Get away with Google Flights

I like daily price bargraph. Gives a sense of overall prices.

I just used this to book my flight to PyCon 2015 oddly enough. It was pretty damn easy to use and let me jump from its search results to directly booking with Air Canada. Pretty smooth...

I think SkyPicker is worth mentioning here: https://skypicker.com

If you are flexible where you want to go, when, how much you can stay, etc... then you get really good suggestions.

Decentralization to the rescue? Create a decentralized system by which such scripts can be circulated and updated without anyone owning them.

In general I live by (0) anything that can be scripted and automated should be automated and (1) humans and machines are no different and the boundary between human and machine will blur in the future, so we might as well stop differentiating the two now, assume the customer is infinitely smart, and define all policies and business models using only initial state and final state of the customer rather than the process the customer went through to reach that state.

For example, my library books can be renewed online (or else one pays a fine). This can be automated. Thus, I write a script to abstract this problem out of my life. The library need only care when the loan out and when they get back, everything else about the system including whether it's a collection of silicon components or a collection of sodium-potassium-pump components that causes the state transitions at book renewals is none of their business. If I invented something that used germanium to cause a renewal (and biologists can't figure out whether to define it as living or nonliving, intelligent or nonintelligent), the library shouldn't care.

Similarly, it's none of the airline's business whether it's sodium-potassium, silicon, or germanium that transfers entropy about tickets; the initial and final states are the same. if I can gain information about airline tickets by manually querying 1000 times from different parameters, that process should be scripted and automated.

I'm a machine just like my computer, just a much slower one.

How is it that we were able to land a man on the moon over 45 years ago and we still can't just type in a search engine and get the cheapest flights from point A to point B on certain dates? I find this really baffling. It is a service all customers want yet even the great Google can't seem to provide this. Meanwhile Google puts out so many "experimental products" that they later dispose.

There is talk of Google getting into cell-phone service and the are already getting into Google fiber. I wish Google would use its pricing power and buy entire flights between major cities domestic and international (eg, NYC to Chicago, LA, SF, Miami, Atlanta, and London). Moreover, an airline can really make its profits on airline fuel speculation since this is the most volatile component of airline costs.