Category Archives: Economics

Business, Economics

The Airline Business

4 Comments

I have a late-afternoon flight out of Tucson to LAX, but the business that I thought I had in Tucson today has fallen through. There’s a morning flight with seats available.

In days of yore, American would have let me go standby on an earlier flight same day with no change fee, which makes business sense, because if they can satisfy their commitment to me to get me where I want to go earlier at essentially no cost other than fuel to carry my weight (assuming that the flight isn’t full), they have an opportunity to sell my seat (at $252 according to a quick check) on the later flight.

Apparently, the suits have decided that they’d rather charge me $75 bucks for the change. Now, it would be nice to get home earlier, but it’s not worth $75 to me, because I can do work here and just catch the later flight. So they just lost the opportunity to sell that seat on the afternoon flight. I guess they think this makes business sense, and maybe they have revenue models that indicates it does, but I’m annoyed.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Shale Gas

28 Comments

…is Rearden metal:

Rand’s fictional progressives don’t want Reardon Metal to succeed any more than their modern, real-life equivalents want shale gas to succeed.

Why not? For the same rag-bag of made-up, disingenuous reasons which progressives have used to justify their war on progress since time immemorial: it’s unfair, it uses up scarce resources, it might be dangerous. Rand doesn’t actually use the phrase “the precautionary principle.” But this is exactly what she is describing in the book when various vested interests – the corporatists in bed with big government, the politicised junk-scientists at the Institute of Science (aka, in our world, the National Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society), the unions – try to close down the nascent technology using the flimsiest of excuses.

It was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual.

Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Who Won The Cold War?

44 Comments

Thoughts from Sarah Hoyt:

Few people have read The Black Book of Communism – which should be taught in our schools, in every grade, in grade-appropriate chunks – but our highs chools boast Howard Zin’s People’s History which is the Soviet view of America; Young Hegelians clubs and hipsters decked in Che Guevara.

The “Well educated” are in fact indoctrinated, taught communist propaganda and syllogisms until they’re UNABLE to think. We now have an administration composed of people like this, who are unable to connect to reality. They might be our first Marxist administration, but they suffer from third generation blight, not having come to their opinions from their own mind, but having been browbeaten into them. They are the good kids, trapped in an illusion from which they can’t break out.

But the d*mned ineradicable fact about communism and its cousin “state capitalism” and the hellish hybrid they’re trying out here is that it doesn’t work. IT NEVER WORKS. It doesn’t work even when instituted by very bright psychopaths. It works even less when instituted by people so indoctrinated they can’t SEE reality.

And it will crash here – hard or soft, with a bang or a whimper. It will crash and it might drag the rest of the world with us into the endless night.

Perhaps liberty will re-arise amidst the wreckage, but I hope we don’t have to get that far.