Honestly, how can we ever beat climate change if this is the norm.
This is just our typical air travel fuel usage. These flights are the norm. Our solution to climate change can't be to count on a black swan virus pandemic to reduce global demand.
Airlines flying empty planes to keep flight slots during coronavirus outbreak
291–300 of 364 posts
Re: Airlines flying empty planes to keep flight slots during coronavirus outbreak
#292[deleted]
Re: Airlines flying empty planes to keep flight slots during coronavirus outbreak
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
AIUI, it isn't exactly that it is enshrined into law that if you don't use it, you won't get it next year. It's just that there's never enough money to give everybody what they want, and not using all your money is a primo-grade signal that you don't need it, so of course you lose it. I believe you'll find this isn't an "American" phenomenon at all. With some kind of award for not using all your money, it's hard to j…
so.. if I don't need $100 i.e. I can do all my work with $80. Then my budget for next year becomes 80. You have given a scenario where budget of one team is decreased.
So, where did that $20 go ? To some other team, right ?
What about the reverse scenario? If I cannot do all my work with $80, I ask for more, say $100. Then my budget for next year becomes 100.
I don't see a problem with this. Budgets are fluid and change from year to year. Because I saved the company $20 in year 6, I will be rewarded with $20 in year 7 if I ask for it.
Re: Airlines flying empty planes to keep flight slots during coronavirus outbreak
#294Is "thousands" of gallons even remotely accurate?
The numbers I can find are that a 747 uses 1 gal/second, so a single excess 5-hour flight is like 18,000 gallons. Even a ~45% efficiency reduction on that for more modern planes gives 10,000 gallons per excess flight. Multiply that by however many excess flights per airline per day and then by many airlines are doing this (I dunno, let's say 5 flights for 5 airlines? though this feels generous) and suddenly you have like 250,000 gallons/day being wasted per day. Multiplied by however many days they're doing this (idk, 10? though that also sounds generous) that's already like 2.5 million gallons every couple of weeks.
Did they mean "millions"?
Re: Airlines flying empty planes to keep flight slots during coronavirus outbreak
#295Ironic. 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.
Any large organisation will tend to run into exactly the same issues that the socialist centrally planned economies did. Centrally planning an economy simply can’t work and the inefficiency gets worse with scale. They have the politburo (the executive team), and apparatchiks (middle management). Large organisations are just a smaller version of a centrally planned economy.
Market forces have very limited opportunity to influence the micro-level internal resource allocation decisions of a large organisation. There’s some things you can to do mitigate this within an organisation, but having efficiency decrease with organisational complexity and scale is inevitable. There’s only two reasons I can see that this doesn’t devolve into soviet style catastrophe. Firstly, some of the lost efficiency is offset by the economies of scale. Secondly, if an organisation becomes too inefficient, their market position can (usually) be usurped by competition. Shareholders can also fire insufficiently competent management, but usually not before the damage is done, and they can’t exactly guarantee the replacements will be any better.
Re: Airlines flying empty planes to keep flight slots during coronavirus outbreak
#296AFAIK this is common practice in many armies, where each group obtains a predetermined amount ('dotation') of goods (gas, ammo, clothes...) for a given period (often a year), uses whatever it needs, then an accounting process takes into account whatever wasn't used in order to calculate the next dotation. It seems consistent and efficient. However it neglects human nature. The soldiers want to avoid missing anything,…
I'm not too familiar with the practice, but Zero-based Budgeting (ZBB) seems like it can solve this problem. It basically requires constant justification of the budget (as if you were making a budget from scratch) rather than looking at relative changes year-over-year.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-based_budgeting for more.
Re: Airlines flying empty planes to keep flight slots during coronavirus outbreak
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yep, they are human beings forced by the government to hide the truth under the guise of “harmony” with the threat of much worse. Also, you can criticize the Chinese government without having any issues with Chinese people. Learn the difference or life is going to be hard.
You're literally just agreeing with me, but in a condescending tone. My point is that not literally every Chinese person is "conspiring" to "fake" a "veneer" because they're "scared", because people != government. It's GP who needs to learn the difference.
Re: Airlines flying empty planes to keep flight slots during coronavirus outbreak
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t understand this. Can’t we put rules in place to prevent this? How hard can it be to take the slots back from the big airlines if they are not using them?
Hence, the problem with empty planes being flown around.
Ok, can’t they make another rule against flying empty planes? This seems fair, right?
Re: Airlines flying empty planes to keep flight slots during coronavirus outbreak
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines is why airlines go bankrupt so often.
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…
I don't know, pro sports are all unionized and they make money. Blaming the workers seems like rightwing nonsense to me.
Re: Airlines flying empty planes to keep flight slots during coronavirus outbreak
#300AFAIK this is common practice in many armies, where each group obtains a predetermined amount ('dotation') of goods (gas, ammo, clothes...) for a given period (often a year), uses whatever it needs, then an accounting process takes into account whatever wasn't used in order to calculate the next dotation. It seems consistent and efficient. However it neglects human nature. The soldiers want to avoid missing anything,…
I'm not too familiar with the practice, but Zero-based Budgeting (ZBB) seems like it can solve this problem. It basically requires constant justification of the budget (as if you were making a budget from scratch) rather than looking at relative changes year-over-year. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-based_budgeting for more.
It's very unclear to me how this is all that different from basically any other means of allocating funds that people use.
The only fundamental difference seems to be the rate at which you re-evaluate allocations.
Conceptually I see how this mitigates the sort of waste described by the OP, but implementing it seems ridiculous. How would you conduct bureaucratic audits in the middle of military operations?