Brad Ideas - Brad's Rant - Comments

I understand the revenue management

brad — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:57:59 -0800

But that is not the case here. Here it’s just bureaucracy. If I had booked the flight as two one-way flights, at no extra cost, I would have been able to change one leg. If I had booked a slightly different flight to Europe with a similar plane change and also a flight number change, I would have gotten the upgrade offer.

I agree that revenue management causes all sorts of strange things, but these are not among them.

My general view is that when you have a business like this, you should have a desk that is able to authorize changes when the airline is clearly doing something silly and bureaucratic. Escalate to that desk if it seems that has happened, and if that happens a lot, fix the software.

Revenue management

John Moore — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:59:56 -0800

You are being treated to the tender mercies of revenue management systems. These automated beasts were first developed in the '80s to allow American Airlines to defeat a discount carrier. RM's optimize the revenue on a flight by selling low when they have to, and selling high when they can. Because these decisions are not made real time, they create a thicket of ever changing weirdness in pricing. However, they work really well, which is why aircraft are usually full these days.

They use AI and linear programming and various models as part of their work. I have run across these in my work in the hotel reservation business, which also uses them. When they set the fares, they are looking at history and then modeling current demand against that (and other factors) to calculate the price. Airlines used to use humans to do this, but the modern systems are much more effective (and weird).

In the airline world, customer satisfaction has taken a back seat (okay, way back in the tail cone) to price competition. That's how they can get away with treating us this way. It may piss you off royally, but they make more money doing it - even as everyone is growing to loathe the airlines.

Phillip, The idea that

kbender — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:09:56 -0800

Phillip,

The idea that income should be directly tied to "how hard you work" Sounds nice, but in reality it doesn't really work.

The basis of capitalism is that it rewards those who are innovators. Bill Gates is rich because microsoft and his accomplishments were huge innovations and improvements on our society that almost everyone benefited from. Did he work millions of times harder to create these innovations? of course, not. But are they millions of times more valuable then say someone who has flipped a bunch of burgers for a living, Apparently yes, because we (society) have all paid him that much money for the technology that he has given us.

I would prefer the system stay this way because it will continue to reward innovators for what they produce, not just how hard they work...

Frequent Flyer Porgram

Michael — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 04:43:28 -0800

I have similar experiences with several airlines. I changed from LH to UA 3 years back and still have LH miles which I tried
to use now. A miles & more ticket Duesseldorf to Montreal is at 60000 miles plus 618.36 CAD fees.

For the same dates you get a similar flight on expedia (Going leg identical, return leg different routing but also 1 stop) for
696 CAD. Identical flights (but not a LH ticket) go for 765 CAD. If you insist on LH paper it's 1166 CAD.

The Fee structure tends to be a bit better at

Sounds like a straw-man argument

Trey Jackson — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 08:55:05 -0800

I agree with the fact that stating that the top 1% receives X% of the income in itself is not very convincing, or even very interesting.

However, I don't think that is the argument people are generally making (people worth listening to at least).

I believe the argument being made is that over the last 30 years, the majority of the increases in income have gone to the top 10%, and within that segment, the majority of the increases in income have gone to the top 1%, etc. A variety of tables showing this can be found: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States

The basic idea being, sure the U.S. has done great in the last 30 years, but the bottom 40% has seen almost NO increase in income. So the ideas that "a rising tide lifts all boats" and "trickle down" just don't hold water.

That's what people are complaining about.

It's also worth remembering

Glen Raphael — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:18:30 -0800

It's also worth remembering that the top 1% of "earners" contains more than 1% of the people. (And there are many more people in the "top 20%" than the "bottom 20%". )This is because income statistics are based on reported *household* income. Households in the top 20% tend to include a lot of double-income families, whereas households in the bottom X% are mostly single-income families.

Also worth noting that since people's incomes change through their lifetime, simple demographic changes could make it look like "inequality is getting worse" even if everybody on the planet had the exact same income at each given age. Or suppose you take somebody who is in the "bottom 20%" and give that person a $200k/year job, changing nothing else. That individual is now hugely better off, but you made him so much richer that he's no longer in the bottom 20%. The average for his old quintile hasn't measurably changed because his new salary is not counted in that average. So long as there are new immigrants coming in near the bottom and new college students starting out near the bottom, it's very difficult to make it look like "the poor are getting richer" based on such statistics even if every single poor family were, in fact, getting richer over time.

Thank you!

Jeremy Stein (not the economist) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:12:18 -0800

Thank you for saying that Brad. That has always bothered me. People tend to quote statistics in the way that sounds the best for their cause.

It appears that it is the case that income inequality has gotten worse. The percentage earned by the top 1% has risen. However, there must be a better way to express the disparity.

Probably the Gini coefficient would be more appropriate, but we need something that everyone can understand. Any ideas?

True, but...

Phillip Helbig — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 02:01:47 -0800

While this is a valid point from the point of view of statistics, and one I've noticed myself many times, it is still a valid question to ask if the top 1% of earners should be earning 18% of the total income or whatever. The alternative is not necessarily communism. If one thinks, say, that earnings should be proportional to the product of time worked and intensity of the work, then someone who earns 1000 times what I do is probably earning too much. He can't be working 1000 times as much. I doubt that he is working 1000 times as hard, by any definition. He might be worth 1000 times as much to his company as I am to mine. In this sense, it is correct, but raises the question whether personal income should be determined exclusively by the market or whether other factors should play a role.

A related statistic is that the top 1% of earners pay 18% (or more, in a progressive-tax system) of the tax or whatever. Well, duh, big deal; as in your example, one is simply a consequence of the other.

I think the comparison with insurance is a bit misleading, though. The whole point of insurance is that everyone pays in a small amount and a few get out a large amount. This is different to income.

give them to needy school kids

G3 — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:42:46 -0800

Or even college kids impoverished by $150 textbooks. CS students will get a kick out of the association with a potential future employer. OK, it's not the "My Little Pony" backpack that's essential for the preteen girl, but it carries stuff just as well. In my part of the country, there are a number of charitable organizations that will pick up a clothing donation from your door. Just package your donations in one of those backpacks every time they come by, and your collection will be depleted in no time.

Grocery bags

brad — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:21:54 -0800

As noted, laptop bags don’t tend to do that well for groceries. Big open bags and tote bags are best for those. Bags that zip are handy though, for loose items. Some laptop bags have foam in them, which can provide some insulation.

How many are suitable for groceries?

rjh — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 12:34:04 -0800

I've never purchased reusable grocery bags. I've gotten enough suitable swag bags to meet my needs. If you go to a lot of conferences, you probably collected enough to supply your friends also.

I got a new tv last christmas

TV fix — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:12:31 -0700

I got a new tv last christmas, and and wait to see all the channels I wanted to watch. But when I turned it on, there was something off, the whole thing was streched and the sides are cropped off(the shows are 16:9 but thinks my screen is 4:3) and the only person that can help is my dad. He did not know about the problem and 6 months went by until I showed him the sports channels and he notices that he hates it because its wierd(In other words, "Streched") and fixes it. You know what, show some people their favourite channel, the ones that they watch all day, that are either 4:3 or think your tv is 4:3 and they will not love it.

Yes, especially with

Jon — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 20:07:17 -0700

Yes, especially with animated shows. Apparently it's okay to stretch out cartoons. Nope, sorry, even animated people look like football heads when stretched out.

At the moment I'm stuck with a hotel TV that not only stretches out the 4:3 signal, but it's zoomed in past 16:9 so it's painful to watch.

It would be nice if we could

Anonymous — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 20:32:29 -0700

It would be nice if we could just arrest and lock up people who have their TVs displayed incorrectly. It would definitely cut down on the amount of stupid people in the world. Pretty much everyone who pays for cable should be locked up too.

Rubik's Cube

Nathan — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 17:37:00 -0700

I thought for such a long time that this was just a South African problem. I'm actually kinda horrified to learn that that's not the case. I used to say that giving a widescreen tv set to a South African is like giving a Rubik's cube to a slightly dim two-year-old. The pretty colours are great but they'll never quite get what it's for.

To the earlier commenter who feels cheated - that's what you get for going out and buying something you don't understand. Yes, you could've gone to a pawn shop and got a giant Cathode Ray Tube from the seventies, set your set-top box to crop wide content (most still seem to do that by default anyway) and all your stories would be nice and big and fill up the entire screen. And the really sad part is you'd be happy.

I think people should have to pass a license exam in order to be allowed to purchase widescreen sets.

Yes, this topic brings out the angry sarcastic misanthrope in me.