KLM to Lay Off 5k Employees Due to Covid-19

Doesn't negate the fact that there was a drop in demand for those skilled workers during that time.

> it was a wild ride if you were employed in an unsustainable VC-funded startup in the US

Does it matter? Also, there were loads of techs/devs hired for year 2000 bugfixing. After 2000 it took a while to find something else for them or let them go. Quite a huge amount could not find anything to do after 2000.

I remember being at a large company in 2001 that was forced to shed about 40% of the workforce: Accenture (which went from 40k employees to a bit over half that.) Same story for most of the large systems integration consultancies.

Same story for many of our clients: telecom firms, financial services firms

People remember 2000 as a tech startup bubble burst. But it was just as much a bubble burst for telecom (AT&T, Global Crossing, Lucent, others), financial services firms, and consultancies.

Yup. I know.

Still sucks when you can’t get a job. I too thought because I was a smart web developer that I would always be able to make so. Oops.

Yes! We need to do less computing too. Much less. See, I said it.

Data centers are much easier to turn carbon neutral though. "Just" switch out the electricity provider. Flying with something other than jet fuel is more of an existential risk to the industry.

You just have a shitty rail system in most of US. The solution is to fix it not fly more.

Also trains are a lot more then 40% more efficient in terms of pollution. Eurostar for example 6g per km traveled while airplane is 100g (long haul flights much worse for short ones). Though electric train powered by coal can get to around 40g per km and even worse for diesel trains.

This still holds for having kids as well though.

If tourism + aviation is profitable combined, then why should we care? It's like Sony is not profitable by selling play station hardware. But game business unit is profitable because subscription income covers the hardware loss.

Why is it a subsidy if people are paying full price for their tickets?

If you're looking for subsidies, check out the way jet fuel is taxed (usually at far lower rates than regular fuel) or implement a consistent emissions scheme. Not that either is likely for a while given the ongoing carnage in the industry.

Could you elaborate? How exactly does tourism heavily subsidize plane ticket prices?

Worse, even. Fuel is heavily subsidised (In many EU countries there's no excise on fuel for aircraft, but all other transports pay them; in UAE and other oil-states, fuel is even "free" for local carriers). Airports are often kept aloft by (local) governments (Ryanair to Charleroi every X years: Want us to start paying you? Then we leave and you can close the airport. Good luck with the unemplyment). And ticketprices are subsidised (in EU at least) by not having VAT and other taxes on them.

Airtravel is a very heavily subsidised sector. As is train-travel and other public transport, but (I'm not expert, so this is merely hearsay) apparently airtravel is heavier subsidised than public transport.

If business travel could be cut to next-to-nothing, short flights could be electrical, longer flights can be partially or fully renewable fuel then perhaps we don’t have to give up the odd intercontinental leisure flight. At least one can hope.

> I think we all now what he means

He literally used the expression "to wind down":

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/wind-dow...

"if a business, situation, activity, etc. winds down, or is wound down, it gradually ends"

So I think he meant there should be no more air travel at all.

More likely is a liquid fuel generated in a net zero carbon way.

What matters is two things: range & cost (kwh, maintenance & overhauls). For that battery is becoming unbeatable on short hops and longer hops pretty soon after.

Basically if it flies cheaper, battery is going to win in the air as well. R&D done by hundreds of battery tech companies will help improve the range of already flying (or soon to fly) electrical planes to the point where the range becomes useful to somebody; or at least useful enough that the cost argument becomes decisive.

There are a few planes in the process of certification that have useful but modest range that use battery tech from a few years ago. The price of certification is that you have to pick some tech and stick with it for a few years. Successors to these planes with more recent tech would probably get about 1.5-2x the range. That's roughly what Bye Aviation and Eviation are talking about for successors to their current first generation tech. To be clear that's just swapping out tech they picked a few years ago for the kind of stuff that Tesla is talking about next month.

The fallacy in this argument is believing we need to match A320s, Boeing 787s, etc. specs to be able to match their cost per passenger. This is simply not true. Big jets get benefits out of fuel efficiency because fuel is stupendously expensive. That's literally the only reason to spend hundreds of million on a super complicated piece of technology that burns tens of thousands of $ of fuel per trip.

This is not the case for electrical planes. Bigger ones are actually less efficient and the smaller ones are ultimately going to be cheap enough that you can simply get more of those to match the passenger volume. At the list price of the Eviation Alice (900kwh, 700 miles, 9 passengers + 2 pilots) of 3.5M$, you can easily buy the 20 or so you'd need to transport the number of passengers you'd typically cram in a A320 and still save a bit of cash. Eviation is not likely to ship the kind of volumes to allow airlines to make that kind of choice any time soon. But think autonomous planes flying much further and cheaper in a few decades and you get the picture. At some point, A320s stop making sense. It's mostly a matter of volume production and certification. Battery tech improvements during the time it will take to do that will help but are far less essential and partially already a done deal. More is better though; or rather less is more in terms of cost.

The people who were able to pump billions of EUR into KLM. So basically VVD. It doesn't really seem to matter that others have a different opinion. What matters is that billions go into an unsustainable company, were I mean unsustainable on basis of money.

Follow the money did an article on KLM. Giving money to KLM is like throwing your money away, it such a poor investment. It's worse than just donating. Instead of that you could also e.g. invest that money in the off-gas transition. Meaning, insulate houses. That would help the economy, help the ecological goals, etc. Instead, KLM gets money but in a weird way, all kinds of unrealistic conditions.

It's interesting how it doesn't make sense to give KLM money either ecological wise, nor economical. Still, they get billions.

The government in general, and to a certain extent me as-well (despite me voting left of D66).

The fact that Schiphol is a major hub helps make us a bigger player in international trade. It helps setting up main offices here (which bring in decent tax, and maybe some jobs too).

In general, on this issue, I trust the VVD to get the economic side somewhat correct. They are pretty smart people, and not totally evil. And they care a lot about the economic side. So I tend to believe them when they say 'this will be good for the economy'. Especially when they come up with an underlying mechanism that seems quite plausible to me.

Unless the entire industry is in a downcycle and there are no jobs to be had.