211–220 of 364 posts
I feel like there's a short-term solution to this: You can keep your slot and not fly the plane, as long as you pay some large percentage* of the cost of each ghost trip to the organisation that'd resell your slot. Your 'flight' must be fully crewed. That way the carbon isn't emitted, (some) jobs are kept secure, and the airline recoups a little of the money they would have otherwise lost.
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Another reason why work shouldn't be a precondition for being alive. I think that would be a sensible change.
Yet it's work that funds the taxes that would pay for basic income. Unless people are willing to take a massive decrease in quality of life to fund such a system, it will never happen.
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.
This formula gives you the odds someone on a plane is infected: 1-(1-IR)^N N is the number of seats. IR is the infection rate. Takes a lot of assumptions to get the odds someone on the plane is infected, and even more to get the answer you want. The biggest assumption would be how likely you are to get the virus just because someone on your plane has it. You could replace the N with total number of people at an airpo…
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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…
The American model for government funding is also a bit messed up ( at least what I remember from high school civics in the 1980s) where each department must spend what they are allocated or the department is guaranteed to get less money in the next fiscal year budget. I could be wrong but this creates a disincentive for saving money as most states and the federal government work on the same model.
With some kind of award for not using all your money, it's hard to justify it for the people spending it... and "rewards for not spending all the money" are also really easy to cut out of next year's budget...
Certain patterns just naturally emerge with budgeting at scale, and if you've got some brilliant idea about how to fix it I can assure you that with just some minimum business acumen you can become a very rich person.
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Companies are only profitable because they serve their users better than their competitors.
You cannot seriously believe this. Is a parking company only successful due to how well it serves its users? No, it extracts rent.
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I used to work for a consulting company and heard similar stories for IT budgets. Companies nearing the end of financial year with budget to spare would scramble to get more consultants in to spend the remainder, otherwise the following year their budget would be scaled back to whatever they actually spent.
Don't forget that a company internally is run like a Soviet Style planned economy. 5 year plans, no way for people on the ground to adjust plans, inflexible leadership. I could also mention things like total disconnect between communication from leadership and reality or motivational posters. It's all there. It's not surprising they create similar behaviors.
Does that imply that command economies are actually more efficient than market ones?
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This appears to be happening in China with electricity quotas. Running AC and machines in empty factories to make quota. "Local companies and officials are fraudulently boosting electricity consumption and other metrics in order to meet tough new back-to-work targets" https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/Lights-go-on-but-no... "Video evidence. In #Wenzhou, factory manager told they must consume 3000 kWh electrici…
When a metric becomes a target
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Zerhoedge has also been a month ahead of the media with respect to coronavirus reports. The fact that ZH speculates about conspiracies does not mean that everything on their site is BS.
If you doomsay about everything that could possibly cause a crisis, you may eventually be right about one of them causing a crisis. Does it make their articles in 2018 about how the economy has about to collapse more accurate?
CNN and Fox also misrepresent news regularly - that doesn't mean they have nothing useful to report.
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Zerhoedge has also been a month ahead of the media with respect to coronavirus reports. The fact that ZH speculates about conspiracies does not mean that everything on their site is BS.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
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The answer is to look at who controls the pilot's union: very senior pilots. The airline management is mostly interested in what percentage of its revenues are paid out to pilots; the distribution of the money among the pilots does not affect profitability. The very senior pilots on the other side of the table say "We need the most senior pilots to get $300,000 in pay and benefits." The airline's response is "The onl…
and what are executives making?
Doesn't change that the union screws over the new guys in favor of the more senior members.