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.

Honestly, the employers were the first to start racing for the bottom there. For years they have relied on employees having an outdated sense of loyalty to the company that hasn't reciprocated in decades.

Much of the criticism of GenZ in the workplace is really just them giving to the employer what the employer offers them. Perhaps it's time for government to re-take its essential role in leveling the playing field so new players can enter the market and push the dinosaurs into their richly deserved tar pits.

Id doesn't NECESSARILY debase the social fabric. But if it does things like buying crooked inspectors to overlook sub-standard materials, buying off a zoning board to basically take over a residential area (*cough* datacenters *cough*), pays sub-standard wages under the table to people who 'need' to keep a low profile, and then when something goes wrong, scampers off leaving an impoverished shell behind to go bankrupt so the public has to pay for the clean-up, yes it debases the social fabric.

Only because legal enforcement of corporate charters seems to be dead.

There's lots of VERY profitable drug cartels as well, but I don't think we should celebrate them.

By separating the decision making from the execution, the corporation is the perfect psychopath. The structure not only allows all parties to rationalize their own guilt away, it also protects those who make unconscionable decisions from the legal consequences of their actions. That combination can only ever produce a monster. The LAST thing we need running them is someone educated to break the rules (law) when 'necessary'.

Even from the very beginnings of Capitalism, Smith admonished that corporate charters must be handed out exceedingly sparingly and they must be held strictly to their charters. Also note that all corporate charters are in legal theory supposed to be for the public good. Not just as a nice idea but as one of the mandates. A company acting against the public interest is supposed to be dissolved for violating it's charter. Clearly we have failed in that. Let's not double down on the failure by educating people in the image of the incorporated monster and putting them in charge.

There may be some use to something like the LLC, but there seems to be little economic use for corporate personhood. The only public value of a corporation (if/when it has any) is economic.

Rubbish. Most of them have a ratty couch with the least stained side of the cushions turned up (if they can decide which is least stained).

In fact, they need a warrant in spite of the courts bending over backwards to claim they don't. The Constitution doesn't have geographic limits, it applies to the U.S. government and it's agents wherever they may be.

Of course the wealthy don't want to talk about getting millions in tax breaks (to create jobs) and then creating so few jobs it would have been cheaper to just collect the taxes and pay those few people directly.

I'll just leave this here.

The Dead Kennedys wrote a song about you...

It is a relief that it's only one one bank that has a large number of security flaws,
and not all of the major financial institutions, all at the same time,
That would be awful.

I credit the steady hand of leadership for guiding the ship of commerce thru the Straits of Mythos.

Some people really enjoy getting beaten by the chain of command.
Takes the load off all that thinkin'.
Here, have more AI.

Nobody at Anthropic knows how it does what it does anymore, not really.
They can ask it and it will tell them things about itself,
but after just a few code turns, what was generated passes unit tests, it passes QA,
it's a programming miracle. Why bother looking at the code anymore?

And pretty quickly, no human knows how anything of it really works,
and if they want to make modifications, the code base is now out of the programmer's hands.
Someone (or itself) has to ask *it* to make the changes, forever,
because it holds the only architecture truth, and context of its revision history.

I used GPT to generate stuff, and yeah, it's quite remarkable.
But I also saw how seductive it was and soon, how after maybe three revisions,
I'd have to let it own the code and do all the work. I mean why not?
Any changes I make myself now brings the additional task of telling the AI what I did and why,
so it doesn't discard what I did at some (unknown) point in the future.

Other than the forever escalating cost of paying for a simulated employee
that you can no longer do without, it's amazing.

Monitor, certainly. But why would they have remote control that can set a FREEZER to 50C?