I am usually able to find a place faster on agoda.com than on airbnb fwiw.

It makes sense, hotels are almost always a better experience than an AirBnB, unless you have a special location like this one or an area without enough hotels.

Why stay at a sketchy house that makes you clean, when you can stay at a hotel that cleans for you?

I fly 200ish flights a year so figure 70-80 nights away.

2025 was 100% hotels but 2019 was about 80% Airbnbs.

Airbnb will never get my business back. Ever. The professional scammer hosts are so good at finding a way to nail me for a fee. Iâ(TM)ve taken perfect check out video and still had to spend hours fighting fees.

Airbnb allowed making guests do it.

They lost so much money to hotels theyâ(TM)re banning hosts from requiring it.

This.

They aren't going to use the beam on illegal immigrants, they are talking about making a plan to potentially use it. Enough to get headlines, not enough to do anything.

Here is some footage of the device in action. It was originally thought to be lethal because of the water, but that was mistaken understanding.

It's not always harmless.

The thing that worries me isn't "new" weapons, those are a perpetual problem of humanity.

The thing that worries me is that now people/countries have an understandable incentive to intentionally induce Kessler syndrome.

Point taken, but it only takes one good ICBM to ruin your day. Russia doesn't like Golden Dome, but China is the one on the warpath towards America (in both the Philippines and Taiwan).

They're brilliant at making games. They have their suite of exclusives that people love and will buy the console for. And they keep a consistently high quality bar for those games. Even the worst Mario game was still good. Same for Zelda. Same for Metroid. As long as they keep that the case, and their consoles are reasonably priced they'll sell. Which, combined with cheaper parts, is why they generally made a profit per console rather than a loss.

Xbox and PS don't have that. They used to each have some exclusives- but they've gone away from that road due to the high cost of creating them (Nintendo's focus on gameplay over high end graphics also reduced the cost of making a game). Even the exclusives they do have don't have the reputation for quality- they tend to run hot and cold. And MS in particular has waffled between wanting to push xbox vs PC gaming, reducing the number of exclusives as they launch on PC. It leaves them in a place where there's no driver for their new product other than better graphics quality. And with the economy tightening, that's something that will be dropped first.

Golden Dome is an escalation.

Interesting. Makes me want to work at a chemical plant for a while to see how it goes.

It's not particularly insightful to say that political preferences don't fit in a single left/right dimension, or even two or three dimensions.

Also this https://f6ffb3fa-34ce-43c1-939d-77e64deb3c0c.atarimworker.io/comments....

They are lying when they claim that no one approved the torrenting.

My idea was that if lawyers are involved, then that is evidence higher-ups are definitely also aware of it (otherwise lawyers wouldn't be involved). Upon further inspection, I'm not sure if the timing matches correctly for that to be supportive evidence (ie, the lawyers might have come after the torrenting ended).

I think you have a point, but it's not clear what it is.

There's a reason in school they teach you about a topic sentence and supporting sentences.

The US is engaging in an arms race escalation, putting weapons in space. In particular, the US is trying to develop the ability to shoot down ICBMs in space, meaning Russia and China's nuclear arsenal is effectively useless (effectiveness of the defense shield is another matter, but it doesn't matter as long as the adversary believes it will be effective). Russia and China and North Korea are not happy about it.

There are too many satellites in the constellation for Russia to shoot them all down one by one. If they feel threatened enough, Russia (or China, or even N Korea) may induce Kessler syndrome as a way to deny the capability to anyone, thus re-leveling the war field. North Korea is worried enough that they are trying to respond by building a submarine fleet.

It may be worth noting here that N Korea could just end the Korean war and then they wouldn't have to worry, just focus on building their economy, but if evil dictators were rational they wouldn't be evil dictators.