10 ms·

Living in first world country it's easy to be biased against race to the bottom - it hurts previously very well paid jobs and breaks established status quo. Bu

Living in first world country it's easy to be biased against race to the bottom - it hurts previously very well paid jobs and breaks established status quo. But that race to the bottom made cost of flying at least order of magnitude more affordable, and as a result likely saved and improved countless numbers lives (lifting out of poverty, ability to travel for treatments, ability to see your loved ones, ability to travel for work, etc). And to put things in perspective - air travel is still safest form of travel, even accounting for MAX, and during this whole race to the bottom it was constantly improving, by orders of magnitude.

jacobolus 7y ago
> made cost of flying at least order of magnitude more affordable, and as a result likely saved and improved countless numbers lives Except for the climate change part. Continued carbon emissions threaten billions of lives. To keep our planet inhabitable current-fuel air travel must be reduced to a tiny fraction of its current scope within the next few decades (alongside many other drastic changes to transportation, industry, and electricity generation). It’s not clear that alternative power sources for air travel will be practical at large scale any time in the near future.
- MartianSquirrel 7y ago
  > Except for the climate change part. This is out of context. Same thing could be said with the advent of the internet and massive energy consumption that came with it. The debate here is about the effect the technology had on day to day human lives, not on the optimization of it afterwards.
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    Global air travel is projected to significantly increase in the future without any obvious way to sufficiently reduce its carbon footprint. The internet can be plausibly powered by low-carbon energy sources using present technology. If you uncritically define negative consequences as “out of context” then every technology can be declared to be an unalloyed good.
    - mcny 7y ago
      > Global air travel is projected to significantly increase in the future without any obvious way to sufficiently reduce its carbon footprint. I think we all understand that flying is not "green" or "sustainable". > To keep our planet inhabitable current-fuel air travel must be reduced to a tiny fraction of its current scope within the next few decades (alongside many other drastic changes to transportation, industry, and electricity generation). It’s not clear that alternative power sources for air travel will be practical at large scale any time in the near future. > If you uncritically define negative consequences as “out of context” then every technology can be declared to be an unalloyed good. Reminds me of something really out of context: food. I was shocked when a gym trainer told me that if my goal is weight loss, I must focus on what I eat. (I am not a vegetarian or a vegan btw) To keep our planet inhabitable, we must reduce the amount of meat we consume and alter our diet very significantly. I know this is a fact and yet I continue to stuff our faces like there's no tomorrow. I don't fly a lot but I eat a lot. I actually enjoy eating (to the point that it wasn't obvious to me that many people don't). It would be very hypocritical of me to suggest that there be a huge surcharge to discourage people from flying but no surcharge on meat products, leather, almonds, ... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/10/huge-reduction-in-meat-eating-essential-to-avoid-climate-breakdown https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/10/huge-red... https://outline.com/BYjw66 https://outline.com/BYjw66
- entee 7y ago
  Keep in mind that as a fraction of emissions, air travel is actually quite small, about 2-3% [1] (and this is from a harsh article). There's some concern that as the industry grows (roughly 5% a year) and other sectors decarbonize, air travel will consume a larger fraction of remaining "carbon budget" (25-50% depending on where you look). Clearly as the denominator shrinks, and the numerator grows even slowly, percentage increases. That said, it's probably not the main issue in in climate change or even close to it. Other sectors such as ground transport, industrial heat (cement, steel etc.), agriculture (primarily fertilizer) and other fixed sources (buildings/homes) are a bigger deal. If we end up with airlines as the last carbon source, that's probably OK if we deal with the rest. 25% or even 50% of remaining budget is fine if the rest of the (easier) problems get solved. Air travel is uniquely hard, let's get the easier stuff first. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/climate/air-travel-emissions.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/climate/air-travel-emissi...
  - Symmetry 7y ago
    It's true that, overall, air travel isn't a large fraction of our carbon emissions. But that's entirely do to that fact that most people don't fly. Every trip you make across the Atlantic and back takes about 10% of a typical American's yearly carbon emissions. If you're a typical person who doesn't fly then indeed it's not worth worrying about the flying that other people are doing. But if you're someone who flies every year or especially multiple times a year then cutting down is probably one of the most significant things you can do for the environment.
    - entee 7y ago
      How many of those trips are cuttable? Maybe one or two business trips. And businesses would already rather teleconference these days if the trip is really avoidable. Given how cumbersome and expensive flying is already, I'm not sure there's a huge amount of "waste" in the system to cut at the moment. As for the occasional personal trip (I assume by # of people though maybe not # of miles flown, the far more common use case, only 12% of passengers are business travel[1]), should we be telling people, "no you're not going to see grandma for christmas"? [1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/041315/how-much-revenue-airline-industry-comes-business-travelers-compared-leisure-travelers.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/041315/how-much-rev...
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  > Continued carbon emissions threaten billions of lives. It does not. Climate change is real and will cause serious problems. It will emphatically NOT threaten billions of lives. The people who tell you that are either misinformed or lying.
- zokula 7y ago
  Since climate change is a myth you can't really make that argument
kevingadd 7y ago
On the other hand, the new pricing structure means some airlines shut down and other airlines cut out unprofitable/less-profitable flight routes entirely, making it more difficult for some people to travel. ️ https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Airline-News/Southwest-Airlines-eliminates-16-routes https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Airline-News/Southw... https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/Routes-Southwest-Alaska-United-cut-back-TSA-14947998.php https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/Routes-Southwest-Alask... https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/07/03/jetblue-is-canceling-more-routes.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/07/03/jetblue-is-canceli... Reportedly a lot of this is because deregulation eliminated many requirements that previously forced airlines to service less-profitable areas, in a similar fashion to how the USPS is required to provide service to Anyone instead of just people in profitable areas.
mirekrusin 7y ago
It's not the safest way to travel if you look at per trip or per hour spent death ratio [0]. To have even more correct numbers you'd have to add death ratio for transport to/from the airport as well. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Transport_comparisons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Transport_comp...
- Symmetry 7y ago
  Usually, when comparing modes of travel, a person has some destination in mind which is a fixed distance in mind. If you're just trying to get out of the house, say, then I'd agree that air travel is a more dangerous way to do it than driving around the block. But if you're trying to travel to a specific place for business, family, or vacation then it makes sense to compare based on danger per mile.
  - cujo 7y ago
    But then you should probably only compare trips with somehow similar distances/times involved right? Since I'm unlikely to fly my 20 mile commute to work, logging those miles under the "drive car" category isn't comparable, but is likely how I'd be in a car accident since that's something like 75% of my driving life. It seems you should only compare flights of 3 hrs vs car trips of 3 hours, or similar.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      I’m not following. If I want to go visit my family 700 miles away for a holiday, I should most reasonably compare driving there with flying there as the risk choice is between those two manners of getting there. Comparing flying for an hour vs driving for an hour isn’t a comparison between two substitute goods, unless the purpose of my trip was “to kill an hour”, making those valid substitutes.
    - QuotedForTruth 7y ago
      Its normalized by distance, so the fact that 75% of your driving is short trips doesnt matter. You could argue that you need to look at only sustainable trips, but I think its unlikely to change the conclusion that per mile flying is safer than driving on a per mile basis. You'd need to set some minimum trip distance for which flying is a viable alternative, like say 300 or 500 miles. Then throw out all the driving data for under that. Now, how would you expect this to shift the deaths/mile of driving? In order to reduce it, driving short trips would have to be more dangerous per mile than driving long trips. I think this is unlikely to be true. Long trips often take place on highways at higher speeds and thus accidents have higher consequences. Drivers are more likely to be fatigued on longer trips. Drivers are less likely to be familiar with the roads on longer trips. You've probably also got to throw out all flights for which driving is not a possibility. Like transcontinental trips. That may make flying appear safer since flights over oceans are more dangerous since there arent as many emergency landing opportunities.
ATsch 7y ago
This kind of reminds me of the dril quote: > drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not, https://twitter.com/dril/status/464802196060917762 https://twitter.com/dril/status/464802196060917762 Point being, just that something has some upsides does not mean that it is a good thing overall. I personally believe that if flying millions of people across the globe is truly impossible without reckless exploitation of people and resources, we should rather not do that, no matter what the benefits of that would be.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- aeternum 7y ago
  > no matter what the benefits would be This is illogical reasoning. We should look at the cost/benefit tradeoff. Looking only at costs or only at benefits will not yield the best decision. We need to draw a line somewhere between safety & cost. I'd argue it is always possible to make something safer if you are willing to accept higher cost. Expensive plane tickets have negative externalities, and for some, does cost lives (inability to get treatments for ex.).
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
    > inability to get treatments for ex. I don't think that is a good example. If the treatment you need requires you to fly, that means it a very complicated diseases, or a rare disease that only a few centers treat. In any case, it is likely that the care is very resource intensive and is either expensive or heavily subsidized. In those cases, even if the airfare were doubled or tripled, it would not be the limiting factor in treatment.
    - SahAssar 7y ago
      I'm not saying it necessarily applies for life-saving treatments AFAIK, but not everyone agrees on what medical care is. For example, in the U.S. it has been shown that state abortion restrictions hit the lower-income segment much harder precisely because they cannot afford to travel to states which have more liberal laws concerning abortion.
t12212w2w 7y ago
Could this "lifting out of poverty" nonsense stop. In the West people have been put into poverty in the last decades, precisely because decent medium skilled jobs were exported by greedy managers who hide behind multiculturalism as a rationale. To these people multiculturalism is just a means to increase the size of the industrial reserve army.
Y-Bopinator 7y ago
The human race is a race to the bottom. We’ll see what happens when we get there.
taurath 7y ago
Its not a binary choice though - perhaps instead of a sprint to the bottom, it could be a marathon to the bottom with a lot more safety checks?
caconym_ 7y ago
> But that race to the bottom made cost of flying at least order of magnitude more affordable This is a point that needs to be made more often. I'm not sure more access to air travel has made people's lives better (different, sure)... but it's not like the flying experience has been getting worse in a vacuum. AFAIK, way more people have access to it today than did half a century ago.
- idoubtit 7y ago
  When reading old novels and travel logs up to a century ago, the main difference is that people took their time. Travelling often took days or weeks, but it was okay since there was no alternative, and since enjoying the journey was sometimes a part of the process. It's amusing to read about trains that stopped for 2 hours so that passagers could go out for lunch. Trains and boats were places were you lived and met people. Since travelling was slow, people had to adapt. From Paris, a bourgeois family could spend a day or two in the neighboring countryside, but if they wanted to visit Italy or Russia, you'd stay there for a few months. Nowadays, it's the same: from Paris, a middle class family can spend the week-end at Tunis, but they will take two weeks of holidays for Thailand. Yet our time-constrained lives have made months-long stays less frequents.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    What you're missing is the vast majority of people simply never traveled any real distance from their hometown at all. Spending a few months visiting Italy sounds lovely, but most people have always been too time-constrained for that kind of luxury.
nicoburns 7y ago
Yes, it's certainly a tricky one. But note that deregulated markets not only allow harmful race-to-the-bottom style behaviour, they all but require it, because "good apple" companies will be outcompeted by those cutting corners. I think it's worth considering the effect that political and social narratives have on this. Reagan-style politics not only deregulates markets, it pushes a moral narrative that it is righteous to exploit the market as far as you possibly can, even when that means taking advantage of market flaws and externalities such that you are causing a net societal harm. Their ideology is such that this is "capitalistic" and therefore good, and so we should not attempt to curb, regulate or otherwise discourage such behaviour. This has no basis in economic theory, and it's causing huge harms to our society (and economy).
rootsudo 7y ago
Is that really a "good" thing? USA innovated and created POTS, land line phones - and then again with wireless phones/radio phones that ultimately became cell phones. Emerging countries skipped all that, landline, pots, regulation of monopolies and ultimately in the end just were able to put in some towers and voila, cell phones all w/ imported technology that majority of people in that emerging country do not understand to the equilivent of magic. If there is no profit, it won't be built. Many countries didn't get cell phones until late 00's. Where now it's not really a cell phone, but "facebook."
LMYahooTFY 7y ago
I didn't read the parent comment's point as bias. Your points about cost reduction spreading wealth and access don't preclude the idea that a race to the bottom incentive might pass a stress tolerance threshold somewhere.
specialist 7y ago
Please explain how exec pay increased while quality and wages declined.
BurnGpuBurn 7y ago
> air travel is still safest form of travel, even accounting for MAX That wholly depends on how often you fly those damn death traps. I highly doubt accounting for just the MAX alone would still give you the same result (safest form of travel). My car sure feels safer than a MAX, but I didn't run the numbers.

jacobolus 7y ago

> made cost of flying at least order of magnitude more affordable, and as a result likely saved and improved countless numbers lives Except for the climate change part. Continued carbon emissions threaten billions of lives. To keep our planet inhabitable current-fuel air travel must be reduced to a tiny fraction of its current scope within the next few decades (alongside many other drastic changes to transportation, industry, and electricity generation). It’s not clear that alternative power sources for air travel will be practical at large scale any time in the near future.

MartianSquirrel 7y ago
> Except for the climate change part. This is out of context. Same thing could be said with the advent of the internet and massive energy consumption that came with it. The debate here is about the effect the technology had on day to day human lives, not on the optimization of it afterwards.
- jacobolus 7y ago
  Global air travel is projected to significantly increase in the future without any obvious way to sufficiently reduce its carbon footprint. The internet can be plausibly powered by low-carbon energy sources using present technology. If you uncritically define negative consequences as “out of context” then every technology can be declared to be an unalloyed good.
  - mcny 7y ago
    > Global air travel is projected to significantly increase in the future without any obvious way to sufficiently reduce its carbon footprint. I think we all understand that flying is not "green" or "sustainable". > To keep our planet inhabitable current-fuel air travel must be reduced to a tiny fraction of its current scope within the next few decades (alongside many other drastic changes to transportation, industry, and electricity generation). It’s not clear that alternative power sources for air travel will be practical at large scale any time in the near future. > If you uncritically define negative consequences as “out of context” then every technology can be declared to be an unalloyed good. Reminds me of something really out of context: food. I was shocked when a gym trainer told me that if my goal is weight loss, I must focus on what I eat. (I am not a vegetarian or a vegan btw) To keep our planet inhabitable, we must reduce the amount of meat we consume and alter our diet very significantly. I know this is a fact and yet I continue to stuff our faces like there's no tomorrow. I don't fly a lot but I eat a lot. I actually enjoy eating (to the point that it wasn't obvious to me that many people don't). It would be very hypocritical of me to suggest that there be a huge surcharge to discourage people from flying but no surcharge on meat products, leather, almonds, ... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/10/huge-reduction-in-meat-eating-essential-to-avoid-climate-breakdown https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/10/huge-red... https://outline.com/BYjw66 https://outline.com/BYjw66
entee 7y ago
Keep in mind that as a fraction of emissions, air travel is actually quite small, about 2-3% [1] (and this is from a harsh article). There's some concern that as the industry grows (roughly 5% a year) and other sectors decarbonize, air travel will consume a larger fraction of remaining "carbon budget" (25-50% depending on where you look). Clearly as the denominator shrinks, and the numerator grows even slowly, percentage increases. That said, it's probably not the main issue in in climate change or even close to it. Other sectors such as ground transport, industrial heat (cement, steel etc.), agriculture (primarily fertilizer) and other fixed sources (buildings/homes) are a bigger deal. If we end up with airlines as the last carbon source, that's probably OK if we deal with the rest. 25% or even 50% of remaining budget is fine if the rest of the (easier) problems get solved. Air travel is uniquely hard, let's get the easier stuff first. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/climate/air-travel-emissions.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/climate/air-travel-emissi...
- Symmetry 7y ago
  It's true that, overall, air travel isn't a large fraction of our carbon emissions. But that's entirely do to that fact that most people don't fly. Every trip you make across the Atlantic and back takes about 10% of a typical American's yearly carbon emissions. If you're a typical person who doesn't fly then indeed it's not worth worrying about the flying that other people are doing. But if you're someone who flies every year or especially multiple times a year then cutting down is probably one of the most significant things you can do for the environment.
  - entee 7y ago
    How many of those trips are cuttable? Maybe one or two business trips. And businesses would already rather teleconference these days if the trip is really avoidable. Given how cumbersome and expensive flying is already, I'm not sure there's a huge amount of "waste" in the system to cut at the moment. As for the occasional personal trip (I assume by # of people though maybe not # of miles flown, the far more common use case, only 12% of passengers are business travel[1]), should we be telling people, "no you're not going to see grandma for christmas"? [1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/041315/how-much-revenue-airline-industry-comes-business-travelers-compared-leisure-travelers.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/041315/how-much-rev...
BurningFrog 7y ago
> Continued carbon emissions threaten billions of lives. It does not. Climate change is real and will cause serious problems. It will emphatically NOT threaten billions of lives. The people who tell you that are either misinformed or lying.
zokula 7y ago
Since climate change is a myth you can't really make that argument

kevingadd 7y ago

On the other hand, the new pricing structure means some airlines shut down and other airlines cut out unprofitable/less-profitable flight routes entirely, making it more difficult for some people to travel. ️ https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Airline-News/Southwest-Airlines-eliminates-16-routes https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Airline-News/Southw... https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/Routes-Southwest-Alaska-United-cut-back-TSA-14947998.php https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/Routes-Southwest-Alask... https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/07/03/jetblue-is-canceling-more-routes.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/07/03/jetblue-is-canceli... Reportedly a lot of this is because deregulation eliminated many requirements that previously forced airlines to service less-profitable areas, in a similar fashion to how the USPS is required to provide service to Anyone instead of just people in profitable areas.

mirekrusin 7y ago

It's not the safest way to travel if you look at per trip or per hour spent death ratio [0]. To have even more correct numbers you'd have to add death ratio for transport to/from the airport as well. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Transport_comparisons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Transport_comp...

Symmetry 7y ago
Usually, when comparing modes of travel, a person has some destination in mind which is a fixed distance in mind. If you're just trying to get out of the house, say, then I'd agree that air travel is a more dangerous way to do it than driving around the block. But if you're trying to travel to a specific place for business, family, or vacation then it makes sense to compare based on danger per mile.
- cujo 7y ago
  But then you should probably only compare trips with somehow similar distances/times involved right? Since I'm unlikely to fly my 20 mile commute to work, logging those miles under the "drive car" category isn't comparable, but is likely how I'd be in a car accident since that's something like 75% of my driving life. It seems you should only compare flights of 3 hrs vs car trips of 3 hours, or similar.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    I’m not following. If I want to go visit my family 700 miles away for a holiday, I should most reasonably compare driving there with flying there as the risk choice is between those two manners of getting there. Comparing flying for an hour vs driving for an hour isn’t a comparison between two substitute goods, unless the purpose of my trip was “to kill an hour”, making those valid substitutes.
  - QuotedForTruth 7y ago
    Its normalized by distance, so the fact that 75% of your driving is short trips doesnt matter. You could argue that you need to look at only sustainable trips, but I think its unlikely to change the conclusion that per mile flying is safer than driving on a per mile basis. You'd need to set some minimum trip distance for which flying is a viable alternative, like say 300 or 500 miles. Then throw out all the driving data for under that. Now, how would you expect this to shift the deaths/mile of driving? In order to reduce it, driving short trips would have to be more dangerous per mile than driving long trips. I think this is unlikely to be true. Long trips often take place on highways at higher speeds and thus accidents have higher consequences. Drivers are more likely to be fatigued on longer trips. Drivers are less likely to be familiar with the roads on longer trips. You've probably also got to throw out all flights for which driving is not a possibility. Like transcontinental trips. That may make flying appear safer since flights over oceans are more dangerous since there arent as many emergency landing opportunities.

ATsch 7y ago

This kind of reminds me of the dril quote: > drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not, https://twitter.com/dril/status/464802196060917762 https://twitter.com/dril/status/464802196060917762 Point being, just that something has some upsides does not mean that it is a good thing overall. I personally believe that if flying millions of people across the globe is truly impossible without reckless exploitation of people and resources, we should rather not do that, no matter what the benefits of that would be.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
aeternum 7y ago
> no matter what the benefits would be This is illogical reasoning. We should look at the cost/benefit tradeoff. Looking only at costs or only at benefits will not yield the best decision. We need to draw a line somewhere between safety & cost. I'd argue it is always possible to make something safer if you are willing to accept higher cost. Expensive plane tickets have negative externalities, and for some, does cost lives (inability to get treatments for ex.).
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
  > inability to get treatments for ex. I don't think that is a good example. If the treatment you need requires you to fly, that means it a very complicated diseases, or a rare disease that only a few centers treat. In any case, it is likely that the care is very resource intensive and is either expensive or heavily subsidized. In those cases, even if the airfare were doubled or tripled, it would not be the limiting factor in treatment.
  - SahAssar 7y ago
    I'm not saying it necessarily applies for life-saving treatments AFAIK, but not everyone agrees on what medical care is. For example, in the U.S. it has been shown that state abortion restrictions hit the lower-income segment much harder precisely because they cannot afford to travel to states which have more liberal laws concerning abortion.

t12212w2w 7y ago

Could this "lifting out of poverty" nonsense stop. In the West people have been put into poverty in the last decades, precisely because decent medium skilled jobs were exported by greedy managers who hide behind multiculturalism as a rationale. To these people multiculturalism is just a means to increase the size of the industrial reserve army.

Y-Bopinator 7y ago

The human race is a race to the bottom. We’ll see what happens when we get there.

taurath 7y ago

Its not a binary choice though - perhaps instead of a sprint to the bottom, it could be a marathon to the bottom with a lot more safety checks?

caconym_ 7y ago

> But that race to the bottom made cost of flying at least order of magnitude more affordable This is a point that needs to be made more often. I'm not sure more access to air travel has made people's lives better (different, sure)... but it's not like the flying experience has been getting worse in a vacuum. AFAIK, way more people have access to it today than did half a century ago.

idoubtit 7y ago
When reading old novels and travel logs up to a century ago, the main difference is that people took their time. Travelling often took days or weeks, but it was okay since there was no alternative, and since enjoying the journey was sometimes a part of the process. It's amusing to read about trains that stopped for 2 hours so that passagers could go out for lunch. Trains and boats were places were you lived and met people. Since travelling was slow, people had to adapt. From Paris, a bourgeois family could spend a day or two in the neighboring countryside, but if they wanted to visit Italy or Russia, you'd stay there for a few months. Nowadays, it's the same: from Paris, a middle class family can spend the week-end at Tunis, but they will take two weeks of holidays for Thailand. Yet our time-constrained lives have made months-long stays less frequents.
- philwelch 7y ago
  What you're missing is the vast majority of people simply never traveled any real distance from their hometown at all. Spending a few months visiting Italy sounds lovely, but most people have always been too time-constrained for that kind of luxury.

nicoburns 7y ago

Yes, it's certainly a tricky one. But note that deregulated markets not only allow harmful race-to-the-bottom style behaviour, they all but require it, because "good apple" companies will be outcompeted by those cutting corners. I think it's worth considering the effect that political and social narratives have on this. Reagan-style politics not only deregulates markets, it pushes a moral narrative that it is righteous to exploit the market as far as you possibly can, even when that means taking advantage of market flaws and externalities such that you are causing a net societal harm. Their ideology is such that this is "capitalistic" and therefore good, and so we should not attempt to curb, regulate or otherwise discourage such behaviour. This has no basis in economic theory, and it's causing huge harms to our society (and economy).

rootsudo 7y ago

Is that really a "good" thing? USA innovated and created POTS, land line phones - and then again with wireless phones/radio phones that ultimately became cell phones. Emerging countries skipped all that, landline, pots, regulation of monopolies and ultimately in the end just were able to put in some towers and voila, cell phones all w/ imported technology that majority of people in that emerging country do not understand to the equilivent of magic. If there is no profit, it won't be built. Many countries didn't get cell phones until late 00's. Where now it's not really a cell phone, but "facebook."

LMYahooTFY 7y ago

I didn't read the parent comment's point as bias. Your points about cost reduction spreading wealth and access don't preclude the idea that a race to the bottom incentive might pass a stress tolerance threshold somewhere.

specialist 7y ago

Please explain how exec pay increased while quality and wages declined.

BurnGpuBurn 7y ago

> air travel is still safest form of travel, even accounting for MAX That wholly depends on how often you fly those damn death traps. I highly doubt accounting for just the MAX alone would still give you the same result (safest form of travel). My car sure feels safer than a MAX, but I didn't run the numbers.