1. True segregation where the rich go to a separate school all-together / have separate planes, etc.
2. Everyone wears the same lowest-common denominator clothes / travel in the same travel class?
Each of these alternatives is economically inefficient, and the poor suffer more as a result as their fares cease to be subsidised by the rich.
I'd rather fly $500 return to Tokyo, because some rich guy upfront is paying $4000 for a flat bed, than pay $2000 because some left-wing loon demands everyone has the same class of travel.
"I'd rather fly $500 return to Tokyo, because some rich guy upfront is paying $4000 for a flat bed"
NB: I'm 40 and didn't have these issues when I was younger/fitter/elasticker.
I pay $10k+ for a flat bed to Asia because I find that I can be off the plane and ready for a meeting the next business day, with no need to take an extra day or two on either end. Little seats that don't recline all the way are a recipe for back pain, neck pain, or just general low-grade misery, as if air travel isn't annoying enough. It's not really about "rich" (although I'm glad I have the option) but more about productivity and not losing time. The same thing happened with Saturday stay-overs on round trips (I don't know if they still do this) or one-way tickets being as or more expensive than round trips, because business customers often prefer to be home on weekends.
All that said, I generally book business and upgrade myself to first, so I'm not feeling the full $10-15k pressure myself. Also, I only book international first on vacations, when it's miles/points anyway, for which the spendy fares help out a lot.
Plus, I really don't want to fight with 500 people over two toilets. That gets more important when you get old. :-)
At the end the original article states pretty clearly what the alternative is: "Everyone wears the same great clothes, but pay different prices for it."
Even the quoted $15 (all JPKab could afford) is more than enough to meet Nike's manufacturing cost, for example, so under the suggested scheme he could wear the same clothes others do; and if Nike could charge different people different amounts, it would prefer to also receive the $15 than not receive it. (If it wouldn't impact its ability to charge its normal prices.)
In practice every company strives for price discrimination, by making something for every price point without hurting the higher ones.
This is a fairly edge case, that only really occurs on US domestic flights. The majority of the world's frequent-flyer programmes do not give space-available upgrades in the way that say American or United do domestically.
The vast majority of those travelling in premium cabins (or their employers) paid cash for their ticket.
Admittedly my airline experience is not with US airlines, but space-available upgrades for our valued frequent fliers are very common in the rest of the world.
You're right, there aren't automatic upgrades on most international flights for those with status. But a lot of people who fly international 1st / business are doing so on redemptions.
It was an oft-quoted meme in the 80s and 90s (and possibly earlier) that all the seats on flights from the continental US to Hawai'i were reward travel.
He was not seriously advocating such a system, merely saying that such a scenario would be the only way to get the richer parents to pay more, ala the airline model. Otherwise it's a simple act of charity.
As a programmer, double negatives make me reel with horror. I cannot parse an English sentence with a double negative as being a single negative; it's utterly illogical. At best, they're an unnecessary hindrance.
This is the problem with being a "programmer" with no domain. This is sort of like the one true programming language debate ("blub") where people want to evaluate mathematical notation as to their qualitative worth completely devoid of any context.
Computer languages are not spoken languages. No one should accuse English of being "illogical" because it's redundant. It isn't as terse as mathematical notation because most people don't speak completely in mathematical notation.
And it's all very logical, actually -- just not in the way you might expect. You might want to look into the effects of redundancy on transmission errors in communications before you pass judgement. :-)
A double negative is not double negation (in other languages), it's called agreement[1]. Just like you have to have agreement between numbers in English (It is / They are) you can also have languages that require/support agreement in terms of negative/positive. Yes, it's redundant information, but all human languages have a lot of extra information built into them at every level to make them easier to use.
My intuition is that double negation in English is usually accompanied by a shift in stress to emphasize that the negation should be interpreted in the "correct" way (i.e., as negating a previous negation) rather than as mere agreement. I think English actually allows multiple negation with no significant change in semantics in many dialects, possibly as the default interpretation.
Think of the AAVE negation, not as an operator, but as a tense. It's like in Standard English when you change a sentence from singular to plural, or from first-person to third-person: several words are required to change in lockstep or else the sentence isn't grammatical. Negation in AAVE works like that.
You obviously didn't make it to the end of the article, where it's explained that numerous Francophones wrote into dispute the author's interpretation and the author admitted his understanding of French was fundamentally flawed. As a French-speaker myself, encountering obvious bullshit at the beginning of the article made it difficult to uncritically accept his assertions for the remaining pages.
That note at the end also made it clear that the mistakes were corrected. Did you read the first part, get upset, then reload and read the note at the end?
I concur--it's a flawed analogy on a couple levels (but still a good conversation stimulator) but I believe one of the hardest things to manage in a start-up is that your success isn't binary.
Yes, there are a great many start-ups that fail to get out of the gate and a small, small number that take off so quickly that success is almost a guarantee. But if you're in the muddy middle the decision to grind it out or try a new approach has to be a difficult one, and is usually a low-data decision. And platitudes are little help here with "it takes three years to create an overnight success" on one side and "fail fast" on the other.
To be fair, this isn't a private airport, it's really just a private terminal at San Jose International (SJC). Don't get me wrong, that's pretty darn cool, though really no different to, say, Lufthansa's dedicated First Class Terminal at Frankfurt. Well, apart from the private Google planes, of course :-)
Yes, but just book a fully-flexible return, the refund it after you've entered the country. Quite a stupid rule given it can be so easily circumvented.
1. True segregation where the rich go to a separate school all-together / have separate planes, etc.
2. Everyone wears the same lowest-common denominator clothes / travel in the same travel class?
Each of these alternatives is economically inefficient, and the poor suffer more as a result as their fares cease to be subsidised by the rich.
I'd rather fly $500 return to Tokyo, because some rich guy upfront is paying $4000 for a flat bed, than pay $2000 because some left-wing loon demands everyone has the same class of travel.