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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   27856 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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This is possibly better saved for a small questions Sunday, but can someone explain why is the federal government up-in-arms over Southwest's latest boondoggle to me?

I understand why Southwest is getting hammered by popular opinion and in the press. I wasn't personally affected but I know a few people who were (8 hour delays, last-minute cancellations, etc) and I understand their frustration. I absolutely understand customers demanding refunds on cancelled flights or compensation for excessive delays. This, to me, is the market reacting and correcting itself. Southwest failed to deliver what it promise and it is reaping the economic and PR whirlwind.

What I don't understand are promises from both the Secretary of Transportation and POTUS to "hold the airlines accountable", which just seems weird to me. Is there a regulatory or national security reason for the Feds, much less POTUS, to be weighing in on this? Is it a straight-forward consumer protection issue or is it just the straight populist look-we-are-doing-something-to-people-you-currently-hate kind of politics that I am currently reading it as? What am I not seeing/understanding here?

I have limited insight into this: I had a former student who worked at Charles de Gaulle airport as maintenance crew, and he would explain to me the changing labour situation with respect to the airport. According to him the goal was to pare down staff to minimum required levels: anything to reduce costs was acceptable because they were in a highly liberalized market where consumers are very price-sensitive (for reasons unknown, customers discriminate by price much more heavily in air travel). That meant limiting crews, getting rid of redundancies, using third party, non-union contractors for every bit of unskilled labour, and generally running as light as possible personnel-wise. This meant that when you had those three or four days a year with bad snowstorms you got absolutely fucked and you have no one in reserve to handle the massive increase in work; but hey, that's a few days in the year and the other 360 customers get cheaper fares. People who get shafted are angry of course, but ultimately they don't interface with upper management and they forget soon anyways because hey, air travel is ridiculously cheap for what you're actually getting: unsurpassed convenience and safety for intercontinental travel.

My dad just got delayed 6 hours in Vancouver flying back (he was lucky: lots of people delayed multiple days). He couldn't fathom why every problem seemed to be someone else's responsibility (I tried to explain that job roles are heavily specialized to minimize the number of skilled labourers), why airport workers were so laid-back (it's no one's dream to load luggage, and they're not getting paid particularly well), and why in general the airport seemed entirely unused to this strange white substance falling from the sky (they know snow exists, it's just cheaper to not prepare for it).

He couldn't fathom why every problem seemed to be someone else's responsibility (I tried to explain that job roles are heavily specialized to minimize the number of skilled labourers), why airport workers were so laid-back (it's no one's dream to load luggage, and they're not getting paid particularly well), and why in general the airport seemed entirely unused to this strange white substance falling from the sky (they know snow exists, it's just cheaper to not prepare for it).

Is your dad stupid? If not I don't think he had trouble fathoming that nobody dreamed they'd grow up to move luggage around or job specificity, I would bet he couldn't fathom why people put up with it. You know, assuming he wasn't just venting his frustration at spending a quarter of a day sitting around doing nothing with absolutely no chance of recompense.

He probably knows that these systems are heavily specialised to both minimise the number of skilled labourers and so nobody can be held responsible and everyone can pass the buck, increasing the effort required to complain and thus limiting the number of complaints received. He probably thinks it wasn't his dream to lay bricks or bag groceries or serve burgers either when he was younger, but he did it properly anyway because it was his fucking job.

He probably thinks it being cheaper not to prepare for snow is a mind blowingly idiotic excuse for all the employees in a major transportation hub to pretend they've never seen snow and they don't know how to react to it. He probably suspects that their wide eyed bewilderment at this mysterious frozen substance is part of the same problem as the lack of accountability and laziness - we always get the minimum amount of customer service we are on average willing to tolerate, and people with no self respect will tolerate anything.

He might even think that anyone who considers those justifications legitimate is part of the problem, giving the airport workers a pass because they hope others give them a pass for doing a bad job.

An alternative explanation is that he might just have checked out mentally. My father has done that on all except a few subject matters. It's not that he can't understand, it's just that he can't be bothered and therefore choose to believe what is comfortable to him unless significantly pressed.

I feel like a lot of retired or older people do this, and those who don't often seem miserable.

for reasons unknown, customers discriminate by price much more heavily in air travel

What else is there? OK, there's of course loyalty programs, but you have to fly quite a lot for them to be of any serious benefit - to the tune that you have to either be rich or fly not on your own dime (e.g. work travel) to get benefits that are worth serious consideration. The basic service - i.e. the economy class - is pretty much the same everywhere. You get the same 2 inches to the next seat and same water-and-salted-mini-pretzels. You can't pay extra to not have your flight cancelled or to have less turbulence or anything else both affordable for a middle-class person and important. So, what else beyond price is there? For me that would be:

  • Convenience. I'd pay extra for non-stop vs stop flight - but lines probably can't easily change that.

  • Convenience 2 - I'd pay some extra for convenient time (not departing at 7 am or arriving at midnight) but less than for extra stop. Also probably hard for a company to make it optimal everywhere.

  • Overall cost - i.e. if I can save on bags charges, or fly to an airport for which the next leg of the journey would be cheaper, or have some other benefit like that, I may agree to get a pricier ticket if the difference is less than the benefit

That's about it. If I am not paying for it - e.g. work travel - I'd of course optimize for my own convenience and for whose miles would work better for me, but that's another story.

BTW, I usually do not downgrade my opinion about the airline because of one-off delays. Shit happens. If the company manages it reasonably (as a minimum - get me a hotel and a couple of meal vouchers if you delay me substantially, and have the staff handle it without panicking themselves and making me panic) - I'll write it off as such and move on. If it keeps happening then I'll likely start paying extra to avoid such an airline - but so far I don't think Southwest is worse than anybody else in this regard.

There certainly is some evidence that Southwest is an outlier: "More than 90% of Wednesday’s US flight cancellations were Southwest flights, according to flight tracking website FlightAware.". And "As of Wednesday, Southwest Airlines had canceled 58% of its flights scheduled for Thursday" whereas "By contrast, as of Wednesday afternoon, United Airlines had canceled just 11 flights scheduled for the day; while American Airlines had canceled 23, FlightAware said. Each figure accounted for less than 1% of the respective company's total flights.".

Yeah I get that there's a particular set of circumstances which broke SW model in ways that it wouldn't break models for other companies. The question is, how often this particular set of circumstances is likely to re-occur? If it's once-per-20-years, I won't likely pay much premium to not fly SW. If it's "every other year" then I'd be more cautious. If it's "likely to happen every time there's a storm", then I'd only fly SW if it gives deep discount and I am not particularly upset if the flight gets cancelled. But the latter does not seem to be the case - there were many storms before, and SW did not break in this fashion.

I am certainly not encouraging you to stop flying Southwest. But it is certainly a problem: It is very difficult to know how much more likely SW is to have a delay than other carriers, and hence it is very difficult to know how much of a discount you should demand. It might well be effectively zero.

Yeah this isn't really weather related, Southwest's solver/optimizer broke with the added constraints and they have to solve a gigantic travelling salesman problem with a lot more manual work now.

I usually do not downgrade my opinion about the airline because of one-off delays. Shit happens.

This is one of the ways in which airlines obfuscate things.

Pretty much every delay is a one-off in the sense that the airline relies on the delay only happening under unusual circumstances. But airline management and policies can make delays more or less likely--yet each delay will still be a one-off in that sense. The bad policies just change the frequency of one-offs. And you won't observe that frequency unless you take a number of flights on the same airline that is much larger than what a typical consumer does.

Yes, but even though each case is unique, there's not much new in general that happens in this area - people try to get from A to B, weather intervenes, staff gets sick, holidays come and go, etc. - there are some patterns that are going to eventually emerge. If every other time I fly particular airline I get some trouble, I'll start avoiding it. But so far I didn't notice such pattern with SW, is there one?

Consumers discriminate by price heavily in air travel because it's extremely hard to compare anything except price on more than a crude level. And a lot of that is because the airlines themselves have tried to deliberately obfuscate anything that you could compare airlines on.

Also, the government has regulated away some things that airlines could otherwise compete on. You can't get an airline without a TSA check.

The TSA is a jobs program. It's not going to go anywhere.

One reason why price is currently the main thing is probably just that, well, if I'm booking a flight I'm going to do it by going to Skyscanner or some equivalent website, entering the flight dates and then picking the cheapest fight that doesn't have a punitive stopover schedule. I suspect that's the usual route for most others, too. If some other instance is paying the cost wholly or in part I might patriotically check if our national airline is flying that route at a suitable time, but that's about it - even then, if that's not the case, I'll revert to basic Skyscanner process for simplicity.

I'm not sure that any amount of deregulation might essentially change the basic process introduced to the game by online cheap flight search engines.

Also, the government has regulated away some things that airlines could otherwise compete on. You can't get an airline without a TSA check.

It's a shame too. I'd gladly pay extra - even a good bit extra - to an airline that eschews security theater. I'm quite tired of having my junk felt up every time I fly.

You can't eliminate security theatre but you can pay for TSA pre-check reduce the theatre to almost pre-9/11 levels (you go through a metal detector rather than a mm-wave scanner). But this isn't airline-dependent.

Yeah, I don't want to pay for it because it seems to me to be a pure scam. If the TSA can "ensure safety" (not that they do in the first place) without all the process at the airport, then they should do that for everyone without charging a stupid fee. I did recently get a credit card which pays for it as one of their perks. So I will spring for it now because it's not costing me anything that I'm not already paying. But previously I wasn't about to pay the TSA for their racket.

You must be using some weird airports if your junk gets felt up at all. And, if it is, then that is not security theater: They have evidence indicating that you, specifically, might have an gun, knife, or other dangerous item. A far cry from making everyone throw away shampoo bottles.

Yes, when I get felt up by the TSA it's because I have some anomaly on the scanner. I don't know why, because my pockets are always completely empty, I try to make sure my clothes aren't loose, etc. But it's still security theater because the process itself is sheer theater. They are taking ineffectual steps against a nonexistent threat simply to make people feel better that somebody is doing something.

Why do you assume that because, in your specific case, they have never yet found anything, that therefore every anomaly on the scanner also is a false positive?

Also, would you have them ignore anomalies? That would be a great way to tell actual terrorists how to avoid detection; just wrap that knife in such a way that it appears to be a mere anomaly. The fact is, a system that is highly sensitive and generates lots of false positives is very effective at reducing attacks, and hence is not "security theater" at all. It might be suboptimal, depending on how much one weighs the value of avoiding actual attacks against the value of not being frisked, and it even might rise to the level of a civil liberties violation, but it is not "security theater."

You're assuming that a) there is an actual threat to defend against, and b) the measures taken by the TSA are effective. I don't believe either is true.

Alternately, he could have a tan and a beard.

No, he just has to be opting out of the porno-scanner, which is still security theater.

And, were the old-style x-ray machines walk through metal detectors also security theater, given that hijackings plummeted when they were mandated in 1973? A lot of people here seem to rather lazily use "security theater" as a synonym for "TSA regulation I don't like."

And, were the old-style x-ray machines also security theater, given that hijackings plummeted when they were mandated in 1973?

Are you by any chance deliberately conflating scanning your body with x-raying your luggage?

Anyway the answer is yes. As 9/11 showed, an airplane can be hijacked with boxcutters. Even now you can easily get weapons of similar lethality, simply after crossing the security check, meaning anything that is currently happening at the airports is nothing but a ritual. If hijacking fell, the best argument that you can make is that rituals work, not that what the TSA is doing is an actual security enhancement against a motivated actor.

Huh? No, I am talking about walk-through metal detectors.

As for the boxcutters, are you not aware that they were used because they were perfectly legal to bring on planes at the time? Is the regulation that now bans them also "secutity theater"?

And, tell me, why did the "underwear bomber" have to use some half-assed method instead of one which, you know, was more likely to work? Could it be because "security theater" prevented him from doing so?

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You could replace junk-felt-up with "getting a year's worth of radiation each way" via these scanners and it's the same thing.

We shouldn't have to be in pre-check to avoid these two options.

So, OP claims that he'd "gladly pay extra" to avoid getting his junk groped, but you think he is not willing to pay for TSA Precheck, which is $78 for five years?

I didn't do it for years because I considered it a violation of principle and privacy. Signing myself up for a centralized watch list, fingerprints, and all that shit is something anyone concerned about privacy shouldn't do.

Then one day I realized I'd already done that for my conceal carry permit and pussied out. I have to say that precheck has been quite the game changer in terms of not wanting to put a shotgun in my mouth after visiting the airport.

As a matter of fact I'm not. I think it's a sheer scam that the TSA claims to need these security measures, but oh if you pay us money we don't need them. I recently got a credit card that pays for it as a perk, so I'll sign up at some point because of that. But otherwise? Fuck that noise.

People are generally reluctant to pay X to alleviate problems that are caused by unwanted interference by X in the first place. It creates bad incentives and amounts to giving in to blackmail.

It's the government's main business model, though. "Pay us taxes for protection. Protection from our people taking all your stuff and throwing you in a cell to be raped for the rest of your life, that is".

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These days it seems like first class is mostly a way to reward loyalty with incentive upgrades.

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