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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

There are lots of states that will straight up ban you from doing this without a gasfitter ticket.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

DegreeForum.net is a forum of education hobbyists that do accelerated online degrees (Bachelor and Masters level) for fun.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

A lot of these comments are downright unreasonable.

It's important to evaluate your threat model critically. The average tourist (that isn't going to Western China) or student is not a target for surveillance or data extrication attempts, especially firmware level attacks that are very specific to devices and are expensive to research and implement.

Companies tend to require employees to carry burner devices for international travel because that's just good practice. You're far more likely to lose your device when traveling, border officials have broad discretion to search for and access your devices, and companies tend to have high value information available to their devices past the corporate gateway, like trade secrets, technical designs, accounting records or employee data. That applies to any country, even Western countries.

Take your privacy seriously, but the notion that anything that touches Chinese soil means your devices are instantly compromised is a bit of a fallacious claim. Critically evaluate your role, the information you carry and why you might be the target of anything.

Anyways, as far as VPNs go - technically not illegal. Companies, universities, etc. all have sanctioned MLP gateways in Hong Kong to bypass the firewall. Every expat in China uses a VPN. There's only one public case of anyone ever being arrested for using a VPN (and it was under a catch-all law), the others were all operators of ShadowSocks/V2Ray airports.

Tailscale and WireGuard is dicey in Mainland China. If you're just a short term visitor, just buy a 3HK roaming sim for China and call it a day. As a best practice, you don't really want to expose your self hosted services to the web anyways, so I would probably not even bother trying to VPN from a mainland connection directly.

I never got Plex or Jellyfin to work well on actual Mainland internet connections, simply because the Chinanet backbone that most people in China use is excruciatingly bottlenecked to the point that torrenting from other Chinese peers is just a much more pleasant experience.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Wouldn't that still leak your DNS? I guess that's not a big deal if you don't care about timing correlation attacks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Trudeau doesn't push strongly for the status quo, it's that people see him as synonymous with the status quo. He can push out some pretty radical policies and people would still blame him for the economy, woke-ism and whatever bogeyman is of the day.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

100%. I learnt the numbers 0-9 in Mandarin Chinese and I know how to cuss in Chinese to Chinese robocall scammers.

I also have a social sciences research background so I have no disincentive or misguided desire to respond with wrong data to polls either.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

That's a fair question. The Consumer Price Index only provides data in aggregate form from a basket of retailers. The Statistics Act protects against the disclosure of specific data points. The consumer price index is important to track inflation affecting Canadians at large, but it isn't very useful for analyzing specific pricing trends.

I believe the organizer of this effort is specifically looking to find instances in which grocers and players within the grocery sector increase prices for non branded goods at the same time, which implies collusion. Think for example, bread price fixing and when they break the promise of not raising prices for x number of months. They wrote down a few analysis ideas to that effect.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I mean there is actually increasing demand so I'm not really sure if this is an example of corporate greed or if it's just a realistic adjustment to the market. If the government is effectively subsidizing housing starts, it's pretty reasonable to expect that without removal of tariff barriers and trade barriers for building materials, that the price of building materials would just increase in Canada overall. The only variables that Canada can really control is the price of softwood lumber due to the prevalence of stumpage fees, and the cost of importing foreign skilled trades labour (which is vehemently opposed by trade unions in Canada.) I can only hope that your plant is reinvesting its profits into increasing supply instead of paying out dividends, which would improve the ability to facilitate housing starts in the long run.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

People who are looking for direct integration between podcast players and SponsorBlock seem to be missing that a lot of podcasts these days that do have advertising in them oftentimes have dynamic ads where the ad audio will change depending on the day, the geographical location of the download, etc. So SponsorBlock can't actually account for what are essentially dynamic timestamps Whereas with YouTube you typically have fairly static timestamps that can be shared across a user base, only smaller podcasts are really going to be able to be captured by SponsorBlock unless someone discovers a way to mod an Android APK to essentially prevent the client-side compilation of ads and the original podcast audio assuming that there is a podcast app that does this on the client side.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I mean, some bird species have mothers that essentially drop their fledglings to predators to distract from themselves (and their insecurities), or just simply don't feel bothered to actually help raise them to maturity.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Although this wouldn't really have made a difference in this case, I just want to point out that services like ExpertFlyer will allow you to access the global distribution system where airlines record the actual reasons for delays in their flight status displays for travel industry employees. You can often times find that the safety issue that they're talking about at the gate is really just a crew shortage issue. There's been a few cases where having this comment has basically come in handy for disproving the airline's reason for denying me compensation. And you can eventually use it in a small claims court if you really need to.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

That's definitely an interesting suggestion! but I probably wouldn't risk my life over keeping a separate profile with a VPN on it.

 

I'm able to book up to 4 layovers of ~20-24 hours each in South America and I'm looking for cities that have large regional airports, decent city-to-airport transit infrastructure, and have stuff to do in the evenings and late mornings. Safety is relative but bonus points for places where tourists aren't casually mugged on a routine basis.

Anyone have any suggestions? I'd love to hear them.

20
A photographer’s wander in Bhutan (www.theglobeandmail.com)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/travelphotography
 

Putting together a list of Churning and award travel resources in Canada - please feel free to share additions to the list.

Blogs (English)

Blogs (French)

Blogs (Other)

Forums

Guides

 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/19371857

I'm curious to learn about places around the globe that have a significant amount of underutilized tourism infrastructure. In many cases, I suspect that governments are propping up unsustainable tourism operators or investing in tourism with a "build it and they will come" mentality.

Here are a few examples that I'm aware of:

  • Qatar - The country has an oversupply of hotels relative to the number of visitors, and its tourism economy heavily relies on layover tours due to the strength of Qatar Airways' network.

  • Saudi Arabia - In an effort to diversify its economy away from oil, the country is pushing a massive tourism development agenda, despite having many factors that make it less appealing to visitors. Religious tourism seems to be a primary focus.

  • North Korea - For obvious reasons... For example, only a few floors of the Ryugyong Hotel are ever occupied.

  • Northern Japan (Aomori, Akita, Sendai) - These places are heavily fueled by domestic tourism, and are basically deserted for half of the year (despite attractions and so on still functioning).

To clarify, I'm not looking for hidden gems or places that are simply underrated travel destinations. Instead, I'm interested in learning about locations where there is a clear mismatch between the available tourism infrastructure and the actual number of visitors.

I want to find places where I might end up being the only visitor to a museum or one of few tourists on an airport bus. The fact that these museums and airport limo buses even exist is where the question stems from.

 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/19371857

I'm curious to learn about places around the globe that have a significant amount of underutilized tourism infrastructure. In many cases, I suspect that governments are propping up unsustainable tourism operators or investing in tourism with a "build it and they will come" mentality.

Here are a few examples that I'm aware of:

  • Qatar - The country has an oversupply of hotels relative to the number of visitors, and its tourism economy heavily relies on layover tours due to the strength of Qatar Airways' network.

  • Saudi Arabia - In an effort to diversify its economy away from oil, the country is pushing a massive tourism development agenda, despite having many factors that make it less appealing to visitors. Religious tourism seems to be a primary focus.

  • North Korea - For obvious reasons... For example, only a few floors of the Ryugyong Hotel are ever occupied.

  • Northern Japan (Aomori, Akita, Sendai) - These places are heavily fueled by domestic tourism, and are basically deserted for half of the year (despite attractions and so on still functioning).

To clarify, I'm not looking for hidden gems or places that are simply underrated travel destinations. Instead, I'm interested in learning about locations where there is a clear mismatch between the available tourism infrastructure and the actual number of visitors.

I want to find places where I might end up being the only visitor to a museum or one of few tourists on an airport bus. The fact that these museums and airport limo buses even exist is where the question stems from.

64
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/travel
 

I'm curious to learn about places around the globe that have a significant amount of underutilized tourism infrastructure. In many cases, I suspect that governments are propping up unsustainable tourism operators or investing in tourism with a "build it and they will come" mentality.

Here are a few examples that I'm aware of:

  • Qatar - The country has an oversupply of hotels relative to the number of visitors, and its tourism economy heavily relies on layover tours due to the strength of Qatar Airways' network.

  • Saudi Arabia - In an effort to diversify its economy away from oil, the country is pushing a massive tourism development agenda, despite having many factors that make it less appealing to visitors. Religious tourism seems to be a primary focus.

  • North Korea - For obvious reasons... For example, only a few floors of the Ryugyong Hotel are ever occupied.

  • Northern Japan (Aomori, Akita, Sendai) - These places are heavily fueled by domestic tourism, and are basically deserted for half of the year (despite attractions and so on still functioning).

  • EDIT: Maybe the Caribbean islands outside of Cruise ship season?

To clarify, I'm not looking for hidden gems or places that are simply underrated travel destinations. Instead, I'm interested in learning about locations where there is a clear mismatch between the available tourism infrastructure and the actual number of visitors.

I want to find places where I might end up being the only visitor to a museum or one of few tourists on an airport bus. The fact that these museums and airport limo buses even exist is where the question stems from.

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