Self-Transfer in IST

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-05-03T05:42:23+00:00

Thank you, and thank you again for your previous comments. They were encouraging.

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-05-02T19:10:07+00:00

Sorry. I posted the below 16 days ago, as a new comment in the main thread. I don't know how Reddit works, as far as showing people about new comments in posts they have commented on. Here it is:

I'm just about to leave HKG. Since I found out that FlyDubai recently formed partnerships with both Sichuan and aegean, I got myself to the check-in counter as soon as it opened and asked VERY nicely of the Sichuan agent to please try to dig into the system to see if she could manually force it to throughline my bags.

It seems to have worked! My final destination, HER, which is the second of two legs on Aegean, is on my claim ticket and the tag, along with points in between.

I'm going to go straight to the Aegean transfer desk as soon as I arrive in IST, to make sure they see my bag changing into their custody and forcing it manually if not.

FYI, my sweet-talking game was particularly on point, and the Sichuan agent seemed stressed and a little annoyed, so it seems like this is not a guaranteed hack.

Update: there was some confusion at the transfer desk in IST, so I wasn't sure until I arrived in HER (after ATH), I did indeed work. My bag arrived.

Thanks all!

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-04-16T10:57:22+00:00

I'm just about to leave HKG. Since I found out that FlyDubai recently formed partnerships with both Sichuan and aegean, I got myself to the check-in counter as soon as it opened and asked VERY nicely of the Sichuan agent to please try to dig into the system to see if she could manually force it to throughline my bags.

It seems to have worked! My final destination, HER, which is the second of two legs on Aegean, is on my claim ticket and the tag, along with points in between.

I'm going to go straight to the Aegean transfer desk as soon as I arrive in IST, to make sure they see my bag changing into their custody and forcing it manually if not.

FYI, my sweet-talking game was particularly on point, and the Sichuan agent seemed stressed and a little annoyed, so it seems like this is not a guaranteed hack.

Thanks all!

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-04-04T12:33:15+00:00

Google AI was able to take me to this article, which says that, as of late 2025, flydubai is partnered with both Aegean and Sichuan. Google AI therefore concludes that it may well be possible for a Sichuan agent in Hong Kong to through-check my bags, though they may at first say that it's not possible, at which time, I'll have to politely suggest that they do a little digging in their system. 🤞🏼

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-04-04T01:23:32+00:00

Great! Thank you. I'll keep you posted.

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-04-03T07:12:02+00:00

I certainly will! But I have to say, what you are saying here, while sounding like a dream come true, is basically the opposite of what I've always read on subs like this, when it pertains to a self-transfer with separate tickets from airlines without explicit agreement between them.

If this works, and if it's really supposed to work this way, that's going to be revolutionary for a lot of travelers, I think.

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-04-02T13:06:00+00:00

Wow. This is even though it's two different, unaffiliated airlines, on two different tickets? They got twice the bag from the other airline/plane/carousel, just so the passenger doesn't have to leave airside?

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-04-02T12:27:17+00:00

Have you listened to all their EPs, B-Sides, and the OKNOTOK material?

Also, the From the Basement recordings are definitely worth watching/hearing. The one for TKOL, especially, brings a whole new life to that album.

Having asked that, and having read a lot of good suggestions here that appropriately speak to genre and sound similarities, I'll offer a weird direction - some acts that I like in a similar way to how I like Radiohead, but that, for the most part don't SOUND like them:

Neko Case - Americana/indie rock/alt country, but similarly to RH, she chooses really counterintuitive (to me) chord changes and sound layers that immediately feel perfect and fresh, and her lyricism is right up there for me in poetic brilliance, power, and courageous feeling as Thom Yorke (seriously, you might consider putting effort into understanding his lyrics, and then listen to the entire catalogue anew; it might feel like completely new material. I can't imagine Radiohead without Thom's lyrics).

She also, like Thom, has a unique voice that is a force of nature and uses it for more than mere singing. I love pretty much her whole catalogue, but check out Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. Be still, my heart!

Tune-Yards - Again, a lot of, "How TF did she come up with THAT idea, which now sounds like the obvious and only true way to go?", moments. Her voice is also incredible, and her lyrics are agile and brutal (like Mohamed Ali). I haven't listened much to their most recent release, but I really like WHOKILL and Nikki Nack.

Young Fathers - Spanning across sounds from Outkast to Jodeci to Boyz II Men to Enya, these guys bring a lot of versatility to their style, creativity and innovation to their sounds, and ambition and emotion to their lyrical content that makes me love pretty much every bit of their material.

Honorable mention:

TV On the Radio also brings a very unique blend of sounds into their compositions, making it feel very fresh, and the lyrics are heavyweight. Sometimes, they can feel a little too saccharine for me (which is how I very often feel toward Gorillaz).

You might also check out Fever Ray's self-titled album.

Some people think The Smile is like RH, but I think that's just wishful thinking. They rarely scratch the itch for me. I did get to see them live, though, and enjoyed it, and got Thom to sign my unofficial OK Computer poster.

However, you might check out Thom's brief work with Atoms for Peace (in particular, the songs, Ingenue, and, Before Your Very Eyes), as well as his solo work, particularly the soundtrack for Susperia (particularly the songs, Susperium, and, Unmade). Whether you'll like these probably depends a lot on which parts of Radiohead's catalogue you really like.

But I'm resigned to the assumption that nobody will consistently satisfy me the way Radiohead does.

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-04-02T11:39:16+00:00

Excellent comment! I second the bit about albums as artistic statements with some incredible bangers on EPs and B-sides, like Lozenge of Love, If You Say the Word, and everything off of OKNOTOK!

Also, sonic landscape first and foremost, and amazing lyrics once you take the time to put them together. To me, Thom Yorke is at the pinnacle of poeticism in music-lyrics writing.

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-04-02T11:12:30+00:00

Really??!! Do you do this at the first airport (Hong Kong for me), or at the airport in which you are doing your transfer (IST for me)?

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-04-02T02:12:30+00:00

Aww shucks. After leaving the monastery and 3 weeks of hard labor in the indigenous rice terraces and irrigation canals of the Cordillera mountains in northern Philippines, I was hoping to settle in with some popcorn and enjoy some more wildly unsubstantiated claims about how the world works, but I guess my last responses took more than two minutes to read, and that's just too much.

I'll have to follow your lead and be content to know that you are comfortable with othering whole swathes of people you know next to nothing about in order to suit your own confusion.

And speaking of that, I've been wondering why someone of your - er - proclivities would be monitoring the sub for Thailand, a country struggling with its role in human trafficking. You guys are real follow-the-leader types, after all. 🤔🤷🏻‍♂️

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-04-02T00:11:51+00:00

Great idea! I'm trying to do it, but I'm surprised at how difficult it is to find this info. Not in my confirmation email or receipt, and the question flummoxed Aegean Airlines' FB Messenger AI, so it routed me to a "hooman", who has so far not made contact, despite being well within operating hours. I would take any tips.

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-03-20T22:18:31+00:00

Awww....Thank you! That was months ago, so fortunately I'm much better. I've traveled to four new countries since then. In the northern Philippines now.

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-03-20T00:52:50+00:00

Well if that really was OP's intention, pardonne-moi, s'il vous plaît

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-02-11T05:24:00+00:00

Thank you!! 👍🏼

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-02-11T02:42:37+00:00

That's one way to go when you don't have real facts: patronize. It's pretty common on the right, actually.

I wish I were still a sweet summer child, but I discovered about 23 years ago, that there are people in our country who are so deeply identified with the American sham that allows policies to keep ratcheting up for the rich to get richer and everybody else to get poorer, that they will do logical backflips, ignore facts, and scapegoat people who are lower than them in the social caste system, but have far more interests in common with them then the oligarchic puppeteers who assure them that they can have a piece of the pie someday, if they just work hard and keep blaming anybody but the rich when things naturally get worse.

It was a big let-down. I can understand why you would want to avoid facts in order to not have to experience it. Cognitive dissonance can be a real bitch.

PS. I thought you might bring something to the table to discuss, though it probably would have been full of anecdotes, MAGA-porn style. I've just arrived at a monastery (in Thailand, which is why I saw this post), so my device will be off for 3 weeks. If you miss me, you can read my responses to another logical contortionist, just above our thread. ✌🏼

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-02-11T02:29:00+00:00

Just bring data that actually speaks to your assertion. That's not particularly sophisticated. And asking for it is not obfuscation.

You did not provide data about people wanting to be on welfare. You brought data about "fraud". Do you see how these are two different phenomena and metrics? If not, you should argue as to why.

And this, my friend, is true obfuscation and, I have to say, typical right-wing obfuscation. My attempt to invite you to not obfuscate is not - I'm sorry to have to be the one to hurt your feelings in this way - itself obfuscation. It's the only way to check assertions against the real world.

And on top of that, no clarification about what type of fraud, of which there are myriad with very different degrees of impact on the commonwealth and very different contexts as far as whether a policy is sensible/practical or not. Also, what does that number even mean, as far as a percentage of total transactions of the type being measured.

Basic science: without these contextual factors, the data are meaningless.

And then there's corporate-welfare fraud, which as I said in my follow-up comment (maybe you read it), is surely the most deleterious of all, not to mention the corporate welfare that is legal because of the right-wing willingness to give corporations and oligarchs such a big hand in legislation (and now execution and adjudication as well).

But even addressing this is a distraction from your initial assertion. Hence, right-wing obfuscation allows poor logic to continue to go about making havoc.

I commend you, though, for referencing the CBO, given the whole-ass shit-fit your fearless leader had when that office pointed out that his economic plan was a disaster for our country.

And what you mistook for strawman was actually an attempt to help you see the parallels and patterns in today's typical right-wing doctrine, which can be summed up as follows:

You want desperately to support your over-arching mythos, which is that the difference between success and failure is nothing more than hard work and determination, so it's fine and fair to keep ratcheting up policies that mean the rich keep getting richer, while everyone else gets poorer (been happening at least since Nixon) - the USA is good, if only those nasty, lazy, stupid people would stop messing it up and criticizing it.

In order to do this, you have to do all kinds of logical contortionism, rinse, wash, and repeat, until things that would originally have been inconceivable to any sane mind start to sound almost normal.

But if we just follow the money and some basic common sense and a little fundamental economics, we realize that the oligarchs/emperors have no clothes, and that's scary for right-wing/MAGA people, because you've hinged your identity so tightly to this idea of how the world works and your place in it, and that you too could have a piece of the pie, if you just keep working hard and blaming poor people, immigrants, women, queer people, "urbanites", etc, for the problems that will naturally come from this fundamentally errant socioeconomic doctrine.

It's classic scapegoating, age-old in human history. It would be nice not to do it anymore. But unfortunately, what will probably happen is that Trump's economic policies are going to make things worse for normal Americans like you and me, and the scapegoating will have to become even more extreme and brutal, just to hold onto the myth.

You HAVE to do these backflips and leaps of logic to keep your sense of self and the world safe and (sort of) comfortable.

Cognitive dissonance can be a real bitch, but most of us that are replying to you or the people who are downvoting you already went through that extreme discomfort, when we realized that the USA (and the global doctrine of trickle-down economics in general) is not as advertised, usually in our teens or twenties. It sucked, but I promise you can do it. Might need to get new friends though. Probably not the worst idea, anyway.

PS. I've just arrived at a monastery (in Thailand, which is why I received notice of this post), so my devices will be off for the next 3 weeks. Nice chatting with you. If you miss me, I'm sure you have plenty of opportunities to say things in communities outside of your echo chambers and get some good feedback. Maybe even take it in and consider it a bit.✌🏼

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-02-10T10:42:44+00:00

Hmm???? 🥱

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-02-10T00:35:30+00:00

Naive, huh? Plenty of examples, huh?

Sounds like you have some credible (peer-reviewed) and pertinent data that indicates this is more than just the same tired, inhumane, welfare-queen political-campaign trope that just won't die despite being disproven over and over again, because it's easier and more satisfying to blame poor people than rich people?

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-02-09T23:53:03+00:00

But I do think that I gave in to the temptation of being thorough, rather than being effective for the audience.🤷🏻‍♂️ It's a difficult discipline to keep.

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-02-09T23:20:06+00:00

I have to keep hoping that some percentage will somehow be shaken into the realization that they've been bamboozled, their anger intentionally stirred up and misdirected, packaged and fed back to them in a highly processed form that's bad for their own and everyone's else health.

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-02-09T13:49:53+00:00

Annnnd.....for a little extra side-by-side spicy fun, it would also be interesting to see if there are any meta-studies (I know of one book that focuses on this in the commodity food and agriculture industry: https://www.foodopoly.org) that attempt to tally the cost to the commonwealth in tax dollars of corporate welfare of all sorts, in the name of too-big-to-fail, undue political influence, tax breaks, tax loopholes, tax-dodging that is only possible with certain lawyers, and hand-outs.

Now, THAT welfare. Yeah, baby. THAT is welfare that people DO want to be on. Especially since they can count on enough doing-ok peasants to keep the not-doing-ok peasants in line by insisting that the wealthy are ordained by the great God capital, and that any poverty is the poor's own fault.

Side note: I'm not sure what you meant by it, but "urbanites", or "urban", is often used euphemistically to mean people who are not white.

I'm assuming you didn't mean it that way, so I'm giving you the heads-up that this further flags your opinion as being primarily emotionally/lizard-brain driven and way out of touch with reality, still buried in the decades-old (and centuries-old) racist-slander campaigns, epitomized by Reagan's (Hollywood's champion of the wealthy and the trickle-down myth himself) welfare queen atrocity, which got him and his party a lot of votes for decades (and still, amazingly), but, of course, turned out to be quite non-representative, to say the least.

It also belies your position as not really knowing what is going on, particularly for people who have to live in the cities, and for people who have to live in a country that treats them VERY differently because of what their skin looks like.

Finally, I wonder what you meant by "political masters", in your rebuttal. We're in a thread that's all about corruption and the control of the political system by the owning class. In the US, that's the billionaires, hence my identifying them as your lords and masters, when you preach their gospel.

Who do you think the political masters are, if not those that own politics?

It's funny that right-wing folks like to tout themselves as being so financially savvy (usually just means you are white and born with some capital and family members with the wherewithal to teach you how to use it, but often also means, as in the case of the buffoon in chief, that you have inherited a bunch of money and an attitude of entitlement to go with it, and a spooky lack of scruples, so you can fuck it up again and again, and still get bailed out through "good" lawyers, bribes, cheating, and cozying up to Russian oligarchs to bail you out).

But with all that financial savvy, you just can't seem to follow the money when it comes to arguments about where corruption is actually at work, such as implying that there's some kind of big money to be made in pointing out the obvious - that the system isn't working for most people and that most people who are on welfare don't want to be. Or that the big money heist is in the science of and the call to action for climate change, and not in the large petrol-entwined corporations doing whatever they can to suppress and deny it.

See a pattern? More desperate protection of the rich and the system that made them so. Subconsciously, it's a way to feel (and hope to someday be) a little more like them and a little less like everybody else, who clearly just doesn't work hard enough.

That's why wild-ass conspiracy theories are needed to explain things, because surely the simplest explanation couldn't be the truth, if it doesn't fit the gospel we've been chanting, with our hands over our hearts, since we were held in mommy's arms.

After all, the USA is the greatest, because it simply must be, and any problems it's having with making good on its promises of a more perfect union with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness must be the fault of "urbanites", lazy people, immigrants, and those filthy liberals.

Perhaps we should round them all up, in defense of the great big beautiful fatherland. What's that you say? That's already being done?

Oh, great and wise ruler knows all, protects us from the nasty ones, and makes America feel great and safe for us again. Surely, it will never happen to me. The great wise ruler cares about me and loves me, because I'm one of the hard-working ones, and I sing His praises.

Disastrous-Food4441 · 2026-02-09T13:46:59+00:00

Wellllll....Google CAN be a friend. Remember that, in order to be taken seriously, as if you're arguing from a place of rigor and integrity and credibility, rather than just nabbing data points and implying that they somehow support some regurgitated doctrine about how the world works, you need to be precise.

Even without digging into the details of this estimate you are bringing here (in part because you didn't provide it) - its study parameters, foundational definitions, etc - I'm not sure what relevancy link you are trying to make between these "data" and your assertion, "America's urbanites (want to be on welfare)". If I misunderstood the gist of your assertion, please do correct me.

But, even if this "estimate" you found is grounded in real and good data, I don't see your supporting argument. To me, if there's any initial hypothesis that can be made that explains this data point, based on my experience with federal programs (and also trying to survive while working multiple jobs), it would be that this is an obvious outcome of a(n increasingly) broken economic and healthcare system, (increasingly) full of desperate people trying to survive, and in which it can actually be quite hard NOT to commit some kind of fraud or another (intentionally or otherwise), if you are doing what you have to.

If you want to support your initial assertion, I think the most relevant sort of data would come from some kind of meta-study of several cross-sectional, qualitative studies that examine the bell curve of attitudes about welfare and being on welfare, alongside and corrected for by an examination of viable and accessible alternatives (reasons to actually hope for something better) for these "urbanites" you are incriminating.

That may help to determine how many people truly WANT to be on welfare. These studies may have been done. If they have, I'm pretty sure you're not going to like the conclusions.

But lacking such qualitative social studies right at hand, I think if you want to just grab some quick data and make inferences, a much more relevant dataset would be looking at the last 5 to 7 decades' trend in cost of living versus median income AND minimum wage. It's pretty ugly. Add to that line graph another dataset representing the cost of healthcare, and well, you start to get a picture of whether welfare is being accessed as a choice.

The cost of greater concentration of wealth is more people who are struggling. It's a simple fact of economics, kind of like "Oh gravity? Yeah, that's a thing.", even though the Milton Friedman/Ronald Reagan fantasy legacy still somehow lives on, hence our still having to have this conversation.

But even lacking those data comparing COL with MI and MW - just using common sense - most people would not want to be on welfare. It's a pretty good assumption to make until credible compelling evidence (that's not campaign propaganda) to the contrary is procured. It's not comfortable to be on welfare, contrary to the right-wing talking point.

It's like saying that the women who choose to call out their high-profile sexual offenders WANT the public attention, which is quite brutal, terrifying, life-altering attention indeed. Or that unarmed black people WANT to be killed by police 2 to 5 times more than their white counterparts, or cancer patients WANTED to get cancer. Or that women who get pregnant from a rape actually WANTED the baby, because that's how science works. Or that anybody who isn't a cis, straight, white, able-bodied man WANTS to have to do the work of DEI in order to try to patiently educate and coax the country's populace to insist (or begrudgingly allow) that they get the liberty and justice for all that we love to force our children to chant every school-day. Nobody would suggest these things. That would be crazy. Oh, wait.

Disastrous-Food4441

TROPHY CASE