Interesting tale about a pack of wandering Germans in Death Valley, California - a close second to Australia in terms of places you don't want to get lost
https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hunt-for-the-death-valley-germans/
80 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Nov 2015
We had a similar experience: the first warning sign was when were informed of *two* flight changes the day before our flight. We were going from Sacramento to San Diego, but got changed to Sacramento to Burbank, then back to Oakland, and then to San Diego. The next warning sign was we sat on the plane in Sac for over an hour before even pushing back from the gate. When we got to Burbank, it was an unholy mess. We talked to a pilot that was waiting for a plane and he told us it was highly unlikely that the flight was actually going to happen, so we decided to rent a car and drive. My wife immediately reserved a car online (which she does at least once a week for her work) but when we got to the car rental counter, they laughed and said there were no cars. We ended up taking an Uber from Burbank to San Diego, which cost almost $500.
We got to San Diego with the clothes on our back. Attempts to contact SouthWest about our luggage were hopeless, so we bought stuff locally in order to get by.
For the trip home 3 days later, we were notified the flight was cancelled, and we couldn't get ahold of anyone about scheduling a new one. There weren't any flights available on other airlines, either. Luckily my BIL had a car he was selling, so I made a deal that I would handle getting the car cleaned up and sold in exchange for letting us drive it home.
Our luggage was finally delivered to our home on January 5th via FedEx.
SouthWest eventually reimbursed us for the clothes and stuff we had to buy, and for the Uber trip.
You wouldn't refuse to go into a supermarket and buy food there simply because they also have other things on display you don't want to see on the way in and demand they only display the things you want
How about if the stockboys nicked your wallet, or you came out and your car was gone?
So because you hate advertising, you find the the things you want by using a search engine, which displays ads (or sponsored results if you prefer to call them that) in your search results and which is run by one of the largest advertising companies on the planet.
Between uBlock and NoScript, I don't see said ads or sponsored results.
Unless you don't quite realize that precisely 100% (one hundred percent, I'm neither rounding this up nor making it up) of those companies' customers exist because, at some point, a woman got pregnant.
Which is perfectly fine - as long as it's some other company's employees that get knocked up.
And before all the Defenders start with the "Reagan emptied the asylums" rhetoric-the average age of homeless in counties like Santa Clara and San Francisco is nowhere near old enough to have been involved in the State mental health system
I shitteth thee not - I saw a 20-something "homeless" kid a while back with a "Vietnam Vet - Please help" sign.
It's taken two weeks of chaos, but at last Trump has got a policy that actually has some logic and sense behind it.
Don't hold your breath. As soon as those with the money and motives get to him, his position will morph. People seem to forget that his MO is to request something extreme, then "graciously" accept a more reasonable counter-offer which was what he actually wanted in the first place. The fact that he gets away with this time and time again - even after publishing his strategy, speaks to the idiocy of those that deal with him.
My wife has gone through two of them - on the first one, the non-replaceable band disintegrated, the second one just displays the FitBit equivalent of the BSOD. Since it's past the 45-day "warranty" ( https://www.fitbit.com/legal/returns-and-warranty ) she's not amenable to the idea of buying yet another one. I bought one for myself at the same time I bought hers, but the thrill of watching its random number generator of steps and stairs soon wore off. I had also bought a fitbit Aria scale, which is supposed to automatically update your fitbit account with your weight and body fat data, but it only supports 802.11b - which means it's incompatible with any consumer-grade router built after 2003.
I see this a lot in the US, companies set goals and when the sales people exceed
Moving the goalposts is a just another corporate pastime; it doesn't just happen with salespeople. If any goal is exceeded, it must have been too easy; conversely, if you don't reach said arbitrary goal, you're useless dead weight which must be trimmed.