This is sheer speculation, but I do think the hotel business is really convenient to get into if you have a questionable side-business and need to launder money. Who is to say if a room was occupied or not that night, if that foreigner who paid in cash really existed. Can pretty much just trickle money into the books. I imagine you could also run contraband out of them fairly easily. Lots of people coming and going with all sorts of luggage. Who is to say if they are as full when they leave as they were when they arrived? Great for prostitution too, trafficking. The girls can tidy up the rooms during the day.
When I joined the first meeting my first day had people talking about how they got up at 2am and then 4am to make sure internal processes were still working. They had people who were barred from the office and were massive screaming matches if they came in which was mostly management yelling at people for talking to them.
On the money laundering aspect, I doubt this since most gangsters are busy with other businesses such as running taxis and bus services that are mainly cash businesses while hotels are mainly internet and card payments and largerly coming from business accounts unless it's a tourist spot.
When you check-in to a hotel you aren't "handing over a cheque", you are checking-in with the reception. Ie., you are speaking to reception and checking your reservation/room.
To "check in with someone" is to have a chat or talk to a person to "check" how they are.
Unless you're talking total dumps, which relies on cash business only (and does'nt have a turnover to make money laundering worthwhile) I think you're flat out wrong.
My guess is that reputable hotels take in very little cash (it's actually frowned upon and they will ask for a security deposit). The lion share will be credit card transactions and the rest will be invoices for corporate customers and large travel agents.
Not much scope for money laundering here.
Any business where people in charge have no affinity with the end product automatically becomes shady. The only source of pride for these people is to rake in more money, so it's even difficult to blame them.
That's why in some countries ID is required when checking-in. Makes it a bit harder to use for money laundering.
Hiring a real cleaning lady seems like a good price for not ending up with filthy rooms.
Here in th EU, they usually have a look at your passport. I think it's enforced by law in some places. Government overreach
This since a few years, 2013 I believe, until then you had to send (via snail mail) the "records" or bring them daily to the nearest Police (or Carabinieri) station.
The provision is since 1978, it was a Law approved in a short time due to the "emergency of fighting terrorism".
My thoughts, exactly.
I started off in the 1980s, just as tech was starting to become mainstream.
In the early days, we were not the most "socially well-adjusted" crew, but were fairly enthusiastic about the tech, with most of us working for the love of the craft.
Then, the money started to pour in. It was inevitable.
That brought the sharks and the rapacious bastards.
They became heroes and role models.
And here we are...
Once you get past the scam/hype bullshit anyway.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO50TC6WG8A
But psychics didn't burn anywhere near as much coal and cause as much cancer and lung disease as crypto does.
>Once you get past the scam/hype bullshit anyway.
"Well, aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, what did you think of the play?"
https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/oth...
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/uncover/new-podcast-explores-how-sa...
Otherwise dunk away lol
They're desperate to hire lots of willing Perl programmers, so they have to set the bar low.
And inexperienced programmers cause lots of security problems.
Edit: My point is about the moral flexibility of BooKing.com, which is well established and widely known, not good Perl programmers, who are rare, hard to hire, and extremely expensive (especially by Netherlands programmer salary rates).
And to jacquesm's point about plants: All any intelligence service has to do to place a plant at BooKing.com is fake them up a good looking resume full of Perl experience, and Bob's your U.N.C.L.E.!
Edit2: yes xxs, downvoting's probably from royalists offended at the thought of one of the Netherland's biggest tech companies has been mocking their King. Good Perl programmers can take a joke. ;)
If BooKing.com were trying to hire JavaScript programmers, they'd have a vastly more enormous pool of young and old, well educated and self taught, local and remote, highly experienced and self motivated talent to hire from, and wouldn't have to be so flexible about who they hired to program in Perl.
And the moral flexibility of that company (not the programmers) also expresses itself through those "dark UX patterns" that BooKing.com is so famous for.
(Although they should probably talk to somebody about their domain name: I always assumed BooKing.com was an anti-royalist web site. ;) )
Yes, but then they'd get results in Javascript, which has it's own security nightmares (like npm's recent third-party-code-injection incident.) Given their business most likely involves the need to quickly parse huge amount of text files (think: hotel booking information, SABRE info, ...), Perl might just be the right tool for the job.
I don't know about booking.com's hiring platform, but in my subjective experience, Perl people tend to be more professional and more careful than JS folks.
But how many schools and classes and youtube videos teach JavaScript? And how many teach Perl?
The fact that there are a lot of bad JavaScript programmers isn't a symptom of JavaScript programmers being bad. It's a symptom of there being a lot of JavaScript programmers. There are also a lot of really excellent JavaScript and TypeScript programmers, just not as many as bad ones.
(But I bet there are more good JavaScript/TypeScript programmers than all Perl 5 programmers plus all Raku programmers (counting everyone who knows both twice), by far.)
To make a gross understatement, TypeScript's evolution from JavaScript didn't take as long, went smoother, wasn't as incompatible, and was more interoperable, successful, and popular than Raku's evolution from Perl 5.
Not to mention it's much easier for a JavaScript programmer to learn TypeScript, and to upgrade JavaScript code to TypeScript code, than moving from Perl 5 to Raku.
(And I also bet BooKing.com isn't upgrading from Perl 5 to Raku any time soon.)
There are more great JavaScript and TypeScript programmers available to hire than mediocre Perl 5 programmers, because Perl 5 is effectively a dead language, while JavaScript and TypeScript are both ubiquitous, thriving, widely taught languages.
JavaScript shops (and also Python and C# and Java shops) actually have the option of not hiring the bad programmers and intelligence agency plants, and hiring lots of the good programmers.
PS: BooKing.com could easily be confused with the evil "King Boo", Luigi's antagonistic arch-nemesis, and scheming ally of Bowser! Why doesn't Nintendo send them a cease and desist for acting so villainous, and seise their rightful domain in the name of King Boo? ;)
https://www.mariowiki.com/King_Boo
>King Boo is the leader of the Boos and ghosts, ruler of the Paranormal Dimension, the main antagonist of the Luigi's Mansion series, and the arch-nemesis of Luigi. He is also an ally of Bowser, who has aided him in his various schemes. He is more than capable of devising and enacting villainous plans by himself, including his capture and imprisonment of Mario. Although not the biggest Boo, King Boo has abilities that far surpass that of the average ghost; he wields a number of impressive magical abilities, including the ability to materialize objects. King Boo's magical power is directly proportional to the number of Boos in his vicinity.
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020
Most popular technologies:
JavaScript: 67.7% for all devs, 69.7% for pro devs): First place!
Perl: 3.1% for all devs, 3.3% with pro devs: Third from last place, only a wee bit more popular than Haskel and Julia!
And you can take a guess at how many jobs for Haskel and Julia programmers there are.
And it's not like good Perl 5 programmers are dropping dead, or being hit by busses: They're simply moving on to better, more popular, well supported, widely taught, more modern, higher paying, more pleasurable languages!
Any programmer who permanently sticks to only one language and has "no interest in learning yet another programming language" simply isn't a good programmer, no matter what their only language is.
Any decent professional programmer (ESPECIALLY web developers) should have no trouble picking up and applying new languages, and regularly using multiple languages together at the same time every day. The world is not partitions into mono-linguistic silos, and no one language is good for everything.
If those monolinguistic Perl 5 developers b20000 speaks of who refuse to use any other languages are the only ones left for BooKing.com to hire, then it's no wonder they have enormous security holes and terrible buggy hard-to-maintain code.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3026446/the-fall-of-perl-the-web...
While generally speaking, most remaining Perl 5 programmers are old, remote, self taught, highly experienced, very busy, hard to find, and extremely expensive.
There aren't many schools and universities and bootcamps and online learning sites and youtube channels cranking out new Perl 5 programmers that I know of. But there are a hell of a lot of them for JavaScript.
finally, it is perfectly valid to choose to become BETTER in a tool set instead of learning a new one every year. i’m pretty sure there are many developers out there who have no interest in learning other languages and are content in spending their valuable time learning other skills that are more valuable.
You can get better in one language by learning and using several other different languages (the more languages and the more different, the better), which expands the scope of what you know how to do in ANY language.
And if you refuse to learn more than one language, that limits yourself to tasks that don't involve multiple languages, which is a large proportion of the typical tasks a professional programmer encounters. Many common tasks are impossible to do in only one language, since all libraries and apps aren't written in the same language.
Again, my point that you haven't countered is:
Any programmer who permanently sticks to only one language and has "no interest in learning yet another programming language" simply isn't a good programmer, no matter what their only language is.
Any decent professional programmer (ESPECIALLY web developers) should have no trouble picking up and applying new languages, and regularly using multiple languages together at the same time every day. The world is not partitions into mono-linguistic silos, and no one language is good for everything.
If those monolinguistic Perl 5 developers b20000 speaks of who refuse to use any other languages are the only ones left for BooKing.com to hire, then it's no wonder they have enormous security holes and terrible buggy hard-to-maintain code.
Have you ever actually met any of those hypothetical monolinguistic Perl 5 developers in person who you're "pretty sure" exist, and actually discussed with them why they refuse to learn or use any other language, and asked them who they work for, and what they work on, and how they enjoy it?
Or will you actually admit to being a monolinguistic Perl 5 programmer yourself, and answer those questions about yourself, please? Or are the people you speak of entirely theoretical and unknown to you?
If you are saying that Perl 5 makes people give up learning other languages, that sounds like a horrible thing about Perl 5, because it's so discouraging, but unfortunately it's probably partly correct for some people.
But not all programming languages are as hard to learn, and program in, and read, and debug, and maintain, and find good jobs for, and hire good programmers for, as Perl 5!
Please don't give up just because you picked the wrong first language to learn.
You have not given any reasonable proof for this. If this were true, just to give you one example, linux kernel programmers would be bad programmers.
I used to use Perl for web development, but quit web development years ago. I use primarily one or two programming languages and have zero interest in learning other languages. And that's OK. I've brought multiple succesful products to market. I have chosen what I want to do and have no time or energy to follow fads.
My comments have nothing to do with anti-intellectualism.
So name some linux kernel programmers you actually know for a fact that they only know and program in one programming language?
I bet I can name a lot more Linux kernel programmers who know and use multiple programming languages.
Have you considered the possibility that most Linux kernel programmers might have also worked on other programs than the Linux kernel (and didn't just jump into the deep end of Linux kernel hacking as their first job) and actually know and use some other languages other than C? Like maybe Bash, or Assembly, or Python, or Lua, or TCL, or Lisp, or C++, or FORTH, or Pascal, or Fortran, or Java, or C#, or Lord forbid even Perl?
Because Linux kernel hackers tend to be experienced, professional programmers, who know and use multiple languages, not monolinguistic amateurs who gave up learning new languages after only learning C, then started hacking the Linux kernel as their first and only project.
i know perfectly well what point i am making and you do not have to spin this differently and try to make me look like a fool. you stated that anyone who is not interested in learning a new language is a bad programmer, and you are wrong. people make choices for different reasons.
Well Booking.com pays about double of that.
A list of a 200 hotels of $50-100 is simply not enough information when searching in an unknown city. I need to narrow down that list, for example with features like a kitchenette (60 hotels left), but also a location near the city center, and not 20-30 minutes away in some suburb (20 hotels left). With booking.com I can now see on a map 20 pins of hotels with their pricing. Ok, some hotels are hostels with a Shared-6 room, which is one filter you cannot actually apply unfortunately (hey booking.com, if you are reading this, this is a hint!).
..then I know the hotel names, and search on the hotel's own site or other travel sites if there are any deals (genius dicounts sometimes help). Sometimes, Booking.com is cheapest, sometimes it is not.
I'm not completely sure how biased they are in their ranking. But I've been using this site for the last few years and never had any problems. I recommended this site to a few of my friends who shared my positive experience.
Trivago does the same and maybe others, too.
I have seen their presentation on a ML-related conference and what goes into which pictures they show for you for a given room is quite advanced. E.g. whether you will prefer a photo of a pool vs a nice room, etc.
Imagine Facebook if the like counts and comments were all false, and there were things flying across your screen saying "20 people are reading this comment, you should also do it". Then you got Booking.com.
Bad UX: How Booking.com deceives clients
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15152155
https://medium.com/@ilyadoroshin/bad-ux-how-booking-com-dece...
How Booking.com manipulates users (ro-che.info)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15297915
https://ro-che.info/articles/2017-09-17-booking-com-manipula...
[dupe] Dark Patterns (darkpatterns.org)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20858714
Successful machine learning models: lessons learned at Booking.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21182445
https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/10/07/150-successful-machine-l...
Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites (2019)
Generally I think you're right, but I guess it depends.
A "traditional" hotel will (should) have a proper "bookings/reservation" procedure a "modern" one may well rely entirely on booking.com or similar.
Moreover it depends on the "incentives" (or lack thereof) of the actual people at the reception, in large hotels (or chains of hotels) why employee/clerk - say - #215 (possibly a low paid intern) would want to actually work to make your reservation (as you can do it yourself online, less work and responsibilities for him/her).
If you think a bit about it, when you book on one of these sites, you take all responsibilities about dates (arrival departure) people (number of people in each room) types of rooms (like two/three bed, queen size or king size bed, etc.) type of accomodation (with/without breakfast).
It is not entirely uncommon that people arrives on the "wrong" date or has miscalculated the days of stay (rare but happens from time to time), or - this happens quite often - having booked a single use room for two people or similar, simply because of a slip on the finger or not having read the whole page of info on the accomodation.
If you write or (when possible better) talk with the reception, usually they can verify your request and offer you more options (like - say - a "family room" for 4 people instead of two doubles, or a room with a large balcony if you are traveling with a pet).
In this case, you can contact the hotel and ask for a better offer. Works sometimes.
Them being nice for a while, it just a coincidence of aligned interests.
Court mandated fines are taken into the account - if profit increase is higher than the fine, what's stopping them from going forward with such idea?
the current system that makes is the most rational action to take?
Not disagreeing with you, but why is it a surprise to anyone? Any company that seems to be “nice” is only doing that as a good PR increases their profits, which depending on domain may be very important.
There are real firms in highly competitive markets that have been doing well for decades or even more than a hundred years without putting the profit motive above everything else, but have favored long term stability, cooperation, servicing customers, respecting workers and so on.