toughfluff

Agree. Also Paris is not really a budget destination once you get there. Hotel, food bills, museum entries, etc can rack up quickly.

I’ve been reading your comments and you really come across as a genuine, helpful person!

A lot of what you said seems theoretically possible to me: be candid to clients, have patience to educate them, showcase new perspectives, and cut them off when they go too far. I think these are kinda ‘duh’ on paper, but also not easy to execute in real life (even just through online interaction). And honestly, can be applicable to scenarios outside of dating app profiles. Your process sounds fascinating!

I guess it really depends on what you seek. If you're comparing Croatia to a city break in Paris/Madrid/Barcelona, then maybe it lacks that kind of museums, landmarks, or entertainment. But say if you're interested in beach, Roman ruins/historical artefacts, cuisine, then Croatia has plenty to offer.

Plitvice Lake is still, to this day, one of the most beautiful sites I've been to (only slightly beaten by Interlaken and Jasper). They share the Adratic with Italy. So actually their cuisine near the coast is quite comparable to other coastal cuisines in the region. Lovely honest cooking, wash down with simple local wine. There are plenty of sites for water sports. Overall you get a pretty good experience and value in terms of what you pay out.

Sometimes you just don't want to (can't) blow €250/night for a dinky room in Paris. Good to have options.

Former journalist myself too. Former, because the journalism model is broken. So many people like OP doesn’t want to pay to read things, or simplify digital content as something that’s singularly produced by writers. Well, it isn’t as simple as that is it? Beyond the writer, how about the editor who finetunes a writer’s work (often more than 1 round of edits), the fact-checkers and researchers ensuring accuracy of final published piece, the photographer and illustrator adding colour to words? And if it’s a multimedia piece, how about the producers, sound mixers, graphic designers? Who’s paying for the server to host the articles that readup plans to scrape off of?!?

It takes a village to get 750 words published and that village has gotten smaller and smaller in the past 15 years with early retirements and media companies being bought out. It’s a self-fulfilling cycle as newsrooms gets smaller, quality/quantity can’t keep up, subscriber attrition, another round of cuts. Rinse and repeat.

I genuinely think the solution isn’t these novel ways of bypassing pay walls. It’s accepting that words on screen has value. At the end of the day, someone is paying. It can be me, who pays a monthly subscription (£8.50/month to New York Times genuinely didn’t feel that much for their breadth and depth of reporting, my TV license fee didn’t feel much to pay for BBC and its cadre of international journalists). Or some rich guy will pay for it on your behalf and make that money back somehow. Either they can make it back via ad revenue, or they’re getting something even more valuable — the ability to influence minds by gatekeeping what you get to read without paywall and indirectly (directly) get to be kingmakers. Not everybody needs to be Rupert Murdoch. Don’t overlook the influence of local and regional publishers and how they want to steer their local landscape.

Although clothes are not meant to be single-use, the popularity of fast fashion means a lot of clothes are worn only very few times. 1 in 3 adults (under 35) buys a new Christmas jumper each year. And an estimated 8 million of party clothes will be thrown out after 1 wear.

And clothing recycling schemes are an illusion. According to numbers in this BBC article, only 1% is actually recycled into another garment (12% into other materials like mattress and insulation. Which is still not a lot.)

At this point, we need to be less reliant on recycling. The 3 R’s start with ‘reduce’. That’s the direction we need to go. Overconsumption have been fuelling our economies, but it is killing our planet.