The future of flying
ft.com
ft.com
Let's try a future that is actually a bit more futuristic, shall we? Imagine, small electric hybrid fuel cell planes that carry less than 50 passengers flying point to point to municipal airports instead of just major hubs. Roomy accommodations, coach is almost as nice a 1st class is today. And the cost is half.
The problem with the future of flying is not environmental or technical. The above is possible. The problem is regulatory (and greed).
Airships! I want to see airships, zeppelins, blimps come back. They can fly passengers or cargo faster than seafaring ships or travelling on land, while being able to take off and land in a smaller area than an airport runway. The speeds of airships were around 120-200+ km/h, making it comparable with a slow flying piston powered aircraft of the same era.
A flight on the Hindenburg was more luxurious than flying in an airplane has ever been. There was a dining salon and a smoking lounge and plenty of room to walk around. Airships were capable of transporting close to 100 passengers. They can fly closer to a big city than an airplane can, reducing the total time of travel when you don't need to go to the airport, far away from the cities.
Anecdote: my home town has a futuristic art deco hotel built in the 1930s, which has a mast that was designed as a mooring point for airships, right in the middle of the city. Unfortunately that has never been used to my knowledge.
Airships might also be (partially) powered by electricity and have very large surface area that could be used for solar panels.
Unfortunately, I can't see this happening any time soon. There are some ventures into building modern airships, with mixed success. I recon modern people are too impatient to travel 4-5 times slower than what they're used to. Transporting cargo overseas is so cheap that it's difficult to compete with. And whether it makes any kind of economic sense is another question.
Where mixed ~= no. The luxury of pre-WW II zeppelin travel is something of a red herring. To the degree there were a market for travel at the equivalent cost of trans-Atlantic Zeppelin travel, you could pretty much have it in a wide body aircraft. After all, Pan Am's original 747s had a first class lounge upstairs which today is (universally, as far as I know) used for additional business class seating. High-end seating on airlines like Emirates is pretty luxurious today but the modern preference tends toward individual suites rather than space given to common areas.
>I recon modern people are too impatient to travel 4-5 times slower than what they're used to.
Well, even if the travel is relatively luxurious I don't have a burning desire to spend a couple of days in a relatively confined space although your general point is probably true. On the other hand, I'm sure lots of the people who travelled by ocean liner or zeppelin would have jumped at the chance to go from London or Berlin to New York in under 10 hours.
I want a Helicarrier.
You need to stop reading/watching material that promotes this nonsense about business and, perhaps, try running a business for a while.
What this ideology calls "greed" is what every business, from the local small bakery shop to a multinational has to do: Optimize for profits while delivering product that satisfies customer needs at the right value and quality level. If they miss either or both of the last two they lose business to competitors who do a better job.
Was Steve Jobs greedy? It's funny how when that example is brought up those characterizing big business as being greedy suffer a short circuit in the brain.
Now, wait a minute, before you down-vote, Steve Jobs and Apple sell some of the most grotesquely overpriced tech in the world and the company is exploding with cash. Ain't that greedy?
Oh, you say their hardware isn't grotesquely overpriced because of the value and quality it offers? BTW, I own a bunch of it myself. PC's as well. Not overpriced? OK. I guess the company OPTIMIZED their offerings to FIT WHAT THEIR CUSTOMERS WANT.
How about that? They are not greedy after all. They are doing what every company large and small has to do: Optimize for profits while delivering product that satisfies customer needs at the right quality level. If they miss either or both of the last two they lose business to competitors who do a better job.
Yup. Greedy bastards.
I don't believe that every single business in the word cares about "delivering products that satisfies customer needs at the right value and quality level", and I doubt that you can find evidence that would convince me.
Apple and Mercedes are not interested in the buyer looking for the lowest price who cares not about quality. They specifically put out product designed for a high end audience. They, we might be able to say, care.
Harbor Freight either aims for the low end or is taken there auto-magically by the audience they have cultivated. Most people I know think of them as providers of cheap crap that won't last.
Once people classify a business on a value/quality scale it is virtually impossible for that brand to do well at a higher value/quality level. Hence companies such as Honda launching upscale brands like Acura. Today nobody would pay Acura prices for a Honda even though there probably isn't a significant and objective quality difference between the two.
The point is that every company optimizes for profits in the context of the value/quality their audience wants. Some do it explicitly and others do it as a result of their audience pushing and pulling them there.
Your offense to the "greedy" label is misguided at best and manufactured at worst. You do correctly identify that the current state of markets have locked most agents whose only goal os to make money into Nash equilibrium, where "everyone has to optimize for profits". Duh.
However, this quote of yours is demonstratably false in general: "satisfy customer needs at the right value and quality". See: Comcast, HSBC, 90-s Microsoft, Enron, MPAA etc etc. That is the main point of the ideology that you were so quick to rage at: current market and financial policies mostly do not incentivize generation of social good. Most profits are made when corporations are in a monopoly position with significant power imbalance.
Your diatribe also completely ignores negative externalities that many large megacorps are offloading on the society. See walmart with a significant chunk of its employees receiving food stamps from the government. Many non-profits compete with for-profits and they are "non-greedy" by definition. Conveniently missing from your rant.
Your comment is so wrong, yet so full with righteous anger.
That is what I object to. This brainwashing of the American public to create this image that busimesses are driven by not much more than greed. Almost like it's a bunch of pirates out to fleece everyone.
Why does it bother me? Because it drives an ideology that is actively damaging our country. It drives political rethoric used to push nonsense like $15 per hour minimum wage and absolutely insane union rules and compensation packages. It is a destructive ideology that does not promote cooperation between management and labor or government and businesses. It assumes the guys at the top are all crooks, which starts of the conversation from an entirely distorted perpective.
I remember congressional hearing of the top three automakers where an ignorant-as-fuck congressman was pounding Ford to promise not to buy foreign-made fasteners "to try to make more money". This, completely ignoring the fact that we don't make shit in this county any more and a lot of the shit we do make is grotesquely overpriced either because it is made for gov/mil applications or because our regulatory and labor framework (or both) simply make doing business far more costly. And so, this highly refined moron of a congressman was focusing on a "greed" angle -because it plays well to his base to promote the idea that all businesses are greedy bastards- rather than understanding that cost optimization is pretty much forced upon you in the context of a global economy.
In terms of monopolies, we have laws for that. Bad players ought to be dealt with accordingly. Let's not promote the idea that all businesses are greedy because of the few that might misbehave.
Business is hard. I've been at it for over 35 years. I've had some monumental failures and notable successes. Those who might point my way and call me greedy never sat with me in a dark garage or office 16 hours per day woking hard to make the thing go.
Yes, I am passionate about this because I hate the mentality being promoted in our country. We are destroying ourselves fromthe inside out. Instead of creating a society where rabid entrepreneurship is actively promoted and supported we are brainwashing people with an anti-business mentality that will eventually implode us. Sad.
There is no way I'll be able to change your mind. "Free market" capitalism in US is a religion at this point and arguing with its proponents, you certainly among them, is an exercise in futility.
That said, no need to waste your time with a long reply. I really don't think it is worth anyone's while to engage in a typical HN battle of minutiae. You know: What is the meaning of "is" type discussions.
My only point is that businesses are not driven or managed by greed. That is very, very rare. As an entrepreneur yourself I would hope you can agree with this simple statement without looking for corner cases that could support a 300 comment thread.
I have to address this one separately because it is dead wrong.
Nobody just optimizes for profit. You can't do that. At least not if you want a business that will survive the test of time and shifting consumer needs and markets.
You optimize for exactly what I said: profits and the right value/quality ratio for your customer base.
Example:
Harbor Freight sells cheap tools. Quite a bit of it is crap. Their audience wants cheap tools. Harbor Freight optimizes for profits within the value/quality ratio their audience demands (or in their case, tolerates).
Home Depot does not focus on cheap tools. I think most tools I've seen there are of good quality. They offer tools covering a range of value/quality ratios. You can buy a less or more expensive power drill. In no case does the quality drop down to what you might buy at Harbor Freight. They optimize for profits in the context of what their audience expects for value/quality.
The reason one can't just optimize for profits is free market competition. Home Depot can't squeeze profits beyond what, for example, Lowe's might allow them to. They are just a few blocks away and offer tools in similar value/quality ranges. Therefore, Home Depot management can't be greedy and push for nothing but profits. They don't exist in a vacuum.
Again, monopolies are a different story. Not part of this discussions except to say that it is highly unlikely that companies with real or virtual monopolies are "greedy", again, in the sense of management rubbing their palms while singing pirate songs about how they are going to screw their customers for all they are worth. That's utter nonsense. Companies that have strong market positions will get as much as they can out of the market as possible.
Apple is an example. Yeah, they compete with other phone makers, but they really don't. And they get four times what anyone else is getting for their phones (or whatever the ratio might be). They go right to the point where they'll generate the most profit per quarter without losing too many buyers to the competitors due to pricing. Not greed at all. That's just good business management.
Sounds heavy and underpowered.
I honestly don't think the US could handle a doubling of flyers, we will have outgrown our current infrastructure yet it's almost impossible to expand it. Like it or not, the price of airline tickets is probably going in one direction for the foreseeable future.
I think this is going to become a very heated topic over the next 25 years. The general public has been groomed to believe that cheap airfare on a several-hundred-million-dollar vehicle with incomprehensibly good safety standards is a birthright, so when the cost of air travel starts going a lot higher, people are going to freak out. We can make all sorts of tweaks to alleviate the problem (load efficiency, bigger planes, more seats/plane, longer hours of operation, etc) but at some point the inherent limits of a fixed number of runways, gates, and slots is going to catch up to us, and that's when the price of a ticket for many particular routes is going to go vertical.
Though I'll grant that this is probably an exception, not a rule, and that it just barely got approved.
Most of the people coming out of poverty would not be in the US.
For the former, here's IPCC on the subject. http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/aviation/index.php?idp=6...
For the latter, the wikipedia article looks fine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviati...)
I know this won't persuade anyone that's already decided. This issue won't get "settled" until we actually understand the mechanics of consciousness. AFAIK, no one has any real good descriptions of what's going on. Hell, some are still supporting dualist views.
And who needs to go on a business trip if you can use the internet?
I can't fly because I can't risk being groped by the TSA: I have deep issues with my body, and I will not let anyone pat me down under any circumstances. My biggest fear is that an employer will order me to fly somewhere, and I'll have no choice but to get fired because I can't go through security and wind up losing my house and living on the streets.