Overbooking 101

Donal

I’ve read a few outraged articles about United Airlines vs Dr Dao. As he often does, James Pilant questions the business ethics involved. I consider air travel an environmental tragedy, and agree that people wearing police uniforms are entirely too ready to dish out force and violence, but I have been generally aware (one of my brothers has been bumped) that overbooking was a common practice driven by A – people missing or not showing up for flights, or taking earlier flights and B – the airlines wanting to maximize profit by having a passenger in every seat.

I read somewhere that without overbooking the average flight might be only about 83% full. I see far worse vacancies on Greyhound, though. I’ve taken the bus from Altoona to Harrisburg to Baltimore dozens of times, and unless it is a holiday weekend, I see anywhere from 50 to 90% of seats…

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The United Airlines Edition

Pilant is always worth a read …

Pilant's Business Ethics Blog

The United Airlines Edition

United Airlines has acted outside the norms of business ethics. They have done so in a manner the requires the guilty be punished.

Let me list some links so you can get a grasp of the actions of what calls itself an airline:

United Airlines passenger forcibly removed from overbooked flight

Passenger dragged off overbooked United flight

Man Violently Dragged Off Plane After United Airlines Overbooks Flight

Or my favorite –

Video shows man forcibly removed from United flight from Chicago to Louisville

I’ve thought about this since I first saw the headlines and I gone from rage to lamenting the sorry spectacle of human stupidity.

The Fire Everyone Edition

Here we have what purports to be a business overbooking flights and using the way the contract is worded to get rid of the unwanted passengers. You notice I don’t call them customers. It’s obvious that the…

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Don’t Be Evil

Donal

I recently posted about watching several youtube videos featuring Robert Palmer. The truth is, I’ve been watching a lot of online video in the last few months. After watching Democracy Now!, and The Young Turks, I usually find some youtube video. Last week I watched some old BBC documentaries like The Edwardians in Color, Mods and Rockers, and a university lecture 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed. There were a few ads throughout, but it wasn’t so bad.

Sometimes in the evening I pull up a karaoke to sing to my wife over skype. Then the ads get a lot longer, sometimes 90 to 150 seconds. During the ads, she tells me about essential oils, and stuff.

There are however youtube videos with no advertising. Really. I was watching Jimmy Dore, and he was complaining about being de-monetized for speaking truth to power, or something, and I…

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Classical Gas Attack

Donal

I wrote about the possibility of a false flag operation during the Ukraine situation, but had been holding off on the recent Syria gas attack.

A few sites, Yournewswire, Antimedia, ShadowProof and the like, went false flag immediately, as did The Sane Progressive. They also noted that two previous Sarin attacks attributed to Assad had been later shown to have been carried out by rebels. Senator Rand Paul pointed out on camera that we didn’t know who was behind the Syria attack, and was roundly criticized in the mainstream media. Many liberal bloggers, like Juan Cole, pointed out that the US had just killed innocent civilians in a drone strike, and had used tear gas on its own citizens at the DAPL protest, but seemed to go along with the assumption that Assad was probably culpable.

A few outlets urged us to be cautious in assigning the blame to…

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Learning a New Word

Donal

In support of friends Charles Murray and Allison Stanger, Andrew Sullivan wrote, Is Intersectionality a Religion? at New York Magazine.

Middlebury College’s American Enterprise Institute Club had invited Murray to speak with Poli Sci and Econ Professor Stanger about his 2012 book, Coming Apart: America’s Growing Cultural Divide, which does for the class divide what The Bell Curve did for racism in 1994.

Given Murray’s reputation for providing a semi-scientific basis for considering blacks to be genetically inferior, and Middlebury’s reputation for liberalism, I would have hoped that students would either stay away or politely challenge his position, but the latest issue of The Middlebury Campus offers a timeline of planning for a significant protest:

By evening on Feb. 24, several months after the AEI had scheduled Murray’s talk, the decision to bring Murray to the College had escalated into a campus-wide controversy. Over the weekend of Feb. 25-26…

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Clinton vs Trump

We now seem to have decided on our Two Weak Candidates. After a spirited primary season, it comes down to an establishment neoliberal candidate and a populist moderate candidate, both of whom are widely disliked and distrusted outside of their loyal core.

Watching Bernie Sanders’ campaign rattle the jewelry of the increasingly elitist Democratic Party has been an inspiring political story. No, he didn’t win the nomination, but he came out of near obscurity to start a serious progressive movement among the large voting bloc of millenials. He treats his young supporters like adults, and advises that they make their own judgment on the election. Instead of trading his endorsement for a post in the new administration, he is still campaigning for his issues. But has he had any effect on this election?

Continued

Chernobyl after thirty years

Thirty years ago, the staff running a test on reactor #4 at the Lenin Nuclear Power Plant near Pripyat, Ukraine, USSR were reading unexpectedly high radiation levels. They debated stopping the test, but decided to keep going to find the limits. When the temperature readings climbed too high as well, they tried to shut the reactor down by inserting carbon rods.

There was, however, a design flaw, known by upper levels in the government, but not by the staff doing the testing. Inserting those rods somehow increased the reaction, increasing the heat. Containment water became steam, the roof of the reactor blew off and some 12 tons of radioactive uranium became airborne, contaminating a large swath of Europe.

Continued on my blog

Establocrat

In Clinton Needs Sanders, Josh Marshall posted a brief comment from John Judis, who I suppose is the progressive journalist, exhorting Hillary Clinton to up her game:

Clinton’s campaign seems stuck in the mud thematically. I listened to some of her speeches the last week. I heard her appealing to voters to support her because she is a Democrat and Sanders is not really. Look, America isn’t Europe circa 1960. We don’t have membership parties, and partisan allegiance has been declining since the election of 1896. If your main appeal is that you have a D next to your name, you are going to lose.

Maybe that’s why Wisconsin’s left-leaning Independents voted 70-30 in favor of Sanders.

I also heard the appeal from Clinton and her boosters that her programs are practical and pragmatic and that his are airy, grandiose and totally impractical. Clinton seems to be arguing that the test of a good campaign proposal is that it be able to be inserted in the annual budget message that the President sends to Congress in February — a message that is never read and that is inevitably pronounced dead on arrival. It’s no wonder that Sanders is attracting young voters. They know Washington is currently gridlocked, but they want to know where a presidential candidate wants the country to go in five, ten, or fifteen years. What are the larger changes on the basis of which incremental changes could be made?

Sanders’ independent supporters could have been the core of the Democratic party someday, but probably won’t have much use for the Democrats after an election cycle resulting in business as usual. As Green Party candidate Dr Jill Stein recently reminded Abby Martin, third parties have stepped up to replace older parties that have faltered. If the Sanders Independents start their own movement, and if the Trump/Tea Party supporters do the same, the Democrats and Republicans might be relegated to the history books with the Federalists, Democratic-Republicans and Whigs.

Thought Experiment

In The Elbonian Zombie Virus, Scott Adams asks what should happen if one percent of a given nationality of people, his cartoon Elbonians, were infected with a virus that turned them into zombie killers.

There is no cure for the Elbonian Zombie Virus. So what would world health organizations do?

For starters, they would quarantine the entire nation of Elbonia to limit the damage. This is obviously unfair to all uninfected Elbonians but it is also the only practical way to protect the rest of the world. Once the quarantine is in place, the professionals can get to work on a cure.

Now here’s the interesting part. What is the functional difference between the Elbonian Zombie Virus and radical islamic terrorism?

So, Adams established an analogy between a medical quarantine and Trump’s idea to keep Muslims out of America. I’m sure that will please Trump supporters, and doing so would probably reduce the number of Americans killed by Muslim terrorists, which is around three dozen per year. But it wouldn’t do anything about the three hundred other American deaths by non-Muslim terrorists. We’d also have to quarantine Christians, Jews, Sikhs and even atheists. So the Amish would be running things.

But let’s extend Scott’s thought experiment to other dangerous groups, for example, gun owners. Even though some talk about it first, no one knows for sure which gun owners will actually and suddenly start shooting innocent victims – or themselves. No one knows which gun owners will leave their weapons in reach of children. We don’t even know which police officers will start shooting innocent victims.

How would Adams’ approach work against firearms enthusiasts??

So what should world law enforcement organizations do?

For starters, they should quarantine gun owners to limit the damage. This is obviously unfair to all responsible gun owners but it is also the only practical way to protect the rest of the world. Once the quarantine is in place, the professionals can get to work on a cure.

Effectively ending the Second Amendment would not please Trump enthusiasts, but it would reduce the number of suicides, murders and accidental deaths that currently number about thirty-two thousand per year. It would also reduce the eighty-five thousand non-fatal gun injuries every year.

In other words, discriminating against gun owners would save far more lives and makes just as much sense as discriminating against Muslims – which makes no sense at all.

Primary Snapshot II

According to FiveThirtyEight’s delegate targets, here’s where the candidates were on March 3rd, after Super Tuesday when a Trump vs Clinton contest looked inevitable:

Candidate – Won/Target – Percentage of Target
Trump – 338/297 – 114%
Cruz – 236/384 – 61%
Rubio – 112/242 – 46%

Clinton – 609/529 – 115%
Sanders – 412/492 – 84%

Here’s where they are on March 28th:

Candidate – Won/Target – Percentage of Target
Trump – 754/789 – 96%
Cruz – 465/882 – 53%
Kasich – 144/657 – 22%

Clinton 1267/1174 108%
Sanders 1037/1129 92%

Trump is no longer a lock for the Republican nominee, not because of votes, but because the RNC seems to be considering rule changes that would lock him out. Cruz has fallen off pace, Rubio dropped out and the lone remaining establishment candidate, Kasich, has no path to winning on the first ballot.

But the Republicans are truly trapped. If they finagle Trump out, they will openly alienate the blue collar segment of their base, and could become an irrelevant third party. If they allow Trump’s win, though, they risk becoming an extremist American Ba’ath party. They would probably lose the election, but as Michael Wolraich described in a recent Salon interview, even losing elections can signal the start of a powerful movement. Wolraich was talking about progressives, but the Tea Party movement has been smoldering for almost a decade.

Clinton has dropped by seven percent, is out of Southern states, but still is considered the presumptive nominee by both the mainstream and much of the new internet media. Sanders has risen by eight percent, has momentum and solid fundraising, but is out of caucus states. Sanders must continue to win decisively but his main hurdle will be winning New York, which is his home state, but Clinton’s adopted state.

The Democrats are not trapped, but do risk alienating those millennial voters that should be their future core constituency. Since Arizona, the shadow of voter suppression looms large. One of my office friends thinks Hillary will have to ask Bernie to the prom, as VP, to keep her party together. Sanders has already said he would not look to include Clinton in his cabinet, so I would have bet against him being part of a neoliberal Clinton ticket. But she needs him much more than he needs her, and in a recent Young Turks interview Sanders cited a long list of policy demands that would reconcile him with the Clinton platform. So it is at least possible.