u/Adept_Strategy_9545

My landlord has recently been on a huge maintenance kick (I assume trying to prepare to raise rents massively and/or sell the property). While they are giving the required 24 hrs notice each time, they are now having required forced entries multiple times a week now.

Not only is the entry window usually 12 hours (with no prior warning during those 12 hours), but lately I’ve been getting more and more where I have to rearrange my entire life - for example, move furniture or shelves containing stuff to give 6 feet of clearance to X area, and unplug all my electronics to give at least 2 open outlets - all with only a day’s notice. I had to cancel my plans this evening to spend the evening moving furniture instead. God knows how I’ll be able to travel for business when I need to be able to rearrange my life on short notice multiple times a week.

Is there any legal recourse in this lovely “pro-business” state, or am I just SOL if they want my apartment to be a constant worksite, and they can technically just give 24 hrs notice every evening and never stop working in my unit?

I’m not doubting the actual safety of flying on the 170 series as their safety record speaks for itself. And it’s also by far the most comfortable narrowbody for domestic flying, assuming you actually get up.

But WHY WHY WHY do these birds always seem to go mechanical? I know better than to leave the lounge in time to be there when boarding is scheduled to begin, because every single time, it’s “just an update, they’re saying maintenance is on board, we’ll maybe be back in 15 mins with more info for you.”

In fact, I kept track, and my last 5 mech delays were all on Embraer 170 series, 4 of 5 of which were Envoy. Do I just have bad luck, or is this specific aircraft type just wildly more likely to go mech than, say, a 737, 787, or CR9? Why is this? Is it Envoy more than the a/c type?

Just like the Marriott folk do with “Bonvoy,” I’m about to start using “Envoy” as a verb.

The Piccadilly Line was already closed for planned construction today, and now a pedestrian has been hit on the Nat Rail tracks heading into LHR so those are also closed the rest of the day. The ONLY way in or out of LHR right now seems to be a taxi or rental car, and the wait times are astronomical.

Aim to be 6 hours early for your flight if departing. Seriously.

We need a minimum of 8 weeks (realistically more like 10) of global lockdown, RIGHT NOW. And it needs to be a HARD lockdown. No exceptions for repatriating home. You shelter IN PLACE, wherever you happen to be right now. You’re out of the country? Tough, sounds like you’re gonna overstay your visa.

The CDC just confirmed this IS the Andes variant, which does, in fact, spread person to person.

With a CFR > 40% and an r0 of 2.1, this could potentially wipe out half of humanity. It may seem trivial now with only a small handful of cases, but this is precisely our only opportunity to get out in front of this. We learned that by waiting until we had 4,200 cases of COVID (in the USA) before announcing 15 Days to Slow the Spread in 2020. Once it gets into 4 digits, it’s too late. At that point it’s runaway, exponential spread.

Shut everything down until July, right now.

I don’t know what travel influencers on TikTok started this idea, but I’ve several times in recent months been stuck in line for a protracted amount of time behind someone trying to haggle at the front desk.

Tonight I just needed extra towels. That’s all I needed. Hotel had a dedicated elite lane, but only one FDA working so the point was moot. The hotel is completely sold out this week, and yet the dude was trying to haggle on his already-confirmed reservation. After it was made pretty clear that the price was firm, take it or we’ll sell the room to someone else for a higher price, he agrees on the number but starts trying to haggle for a complimentary upgrade.

My brother in christ, I am a GLOBALIST and despite having a months-old existing reservation, they acted like they were “squeezing me in” upon checkin, and asked if I “really needed two twins” (this was a win for me tbh, as I didn’t, and preferred a King… but the way it was asked was a bit huffy). So if they’re asking ME, as a Globalist, to voluntarily switch room types? Yeah, you’re not getting an upgrade or a discount just because you asked.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

I see a lot of people trying to calculate the exact date they can re-enter under visa waiver programs. So to refresh everyone’s memories, 90/180 is a limit, not a guideline.

Unless you are an EU citizen, visiting is always a privilege that is 100% up to the officer admitting you. They can quite literally refuse entry on the basis of vibes, if they so choose.

That said, if it looks like you are trying to 90/180maxx and live in the EU via successive visits, it doesn’t matter if you are within 90/180. There is a good chance you will be refused.

A good rule of thumb: if you have to ask, there’s a good chance it’ll cause you a problem. It isn’t intended to use the full 90 days 2x a year. It’s intended for you to visit in line with normal tourism patterns; the limit is just exceptionally generous so as to cover nearly all tourism cases within a few standard deviations of the mean.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

I realize that is a wild take, but it’s a trolley problem. With a 50% mortality rate and an incubation time of 8 weeks? The entirety of society could lose billions of people. This could potentially make COVID-19 look like child’s play if unleashed into the wild.

If not destroyed, it should be left to sea permanently, or at least until no new cases for ~a year, with each new case resetting the clock to zero.

I realize we as society place such a high value on immediate, emergent human needs. We would rather potentially endanger millions and millions of people, than neglect ONE grandma who needs emergent help right now, even though she knew the risk (however improbable) of taking a cruise and chose to board that ship anyways. We’d rather save people from their own poor decisions in the here-and-now and risk an outcome far far worse than COVID.

So yeah, we should at a minimum tell these people “you’re on your own.” And honestly, any future passengers boarding a cruise ship should be forced to sign a waiver that basically “I understand what I’m getting into, and know how public health authorities may handle me if my ship is the origin of a new pandemic.”

This is not about being cruel. In fact, quite the opposite. This is about saving humanity. ~150 lives is a small price to pay compared to the alternative, but we won’t do it, because that’s a trolley problem nobody wants to get into.

Has anyone else noticed that, when traveling internationally and connected to data roaming, you are asked to enter your PIN more often than not? Last two times I have been out of the United States, I’ve noticed probably 60% of the time I pull my phone out of my pocket, it requires PIN entry as opposed to Face ID. Once I reconnect to my home PLMN, the behavior returns to normal.

I get where Apple is going with this, but I don’t like it. First off, I feel safer in much of Europe (save for maybe the UK) in terms of privacy. Second of all, a determined attacker (say, a pickpocket who has been on the train with me for a good while) would get more opportunities to observe the PIN being entered on the screen; Face ID removes this opportunity. I try to mitigate this with a screen protector and shielding with my other hand but I’m sure there are people out there that have the layout of that keypad memorized.

Anyone else notice this? I wish I could turn it off.

So conventional wisdom is Apple was going by the country on your App Store profile to determine whether or not to enable age verification on your phone. Cue iOS 26.4.2 and a literal 3 hour layover at London Heathrow.

I have a US-purchased iPhone with a US SIM card (no local SIM cards here). Coming home from Germany, I had a 3 hour layover at Heathrow. While I was physically on UK soil, I did not even clear passport control to legally enter the UK. I did connect to the free WiFi at Heathrow.

And boom. Now age verification is enabled on my iPhone. It seems to be permanent once it is turned on, too. Luckily I already had a credit card tied to my profile and that seemed to be sufficient, but now many of my apps have been asking me to share my age range, even after being back on US soil.

Tl;dr: If you even momentarily have your phone powered on on UK soil, or at least connect to the internet from a UK IP address, you are now stuck with age verification… forever. It seems to be a one-way switch. Maybe it will go away on its own given enough time outside the UK, or the update to iOS 26.4.69, but who knows. Govern yourselves accordingly.

I am unsure if staying on cellular (thus terminating in Chicago or Dallas) or using a VPN would have helped

Why is it that we have normalized the taxi time after landing taking longer than the actual time spent in the air? I realize some of this is a certain Midwest hub, but there’s a lot of controllables AA fails to control…

First you land in Omaha and have to taxi all the way to Rosemont, Illinois. This takes about 30 mins. Okay, frustrating, but that’s not AA’s control. But you know what is?

Now we’ve gotta wait another 30 mins for clearance into the concourse L alleyway. Now we have to wait for the engines to spool up again. Both of them. We finally inch forward to the gate, wait about 15 mins for no apparent reason…

Engines shut off again. Captain makes a PA that Unifi is short staffed and we have to wait for someone to marshal us in. Meanwhile the jet bridge driver who was watching us intently through the window of the cab of the jetway gave up on us and went to work another flight, so guess what? We have to wait on THAT third-party contractor to find additional staff to come drive the jet bridge. Meanwhile I could have walked to our gate 100 times by now, but you’re not allowed to… because safety.

What makes this so frustrating is this isn’t a one-off experience. Today may have been especially bad, but why has this seemed to become the norm with AA/Envoy? It’s always a cascading set of one failure after another. They spend more time finding reasons things can’t be done than working on solutions. It seems like virtually everything except the pilots sitting at the controls have been outsourced to third parties - and if you’re on a regional, even that is outsourced.

It seems AA is devolving into less of a coherent airline and more a consortium of enshittified third-party services all pointing fingers at one another and not taking any accountability or initiative, ever. DFW and CLT are a little better, but not by much.

Why can’t AA bring some of these things back in house? I get outsourcing at regional outstations, but why why why must their hub at the world’s (contested) busiest airport be largely dependent on Unifi and friends? If they want to win against United, they need to start controlling their controllables.

Listen, AA isn’t perfect. Isom has a lot he could work on. But if your entire justification for being a hAAter and comparing AA to Spirit or Allegiant is “but United has a little TV at your seat,” then you lose all credibility with me.

Why? Because we have Wi-Fi. Free Wi-Fi. Mostly consistent Wi-Fi (at least, far more consistent than the working order of your typical Panasonic IFE). Yes, you have to use your own device for that. But you have the entire Internet at your disposal. You can (mostly) use your phone normally. You can communicate with people on the ground. If you don’t like the titles offered, you can often connect to your own streaming services and watch things you know and like, or go down a rabbit hole on YouTube.

Meanwhile over at r/unitedairlines, if you dare mention the fact that the WiFi is INOP on half their flights, and on the others, it costs money and is barely usable (save for the handful of proof-of-concept Starlink aircraft), you will smugly be met with people telling you that you should bring a book, or that people survived for decades without inflight WiFi and were just fine. Or people lamenting that the last space they could disconnect is now gone.

Guess what? Not everyone has the luxury of disconnecting. Some people are business travelers and have to have email flowing during the work day. For others, the inflight WiFi saves them from having to blow their precious little PTO on a day where they are otherwise just flying. Some people are running their own businesses and they don’t get PTO, only “TO” - that otherwise useless time in the air, they aren’t running their businesses.

And if disconnecting is what you wish? Nobody is forcing you to connect to the WiFi. That is a choice you can still make!

Again, this isn’t to say American gets everything right, or that Scott Kirby isn’t doing great things at United. But they prioritized true inflight connectivity and seatback power when their competitors were prioritizing stupid little seatback TVs for the little kids in the row behind you to tap-tap-tap on. And save for certain widebody routes, it’s consistent - I don’t have to play a guessing game or cross-reference my tail number with some tracker. Even regionals are decent for the most part and the new gogoinflight Intelsat package ain’t bad at all. I’ll take that as a win.