8 ms·

This is a problem bigger than United -- which has a lot of problems. This is what you get when you subsidize bad companies that need to fail. United needs to fa

• pcrh 14y ago
  I don't think weather forecasting is currently good enough for a farmer to plan which crops to plant based on rainfall predictions. If every farmer planted a diversity of crops to account for all likely weather scenarios, then the average productivity would drop, as most crops would turn out to be unsuitable for the weather that occurred.
  • mseebach 14y ago
    It depends - surely, studying the weather (how much snow there is on the mountains in winter affects how much water there is in the rivers in the spring) can reduce, if not remove, the risk of crop failure. Perhaps you have the choice of a more expensive drought-resistant crop and a cheaper one that isn't. Breaking the feedback loop by subsidizing failed crops doesn't create any incentive to invest effort into making good decisions in these areas.
    • greedo 14y ago
      You're making the assumption that winter snowpack has a dramatic effect on farming success. Sure, it helps fill the aquifers when it melts, but farmers depend on rainfall (at least in the US) as much as they do on irrigation. Heat also makes it hard for crops to grow successfully, regardless of how much water they get through irrigation.
    • pcrh 14y ago
      The returns a farmer receives depends also on the price the crop can receive. Barring futures contracts, for widely-traded crops such as wheat, soya and corn, this will depend on the global market, i.e. not only the local weather, but also the weather in Brazil, Australia, etc.
  • slowpoke 14y ago
    Think of it this way: it's a trade-off, like almost all reliable systems have to make. Would you rather have, for example, a server that runs with maximum efficiency but has a high risk of failure and extended downtime or one that is reliable with a 99.9% uptime, but isn't as powerful as the first one?
  • roel_v 14y ago
    "I don't think weather forecasting is currently good enough for a farmer to plan which crops to plant based on rainfall predictions." It's good enough to offer insurance to farmers for when harvests will fail. This exists, I know because I (even if only at arms length) work in this field.
    • pcrh 14y ago
      Agriculture is boom-and-bust, precisely due to the unpredictability of the weather, infestations, etc. It's more predictable today than in the past, but there is still a lot of guesswork going on. There are sophisticated mechanisms in place for mitigating this, such as the futures market and insurance. I'd wager that the "compensation" the hay farmer mentioned above is part of an insurance-type scheme. Maybe like this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/drought-puts-federal-crop-insurance-under-scrutiny/2012/08/13/3d9e2960-e0c7-11e1-a19c-fcfa365396c8_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/drough...
    • wooster 14y ago
      The insurance plans I've seen were based upon historical data, and didn't take weather forecasts into account. (My family is in farming and ranching.)
      • roel_v 14y ago
        I'm not sure how these insurances are sold to end users at small scales. I'm involved in building crop harvest forecast systems to be used by insurers who insure large businesses (think multinationals) who need resources from mostly Asian and African countries for the production of their goods, e.g. palm trees. So this use case is different in scale from your example, our work is mostly in risk modeling on a large scale. That said, if I were selling insurances, I'd want two things: data to justify or explain my rates to my customers, and data to make predictions of my own risk and/or profit margins. The two might be correlated in a highly competitive and transparent market, but I have a hunch that these insurances are not, and that there isn't a whole lot of pressure to work on a cost plus pricing model, so that these insurers can work on a value-added pricing model.
  • greedo 14y ago
    Exactly. Anyone that thinks farming in the US is a matter of pulling out the almanac and hoping the rain will match expectations is naive at best. Here's the thought process a farmer goes through in deciding what to plant: 1. What's the expected market price for corn and soybean. 2. What is the cost of crop insurance? 3. What's the current rainfall estimate? 4. What's the cost of water via irrigation and the cost of the irrigation equipment. 5. What's my field rotation state? 6. How much is fertilizer? 7. What subsidies are in effect for the various crops? 8. How is my cash flow? And so on. The stereotype of farmers either being stupid hicks or suckling at the teat of Federal subsidies is ridiculous. The technology farmers use is amazing, and the factors they have to consider are multi-variate. Sometimes farmers get screwed, and sometimes they make a fortune. Subsidies (as well as futures and other hedges) are a means of smoothing out the market so that farmers can stay in business while also providing for steady agricultural returns. It's not a perfect system by any means, and subsidies for things like ethanol drastically distort other markets, but to try and simplify it into Farmer A works hard but dumb and Farmer B is a smart, HN guy is just too simplistic.
    • jerf 14y ago
      So, context, I'm a libertarian. But, bear with me a moment. Why are subsidies bad? They "distort the market". How do subsidies distort the market? They cause overproduction of the subsidized good. Where an efficient allocation would tend to fairly precisely match demand to production (more precisely than any other known way of doing it), thus allowing the rest of the capital to go do other useful things, a subsidized good overinvests capital into producing the subsidized good, thus producing an opportunity cost to civilization due to the misallocation of resources into overproducing a good rather than doing something else more useful. What is the result of farming subsidies? An excess of food. What is food? Food is one of the fundamental foundations of civilization. No food means total chaos in a matter of days. What does precisely producing 100% of the expected target food production means? It means the slightest bobble in production translates to shortages, and as we all know, shortages happen, and in particular, black swans will happen. A free market does not blindly assume everything will be swell and does build in some buffer against expected disaster, but the buffer can always be exceeded and the free market makes it very difficult for a given producer to make their own buffer larger, lest a competitor eat their market share. Suddenly, a bit of "overproduction of food" doesn't sound like such a bad idea. Ideally we'd be storing the excess as much as possible, though regrettably food doesn't store as well as you'd like. Still, I'm actually in favor of a certain amount of food subsidy. The ethanol subsidy is still stupid, and given subsidies may be bad on the grounds of being excessive, or because the interest group has captured the regulator and are managing to harvest the surplus directly instead of via overproduction (which is the result we're actually trying to produce for once), but in general, I'm not actually against a bit of overproduction of the foundations of civilization.
  • pbhjpbhj 14y ago
    >I don't think weather forecasting is currently good enough for // That would be an interesting study. Take weather data and forecast data from the last n years and look at how good various sources are at prediction over various regions and timescales. I'm sure it's been done?
• ljf 14y ago
  I've only been to the US once, and I really wasn't sure how I would find the 'service industries' (waiting, bar staff, shop staff) always asking if I 'had a nice day' etc. I thought I would find it cloying and draining. In reality I generally felt VERY well taken care of by everyone I met in retail or service industries - EXCEPT for the airlines. We flew BA, London to LAX, and as ever BA were fine. We then flew Delta to Hawaii, and I couldn't believe how rude, unhelpful and almost angry these people were. I mean coach drivers in the UK are grumpy but these were something else. When my partner requested the gluten free meal she had confirmed with the check-in staff, she was told they didn't have anything and was given a bread roll (!!!) and an apple as a replacement. Returning we flew United Airlines, and again they were curt, unhelpful, and generally annoyed that we were there on their plane. I couldn't believe that these airlines could be operating in a country that prides itself so highly on service. As the parent says, these are companies that need to be built up again from the ground up - subsidizing them is not helping them.
  • briandear 14y ago
    The unions are the big problem along with a lack if accountability. They can break baggage laws, for example, with impunity leaving the passenger little recourse except to attempt to sue in federal court.
    • acdha 14y ago
      That's not the union, that's the business. I guarantee that they would have no trouble getting rid of anyone, even a union employee, for stealing baggage: simply calling the police and charging them would take care of the problem. It's just that in the absence of government regulation[1] or a market with more competition, it's cheaper to pretend bag theft doesn't happen and let passengers pay for private insurance. At this point, our best chance is probably convincing people that the bag theft rings are ripe for terrorist exploitation and we need point-to-point video tracking to prevent mass mayhem. 1. e.g. banning the “we reimburse everything at $2/pound & $0 for anything which uses electricity" clauses in every airline's ToS
  • robk 14y ago
    BA is just as bad as any other US-based carrier. Surly staff are everywhere.
• gnaffle 14y ago
  Ryanair isn't subsidized. It's a bad airline that doesn't need to fail because it makes money. It's one of the airlines in Europe with the worst customer service track record. The same is true for lots of other compenies with terrible customer service. On the other hand, there are many state-owned or subsidized airlines that have very good customer service. So whether or not United needs to fail, I think the problem runs far deeper than subsidies.
  • mseebach 14y ago
    Ryanair isn't a bad airline. It's a fairly good airline in terms of moving passengers around. They are completely honest, even proud, to offer literally no customer service and comfort. Look at the comments here: http://www.airlinequality.com/Forum/ryan.htm http://www.airlinequality.com/Forum/ryan.htm Not one is about Ryanair failing to deliver the service they've sold (as the article is very much about United failing to) - they're all about people being disappointed about a £25 flight on an airline that prides itself on not caring one bit about your comfort ... not caring about their comfort. All of the extra charges complained about are loudly and clearly announced as part of the ticket buying process. Don't bring a 20 kg bag on a flight when your ticket clearly says "max 15 kg, excess charges apply", then complain about excess charges being leveraged. If you want service, comfort and flexibility, fly BA and pay for it (or EasyJet, they're usually very good IMO, and usually priced in the sweet spot between Ryanair and "proper" airlines). If you want to get to the beach in the cheapest possible way, everything else be damned, fly Ryanair.
    • rmc 14y ago
      Agreed. People only feel "screwed" by Ryanair because the are used to flexibility, and Ryanair are not flexible. "Oh I'm 2kg over, but that's not a lot, so they'll let me away with it.... What do you mean I have to pay €40?" "Oh they'd have to let me take my handbag, so I'll bring a massive one... what do you mean only one cabin bag?"
      • mgkimsal 14y ago
        double agreed. however, it does bug me charging on weight for baggage when fat people pay the same price as extremely lightweight people. Someone who's 105 pounds with a 52 pound bag gets charged extra, while someone who's 290 pounds but has a 49 pound bag pays no extra charge. Dunno quite how they'd ever get around it, but it does bug me. And I say this as someone who's got a few extra pounds of his own :)
• jhcoaps 14y ago
  Your post is endemic of something I see a lot on HN. You know nothing about agriculture, but you see a minor set of stories and you think you're a fucking expert. You have no idea if the diversified strategy has a higher expected value, or if it's just a variance play based on heat, or if different weather conditions could've affected interplay in a different way. You have no idea what the crop insurances for different crops cost. You have no idea what the weather forecasts were. You literally know absolutely nothing about the matter. All you know is that you've got an ideology and that you see absolutely everything through the ideas of your ideology, selectively perceiving, remembering and interpreting events to confirm and reconfirm your ideology. And you're sufficiently arrogant that you think you can glance at a farm and know what tradeoffs they considered when they were planting their fields. And that doesn't even get into the fact that if you travel via air around the globe, nearly all of the airlines are absolutely terrible, not just the subsidized ones in the US. Thus, it's fairly clear that while you'd like to pretend that your religion explains everything, it really doesn't.
  • stonemetal 14y ago
    Your post is endemic of something I see a lot on HN. You know nothing about agriculture, but you see a minor set of stories and you think you're a fucking expert. What is with the create a throwaway account to insult people thing? Karma isn't worth anything why not burn it under your real username?
    • Useful_Idiot 14y ago
      HN has the same issue as Reddit: accounts tend to get Hell-banned / Voted into obscurity for merely voicing alternative thought processes / not conforming to the 'logical-identity' construct that HN is comfortable with. Proof? This account is hell-banned, or at least it was.
    • calinet6 14y ago
      Frankly, HN is a better place if people value their accounts and their reputation. This is a Good Thing.
• imgabe 14y ago
  Your farming example is ludicrous. We need hay as much as we need sorghum. We can't have every farmer planting only one set of crops based how they expect the weather to be. First, it would absolutely crash the market for that crop when the harvest came in, and second there would be none of the other crops that are necessary.
  • mitchty 14y ago
    Not only that but you have to rotate what is planted in fields or you'll basically decimate the fields productivity. The guy putting in hay just got unlucky this year. I grew up on a farm, this isn't unheard of. Also sorghum doesn't grow well in all areas, where I lived corn and barely/wheat/rye were the best crops. Sorghum grew, just not all that great due to growing season. We never ever planted the same field twice in a row with the same crop. Some years we left it fallow (nothing planted) to give it and the microorganisms a rest. I think the parent poster lacks some fundamental knowledge of crops with his analogy.
• msrpotus 14y ago
  That's why there is crop insurance. Humans, last I checked, can't control the weather, so we create systems to make up for that risk.
• wtvanhest 14y ago
  1st, $8b in theoretical subsidies after September 11th isn’t material when an industry has $100s of billions of debt and equity. Delta and United have about $65b alone. AIG’s bailout was $182B. 2nd, It is inexcusable for a human being to not help a young child regardless of the company they work for. However, the other stories about airlines being terrible with customer service are dumb. In general people are stressed out when they fly and they project it on staff. I see it every time I travel. People are mad about weather delays, mad about gate changes, mad, mad, mad. If I had to deal with that as an employee every day, I wouldn't be freindly either. What is the point? 3rd Most airline employees are making 30% less than they were in 2001. People’s retirements have been wiped out and they cannot change jobs in the industry because doing so would require they start at the lowest pay offered at a different company and wait until their seniority number allows them to climb. They work for zombie companies in which the employees have limited opportunity to help meaningfully change the business. When I fly, I am nice to the staff and they are nice to me. I recognize the complexity of the daily achievement of getting people from place A to place B via air and I am extremely happy with today’s price point. [added] Most people on HN hate the TSA, can you imagine having to deal with them every day on your way to work?
  • greedo 14y ago
    To address your second point, how is it that Southwest can consistently provide friendly service? They have to deal with the same stressors that their competitors face. Don't underestimate the importance of leadership and management prowess in how employees perform.
    • wtvanhest 14y ago
      South West management hedged fuel in a risky financial bet which paid off when fuel prices unexpected skyrocketed in the mid 2000s. This risky bet led to industry leading profitability. Once South West's hedges came off their profitability has declined. They are not burdened with the same debt because they had profitability for so long. They also do not maintain a hub and spoke system which keeps their costs down. Because management got lucky with a fuel hedge, their employees did not have to take pay cuts like the rest of the industry and have not lost their pensions. For additional information read this (ignoring the stock price stuff, just for a little history) ”Mr. Alukos says the AirTran acquisition makes sense in the context of rising fuel prices. For many years, Southwest hedged rising fuel costs better than any other large U.S. airline, saving $2-billion from 2004 to 2008 by his estimate, something that “overshadow[ed]any of its other cost-containment measures.” Those contracts have gradually expired, and the current hedges are no longer a significant cost advantage, he believes.” Source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/investment-ideas/southwests-new-legacy-shouldnt-strand-shareholders/article4105283/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/investment-ide... [added] I didn't really answer your question, but I believe that number 2 combined with number 3 to create the problems we are seeing at most airlines. People can handle a lot until they realize when they get home they have no savings, no retirement and no future.