Holding flights and hotel bookings like that is possible although any kind of online travel agent doing it at scale will not last very long. Travel is still pretty relationship focused when it comes to inventory and if an OTA tries to do things that create churn on that inventory then it will get flagged pretty quickly.
An aggregator or AI assistant like Muse might have better luck although the mechanism for those will require charging whatever credit card you give it. For flights, it should work just fine in the US. There is a mandatory fully-refundable 24 hour cancellation period on all flights booked more than 7 days in advance through US point-of-sale, or they have to honor a 24 hour hold without payment but not both. Hotels get a bit dicier since the policy there will be dependent on each hotel.
For what it's worth, the same thing happens with physicians.
For some reason when I was living in Jersey City about 7 years ago, there was a lack of dermatologists in the area that took my insurance and were also taking new patients. I finally found one, made an appointment, and went in for a full skin exam. I waited for about 20 minutes after my appointment time, finally was called in, the dermatologist commented that someone my age (late 20s) shouldn't have any acne on their chest and tried to prescribe and sell me a bunch of ointments directly from his office. He spent maybe 2 minutes looking at me and definitely didn't do a full skin exam.
A couple of years ago I moved and had to find a new PCP. Went to the first one I could find that was close-ish and took my insurance. While I'm in the waiting room, I see 50% of the people leaving with these packs of meal replacement shakes for weight loss. When I was finally called back, I see a bunch of signs about subscriptions for the shakes and all of the different flavors they had. I ended up getting a physical from the PA in the office instead of the physician that I had made my appointment with. I have nothing against PAs or NPs, but I expect to see the physician I make my appointment with. The whole thing was so shady that I ended up just finding a new PCP.
Dermatologists are hit or miss. I had one years ago who had her own practice. Her office was fancy and filled with skincare products; I guess her main clienteles were women wanting better looking skin. But she was good. She looked at the symptom for a minute, prescribed a cream, and gave detail instruction on how to apply it. The whole visit was less than 5 minutes. My skin condition plaguing me for several years were gone within two weeks.
Years later I had dermatologists in hospitals who were bad to useless. The only good one was a new graduate doing substitution shift for my dermatologist who was on leave. The sub prescribed medication that actually work.
That's even relative to the condition you have. The right match of doctor to condition gives you the right treatment. But the same doctor facing a different condition might be clueless. From that angle, the whole situation looks less weird.
The quality of a doctor then could be measured in how many conditions they are good at, maybe weighted by likelihood of occurrence, as well as how self aware they are about whether they have a clue or not.
A corrollary is that a single data point does not tell you much. "Go to this dermatologist, they are great" is only good advice if you have the same condition as the recommender as their sample size is likely very small.
And it's not just scams for $, it's missing standard care.
My father (80) and I have the same (genetic) heart condition. My current and previous cardiologist (due to a move) ordered a week long heart rhythm recorder, noting that doing this every 2-3 years was the standard of care for the condition, to catch irregularities before they become serious.
My father's current and 2 previous cardiologists did not. They ended up having to do an urgent pacemaker implant since he was frequently on the verge of passing out in his apartment due to an irregular rhythm.
> noting that doing this every 2-3 years was the standard of care for the condition
You can't predict when a medical emergency will happen. It's not surprising that someone in their 80s got worse over time. It's unfortunate that he had a condition that caused fainting, but we can't monitor everything around the clock lest something happens.
You cannot give every patient a defib or pacemaker the moment any tiny deviation from normal is detected. If you did, it would lead to more deaths due to complications and excess pain. There has to be a line drawn, and unfortunately that requires exhibiting a serious symptom first.
Should every child carry an asthma inhaler because they might have asthma? No, they have to show signs first. It's unfortunate we cannot prevent all suffering but it's impossible and or impractical.
I'm saying they should have done the (week long) recording every 2-3 years, which is standard. This would almost certainly have given them some advance understanding of the issue.
One of the reasons I am an anesthesiologist is that while you might have issues with the surgeon or the surgery, I find that very few people decline my services. If anything, they generally want more.
My father-in-law once asked me how long it would take to teach him how to put people to sleep. I said, five minutes, but if you want them to wake up at the end, a lot longer.
I interpret that as they lose people all the time, but if you come into the ER with 10 bullet holes in you or after coming to a grinding halt on the freeway after a head on collision, they don't expect you to make it and it's not the sleepy drugs at fault.
Here's a thing humans do: They knew what they meant, but saw an amusing way it could be parsed, and said that, because it's amusing. We all knew what the comment really meant.
There's actually a few ways it could have been meant, or it could have been meant to convey all of them. We all have a pretty good idea in the general sense what they meant, but that amusing reply is also an invitation for the person to elaborate and add nuance.
They probably do. Not all medical procedures have a greater than 50% expected chance of survival, but it still might be better than the alternative. That doesn't necessarily mean the anesthesiologist is the once responsible for the death, nor that anyone is, for that matter.
I have a friend that is a retired anesthesiologist.
He made very good money, in his day, but, apparently, the malpractice insurance for anesthesiologists, is sky-high.
I am fortunate to have a very good dentist, these days. This was not always the case. I have two crowns, and I believe they are both from dentists that caused tooth damage, on purpose.
Was always a childhood plan to do anaesthetics. Always fascinated me. But I did get to spend time as a paramedic and did many a rapid sequence induction. I never met an anaesthetist who wasn't happy to share time and knowledge when we had to do periodic tubes for recert or CE. So I appreciate you.
Dermatologists (at least, the mundane sort you come across in a suburban office park) are another matter entirely. I assume it comes from doing a lot of elective work for wealthy people who are concerned with their appearance rather than their health. The PCP is more surprising to me.
Otoh the Derm I go to is the most pleasant experience I have in medical care. Super nice office, very pleasant chatter, quick full body check in and out. Something to be said about wealthy elective care subsidizing my healthcare experience.
Most states still have very strange laws around alcohol due to the aftermath of prohibition.
I grew up in NY where beer cannot be sold in liquor stores, but can be sold in grocery stores. But grocery stores can only sell beer that is less than 6% ABV so any beer that is higher ABV can only be sold directly by breweries or by beer distributors.
Right next store in NJ, beer is only sold in liquor stores and for the longest time breweries could not legally sell you beer for on-site consumption so a bunch of breweries got around this by offering a $5 tour and as a part of the tour you were given a glass of beer.
Your point is valid for individual developers or small teams of technical folks.
However, MCPs are a godsend to anyone trying to manage access to systems (especially SaaS systems) in a large organization that includes a ton of non-technical employees. We use at least a couple of SaaS products where RBAC is severely limited in what it can govern or where API keys do not have any kind of governance so handing one out is basically handing out read/write on the entire system. Being able to configure an MCP to only have read endpoints enabled it a very useful piece of duct tape. Obviously it would be great if the underlying API was just designed with proper governance but that's out of the user's control.
My primary beef with my home built in 1963 is that half of the switches aren’t wired to what you would expect and I have no attic or basement with access to make it easy to rewire. Home assistant and smart switches are a godsend because I can repurpose the existing switch boxes to actually do what I want them to do with the added bonus of being able to control them remotely from my phone.
And related to what happened in Ceuta recently. "The Moroccans orchestrated a similar cross-border influx in 2021 in retaliation for Spain’s allowing Western Sahara President Brahim Ghali, whose nation Morocco claims for itself, into the country for medical treatment." https://www.thenation.com/article/world/ceuta-spain-morocco-...
Thank you! I ran into this a ton in college, and still do sometimes with new (to me) authors. I was confident about what was happening, but it's nice to know it's a documented phenomenon.
To be fair to the person you're responding to, airbag systems in modern vehicles are a lot safer than the single airbag per front passenger in older cars. The original airbag systems were just a single bag that deployed at a single rate based on an inertia sensor. Modern systems have several bags with multi-stage deployments that are inflated depending on seat belt and weight sensors.
But yea, as for the rest of the "safety mechanisms" the only modern change that I can think of that's not easy to retrofit but is a huge safety boost is blind spot detection. As someone that drives older (and smaller) cars, being able to see the blind spot detection light on other cars' mirrors is always a bit of a relief that their car will notify them if they try to change lanes.
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