Soon, no one will fly unless they have no choice. The financial “bonanza” airlines have seen will diminish. Vacations involving flights will sink to the bottom of the pile — and are already doing so.
We know many people who won’t fly. We are two of them. Between TSA and the airlines, it’s horrible, more like torture than vacation. Every day, more people say “NO PLANES. NO THANKS.” When the numbers start piling up, watch how quickly the airlines will shift position.
You can’t continuously mistreat the majority of your customers without a payback. It always comes. Sooner or later.
Dr. Dao received exceptional treatment, but passenger abuse is built into the airlines’ business model.
Dr. Dao received exceptional treatment, but passenger abuse is built into the airlines’ business model. While the videos of security cops dragging a bloodied physician down the aisle of a United Airlines plane clearly shocked the millions of people who viewed them, my guess is that, at some level, it didn’t surprise them. Indeed, the reason the videos were so damaging to United—and at some level, to the entire airline industry—is that everyone who’s flown in coach during the past several decades knows that the welfare of airline passengers, save for those who fly first- or business-class, is the least of the airlines’ concerns.
Photo Credit: PhotonCatcher / Shutterstock
The systemic abuse of those who fly coach has become the sine qua non of the airlines’ business model, as the incessant shrinkage of the seats and legroom afforded passengers clearly attests. “The roomiest economy seats you can book on the nation’s four largest airlines,” according toConsumer Reports’ Bill McGee, “are narrower than the tightest economy seats offered in the 1990s.” Maverick airlines that try to market themselves as more customer-friendly have been compelled to revert to the industry’s dismal norm.
JetBlue did indeed offer coach passengers more space, partly because many of its planes didn’t devote space to a first-class cabin. When Wall Street analysts condemnedcompany management for being “overly brand-conscious and customer-focused,” however, the airline deposed those executives and in came a new team, eager to install first-class accommodations up front even if it meant squeezing the saps in coach.
After contemplating operating systems at length, I started rethinking the whole thing and I began to wonder if operating systems will be relevant a couple of years from now. Because everything is changing.
Change is hardly new to the world of computers and technology. Change is what drives the industry. Change is how come you need to buy new software, new hardware, new operating systems. Change can make things work better, but it’s not unusual to discover that your “upgrade” is a downgrade because what used to work no longer does. You pays your money, you takes your chances.
I grew to adulthood in a pre-computer society. I started working before cable TV, when encyclopedias were huge heavy sets of books and a computer was gigantic and needed a whole building for itself. It ran on punch cards and used special languages — COBOLand FORTRAN. Even decades later, personal computers were one step removed from a doorstop. Floppy disks were 5-1/2 inches across and flopped.
Those early machines (personal units, not mainframes) — I hesitate to call them computers — didn’t do much. They didn’t have hard drives. There was no software and no user-friendly interface. I don’t think the concept existed. No WYSIWYG. What you saw was a black screen with lurid green letters that made you feel like you were going blind after an hour or two.
Then … everything changed.
APPLE, WINDOWS, ANDROID AND SO MUCH MORE
First there was Apple and then Windows. Windows didn’t work very well at first, but soon enough, it got better. And then better again.
There were different players and more operating systems in the beginning. Wang and DEC plus a crazy quilt of dedicated word processors and computers made by Commodore, Atari and many others. For a while, I had an Amstrad, a European machine that was almost a computer, kind an intelligent typewriter with a screen that spit out paper.
This was the Amstrad!
Then, everything changed again. Computers started to really do stuff. It was magic!
I worked on this machine in Israel using the first word processing tool, WordStar.
For a while, it seemed like everything changed every day. One day, there was a thing called the Internet. I had to buy and install Netscape to access it. Once connected, there wasn’t much going on, but it was cool to just roam around and see what there was to see.
You could send electronic mail — email — if you had a friends with computers. You sent them messages over old copper telephone wires and everything happened in slow motion.
My first personal computer.
To get on the Internet , you turned on the computer and the modem. Went to the kitchen. Prepared dinner. Cooked dinner. Served dinner. Ate dinner. Cleaned up. By the time you got back, you might have managed to connect. Or not.
My first PC. I think everyone had one of these at some point!
Then suddenly AOL popped up and I got a really fast modem, a whopping 2400 BPS! Imagine that. I worked in California from my home office in Boston. Cool! Telecommuting was the cat’s pajamas.
By the time my granddaughter was born in 1996, everybody had a computer or two. In her world, computers have always been fast and the Internet has always been the world’s biggest shopping mall.
My old 486 ran for 10 years. It wasn’t fast, but it was durable.
At age three, she could run basic applications. Computers are to her as electricity is to me. It isn’t something you think about. It has always been there. I’m sure she can’t imagine a world without it — or WiFi, cable, and electronic cameras. Even for me, it’s not easy to remember. My brain gets stuck in the early 1980s when I realized that computers were definitely going to be my thing. I would never go back.
Memories of days of yore … but not halcyon I fear,
During the 1990s, the rate of change slowed for a while. We drew a collective breath and didn’t have to buy new computers for a few years. High speed connections arrived, though most home users didn’t have it immediately. Nonetheless, everything kept getting faster. Soon, no one could remember getting on the Internet using an old, copper telephone line. If you did remember it, it made your brain hurt.
Commodore 64 – the most popular computer ever produced. More than 30 million of them sold. I had one of these, too. Everybody had one, if they were “into” computers.
AND NOW
Every couple of years, there is a new generation of processors. Bigger, faster hard drives. Amazing super high-definition monitors and speaker systems to knock your socks off. Just when you think your socks have been knocked as far off as socks can go, there’s another “fix” and your super fast computer is a slow-poke compared to the latest and greatest. I should know. I’m using one of them.
Meanwhile, the highway of information devolved into a chat room with ranting … and a universal shopping mall. The Internet is a world.
I played bridge in real-time with a partner who lived on an island off the Pacific coast. Computers aren’t only computers, either. We have them everywhere. They are part of our cameras, our bed, our toaster oven. Our television. The car. Smartphones. GPS units. Kindles and tablets. The little computers probably make “things” run better, but when they stop working? They are exorbitantly expensive to fix.
Sometimes, you can’t get in or out of your car because everything is locked tight. That little computer blew again.
ABOUT THE CLOUD
Same old Internet, but “cloud” is the “new” word for stuff stored on external servers.
We’re going back to where we began, to using stripped down computers with no hard drives. Instead, everything is stored on someone else’s computer — out there. In the “cloud.” Our data might be anywhere. We have no way of knowing where it lives. Am I the only one who finds this unnerving?
I can see advantages. When you eliminate memory sucking operating systems and cumbersome installed applications, your computer will run faster. Start-up is instant. You don’t have to maintain and upgrade expensive applications and volumes of data. You don’t need ever bigger hard drives, more memory, and video RAM. You wind up with faster computers that are less expensive and easier to maintain. It’s a win-win, right? Or is it?
SO — YOU HAVE FAITH IN YOUR INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER?
If your cable company has a bad day or the servers on which you store your critical data go down — even for a short while — you have nothing. As long as everything works like it’s supposed to, it’s hunky dory, but Murphy hasn’t left the building yet.
WHAT CAN GO WRONG, STILL GOES WRONG
Maybe it’s my age showing, but I would prefer to have data on hard drives that I control. That I own.
The idea of entrusting everything — from my photographs to the manuscript of my book — to an unknown server somewhere in the world scares me. What if the building in which the server storing my stuff burns down? Gets hit by a terrorist attack? Taken down by hackers? You have no way of knowing what country your data is in, how stable its government is, or how good an infrastructure it maintains. You financial data could be in Pakistan, Indonesia, or Kuala Lampur. Or next door.
Is there a compromise possible? Because when I think about entrusting everything to a cloud, I twitch. How many times have you been unable to access a web page because servers are out? What if you need a critical piece of data from a server when it’s offline?
My bank was hacked. BOA had to send me a new bank card. Land’s End and Adobe have been hacked. More than once. I’ve had to redo several accounts because they’d been compromised. Lots of other places over the years, places that were supposedly “unhackable” have gone down.
I know I am hackable. Luckily, I don’t have anything worth hacking.
If your ISP is down, you’re out of business. If you think your cable company has you by the throat now, how much worse will it be if everything you need to run your life and business is dependent on their services? If that doesn’t give you the cold sweats, nothing will. If you put too many eggs in the basket and the basket falls — and it will — eggs break. In which case you don’t have an omelet, just a sloppy mess of busted eggs and slimy shells.
You can’t totally avoid the cloud these days. I keep my audiobooks and eBooks on Amazon, and my email on Gmail because there’s no way on earth I could store all of that, even on this big computer. But my personal stuff? Pictures, documents, and other important material? It lives here, at home. On personal, external hard drives.
I learned the hard way to perform regular backups. I don’t do them as often as I should, but I do them regularly. If you don’t, think about it. It’s a little late when you’ve already lost all your stuff.
With the EPA down for the count and hunting of wolves and bears back on the table, it’s hard not to despair about the survival of those two species. The horror of what we do to our beasts makes me ill. All evidence to the contrary, I hope we will come to our senses and save our wild creatures but I have serious doubts that anything larger than a squirrel will survive in the wild. Not here or anywhere.
I believe that pretty much all Earth’s large animals are doomed in their natural habitats. Some will be gone soon. The remaining species will succumb eventually. Tigers, wolves, lions, jaguars — all the big cats — as well as other large land animals, like elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, apes and most monkeys and many more will no longer have a home on this planet.
There will be no wild places.
Humans will, for a while, maintain controlled populations of various species in zoos and special habitats, as if that could make up for their disappearance. As if warehousing is the same as having a wild kingdom. Want to know why? Really? It isn’t the long complicated explanation you will get from environmentalists or public talking heads. Let’s skip past statistical analyses.
It’s simpler than that.
The animals will disappear because they are in our way. Animals don’t fit with human civilization. They are untidy. They eat cattle, goats, chickens, sheep. They trample fields, demolish gardens. Take up space that could be more profitably used for shopping malls and suburban subdivisions. They are more valuable dead than alive.
Predators and large animals are inconvenient.
When humans finds something — anything — inconvenient, we eliminate it. Kill it. Demolish it. Whether it’s a species, a river, or a mountain. If it’s in our way, we make it disappear.
There’s a moral to the story. We should all take care because someday soon, we might eliminate ourselves.
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