Direct booking needs to make a come back. Middleman platforms got too comfortable charging increasingly large fees to both seller and buyers while providing less and less value. I personally started booking direct from hotels and airfares unless I'm forced otherwise or direct is pricier.
My first job as a SWD was at a company that built a reservation system, they had integrations with AirBnB even though our product did everything they offered. The only difference was that AirBnB had more/different traffic, so it was beneficial to also have a subscription there.
Little did they know, if AirBnB never existed that traffic would still find way through search engines or ads
I was happy to use booking.com for that reason for many years. When there was a issue booking would fix and discuss it for me. 7 years ago.
I've had 2 interactions with booking in the last year and both went horrible. One booking literally broke several booking rules, and asked for a lot more money after already paying $300 a night. And still I had to make a drama to get my right and the hotel is still online without anything. They lost $15 and I lost hours of painfully calling around.
I bought a camper that year and haven't used anything but the hotel site itself ever since.
Downside of direct booking is that you need accounts dedicated for each hotel that can be hacked.
Of course the "middlemen" can be hacked as well, but the likelihood of someone exfiltrating credit card data from the shitty fossil wordpress installation of the hotel is much more real.
Terrible place to be poor more like. Being poor is not enviable in any country, but you're better supported in some countries compared to others. Obviously this comes at a cost for the economy as a whole. At some point you need to think about what kind of society you want to live in.
I wouldn't necessarily make the assumption that welfare support "costs" the economy as a whole.
It's really expensive to support homeless population since they use up critical important resources such as emergency care, compared to just giving them a home. They may recover faster and become a productive member of society again.
For sure, it costs real dollars in a national budget, but it isn't necessarily a bad thing for the economy.
Nobody needs to work in USA either, but people do it anyway since the free stuff isn't comfortable enough. Its the same in Europe, people don't view the free stuff as good enough for them so they work to get more.
But then who's gonna be the delivery man who delivers your post/packages? Who's gonna be your teachers in school? Who's gonna be the baker making your food? Who's gonna be the builder and plumber building the shelter you live in? Who's gonna be the doctor healing you? If nobody needs to work.
They don't need to, they work anyway since we are still living in a capitalist nation where working pays off, that goes for both Europe and USA, you get supported by the state so you don't starve if you don't work but people still prefer working over not working thanks to the extra benefits you get.
Communist nations force people to work, there is no need for that in capitalist nations, people work for the extra rewards.
Yeah they do. I live in a socialist European country and if you refuse to work you'll end up on the streets and only live off charity of others or starve/freeze to death.
You won't get any state welfare if you're decaled medically fit to work and refuse to take work that get sent to you by the unemployment agency, like for example working in a warehouse or in an Amazon fulfilment center. Nobody would willfully take those shit jobs if they wouldn't have to work.
Yeah, there's some people who made a lifestyle out of gaming the system who choose not to work and still get welfare but that's a minority.
> You won't get any state welfare if you're decaled medically fit to work and refuse to take work that get sent to you by the unemployment agency
That depends on the country, but in the USA you get food stamps regardless of anything else so you wont starve. Then you can live on public lands in a tent or so, many do that in California.
> Virtually no one wants to live on the bare minimum
Many people prefer that to working.
The Seattle Times wrote an article decades ago where they interviewed a woman on welfare. They asked her what she'd do if her welfare was taken away. She replied "get a job".
They asked a couple of guys in a car with fishing equipment why they lived on welfare instead of getting a job. They replied that on welfare, they get to fish all day and enjoyed it.
I also knew a fellow for years who was on and off unemployment. He said he'd work at a job long enough to qualify for unemployment, then he'd f'up and get laid off. He'd then live off of unemployment, and would fail the requierd job interviews (amazing!). When that ran out, he'd have no trouble finding a job.
A friend of mine ran a nursery. He tried to hire a couple people who said they wanted the job, but would wait until their unemployment ran out before taking it. They were quite open about it.
Hence why I said "virtually", having a few anecdotes from interviews or from someone you knew doesn't cover it. Of course there will be people who choose to live on welfare, the vast majority would rather not. It's a small price to pay to have welfare programs saving countless lives from falling deeper into the hole of abject poverty... We just view this very differently, you prefer the "stick" approach, punish people who you deem unworthy because of their lack of motivation to work; while me on the other hand prefer the "carrot" where I think it's an okay price to pay to have some people choosing to not to work while society can protect people caught in bad times from falling away from the margins.
It's still absurd the straw man you created, please provide me data covering the whole population and we can discuss it, while it's based on these anecdotes you just being guided by your feelings and ideology.
Making people work is an assumption that work in itself is valuable, or at worse, mostly valuable. This isn't necessarily the case for jobs, and some jobs are probably actually detrimental to the well being of our society.
I honestly think this idea just needs to die. So many people I know don't even bothering applying for welfare because they think they won't get it.
In reality, most US states are insanely generous.
I recall once my mom had to help a friend's dad who was uninsured and dying of prostate cancer simply apply for benefits. He didn't think the state would pay for it and had just resigned himself to death. My goodness, how silly... Instead, he applied and it was paid for.
I myself have fallen into this trap. When I was laid off, I was going to pay COBRA, instead of just biting the bullet and applying for medicaid. There's almost always a free government provided option if you need it. Literally people don't even bother.
I drink coffee and tea more for their beneficial phyto chemicals. If I were to stop them, I would lose this benefit. I limit it to a single cup of each.
B6 as P5P at 20 mg twice daily has helped my stress. Similarly, magnesium citrate has too. Theanine is also relevant at night.
I think the best cure for stress for someone who has saved up money is to quit their day job.
Alternatively, in some companies the only way to give a decent salary raise is promotions which leads to all kind of problems : title inflation, super performers put into a job they won't perform as well in, etc...
Also, when I've been unhappy in my job and ultimately quit as a result, a pay raise has always been offered in an attempt to get me to stay.
However, at the point I'm actually quitting, I've already told them the reasons why and pay is never on that list (if it were a pay issue, I'd have asked for a raise instead.) Offering me a pay increase and ignoring my actual problems tells me that the only thing my employer can offer me is more money, and any further discussion of the issue is pointless.
> I find it fascinating that people are putting so much efforts optimizing exploitation techniques, yet ~nobody bothers fixing them, even if it only takes a couple of lines of code and 20 minutes.
Like it or not, exploiting seems just more fun and rewarding. A lot of people will be interested to learn on your blog how you came to find and exploit a vulnerability. The 10 line of code patch gets little attention. Not even taking into consideration bug bounties...
Exploiting is mainly much, much harder. Programmers are pretty good at preventing the obvious exploits so the gaps left to exploit are the tricky ones.
So there is a boom in terms of investment for future capacity. It could be interesting to see if the demand is following. I suspect there will be over capacity built, resulting some bankruptcies + cheaper compute/ai costs, hopefully allowing the next generation of startups or companies to flourish later on.
Are you sure all these companies you dealt with are verifying addresses against Google Maps data? It could have been the "official" data missing the street (not sure which entity maintains that, postal services?) - in that case surely there is a way to get it fixed.
I've come to realize the same thing. I was found the "boomer" thing to look for restaurants on Google Maps, then I realized younger people use Tiktok for this now. And here I thought Tiktok was for just for memes and funny videos.
In China, there's WeChat, which is basically the everything app, from chat, to food delivery, to ecommerce, payment, and even navigation. Normally, that would violate App Store guidelines, but they are dominant enough in the Chinese market that Apple caved in and granted them special permissions.
Don't forget indoctrination and demoralization for thought reform as well.
Beams marxist reeducation right into every teen's life in subtle ways.
There's good reason its being considered a national security threat when all user data is being shipped through China, and their businesses are a government partnership.
Political Warfare and Subversion are real and difficult issues to deal with given our 'open' society.
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