Earlier this year I moved to Cape Town, with an Airbnb booked for the first month.
I was the first guest, and the place did not meet even the most basic standards of hygiene. What’s worse is that there was still evidence of the place being used as a crack house.
Needless to say, I refused to stay there and Airbnb gave a full refund.
All of this could have been avoided by a simple verification system.
Any new listing should, at the very least, be viewed and assessed against a list of basic standards before a paying guest arrives at the door.
> Needless to say, I refused to stay there and Airbnb gave a full refund.
I don't think that's good enough. You were relying on that accommodation. Now the worst for AirBNB is that they won't make money. So there's no incentive to do anything about it. Further, if you suddenly need to switch accommodations the last minute price will be much higher than usual.
AirBNB should fix the accommodation problem they caused. They must/should offer an alternative.
Inappropriate content can be flagged, and continuing to view or partake in discussion of extremist things, that are counter to the interests of every living thing on the planet, waive the users right to privacy, and logs of activity automatically get passed on to public protection agencies.
How many edx courses from top universities could you do in the same amount of time?
Perhaps a balance between the two.
Binge watch?
How about binge development.
It is definitely worth focusing on quality rather than quantity.
Personally I have found hacker news to be a highly valuable resource over the past few years. Many books I have read, and interesting topics I have looked into have come from all of your posts, comments and recommendations.
The signal to noise ratio is among the best on the web that I have encountered thus far.
Maximising regenerative braking is always a goal with BEV.
If there was a design tradeoff that allowed to somehow massively sacrifice efficiency for very low low specific mass and extreme heat tolerance, we might see the discs replaced with in-wheel "harvesting brakes" in addition to inboard high efficiency cruise motors.
But #1 I doubt that kind of tradeoff exists, at least not in sufficient magnitude, and #2 it would probably be quite uneconomic to exploit, lots of lower hanging fruits to pick first.
Personally I was introduced to the poor standard of early childhood development in my city by a friend, and since then we have built 3 schools. Just in my immediate area, there are around 40 that need attention, and across the country of South Africa there must be thousands. The cost of a simple building to handle part of the problem is around $25k. Another problem we face is high unemployment, so we pay people from the community to help build the schools.
Lack of access to quality education, skills and funding are the challenges we face.
A lot of research still needs to be done on extent of the problem. I have been dreaming of an app that maps all of these ECD centers and rates them on various metrics, like quality of education, building, and nutrition. An app that would allow professionals who would like to give their time a list of options of places that need their help. Like crowd funding, but for skills. An app to allow the greater community to see, engage and solve the most pressing problems around us, all over the world.
Also and app like Uber or Airbnb, but for artisans and skilled contractors, with similar rating systems.
There are many crowd funding sites, but it’s time to go deeper and actively seek out and solve issues.
There should be law that makes companies directly responsible for what happens to their packaging materials. Whatever a company brings into this world is their responsibility to recycle. Yes it adds overhead, but it makes people a lot more aware, and forces them to take responsibility of the impact they are having.
Why shouldn’t packaging be designed to be easily transformed into something useful, or even into functional community art projects?
A temple of coke cans for example. If they going to last forever it might as well be in a form that benefits communities.
Plastics have already been banned in certain countries.
Or are there to many lobbying in the wrong direction?
Surely every country around the world needs to be involved in approving something like this. Amazon does not get my vote to put anything that could potentially become space junk in the air above South Africa.
Not yet at least. What is the benefit to humanity as a whole?
1. It's never about what benefits humanity, it's just about money most of the times
2. Every country and probably several companies of each country will do this as long as we are the divided world we have to live in
3. Just like the internet never became the awesome tool one might see in series like Star Trek (benefit of humanity & stuff like that) something like this will never be that awesome and useful. Until there'd be a market that forces people/companies to act like that. So I think our world is a place where incentives lead us to do the wrong things that actually hinder humanity in it's progress and positive development.
> 2. Every country and probably several companies of each country will do this as long as we are the divided world we have to live in
I really hope that a “world government” never happens, it is too much of a risk.
Consider the US for example: once the land of the free, it has become a land of espionage, lack of personal privacy and persecution. This hasn’t begun with Trump, but it became a lot more evident with him as a president.
What I want to say is that the risk of a global government going rogue is too high.
I hope that we will always have a plurality of nations and ideas, living peacefully with one another.
In my opinion this is the only solution that will lead to success of the human race. For me that is not destroying our planet, evolving in the "right" direction (more education, more science and especially more ethics).
At the moment we kind of burn our resources without need and our nations compete which creates more unnecessary costs and suffering than good outcomes.
We live in a world where you wonder every day why things are solved in that particular stupid way instead of doing things the smartest possible way to really serve humanity as a whole.
The fact that it's more important than anything else to "grow" money out of nothing speaks for itself.
What is the situation like, right now? Several countries with atom bombs "go rogue". They do what they want and behave like little children who's toys have been stolen (USA, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Great Britain...).
They screw their own people and take away the wealth and stability they enjoyed for some time now, they increase surveillance and take away the (human) rights the people have fought for many decades and they engage in wars and battles that serve no one on this planet but companies who produce weapons and political agendas of maniacs who shouldn't do this job in the first place.
Of course the danger that this one govt could do something bad is also present but at least we'd have a single point of failure that we could get rid of in case of emergency. Now your only chance is to migrate to some other country in the hope that you'll be given a chance to start a new life there and that no one does something that will force you to leave, again.
Wars, Nationalism, tax escaping, finance, poverty .... nearly everything could be solved in a better way when there'd be no seperate govt's who all believed they were the godsend rulers of earth.
I hope some force some day is just strong enough to force everyone into such a system as I don't think nations will be willing to give up their sovereignty that easily. Let it be some aliens - as long as they are intelligent and act rationally it's far better for us than the current unbearable state we have to endure.
Without that there will never be peace on earth. Plurality and ideas come from people and not from states. You can see that today e.g. in countries who are more open minded and welcome people with different believes.
Earlier this year I moved to Cape Town, with an Airbnb booked for the first month.
I was the first guest, and the place did not meet even the most basic standards of hygiene. What’s worse is that there was still evidence of the place being used as a crack house.
Needless to say, I refused to stay there and Airbnb gave a full refund.
All of this could have been avoided by a simple verification system.
Any new listing should, at the very least, be viewed and assessed against a list of basic standards before a paying guest arrives at the door.