Weigh more, pay more: Argument for charging obese people higher flying fares • Hacker News Board

Re: Weigh more, pay more: Argument for charging obese people higher flying fares

#51

Post by heretohelp » Mon, Mar 19, 2012, 11:52 AM UTC

moonchrome wrote: post #49

heretohelp wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 100% serious, the deviation between the highest and lowest metabolisms save for people with specific conditions like hypothyroidism is not a significant contributor to obesity.

What about insulin sensitivity and different sources of calories. Surely you aren't suggesting that eating a 1k calories of pure protein, pure carbs or pure fat is the same ? Even proiten/carbs/fat branch and have different effects on the metabolism and are required in different amounts for a balanced diet to achieve some desired effect. What about muscle mass vs fat tissue, they burn calories at different rates and…

Much of that is addressed here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3723464

Our product accounts for a great deal of factors, don't conflate my over-simplistic agreement with the OP for a lack of dedicated research into how we actually plan to help others.

Macronutrients and their impact on satiety are core to our product and to helping people eat healthier.

Re: Weigh more, pay more: Argument for charging obese people higher flying fares

#52

Post by dalke » Mon, Mar 19, 2012, 11:59 AM UTC

vacri wrote: post #20

slimdizzy wrote: post #3

The author dilutes and weakens his argument by bringing up obesity. Whether a 80kg person is 40% fat or 10% fat doesn't matter; the central point is that a person who weighs more, consumes more, and thus ought to pay more. I wish he stuck more to that point instead of running off on the tangent about health and the environment. Friends with whom I discuss this proposal often say that many obese people cannot help bei…

Weight of a 747-8: 442 metric tons. Weight of its 467 passengers ex luggage, assuming 80kg average: 37.3 metric tons. That 442 tons has to move as a whole regardless of how lean your diet is. So when you're paying for your flight ticket, extremely little of it is about moving the meat in your body. After all the overheads (salaries, fees, whatnot), whatever's left of the ticket that's paying for jet fuel has less tha…

"Extra luggage is more work for the airline". Here's one scenario I came up with: a student from Australia does a high school year abroad to the US, joins the school football team, which places first in state that year. With a growth spurt plus putting on muscle weight that student ends up 15 pounds heavier on the return trip 10 months later.

Does the student have to pay more money at the gate in order to return home? If that student does not have the money, does the student have to leave luggage behind in order to make up for the weight? Will that be bad publicity for the airline?

Or the other way: suppose someone has a round-trip ticket from Australia to Maine to fulfill a dream of hiking part of the Appalachian trail. During the hike, that person loses 20 pounds. Does the airline reimburse the person for lost weight? And if so, is it in dollars or euro? If not, is this rightly seen as a penny grabbing method by the airliners?

If someone buys three bottles of wine at duty free (about 12 pounds) before flying back to Australia, will the gate agent charge them for the extra weight?

All-in-all, it seems like a bad idea for the airlines, and for relatively little money per flight.

Re: Weigh more, pay more: Argument for charging obese people higher flying fares

#53

Post by mjburgess » Mon, Mar 19, 2012, 12:43 PM UTC

kristiandupont wrote: post #47

mjburgess wrote: post #13

Should we charge more for disabled people? Does any additional cost to a company mean that it can treat its customers differently? We must have a society where the equality of people is incontrovertible, and we make accommodations for the fact. That a thin small woman weighing 50Kg is worth the same as a muscular or fat person weighing 100kg. To ask one to pay more for a service because of what they are is unequal tr…

This is a good point, but surely you will agree that we can only discuss where to draw the line, not whether it should be drawn or not? As said in another post, life is not fair. If we take your point to the extreme, society should even out the disadvantages that come from having below-average intelligence.

Well there are many competing princilpes, and the way we prioritize them will affect the kind of society we end up with.

I believe in this instance, the benefits of equality outweight the costs.

If we believe that a "free" market would distribute prices differently so that lighter people paid less and you believe the free market price is fair. Then some small ecnomic harm is occuring, to those who pay more.

The social cost of rectifying this small harm however is, i think, considerable. It makes transportation harder for poorer people and perhaps those that need transport the most. And so on.

In this case, i think the $500 extra /flight can be distributed across the couple hundred passengers without much to-do.

Re: Weigh more, pay more: Argument for charging obese people higher flying fares

#54

Post by fab13n » Mon, Mar 19, 2012, 12:53 PM UTC

vacri wrote: post #34

fab13n wrote: post #31

Paying by the kg, whether kg of flesh/fat or kg of luggage, wouldn't be absurd. The kg of fat might be a bit cheaper, though: you need luggage crew to haul luggage, but most haul themselves autonomously. A reason to impose penalty on luggage weight is that it affects what people bring aboard: penalties might entice you to leave some luggage at home; they won't entice you to leave your rolls of fat on the ground. But…

It's not the pricing scheme, it's the invasion of privacy that people will arc up about. Someone who is sensitive about their weight - and there are a lot of them - will be very difficult to manage in this situation.

You mean, the privacy of those people who will be scanned and groped by TSA thugs minutes after they've checked their luggage in?

It seems that people are ready to give up the last bit of dignity as soon as they enter an airport; if a company could offer a substantial discount in exchange for paying by the kg, many people would cope with it. Not everyone, but enough people to sustain an airline company.

The reason why it won't happen is because their pricing scheme is already optimized to extract the last dime each traveler is willing to pay. Introducing a weight variable would mess that system up.

Re: Weigh more, pay more: Argument for charging obese people higher flying fares

#55

Post by antihero » Mon, Mar 19, 2012, 1:16 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #11

antihero wrote: post #4

I don't think 75KG is a good standard weight. I mean, what about people who are muscular? I go to the gym and nobody I know would say I am obese (I am a little overweight) but because of muscles I'm around 109KG - I was 100KG and overweight, now I'm thinner and stronger but actually heavier. So should people who are muscular be exempt? Do we do it based on height vs muscle or body fat percentage? Unless we consider t…

> I don't think 75KG is a good standard weight. I'm sure that can be discussed, focusing on this detracts from the article's main point. > I mean, what about people who are muscular? They're completely irrelevant, this is not about people being healthy versus not healthy, this is about weight being a direct driver of costs for airlines. > So should people who are muscular be exempt? No, why should they be> > Do we do…

Because all of these factors have some degree to which isn't under our control - by this logic a muscular woman pays less than a muscular guy, which is sexist.

Would you have disabled people pay a huge amount for their wheelchair? How is discriminating based on sex or height or build any different? Some people naturally gain muscles at a much faster rate than others. What makes it okay to discriminate against those people?

Having a society where people are not discriminated against based on factors they cannot control is far, far more important than private profit.

Re: Weigh more, pay more: Argument for charging obese people higher flying fares

#56

Post by antihero » Mon, Mar 19, 2012, 1:20 PM UTC

rahulrg wrote: post #7

antihero wrote: post #4

I don't think 75KG is a good standard weight. I mean, what about people who are muscular? I go to the gym and nobody I know would say I am obese (I am a little overweight) but because of muscles I'm around 109KG - I was 100KG and overweight, now I'm thinner and stronger but actually heavier. So should people who are muscular be exempt? Do we do it based on height vs muscle or body fat percentage? Unless we consider t…

Trying to understand how to factor in "fairness" here. The fact is that irrespective of body content (ie fat or muscle), what counts for the economics of the airline is the total weight. Heavier the passengers and the luggage, more fuel is burnt, and the costs correspondingly go up. I agree with you, however, that the 75 kg choice is pretty arbitrary. I wonder, though, if tickets online can be initially issued at pri…

But then, many people are on medication that causes huge weight gain, or are naturally built bigger, or are taller, or are male. We shouldn't support discrimination in order to detect profit, and something like "how much someone weighs" is far too simplistic to take into account the factors that would contribute to it being a horrendously unfair system.

Re: Weigh more, pay more: Argument for charging obese people higher flying fares

#57

Post by kahawe » Mon, Mar 19, 2012, 1:26 PM UTC

vacri wrote: post #20

slimdizzy wrote: post #3

The author dilutes and weakens his argument by bringing up obesity. Whether a 80kg person is 40% fat or 10% fat doesn't matter; the central point is that a person who weighs more, consumes more, and thus ought to pay more. I wish he stuck more to that point instead of running off on the tangent about health and the environment. Friends with whom I discuss this proposal often say that many obese people cannot help bei…

Weight of a 747-8: 442 metric tons. Weight of its 467 passengers ex luggage, assuming 80kg average: 37.3 metric tons. That 442 tons has to move as a whole regardless of how lean your diet is. So when you're paying for your flight ticket, extremely little of it is about moving the meat in your body. After all the overheads (salaries, fees, whatnot), whatever's left of the ticket that's paying for jet fuel has less tha…

> Extra luggage is more work for the airline

This right here. Also, storage space for cargo is quite limited and packed full in comparison to the space used in the passenger cabin and you can easily and more safely accommodate 35kilos more "meat bags" than a couple of 35 kilo big, heavy suitcase that don't fit under the seat or into the overheads.

Re: Weigh more, pay more: Argument for charging obese people higher flying fares

#58

Post by rrouse » Mon, Mar 19, 2012, 1:40 PM UTC

dalke wrote: post #52

vacri wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weight of a 747-8: 442 metric tons. Weight of its 467 passengers ex luggage, assuming 80kg average: 37.3 metric tons. That 442 tons has to move as a whole regardless of how lean your diet is. So when you're paying for your flight ticket, extremely little of it is about moving the meat in your body. After all the overheads (salaries, fees, whatnot), whatever's left of the ticket that's paying for jet fuel has less tha…

"Extra luggage is more work for the airline". Here's one scenario I came up with: a student from Australia does a high school year abroad to the US, joins the school football team, which places first in state that year. With a growth spurt plus putting on muscle weight that student ends up 15 pounds heavier on the return trip 10 months later. Does the student have to pay more money at the gate in order to return home…

Plus you have the bad publicity when people learn that they are being weighed for the flight. For many people, it's a touchy subject (like obesity or an eating disorder) that can turn traumatic pretty quickly.

Not a good idea at all

Re: Weigh more, pay more: Argument for charging obese people higher flying fares

#59

Post by kahawe » Mon, Mar 19, 2012, 1:40 PM UTC

heretohelp wrote: post #14

tomp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of evidence that obesity is not hereditary/predetermined, but is a choice (or a consequence of a weak mind/bad incentives). I was in Vietnam 5 years ago. I didn't see any fat people. Look at photos/documentaries of Africa. No fat people. To take it to the extreme, there were no fat people in Auschwitz. That is not to say that it was good in any way and that people should starve, but just that it is not…

Obesity is 100% calories in/calories out. Good thing I'm at a startup trying to help people eat healthy and in reasonable portions without feeling unduly hungry.

> Obesity is 100% calories in/calories out

Generally, yes, you are technically correct. What I hate about where this train of thought often leads is: it is not human, at all. It ultimately makes all fat people look like lazy, greedy and stupid slobs because hey, the answer is sooo simple and totally obvious, right? 100% calories in vs. out!

What you completely fail to realize is the squishy human part that makes a lot of people eat way too much and not move around enough. Food and food addiction (mild or heavy) can be very powerful escape mechanisms for underlying psychological problems and once you are caught in that downward spiral, it can be very difficult to find a way out of e.g. depressions AND on top of that shedding all that excess weight with potentially life-long damage already done to your tissue and skin.

With fat shaming being a very widely accepted form of discrimination, it will take a LOT of courage and strength to lift oneself out of that hole, so I don't find it that surprising that a lot of people can ultimately not change and they hardly get any sympathy or healthy, positive encouragement, quite on the contrary, a lot of additional toxic shame.

So there definitely is a lot more to this.

Re: Weigh more, pay more: Argument for charging obese people higher flying fares

#60

Post by kahawe » Mon, Mar 19, 2012, 1:55 PM UTC

kristiandupont wrote: post #47

mjburgess wrote: post #13

Should we charge more for disabled people? Does any additional cost to a company mean that it can treat its customers differently? We must have a society where the equality of people is incontrovertible, and we make accommodations for the fact. That a thin small woman weighing 50Kg is worth the same as a muscular or fat person weighing 100kg. To ask one to pay more for a service because of what they are is unequal tr…

This is a good point, but surely you will agree that we can only discuss where to draw the line, not whether it should be drawn or not? As said in another post, life is not fair. If we take your point to the extreme, society should even out the disadvantages that come from having below-average intelligence.

> life is not fair

Then the line can very well remain drawn where it already is drawn: same price for everyone. Also, see top comment with an estimation how little price difference there would be between "petite" and "overweight". It would cost the airlines a lot more to implement this and then prices for everyone would be higher plus it will add a lot humiliation on top of the shenanigans the TSA is already putting you through.

This whole idea is nothing but minutiae and micro-managing, being lost in details and on top of that very unrealistic when you think about implementing it.

Also, I am surprised how quickly all human rights and rights of equal treatment suddenly seem to stop existing when it is about "fat people".