81 karma · joined February 2, 2017
"Six weeks before the aircraft’s disappearance, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah used his home simulator to fly a route that was initially similar to part of the route flown by MH370 up the Strait of Malacca, with a left-hand turn and track into the southern Indian Ocean, the ATSB said in its report."
It's highly likely that MH370 was the result of pilot suicide.
I seem to remember the Assad regime continuously arresting, torturing, and even outright shooting peaceful protestors for a number of months, which directly lead to the armed rebellion. Obviously, Sunni extremists would later hijack the opposition, but I feel that far too many gloss over Assad's role in starting the entire conflict.
I see no evidence that the CIA directly gave weapons to Al-Nusra or other Al-Qaeda affiliates. And zero evidence of any direct funding or support of ISIS as conspiracy theorists and Putin propagandists love to assert.
It's possible that these weapons fell into the hands of Al-Qaeda, but more evidence needs to be presented and it's doubtful that arming Al-Qaeda was ever the original intent.
As for arming the SDF/YPG, that has been well known and public for awhile. Morever, the Kurdish forces are pretty much the only ones actually making significant progress against ISIS and will likely be the ones to free Raqqa. Arming and supporting them is completely justifiable, just as supporting the Iraqi army in their fight against ISIS was and remains justified.
Trying to do something like getting the return leg of a ticket changed, resulted in multiple dropped calls, talking to people with poor English skills (all their support is outsourced) and even getting told that all their computers crashed so they can't do anything. Then when I finally did get through to someone, I was quoted $2,500 to change the date of a $400 ticket.
A simple Google search of Expedia customer service complaints reveals that I'm not even close to being alone.
I suppose their CEO calculated that the savings from having dirt cheap customer service exceeds the losses they suffer from alienating customers with miserable support. That might be true, but I still don't think it's a good way to run a company. We'll see what it entails for Uber.
The conflict in Syria was started and escalated by Assad. It was prolonged by a number of actors, including Russia and Iran supporting Assad, and the gulf states / Turkey etc., supporting the other side.
America is a common boogeyman for whenever something goes wrong in the world (Venezuela's Maduro never misses an opportunity to blame the US for his own regime's multitude of failures and crimes).
However, it's easy to exceed their record limits, especially since you need to duplicate your index every time you want to 'sort by' something.
For instance, if I wanted an option to sort my results by date, and to then search these, I'd need to create 2 new slave indexes for date ascending and descending respectively. Sorting by anything else, like price, means creating yet more indexes and suddenly it's easy to turn 30K records into 150K. This happened to me and I ended up having to roll something custom instead (Vuejs frontend and Sphinx Search backend), since my client balked at the extra cost.
But, if you have a small dataset, or are fine with the costs, then Algolia is spectacular.
It began when Assad's security forces tortured children for spray painting anti government graffiti in Deraa. Protests, in the spirit of the Arab Spring which had spontaneously consumed the region, then followed. Assad met these protests with total violence, including shooting unarmed civilians.
Assad's security service continued to kill and torture unarmed civilians until eventually people started shooting back. Thus began the civil war. Had Assad merely stepped down, as Mubarak did in Egypt, then Syria today would likely be as peaceful as Egypt is.
Here's an excellent documentary, filled with primary sources and not made by some conspiracy nut in their basement, on how the conflict started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njKuK3tw8PQ
The majority of NK's artillery is not long range and can't threaten the densest parts of Seoul; while those that are long range will be immediately targeted and destroyed once they begin firing. Then there are serious questions regarding the quality of NK's equipment and their troops, plus the fact that artillery on its own is not particularly lethal.
Finally, South Korean civilians in the part of Seoul most under threat are prepared for this attack and most every subway station can double as a bomb shelter.
Any NK artillery attack would definitely kill a substantial amount of civilians, but it wouldn't be 100,000s and it wouldn't destroy Seoul. The real wildcard is if NK uses chemical or nuclear weapons which changes everything.
There's a good summary of any potential NK attack on Seoul here: www.dailykos.com/story/2017/4/25/1656090/-North-Korean-artillery-and-the-concept-of-flattening-Seoul-a-breakdown
I had to make a few small tweaks, like making it easier to switch between VIM and terminal panes, but overall I'm very happy with the Neovim + terminal mode setup.
They are targeting the Thong Lor, Ekkamai and Phra Khanong districts too, specifically Soi Thong Lor, Soi Ekkamai, and Soi Pridi Banomyong: https://coconuts.co/bangkok/food-drink/first-soi-38-closed-s...
Completely ridiculous of course since street food is super delicious, affordable and remains one of Bangkok's biggest attractions. Hopefully this move doesn't spread to all of Bangkok, but who knows.
If you're checking in at some place you've never been to in the middle of the night, then of course a hotel is a better option. Likewise if you can't be bothered to tidy up a bit before checking out, then a hotel is the way to go. Personally, for short stays, like a few days or a weekend, I'll go with a hotel. But for anything of a week or longer, AirBnB is terrific.
Through AirBnb I was able to book very nice condo apartments, with awesome amenities (rooftop swimming pools, brand new gym facilities etc) and very gracious local hosts who showed me things I never would have been able to discover on my own. Moreover, with AirBnb I don't have to worry about landlords ripping me off like I would if I actually signed a rental contract in a foreign country.
I think most of this criticism is rather petty. AirBnb isn't a hotel or hostel replacement and it isn't supposed to be.