141–150 of 364 posts
Does anyone have any reliable information on the risks of flying right now? I took a couple flights this week, seemed to be status quo. People of all ages flying with no one practicing any special hygiene measures.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, the auction model doesn't seem to work well when it comes to spectrum. What you end up with is a few big players delivering awful service while having enough money to outbid anyone, essentially preventing any competitor from ever breaking into the market to provide better service.
The government can only give away slices of a fixed resource for so long. Eventually it runs out. You literally can't start an airline from scratch. You have to first buy one that already has landing slots, then figure out how to dispose of the planes/staff/operations/debts that come with the package. Is that really better for competition than just having a market for slots?
How about a market for destinations? Oh wait that will be immediately controlled by one player.
Hm it seems consolidation is the natural path we prefer towards solving a problem. Why not let the bureaucracy manage it then?
Give up the pretense. This is all market capture of finance by low effort grifters who will throw a fit when they don’t get privilege for nothing but being an obnoxious talking head.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a stupid rule. This is not an unforeseeable case. Just sell the slots. You can sell them once and forever or you can auction them yearly or every two, three, five years, whatever. Demanding planes run for no one’s benefit is just setting money, and more importantly resources, on fire.
I don’t think you understand the problems associated with the “just sell the slots” idea. The problem is that big airlines could buy up slots and then not use them. They wouldn’t necessarily have an incentive to sell them, either, because the buyers could be small, regional, or low-cost companies that could leverage them to build up a small but profitable business and later take on the bigger airlines (as happened wi…
Ironic. I had heard tales of the old Soviet Union about trains running empty to fill distance quotas. It was presented as the ultimate proof of how messed up their system was.
This is similar, but different. We have an system that works in the normal case, that is struggling with an exceptional case. Could it be improved? Sure. Is it a sign that western civilization is doomed? No.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>When the dollar collapses after the Fed cuts rates, the interest rate will rise very high. As long as the dollar denominated debt outstanding continues to dwarf the amount of dollars in circulation (claims on future dollars far exceeds the amount of dollars that exist), I don't see the dollar collapsing. Interest rates can also rise due to credit risk. Fake interest rates set by FRBNY cant fix credit risk, they cant…
What corporations are engaging in bank-like activities without access to the mentioned facilities??
Covid 19 is a good opportunity for extremely sensible change. Lets all stop needlessly flying, lets all work from home (if your just doing an office job anyway), lets use local products and not stuff from half way across the world.
That ship sailed 70 years ago. We could maybe go back to the brief era of limited international trade in the inter-war era, aka the Great Depression, but it won't be fast or easy.
Airlines almost never make profits, because their revenue and main cost are strongly pro-cyclical: In the booms, they fly full, but with high fuel prices. In the recessions, they fly empty, but fuel is cheap. Covid-19 has devastated travel, but also dropped the oil price - still no profits.
Airlines (and other businesses with very high fixed costs) can be profitable if there’s enough consolidation in the industry. Otherwise they get into price war death spirals with no way out.
Ironic. I had heard tales of the old Soviet Union about trains running empty to fill distance quotas. It was presented as the ultimate proof of how messed up their system was.
Edit: Found an article mentioning this practice: https://mont.thesentinel.com/2019/10/03/one-imperfect-day-in...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Never heard that, why would they in planed economy?
In authoritarian states you frequently get situations where you're punished for not meeting certain bureaucratic metrics. For example, in China word is factory output is used as a proxy for productivity, so they're allegedly running factories without producing anything just to raise the power bill to appear productive. Face is ingrained in Chinese culture partly because in an authoritarian state where your behavior m…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is just another instance of the classic Soviet problem. A scarce resource is allocated by a government bureaucracy instead of a market, and the bureaucracy's design is imperfect, so nonsensical incentives fall out of it sometimes. There's no irony. It's just kind of quirky for the West to manage flight/landing slots this way, instead of an auction (as the FCC does with spectrum).
At least in Britain, there's an open market for the landing slots. Slots at Heathrow can be sold for tens of millions of pounds. https://simpleflying.com/flybe-heathrow-slots/