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To me, this story is a great illustration of how we humans will always try to become fat cats by clinging to and expanding upon any privilege we may have or com
by wastholm 7y ago
To me, this story is a great illustration of how we humans will always try to become fat cats by clinging to and expanding upon any privilege we may have or comfortable situation we may find ourselves in. Be it something small, like free snacks in the breakroom at work, or something big, like free unlimited air travel, or something vast, like cheap abundant fossil energy, if there is any way whatsoever to externalize the costs of our privileges and benefits, then, naturally, that's what we do. And should this privilege that we have now come to consider our right ever be taken away, we are of course duly offended.
So I find this guy's reaction pretty understandable. I would love to think that I wouldn't so unreasonably take advantage of a playing field so absurdly tilted in my favor, and that I wouldn't be outraged when such a tilt was corrected. But such situations twist your perception of the world and it's hard to even know you're doing it.
- listenallyall 7y ago>> privilege we may have membership for which he paid $400k >> such a tilt was ~~corrected~~ completely eliminated, without recourse
- close04 7y ago> completely eliminated, without recourse For breaching the contractual agreement, something the court has also observed and ruled on. This man indeed paid for something but then used it in a way that was an abuse from the contractual perspective and (saying this as a regular person) also from a common sense perspective. He showed a lot of bad faith and this undermined his case.
- ethbro 7y agoThe lack of notification from AA of purported abuse should have been enough to get the case thrown out. The abuse being serious enough to force AA to revoke the pass... yet not serious enough that they discovered or communicated it before they decided to revoke the pass? I can't square that logic.
- JeremyNT 7y ago> membership for which he paid $400k ... from the proceeds from his work as a Bear Sterns stock broker. He was in the right place, at the right time, with the right background, engaging in an industry which provides basically negative value to society. Pardon me if I shed no tears for this guy.
- ethbro 7y agoThat seems like a shaky moral foundation. What he did to make a living doesn't seem material, nor does the fact that he was a [shock quotes]Bear Stern's stock broker[/]. Everybody does something, but the US is supposed to be a country ruled by law. American mispriced the offer, and several people (including Mark Cuban) bought it, signed a contract, and took them at their word. Then they changed their mind after 15 years.
- zwaps 7y agoI completely agree, in fact I would probably have the exact same reaction as this dude. But I don't have half a million to spend on tickets, nor do I get to jetset across the oceans to buy flowers - nevertheless I will get to feel the externalities in form of climate change. So from that perspective, it looks different.
- i_am_proteus 7y agoBy this logic, any breach of contract involving a polluting activity is justified. This is a dispute between a man who flies on climate-change-causing aircraft and the company that operates those airlines. So one could argue that by opening up his previously-paid-for seats to new paying customers, the airline becomes more profitable and contributes more to climate change.
- prvc 7y agoYour general point about becoming accustomed to one's own privileges may be true, but the attitudes demonstrated in this article are so absurd, that they are far from typical examples of that trend. The article was one of the most ludicrous sob stories I have ever encountered.