edwardwatson

To offer an alternative perspective: I'm gay and live in a minor city in the UK. It's very unlikely I meet other gay men through my hobbies, it's just improbable unless you live in a major city. So the dating apps are very useful and I've met great people through it. I'm sure it's the same for other niche groups or straight people who live in rural areas, and there just aren't many single folk around.

Even if they have internal counsel (I haven't checked but I'm sure a company as large as Booking.com does), for decisions which have for reputational harm, it's useful to lean on advice from X prestigious third party.

The same goes for using consultants. It's not just about deferring blame for a backlash but lending an air of objectivity and professionalism to the decision(s) made by management.

Many will also pay a few dollars per booking to a distribution system that makes their inventory available to travel agencies and other resellers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system

Counterintuitively, it's even worse out of London where salaries are lower. In Nottingham, a 15 minute bus ride to work costs me £3 (so I cycle).

I'm in the UK and have never met someone called Alexa. Is it really a common name? Perhaps it is in the US, but it's not like Amazon chose a popular human name e.g. Sarah, Ben, etc.

Of all things I am suspicious of why they would choose a female name for an assistant.

But there are significant sums invested to fund research. In many ways it's a similar transaction to the VC. An investment into 'bad' research does not help the university or funding council reach their goals e.g. to raise their own funding or contribute impactful research to science. Hopefully, they are diversified enough for the bad eggs not to matter

Python is as popular as it is because it's free, not because it's good. If companies had to contribute, many would pick something else.

I have a base spec 2017 iMac and it runs City: Skylines smoothly. It's not a particularly hungry game.

I tried to replace WhatsApp with Signal, by telling all my frequent WhatsApp contacts I'm moving to signal and they should download it if they want to talk to me.

About 10% of contacts moved to Signal. I lost touch with the rest and Signal was in many ways worse than WhatsApp for everyday communication.

I ended up using WhatsApp again. For me, it's too popular to leave.

I got redirected to the Tailwind CSS site. Hacker News has left its mark.

My 2015 MBP bricked when upgrading to Catalina. Thankfully I managed to recover back to High Sierra via Disc Utility/Recovery Mode. I upgraded to Mojave and now refuse to upgrade it any further. I have an iMac which will be staying on Mojave too.

I worry that this opens me up to security risks, but the reality is, upgrading could break it again and force me to replace it when the hardware still has plenty of life in it.

Iceland is small with no land borders, making it less profitable and more difficult to sell drugs there. Similarly, alcohol is incredibly highly taxed there, perhaps more than any other country outside Scandinavia. Very different conditions to e.g. the UK so it's not clear any of these initiatives would be portable to other societies.