271–280 of 364 posts
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.
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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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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…
> You can probably personally blame me, at least to some degree, for the fact that United pulled out. When I was at American Airlines, we were consciously trying to push United out of JFK. That was our goal.
Once you give up those slots at an airport like JFK, good luck getting them back.
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Hoarded? Jeff Bezo’s billions are tied up in Amazon. That’s providing no value? No wealthy people are keeping their cash under their mattress. It’s actively invested and providing capital for future growth.
> Hoarded? Jeff Bezo’s billions are tied up in Amazon. That’s providing no value? Yes, hoarded. You're really bringing up Amazon? You're talking about the same Amazon that paid no federal taxes last year? I paid more taxes than Amazon did. The same Amazon that encourages a work environment where their warehouse employees wear diapers [0]? The same Amazon that forces its employees to work around a dead body [1]? Amazo…
So that means Amazon didn’t spend any money on income taxes in 2018? No. Even though Amazon’s “current provision” number for 2018 was negative for federal taxes, Amazon said it made income-tax payments totaling $1.2 billion during that year, more than from 2011 through 2016 combined.
[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/does-amazon-really-pay-no-taxes...
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Not also in the US. They're entirely different situations with entirely different goals by the people doing it. Microsoft was trying to avoid a penalty for itself, one company. The businesses in China (not all obviously) are conspiring with the bureaucracy to fake economic activity on a massive scale, to put on a veneer for the outside world. This is about appearances to the world, because China is very scared right…
How about you stop with the nationalism? People in China are actual human beings, not part of a hive mind. They react to individual incentives.
Also, you can criticize the Chinese government without having any issues with Chinese people. Learn the difference or life is going to be hard.
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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).
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.
For other spectrum, it’s easy enough to acquire spectrum that microwave ISPs are able to get into local markets with very limited capital. I graduated with 2 folks who started an ISP together and the spectrum was cheaper than the hardware to transmit on it at the time.
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When a metric becomes a target
Aren't all metrics targets?
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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?
Only for them to immediately be gobbled up by 1 or 2 big players. 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 privile…
Big companies buying small companies is good. It’s a reward for improving the market. Big companies preventing smaller companies from even starting via government regulation (i.e. regulatory capture) is what’s bad.
Giving it to the government is just skipping to the worst possible outcome. Nobody has any incentive to compete.
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What I don't like is the DoD keeping the best 5G spectrum to themselves (3GHz-4Ghz) while the rest of the world is using it, putting our future lead in communiciations industry at risk.
Lead? Telecom in the US is an oligopoly, with most of the major spending backed by government grants. Many areas are still supported by rotting copper and old 2g/3g towers because there's no incentive for providers to upgrade them. Unless you meant something else by "communications industry".
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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.
And yet, all of these companies that run like command economies have collectively out-competed all the companies that run like market economies. We know this, because the latter... Don't really exist. No company of any note operates like one. Does that imply that command economies are actually more efficient than market ones?
That might also explain why centralized command was so common throughout history. The political entities of the past were much smaller than today and could be centrally organized, but they competed against their neighbors for resources in a regional market. It's only in the past 2 centuries that political entities have become large enough to encompass entire markets within themselves and have had to step back and let the market do the large scale economic allocation that they've become too large to do effectively.