ve been asking people to vote with their wallet a lot recently, and this is another example!

…

Matt Mullenweg

This was a really bold move, and gave many people I know pause for consideration. “Quit today, and we’ll pay you six months salary,” could be a pretty high-value deal for some people, and it was offered basically without further restriction².

A 2008 Havard Business Review article (unpaywalled version) talked about a curious business strategy undertaken by shoe company Zappos:

…

Every so often, though, I spend time with a company that is so original in its strategy, so determined in its execution, and so transparent in its thinking, that it makes my head spin. Zappos is one of those companies

…

It’s a hard job, answering phones and talking to customers for hours at a time. So when Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. People get paid their full salary during this period.

After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!

…

Bill Taylor (Harvard Business Review)

I’m sure you can see the parallel. What Zappos do routinely and Automattic did this week have a similar outcome

By reducing – not quite removing – the financial incentive to remain, they aim to filter their employees down to only those whose reason for being there is that they believe in what the company does³. They’re trading money for idealism.

Buried about half way through the Creed is the line I am more motivated by impact than money, which seems quite fitting. Automattic has always been an idealistic company. This filtering effort helps validate that.

The effect of Automattic’s “if you don’t feel aligned with us, we’ll pay you to leave” offer has been significant: around 159 people – 8.4% of the company – resigned this week. At very short notice, dozens of people I know and have worked with… disappeared from my immediate radar. It’s been… a lot.

I chose to stay. I still believe in Automattic’s mission, and I love my work and the people I do it with. But man… it makes you second-guess yourself when people you know, and respect, and love, and agree with on so many things decide to take a deal like this and… quit⁴.

There’ve been some real heart-in-throat moments. A close colleague of mine started a message in a way that made me briefly panic that this was a goodbye, and it took until half way through that I realised it was the opposite and I was able to start breathing again.

But I’m hopeful and optimistic that we’ll find our feet, rally our teams, win our battles, and redouble our efforts to make the Web a better place, democratise publishing (and eCommerce!), and do it all with a commitment to open source. There’s tears today, but someday there’ll be happiness again.

Footnotes

¹ For which the Internet quickly made me regret my choices, delivering a barrage of personal attacks and straw man arguments, but I was grateful for the people who engaged in meaningful discourse.

² For example, you could even opt to take the deal if you were on a performance improvement plan, or if you were in your first week of work! If use these examples because I’m pretty confident that both of them occurred.

³ Of course, such a strategy can never be 100% effective, because people’s reasons for remaining with an employer are as diverse as people are.

⁴ Of course their reasons for leaving are as diverse and multifaceted as others’ reasons for staying might be! I’ve a colleague who spent some time mulling it over not because he isn’t happy working here but because he was close to retirement, for example.

Note #24599

At work, we recently switched expenses system to one with virtual credit card functionality. I decided to test it out by buying myself lounge access for my upcoming work trip to Mexico. Unfortunately the new system mis-detected my lounge access as being a purchase from lingerie company loungeunderwear.com. I’m expecting a ping from Finance any moment to ask me why I’m using a company credit card to buy a bra.

One might ask why our expenses provider can (mis-)identify loungeunderwear.com from a transaction in the first place. Did somebody at some company that uses this provider actually buy some ladies’ briefs on a company credit card at some point?

[Bloganuary] Not The Lottery

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

What would you do if you won the lottery?

I know what I’d do, and I’ll get to that. But first, let me tell you about the lottery game I play.

"LOTTO Schleswig-Holstein" player slip with two "series" of numbers selected: in game one, all the numbers ending 7, and the lucky stars 1 and 2; in the second game, the first five numbers (the lucky stars aren't visible). — “Why yes, my numbers are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, with lucky stars 6 and 7. What do you mean, they’ll never come up? They’re just as likely as yours!”

Not the lottery

I don’t generally play the lottery¹. I’ve made interactive widgets (now broken) to illustrate quite how many losers there are in these games and hopefully help highlight that while “it could be you”… it won’t be.

But if I ever happen to be somewhere that the lottery results are being announced, I sometimes like to play a game I call Not The Lottery.² Here’s how you play:

Set aside the money it would have cost for a ticket.
Think of the numbers you’d have played.
When those numbers don’t come up, congratulations: you just won not-wasting-your-money!³

Want to play Not The Lottery retroactively? Cool. I’ve made and open-sourced a tool for that. Hopefully it’ll load below and you can choose some numbers (or take a Lucky Dip) and have it played through the entirety of EuroMillions history and see how much money you’d have won if you’d only played them every week. Or, to look at things from a brighter perspective, how much you’ve saved by not playing. It’s almost-certainly in the thousands.

Loading game… please wait… (if it never loads, Dan probably broke it; sorry!)

Winning the lottery

But that’s not what the question’s really about, is it? We don’t ask people “what would they do if they won the lottery?” because we think it’s likely to happen⁴ We ask them because… well, because it’s fun to fantasise.

And I sort-of gave the answer away on day 20 of Bloganuary: I’d do my “dream job”. I’d work (for free) for Three Rings, like I already do, except instead of spending a couple of hours a week on it on average I’d spend about ten times that. I’d use the luxury of not having to work to focus on things that I know I can do to make the world a better place.

Dan poses in the centre of a group of seven other Three Rings volunteers. — If money was no object, I’d spend more time with these happy folks (and many more besides), making volunteering easier for everybody.

Sure, there’s other things I’d do. They’re mostly obvious things that I’d hope anybody in my position would do. Pay off the mortgage (and for all the works currently being done to ~~infuriate the dog~~ improve the house). Arrange some kind of slow-access trust or annuity for the people closest to me so that they need not worry about money, nor about having to work out how to spend, save, or invest a lump sum. Maybe a holiday or two. Certainly some charitable donations. Perhaps buy really expensive ketchup: the finest dijon ketchup⁵.

But mostly I’d just want to be able to live as comfortably as I do now, or perhaps slightly more, and spend a greater proportion of my time than I already do making charities work better.

I don’t know if that makes me insufferably self-righteous or insufferably simple-minded, but it’s probably one of those.

Footnotes

¹ I’ve been caught describing it as “a tax on people who are bad at maths”, but I don’t truly believe that (although I am concerned about how readily we let people get addicted to problematic gambling and then keep encouraging them to play with dark patterns that hide how low the odds truly are). I’ve even been known to buy a ticket or two, some years.

² While writing this, I decided to retroactively play for last Friday, having not seen whatever numbers came up. I guessed only one of them. Hurrah! That means I saved £2.50 by not playing!

³ There are, of course, other possible outcomes. You could have missed out on winning a small prize – the odds aren’t that low – but the solution to this is simple: just keep playing Not The Lottery and you, as the “house”, will come out on top in the end. Alternatively, it’s just-about possible that you could pluck the jackpot numbers from thin air, in which case: well done! You’re doing better than Derren Brown when in 2009 he performed a pretty good magic trick but then turned it into a turd when he “explained” it using pseudoscience (why not just stick with “I’m a magician, duh”; when you play the Uri Geller card you just make yourself look like an idiot). Let’s find a way to use those superpowers for good. Because what you’ve got is a superpower. For context: if you played Not The Lottery twice a week, every week, without fail, for 393 years… you’d still only have a 1% chance of having ever predicted a jackpot in your five-lifetimes.

⁴ What if we lived in a world where we did use statistics to think about the hypothetical questions we ask people? Would we ask “what would you do if you were stuck by lightning?”, given that the lifetime chance of being killed by lightning is significantly greater than the chance of winning the jackpot, even if you play every draw!

⁵ Y’know, to keep in the fridge in the treehouse.

EGXchange – a digital EGX wallet

I’ve just launched EGXchange.org, a digital wallet for new currency Emma Goldcoin, which I’ve mentioned previously (including a discussion with the author in my comments section).

Homepage of EGXchange.org, showing the slogan "Everybody has an EGX wallet. Log in to yours now." — Of course, you don’t strictly *need* a digital wallet to use EGX. But as we’re in a culture where people invariably ask “is there an app for it?”, I thought I’d make one.

You can install it as an offline-first progressive web application, which means that this could be the first ever digital currency to have an app that works without an Internet connection. That’s probably something no other digital currency can claim to have, right?

Here’s what it looks like if I send 0.1 EGX to my friend Chris using the app:

Naturally, I wouldn’t be backing Emma Goldcoin if it didn’t represent such a brilliant step up better-known digital currencies like Bitcoin, Ripple, and Etherium. Specific features unique to Emma Goldcoin include:

Using it doesn’t massively contribute to energy wastage and environmental damage.
It doesn’t increase the digital divide by helping early adopters at the expense of late adopters.
It’s entirely secure: it’s mathematically impossible to “steal”EGX.
Emma Goldcoin is so simple that you don’t even need a computer to use it: it “just works”.

Sure, it’s got its downsides, and I’d encourage you to read the specification if you’d like to learn more about what those are. Or if you already know what EGX is all about and just want to try a new way to manage your portfolio, give my new site EGXchange.org a go!

Note #14082

In the remote chance that @Facebook‘s #LibraCoin [Wikipedia] takes off, I suggest that the appropriate slang term for the currency shall be zucks.

As in: “I’ll bet you a hundred zucks that this new #cryptocurrency will be barely more-successful than Dogecoin, and far less-cute.”

£20 for a boiled egg, one piece of toast and a mug of tea?

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

£20 for a boiled egg, one piece of toast and a mug of tea?

The story of a modern London cafe…

(Read to end of thread before commenting!)

…

Steve Parks (Twitter), via ThreadReader

An amazing thread well-worth reading to the end. Went in expecting a joke about hipsters, millennials, and avocado-on-toast… finished with something much more.