Why does any of this imply they should become a regulated utility? This seems like a textbook case of the free market pushing prices down to cost. Having alternative revenue streams pushed that minimal price down; but even without that, there is no reason to think the market would have done anything other than push prices to the lowest level possible in that environment as well.
A more fair assessment would be: company runs a utility => they need to be a regulated utility!
The core part of air travel doesn’t really feel any different to a bus or metro or train. Off the tarmac then yes it absolutely feels like a Verizon store, as does some of the in-flight service, but there’s always been this weird feeling as a traveler that every carrier is basically the same thing but with different decals on it. Airline alliances are surely the ultimate example of this.
Have you ever flown spirit or any of the other ultra low cost carriers?
It very much is a different experience than flying a legacy domestic mainline carrier. I’m not alone amongst people i know who will happily fly the cheap seats on United/Delta/AA but won’t even look at a ticket from Spirit or Frontier even at a significant discount.
Compare it to a flag carrier like Singapore air and it is a shockingly different product.
All that’s an aside: we know what regulated airlines look like since we already tried it, much more expensive, with airlines competing not on price but on amenities.
I’ve flown Spirit and Frontier several times, and Southwest many times (I know they’re not quite in the same category, especially after their recent changes). I genuinely don’t know what you’re referring to regarding the experience being wildly different. Other than a few quirks about what they do and don’t charge for and how they board and assign seats, I feel like there’s almost no meaningful difference between these and legacy carriers like United and American. I honestly don’t even feel like the prices are consistently that different.
The two main differences are more armchair lawyering required to avoid fees (legacy carrier is often not going to put your bag in the dimension bin, but the Spirits and Frontiers of the world certainly will) and having to sit through three sales pitches instead of one on the legacy airlines. I think Delta is the only legacy carrier in the States that doesn't do obnoxious sales pitches - only the food cart upsell. Ryanair will come through with their hands out minimally three times since last time I rode them (though it's been several years, is it four now?)
One other difference I can think of is that carry-ons are more rarely included in the base fare in the budget airlines than the legacy airlines, though maybe that has also gone away since the changes where bags must be included in the listed price that Southwest pushed for.
Ryanair (EU) also does this, but the US is indeed pretty obnoxious here.
United even has commercials before the safety video; combined with the "if you're watching explicit content on this flight, please mind the children" announcement, those flights onestly honestly felt pretty surreal to me.
United has gotten worse and worse with this. The ads after (not before) the safety video, and also before each movie you watch (and it's usually the same ads before every movie). A few years ago the ads were skippable, but not anymore.
The flight attendant also makes an announcement about the United-branded credit cards near the beginning of the flight.
But this is really just an illustration of what the top-poster of this thread said: flying people places doesn't make enough money, so they have to pursue other revenue streams.
Look at prices (which are much higher than when I booked my trip later this summer), United prices are insane compared to others. Their prices were 4x what I paid for on SAS. I've long had a united club card, but likely circulating that out in the next year. Their prices for service/availability isn't worth whatever crack smoking is going into their pricing.
People keep asking airlines to raise price for better service and then every time they travel they hop on a price comparison website to find the ticket with the lowest sticker price, punishing companies for actually raising prices.
The annoying thing is... I already have a United card :) (and being able to board early and bring a normal size carry-on on basic economy is one of the best perks).
[1] There's two metrics airlines report: Cost per Available Seat Mile and Passenger Revenue per Available Seat Mile.
This is the cost/revenue for flying a seat, which may or may not be occupied by a person, to a destination. If the seat is empty it gets $0 in revenue but still costs money.
You can calculate the profit made from selling tickets per seat mile by PRASM - CASM.
The cabin crew stand at the front of the plane, and either play a recording or make an announcement saying you can buy a lottery scratchcard for €2 or whatever, with some of the money going to charity. They then walk down the plane "scratchards? scratchcards?"
They repeat this with a collection for charity (no scratchcard), a promoted drink, and some sort of food.
I think this is mostly unique to Ryanair (in Europe), I don't remember Wizz Air, Norwegian or EasyJet doing this. Part of Ryanair's marketing is to make the experience worse than it needs to be, so you know you're saving money.
ive never experienced that on ryanair? I fly it pretty regularly, its just the food cart, and even that feels halfhearted, I see maybe 3% of customers actually getting something, so most of the time they dont even bother asking, just roll right on by unless you go out of your way to ask for something.
The only bad upsell they do is in the booking process. Are you sure you don't want a hire car?
If you search "Ryanair scratchcards" you'll see recent news articles about them.
I've used Ryanair once in the previous 5 years, so my experience might be out of date. There was a time my job was taking me to "holiday" destinations for meetings, back then I used Ryanair more often as they often had the only direct route. Maybe the scratchcard sales are more common on those flights.
googling it it seems like its still a thing. I reckon it must be on certain specific flights, maybe ones that are likely to attract a certain crowd, liverpool to malaga sort of flights maybe. Ive definitely not heard about it, but I do usually fly the same routes so
Yes, Ryanair is the undisputed leader in finding new creative ways to take advantage of their captive audience and saving a few pennies here and there (e.g. I'm not aware of other low-cost carriers that have advertising on the overhead bins or put the safety instructions on seat-back stickers because it's marginally cheaper than using cards for that). Not to mention only flying from airports in the middle of nowhere to save airport fees.
...while other low-cost carriers try to distinguish themselves by not being quite as bad as Ryanair.
I kinda' like Ryanair as lowcost airline? They're fairly efficient (boarding, serving etc), they _actually fly_ the advertised flights (with relatively few exceptions), and the food is reasonably priced. During COVID they would just give your money back, no shenanigans like "they're in our company wallet". Sure they have their quirks but they don't seem to go out of their way to deceive you, they're pretty open about what you pay and what you get.
Now Wizzair is "mostly not an airline" for me, because they have all the negative traits I hinted above. E.g. they'll happily advertise flights they have no intention of flying, make refunds hard, are as misleading as they can be about pricing, make it impossible to checkin online a few hours before the flight so that you have to pay their high fees, etc.
I wouldn't want the Ryanair experience for long-haul flights; but for short 2-3h ones within Europe, they're fine, I'm always considering them. Not for the perceived cheapness, but for the "I expect them to actually fly AND be on time" part.
> During COVID they would just give your money back, no shenanigans like "they're in our company wallet"
Generally I agree with your view that Ryanair is decent at what it does, but COVID refunds happened only after the regulator stepped in to threaten them over their original "no refunds" and then "refund in the form of a voucher, with a short expiry date on it" policies actually being unlawful, and even allowing for the scale of its operations it received more complaints to the UK CAA than anyone else about refund handling during COVID.
In Romania I think they just gave back the money (or maybe it was on a voucher with "if you don't use the voucher by date X, we'll refund the money"). which is in stark contrast with how other low-cost airlines like WizzAir behaved. Perhaps it was regional policy; or perhaps it was due to their previous interactions with UK regulators? But for me, they gained a lot of respect for them back then (whereas WizzAir is on the "only if absolutely no other choice" list - and I think I only used it once, for a business trip where it had a good direct flight AND I didn't care if I actually made it to the destination, or if I got stranded there for a few days - since the company would've been paying)
Ryanair have been regulated into compliance very effectively by the European authorities- everyone knows they are scumbags and make sure they don’t get away with nonsense.
Literally how regulators should work. They look at the outrageous things they try to do and make laws to prevent them. It’s worked very well and also hasn’t ended Ryanair (which is the usual anti regulation argument , that we can’t have cheap things with regulations).
I personally never fly Ryanair because I’ve had to sue them (and won) in the past, they really do suck.
When's the last time you tried to claw back your EU mandated clawback for things like delayed flights from one of these airlines without fighting tooth and nail and threatening legal action? Perhaps this has improved in recent years, but when I was flying EU regularly several years ago getting that refund has always been an uphill battle.
Hah, I tried when BA had to cancel my flight due to a computer system outage. Coincidentally, some “activists” handcuffed themselves to a fence on the runway at the exact same time, which was an act of terror or whatever and thus not covered, so I did not receive my money back.
I actually like wizz. They are dirt cheap which is the only thing i care about. The ground crew don't openly despise you, unlike easyjet, they tolerate you and their cabins are all right. Just they don't have any customer service if anything goes wrong.
"Wizz; Not the worst airline you've ever flown on"
They don't have to actually sell a single scratchcard for it to be worthwhile for them - the whole point is to cheapen the experience.
They have an entire theory of marketing based on people believing that "if it feels cheap, it is cheap", and so they deliberately build in a bunch of annoyances (scratchcards, arbitrary baggage restrictions, checkout hoop-jumping, endless PR about removing toilets or running standing-only flights) which serve to make their service seem as cheap and nasty as possible.
And it works: some people simply ignore the nasty aspects, others are willing to put up with them in order to get a bargain, and yet others actually take pride in wading through the crap - usually expressing it in "I beat the system" terms. And here we are talking about it on a barely-related thread - carrying their marketing message further!
The safety card thing, and lack of seatback pockets is mainly to speed up turnaround after everyone's off the plane. (planes only make money when they're in the air)
After they made this change years ago, they said so explicitly in their marketing around continuous improvement.
Besides the seats, seat pitch, entertainment, cabin classes, upcharges, boarding staff paid commission to reject carryons, advertising everywhere, the unpolished behavior of other clientele, customer service, and how they handle failure, sure it’s practically the same.
Failure is the one that always puts me off...
At least with United, there's a good chance they can get a broken plane running again, or swap in a different airframe, within a reasonable number of hours. For example, my last flight to Puerto Rico was delayed by ~5 hours, due to a nose gear problem. They eventually swapped air frames around, giving us one that was scheduled for the late day flight, and got our air frame fixed in time for that later flight.
Spirit or another super-low-cost? They don't have the extra air frames and number of flights to do that. You get to wait even longer, losing valuable vacation days (or missing work meetings).
I feel like you're living in a different universe then. I will literally never fly Spirit (well, neither will anyone else) nor Frontier ever, I loath the experiences I've had on them so much.
First, as someone with relatively long thighs, I literally don't fit in their sardine can seats. But more relevant to most people, while things may be OK if everything goes perfectly and nothing is delayed or cancelled, you are completely SOL with Spirit/Frontier if something goes wrong (and "something" may just be they themselves decide to cancel an undersold flight at the last minute). It's nearly impossible to get someone to talk to, I feel like the employees know how shitty their companies are so they all have an attitude like they DGAF, and it's a mad (expensive) scramble to find alternative arrangements at the last minute.
I've never had as abysmal experiences as I've had on Frontier compared to any other airline.
From a customers' immediate point of view, this sucks for you.
But it's great they are not regulated utilities. Because either everyone would have to pay for extra legroom, even if they don't need it, or some freakishly long people would not be able to pay for the extra legroom that they need.
That's not how regulation works. Or at least not how it has to work.
I don't pay a flat fee for my water, electricity, or gas usage, regardless of how much I use. I pay for the gallons, kWh, and therms I actually use. (Yes, there are other fees on those bills, but my usage actually matters.)
Airline regulation doesn't have to specify standardized seat pitch, etc.
Sure, there's probably some utopian nirvana regulation that gives you exactly what you need.
In practice airline regulation did preclude the airline from adding more seats. So in practice it banned airlines from offering you cheaper fares in return for enduring less legroom.
In practice airline regulation did preclude the airline from adding more seats. So in practice it banned airlines from offering you cheaper fares in return for enduring less legroom.
I’m relatively tall and have a generally rough (but tolerable) time with all domestic bottom-tier seats.
I have no difficulty believing you when it comes to customer service. I’ve never had any issues requiring anything beyond the most basic customer service, so I just haven’t been exposed to differences between airlines in that regard. I also understand that a bad experience can leave an exceptionally bad impression. I suppose the only thing that might surprise me is if the higher-cost airlines don’t also have terrible service.
Yup, came here to say this. Once you're on the plane and its in the air, Spirit and Frontier are like pretty much every other domestic airline. There's slight variation in terms of whether you get a whole can of coke for free or not. If you're taller than me, the 28" of seat pitch vs say 31" on delta may make a difference, but I'm only 5'9".
I still avoided them like the plague because the legacy carriers are selling you operational performance and the ability to usually get you where you're going within a reasonable timeframe if you're delayed or canceled. Spirit, Frontier, Allegiant, whoever else, do not do nearly as good a job when something goes wrong. Although they should get a lot of credit - none of them have ever had a fatal crash.
> Once you're on the plane and its in the air, Spirit and Frontier are like pretty much every other domestic airline.
Yes, if you ignore the part where things are different, it's basically the same. Trouble is, those differences do meaningfully make a difference. There's no objective measure for misery and happiness, but flying Jsx is nicer than Spirit. You can put a dollar value on misery, that's why one's so much more expensive than the other.
My parent "airports" are Bellingham and SeaTac. I hate SeaTac with all my soul. Next admission - primary carrier is Alaska. They are mediocre to ok. Cabin crew, always friendly. I've had random flight cancellations - some seatac/bellingham, others randomly before/after homeland security budget BS. In all cases, they rebooked on something ridiculous (a day or two later, hours that made no sense) and their call hold times (or call backs) are hours. Sadly, I'm in a captive market and am very proactive when day of travel is around.
Sounds like you guys need some very basic regulations we have here in Europe - companies have to take care of folks, provide food, accommodation and replacement flights (and up to 600 euro in case of overbooking depending on distance). Not great, but worries like above are simply not on our calendar when traveling, low cost or not.
Also, here in Europe, traditional aircraft carriers have been migrating their quality towards bottom end (ie Swiss not giving any beers for free even on intercontinental flights, microscopic legroom also on intercontinental) while for example Easyjet is for me at this point a high quality reliable carrier with no bullshit. Ryanair is a dumpste3r but luckily they don't serve my nearest airport well.
You state an opinion, but not why for that opinion. I’m mostly stuck with Alaska or a small handful being a couple hours north of Seattle and driving to/dealing with SeaTac is not fun. In the caliber you said you wouldn’t travel includes aliegent.
I’ve not flown them and stick to Alaska and the local puddle jumpers to get off the island.
If anything it’s a tool for making people outside of Singapore like/want to do business in Singapore, so if that makes it some twisted kind of utility then I guess anything can be a utility. Not like they have domestic flights.
Singapore Airlines is majority-owned by the Singapore government's investment and holding company Temasek Holdings, which holds 55% of voting stock as of 31 March 2020
Staff that are unfailingly polite, comfortable seats in all classes, well maintained interiors, a culture of excellence. It is an airline that competes on being the best experience possible. My FIL used to do a lot of business in Singapore, and exclusively flew them on any route that was possible mostly economy and business class, but a spend that was high five figures per year, in the top tier of whatever their points program was. A staff member who knew what he looked like would meet him at the curb and walk him into a private check in cubicle. Even if you aren't one of their frequent fliers, they just treat you far better than you can expect from EU/NA airlines.
US mainline carriers try to get the high end travellers in first class, while also trying to run an ultra low cost carrier with the new "basic" class tickets. They end up doing a mediocre job at both by not hitting the level of service that Asian airlines provide, and not having the low prices that the Ryanair's of the world give you.
I think Spirit has the most comfortable seats out of all the ones you listed. Especially if you're lucky enough to have a row to yourself and get to lie across all three of them.
This is more accurate, but the case for tarmac is weaker than streets or tracks. The natural monopoly on tarmacs is weaker. It can be a very good think for a metro to have competing airports.
The question is whether we feel air travel is as essential to everyday life as busses and trains are.
In other words, do we need to make sure everyone can afford to take a flight somewhere?
Or is air travel a luxury that we can allow the market to set a price for?
Maybe flights are simply too cheap, and we should just allow airlines to fail, which will limit supply enough to bring ticket prices back up to a level that is sustainable for airlines as a business.
Of course, this means that a lot of people are going to be priced out of being able to fly places for non-essential reasons. Which, given the environmental impact, might not be a bad thing, although it will make life very different for most people.
Personally, I'm inclined to drive over fly if I can get there in 8-12 hours or less. Even if it uses up close to a full day for a round trip. I absolutely abhor flying. I'm a bit tall and fat, and I've been stuck on the last row, inside seat with less room in both dimensions while the person in front of me tries to lean back literally dislocating my knee. All because they oversell flights, and your seat selection at purchase time apparently counts for jack squat when you show up at the airport to check in... you really needed to "check in" online the day before, even if you were in meetings until 9pm with no time to actually step aside to do the check-in on your phone that's just a miserable experience in itself, because nobody does accessibility testing with phones and larger text/display sizes.
> The question is whether we feel air travel is as essential to everyday life as busses and trains are.
Anywhere I can get to by train in the USA I can go faster and cheaper by plane. By bus I can go "cheaper" if I ignore the value of my time and the people offering me meth at the bus-stop.
I think the ultimate example is the fact that most routes are run by other companies than the branded carrier; capacity providers like Endeavour and SkyWest just borrow the name and livery of the major carrier they're operating for that day.
Yea that's a good one. The problem is folks don't have patience. They see an airline fail and instead of waiting until a new competitor enters the market, as they inevitably will, they want to start regulating or look to other "solutions" but these things take time to work themselves out. It's a free market, not an instant free market.
Or maybe a new competitor doesn't enter the market, and we're stuck with a mere four major, three mid-sized, and some smaller airlines in the US. It's still a highly competitive market even with Spirit gone.
Am I the only one who really doesn't care what kind of service I get on a plane? I don't drink alcohol, so I don't care about that. I bring my own water bottle, so I'm good on that. The little bags of pretzels are nice, but if they stood at the front and launched them out of a t-shirt cannon, I'd be good with that.
As long as the required crew of flight attendants doesn't assault me, I've never really got off a plane thinking anything at all about the service. Just "where do I need to go next" or "I'm glad to be home".
Dang no way? I had a terrible experience with them (tbf it was half a decade back at this point). We were in line to check in, something like 1.5hrs before a one hour flight. The line was agonizingly slow (only 2 of like 5 check-in counters were staffed), and when we got to the counter they said we were too late, missed the window for the flight. We only had carry-ons, were 3min late for their arbitrary window, and the plane still wasn't scheduled to leave for an hour or so.
We were clearly in line before their deadline, were certainly going to make it to the gate before they even opened for boarding, had no checked bags, and they made us buy new tickets. The cherry on top was that they ran flights every hour, so we bought the ticket for the next hour but the gate agent let us on the original flight we had- so they basically just forced us to pay double for our flight.
Not arguing against your point, but it astounds me how many airports do not have water-bottle refill stations. My home airport (SFO) does, but many in the US still do not. I feel like that sort of thing should be legally mandated, given we're not permitted to bring water through security. The paltry amount of water they give you on the flight (and at times of their choosing, not yours) is not enough to rehydrate basically anyone.
Honestly I kind of liked Spirit because the snacks aren't free. When it's snack time, I don't have to wait 45 minutes for the cart to get to me because it's not stopping at every row. And it doesn't bother me to spend $4 on a snack because I already spent so much less on the ticket.
But I guess I also don't fly much, and I never had to deal with delays or rebooking with them.
Spirit wasn't asking for a government subsidy to get saved from bakruptcy. They were asking to be allowed to get merged with JetBlue (which could've saved them from bankruptcy) and got denied by the government. Those two things aren't the same.
My understanding is that the Spirit/JetBlue merger was blocked by the Biden DOJ. Were they asking for that again, or was it a different thing that failed in negotiations with the feds recently?
“Our win in court is a victory for U.S. travelers who deserve lower prices and better choices,” said Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. “We fought this case to protect consumers who, as the court recognized, ‘otherwise would have no voice.’ I am incredibly proud of the Antitrust Division’s team and our state law enforcement partners’ tireless advocacy.”
Sure, that's fair. But often enough I see people (not accusing you of this) doing the opposite: seeing bad regulation, and drawing the conclusion that the only solution is to remove all regulation and "let the market decide".
Have you ever tried to get rid of bad regulation? I have, and it is essentially impossible. De-regulation is usually the only path once the initial regulation is in place. It also only ever seems to grow in complexity and onerousness, rarely ever goes the other directin. It's like dealing with a massive legacy codebase that also has the power to throw you in jail.
I'm not against regulation, I think there are areas where it's needed (privacy is a good example), but it is fire, and fire should only be played with when you really need it because it can easily grow out of control and burn things you don't intend to get burned.
> In economics, a normal good is a type of a good for which consumers increase their demand due to an increase in income, unlike inferior goods, for which the opposite is observed. When there is an increase in a person's income, for example due to a wage rise, a good for which the demand rises due to the wage increase, is referred as a normal good. Conversely, the demand for normal goods declines when the income decreases, for example due to a wage decrease or layoffs.
Health and safety are normal goods. As people get richer, they demand more of them.
I like the EU model. The regulators set a "bare minimum" set of requirements. They have much better minimums that North America, and the fares are (still) cheaper per kilometer travelled. Also, I love the penalty system when flights are late.
For one, the penalty system for late arrivals. It is such a big business now, that there are whole businesses setup to advise you and do the work for the cut of the penalty paid. And that penalty system applies for trains too.
Also, look at Ryan Air (and Wizz Air) fares. They are consistently the lowest cost per kilometer travelled anywhere in Europe. Sure, it is like a flying bus, but it gets the job done, much cheaper than anything the US.
Not op but I also agree with the framing assuming you add “and they provide a vital service” to both. If a vital service is being used to extract profits it should be regulated so that equal access to the vital service can be provided. If a vital service is being provided but cannot make money it should be regulated so that it can be sustained since it is vital.
Now what is vital? Is Spirit vital? That’s the hard to define part.
1. "We want to have this, but we don't want to pay for it!"
2. "We won't pay for this, but we still want to have it!"
These are of course both fair points. Why should we "pay for" things, what's that all about? We should just naturally have the natural things that we naturally want, supplied by pixies.
I think they're both actually "We want to have this, but we don't want to pay too much for it just so a CEO can make 10,000x their workers and potentially ALSO still lose money."
How much of the money goes to CEO vs shareholders is something they can work out between themselves.
If the airline goes bankrupt, that just means that the creditors get less than they otherwise expected. That's something to haggle out between creditors and management and shareholders.
(Or do you want to imply that if the shareholders saved money on CEO compensation, they would give the money to ordinary workers?)
It JUST means that the creditors lose money? It doesn't stop the planes flying? It doesn't stop the humans and freight from being transported? The plane maintenance? The airport's budget isn't affected, the airline employees aren't affected?
It's funny how any time something comes along suggesting consumer choice should play a role in a market economy, these types of comments come along to suggest its not their place.
There's no fundamental rule of a capitalist society that consumers have to make their choices out a narrow selection of options provided by corporate oligarchies between the criteria they would prefer to compete on. As a customer, I can choose which airline I want based on whatever criteria I want. Maybe I pick it based on pay ratio between executives and average workers, maybe I pick it based on whichever has the font I like best on their homepage.
> We should just naturally have the natural things that we naturally want, supplied by pixies.
Is this how you see roads? Are we entitled for wanting those to be paid for by the state? What about the police? Should we have to pay whenever a police officer stops a mugging -- or is the wage of that officer, too, supplied by pixies?
These have remained unresolved questions, for me, for decades. When an internet pal was trying to found a libertarian (what noun should I use) locale, in Awdal in Somaliland (that detail of whether it was really in Somaliland or not was more debatable at the time), he first founded the Awdal Roads Company.
So obviously there are theories about how these things can be privately funded. But I can never remember the theories. Looking at that link, it was going to be toll roads. People dislike this, understandably. One problem with private roads is that you can't exactly use a competing road, which might entail moving house, or changing your plans for the day, or your job.
I have a vague notion that roads could be funded by a group of businesses that benefit from them, sort of like the W3C or a mall. Non-profit, sponsored roads, or something. (Now I'm thinking of runestones, several of which are near bridges and say "He made this bridge for his soul" or a similar statement.)
Don't ask me about police, I don't even understand crime and punishment, really.
I should maybe add that I meant "We should just naturally have the natural things that we naturally want" somewhat unironically. I feel that way, the same as anyone else. The difficulty, as observed up the thread, is in working out what's natural, or vital, or wanted and feasible. There are no pixies to magically know the answers, to my regret, only governments, and they only pretend to know. By buying and selling we can almost figure out the answers, contingently and approximately, but a lot goes wrong with that, including the friction of having to do it all the time, and "rent-seeking", whatever defines that really.
> "I have a vague notion that roads could be funded by a group of businesses that benefit from them"
Everybody benefits from roads. People who use the roads directly, benefit from being able to move around quickly. Companies which move raw materials around to make products benefit from roads. People who buy products that were moved and delivered by road are benefitting. People who can work because roads enable tourists to come, benefit from them. People whose decent coworkers were once children who were educated by teachers who got to work by road, are benefitting years later. People whose family members didn't suffer a massive property loss because they could call a plumber who got there by road, are benefitting. People who can engage in long distance trade and relationships by post, benefit.
Even though there are people harmed by roads, there's nobody who doesn't benefit from roads.
We have ways to charge people-who-use-roads-more, more money; they pay larger road tax for commercial vehicles, for larger wheelbase vehicles, for larger engine vehicles, they pay more fuel tax because they drive further and buy more fuel, they pay more tax on parts and labour because they wear out their vehicles faster, replace parts and vehicles more often, spend more on mechanic work.
I also don't really want it so that a business owns private roads, and if the road gets a sinkhole and traffic cannot flow, the business can just shrug. If ambulances can't get through, if garbage collection can't happen, if people can't get to work, if companies can't deliver products, the company doesn't have to hurry to fix it. They only care to the extent that their toll income has dropped by one road's worth, but if they fix it within a month or two that might be fast enough for them - but not fast enough for the rest of us to avoid serious consequences.
You’re missing the vital framing. You’re welcome to strawman the strawman but the respond with yet a third: “I’m not able to pay for it and will die as a result”. I’d prefer to live in a society where we avoid as many situations like that as possible. It’s the primary purpose of a government and a nation. Solving the problems of aggregating the required parts? Again it’s why we work together and it’s the point of government to solve that problem.
Good regulation doesn’t completely avoid market mechanisms it tries to tame the more brutal ones in order to maximize return to society. The roads argument is important because without roads we do not have any trade. So by collectively and somewhat proportionally, to use and income, managing the cost of road it makes everything else the market does possible.
So you're saying it's all about the concept "vital" and I should pay that more heed? But I don't think the term "vital" solves the problem of information. Natural, vital, optimal, feasible, wanted, it's all the same question, which is, uh, "how should we specifically cooperate," I guess. Government just knows less about this than the people involved do. Hayek yek yek.
Maybe you mean that in desperate situations - such as working out what to do about roads - we might as well resort to government. We do, so I guess you're right.
Lots of roads in the USA are built by private developers, then they're deeded over to the municipality for "free" so its on taxpayers to do maintenance.
And the tax income from sparse, sprawling suburbs, is not enough to cover the cost of providing sewage/electric/gas/garbage collection/firefighting/road maintenance. So either 'wealthy' suburbanites end up being subsidised by taxes from dense 'poor' inner city taxpayers, or the city has to approve a new suburb to get a chunk of income from new house sales and taxpayers to pay for the maintenance of the previous suburb's roads, in an unsustainable pyramid scheme where the city has to build more roads forever just to stand still.
I'm with you in the first half but not the second half. State governments don't allocate state money to helping suburb/exurb infrastructure unless it's specifically a state road. Never for residential roads. What happens is that maintenance gets deferred indefinitely, it goes to shit because nobody has the money for it, and the homeowners who are affected conclude government doesn't work.
> and "rent-seeking", whatever defines that really.
"The act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth." This is in opposition to profit-seeking, where "entities seek to extract value by engaging in mutually beneficial transactions." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
Friend, with respect, the mental blocks you're coming up against regarding roads, police, and resource distribution, within an American libertarian framework, are outlining exactly why American libertarianism (unregulated capitalism) is an untenable ideology.
Private roads don't make sense in capitalist framing because there's no possibility of competition - no market for a free hand to move in. Furthermore, there's ethical issues around the fact that roads won't be built to people who aren't as instrumentally valuable to capitalism, which is in opposition to the idea that all humans are equally intrinsically valuable. In plain words: poor people won't get roads built to them, won't be able to work, will get poorer. This is bad, and if you want to just be selfish about it, will lead to crime and social discohesion.
This argument extends to all the resources governments typically involve themselves in: electricity, sewage, water. We have direct evidence that when they try to privatize these things, it goes horribly wrong: see, the American healthcare industry, or, what's happening to the UK as it privatizes sewage. See the Texas privatized power grid.
All capitalist entities (corporations) are simple algorithms: Make profit go up. We like to tell ourselves that making profit go up is possibly only through mutually beneficial trades, aka the aformentioned profit-seeking, however that's not true in practice. The most profitable activity is slavery driven labor, and the most profitable state for a corporation to be in is monopoly. All optimized capitalist behavior selects for and trends towards that activity and that state, and literally the only way to stop this is through establishing some kind of hierarchy that allows for the limiting of corporate behavior - governments, and regulations.
Any example you give of a corporation in capitalism not trending towards slavery or monopoly has one of several explanations. 1. It's regulated, 2. It's led by someone who ethically doesn't want to trend towards slavery or monopoly, or isn't intelligent enough to do so. In the case of 2, that company will eventually be surpassed and consumed by someone with less morals, more intelligence, and more capital (more power).
> "We should just naturally have the natural things that we naturally want" somewhat unironically. I feel that way, the same as anyone else. The difficulty, as observed up the thread, is in working out what's natural, or vital, or wanted and feasible.
I completely agree, and there are other ways to do this other than capitalism, regulated or otherwise. I strongly recommend the most cited economist in history: Karl Marx. Peter Kropotkin is also very good, "The Conquest of Bread" is a great speculation of alternative systems.
Breaking down complex topics into binary black and white doesnt have to be wrong. The more important part is, how much wealth they extracted and how exactly. Was it market dominance with a superior product or amoral cost externalization.
The angle of treating transportation as regulated utility shifts the business focus away from profit onto providing services, which sometimes can cost more than your income. Similarly, would you close schools, because they didnt make enough money? Airlines are highly subsidized anyway, treating them as regulated utilities falls short of taking public ownership as public institutions, where services just cost money/subsidies.
> Similarly, would you close schools, because they didnt make enough money?
Yes, of course. We should separate school and state.
> Airlines are highly subsidized anyway, treating them as regulated utilities falls short of taking public ownership as public institutions, where services just cost money/subsidies.
How are they highly subsidized? And where? Perhaps we should fix that, instead of adding to the problem? Two wrongs don't make a right.
You mean better education for uber achievers that can pay more for it? That is already the case in the US [1] for a long time now and with expectable outcomes of poverty and wasted economic and human potential, observable today. With the melting middle class, these problems will continue to grow. Are you for euthanasia already? The next step is cutting public education even more and divert these budgets into private school via school vouchers [2]. Can you guess the outcome?
> "Today I learned that a new account starts getting rate limited upon receiving its first downvote. Yay?"
Your comments are one-line thoughtless mic-drops, the system is working.
> "If a service cannot be provided for a cost below what someone will pay, the service should not be provided as providing that service is a lose-lose situation."
It can be a win-win situation, not everything is about profit. See also:
> "How did poor people who needed to fly fly when flying was expensive?"
If a poor person can fly somewhere to get a better job, they stop being a poor person. That's a win for them personally, and a win for society, and a win for future government tax income. It's also a win for the airline which moved them and got paid for it. The only time it's not a win is if you have a myopic focus on "but it costs money now and that's bad".
Utilities and transportation should be public services, and they are in many places. Sometimes it works well, other times it works less well… usually because the capitalists lobby it into neglect and then say “see it’s not working / losing money let the private sector take over”.
Companies like John-Deere should be able to survive without abusing their downstream customers. Many farmers are importing tractors from China because they're cheap and not hostile to repair like JD is. Some people might call it a "smart business model" to sell interdependent services, but in the long-term it's suicide.
Whether or not you solve this through regulation, that's up to you.
The extremes of capitalism have a negative impact on people’s lives.
The first scenario it harms us by under-serving and scammy practices, the second scenario it’s over-extractive and funneling money from the many to the few.
Company offers a service that is considered essential to function in society, and the overwhelming majority of people _must_ pay for as if it were a tax: "this seems like something generally useful to the public! They need to be a regulated utility!"
If it's basic essential infrastructure and in the absence of high speed rail it is, it shouldn't be a regulated utility it should be nationalized holistically. You have to 1) make sure nobody is profiting of a basic necessity because that will always eventually be unsustainable (profits need to rise always and forever like cancer), 2) holistically because the parts of it that are profitable need to be used to cushion the unprofitable parts (in contrast to privatization where the profitable bits get privatized and the unprofitable bits are subsidized like USPS vs. UPS/FedEx/Amazon)
Okay, but the process of underwriting an airline now somehow involves operating a successful credit card company. Which, you know, are not typically successful based upon operating excellence but upon rapaciousness of interest rates and merchant fees.
I'm not sure it's great to have important infrastructure operated this way. Other than regulation do you see a way out?
No airline operates a credit card company. They just put their name on a card and sell miles at a discount in bulk to credit card companies like Chase or Citi.
Of course they do. Why do you think they get money in return? You don't think that's linked to performance? They just put their name on a card, get a fixed amount of monthly money, and that's enough to let them lead at a loss on airline tickets?
Hacker News has become simple minded. It's embarassing.
Company is valuable to us as a society in a fundamental way but is fucking us up in all sorts of unique ways: They might need to be a regulated utility.
Hopefully we can regulate them like California electricity and let one airline be active per airport and let them charge more than triple national rates.
I am not trying to be flip - I am just saying the two sides are not bad regulation ripping us off and bad private companies ripping us off, we can instead do good things and attempt to do them well, we can hold people accountable and have integrity; these are choices we make every day.
Power companies are the classic example. If power companies were forced to compete, their costs + competition tend to drive them out of business. As a result most power companies are forced to operate in really tight constraints with very limited but predictable margin.
I'm not saying that this a better outcome (power companies have their problems too). I was just commenting that this issue parallels the historical solution that was applied to utility companies.
Power companies are a classic example of a natural monopoly because they require a ton of extremely expensive physical infrastructure to connect every house to the grid that would be wasteful to duplicate for every competitor.
The whole point of airplanes is that they require no physical infrastructure between point A and point B.
You can have competing power companies generating the power if the grid is owned by the state (or a regulated monopoly). Coincidentally, that is a good mental model for airlines because airports are often state-owned or if not are highly regulated.
I'm starting to come around to seeing airports the same way. Airplanes need "a ton of extremely expensive physical infrastructure to connect every" city to the grid.
That's why the creditors let Spirit die. Their airport slots and gates are more valuable than the rest of the company combined.
Fair point and I don't disagree. The more meta point I would make is that airlines are still fairly capex heavy (even if there is no point-to-point infrastructure). Each incremental new route operating during standard hours still requires 90m+ on a new airplane.
So if they tend to compete themselves into oblivion, or need to turn into banks to subsidize their product, then it might make sense that they should be regulated monopolies.
Still you're probably right, if they can turn into banks and stay profitable, then maybe that's a better market outcome overall.
If we let the free market do its work, there'd be no airlines. Jet fuel is heavily subsidized, the State injects massive amounts of money into airports and plane manufacturers, etc.
Honestly, with the looming climate crisis, we should probably just let them fail one by one and let alternatives (who can actually be profitable) take off.
In a free market, every working citizen could easily afford more expensive airline tickets, since they could keep their entire income with no taxes deducted.
> every working citizen could easily afford more expensive airline tickets
You mean every laboring slave.
No free market means corporations are allowed to engage in slavery, chattel or otherwise. Let's be honest about what a free market actually is. Factory towns, lifetime debt bondage.
Modern governments have their fingers involved everywhere. That doesn't mean that nothing would exist and nobody would survive if things were different.
You could just as well say that if it weren't for private investors nothing and nobody would exist, because they also have their fingers involved everywhere.
But the post I'm replying to is a scenario of a different world. We're not discussing how things actually are and how things actually happened.
When a necessary service is pushed towards being unprofitable / breakeven due to "free market pressures", it probably should have some kind of backstop to ensure the service doesn't completely fold - because it is necessary. I think the suggestion to treat it like a utility was trying to emphasize this.
I'd also feel similar I'd my primary water, electricity, or internet provider was on the brink of failing due to "free market pressures".
But also, 'Not necessary' doesn't mean 'not worth subsidizing'.
If you think the government finds value in having a connected population with easy access to information then there's value in subsidizing that. Assume the government valued it at $10 a month per person due to increased economic activity made possible from the information flowing, if the market price for it was $60 a month then you have expanded access to anyone who valued it at at least $50 a month.
You can make the same argument for air travel by the way. Why does the government value consumers flying around the country? Why would the government want to encourage people to fly from Charlotte to Florida to go to disney instead of drive to Pidgeon Forge and go to Dollywood? Or fly to NY 3x a year to see grandma for a weekend instead of drive to NY and see grandma for a whole week 1x a year?
Airlines basically were a regulated utility until they were unregulated to the point where normal people can barely fit in a seat and there’s basically no amenities anymore. It used to be kind of nice to fly. That’s laughable now.
On the other side of that coin, when airlines were heavily regulated, most people couldn't afford to fly at all.
The "regulation vs. no regulation" stance is the wrong way to look at it. Airlines are still regulated, of course. Maybe some of the regulations we do have are unnecessary, some of the regulations we got rid of we should really bring back, and perhaps there are others that we never had that we need.
> Why does any of this imply they should become a regulated utility?
Because the majority of the HN crowd defaults to "a massive government bureaucracy would do this better" unless it's even tangentially related to their industry in which case it's "regulations bad" and "move fast break things."
Because the amount anyone would actually pay is substantially below cost for most routes, but it's still a service that many people depend on (either directly or by the indirect economic impact of travel). It's a genuine force multiplier that is unaffordable without being subsidized; making it a utility would just shift the subsidy from credit card points programs to the government.
> Because the amount anyone would actually pay is substantially below cost for most routes
This is absolutely not true. If all the airlines were prohibited from making money with anything else (miles, credit cards) then airfares would rise across the board and there would still be plenty of demand. Not as much, but still plenty.
That's.... like a pretty shocking erasure of the idea of a demand curve given the forum here.
To be glib: no, that's not how it works. Increase the price and fewer people will fly, but the demand won't drop to zero. Decrease it and you make less money per ticket but the size of the market is bigger. At some point there is a local maximum, to which the market seeks.
But conditions change occasionally and the equivalent supply curve is moving rapidly because of the oil shock (i.e. it's more expensive to put planes in the air to service tickets you already sold). And things like the mess with Spirit are what happens when the market readjusts: the rest of the industry will (probably) backfill some of the lost capacity, but not all of it, and prices will (probably) rise a bit to a new equilibrium.
If airlines didn’t exist, people and goods would continue to move around the globe as they have done for thousands of years. There’s nothing magical about air travel (or any other transport mode) that makes it worthy of subsidy .
Listen, I'm the type of fella who'd gladly take the Amtrak from the East Bay to Portland, 18 hours each way, and I'm telling you even I'd do so only as a novelty. If I actually had somewhere to be, spending basically an entire day on a train would be a non-starter. And that's just on the same coast! If I had to take the Amtrak back east to see my family for the holidays I would probably just not go. My travel to the other coast (not to mention back to the country where I was born, an additional ocean's worth of distance) would only be worth the trip for like a life change or a death in the family.
I'm clearly not the only one who thinks so, judging by both Amtrak ridership statistics and the cost ineffective nature of my attempts to travel on it.
People and goods have travelled around the world long for thousands of years before air air travel and train travel. And people have made decisions above the trade-offs of travel to see family for thousands of years before air travel and train travel.
If air travel was unavailable or unsubsidized, people would continue to make those decisions and life would go on.
> People and goods have travelled around the world long for thousands of years before air air travel and train travel.
Yes, and it really, really sucked back then. And the number of people who could actually do that travel was much, much smaller than today. Air travel (and train travel, to some extent, though it mostly sucks in the US) has enabled people to travel around the globe who never would have been able to in the past.
I'd like to see a revival of trains in the US, but I agree their impacts will be limited. I think they make sense for regional travel (Texas triangle, New England area, West coast, Midwest, maybe NM/Colorado/South Wyoming, etc.) Hopping between these regions seem like planes are the obvious choice. The distances are just so high, with often very limited regional centers connecting them in between.
I'd love to take some HSR to Austin or Houston or San Antonio from DFW, but I just can't imagine the network to make a train work competitively to get from DFW to NYC or LAX.
When something is that drastically different, it becomes different in kind. For example, if you have high network latency, you cannot jam (play live music) with friends remotely. If you have low latency, you can. Just because the difference is in a single value (I.e. net speed) doesn’t mean it doesn’t change the fundamental nature of what’s possible. Air travel makes the kind of business, shipping, and attendance possible that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise, because our collective lifetimes and risk tolerances are limited.
I think you're saying that there are businesses that rely on cheap air transportation that are very valuable, but at the same time couldn't afford higher air fees.
But that's a contradiction. If they are valuable, their customers would pay more for their services - that's the definition of valuable. And if their customers would pay more, they could afford higher air fees.
No, all I’m saying is that air travel is so different than any other kind of travel, that it is very special, and borderline magical. Saying something like “nothing magical about air travel, things and people would still travel around the globe” is very reductive. I’m not giving my opinion on subsidies.
Person 1. "Airline service is more valuable than people will pay for, it's a genuine force multiplier that is unaffordable without being subsidized"
Person 2. "Airlines are not magical, people and goods will move another way, so it doesn't need subsidy".
You: "Airlines are magical. Those things cannot happen another way."
There's three conclusions for what you think: 1) that airlines are special and magical and doing something which cannot be done another way, but that has no value and airlines can go away. That's incoherent. 2) Airlines are both affordable and profitable. That doesn't seem to be true and needs some supporting. 3) Airlines are doing something uniquely 'magically' valuable, they are not profitable, then they need subsidising.
Your point 3 is a non sequitur. If air travel is magical and valuable, that doesn’t automatically mean it needs subsidizing. We sometimes allow magical and valuable things to go away if we find them not to be popular enough to garner widespread political support.
My statement is correcting a fact (descriptive) not proposing what to do about it (I.e. not prescriptive).
It’s very hard to imagine what the world would look like without subsidized air travel. I have to think long and hard to figure out if subsidies would actually be sensible for something like this. I can be convinced either way right now, but it would take a lot of good historical data on something very similar, perhaps has to be specifically air travel in countries that do and don’t subsidize it, and their economic outcomes, controlled for other factors.
But saying that air travel is somehow the same in kind as other kinds of travel is incredibly shallow and reductive. We get to travel orders of magnitude faster and to places we wouldn’t even be able to reach otherwise.
There absolutely is something magical about air travel! We can get places much faster and much safer than we could before. I live in California, and another part of my family lives in Maryland. Are you saying that when I want to visit my family, instead of spending 5-6 hours in a metal tube in the air, I should spend a week (or more) either driving or taking various trains and buses?
If air travel didn't exist, I likely wouldn't move around the globe at all. Hell, I wouldn't move around the country even.
In the US, roads are mostly publicly-owned (the ultimate subsidy). Local bus and rail transit is usually also publicly-owned, though when it isn't, it's done through public-private partnership and/or subsidy. Regional and long-distance rail is subsidized. Why shouldn't air travel follow the pattern?
> There’s nothing magical about air travel (or any other transport mode)
There kind of is. I can make it from here in Bucharest to Paris in about 3 hours by plane, while by car I'll need about 3 days (i.e. two sleepovers till I get there). This is magical to me. To say nothing of places like the Arabian peninsula or, I don't know, the Indian subcontinent, I wouldn't even think of getting there by car as it is close to impossible (at least when it comes to a land-route to India), but taking a plane is a 6-hour flight from nearby Istanbul to Delhi.
Buses and planes are both great! Both have advantages and disadvantages, and different cost structures. I trust people to make their own decisions about trade-offs for travel that work for them and their situation. When we arbitrarily pick one and shovel free money, land or infrastructure toward it, we are putting a thumb on the scale and depriving people of the power to make their own decisions.
Of course, we can argue that there are network effects or natural monopoly effects for fixed infrastructure like roads and rails, and thus there must be a public role. However policy rarely seems to remain at this reasonable position and instead quickly expands into something altogether different.
Aren't all modes of transportation in the US either subsidized or public-owned to some degree? We haven't arbitrarily picked one; we picked them all.
Air travel is maybe the least subsidized, though? Essential Air Service is probably the main thing? Long-distance bus like Greyhound is only minimally subsidized too.
But local transit (bus & rail), and regional and long-distance rail are all subsidized or publicly owned in the US. Most roads are publicly-owned, either locally or by the federal government. Long-distance bus and rail are actually unusual in how little they're subsidized.
You forgot that private cars are also creatures of subsidy. We like to think that the main input to go vroom vroom in cars is cheap gasoline, but IMO it’s realy cheap land. (aka subsidized public land)
A car with no gas could still be used to store stuff, or even roll downhill. A car with no land can’t be used at all for anything. And the amount of land required increases with the square of the velocity you want to travel out. But we never add that in.
As far as air travel, I haven’t done the math, but I suspect if you were to add up just the foregone property tax revenue associated with the land underneath the airports you’d end up with some pretty serious numbers.
Anyways, my basic point all of this is the same – we should be careful about subsidies because they tend to distort incentives and decision-making, whether we apply them to airplanes or horse buggies. It doesn’t mean that there’s no place for government involvement in transport, simply that we ought to be wise to the side effects and externalities. I could buy that the government should be involved in air travel, but I part ways with the idea that this should be extended such that if people get used cheap fares on Spirit then the government should guarantee Spirit operation forever. Maybe Spirit was just an anomaly, and we’ll be fine when it’s gone? Some people might fly a little less, some people will just eat the difference and not care, some people will take the bus, some people will buy a car. It’s all just normal people making normal trade-offs about decisions in their life.
Right, the externalities of those road systems aren't really paid for properly, by anyone.
But that's hard to do, because for many people/uses, they have to use those roads to get done what they need to do. The alternatives (like high speed rail) just largely don't exist in the US, or are painfully sub-par.
We have to distinguish between several levels of externalities and between different timespans.
About the former: when you drive on the road, you cause congestion for other road users. But having the roads at all (and having them used) also causes externalities for others, who ain't on the road. Like cutting up nature or noise.
About the timespans:
In the very short term, demand for specific roads is inelastic: if you live in one place and work in another, you have to commute.
But over several years demand for specific roads is very elastic: people and jobs can and do move.
> people and goods would continue to move around the globe as they have done for thousands of years.
Indeed! We don't need air travel when we have perfectly good teams of oxen and covered wagons. We could even hunt and forage for our food along the way to save some money!
Just build hospitals closer to people. Or make people move closer to them. If it wasn't possible to fly to the hospital, people would just not live so far from them.
> people and goods would continue to move around the globe as they have done for thousands of years.
Would love to compare the economic throughput in raw dollars of the Oregon trail vs a single flight route.
Don't forget that the whole point of transportation under capitalism is enabling and stimulating economic activity. So sure, get rid of the airlines if you want to collapse a bunch of economic activity. Personally I'd hope for it to get replaced by high speed rail, but kinda hard to do that when economic activity is highly depressed.
Nearly all 'goods' are going to travel more efficiently by rail and truck. And I say nearly all to cover the outliers like maybe an organ flying across country for transplant.
So if it's not the distribution method of choice for goods, then leisure? It's probably a global positive if people fly less. People will end up going to more local vacation destinations instead of aggregating all of those resources into a few popular locations that end up being massively overcrowded. This in turn reduces carbon impact because driving 3 hours is significantly less impactful than flying for 3 hours.
If you are just talking about all of the labor that has built up to support this inefficient and wasteful enterprise, that's probably for the best to reallocate that labor elsewhere. It will happen eventually, unless you think cheap oil is a permamenent feature, so why not happen sooner than later?
Bankcruptcy and corporate death in general are important. However, the details of how that is managed can vary wildly, and not all implementations are equal.
In this case, the bankcruptcy was handled by cancelling all flights with 1 day of notice. This level of ugliness is not necessary.
I think the death spiral breaks at step 3. Financially stable and literate people do not pay credit card interest. They pay off the full balance every month resulting in 0 interest payments. In cases where they need credit beyond the short term float the above gives you, they have access to lower interest loans.
These people also don't make the cards much money, so loosing them wouldn't have that much of an effect anyway.
These people mostly contribute via transaction fees, for Amex for example more than half of revenue is from transaction fees instead of interest. Unfortunately for the credit card companies, an economic downturn also reduces spending by the financially stable people. So transaction fees are also affected.
People are used to living in highly regulated markets. When they go to a grocery store to buy lettuce, people don't stop to ask "what regulatory regime is this lettuce being sold under?". They just trust that food being sold in a food store will meet our societal standards for food. I can go to Amazon and order a raw steak for delivery, and still trust it will meet standards.
The situation with wellness apps is that they are a product that are designed specifically to exist outside of the regulatory regime that people associate with them.
That may be surprisingly difficult in Rust. We generally think of Option<T> using O to represent None. However, it can actually use any invalid value of T
For example None of Option<OwnedFd> is the bit pattern for the integer -1, the invalid Unix file descriptor
And in this particular context None of Option<CompactString> is the bit pattern for a carefully chosen impossible 24 byte slice, all zeroes is of course a completely valid way to spell 24 of the ASCII NUL U+0000 character so we can't use that to signify None, but many 24 byte slices are not valid UTF-8 encodings.
When some day I get to make my own BalancedI8 in stable Rust (the 8-bit signed integer except without the slightly annoying and rarely needed most negative value -128) then None of Option<BalancedI8> will occupy the bit pattern for -128 which is 0x80
So, the long answer with lots of reading material is that you want "Pattern Types" and who knows when that could land in Rust. Pattern types are a simple Refinement Type, you can go absolutely wild with refinement in theory and some niche languages go much deeper but all we want here is to say "Only these values of the type are allowed" and by implication all bit patterns not used for those values are a niche and Rust would optimise accordingly.
Rust doesn't (even unstably) have Pattern Types so you might wonder how NonZeroU32 works for example, or indeed OwnedFd, and similar types. For these types there's a permanently unstable "compiler only" feature flag which allows you to explicitly specify the niche, that's how they're made. So, if you're comfortable writing unstable nightly-only software you can do this today, go look at the guts of NonZeroU32 for example.
If you want to write Rust software for ordinary people who use stable Rust you have two options today and for the indefinite future in which Pattern Types are not stable:
1. Enumerations: An enumeration which has say 5 values clearly doesn't need byte values 0x5 through 0xFF, so Rust stably promises this is a niche. For BalancedI8 that's kinda messy with 255 values but tolerable, some real crates use this trick or one related to it and they work fine - for a hypothetical BalancedI16 it's imaginable to create 65535 values but silly, and for BalancedI32 clearly we should not expect the compiler to accept an enumeration with 4 billion+ named values so no...
2. XOR trick: Rust provides NonZeroI8 for example. We can "make" BalancedI8 by providing accessors which always XOR -128 (0x80) with the value and then actually internally we store the NonZeroI8 instead, at runtime now operations incur an extra XOR which is a very cheap ALU operation. This works for any "Not this" value because of the properties of the XOR operation, so unlike with enums this is practical for BalancedI64 for example.
There is nook which does it with unstable features [1] and nonany [2] which uses xor operations to map your custom niche value to 0 so it can use the NonZero* types to achieve the same in stable rust.
Eventually rust will likely gain pattern types as a more generally useful version of the features used in nook. There is even some actively ongoing work on this [3]
Niche values: fair! You can't just scan memory looking for 0000000000... (... for some types at least)
But if a debugger can show you all values of type X, and the compiler defines null-y values of X, surely there's some way? That still doesn't seem complicated, just not as overwhelmingly-trivial as some languages.
Maybe I just haven't worked in enough start ups. But where I have worked, there are a lot of things stopping that. Most people don't have access to any production keys. For those that do, we have policies about how to manage them. Those policies go through audits. Our intranet goes through audits.
A production API key appearing on the wiki would be the second biggest security incident I have seen in almost a decade.
------
On the AI note, despite a massive investment in AI (including on-premesise models), we don't give the AI anything close to full access to the intranet because it is almost unimaginable how to square that with our data protection requirements. If the AI has access to something, you need to assume that all users of that AI have access to it. Even if the user themselves is allowed access with it, they will not be aware that the output is potentially tainted, and may share it with someone or thing that should not have access to it.
The closest I am aware of is clippy (`cargo clippy` in a standard Rust project will run it with default configurations).
Clippy is essentially a linter; and one of its checks catches cases where different enum variants have a significantly different size; with a suggestion to Box the larger variant.
Since this is just a linter, it doesn't actually have any knowledge of how frequently each variant is actually used. It also doesn't address the situation in the article at all.
Open source is driven by contributions. Most of the time, if someone wants a feature, implements the feature, and submits a reasonable PR to a project, that project will have the feature. In this case, the PR appears to have been written by someone who is not a regular SystemD contributor, and (through a bit of Googling) works for a FinTech company with no obvious interest. I can't comment on why that individual wanted to add support.
However, once someone added support, the question for SystemD is not if it is worth implementing, but if it is worth merging. At this point, it becomes a simple case of "the most intolerant wins". For people who care about complying with CA style laws, this feature is critical. For people who don't care, this feature is fine. I doubt it will even make it on mosts lists of SystemD feature bloat that most people don't care about.
This is the same reason a bunch of the food in your pantry is certified kosher. No one is going to not buy something because it is kosher. But if paying a thousand dollars a year to put a small circle-u symbol on the back of your box can increase sales by 1% among observant Jews, most companies are going to do it.
> No one is going to not buy something because it is kosher. But if paying a thousand dollars a year to put a small circle-u symbol on the back of your box can increase sales by 1% among observant Jews, most companies are going to do it.
Contrary to perceived politics, many Muslims will eat kosher food because it's a superset of halal rules (excl. alcohol).
It's a globally consolidated certification through organizations like the Orthodox Union. This is unlike halal which is local and has many scammers offering to pencil whip compliance. This means many Muslims will prefer kosher to "halal" food to avoid due diligence on the certification agency.
To tie this into age-verification, companies and ecosystems will use the strictest method that makes them globally compliant. Consumers will prefer that convenience even in the presence of intense political beliefs.
A bank that uses seamless OS-level age checks everywhere will win against one asking manually in the jurisdictions it isn't required.
I hope everyone’s bank knows how old they are— what with all the documentation we have to cough up to keep us safe from Terrorism , patriot act, 9/11, never forget, etc
Anything that requires an electrician to come and modify your mains connections (followed, presumably by a municipal inspection), defeats the main benefit of balcony solar, which is that it is a commodity unit that can be installed by non-experts without any red tape.
Further, the utility's safety concerns do not require any shut off on the mains. Their safty concern is not a new backflow of current; but a backflow of current into an otherwise non-energized grid. Grid-tied inverters will not do this. If the grid goes down, they shut themselves down without any need for an upstream shutoff.
The utility's may have a reasonable business object to back-flow if their meters are such that backflow forces net-metering. Around here, that is a non-issue because net-metering is the law for residential connections anyway. Even in juristictions where net-metering is not the law, I don't find this convincing. The limited capacity of balcony solar means that it won't actually happen in any significant amount, and if it does become a problem, they can shoulder the cost of upgrading their metering equipment.
The simple plug-in and go balcony solar is going to be constrained in many ways. Zero export solar is more sophisticated, yes, does require electrical inspection, but given that it lets you add extra solar panels, battery storage and keep all the power you produce on the house side of the meter. There is some win there. Additionally, if you live where there is time of day rate changes, you can store up cheap energy at night and use it during the day when it's expensive.
Net metering is common, but not everywhere and frequently there's a pricing differential between what you buy and what you sell. My mother leased her solar panels from SolarCity/Tesla. She buys electricity at $0.12 a kilowatt hour, but sells at $.09/kwh. Some of the regulatory shenanigans I've seen regarding balcony solar include no net metering. If you produce excess power, you get no credit for it.
The Department of Health and Human Services releases a figure every year. Their current estimate ranges from $6.6 million to $21.5 million.
Note also, that we also often talk about statistically life years and statisicsl quality life years; both of which would value the lives of infants higher than an average life.
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