How often do you get a meaningfully better result than google.com/flights? Outside of booking with points, it's all basically the same thing and I can book on google on my phone in under a minute
I could go into detail how being able to have a dozen tabs open almost always gives a better result than simply picking the first flight on google flights. But let's assume there's no difference:
Do you really want to use a phone's on-screen keyboard to type in your family's passport details, address, then credit card numbers, then review all of this to ensure your $2000 purchase doesn't have any typos or mistakes?
If you have the choice to use a real computer for this, then why not? It's not like booking a big trip is something you do while sitting on a bus.
Then of course there's accommodation, itineraries, visas, trip research...
I’m wondering what the sample size is for this assessment. I know gen z people that don’t buy stuff on Amazon out of anxiety, let alone booking a 4 figure flight.
just for the record, I completely agree that _research_ is way easier on a computer.
But i take issue with this concern:
> Do you really want to use a phone's on-screen keyboard to type in your family's passport details, address, then credit card numbers, then review all of this to ensure your $2000 purchase doesn't have any typos or mistakes?
My iphone (safari) auto-fills almost all of those details. It’s also likely that semi-frequent travelers have an account with the airline in question, so passport and TSA precheck info is pre-saved too.
My personal experience is that Chrome on my PC is more reliable/predictable than Safari on my iPad.
Now I am wondering if this is Safari/Chrome thing and not a mobile/desktop thing.
Certainly if the autofill doesn't work and I do need to to type it in, the PC is way easier. I'm thinking international travel for 5 people - all my responsibility and I don't want to get held up half way across the world when no one has slept for a day, work visas beign contingent on correctness, etc.
Indeed. I often complete purchases via mobile because the experience is better. For example, using Apple Pay. The ability to have details auto-fill works on desktop, but it works far better on mobile I find.
The idea of manually typing any of this stuff in is very old fashioned.
I bought a Tesla in 2018 on my phone, only ever having seen one, and without ever having driven one. In a quiet/stalled moment while traveling.
But that says 1000% more about impulsivity coming to my rescue, with reckless disregard for the risk of regret at the first sign of boredom, than any trust in mobile interfaces.
I didn't (and would never) book the trip that cost a fraction of that on a phone or pad.
> Do you really want to use a phone's on-screen keyboard to type in your family's passport details, address, then credit card numbers, then review all of this to ensure your $2000 purchase doesn't have any typos or mistakes?
Not only do they type it in, they let them save their information...
For tasks like planning travel I often am trying to optimize multiple goals at once. I might find cheaper flights on certain days but more expensive hotels. This is much easier on larger screens because you can view more information side by side.
I live in a place where I have to fly to a nearby bigger airport to go anywhere outside my province. In other words, everything is a compromise on routing, layovers and cost. When I lived in a big city, it was just timing and cost that mattered.
Frequently it isn't that google flights on a phone doesn't find the same flight, its that it is much easier to figure out the tradeoffs with more screen real estate. E.g. I can see that a flight is cheaper, but it involves mixing airlines, and a terminal change that I probably can't trust on a tight schedule in winter.
Not kidding, pricing is based on these bullshit assumptions more than you might think. For the German market, for example, it's also cheaper to buy tickets on Thursday evening around 22:00-23:30. Paid around 400$ less for a 2k trip, multiple times, reproducibly, not depending on seasons or years.
Even that presumes you already know when you’ll want to leave and come back. For me, I’ve got a vague idea, but it’ll depend on how much time I want to spend there. And that’ll be based on what I want to do, which may only be available certain days of the week or times of day. And that’s before factoring in the prices of those things relative to their availability and how much I want to do them.
To figure all this out, I’m going to need to keep notes across several browser tabs, likely while communicating asynchronously with whoever else is going on the trip. All of this is dramatically easier with an actual computer.
Dude, you've got to check every possible combination of departure and arrival dates from each different nearby airport then check everything again as one ways using different carriers then compare paying cash to using points then compare Airbnb to hotels then recheck the flights to make sure that paying slightly more for different dates or routes wouldn't be offset by saving more on the hotel... then you can book. Takes about 50 tabs.
This. its enough to check a couple of alternatives, the prices are nearly the same most of the time. If you can move dates for your travel, that is far more impactful, like if you have the option to avoid major holidays or such. Note that I am not in the US, and I do agree that it is much better to do research on my desktop!
It's not that you get a meaningfully better result. It is that you can open an arbitrary number of results and trivially compare them side by side. Essentially multitasking multiple concurrent searches and scenarios. Smartphones limit you to one view at a time on the screen and make it somewhat clumsy to flip through tabs in comparison.
Yes the results are pretty much all there on Google Flights
But if you want to shuffle times/dates/different choices of flights to find the "best one" (which does not mean the cheapest one with weird connections)
That's the thing for us whose life is mostly "by the seat of their pants", there really isn't. You book the tickets, you go there, see what you feel like doing, do those things, and go home. Done that for all my travels more or less, never felt like I missed anything and had a blast most of the times.
I still do everything important on a computer and wouldn't book the flight on a smartphone, but that probably says more about my age than anything else.
I mostly use a computer because you can get a better idea what is a good deal, and fits in my budget.
If I had stacks of cash, I could easily see myself booking everything via my phone.
But I'm too much of a penny pincher..
But I do often only pre-book the first night/s accom, then book the rest as I travel and know where I will be when. But I do travel with my laptop, and often will park up somewhere and hotspot it, to find that days accom. (+ I get cash back deals on computer)
I don't over plan trips, but I still want to make sure I'm not overpaying. There's all kinds of combinations of things to check. Also thinking through routes through areas. Fly in, take a train around. Things like that. Also getting hotels or vacation rentals and go through the reviews and seeing which neighborhoods you want to stay in
> There's all kinds of combinations of things to check. Also thinking through routes through areas. Fly in, take a train around.
For me, not knowing those things and figuring them out on the spot is part of why I love vacations, and going through review of neighborhoods or figuring out the exact place where to stay would remove a lot of the fun.
I admire your style, and envy it, at least a little.
But I couldn’t do it, especially with the presence of which I’ll call “expectations of planning” in my immediate circle. Some people want the best possible experience and can’t be confident they aren’t missing out unless they have done the research.
No level of planning can match the raw joy of spontaneously enjoying something with like minded friends.
> Some people want the best possible experience and can’t be confident they aren’t missing out unless they have done the research.
The majority of such people perform what I call “checkbox vacationing”. It’s not about actually enjoying any particular thing, it’s just about checking the boxes of whatever some online list says is the current “best XYZ”.
> especially with the presence of which I’ll call “expectations of planning” in my immediate circle
Yeah, when traveling with others who do like/need to plan I'll go with their plans and flow unless it gets too boring. When traveling with my wife I'll even stick around even if I'm bored.
> Some people want the best possible experience
I mean, I do too! :) Just different methods of getting there.
> can’t be confident they aren’t missing out unless they have done the research
Man, just daily life must be tough if they're feeling FOMO from such low stakes situations, I couldn't handle that myself :/
You missed plenty, and you wouldn't even know it because you didn't even do the most basic research about where you were going. It's a very lazy way to travel, and I guarantee I got way more out of my travel than you did if we visited the same places. But I don't know you, maybe your idea of a good time is getting drunk in whatever corner bar there is nearby.
If I'm spending thousands on plane tickets and hotels, and taking time off from work, and I know I'll likely never visit a place again (because there are so many other places to visit), I can't understand not doing some basic research on the things that the area is famous for, to visit those things. But whatever, you do you.
> It's a very lazy way to travel, and I guarantee I got way more out of my travel than you did if we visited the same places
It's funny, I'd say the same to you! :)
How often do you sleep over on the couch or floor of strangers homes, waking up when they wake up, participating in something that isn't overflowing with tourists already? Or got to experience how a day is for someone who works and lives in the place you're visiting for the first time?
Granted, it's not for everybody, but we both feel the same about each other, which hopefully means we at least enjoy our own lives, even if we wouldn't like each others. But I won't say you're lazy just because you don't try to truly experience other cultures when you travel, we just have different ways of traveling and enjoying life. And that's OK, as long as you enjoy what you do, and I enjoy what I do :)
>How often do you sleep over on the couch or floor of strangers homes, waking up when they wake up, participating in something that isn't overflowing with tourists already? Or got to experience how a day is for someone who works and lives in the place you're visiting for the first time?
You have the strangest travel goals I've ever heard of.
Fortunately I don't have to sleep on floors when I travel. That sounds awful.
I can't imagine anyone would want to "experience how a day is for someone who works and lives" in my life, they'd be sitting on a couch in my office watching me type in lines of code all day. Thrilling.
I spent 3 months living and working in a city abroad (again, coding), so yeah, I know what it's like. We travelled all around the region, saw and did amazing things instead of "winging it", and the horror - there were tourists there too! Avoiding tourists just to avoid tourists means you missed out on things that are interesting, because why, you don't like being around other people? But I don't actually care why or how you travel, you do you.
I'm a 2024 Tesla Model 3 owner and my car drives me everywhere nearly flawlessly, thousands of miles. For all this I pay something like $500 per month for the lease, including FSD.
It's a miracle product to me, and the comments here about Tesla (not the ones about the story, which are reasonable!) are just so far removed from my personal experience with the product.
I have a model 3 and have tried FSD several times (Tesla regularly offers free one-month trials), and I've only found it to work well for long highway inter-city drives. I'm generally an early adopter and was eager to try it. It did _not_ work well for urban driving -- at least not in our city -- it acted like a new, nervous driver. I felt uncomfortable the entire time. I convinced my wife to try it for a day and she hated it and will never touch it again.
If you can't trust it 100% for urban driving, then FSD provides almost no benefit over more basic adaptive cruise control, early collision detection and lane departure warnings, etc. You still have to sit there and focus on the ride. The idea that I can now sit in the backseat and catch a nap or do some work or whatever, is still sci-fi at this point.
Comments can be productive whether they are intended to be helpful or not. Just calling out a common case/rationalization can make the other person see it as a possibility. Or make others identify it as some problem they also have.
No helpful disposition is required behind the "calling out" for that to be the case.
The (unverifiable anyway) intention doesn't add some magic dust to a comment to make it good or bad.
And they aren't even doing that. The administration doesn't give a shit about jewish people. It cares about hurting lefties and has decided that "pro-palestine efforts are anti-semitic" is a cudgel they can use to do that.
I wonder how many jewish researchers lost their funding here and in the other cases. Seems like a misguided approach if this is what they really care about.
What's funny about this report is that it doesn't mention the challenges China, the biggest manufacturing power in the world, faced while automating factories with AI and robots.
Considering how advanced China is, maybe it's time we stop talking about the "AI race" and start talking about the "unemployment race." The US government should be asking: how is China tackling unemployment in the age of automation and AI? What are they doing to protect people from losing their jobs?
From what I've seen, they're offering state benefits, reinforcing unemployment insurance, expanding technical education, and investing in new industries to create jobs.
So what's the US doing apart from writing PDFs? It's up to them to decide what the next chapter is going to be.
One thing is for sure, China is already writing theirs.
Social discomfort can lead to long-term instability if nothing is done about it. When people are pushed out of the system, it can trigger protests, strikes, and divisions within society. This is going to be America's (North and South) biggest challenge.
If you take their words for it, a large percentage of Trump voters cite employment competition for their complaints with immigration and complain about NAFTA and corporate offshoring of jobs as their rationale for breaking many US institutions + scrambling the Democratic and Republican parties.
I’m not trying to challenge how you feel, but I’ll note that in my social groups people don’t feel this way, life is good, and they also feel confident that they’re well informed.
So I’m open to the possibility that lot of these types of feeling, in both directions depending on the political era, is more dictated by environment and media consumption choices and their versions of doom and gloom than reality
Feeling well informed is not the same thing as being informed. Just because it's possible to live in the USA and follow some news without knowing how badly the democratic order is being eroded doesn't mean that all is actually well.
Do your friends know about the absolute immunity the Supreme Court invented for the president? Do they know about the illegal deportations that are accelerating? Do they know about the presidential order that aims to deport legal citizens of the USA (the end of birthright citizenship)? Do they know about the gutting of virtually all social programs?
If they don't, then they're ill informed, regardless of their feelings on the matter. If they do and still think all is well, then they are just as much a part of the problem as the ones doing this all.
Just to spell it out it will become necessary in the future to prove that your parents were citizens, so make sure you save your birth certificates and other documents for any children you may have. They won’t automatically be citizens just because they were born here. And they may get rounded up and deported before they can find those documents or have a trial to establish their citizenship.
Plenty of people feel that way when they're in Dubai or Qatar. Lovely place, just don't look at the army of migrant workers with no rights who keep it all running.
