Many restaurants in Japan put a small plastic device on tables. When you press it, a chime rings at the waitstaff station or in the kitchen, and a server comes to your table.
Algis Tamosaitis writes the newsletter Japan or Die, and he explained the table call button for travelers. — Read the rest
The post In Japan, press the button on your table and a server appears appeared first on Boing Boing.
The world's southernmost ATM is at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, at 77°51′ south. It is the only cash machine on the continent.
Atlas Obscura says the machine works the same way as an ATM in the United States, and it gives out U.S. — Read the rest
The post The only ATM in Antarctica has a second ATM for spare parts appeared first on Boing Boing.
The upcoming hour-long film on Disney+, "Disney Worldbuilders," focuses on how the cinematic visions of seven filmmakers have been realized as physical, immersive areas of Disney theme parks.
The film has more than its share of Disney and former CEO Bob Iger corporate P.R., — Read the rest
The post How Disney builds immersive theme park worlds from their movies appeared first on Boing Boing.
Our table at Cuatrolatas never stood a chance.
My glass of vermút sweats down to the turquoise tabletop. Standing room only among wine glasses, water glasses, sunglasses, juice glasses. A platter of summer tomatoes, tuna-belly conserva, shaved onion, and punchy olives arrives where it cannot possibly fit.
We lift glasses. Shift glasses. Angle plates. Borrow a few inches from the precarious ledge beside the table. Then Lola sends more food. We shift the impossible again.
Pericana lands dark and red and glistening with oil, a spread for bread made with sun-dried tomatoes, peppers, and cured fish. Two creamy ensaladillas come next. One riff includes krab stick. The other follows the familiar Russian formula. A meat board carries half a butcher shop in sausage form. Pork cheeks nestle into a steamed bao. Barbecue flatbread arrives piled with chicken, cheese, and sauce, as though California Pizza Kitchen had taken up Spanish.
Nobody objects. There is no space to clear. Plates lean on plates. Glasses get relinquished. Appetite takes over. Snug becomes a footnote. Outside, Alicante performs the same trick on a larger scale.
Cars vanish from streets. Neighborhood party tents, barracas, occupy half-blocks. Restaurants lucky enough to face freed asphalt push their patios past the curb. Roadways become dining rooms, dance floors, bars, and parties. Alicante finds space, fills it. Then finds more.
This is Hogueras de San Juan, Alicante’s annual festival of fire. Across Spain, San Juan welcomes summer with infernos and midnight rituals. Alicante makes it monumental. Enormous sculptures rise in intersections and plazas. Some intricate. Some cartoonish, satirical, wonderfully strange. People stop to photograph details destined to disappear in the cremà, when the monuments go up in flame.
Alicante does not ease into celebration. It engineers it. Neighborhoods commission the monuments, build the barracas, prepare the food, and turn valuable public space into temporary headquarters. Then they welcome everyone in.
More glasses. More tapas. More elbows. More appetites.
From Cuatrolatas, I hear a saxophone. A tuba. A brass band works down the block and stops at the park outside. Percussion underneath, horns above, their rendition of “Tequila!” with a ska spirit. I leave my plate and pop into the street.
There is no room to dance. People still try with whatever parts still fit. Feet first. Shoulders when possible. At the end, the entire block shouts the only lyric required. “Tequila!” The band moves on. Another block has another band. Brass woos one crowd. Percussion shakes the next.
Women in lace mantillas and gold jewelry pass on their way to somewhere ornate. Men dressed as pirates follow along in their own finery. Another band carries the flower procession, ceremonial now but no less insistent. Alicante has music for lunch, music for dancing, music for parades. Silence is not part of the program. The city is precise about its chaos. It is also hungry.
Alicante is a city of paella. Yes, Valencia, I said it. This afternoon, rice asks too much. It wants a chair and thirty quiet minutes. Hogueras wants another beer and somewhere louder to be. So the city eats on the move. Tapas. Charcuterie. Salty things. Sandwiches. Paella gets a rain check.
We leave Cuatrolatas, catch up, and follow the music. The genre or at least the loudest instrument shifts every couple hundred feet until we reach the fireworks. The streets are shoulder to shoulder. We slip into a packed barraca beside the traffic circle. As close to the pyrotechnics as we can get. Then we look up.
The sky detonates. The loudest noise I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. “Keep your jaw open,” someone yells, “it helps.” I may disagree.
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Smoke swallows civilization while sparks fall around the baroque column of the Fuente de los Luceros. The tower somehow survives the booming chaos. Stacked balconies on surrounding apartment buildings are packed with celebrants, drinks, fireworks scorecards. Mostly 10s. A few 9s to keep the ignition crew humble.
The open-jaw guy Jaime helps keep this barraca organized. He calls Hogueras the most important celebration of the year. Tourism, commerce, and visibility matter, he suggests. Then he finds the word beneath all of that. “It’s pride,” he says. “We’ve been burning our bonfires and our traditions for like forever.”
The fireworks end. The crowd does not. It wriggles back into the streets aiming for friends, tunes, food. Preferably all three. Inside another barraca, there is no room for another person. So I go in.
Long tables run beneath temporary walls, temporary roof. White plastic chairs press together. Red shirts, straw hats, beer bottles. Bodies fill nearly every gap. Another somehow appears when someone needs it. Another band plays next to the entrance. Feet answer beneath the tables.
Then a smiling man walks in carrying another tray. The tables are full. More food fits. Somehow.
Cold beer. Catalan sausages. Olives. Black figs. Soft, jammy in the heat. Then coca de tonyina, icon of Hogueras. The golden slab loses a few crumbs over the tablecloth when cut and grabbed. Inside, tuna and onion cooked slowly until savory hits sweet, almost caramelized. A little anise. It travels well, and leaves one hand free for beer.
(Howie Southworth) Anchovy and spiced aioli on toast at La Alegria de la Huerta in Valencia
A cartoonish monument depicting a certain oafish world leader dominates the intersection outside. In here, the art seem almost secondary. Though funny.
Artists spend months crafting these monuments that will burn to ash two nights from now. The temporary walls and roofs, the tables and chairs, the music. They all disappear or duck behind a curtain for another year. The people begin again.
I head for another feast, another set of fires. The route carries me north toward Valencia. We pause in Benidorm.
We sit high above the city at La Terrasse in the Port Benidorm Hotel just before sunset. Skyscrapers line up against the Mediterranean. A DJ checks the sound and bartenders shake their elevated work while Benidorm turns to gold below. Sea, sand, spiked skyline, and mountains meet in one widescreen.
Rarefied air with room to breathe it. And the hospitality and the menu have changed clothes.
A foie gras “emerald” comes first. A squat little gem painted gold, filled with vermouth jelly, surrounded by blueberry toast. Crimson beet and avocado tartare, mango vinaigrette. Aged picanha peeks beneath tonnata, goat cheese. Croquettes draped in jamón. A plump shrimp concoction that reminds me of a lobster roll. Wrong coast.
The plates are polished, precise, a bit of theater. Proper wine stems. Soft seats. Enough empty space to recognize as luxury. Glasses fill. Plates multiply. Music drifts through the warm air.
Down the coast in Alicante, the monuments wait for their flame. From this height and with the southern horizon glowing orange it feels like a preview. Or someone lit the fuse a day early.
A friend joins for dinner. Adriana distills the season’s arrival into one sentence: “Summer here is experienced collectively.” Across the Comunitat Valenciana, that communal arrival changes shape. Alicante gives it ill-fated monuments and exuberant crowds. Benidorm gives it height and panache. Valencia goes to the beach.
At L’Alegria de l’Horta on the Malvarrosa Beach promenade, I sit in pressed clothes and drink fine Valencian wine. White, cold, a touch tart. My free hand dangles close enough to touch the sand. I resist.
Bread comes with alioli and grated tomato. Anchovies shine like silver blades over toast and spiced aioli. Hearty slices of calamari singed on the plancha gleam in the fading sunlight. Baseball-sized salt cod fritters arrive golden and hot. Garlic oil erupts from the middle.
Our Summer sale is on!
Then my lubina arrives. A whole fish split open direct from the grill. Smoky. Simply dressed with oil. A lemon wedge. Crispy fries. No sauce. None needed. I work from the tail toward the head until my plate holds just a frame, some skin, one or two fries I’m saving for no good reason.
From my perch I see thousands of revelers pour from the tram, cars that magically found a parking spot, bikes, and buses. They carry blankets, coolers, and totes with dinner. Each group branches off as they meet the sand with enough equipment to establish a civilization for one night. Small fires start within each pod. Smoke begins to rise.
My fish is a buttery memory. My glass is dry. I step off the restaurant’s orderly little terrace and make a slow serpentine path past makeshift dinner parties. The night grows darker. The beach grows brighter as fires multiply from Malvarrosa down toward the port. I stop counting at 175.
A sausage spits over open flame. Meat skewers hiss when fat reaches flame. Corn cobs char and pop. Shellfish, bread, beer circulate around firepits dug into sand. A blanket becomes seating. A cooler becomes a table. And a fridge. A plastic crate holds more wood in waiting.
My friend Felipe had explained the ritual back in Alicante. Make a big fire, jump it several times, then jump several waves. “That will welcome summer,” he told me, “and will give you strength and good luck for the whole of the year.”
(Howie Southworth) Fire jumping for good luck
On this beach, interpretations vary. Some make deliberate, careful hops. Some leap over flame as friends raise phones and cheer. Some perform feats of strength, flips, aerial dance moves, head-first dives. Possibly singed and mostly sandy, they storm the Mediterranean and return to their grills wet, steaming, and triumphant.
Children thin out before midnight. The club crowd grows afterward. Elbow room becomes a luxury. Groups become amorphous. Firepit boundaries dissolve. Shoes, bottles, hats, towels, coolers migrate. Blankets become rumpled communal flooring. Jumpers still jump. With increasing altitude and inventiveness and shrinking landing space.
Someone asks me to send a photograph I’ve just taken. We trade Instagram handles. Someone has me hold their phone while they dive through shorebreak. Trust abounds. Someone begs me to jump the fire. I jump. Gingerly. For several minutes, I belong to the beach and to no particular party. It seems a common feeling.
Alicante builds upward. Monuments, balconies, barracas, fireworks, towers of smoke. Valencia spreads outward. Blanket beside blanket, grill beside grill, body beside body, fire beside fire. The beach becomes one long temporary table.
By night’s end, campfire settles into my clothes. My dinner had servers, collars, and wineglasses. Beach dinners have coolers, flame, and daredevils. The smoke makes no distinction.
At Cuatrolatas, there was no room for another plate. Another plate arrived. In the barraca, there was no room for another chair. Someone sat down. On Malvarrosa, there was no room for another blanket, another fire, another wet body running back from the sea. They made room.
The monuments burn. The embers go cold. The tents get broken down. The beach empties. What remains is the promise beneath all that food and flame.
Bring everyone back. We will squeeze in.
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The smell hits first, garlic and char on skewered meat, chiles brushed over buns, oyster sauce mingling with the syrupy edge of black vinegar on sizzling noodles. Then comes the sound, clams tossed in hot pans, cleavers pounding roast pork, a Cantonese rock ballad barely rising above the crowd. At Temple Street Night Market, steam rises, neon buzzes, just like the guidebooks promised.
My first bite of Hong Kong is a fried soup dumpling, filled with truffled pork and that holy trinity, garlic, ginger, scallion. Crisp-bottomed, soft-topped, doused in soy. I eat it standing, careful not to scald my tongue. It’s divine. It’s street food. A memory made to be eaten. But something’s different.
Temple Street Night Market grew after World War II, a “nightclub for regular people,” says the woman beside me, also eating soup dumplings carefully. She remembers when the blocks up to Tin Hau Temple brimmed with food carts, trinkets, and the occasional fortune-teller. COVID changed that. Now food stalls are limited, corralled onto a single block. The rest? Brick-and-mortar, cleaned up, regulated. “It’s a performance,” she says. Still, this is one hell of a dumpling.
I’m not satisfied. Something as embedded and sentimental as street food doesn’t just vanish. I call on two friends, industry insiders at Lee Kum Kee. Yes, that Lee Kum Kee, the ones that invented oyster sauce. Ki Tang and Park Ng are locals, insatiable eaters. If anyone knows where Hong Kong’s old street food pulse still beats, it’s them.
We walk Sham Shui Po, once among the city’s densest working-class food neighborhoods. The differences here are sharp. “Sure, the hygiene issue moved some sellers into shops,” she says,” but Hong Kong-style street foods, they haven’t changed.” We stop at a popular shop, newly under a roof, for cheung fen, rice-flour rolls dressed in sesame, soy, and chile, and eat standing up, like before.
These rice rolls, siu mai dumplings, egg waffles, and curried fish balls, the classics remain. The two agree, the scene’s adapting to keep the favorites around, just in more refined settings. Ki adds, “Many Chinese styles have also come to Hong Kong.” Chinese brands with deep pockets are creatively moving in. Hot and dry noodles with seafood, Beijing crêpes filled with satay beef, Sichuan pancakes stuffed with char siu pork. On food, the mainland is fusing with Hong Kong.
We stop at a northern-style dumpling chain, a new import that’s caught on fast. I try the pork and corn pot-stickers with XO scallop sauce, plump, garlicky, fast. A walkable bite of New Hong Kong. Next, crispy fish-filled siu mai on a stick from a nearby shop. Old-school Hong Kong, salty and hot. The street food menu is expanding.
Our Summer sale is on!
QR codes are everywhere we see food. “People are ordering and picking up later,” Park explains, “queues are shorter… delivery apps also help.” A trend that predated COVID, but the pandemic cemented it. Takeaway meant survival for most vendors. The old crowded wait has become a couch scroll until your green bean skewer and brisket noodles appear by e-bike.
Ki and Park peel off, and I continue to walk south toward Tsim Sha Tsui, A long slog, enough to digest and think. I recall correspondence I had with Virginia Chan, founder of Hong Kong’s “Humid with a Chance of Fishballs” food tours. She romantically contends that street food is an “impulse buy – you pass by it, and it smells good, so you buy it to eat quickly.” True. But it does strike a blow to eating-by-app. She also mentioned something I hadn’t considered: Malls.
“The younger generation goes to malls that have a ton of ‘street food’… The plus is that there is air conditioning.” Right again. As rents rise and street-level spots vanish, street food culture perseveres. A/C replaces gritty urban ambiance. Eaters stay cool. Vendors move up.
Walking through the neighborhood, I see take-out windows everywhere. Pandemic innovation or just smart business? Especially at bakeries and cha chaan tengs, Cantonese diners. You don’t have to sit anymore. You walk. Grab a pineapple bun stuffed with ham and butter, a corned beef egg tart, a sourdough one, even pistachio. (Egg tarts—once a humble snack—have gone global and experimental. And they’re good.) You’re off to work in sixty seconds flat. I watch office workers walk off mid-bite, sipping from paper cups of milk tea.
And that’s the truth I walk away with. Street food isn’t just hawker carts and smoke-filled alleys. Not anymore. It’s not about frenetic, but it is about motion. Food that moves and moves people. To borrow the dim sum moniker, it touches the heart.
It’s still here. Just in new clothes. And still damned delicious.
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Osaka ranked seventh and Tokyo tenth in the Economist Intelligence Unit's 2026 Global Liveability Index. Japan was the only Asian country with two cities in the top 10. BBC Travel asked residents and planners why, and their answers came down to four rules. — Read the rest
The post Why Osaka and Tokyo keep landing in the world's top 10 cities appeared first on Boing Boing.
If you were moving diamonds across the Deccan Plateau in the 1830s, there were rules about when to set out. Leave on a Tuesday or a Thursday, on the 5th, 13th, or 28th day of the lunar month. Eat coriander seeds before a Tuesday departure and jaggery before a Thursday one. — Read the rest
The post An 1832 book explains how to pick a lucky day to travel appeared first on Boing Boing.
Manuel Bravo makes video tours of ancient places, and his "Virtual Rome" reconstructs the city as it stood in the second century AD, when its buildings were at their height. The camera flies over the rooftops, moving the way drone footage does, so the views are ones no Roman ever had. — Read the rest
The post Fly over ancient Rome as it looked in the second century appeared first on Boing Boing.
Forget "Don't be evil"; Google's true motto is a form of vulgar spidermanism: "With great power comes no responsibility." The internet's de facto boss is an absentee landlord.
Google – a thrice-convicted monopolist – is the gateway to the internet, with more than a 90% search market share that it attained by buying out all its competitors and bribing Apple more than $20b/year not to start a rival search engine:
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/8/6/google_monopoly
Google likes to position itself as a wise steward of the internet. They say they use their vast troves of data about the internet and its users to connect the right person with the right information at the right moment. As their mission statement has it, "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful":
https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/
The tacit argument is, "Sure, we repeatedly violated antitrust law in order to monopolize the internet, but the internet needs a monopolist. It's scary out there! We have amassed power so that we can protect and guide you."
It's a bullshit argument and no one should accept it – but even if you think it's worth harnessing monopoly power to promote a wise king to rule over the internet, you'd still want Google to take that responsibility seriously. If we're to have a landlord for our civilization's digital nervous system, let's not have it be an absentee landlord.
Google is an absentee landlord. In 2019, they chose to deliberately worsen search results in order to make you search repeatedly to find the information you're seeking, because every fresh query lets them serve fresh advertisements:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/26/babyish-radical-extremists/#cancon
Not all of Google's enshittification can be attributed to deliberate sabotage. Much of it is the result of neglect. Ask Google for a product review and they'll pass over the most rigorous, honest websites on the internet in favor of affiliate scammers who repackage Amazon best-of lists to peddle overpriced, underperforming junk that's sometimes so bad it's dangerous:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task
Google keeps announcing that it Takes This Problem Very Seriously – and then nothing happens:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse
And of course, Google AI search results present the company with a highly refined and confident-sounding way to launder spam into product recommendations:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/15/inhuman-gigapede/#coprophagic-ai
Could Google do better? Provably so. Kagi, a small company that runs a search engine powered by Google's own search index consistently delivers results that are substantially superior to Google's – using Google's own infrastructure:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi
If Kagi (a startup with a handful of engineers) can extract useful search results from Google's databases, then Google – a thrice-convicted monopolist that's had its pick of thousands of the top computer scientists from the world's most prestigious universities for a generation – could also do so.
They just choose not to.
They're too big to fail. They're too big to jail. They're too big to care.
Google's AI search isn't a way to fix its broken core product: it's a way to partially remediate the damage Google itself inflicted on the open internet, while imprisoning the web in a walled garden that would make Steve Jobs drool:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/29/arsonist-firefighters/#im-feeling-lucky
It's a deadly combination: Google has committed hundreds of billions to stock buybacks and its AI money-furnace, financed by mass layoffs targeting the people who keep the core services useful. The too-big-to-care company is still the internet's gatekeeper, but half the guards at the gate have been fired and the other half have pulled so much overtime that they keep falling asleep on the job.
Google has become a scammer's paradise.
Take Google's "answer box." This is the part of the search results page that tries to answer your query directly, without sending you elsewhere for that info. Back in 2023, Google's Answer Box was taken over by scammers who impersonated airline help desks. When Google's users searched for airlines' toll-free phone numbers, Google directed them to phones that rang in the scammers' boiler room, where they were tricked into giving up their passport info and credit card numbers to boiler-room thieves:
(This was an especially devastating attack because the airlines themselves hide their customer service phone numbers – as enshittified monopolists, they want your money, not your complaints – so it's normal to search Google for the number you're seeking, rather than scouring the airlines' deliberately confusing customer service sites.)
This is especially galling because Google has an extensive "verified merchant" program that goes to enormous lengths to establish the true identity of every merchant whose businesses are listed on Google, in maps, ads and search results. Google "knows" which URLs belong to the airlines. If it can be tricked into scraping a different website for the airlines' phone numbers, that's because Google couldn't be bothered to connect its own database of canonical airline URLs to the process that serves phone numbers to the 90% of the web-using public who search with Google.
Google's database of the canonical URLs for businesses doesn't stop at airlines or even large businesses. Nearly every local merchant has undergone Google's verification process, which includes a step where Google physically mails a postcard with a unique number to the merchant's registered address, which the merchant must then key into Google to prove that they're located where they say they are.
Despite this, Google's ad-sales system will happily sell anyone the right to advertise a different website for queries for specific merchants, and those ads appear above the real result for the business's website. To make this even worse, Google's spent years making it more difficult to distinguish ads from "organic" search results, changing the font and size of the "ad" warning to make it harder to spot, and making the font and color of the ad itself closer to the color of the search results below it.
This is a gift to fraudsters. I had my own run-in with it in 2023, when I was tricked by a Google ad into ordering dinner from my local Thai place using a scam site that had cloned the restaurant's menu. The scammers marked up the price by 15%, then passed the order on to the restaurant, pocketing the vig:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security
This scammer – based out of a UC Berkeley dorm-room – had copied hundreds of restaurant websites, then bought Google ads for the restaurants' names, ensuring that searchers would see the scam result before the real one. Remember: Google knows what the true URL is for every one of those restaurants but it sold the scammer ads for a different URL that appeared when people searched for the restaurant by name.
Google could trivially add a step to the ad sales pipeline that detects mismatches between a merchant's known URL and the URL in an ad bought against the merchant's name. It could automatically resolve these mismatches by sending an email to the merchant's verified email address that says, "Hey, are you buying an ad with a new URL? If so, just reply to this email."
I don't know why Google doesn't do this. Maybe they make huge sums from these scam ads and they don't want to forego the revenue. Or maybe they just don't care.
Whichever it is, there's real consequences for this negligence by the internet's absentee landlord. Take abortions: fake abortion clinics – where pregnant women are bullied or tricked out of the abortions they're seeking – buy Google ads against the names of real abortion clinics. Google makes millions sending abortion-seekers to fake abortion providers:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/15/paid-medical-disinformation/#crisis-pregnancy-centers
Google started off as the ideal "intermediary" – the fancy economist's term for a "middleman." They took as their duty to figure out the best websites for you to look at based on your interests, serving as an honest broker between internet users and internet publishers. In the quarter-century since the company's founding, as it transformed itself into a monopolist, it developed the curse of every intermediary: it got Main Character Syndrome.
This is Tim Wu's formulation: the reason for an intermediary existence is to serve the parties to the transaction. Ebay says it exists to connect buyers and sellers, Uber is supposed to connect drivers and riders, dating sites are supposed to connect people with their love-matches. But intermediaries are cursed with an enviable position: by dint of sitting between these different groups of people, the intermediary learns everything about both sides of the transaction, while each side only knows about its own position.
Amazon knows the price you're willing to pay, it knows who's set the lowest price, and it knows how many identical items that match your query are for sale. But the sellers don't know any of that, and you only know some of it. By capitalizing on that information (rather than using it to efficiently match buyers and sellers), Amazon can match you with the sellers willing to pay the highest junk fees, rather than the ones who offer the best price for the best goods:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers
This is Wu's Main Character Syndrome in action. Once Amazon attains a dominant market share, it can maximize its own welfare at the expense of its buyers and sellers, transforming itself from a helper to a parasite:
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/lawfare-daily–tim-wu-on–the-age-of-extraction
Google says it wants to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," but every dime it spends fighting fraud (a critical part of this mission!) is a dime it can't spend on stock buybacks, executive compensation and AI servers. "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" is the mission of a good intermediary; "do the absolute minimum to fight fraud" is the mission of a formerly good intermediary with terminal Main Character Syndrome.
Google keeps finding ways to expose its users to fraud while lining its own pockets. That restaurant markup scam that caught me in 2023? Three years later, it's way worse.
San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu just filed suit against GuestReservations.com, BookOnline.com and Booking Holdings for running a massive version of the restaurant menu scam – one that extracted millions from people booking hotel rooms:
Here's how the scam worked: these companies put up websites with deceptive URLs, like SanFranciscoMarriott.GuestReservations.com, and then bought the associated Google ad-word ("San Francisco Marriott"). At the top of Google searches for "San Francisco Marriott booking" was the ad for SanFranciscoMarriott.GuestReservations.com. This site would sell you a room at the Marriott, at a markup of 35% to 85%.
This is a pure ripoff. If Google had served the correct result at the top of the page – if it had used its own database of confirmed merchants and their associate websites to validate its ads – then people booking hotels would have saved 35% to 85% on their rooms.
City Attorney Chiu says that the perps here registered domains for all kinds of hotels, even tiny ones in small towns, all over America. That means that it's not just visitors to San Francisco who got screwed by these creeps – it's also San Franciscans who booked hotel rooms around the country.
Google bears the lion's share of the blame here, but Visa and the other credit card companies are critical to these scams. Card companies allow merchants to set terms of service that refuse refunds under almost any circumstances, and, more often than not, the card issuers side with the merchants over their own customers when they call to cancel a charge from one of these scammers.
I discovered this for myself when I was tricked into buying theater tickets from a ripoff site that had registered the URL of the show I wanted to go to. I figured out that I'd been rooked within a minute of clicking the buy button, but it took months and multiple appeals – and ultimately a threat to cancel my credit card – to get Visa to refund me.
Visa – another bloated monopolist with terminal Main Character Syndrome – can see that it has merchants who generate zillions of appeals and charge-backs because they run scam businesses like these. They could treat these merchants as the fraudsters they are, but because the crooks wreathe themselves in gauzy excuses and lengthy terms of service, Visa enables these massive, nationwide cons.
Google, Visa and the other monopolists who serve as de facto regulators for our society have arrogated to themselves the power to observe every transaction and block the obvious scams. We pay for their failure to take minimal, obvious steps to protect us from the scammers who thrive on their platforms.
Why should they? They're the main characters. They're Bizarro-world spidermen, whose great power confers no responsibility.
Gavin Newsom Makes An Ass Of Himself On Antitrust, Paramount Merger https://www.techdirt.com/2026/08/04/gavin-newsom-makes-an-ass-of-himself-on-antitrust-paramount-merger/
Against Self-Fulfilling Prophecy https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/against-self-fulfilling-prophecy
Arson markets https://www.merkley.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026.08.03-LTR-Wildfire-Prediction-Markets-FINAL.pdf
Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3807963
#25yrsago Steve Ballmer: DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS http://www.ntk.net/ballmer/dancemonkeyboy.mpg
#15yrsago HOWTO E-Z realistic corpse from a cheap plastic skeleton https://propnomicon.blogspot.com/2011/08/quick-and-dirty-corpses.html
#15yrsago $300 Million Button: making customers create logins to buy cost etailer $300M/year https://centercentre.com/
#10yrsago 1 billion computer monitors vulnerable to undetectable firmware attacks https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-24/dc-24-speakers.html#Cui
#10yrsago Stiglitz quits Panama’s official money-laundering panel over internal sabotage https://www.reuters.com/article/us-panama-tax-idUSKCN10G24Z/
#10yrsago BBC will use surveillance powers to sniff Britons’ wifi and find license-cheats https://web.archive.org/web/20160806155022/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/05/bbc-to-deploy-detection-vans-to-snoop-on-internet-users/
#10yrsago How and why to short Uber https://qz.com/707947/investors-have-placed-a-one-way-bet-on-uber-which-made-us-want-to-figure-out-a-way-to-short-it
#5yrsago Facebook's official disinformation research portal is a bad joke https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/06/get-you-coming-and-going/#potemkin-research-program
#5yrsago Scammers sell griefers social media banning services https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/06/get-you-coming-and-going/#curse-of-bigness
#1yrago Which jobs can be replaced with AI? https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/06/unmerchantable-substitute-goods/#customer-disservice
Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales
Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/
Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification
Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/
London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn
South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/
Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/
F@#$ the AI Overlords (On The Media)
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/f-the-ai-overlords
Why AI Won't Replace Workers, But Will Crash The Economy (Smart Cookies)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRRmUuxJolY
AI and the Enshittification Era (The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAIJRjb-Bw
AI is not inevitable (Betakit)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbiTVkq1WHo
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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New Zealand’s Māori people often say that food is a feeling, a memory. It talks to your stomach.
Everything in Māori culture is tied to Papatūānuku, Mother Earth, especially its food. Located at the bottom of the world, it’s hard to imagine a place more closely connected to nature, where New Zealand’s Māori communities have long lived in symbiosis with the land.
“Māori food (kai) concepts acknowledge an interconnectedness with living cycles, which renew and sustain us,” says Michael Venner, director of Kora Tours NZ.
The pristine farms, forests, ocean and rivers serve as the country’s pantry, where Māori food is regional, and ingredients are harvested based on seasonality and availability.
“By understanding nature’s cycles and natural rhythms. Māori understood the connection between moon, sun, tides and seasons, the way all animals behave,” says Venner. “For example, if you know the correct moon cycle to go fishing on, lay your nets on the right tide, at the right place, you will have a higher success rate.”
A common everyday dish is a hearty stew or a “boil up,” made of pork bones, puha (an indigenous herb) and seafood like mussels, oysters and crayfish, alongside rēwena bread, a sourdough made with a fermented potato starter or a fried bread.
But Hāngī is arguably the most famous Māori cooking technique. Veneer describes it as, “A hot stone oven which cooks food layered inside baskets, covered by a wet cloth. Once partially buried for a few hours, it has roasted and steamed the food, infused notes of forest herbs, earth scents, smoked tea tree, Manuka honey and banana leaf.”
Our Summer sale is on!
Veneer says if you get the chance to go to a traditional hāngī, do it. These special gatherings are often linked to special community events, like funerals, weddings and ritual occasions.
At Rosewood’s three hotels located throughout New Zealand, the chefs honor this ethically sourced ethos, working with local purveyors and farmers to source indigenous ingredients like beach spinach, fern fronds and abalone.
During dinner, each guest is given a traditional koha, meaning gift or offering, between the starter and main course. “It’s an opportunity for our chefs to share a thoughtful expression of place, often drawing inspiration from Northland’s rich coastal environment and Māori culinary traditions,” says JT Mulry, Culinary Director at Rosewood Kauri Cliffs.
At Rosewood Kauri Cliffs, they periodically serve a Māori-inspired, multi-course meal. “This dining experience celebrates the traditions, ingredients, and stories of Aotearoa. Traditional techniques, such as hāngī, are paired with native ingredients and locally harvested produce, creating food that is both simple and deeply expressive of place. At its heart, it’s about sharing stories, culture and hospitality through food,” says Mulry.
When European colonizers came to New Zealand in the 1800s, it changed the indigenous food. “Settlers arrived with national foods, preparation and cooking methods,” says Venner. “As more people came, food influence evolved and mixed; rural and urban food traditions, tastes and trends merged into the modern era.”
In Auckland, the Hāngī Master, Rewi Spraggon, honors his ancestors with his traditional hāngī catered cooking. The stones he uses have been passed down through the generations to create staples like a Hāngī Tuturu, a plate of pork, chicken, potato, kumara (New Zealand sweet potatoes), pumpkin, cabbage, stuffing and watercress salad. At his Queenstown food truck, more modern, European-influenced offerings include a chicken Hāngī burger, served with a potato spread, grated apple and watercress salad on a sweet potato bun.
Today, New Zealanders are proud of their food culture. “As New Zealand’s demographics changed, new traditions emerged. Since the 1980s, when people returned from overseas, they added to the menus and our palates changed with them,” says Venner. Now, it’s known for incredible lamb, cheese, wine and fruit inspired by the natural, high-quality, hard-working traditions of generations of Māori.
Read more
from this writer
The post How Māori food tells New Zealand’s story appeared first on Salon.com.
We’ve all been there: sitting on the floor at your gate, clutching a sad airport meal, wondering how your relaxing vacation turned into a stress spiral. With fewer air traffic controllers and a jam-packed summer travel season, canceled and delayed flights are basically a guarantee. I’m curious if you’ve noticed similar stuff and how you’re beating the travel woes—let me know.
But one brand wants to turn that chaos into happy hour. For two days only—July 17 and 18—Cayman Jack (yes, the margarita in a bottle brand) is opening The Cayman Club: A Missed Flight Lounge at JFK’s TWA Hotel. And the only way to get in? Show proof of a delayed, canceled, or missed flight.
Welcome to Like a Local, our travel series where writers share how to spend an ideal long weekend in their favorite hometowns. This time, Kristine shares her favorite spots in Bernal Heights—SF’s offbeat gem with dreamy views and even better bites.
Known for its unique blend of natural beauty, culture, and history, San Francisco consistently ranks in the top cities to visit in the U.S. for good reason. It’s also long been a haven for the offbeat, the quirky, creatives, revolutionaries, dreamers, and seekers.
Welcome to Like a Local, our travel series where writers share how to spend an ideal long weekend in a favorite town or city. This time, Marisa brings us to Cohasset, Massachusetts—a charming coastal town just south of Boston.
As I was growing up in New York City and New Jersey, living on the New England coast seemed like a dream. Yet, as an adult, when life threw us a curveball, we jumped on a chance to move to Boston—and I am so glad we did. We loved our time there, exploring the charming cobblestone streets and trying all the clam chowder. But as our family grew out of our cozy apartment, we knew we needed more space and eventually settled in the coastal town of Cohasset, about 45 minutes south of Boston. We’ve lived here for five years now, and it truly feels like we’re home.
Welcome to Like a Local, our series where travelers share their ideal long weekends. This time, Tessa shows how to do Sonoma—wine, food, and fun—with kids in tow.
Sonoma, affectionately known by locals as "Slow-noma," offers a charming, laid-back pace that’s perfect for a relaxing weekend trip. While Wine Country isn’t typically known as a family destination, after spending time there with two toddlers, I’ve realized that Sonoma is a place people of all ages can (and should) enjoy. It’s one of our home bases when we visit the U.S., and a spot we never tire of exploring. Though Sonoma is a small town of roughly 11,000, it offers renowned food and wine while remaining down-to-earth and unpretentious.
There’s something electric about checking into a hotel in a new city or country—the thrill of the unfamiliar, the view from your window, the anticipation of what lies just outside your door. And then, of course, there’s the food. Because while location and amenities shape a stay, it’s the dining options at these Grand Hyatt destinations that transform it—from a great trip into the kind you’ll never stop talking about.
The right dish can transport you: to another place, another time, even another version of yourself. It sets the mood, captures a feeling, and defines the rhythm of your travel experience. At Grand Hyatt hotels, the sheer range of culinary offerings means every stay becomes more than just visiting one destination—it becomes a global journey through your palate.
As a luxury travel advisor, I send people all over the world to explore and make memories with their friends and families, and one place I recommend over and over is Mexico City (CDMX). I’ve spent time there myself and sent scads of clients there, too.
CDMX, in my opinion, is still underhyped for a lot of U.S. travelers, especially those on the east coast. It’s a relatively quick flight (4-5 hours max depending on where you leave from) and once you get there it’s pretty much the perfect long-weekend getaway—the food scene is studded with delicious hotspots in both the high end and the street fare categories, and the city is teeming with art, shopping, and history. And should you want to make a longer trip out of it, you can scoot out to the coast and see some gorgeous beaches.
Welcome to Like a Local, our recurring series where travelers share their perfect long weekend itineraries—from the coffee shops and cocktail bars they swear by to the hidden corners worth wandering. This week, Chicago resident, Caroline Bratney focuses on the city's architectural highlights.
Welcome to beautiful Chicago! I’ve lived in this Midwestern metropolis for ten years and have fallen in love with so much of what this broad-shouldered city has to offer.
Welcome to Hotel Crush, our recurring series where we highlight design-forward, destination-worthy stays around the world—whether you’re planning your next trip or just want a little escape-from-your-browser moment.
There are few things more nostalgic than the idea of building a fort or crawling into a treehouse. That childhood urge to gather blankets, string up lights, and create your own little world doesn’t exactly disappear as you grow up—in fact, it might grow stronger.
Welcome to the latest edition of Food52 Founder Amanda Hesser’s weekly newsletter, Hey There, It’s Amanda, packed with food, travel, and shopping tips, Food52 doings, and other matters that catch her eye. Get inspired—sign up here for her emails.
I just got back from Oslo, where Merrill and I guzzled coffee, walked for miles, and ate as many pastries as possible. Here’s a short list of the restaurants, coffee shops, and bakeries we liked.
This year I had the unique opportunity to visit both Athens and Rome (on separate trips). I’ve therefore seen a ton of ruins. In most of my travels, I’ve found ruins and archaeology in general less interesting than well-preserved artworks in comfortable museums. This time it was more of a mixed bag — the Acropolis, for instance, was a little underwhelming, but it felt very meaningful to me to wander about in the Agora, imagining that this was the same ground Socrates trod.
My reaction to Roman ruins was more complex. Part of the reason that I had never visited Rome before, despite having ample opportunity, was that I have an antipathy to the Roman Empire, due to my intellectual formation in liberation-oriented theology circles. To me, they are history’s Bad Guys, and there is something pathological about the way they are fetishized again and again throughout Western history. What jumped out at me on this tour — especially in the day we spent at Pompeii, the preservation of which surely counts as one of the most horrifying yet amazing things ever to happen — was just how capable they were. The design of the city of Pompeii, for instance, seemed more functional and intelligent than that of 95% of US cities. (Here I count even the biggest cities — surely the Romans would have anticipated the problem of garbage piling up on the streets in New York City and designed the city with alleyways!) The fact that the routes of Roman roads are still travelled today, that aqueducts are still functional, that the international metropolis of Rome literally still uses the sewer dug by the Romans — it’s absolutely incredible.
One of My Esteemed Partner’s favorite sites was the Pantheon. On the ground level, it’s just a moderately cluttered and tacky church, but the ceiling is an unparalleled feat of engineering — a huge dome, with no internal infrastructure or supports. Contemporary investigators literally don’t know how they achieved it. And on this trip, a retrospectively obvious thing dawned on me: for most Western Europeans for a thousand years or more, that was how it was with essentially all Roman achievements.
Often modern people look down their nose at the so-called “dark ages” as an era when people were obsessed with the past, seemingly arbitrarily. But they were physically surrounded by infrastructure and buildings erected by the ancients that they couldn’t build if they wanted to. The engineering know-how, the access to resources, the sheer ability to organize and structure a labor process — it was all gone and there was seemingly no way to recapture it.
The situation reminded me of a common trope of contemporary dystopian sci-fi. In many of these stories, there is a kind of deposit of older technology that current-day people either rely on without fully understanding or else scavenge for parts — often with unanticipated consequences. The same thing happened with Roman technologies. The Colosseum, for instance, was obviously subject to wear and tear from the weather, as well as earthquakes, but a big part of why more and more sections of it kept collapsing was that people were simply pulling out the iron rods that held the columns together and using them for something else.
We could say the same for the intellectual achievements of the ancients. Medieval people didn’t rely on them simply because they were lazy or unimaginative. They lacked the intellectual infrastructure — not just the traditions of education, but often the physical documents themselves, which had to be copied afresh every generation or so. They assumed that Galen was smarter than any contemporary doctor not only because he was such a genius but because he was in a position to know much more than any current-day investigator. You can’t just rebuild that intellectual infrastructure through sheer force of will, certainly not as an individual. The most gifted person in medieval Europe simply could not get as far as a person in the Hellenistic era would have been able to get. Medieval Europeans thought the ancients were better because they were, and it took centuries for them to get to a place where they could seriously think of themselves as surpassing their achievements.
My big worry is that we are currently experiencing a process of decay that will leave future generations living among ruins. It might seem absurd in terms of contemporary ideology to say that we will soon be living off of older technologies, but even within a single lifetime we’ve collectively lost abilities — the ability to get to the moon safely, for instance — and there are still crucial systems that are running on “outdated” code (such as COBOL for bank mainframes, etc.). More prosaically, our roads, our other infrastructure, our housing stock are all cheaper and crappier than they were a generation ago. It is impossible to imagine contemporary buildings remaining functional a century from now, as so many institutional buildings from the turn of the 20th century are. In fact, many of them aren’t functional even when they’re built!
But my more urgent concern is the intellectual infrastructure. Academics of my generation look at people like Fredric Jameson and think of that kind of erudition as simply unachievable — much less earlier polymathic figures like Auerbach. I don’t think anyone the age of 50 would claim to know as much as Jameson did when he was 50. People just don’t do that anymore. And we are witnessing a further ratcheting down, at least in the US, as the humble art of reading an entire book is increasingly lost to the younger generation. Students are graduating from high school and college knowing less and less, and able to do less and less. What happens when they’re the ones teaching the younger generation?
This is not just “kids these days” scaremongering. It’s not about them as individuals, it’s about intellectual infrastructure. My strongest students now are every bit as smart and capable as my strongest students were when I first started teaching — in fact, I’d count some of the students I’ve taught in the last couple years as the finest I’ve ever encountered. But it’s much more binary, and more seriously, the students who lack those abilities and experiences most often don’t think of it as a problem. The students who can engage at a higher level appear to be anomalies, as though they are “born with it.” And if emulating their own stronger peers does not seem like a live possibility, what about emulating the professor, much less the people who are writing or editing or translating the books they’re reading?
Once in a discussion of Aristotle’s scientific writings, a student generously suggested that Aristotle did the best he could, because he couldn’t just look things up on Wikipedia like we can. I jumped in to say: Aristotle was Wikipedia to them! Just like you look it up on Wikipedia, they looked it up in Aristotle! My improvised retort was perhaps a little glib, but especially with the rise of generative AI, it does seem like we’re going to be in a situation where more and more people are going to be forced to rely on a deposit of knowledge from prior to 2019 — one that can be remixed and perhaps commented on, but not really expanded, because the skills and resources that it takes to expand it have somehow withered away.
Some have suggested that this shift is okay, because students are gaining other kinds of competencies we lack. To me, that seems like magical thinking — much like an ancient person assuming that if the Romans left, someone else would come along to build and maintain the roads. Things don’t happen simply because the space is left open for them. Maybe on the margins the new educational regime where text is radically decentered allows other competencies to grow more than they otherwise would, though some of the claimed competencies strike me as having dubious value (like posting TikTok videos). But there is no medium as information-dense or as able to capture complexity as text. People who cannot work with text simply cannot learn as much overall, and no amount of silver linings can undo the brute fact that less is less.
Mass literacy is a kind of infrastructure, and like all forms of infrastructure in our neoliberal and now potentially post-neoliberal world, it has been allowed to crumble. Without a rapid course correction that appears to be nowhere on the horizon, we are headed down a path where many future generations are going to be gleaning from our scraps, because they have been deprived of the resources and knowledge they need to match our achievements. Who knows how long people will look back on the golden age of the Twentieth Century like medieval Europeans looked back on Roman times? As history shows us, it can be a long time.
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