We used to do quite a bit of travelling ten years ago and we used booking.com quite often. In those early days of booking online, there was a period when you could call the help line and actually talk to someone from America or Canada. And they were always helpful. We got messed up bookings back then and we always got help and figured things out. At one point, we were booking so often, we got to know one or two of the operators we kept talking to in London, Ontario.

Fast forward ten years later and I would not recommend any of them any more. All of them send you to a call center in either South / Central America, Philippines or India and like your comment said, they do absolutely as minimal as possible to do anything and keep you waiting on the phone as long as possible.

None of them work any more and it is far better to use them to shop around for quality, reviews and recommendations … then book directly with the hotel.

Use the sites and services as a guide, then find a direct phone number to the hotel and book directly with them.

$40 for a cheap meal delivered to my door ready to eat … made by someone who doesn’t like their job, made with the cheapest ingredients, in a questionable kitchen, by a worker I trust follows proper hygiene, processed by a series of people who will take care of my food to be handed off to some guy who I trust will take care of my food as it travels to my house with everyone being paid as minimally as possible so that several companies can squeeze as much profit out of the transaction as possible.

Or I just take a few hours every weekend to make a ton of good food to eat for the entire week.

Which now renders their site useless … I’ll go on your site to look up basic info … then go to your store to get what I want and even visit some other store or service that could give me the same product.

It’s a disincentive to want to use their site in the future.

I’ve stopped using several store websites because of this. Then when I want an actual product … I’ll call the store and ask them to look for the product for me. If they have it great, if they don’t, I’ll look for it elsewhere or figure out some other solution for myself that doesn’t involve any of their dumb websites.

I’m regressing from the internet and use people contact more and more because of this stupidity. I’m going back to the way I did things in the 90s and early 2000s where I would just use their store flyer as a guide, call the local store to ask for something and then go look for it myself because the online services today are so intrusive and needlessly complicated that its faster and more useful to not go online.

Top 3 are still the same from previous years

1. 12345
2. 123456
3. 12345678

It’s official: “123456” has once again claimed the controversial title of the world’s most common password — and one of the weakest. That marks six out of seven years this password has topped our chart

Don’t ask for permission … ask for forgiveness

The age old mantra of authoritarians and corrupt officials. What use is it to point out wrongs from the past if nothing will ever be done about it … and worse will be repeated again in the future?

The greatest fear that government and our wealthy overlords have about UBI is the fact that it would create an entire population of thinking, creative people who would have time to think about how unequal the world is … and then move on to act on those thoughts because they would have the time and the energy to do something about it all.

It’s far better to control the population if you perpetually keep them on the edge of losing everything.

Imagine getting it punctured inside a public bus … or an elevator.

I remember reading about something along those lines a few years ago.

When we were kids running around with our childhood friends every summer, we thought it would never end, that we would be and stay friends forever.

Then one day, we run home, wave goodbye and say ‘see you later!’ … and without us knowing, or being aware of it, that was the last time we saw our childhood friend.

We might have lived next to one another, or went to the same high school later on or even went to the same college … we never saw our friend again.

We never knew and we were never aware of when we said goodbye or saw our friend for the last time.

I think about my old childhood friends … I’m middle aged now … some of those friends died young, some got married and had a bunch of kids … a few had hard lives and became addicts … one of them is a vegetable after having suffered an overdose … and many of them just went on and had small families and did OK.

Local politician … a member of town council but also a character that just hung onto any and all political positions related to local politics. He never did much expect make money for himself. If he didn’t get on council, he would try for mayor, and if he got neither, Financial Controller, Administrator, Manager, whatever, as long as it was with the town. He was in essence a salesman because he could talk circles around most people with political language and a bit of education, especially when he dealt with the uneducated or gullible people. It was basically his entire career and he’s well on his way to retiring after having done nothing for anyone else or the town.

Isaac Newton put it best:

“I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

It’s completely stupid, short sighted and ignorant of us to think that we know everything there is know about the universe and natural world. There is still so much more to learn about and understand and probably far more than we can even comprehend.

But we also have to regulate how much we know and don’t know and how we can understand or not understand … because as Richard Feynman put it …

“Keep an open mind … but not so open that your brain falls out”

We’d all like to think that but what usually happens is that the ultra wealthy lose a quarter or half their wealth, which makes no difference to anyone because they are so massively wealthy … everyone else lose everything

That we are both simultaneously intelligent and absolutely stupid.

We built a modern technological society for all of humanity yet set it up to only benefit a handful of individuals and convinced ourselves that this is acceptable.

The handful of beneficiaries are intelligent enough to lead but dumb enough to think that this is sustainable. The rest of us are intelligent enough to live and work in this society yet dumb enough to never want to do anything about it.

That doesn’t make sense. I watch Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney on my Ubuntu laptop on Firefox all the time. I have a laptop setup in front of my treadmill just to watch shows while I walk.

I have one large screen dumb TV and I just use a Roku device to watch shows through that. Everything else in the house runs in Linux because I got rid of windows years ago and never had a problem with streaming services.

25 years old

Old enough to be an adult to do adult things … young enough to be able to do everything a human body can do with the most optimal stamina and comfort. Good recovery and trained properly, is the optimum level of development, energy and strength. This age doesn’t get any better after this period.

Capitalism and profit and the need to make more money is like rot, a fungus, a bacterial infection or a viral infection.

Any service product or idea you tie to capitalism will inevitably become infected to the point where you infection of wanting to make money will over ride everything. In the end, it has nothing to do with ideas, development, evolution or making things … it always devolves down to just wanting to make as much money as possible.

That is what destroys and devolves any and all social media today. It has nothing to do with social media … it has everything to do with making money and maximizing profits.

Kindness and empathy is a sign that a person is able to think about the world more widely and intelligently … it means they see past the terrible person or terrible things to try to understand why people, populations or things are they way they are. If you have an understanding or patience to try to honestly and objectively understand why things are the way they are … the more likely you will have the tools and ideas to do something about those problems or those issues.

Someone without kindness or empathy impatiently makes simple assumptions of everything and everyone and immediately jumps to the easiest, simplest “solutions” that usually don’t require any of their responsibility or inconvenience. They don’t care about the source of the problem, they just want to get rid of the problem as quickly and as trouble free as possible, no matter the history, background or circumstances that caused the original problem. It’s a great way of solving problems quickly … but more often than not, this kind of mentality just repeats the same problems over and over again.

Kindness and empathy

Whenever I see or hear someone disregard or debase another person they don’t know or understand without even trying to get to know anyone … I immediately just think they are dumb

Whenever I see or hear someone treat someone else kindly without ever more knowing the other person … then that person is smart in my books … all that can change if the receiver of kindness starts acting like an ass though.

It’s the first impression … if all I see is kindness and empathy at the beginning, I know I’m dealing with a bright person.

There’s probably a lot of wannabe crypto bros in your area

… you had me at ‘spring door stopper’ … thanks

Don’t worry we’ll have a special day of the year to celebrate trump in the future … the day of the year he freaking dies.