Hasta La Gadget!

Most of us have old smartphones lying around, and while they might not be the latest and greatest anymore, the odds are also high that they’re functional and decently powerful. If you’ve been planning to ship them off to a used phone service but have never gotten around to it, there’s a better option: turning those old handsets into functional … Continue reading

There’s something utterly delicious about hotel beds… and towels… and robes. They’re so decadently fluffy and epically cozy, we’d totally steal them if we could.

And much of the time, we do. Towels are among the most-stolen items in hotels, The Telegraph reports. We could’ve guessed that.

But we never would’ve guessed that hotels can tell when you’ve stolen a towel (or robe or duvet cover for that matter). It’s all thanks to a tiny, M&M-sized tracking device that thousands of hotels have embedded in their linens — a device that lets them know where their towels, robes and bedsheets are at all times.

The main service they use is Linen Technology Tracking, which provides the chips to some 2,000 hotels around the country, according to its executive VP William Serbin. The company’s initial goal was to let hotels track which linens had made it from the hotel to the cleaners and back again, but the chips have also proven handy for keeping tabs on stolen goods that guests think have slipped out unnoticed.

“One hotel uses the chips to monitor the elevator banks,” Serbin told The Huffington Post. “Any time one of their towels passes through the elevator bay, Housekeeping gets an alert.”

While he says the hotel in question doesn’t charge guests for lifting towels or robes (he can’t say which hotels have his trackers installed, but we’ve found the name of at least one that does), hotels that use Linen Tracking do know precisely how many linens have been stolen each month. The average hotel loses 10 to 20 percent of its linens per month — mostly to wear and tear, Serbin says. Two percent of linens that go missing are stolen, he estimates.

His company’s chips send signals to antennae at the hotel’s entrance or exit, letting owners know if a linen has left the property — they do not tell hoteliers the exact coordinates of a missing towel or robe.

… And for that, hotel thieves everywhere are thankful.

During the Communist period in East-Central Europe, when people talked about “homelessness,” they were speaking of a spiritual or political condition – of being in exile from their country of origin or feeling homeless in their own country because of the presence of Soviet troops. At that time, there were few people living on the street. Everyone had to have an address. Homelessness did not officially exist.

Today it’s another matter. For many of the same reasons that homelessness increased in the United States in the 1980s, the phenomenon has intensified in East-Central Europe. In Hungary, for instance, there are around 30,000 homeless people, many of them in Budapest. People sleeping in the underground entrances to the subway or bundled under street arcades are a common sight.

“The structural roots of homelessness are very much similar in Hungary and in the United States,” explains Hungarian activist Balint Misetics. “In this respect, the transition to free market capitalism in the early 1990s could be seen as a parallel to the neoliberalization of the U.S. state, and it is possible to identify similar structural processes behind the emergence of mass homelessness in the 1980s in the United States, and a decade later in Hungary.” There was also both deinstitutionalization (the release of people from institutional settings such as hospitals and treatment centers) and decriminalization of behaviors like “vagrancy” in the U.S. context and “unemployment” in Hungary under Communism, which previously had been used to put homeless people behind bars.

But, Misetics continued, “the most important factors are de-industrialization and the corresponding loss in stable, manufacturing jobs, considerable state withdrawal from housing policy, and the destruction of cheap intermediary housing forms for very low-income people, SROs in the United States, and workers’ hostels in Hungary.”

Misetics has been an activist since his teenage years. Now in his twenties, he has been deeply involved in the movement The City Is for All, which seeks to empower the homeless and address the structural roots of homelessness.

When he was younger, he had more of a service-oriented approach to the problem. He helped bring the homeless to the hospital if they were sick and raised money for more shelters. But now he takes a different approach.

“It’s like a game of musical chairs in which there are not enough chairs for everyone,” he told me in an interview in Budapest in May 2013. “We all run around, and the homeless are those who run around but when the music stops, there’s no chair for them. And people ask, ‘You didn’t get a chair so what’s wrong with you? Maybe you didn’t move fast enough? Maybe you did not pay attention?’ But those are the wrong questions. What really matters is there were not enough chairs. Most of the sociologists working on issues of homelessness and who are also involved in the shelter system have been concerned with the personal and social characteristics of the people who could not find a chair to sit on, whereas they should really be talking about why there are not enough chairs. Why is housing not affordable?”

The issue, in other words, is not just a matter of treating the symptom of homelessness but addressing the root cause in the overall crisis of housing and economic inequality in Hungary. Misetics told me that anywhere from 800,000 to 3 million people in the country live in substandard housing. That’s nearly one-third of the population.

“This is an estimate that groups together people who are strictly speaking homeless, who live in substandard housing, whose housing is overcrowded, who are indebted and in danger of losing their homes, and so on,” he explained. “It is a striking number, but you should also consider that by now, around 4 million people are estimated to live under the substance minimum as calculated by the central statistical office. This is very serious, even if the term “substance minimum” is misleading perhaps, because it does not refer to extreme poverty. If you use the definition of the European Union, for example, maybe 1.5 million are living in poverty in Hungary. But it’s calculated in different ways, so these numbers are hard to compare. Still, no matter what poverty indicator or threshold you use, poverty has been on the increase in Hungary in the past years.”

We talked about his views on militancy, how homeless activism connects to other political struggles in Hungary today, and why this kind of work can be traumatic over the long run.

The Interview

Tell me how you first got involved in activism. Was there a moment when you were not an activist and then you were an activist? Or was it more gradual than that?

I think it was gradual. Already in high school, from time to time, I went to different demonstrations and protests and events. The earliest I remember was connected to something Tarlos Istvan said – he’s now the mayor of Budapest – that he essentially wanted to ban “homosexual” cultural programs at the Sziget Festival. And he also said that if he could he would really like to ban gay and lesbian people in general from Sziget, but since he couldn’t do, that at least he would ban these cultural programs. What was even more problematic is that the organizers of Sziget actually went along with this and made some changes in the program. So, there was a protest.

There was also one about recycling glasses for Pepsi and other sodas, organized by activists in Humusz.

Humusz?

It is the abbreviation of this working group around issues of trash. They poured thousands of these non-recyclable PT soda containers in front of the headquarters of Pepsi. I was around 14 at that point.

I also started to work on the issue of homelessness but initially as an ad hoc sort of social worker — talking a lot with homeless people and trying to help with whatever I could. I did this in a pretty intense way. I also organized some charity events in my high school. We played music before Christmas in the subway stations, and the money we collected we gave to the Shelter Foundation.

I also felt more and more that what needed to be done was something much more political, that you need to appeal to justice and rights as opposed to humanitarian concerns or the goodwill of the rich. There was a recently formed activist group that I joined, called People of the Street. We focused on homelessness and the right to housing. We organized sleep-outs in one of the major subway stations where a lot of homeless people had been living. The idea was to show that homelessness is not something that you can make invisible, which the authorities wanted to do. We decided to make it visible by going there to protest.

The first of these sleep-outs was the first event I joined. I arrived to the protest with these quotations from the Hungarian constitution saying that in Hungary every citizen has the right to social security. I asked them whether I could put those up. Then they invited me to join. That’s where I spent a lot of time in the following years, starting around 2005. I’d participated regularly in organizing meetings, and the people in that group saw the world very much like I did.

We’ve learned a lot about homelessness. Perhaps we also managed to make some progress in changing the public discourse on homelessness so that it would not be so focused on shelters. That’s one of the most problematic things about homelessness, this compulsive association between homeless people and shelters, as with sick people and hospitals or criminals and prisons.

We did occasionally protest together and work together with homeless people. But in the regular day-to-day activities of the activist group, no homeless people were involved. It was hard to sustain the group and the work we were doing in that group because one of the core members went to Sajókaza, which is in the northeast of Hungary. I’m not sure whether you’ve been there. The Jai Bhim Network, which is active there, is one of the most promising projects in Hungary with respect to poverty and the empowerment of the poor. Also, another core member and I went to study to the United States. So then it was difficult to sustain, which was very sad.

But it actually turned out to be a very good opportunity to rethink things and also to read about how organizing around issues of homelessness is done in other places, especially in the United States. I studied at Bard College, and my colleague, Tessza, she studied at the City University of New York. We met the community organization Picture the Homeless, which was founded and is led by homeless people. That’s where the idea came that we should do something like that as well in Hungary: we would not only work on behalf of homeless people but together with them.

We applied for some money from the Davis Project for Peace Foundation, which I could luckily do as a student at Bard. We got some money, so we invited four members of Picture the Homeless to hold workshops for Hungarian homeless people and possible allies, which was extremely successful. We also had doubts about the extent to which homeless people could be organized or whether such an organization could be sustained in the long run. But the initiative turned out to be quite successful, and that’s how our organization, The City Is for All, emerged from these workshops.

The very idea of people coming from abroad, and especially people coming from the United States, to teach organizing to homeless people was very inspiring for the homeless, who also shared many of the prejudices of the wider society about homeless people. In Hungary, the United States is still something big and exciting and rich for many, and perhaps especially for lower class people. The fact that these workshops were held by Americans was very empowering. It was also especially empowering to our Roma members because two of the trainers who came were African Americans. That’s how we started in 2009, and I have been participating in that since then.
And then there’s the current wave of protests, especially concerning the fourth amendment to the constitution, which is now called the “fundamental law”. The government wanted to emphasize how different the new constitution is, so now it’s not called a constitution anymore. These protests were the most intense political experience I’ve had.

And it was really a spontaneous movement, in the sense that it was not a long-term project in which we would meet regularly to organize a campaign, for example. It was extremely rapid and intense. We needed to do something within a few weeks. So we met almost everyday and organized either a civil disobedience action or a large protest twice every week. Our organizing meetings lasted until 3 and 4 am. It was also very open. We met in this place called Sirály, which is a community place/pub named after the bird seagull in Hungarian. It was a perfect place because it served as some sort of a center for this whole subculture. In that period, you didn’t need to come to an organizing meeting to end up in an organizing meeting. You just went there to have a beer with your friends, and then you saw a large group of people organizing around something that they think is really important, and then you just sit there and listen and then maybe you join in.

That group, which we came to refer to as the “constitution is not a game” group because that was our slogan, is still active. Now we are organizing a protest against segregation in public schools and also another event against a law that would empower the government to conduct surveillance on anyone who works in the state administration, without any suspicion. It would also empower the government to extend this surveillance to essentially anyone without any suspicion.
It is actually very hard now to organize because you’re always on the defensive, and also there’s just too many things going on. Sometimes they would vote five or six laws in a week, any one of which would cause a general strike in France or Germany. So then you need to decide which one to prioritize, so it’s really tiring.

When you were getting involved as a teenager, was this something that your family was enthusiastic about, or did you have conflicts with them?

To read the rest of the interview, click here.

Looking for travel inspiration? We’ve been asking fascinating people — Pulitzer Prize-winners, world champion athletes, entrepreneurs, artists, and more — to share the greatest travel journeys of their lives.

New Guinea

Scientist and author Jared Diamond, who won the Pulitzer Prize for “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” is emphatic: “The most beautiful, exciting place in the world is New Guinea, with no close seconds. This is not my opinion, this is objective fact.”

Here’s his case: “Within this island, you get the whole world, from the equator to the North Pole, squeezed in. It’s on the equator, but its mountains are 16,500 feet high, so there are glaciers. That means that as you go up a New Guinea mountain, you’re going from tropical rainforest, into oak forest, into beach forest, into sub-alpine forest, into tundra, and then finally up to the glaciers, all within a few miles. In fact, it is the only place in the world where you can stand on a coral reef and look up at a glacier. Also, there are hundreds of different tribes with hundreds of different languages, so from a human point of view, it is the most exciting place in the world.” [Map]

Huli Wigmen crossing in the forests of the Southern Highlands, Papua New Guinea. (Wade Davis via Getty Images)

Aerial view of the Bensbach River floodplains. (Col Roberts via Getty Images)

Canyonlands National Park, Utah

Acclaimed Afghan-American memoirist Tamim Ansary moved from Kabul to the United States as a 16-year-old to attend high school. “Every year they would do a trip in spring, a camping trip someplace,” he recalled. “One year they went to Canyonlands, which is in Red Rock Country in Utah. I remember then, I said, ‘I’m coming back here before I die.’ A couple of years ago, we did go back. I’m too old to make the hike anymore. I couldn’t hike into all the places that I remember. But the Red Rock Country of Utah is just overwhelming. Don’t let your life go by without having been there.” [Map]

Mesa Arch sunrise landscape in Canyonlands National Park. (Dave Soldano Images via Getty Images)

(Alan Majchrowicz via Getty Images)

Boundary Waters Canoe Area, Minnesota

Tamim Ansary also raved about the Boundary Waters wilderness area. “If you look at the map of the United States and Canada, you’ll find it along the border there. It’s thousands of lakes. They only let three parties put in at any portage point in a day, and they don’t let you come closer than a quarter mile. They have to carry your canoe and all your stuff down; then you get into whatever lake you’ve come to, and that connects to another lake, and that connects to another lake. And there’s nobody there! We were there for a while and we saw one other party. We camped in a little island that had a campground and everything, but only one and there was nothing else there. I just loved that.” [Map]

Birch Lake, Boundary Waters Wilderness Canoe Area, Minnesota. (Christian Heeb via 500px)

Rishikesh, India

Britta Hölzel is a rare combination, a Ph.D. neuroscientist and a yoga and meditation practitioner. Her research at Harvard Medical School and elsewhere has focused on how meditation changes the brain.

“I’ve traveled to India again and again,” she said. “A special place is a town in the north of India that’s called Rishikesh. They call it the yoga capital of the world, a lot of yoga ashrams are there. It’s right where the Ganges comes out from the Himalayas and goes into the open flatlands. While there, I had a moment of deep realization that this is how I want to spend my life. This is what I want to dedicate my life to, both the research and this kind of practice, because I think it just makes such a profound difference to one’s life to have an orientation towards living a good and spiritual life and a meaningful life. To me, that makes the entire difference.” [Map]

Suspension bridge to Swarg Niwas Temple, Rishikesh. (Exotica.im/UIG via Getty Images)

The Ganges River near Rishikesh. (Ivan604 via Getty Images)

High Sierra Trail, California

To win last year’s World’s Toughest Mudder contest, endurance athlete Ryan Atkins raced for 24 hours straight, covering 95 miles in the Nevada desert, all while wearing a wetsuit.

Endurance competitions have sent Atkins to some incredible locations. “One of my coolest traveling experiences was running the High Sierra Trail in California,” he said. “That was awesome, probably the greatest trail I’ve ever experienced. It starts at Sequoia National Park and finishes on top of Mount Whitney in California, and it’s just a totally gorgeous trail. That one stands out.” [Map]

High Sierra Trail approaching Mt. Humphreys (Gettystock)

Killarney Provincial Park, Canada

We also asked Ryan Atkins about the most beautiful place he’s ever visited. “Honestly, it’s probably a park not too far from where I live,” he says. “Killarney Provincial Park, about five or six hours north of Toronto. It’s beautiful Canadian forest, with crystal-clear lakes and white quartzite rock all over. There’s hiking and canoeing. It’s just a gorgeous place.” [Map]

Island in Georgian Bay along the Chikanishing Trail, Killarney Provincial Park

Hanalei, Hawaii

“I would say the most beautiful place I’ve seen is Hanalei, which is on the northern side of the island of Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands,” says Tim Kochis, the itinerant former CEO and chairman of Aspiriant, a large independent wealth management firm.

“It is just beautiful, particularly in the sunshine, and then after a rain because there are these series of waterfalls that are falling from the north shore mountains into the ocean. If you see this from any distance, you wonder, how could any place on the planet be more beautiful than this?” [Map]

Stand-up paddle board in Hanalei Bay; Kauai, Hawaii.

A morning shot of Hanalei Valley. (Scott Ingram Photography via Flickr)

Tuscany and Positano, Italy

Lalita Tademy has written multiple bestselling historical epics. Asked about her favorite travel journey, she said, “My husband and I went to Italy for a month. For two weeks of that, we were stationary in Tuscany. We rented a farm house. I wrote every morning, very early. Then in the afternoons, we’d go and visit hill towns and just walk around. We had no real plan. We would just walk. We would stumble into markets that were vibrant and wonderful, or restaurants that we hadn’t done any reading but they turned out to be just absolutely delightful.” [Map]

Positano, she said, was the most beautiful place she’s ever seen. “Absolutely blew me away. Up on the cliffs, perched up above everything, watching the ocean, the boats. It was just stunning. I spent so much time on the balcony, just staring. It was inspiring, and the colors were beautiful, everything in bloom. Gorgeous.” [Map]

Sunrise over farm of olive groves and vineyards in Tuscany. (Gettystock)

Positano, Italy on the Amalfi Coast. (Gettystock)

Mongolia

Senior U.S. policy aide Jamie Metzl has traveled to virtually every corner of Asia. His favorite destination? “Oh, that’s an easy one,” he said. “I absolutely love Mongolia, it is such a magical place. The Gobi Desert is actually where most of the dinosaurs in the Museum of Natural History come from.”

He continued: “As opposed to China, Mongolia is this huge country with a very small number of people. Everyone has their little tent — the Turkic word is yurt, but in Mongolia it’s call a ger, and you’re miles away from everybody else. So there’s this expansive frontier culture, a culture of welcoming and of self-reliance and of not wanting to be part of some system that’s going to oppress you. And the people, at least my Mongolian friends — I certainly don’t vouch for every Mongolian — but they’re just such a creative, fun-loving, big-hearted people. They’re not the only people in the world that way, but it’s certainly in a way that’s touched me.” [Map]

A row of Mongolian gers. (Gettystock)

Sand dunes in the Gobi Desert. (David Santiago Garcia via Getty Images)

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Transcription services by Tigerfish; now offering transcripts in two-hours guaranteed. Interview text has been edited and condensed.

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There are so many great sales happening right now, it’s hard not to blow your paycheck on awesome winter duds. And while we don’t need too much help in the shopping department, we are always pleased to see our favorite stars step out in outfits that are both stylish and affordable.

This week Beyoncé sat courtside at two basketball games in inexpensive pants — a pair of $85 jeans from Topshop and some cool faux leather ones from Zara. And if that isn’t enough to make you excited, Selena Gomez looked every bit the minimalist in a light gray ribbed-knit sweater from Forever 21 (that you can easily scoop up for under $20).

Check out the best cheap celeb finds of the week and let us know which ones you’re coveting.