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Southwest operational meltdown as hundreds of flights canceled or delayed

thepointsguy.com

461–470 of 627 posts

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

#461
post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is because it goes agaist the narrative that the only people that oppose mandates are backwater rednecks that have no education. It can not be that high skilled professionals oppose having their body autonomy revoked... it can not be that "my body my choice" should extend to more medical choices than 1... no no. this can not be allowed

If fetuses were infectious - if you could stand by a pregnant person at the bus stop or grocery store or school, and suddenly find yourself pregnant by breathing the same air - "my body, my choice" would not be the reproductive rights slogan.

That is both a weak and dangerous argument if you place any value at all on individual freedom. As a vaccinated person I have a MUCH MUCH greater risk of dying in a car accident on the way to the grocery store than I do of contracting a deadly case of COVID.

Before the vaccine was widely available you may have had a case but once you become vaccinated your risk level drops to well below other risks we already accept as part of having a free society.

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

#462

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.

Any major business is going to have an army of lawyers to look into any potential business practice. It would be trivial for them to shoot off an email to legal asking, "can we jack up the prices of our parts based on inventory levels?"

The answer might be affirmative, but that doesn't mean that doing so is a good business move. If you were in charge of sourcing at a company, and a supplier pulled that shit on you, you'd be finding a replacement supplier rightquick. If a supply will gouge you for this reason, you can be sure they will be looking for other reasons in the future.

TL;DR: price gouging, even if legal, is bad optics.

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

#463

Some financial facts that help explain the situation: over the past 10 years US airlines have spent about 95% of their free cash flows on stock buybacks. This is the money they could have used to have a buffer to deal with these situations or to improve their systems. Why do they care so much about their stock price over long term sustainability? In 2020, Southwest lost 3.1 billion dollars and took 6 billions of gove…

> This is the money they could have used to have a buffer to deal with these situations or to improve their systems. Matt Levine covered this last year [1]. The basic gist of it was that the CEO is focused on the shareholders, and the best use of the money was on stock buybacks. Spending money on improving customer or labor relationships wouldn't have helped during the start of the pandemic when all the airlines were…

Airlines with government backing end up with the only rational choice being to take more risk.

I'm reading a book right now called "The Power of Nothing to Lose" which explores the primary and second order effects of individuals and companies being put into situations where they literally have nothing to lose. It's been an interesting read so far - recommended.

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

#464
post #439
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.

You guess based on data and do your best, that is more or less how all expert opinion works. An actuarial table also doesn't tell you anything about what will happen, but it allows you to do your best.

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

#465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downvotes on this site have gotten insane. This is a perfectly rational comment. Whether you agree with them or not, just burying your hand and refusing to acknowledge that a nontrivial percentage of workers oppose mandates is just asinine. Boneheaded authoritarianism. If you ever wondered how horrors like the soviet union and nazi germany are possible, take a look at the religious groupthink that has seemingly c…

[flagged]

> anti-vaxxers have now adopted a near cult-like delusion

I think you’re right, but I also think that anti-anti-vaxxers are at least as cult-like - disparaging Ivermectin as “horse dewormer” is as disconcerting as insisting that their healthy 20-year-old cousins friend dropped dead after getting the vaccine.

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

#466
post #336

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…

> pro-vax people, like myself, who are strongly anti-mandate

I’m vaccinated, but very uncomfortable with the government ordering me to be.

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

#467

There is currently a major outage at a major part of the infrastructure of our nation, and nobody believes anybody about why. The airline is saying it's something to do with weather, but somehow they're the only airline effected. Everybody online seems to the think it's some sort of labor strike, but the union denies this and nobody can find anywhere where people are planning this. And yet thousands of people are stu…

Seems like it’s a “wildcat strike” where some employees organize and strike silently without the consent or direction of their union.

This kind of subverts union leadership though. How can the union leadership negotiate in good faith when there's no evidence that they are in a position to control or act on behalf of members?

Then again, I think it's technically illegal for members of the airline industry to actively strike. So maybe this is how it's done for plausible deniability sake.

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

#468
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not familiar with the Nordic legal environment, but this could be that because Pfizer has a better safety profile than Moderna, so they'd rather use Pfizer. At the same time, both Pfizer and Moderna are much safer than raw covid according to all direct data that I've seen.

not if you're below 30

Haha, not sure about below 30, but below 18 both covid and vaccines have minuscule negative impact. Instead of arguing whether the impact is 1:100,000 or 1:90,000 (AHA, vaccine mandates for children are a moral imperative because after adjusting for adverse effects short term numbers lean oh so slightly in favor of vaccines), perhaps drop the conversation as irrelevant altogether? There are other concerns in life...

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

#469
post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, my vaccination protect me. They are not threat to me once I have been vaccinated, the data and science show this fact. There is no reason for a vaccinated person to view an unvaccinated person as a threat.

* Vaccination is not 100% effective * Vaccinated people do still spread the infection, albeit to a smaller degree * Some people cannot be vaccinated, and for others it's less effective For the above reasons, it's beneficial to me and society at large if as many people as possible are vaccinated.

>>Vaccination is not 100% effective

Nothing is, but my risk from COVID post vaccination is less than other society risks we accept as normal risks of living in a free society, for example my risk of dying in an auto accident is many times greater than my risk from COVID post vaccination

>> Vaccinated people do still spread the infection, albeit to a smaller degree

I am not sure how this statement is relative to question on if an unvaccinated person poses a risk to me to the point where we must violate their body autonomy for forcibly inject them with a medication against their will

>>Some people cannot be vaccinated, and for others it's less effective

While true, this means those people should take additional risk mitigation, this however is NOT a justification for vaccine mandates, not in my view. These people should wear N95 Masks, take extra pro cations and be extra vigilant about social distancing and/or going to large public events.

>>For the above reasons, it's beneficial to me and society at large if as many people as possible are vaccinated.

Sure, but that is not what is being debated. The question is do those reasons justify the use of force,threats, and ultimately government violence to forcibly inject people.

I say no.

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

#470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've cited two comparatively minor failures confined to a very small subset of what banks do. There's a whole lot of critical software systems in banks that don't touch personal bank accounts. If you've ever worked on bank systems before, it was certainly in a very limited capacity. I did code-level support for a large internal data management system for the federal reserve bank in the mid aughts. I'm not really in…

Money disappearing from a bank account is a "comparatively minor failure"? Sorry, I stopped reading at that point.

Money disappearing is a minor failure in the sense that it is easy to track. Banks do daily audits to check that money sent in one side is deposited in another. If there is any issue, they will track it and rectify within the 3 days grace period created exactly to work around these bugs.
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