Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

thepointsguy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 627 posts

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#441

Post by nemothekid »

rzz3 wrote: post #336
nemothekid wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> that vaccine mandates are some global scheme by bill gates. While they’re all wrong, anti-vaxxers are a whole spectrum. I do think one big of nuance is important here though: there are a lot of strongly pro-vax people, like myself, who are strongly anti-mandate. The choice to take the vaccine is the correct choice. The other choice hurts not only yourself, but others. However there is no circumstance in which I’d s…

>However there is no circumstance in which I’d support the government requiring a medical procedure to be performed on someone without their consent.

You do realize vaccine mandates aren’t new? The chicken pox vaccine has been mandates for all children attending public schools for over 20 years now. It has been enormously successful in eradicated what used to be a very common disease.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#442

Post by buescher »

SilasX wrote: post #417
brandmeyer wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And a lot of "religious exemptions" are being turned down. This would be a bit like taking a staunch vegan and forcing them to eat something (via threatening career) that was tested on animals while they said otherwise. Considering all of the other household items that are also commonly tested using fetal cell lines (including acetaminophen, aspirin, ibuprofen, albuterol, pseudoephidrine), the analogy doesn't apply…

Heh, incidentally, there was a hospital that (reportedly) said, "okay sure, if you're swearing off all those other things you can claim a vaccine exemption": https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/hospital-staff-must-...

Many (most?) of those medicines are quite old and were developed before widespread legalization of abortion, let alone use of fetal stem cells in drug development.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#443

Post by nradov »

HPsquared wrote: post #395
jeffreygoesto wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't this the exact point of operation, controlling and finance in any large corporation wants to find? Extract from bottom to the top until it breaks and then hope to steer back a tiny little bit and keep operating in that state? Finance never did produce, it's whole purpose is to extract. Run a gasoline engine to lean and it will start to heat and stutter... As for the growth, in a peaceful society you can gro…

I don't know about that, with P/E ratios as high as they are I think investors assume companies will have an infinite lifespan.

With P/E ratios as high as they are I think investors are desperate and don't have anywhere else to put their capital.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#444

Post by Zigurd »

nradov wrote: post #439
Zigurd wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naive finance works that way. Sophisticated finance prices-in downside risk.

Sure that's the theory. But how do you accurately price in risk for rare events? The uncertainty is so large that any price you set is effectively just a guess.

Insurance and derivatives are supposed to find prices for rare events. And if an organization can't insure or securitize a risk it should make them think real hard about mitigation.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#445

Post by ihattendorf »

polartx wrote: post #416
drfxyjhdyfrhgc wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why downvote a link to a local news outlet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHOU

Bullet, meet messenger. I was, at first, very skeptical that so many people would walk out of the their jobs in a seemingly organized way, until I heard about the PTO angle of the story. I work at a company with “unlimited PTO” (because business leaders learned that they pay less with “unlimited” than they do with accrued). But in previous jobs, it was very common to accrue PTO (up to 2 to 3 weeks worth). Most employ…

PTO usage generally needs to be approved, I can't imagine Southwest approving enough time off to shut down their operations.

If employees are using PTO by claiming they're sick (assuming there's no separate "sick days" they would normally use), Southwest might have recourse to deny paying PTO but whether or not they will is another question.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#446

Post by brandmeyer »

buescher wrote: post #442
SilasX wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, incidentally, there was a hospital that (reportedly) said, "okay sure, if you're swearing off all those other things you can claim a vaccine exemption": https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/hospital-staff-must-...

Many (most?) of those medicines are quite old and were developed before widespread legalization of abortion, let alone use of fetal stem cells in drug development.

Nevertheless, human cell culture testing has become a fundamental part of the safe production of many common drugs. FDA regulation and approval extends not just to the chemistry of a drug but also to how it is manufactured, to ensure that the delivered product is safe.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#447

Post by nradov »

londons_explore wrote: post #424
brandmeyer wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful: you're letting ideology get in the way of the facts. Price gouging laws are exclusively a local and state matter, and only apply at the retail level. Although there have been proposals for price-gouging laws at the federal level, none have been enacted. State laws don't generally apply to B2B interactions.

I'm not sure it matters... Any goods wholesaler I know of goes straight from "in stock, the price is X" to "out of stock, even if you offer a million $ you can't have any". Nobody auto-increases prices as stock runs low. Perhaps it isn't illegal to do so, but nobody does it, probably because businesses believe it's illegal to do so.

What an ignorant comment. Commercial suppliers are fully aware that there are no price gouging laws. They choose not to boost prices when stock runs low because they don't want to burn relationships with long standing customers.

Also as a practical matter the software they're running simply doesn't have the feature to dynamically change prices based on inventory and lead time. So someone would have to manually update all the parts prices, then lower them again later. Not worth the hassle.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#448

Post by hef19898 »

Zigurd wrote: post #440
hef19898 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, efficiency usually results in an increased level of resilience. You can easily sacrifice both, jeopardizing profits. Every time I saw that happen, it turned out some department-specific KPI (it doesn't matter which department, finance, production, sales, logistics,..) looked really good while that happened. All other sucked, but nobody cared. IMHO, this over emphasis on one silo, at the expense of a…

I have never seen a KPI that is sophisticated enough to not get gamed and not create perverse incentives.

Single KPIs definitely not. Good system come close enough, more often then not I think the issue is the culture that prioritizes one KPI over all others. Or one department's priority.

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#449

Post by paulclinger »

smsm42 wrote: post #293
bobthepanda wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Southwest is literally the poster child of low cost carriers. They started the whole business model, which consists of a few things: * they operate literally one type of aircraft, and therefore only have to train their crew once, keep the specific set of parts, etc. * they optimize the hell out of making sure their planes are in use carrying paying passengers for the maximum amount of time * they fly a vast network o…

How operating one type of plane makes recovering from disruption harder? I'd expect it to make it easier - you can replace any crew with any other crew, and any plane with any other plane. Same with secondary airports - I am not sure how it makes recovery harder. Distributed systems are usually more robust against disruption that centralized ones - if you can't fly in an out of the hub, then all your flights in that…

Maybe it's the same effect as happens with monoculture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoculture#Risks): more efficient, but more fragile/risky?

Re: Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

#450

Post by nradov »

Zigurd wrote: post #440
hef19898 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, efficiency usually results in an increased level of resilience. You can easily sacrifice both, jeopardizing profits. Every time I saw that happen, it turned out some department-specific KPI (it doesn't matter which department, finance, production, sales, logistics,..) looked really good while that happened. All other sucked, but nobody cared. IMHO, this over emphasis on one silo, at the expense of a…

I have never seen a KPI that is sophisticated enough to not get gamed and not create perverse incentives.

That's why large enterprises typically use something like a balanced scorecard instead of individual KPIs.

https://hbr.org/1992/01/the-balanced-scorecard-measures-that...

Post reply on HN