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United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

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Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#151

Post by shrikant »

hobbe80 wrote: post #95
shrikant wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you me? :) I used to do this exact same thing in the exact same age range. This was in the 90s though - what I still regard as the Golden Age of Flying (tm), and the Unaccompanied Minor service offered by most airlines was absolutely fantastic. You would be under constant supervision in the airports, get access to the nicer lounges.waiting areas, have priority for boarding/disembarking, and be generally treated l…

Chiming in from Sweden, I also loved flying as a young kid. These days I'm a parent myself and have sent my kids on flights (domestic only) using Unaccompanied Minor services several times, and it's always worked out well. BTW, in Sweden the age limit for using this service is 12 - if you're 12 or older you're considered old enough to fly (again, domestic) alone, something my 11 year old daughter who turns 12 in a fe…

Yeah, you're right, I just looekd it up as well it would appear that "12 or older" is the cut-off now for most places. Ah well, those were just better times for air travel.

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#152

Post by gearoidoc »

gnaffle wrote: post #79
chimi wrote: post #33

This is a problem bigger than United -- which has a lot of problems. This is what you get when you subsidize bad companies that need to fail. United needs to fail so someone better can take over. The moral hazards are ruining the country. I saw it recently with farmers struggling from the drought. Compare this farmer: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7417774n who has acres full of hay that don't do well in the…

Ryanair isn't subsidized. It's a bad airline that doesn't need to fail because it makes money. It's one of the airlines in Europe with the worst customer service track record. The same is true for lots of other compenies with terrible customer service. On the other hand, there are many state-owned or subsidized airlines that have very good customer service. So whether or not United needs to fail, I think the problem…

Ryanair is no frills but is INCREDIBLY punctual. Punctuality beats cushiness in short-medium length flights ( < 5 hours ) IMHO.

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#153

Post by jerf »

greedo wrote: post #114
pcrh wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think weather forecasting is currently good enough for a farmer to plan which crops to plant based on rainfall predictions. If every farmer planted a diversity of crops to account for all likely weather scenarios, then the average productivity would drop, as most crops would turn out to be unsuitable for the weather that occurred.

Exactly. Anyone that thinks farming in the US is a matter of pulling out the almanac and hoping the rain will match expectations is naive at best. Here's the thought process a farmer goes through in deciding what to plant: 1. What's the expected market price for corn and soybean. 2. What is the cost of crop insurance? 3. What's the current rainfall estimate? 4. What's the cost of water via irrigation and the cost of…

So, context, I'm a libertarian. But, bear with me a moment.

Why are subsidies bad? They "distort the market". How do subsidies distort the market? They cause overproduction of the subsidized good. Where an efficient allocation would tend to fairly precisely match demand to production (more precisely than any other known way of doing it), thus allowing the rest of the capital to go do other useful things, a subsidized good overinvests capital into producing the subsidized good, thus producing an opportunity cost to civilization due to the misallocation of resources into overproducing a good rather than doing something else more useful.

What is the result of farming subsidies? An excess of food. What is food? Food is one of the fundamental foundations of civilization. No food means total chaos in a matter of days. What does precisely producing 100% of the expected target food production means? It means the slightest bobble in production translates to shortages, and as we all know, shortages happen, and in particular, black swans will happen. A free market does not blindly assume everything will be swell and does build in some buffer against expected disaster, but the buffer can always be exceeded and the free market makes it very difficult for a given producer to make their own buffer larger, lest a competitor eat their market share.

Suddenly, a bit of "overproduction of food" doesn't sound like such a bad idea. Ideally we'd be storing the excess as much as possible, though regrettably food doesn't store as well as you'd like. Still, I'm actually in favor of a certain amount of food subsidy.

The ethanol subsidy is still stupid, and given subsidies may be bad on the grounds of being excessive, or because the interest group has captured the regulator and are managing to harvest the surplus directly instead of via overproduction (which is the result we're actually trying to produce for once), but in general, I'm not actually against a bit of overproduction of the foundations of civilization.

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#154

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

ktizo wrote: post #135
Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife and I once flew the length of the UK return for under £4 on one of their sales deals. No typo there, under £4. And I used to commute Glasgow to London once a week and would regularly pay for for the train from the airport to the centre of town than for the flight.

And if you take the train from London to Glasgow, it is currently £120 for a single ticket, whereas I can book on British Airways for a flight tomorrow for £74.

Should probably be a bit fairer to the train as you can get better deals than that and pay a lot more on BA. I've paid £80 for a first class return and I've paid more than £250 return on BA (both London - Glasgow).

But yes, the train can be terrifyingly expensive if you can't pick and choose your time (though I also find it more productive - no putting away your laptop for take off, no security, just sit down and do stuff).

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#155

Post by guga31bb »

potatolicious wrote: post #146
scrumper wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- I wouldn't send a 10 year old on a 30min bus ride alone That attitude is rather a shame, I think. How are we expected to raise a generation of functioning, independent adults if the default expectation is that kids are constantly chaperoned? The societal dangers are familiar to anyone who's tried to deal with the average intern. Unaccompanied minors on US airlines are very common. The service works well, most of th…

This is yet another case of modern parental paranoia. Your child's greatest risk factor comes from people already known to you - statistically Uncle Bob is many times more dangerous than a random stranger. As a society we have a tendency to focus our attention away from where the data leads us. We will act extremely suboptimally to prevent an incredibly remote risk, while ignoring much more likely ones altogether. If…

>statistically Uncle Bob is many times more dangerous than a random stranger.

Well, that's because Uncle Bob is around your kids much more often. I'm not sure if that would be true after adjusting for exposure rate.

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#156

Post by blisper »

2 months back my 13-year old nephew flew from USA to India as an unaccompanied minor in Lufthansa, with a flight changeover in Frankfurt. This is a 21 hour journey. It went off without a hitch. In fact, Lufthansa staff took good care of him, and he had a great time.

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#158

Post by incision »

imgabe wrote: post #139
lusr wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post is endemic of something I see a lot of on the Internet. You hide behind an account you just made, aggressively, lengthily and rudely responding to somebody who actually desired to contribute to the discussion without contributing much of anything yourself, without seeing the irony in any of this.

Actually I found it to be a pretty compelling and well reasoned indictment of grandparent's utter failure to consider the many complex factors that can lead to the necessity of subsidizing certain industries.

Not really.

The criticisms could be absolutely correct, but the response doesn't "reason" anything.

The response doesn't actually demonstrate that the parent is incorrect or propose a complete alternative. It simply states that it is wrong without a shred of evidence or exposition, only vague phrases suggesting omissions.

That's not an indictment, just a wordy insult.

---

I get the frustration with what appears to be shallow understanding of something turned into a sweeping judgement, but at least it's attempting something constructive. The response is pure aggressive arrogance.

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#159

Post by mherdeg »

adolph wrote: post #141
mherdeg wrote: post #80

I don't think this blog post's headline is quite right. "Losing a child" is putting a child on BOS-EWR instead of BOS-CLE and not noticing the problem until the child's family in Cleveland calls the parents and the parents call Newark, http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2009... . It sounds like what happened here was "causing a child to miss a connection" (and also separately "delaying the delive…

If my luggage didn't make a connection and I arrived at my final destination without it, I would think of it as "lost luggage." Would it matter to me if it was stuck in the connecting airport or sent elsewhere? No, it did not arrive with me, the airline lost it, even if temporarily. In lay person terms, the luggage is lost--the airline lost a child, yes.

Yes, I understand your point -- colloquially, one might say that the "child was lost".

Your mileage may vary, but when someone who works for a company has done something horribly wrong and I'm trying to clean it up, I often find it helpful to be careful with my language so that I can express precisely and correctly what it is that they did wrong.

This is mostly a matter of showing empathy, not being a stickler for technical correctness. When I talk to someone who can fix a horrible mistake, and I show that I understand precisely what went wrong and who's responsible without overreaching, I gain credibility and the person I'm talking to (who is after all a person, if perhaps one who has done something horrible) is more likely to believe that I understand them. If I can express that I know exactly how their system works and what part of it broke, it helps them realize that I'm seeing things from their point of view, and this can help bridge the gap between "my side" and "their side" to help them realize that we're trying to get the same thing done.

I've found empirically that practicing empathy with people makes them more likely to try harder to fix mistakes and gets better outcomes. It also saves a lot of time to be able to say "X happened", which is exactly what happened, and not waste anyone's time re-explaining the problem instead of fixing it.

But, again, this is just a thing that's worked for me in practice (as it happens, mostly with airlines). Concise, precise communication about what went wrong, who's responsible, and what I'd like to fix the problem has helped me get great outcomes dozens of times.

Re: United Airlines Lost My Friend's 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn't Care

#160

Post by bdunbar »

mherdeg wrote: post #80

I don't think this blog post's headline is quite right. "Losing a child" is putting a child on BOS-EWR instead of BOS-CLE and not noticing the problem until the child's family in Cleveland calls the parents and the parents call Newark, http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2009... . It sounds like what happened here was "causing a child to miss a connection" (and also separately "delaying the delive…

Total bummer to see service delivery fail here.

You are logically correct. From the parent's point of view the initial impression was 'lost'.

They put the kid on the plane in one airport, she failed to show up at the destination. This was all the parents knew for several hours.

This kind of first impression is going to stick with a person, and it's going to be retold that way.

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