Work for yourself if you can make it viable then it will be a lot more rewarding and grow you as a person as opposed to being a voiceless number in some open plan office just counting the days to your next holiday.
Whale sharks are majestic creatures. I was lucky enough to swim with them in the wild in the Philippines which has a lot of whale sharks in the Donsol area. What I really like about that place is that the locals don’t feed the whale sharks to attract them and so it’s a gamble to spot them but when you do then you can snorkel/dive with them in complete freedom and observe their natural interaction. It’s an amazing experience and I’d highly recommend that to anyone over the whale shark tourism that you get off Mexico.
It's definitely a symptom of COVID. I know someone who had COVID and one day they coughed suddenly, dropped their iPhone on the floor and since then even the iPhone's temperature sensor doesn't work anymore. This is how infectious and terrible COVID is, just one cough caused the loss of temperature sensation!
It's not just you. I know someone who had Long COVID for 1 month. I also know someone who works with someone who was running marathons every weekend and now they can't walk stairs because of knee pain, all because of COVID. I know someone else who had COVID and then was not doing any sport or social interaction for almost two years, barely left the house and who feels much more tired and depressed now, because of COVID. I know a child, who had COVID, then didn't have proper education for nearly two years and now is really underdeveloped, because of COVID of course.
In China people can’t access objective and free speech media and they know it that they are being manipulated.
In America people can’t access objective and free speech media but their oppressors make them believe that they 100% can and everyone is falling for it.
Personally I find the latter much more scary and a dangerously broken society.
If I work on something that I truly enjoy, then I am 100% focused on it and can't get distracted at all.
If I work off a backlog full of seemingly boring and meaningless tasks which some PO came up with and which I don't find remotely interesting or impactful then it's near impossible for me to not get distracted.
Long story short:
If you struggle to stay focused, then maybe your work or your role in the company sucks (e.g. being overqualified for the tasks assigned to you, not challenged enough intellectually, etc.).
People can’t be sent home because English people don’t give a shit about their family members. Brits think that the government should provide everything for them, even something simple as looking after an elderly person who is otherwise fine. What happened to family bonds and a bit of responsibility? Every winter around Christmas young family members (40-50 year olds) refuse to take their parents home because “they don’t want them at home over Christmas as it’s inconvenient for them” so they literally demand from the hospital staff to keep them in hospital for 1 or 2 weeks longer. Unfortunately the NHS is not allowed to dump these patients on the street. The problem is brazen entitlement. The NHS needs reform. Zero tolerance for those parasites, charge people for not showing up to appointments, charge people for simple medicines, charge people for choosing to be obese through an obesity tax.
How is this money laundering? If you use dirty money to sign up to Spotify and listen to specific songs so that you get some of the money “clean” back wouldn’t that in case of Spotify be the dumbest and most inefficient way of laundering in the history of money laundering? I mean doesn’t Spotify keep the majority so you’re essentially donating dirty money into the stock price of Spotify for the most part, no?
Not necessarily. Let's say you get a burner phone and hook it up at home. You need internet and electricity of course.
Buy a Spotify gift card for $10 USD cash, use that to get Spotify Premium (first use the three months free of course).
Play your (artists') songs, 30 seconds each (considered one stream by Spotify). That's 2880 streams per hour, 86400 streams per month.
Spotify pays around $2-$4 USD per 1000 streams, so that's ~170-340 USD clean money coming in. Some of that goes to Amuse/TuneCore/etc. Then music production, admin, etc. But there seems to be quite some money to be made, especially once you manage to fake your way into recommendations and get legit streams as well.
Sorry, but wow you got this wrong. I’m not sure if it was just a guess or something, but look at the comment below for what it actually is. The money laundering is in the form of purchasing botted streams.
As another comment [0] suggests, this is common at least in Sweden. I have it on first hand that a successful local rapper has the whole apartment full of phones streaming his songs. Floor, shelves, sofa, all full of phones.
I'm sure mixing it with bot traffic is also popular. I also assume that Spotify (et al) are more successful in filtering out bot traffic from central Asia than legit phones in the middle of the target group.
Who launders pocket money? Anything less than hundreds of thousands of dollars is just not worth laundering. Nobody is going to ask you where you got a few 10k from.
Spotify supposedly pays around 70% of subscription and advertising revenue to labels and rights holders. Since payments are not pro rata per listener but are aggregated over all listens, if your fake customer streams more than the average you could quite possibly make an actual profit from this technique.
