Readit NewsThey are much less likely to be the recipient of all the money spent on entitlements, no? A giant bucket of money is spent on regular Americans.
But soon enough they diverged from that into the "whole buildings bought by deep pocket owners to build apartments for Airbnb" thing that hurts neighborhoods and is a net negative for cities.
Also now with the big service fees they charge, I usually just prefer avoiding Airbnb altogether. Between their +80€ creeping up from nowhere after having chosen a place, and the "cleaning fee" (for nothing because owners will just clean a bit) that ends up being another +50€ or so, makes most places I see in Airbnb hardly competitive against hotels or proper tourism-approved apartments in other platforms.
The attestation is fine but blocking?
I wonder if can be used to do other stuff, like ML models that distribute the guests in certain ways to increase the chance of certain people meet in order to boost or suppress political movements. Maybe block or overprice individuals likely to engage in environmental activities in sponsorship with the oil companies? Maybe arrange pricing and availability in certain way to demoralize people from certain ideologies so it's more likely they have less energy and money to their thing.
This is the kind of stuff EU needs to block.
This is… already the situation?
Most gas stations where I am are pricing their product in thousands of a cent and rounding the total off to the nearest cent when it’s time to pay.
We got rid of the penny a decade ago in Canada. It just means that for cash transactions the gas station rounds off to the nearest five cents instead. The most they can “lose” is two cents _on the total transaction_. Hardly seems different than losing several tenths of a cent on some transactions (as they already were) in aggregate.
You can also optionally encrypt the backups.
(and no, "it's to help YOU, the hapless user! is of course never the right answer. Corporations never do things for users without an interest of their own.)
(though of course it's not REALLY: it harasses you to backup your messages all the freaking time, and when I say "never", as I ALWAYS do, it asks again in 2 weeks. I assume once they're backed up on Meta's servers, there goes the encryption. But that's a parlor trick and they STILL have that data, as I assume at least 80% back up anyway and the rest is mostly worn down by the constant prompting.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock
I think 1947 was significantly more perilous than 2024. 1949 when the USSR under Stalin tested their first atomic bomb the clock was set to only 3 minutes to midnight. When populations are scared, they become irrational. Look at all the laws that were passed after 9/11. I'm glad people are starting to become immune to this sort of thing.
Unfortunately for them, this particular fear mongering mechanism has a numerical limit. In a few years it will be 0.05 seconds to midnight, then 0.005 SECONDS TO MIDNIGHT!!
1947 was significantly safer than 2024 precisely because the USSR had tested successfully. If the US was the only country with nuclear weapons, it would have nuked the USSR, China, and a dozen other countries by now. This is how the US operates with technological advantages (when it still had them); From the air, from afar, safe on its big little island on the other side of the globe.
But today, it no longer has that advantage, and it's a dying empire, which in 1947 clearly it wasn't. Dying empires get desperate, especially after the loss of technological supremacy; all of its geopolitical rivals have hypersonics now, the US can't get one off the ground. It's been doing every desperate thing it can to extend the neocolonial party another few years. This is way more dangerous.