I never devoted any effort to learning how to listen until the past few years. It makes a huge difference in having a good conversation. It's lots of fun to bring back what someone said earlier, often in a humorous way.
It helps to show interest in your conversation partner, not as technique of influence, but because people can be generally more interesting if you pay attention.
The number one indicator of poor listening for me is holding a response in my head and just waiting until the other person finishes talking so I can spew my wisdom. Taking an improv class or three helps a lot in learning to listen.
If you go to a random spot anywhere in the world, there's a good chance there's not a lot of people there.
The site http://confluence.org/ catalogs visits to intersections of latitude and longitude. Drill down into one of the maps and you'll probably find mostly empty spaces.
If it's for a trip mad you don't need it afterwards, you might think about a refurbished MacBook. The initial outlay will be more, but the resale value is good. I know people who've done this and actually came out a little ahead.
I pay for single sport subscriptions (UFC and MotoGP). I think they work out to about $10/mo for each. I don't follow the major US ball sports, but it seems like they're a bigger deal with more games than you can watch. Spending $25 doesn't seem outrageous, of you're a fan.
MLB for one team works out to be around $.60/game... I watch everything on delay, which living in a different city than my team means I can pretty much just watch baseball at work for 1/2 the year. I just wish google would let me block sports scores on news. Just like who died on game of thrones, it's not news I care to see fed to me, I'll go find out the score if I need it.
I plucked an Aeron out of the garbage. The frame for the seat was broken, so I just ordered the replacement part. I guess that makes it more than $10, but still a great deal.
"Have" is a top 10 most common word for English. "Go" is only top 50. They've gone five times better.
As for how much better you can do... Someone just (6 days ago) registered "be-lang.com" so we might get a top 2. Good news is that "the-lang.com" and the .org equivalents are available.
The one that gets me is the suggestion that direct flights are more efficient. Sure, if you go from New York to Los Angeles, but it wouldn't make sense if you were headed to a smaller city away from a major centre.
With millions to be saved, I'm sure airlines do a decent job of working out the most efficient combination of large direct flights and smaller commuter planes. I don't think a 3/4 empty 767 to Fargo is the way to go.
If you want to take it to an extreme, imagine if the post office only delivered your mail point-to-point in the interest of efficiency.
It shows the transportation networks that arise if you assume that the link between two points gets better as more traffic uses it. It has different curves for the improvement which produce different patterns. Many of them produce the familiar hub-and-spoke model, all without any such notion in the underlying code.
Maybe it's just me, but I didn't take away that the commenter felt it is unimportant and he humourously explained why. He also explained that the other things were of greater concern.
More importantly, there's the fact that the level of access required to take over a webcam implies the ability to do all sorts of other things.
What I took away was that if his system was compromised, an open webcam wouldn't likely be the chosen vector for ruining his life.
It helps to show interest in your conversation partner, not as technique of influence, but because people can be generally more interesting if you pay attention.
The number one indicator of poor listening for me is holding a response in my head and just waiting until the other person finishes talking so I can spew my wisdom. Taking an improv class or three helps a lot in learning to listen.