This is a terrible take. The people who have sacrificed their ethics/morals/souls to reach the top absolutely optimize for different things than the people who passed an interview and put in their 40-80 hours knowing they'll never be in the c-suite. Suggesting otherwise is naive or intentionally deceptive.
> This is the type of cynicism the post is talking about and it's just trivially untrue.
It's a fundamental truth of capitalism, deeply interwoven in the history of markets and modern capitalism. It began when the Dutch East India Company sailed to the Banda Islands and committed genocide in order to harvest nutmeg for trade. Money is and has always been the prime directive of capitalism.
To quote Tom Stoppard: War is capitalism with the gloves off.
While it might be better for your job security to keep your own field hiring locally, it could be better for your life if all other fields hire the best regardless of nationality.
Agreed. I like the idea of being hostile to the airlines so I’ve used Skiplagged to search for flights before but I’ve never found a hidden city itinerary that I actually wanted to take.
I’m guessing it probably makes sense with certain airports with high fees near concentrations of wealth? E.g. maybe London->NYC costs more than London(->NYC)->Albany because NYC airports have high fees and airlines presume wealthier clientele bound for NYC?
I don’t even think it’s a “wealthier clientele” thing.
Some routes are literally subsidized - for example, the Essential Air Service program pays airlines to run flights to places that would otherwise be unprofitable to fly to, and due to the grants the airlines can offer the complete route for (relatively) cheap. So, for example, it might be expensive to fly New York to Chicago, but subsidized (and cheaper) to fly New York to Podunk via Chicago. But if lots of travelers catch wind of this, and pretend to go to Podunk only to get off at Chicago, then the air carrier doesn’t get their subsidy.
That's an interesting hypothesis, but at least in my experience the flights where skiplagging has been viable have always been between 2 major airports, with a flight to a third major airport as the skipped leg. Looking at some examples on skiplagged.com right now, I see flights where BWI->LAX is cheaper if you book BWI->LAX->SFO but skip the LAX->SFO leg. Same with BWI->CLT by booking BWI->CLT->NAS. But those LA to SF or Charlotte to Nassau legs aren't subsidized flights to East Podunk.
Essential Air Service flights might sometimes play a role here but from what I've seen I think the thing that creates opportunities for skiplagging is just typical airline revenue management doing it's inscrutable magic setting prices between 2 cities without any concern for the prices of the individual legs.
I think due to the "nobody would run it without subsidy" nature of the Essential Air Service subsidies, the airlines themselves often pawn it off to a regional carrier wearing their skin under license (American Eagle, Delta Express, sort of thing). The traffic usually is only enough to justify a puddle-jumper that's not their core fleet or operational competency anyway.
Don't airlines have to pay for and/or actively use slots at some major airports? So New York to Chicago is a "mandatory" flight for the airline, but Chicago to Podunk is scheduled based on demand.
The missing point in your argument though is that the people doing this didn't want to go to the destination. So if this wasn't an option, getting off before the subsidized destination, they wouldn't be flying anyway and the airline still wouldn't be getting the subsidy.
I'm still not seeing any real answer how this practice can exist in a true free market and how it doesn't indicate collusion in the airline industry.
In the A->B->C example, probably the subsidy they get for B->C is so much higher than its real cost that they can use such "profit" to finance part of the first leg. If you skip the final leg, you risk spoiling their scheme to extract more-than-needed money from the government.
Even if the subsidy for B->C is not higher than the real cost at all... if they set their A->B->C ticket prices such that (revenues == expenses), and a skipped leg results in any hit to revenue (i.e. losing a subsidy of amount x) along with a reduction in expenses (i.e. less weight means less fuel of amount y), then they are going to take a loss any time x>y.
Sorry, how is this different from what I said? The condition x>y, with x the subsidy and y the expense, is exactly what I intended with "subsidy they get [is] higher than its real cost".
Oh, I interpreted your "its real cost" as everything that goes into the service (i.e. everything the airline does to hold up their end of the deal, which goes well beyond fuel) whereas in my version I'm defining y far more narrowly: the fuel needed to haul the weight of the person.
The subsidy could easily exceed the fuel, which means losing the subsidy despite saving on fuel is something the airline legitimately wants to avoid. They won't be in a worse position than if the seat went unsold, but it'll be worse than if they had a flying passenger.
The former is more common than you might think: hub-and-spoke airlines compete on route pricing, but if an airline doesn’t offer a particular direct flight, then it has to offer an indirect one for a comparable price.
This is why you get these weird pricing patterns where the direct flight costs more than the indirect one. They’re deliberately trimming their margins on certain passengers to compete, hoping to make up the lost revenue with direct fliers (or fliers on more expensive routes).
The restrictions aren’t that onerous if you’re really trying to fly for cheap. Business travelers probably won’t do it, but there’s lots of folks who just fly for personal reasons (think: sports fans going to their team’s game, people visiting family, etc.) and who might be willing to put up with the slight risks for a cheaper fare.
Because it's an extortion fee to get access to rights you're already supposed to have. Every pay or consent prompt asks you to pay a ridiculous sum of money, much more than they earn from tracking you.
They force people who don't want to be tracked to involuntarily consent to tracking, which happens to be the overwhelming majority of people, according to pay or consent providers themselves.
It's also designed to rob people who pay to not get tracked, even though the entire scheme is illegal anyways.
This would be a non-issue if providers would charge how much they earn from tracking you in return for not tracking you. But alas, they want to earn more money.
The EU "ban ad tracking entirely" faction isn't quite strong enough to achieve that, so we get this long slow grind of trying to eliminate the business model for ad tracking piece by piece.
My guess would be that it has to do with the amounts involved. In a typical series A/B only the founders have enough equity (they have larger share, plus they've been at the company the longest so they've vested the most) to be worth the transaction cost of a secondary sale.
Whenever you see discussions about longevity online there are a lot of people who come off as either die-hard enthusiasts or self-proclaimed gurus. They'll sink a lot of time, money, and effort into the field.
Frequently though, whenever you see their profile picture, they are not fit. Why is that? Many of them clearly have the means, intelligence, and interest to know that a fit body is a great predictor of longevity and a good healthspan. Is it failure to execute on what they know they should do? Is there competing information steering them along a different path?
I think the intellectually honest counterpoint is more about relationships. As someone who has been a digital nomad, it's hard to form deeper relationships when people are always leaving.
It's also hard to have hobbies that rely on the same group of people meeting in person over a long period of time.
I don’t think there’s any one size fits all way to digital nomad. I go back to the same places year after year. My friends and family are in those places. They are not in New York and San Francisco, I have no family there.
My partner and I enjoy our hobbies with groups of people when we are there. It’s not that different than being a snowbird. The main difference is that in addition to home base time, we also spend 4 months a year traveling, sometimes on our own, sometimes with our people.
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