Airbnb's listings site mixes host homes and Hotels on their website to let visitors choose their accommodation in many places around the world including the US.

So Airbnb makes $$$ off of hotels also.

If you were qualified to be an editor you would check your sig for a possessive usage and manage the sig character limit more effectively. ;-)

It appears I have to quote it against the censor sock puppets with mod points, but I mostly wonder what part of it annoyed them so much. The philosophic flavor? Or is Social Security some kind of third rail, even in the indirect reference via "pension"? Can't really claim I was disappointed because I no longer expect any helpful references or even thoughtful replies from Slashdot... (There are individual exceptions, but in general the tl;dr appears to be mostly automatic after a paragraph or two.)

My memory of the "discussion" has already faded. Quite sure there was no memorable Funny post or I would remember the joke now. Not that long ago. Also think I managed to dig up some mention of social security after I had posted, but can't recall if it was substantive or not. Is it worth looking around to see if I thought there was some part of the discussion that was worth a reply? Or perhaps the joke is that I was "called back" to the post by a belated positive mod point?

I'm quoting your FP because that moderation appears to be intended as censorship. For what extremely little it is worth on today's Slashdot, I think you are raising an interesting point, probably even an important point, but not doing it well. Positive spin would be to say you felt constrained by the FP problem and wrote in haste. Negative spin would question how well you write. Today I feel positive, except that I believe the FP thing is on the LONG list of problems Slashdot cannot address because of the defective business model. (Long time since Slashdot felt like a friendly place with many substantive discussions... But I still like the "feel" of the input window for the editor. Why?)

However I'm mostly branching back to a higher perspective and I hope my Subject is less vacuous than "Really?" I think this story is about one aspect of a much larger problem with what the google has become. Is there any among you (assuming anyone still has the attention span to read a second paragraph) who still believes "Don't be evil" has relevance in today's google?

Mostly I try to limit my google exposures these years, but I still have contact with a number of google apps. The overwhelming theme is that the quality is getting worse, often in ways that suggest short-sighted or even evil motivations. (In order of decreasing time, I think it's close between Maps and YouTube at the top with Gmail and Gemini and Calendar on a lower tier. Should the weather summary count as a google app? Now I feel like the google is pervading and invading my life...)

However I think there is a simple reason why things are getting worse. The "good" people are leaving or being driving out of the google. Many of the people who leave seem to be hoping to do better things. Apparently they think they have more chances to make the world better from outside of the google? (Also anecdotes of former friends who seem to have changed since become part of the the google. And not for the better...)

The people who are left behind inside the google seem to be more and more focused on money. The FP focused too narrowly on military money. The big money these days is in crypto and AI scams, and that's where lots of evil people are concentrating their efforts. Dare I say naturally?

SIX paragraphs? How dare I? I wait with bated breath for the tl;dr responses.

So you have a very high paying and glamorous job and you don't like it because boo hoo, the military may use it? I am not upset at these folks. I'm jealous. I wish I had so few responsibilities in life that I could just fuck with my livelihood around over something soo stupid. You're just going to go to another AI company. But they totally pinky swear never to contract to the DoD???

Finally, what are they using AI for? I'll wager it's just for mundane, boring shit. It's not designing super bombs to destroy orphanages. They probably are just using it to go through old records....probably trying to ensure the things they are already doing regarding intelligence assessment are more accurate. A goal we can all agree on is military accuracy. The heinous thing about military action is collateral damage, not the concept of war. I think what asshole hippies forget is that better military intelligence and handling would have prevented 9/11. Better military intelligence ensures they capture the right people, not the innocent.

Finally, remember that the US military is a giant logistics company that dabbles in warfare. Approx 10% of solider experience combat in a fucking war. Only 35% of US soliders saw combat in WW2. More servicepeople are doing DHL/UPS stuff than aiming weapons, even in a hot war. I'd imagine the first use of AI is to ensure smoother operations of getting servicepeople paid, getting soldiers fed, ensuring military sites have proper upkeep. The military hires more active duty troops as cooks, dentists, medics, truck drivers, vehicle repair specialists, trainers, fucking projectionists at the base movie theater. Most soldiers do not kill and are not killers. Most are just doing the best they can to ensure safe and smooth operations for the military goals.

Similarly, I think AI will be less about killing foreigners and more about automating performance reviews, digitizing archives, more efficient warehousing, ensuring less payroll and contracting mistakes, etc...the dull, mundane things every large business does....probably a huge portion of it will go to analyzing soldier health data to take care of the veterans who risked their safety and lives to do things you find abhorrent...which most of the rest of the world would do to you without any hesitation...if only they could. I'm massive liberal...but I never forget. The only reason I can think about the bigger picture and higher ideals is because a fuckton of US soldiers convinced the rest of the world's armies that if they harm Americans, we will make sure it's a painful and costly mistake. Ukraine is a constantly reminder. The only reason no one has invaded us like Russia invaded the Ukraine is because they lack the ability, not the desire. And the US Military is the reason why I can be who I am and every entitled spoiled child working for Google can whine like a little bitch about this. I know they'd change their tune if they were living in Ukraine, hearing air raid sirens constantly, and haunted by the ghosts of friends, neighbors, and loved ones who died at the hands of another military.

Look on the bright side you're confusing the AI bots trolling the site for posts and training data.

Probably not. In Europe justice is mostly restorative, i.e. you get back your losses and no massive punitive damages on top. You can sometimes claim for the mental harm it did to you, but mostly you will be claiming for lost earnings, including set-backs to your career.

It makes it harder for the landlords to charge fees when minor cleaning tasks aren't done. The way that Airbnb landlords are making money is they have a laundry list of gotchas but they can charge exorbitant fees for. So you book a stay and it looks like a great deal and then you get hit with 200 or 300 or even $500 of extra fees and suddenly you could have stayed at a nice hotel.

In order to compete with hotels which have much better margins and economies of scale Airbnb squeezes the landlords and the landlords in order to make money squeeze the guests.

The funny thing is the left wing has wanted it rebranded as the war department for some time.

I guess old Boomer types think department of war is awesome since they don't have to worry about being drafted anymore. And God knows they could care less about their kids.

Airbnb has been squeezing the people renting properties for some time. So the only way to make money on the platform is to overcharge on fees. Naturally people have caught on to this and the fact that an Airbnb isn't cheaper than a hotel anymore if you account for those excess fees.

So they are trying to get the fees under control. It's not uncommon to be charged a cleaning fee that is hundreds of dollars.

Nintendo just focuses on making good games. Mario Wonder is a 2D platformer, but it's great. Nintendo is the platform for people who actually enjoy good games, not just flashy graphics and soft porn.

This reminds me of those sonic weapons that turned out to be a lot less safe than initially claimed.

Trump had a let them eat cake moment where he suggested that it was okay that the cost of living was out of control leading into Christmas 2025 because it was okay if a little girl we had two dolls.

It was an astonishingly tone deaf moment but as usual the media sane washed it.

Oh I'm sorry, sane washing is when the news media intentionally either covers up, ignores or downplays or apologizes for something insane that a right-wing politician or a member of the Epstein class does.

Because we live in a hellscape where in order to understand what the fuck is going on you need to understand multiple bits of insanity that are all happening at once

Richard Nixon set up our drug policy to attack the political enemies of the right wing and the Epstein class so those are basically right out the door. Moral panics around drugs are also a great way to get right-wing politicians elected while they destroy the economy.

Phone games are highly predatory and that's the only way they can make money. Because of that they aren't really sustainable as a hobby. It's not something you can unwind with and blow off stress and steam because it's constantly trying to push you into a state of stress so you will part with money. Every time you boot up a game on your phone you're basically booting up a casino.

Indie games will work short term but the hardware that you need to play them will become more expensive and unaffordable over time just like everything else.

Movies don't really work as a hobby except for a handful of hyper fixated people. They're only so many to go around and there is only so much TV to go around. You can get a little bit of vegging out though but it's not enough.

Modern double a and triple a games did a really good job of giving somebody who is otherwise hopeless something that relieves the stress briefly. Something to numb the pain in a way that I don't think there really is anything else quite equivalent.

I want to be clear video games aren't enough to solve the problem. But taking them away from people is going to exasperate things. For the portion of the population that can be numbed by them taking them away will take those people and add them to the portion of the population that is being mobilized by fascists to come for you and to drive us into a new series of wars.

When the Mormons did polygamy they would end up with a bunch of young men who couldn't get wives. So if you couldn't get a wife at a certain point they would kick you out of the community. That's because you would become frustrated and angry and dangerous.

We've known for a long long time that young men with no jobs and no girls aren't safe to be around. In small numbers you can deal with them but once you start getting 10 or 15 or even 20% of your population like that which we are absolutely getting to then somebody is going to come around and take their violent frustration and pointed at something. That somebody is going to be a fascist.

It's hardly a surprise that female companionship is a basic aspect of being an adult male and if you cut an adult man off from a basic aspect of life he's going to be upset. If you do that to a significant portion of your population you are going to have problems. While you're doing that you are probably also cutting them off from jobs that pay them enough to be functional in society.

We have millenia of History to know that we cannot keep that up but we're doing it anyway.

Every Boomer alive I've run into falls into two camps. The first thing that the cops are going to save them which is ridiculous because as the economy collapses the tax base is going to go with it and it won't be anyone to pay for the cops to protect you.

Then there are the idiots who think it'll be fun because they can shoot anyone who trespasses and they are just chomping at the bit to commit murder in self-defense.

That's why I like to remind them that you're going to run out of ammo before the world runs out of desperate young men with nothing to lose.

Oh and Boomer here generally means anyone over 55. Demographics are about shared experiences that result in shared behavior that can be used by politicians and marketers to take advantage of people. People over 55 generally have the same shared experience of receiving massive amounts of government assistance through the New deal and the Great society and then pretending that they made everything on their own.

I think they know that and I think that insecurity from knowing that they wouldn't have made it without the government help is what makes them turn to fantasies about killing home Invaders and whatnot... The Old dirty Harry and death wish bullshit. I thought those movies were pretty awesome when I was 12. In my 40s I revisited them and realized how incredibly fucked up they were.