Tim

This gets repeated a lot - but for avoidance of doubt, practically no normal people use VPNs in China, and the government is very successful at blocking them.

You can set up a brand new, never seen before VPN on entirely new IPs and random ports today, and at 1am tomorrow it’ll be blocked. Commercial VPNs are basically unusable. (For a while, Cloudflare Warp was a very nice way around - but they put a stop to that too.)

IF you have a competent government willing to put the work in, blocking VPNs is entitely doable. That “if” is probably our best hope in the west, though.

I got a sitewide warning a couple of months ago for suggesting that Trump’s inaugural “board of peace” meeting was the apotheosis of the “you have one bullet…” thought experiment. “After reviewing, we found that you broke Rule 1 because you threatened violence or physical harm.” I’ll wager Trump’s secret service guys were absolutely shitting themselves when they read it, so it’s probably for the best they took it down tbf.

On the bright side, it was the kick up the backside that was needed to get me to try Lemmy, and I hardly use Reddit at all now.

That sounds sweetly naive. “Producing innaccurate technical advice, with a confident tone, at scale” sounds like the perfect credentials for a career in consultancy.

You seem to be under the impression that booking.com provides property management services. I’m not aware of them doing any such thing, but if they do them she should absolutely raise a dispute under her contract for those services. A quick scan of their information page for property owners is pretty clear, though, that it’s the property owners’ responsibility to get insurance if they need it (they even have some partner links for insurance providers.)

Using booking.com to advertise and resell her business does not change the fact that managing that business is entirely on her. If she doesn’t want to put in the minimum effort, or expense (e.g. insurance) required, she should get out of the business of property letting.

You can hate booking.com for many reasons, but “not running my spare property as a hotel for me so I can just sit back and count the cash” isn’t really one of them.