siberianbear

This is a follow-on to a similar story in December 2019

https://www.courthousenews.com/drivers-win-bid-to-probe-door...

I travel a lot. I've had so many bad experiences with AirBnB. Despite their high fees, it's almost impossible to get their customer support to read any kind of complaint and give an apropos response. Their responses are usually non-sequitur: they don't give an on-topic response to the issue.

I switched to just using Bonvoy/Marriott and staying in hotels. Now I have a high status level (titanium), and they really do anything they can to make me happy. And actually, there is much rarely any issue for me to complain about: mostly they just get things right in the first place. And with high status, they give me room upgrades, free breakfast, late checkout, free nights and points.

Now I only use AirBnB for stays of a month or more.

Thank you! I presume you were getting the same "500 Internal Server Error" that I was.

I realize that HN frowns on +1 types of comments. But I nevertheless feel obliged to add that I laughed my ass off watching that video. The woman that did the video has a great sense of humor.

I had the same thought. As an undergraduate, I went to some of the interesting-sounding seminars given by grad students. It was a great way to get to learn something interesting and also get to know your professors.

I have to admit, however, that I was usually the only undergrad in attendance.

That was quite interesting, and a bit scary. Especially the kidnapping scam at the airport with the fake sign.

Thank you!

This is great news! I spent most of my career writing in C and C++. I've been waiting for the 2038 bug to become a 'thing' so that I can emerge from retirement and charge people $700 an hour to fix their broken systems, just like Fortran programmers came out of retirement to fix the Y2K bug.

I'm no expert on the topic, but it seems likely to me that there is a significant number of people defaulting on student loans but did not finish their degree program. I'd also speculate that the people who did complete their degree program are less likely to be in default than those who dropped out.

I'm not personally in this category, but I believe that there is a group of people who cannot bank because they're either blacklisted by companies like ChexSystems (which compile lists of people who have overdrawn bank accounts and not paid back the bank) or who have court judgements against them, in which case any money in a bank account just gets seized to pay the judgement.

Part of the problem is that alcohol is very easy to manufacture. It's hard to enforce a law on manufacturing something if anyone with a very small amount of knowledge can easily make it in their bedroom closet out of legal materials.

It's not really clear to me why your comment is being downvoted. You're expressing a constructive opinion.

It seems to me that children can thrive under a wide variety of parenting styles. I consider that my own upbringing was a bit "rough around the edges", but with age I respect and understand my parents more and more.

In retrospect, I wouldn't have it any other way. I respect my parents a lot more than I used to.

I had already admired Mr. Rogers, but watching that clip was awesome. He really has a way of speaking that disarms you and makes you feel compassion.

This link didn't work for me. I got an error saying "Something went wrong We're sorry. This page failed to Outline"

To be pedantic, it's 0.0000005b.

0.0005b would be 500M.

But your basic point is correct. I'm sure Zuck is quaking in his boots that he'll soon be bankrupt.

Back when I was a kid, Silicon Valley startups sold dollar bills for ninety cents.

Now WeWork is selling them for a nickel. The cost of everything is dropping like a rock! /s

Perhaps Airbnb's problem is... Airbnb? I mean, it's awful. I've had so many bad experiences with Airbnb hosts and Airbnb itself that I've written it off and gone back to a combination of booking.com and Bonvoy (aka Marriott).

The idea of Airbnb seems like it should be profitable, if only it were better managed.

This is a topic I've personally given a lot of thought.

I worked for a Silicon Valley company that became quite successful. I made enough money to quit and live off the investment income. I got to the level of wealth I needed and it was enough for me and retired. I enjoyed my work and my job, but I also wanted to do other things in my life, and having a full-time job in Silicon Valley precluded that.

I was at my employer early enough that I had quite a bit of personal contact with the CEO at this company, and he did not think like me at all. Money wasn't the main thing for him. He wants to chase down his competitor, watch it struggle in death, chew on the meat, bury the corpse, dig it up again, make sure it's dead, and then bury it again. This guy lives for the hunt, and the hunt is all there is.

When I figured this out, I realized I could never be him. I couldn't summon that level of motivation on a constant basis even if I used every bit of my willpower.

And I'm glad that I was on this guy's side and not his competitor.

Yes, exactly. Windows 10 is seriously creepy in a way that Windows wasn't before.

That's an odd thing for Linus to say. I read a lot of Peanuts comic books in my youth, and it seemed to me that Linus could never stop blabbing relentlessly about the Great Pumpkin.

Bankruptcy can take two forms. The key question is, "if this company got out from under its debt and didn't have to service it, is it still a viable company?"

If there is actually a viable business there, it makes sense to wipe out the shareholders, extinguish the debt, and make the former bondholders the new shareholders.

If there is no viable business even with the debt, then liquidation is the right path.

(I'm not a finance professional, just another person on the internet with an opinion.)

I fly United a lot and get silver status almost every year. I've had them occasionally re-assign me to a middle seat after I reserved a specific aisle seat at purchase. United does the same crap as the rest of the airlines.

lol I remember those days. It's amazing how much PostScript is required to render a few pages of text. I remember one print job I sent that used about 200 pieces of paper after it printed the actual PostScript source instead of parsing and rendering it for some reason.

There was in fact a film about it. I watched it twice and enjoyed it both times.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0272839/

I did it once at a startup I was working for. I used a Xilinx FPGA and did my own PCB design. I designed my own PCI state machine in VHDL.

Surely, if you look around enough you can find some kind of a development board at a reasonable cost.

This is also a sub-plot of the television series Caprica, where a researcher uses her daughter as the model for the first true AI in a robot cylon.

In Chrome, you can also do per-site Javascript blocking. Blocking Javascript from [*.]bloomberg.com in preferences will let you read Bloomberg without problems.

Yeah, I have this exact same opinion. I saved more than 50% of my take-home pay and retired when I was forty. I'm happier than ever, and can't figure out why my former colleagues didn't do the same and are still going to a cube every day.

I'm putting words in NeedsMoreTea's mouth here, but I think he was referring not to deposit schemes, but deposit and reuse schemes.

In the 70s and 80s, soft drinks (at least in California where I lived) were packaged in really heavy, thick glass bottles. You paid a deposit on purchase, and a refund on turning it back in, and then the bottles were cleaned and reused.

These schemes have seemingly all disappeared. Many or most states still have deposit programs, but the intent is to recycle the glass, not to reuse the original bottle.

I'm not sure what alternative the author has in mind. Should the TSA separately bag the 47 cents you left in the plastic bin with the day and time it was lost, so that it can be returned to you in case you decide to come back and claim it? That's just not realistic.

They basically have two choices: keep it or throw it out. And why would you throw out money?