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Here's an investment banker joke I've been hearing oddly often recently: "How do you get a million dollars?" -> "Invest a billion dollars in the airline industry". On a more serious note: there's a lot of talk on this page about the finance and logistics of starting a company like this - but I think the human factor is also worth mentioning. I fly a moderate amount, and whenever I have an hour or so to spare on a lay…
The airline industry has the lowest return on invested capital of any industry: http://centreforaviation.com/images/stories/2013/jul/05/ROIC... This analysis from McKinsey is worth a read: http://www.iata.org/whatwedo/Documents/economics/Profitabili...
Now Exxon just needs to buy Boeing and then start and airline bringing the full powers of vertical integration to bear. That's probably the only way to make a dime consistently.
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There are technologies today , for example teleconference rooms, which probably capture most verbal and non-verbal feedbackin meetings, to the points participants claim it's like being there. It would be interesting to do an experiment:isolate someone for a period of time, but let him have full contact with family and friends via the best electronic means we have , and measure the impact of his mood and well-being.
Even the full-presence suites don't quite work once you start going over any distance. The lag is just enough that the bit of your brain that processes NVCs gets a little out of sync with your thoughts.
Even if we take 150 as our guiding figure, if we assume direct fiber optic connection between sites, the maximum distance would be 45000 kilometers, which can basically connect any 2 points on earth.
So theoretically at least, it's possible. Achieving good latencies in real life is much harder though :)
[1]http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/solutions/Enterprise/Video/t...
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It's precisely where the idea of a corporation comes in. How can a group of people risk so much? The only way is if it fails they don't go to prison or suffer for the rest of their lives because of that failure. Otherwise it would be very hard to convince people to take such enormous risks. The main "problem" with capitalistic business is in expectations. People need to realize that every day comes with risk. And onl…
> And only through that risk do we see reward. But the little guy working the line, he just wants a paycheck with no risk. This is a bit of pseudo-economics that's popular in the business community nowadays. Risk can be priced, in that it costs money to shift risk to someone else and you can charge a premium for taking on risk yourself. But statements like "only through that risk do we see reward" are just mumbo-jumb…
Here's an investment banker joke I've been hearing oddly often recently: "How do you get a million dollars?" -> "Invest a billion dollars in the airline industry". On a more serious note: there's a lot of talk on this page about the finance and logistics of starting a company like this - but I think the human factor is also worth mentioning. I fly a moderate amount, and whenever I have an hour or so to spare on a lay…
P.S. Professional pilots are known to whinge quite a lot so you might want to take what he said with a little pinch of salt... try lurking on www.pprune.org for a few weeks and you'll see what I mean :)
P.P.S. Having said all of that, some shocking stuff really does occasionally go on (I've personally seen it happen) so there are genuine grievances out there.
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The Fed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System#Monetary...
banks don't normally use the fed discount window to finance ordinary loan activity.
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Even the full-presence suites don't quite work once you start going over any distance. The lag is just enough that the bit of your brain that processes NVCs gets a little out of sync with your thoughts.
According to cisco design guidelines[1] , 150 msec is acceptable network latency(not including video encoding/decoding). Also [2] talks about 300 msec total latency about the limits for remote surgeries. Even if we take 150 as our guiding figure, if we assume direct fiber optic connection between sites, the maximum distance would be 45000 kilometers, which can basically connect any 2 points on earth. So theoretically…
The key issue is that you don't just need to be certified to fly a 737, you need to be certified to fly a 737 for a specific airline. This makes strikes extremely powerful because you can't easily hire replacements.
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> It's an illustration of why banks and bank debt are so important in our economy! This capital-intensive sort of business doesn't happen by an entrepreneur writing a $1 billion check from funds he has on hand. Aren't you just pushing the "problem" back one step? The entrepreneur writing a $1 billion check from funds he has on hand is now the banker , not the airline guy. Of course, I guess these days you can keep pu…
Not exactly, because bankers aren't required to have monetary reserves equal to their loan amount. So a bank can "loan" an entrepreneur $1B of which the bank only physically possesses, say, $100 million. This is what is meant by banks "creating" money -- the bank just created $900 million.
The key to understanding the fractional reserve system is that banks take title to your money when you deposit it, and you get in return an asset (the account) which is essentially a promise to pay you that money on demand.
A bank can't just "create" $900 million by making a $1 billion loan when it only has $100 million on hand. Rather, depending on the reserve ratios, $1 billion in notional assets can exist backed by only $100 million in central bank money. That's because those notional assets are not in fact money, but IOU's that people are willing to treat as functionally equivalent to money.
Here's an investment banker joke I've been hearing oddly often recently: "How do you get a million dollars?" -> "Invest a billion dollars in the airline industry". On a more serious note: there's a lot of talk on this page about the finance and logistics of starting a company like this - but I think the human factor is also worth mentioning. I fly a moderate amount, and whenever I have an hour or so to spare on a lay…
http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2009/06/16/pilot-pay-want-to...