There isn't much left to do. Electric cars are great for short haul, but sometimes people need to drive farther. Small cars are fine for a lot of people, but try jamming a rear-facing car seat in one and you'll find the front seat is nearly unusable.
Which lays bare the real reason these MPG standards were imposed in the first place: to make it impossible to produce or sell anything except electric vehicles. And since the government lacks the power to ban internal-combustion vehicles, government decided to get around that pesky "we don't have the power to do this" issue by making MPG standards that become nearly impossible to meet with a conventional vehicle. It's the same tactic they've used to attack the 2nd Amendment, trying to ban ammunition since they can't ban guns.
Government apparently can't depend on the market to decide what technology wins and loses so they are picking one and forcing the other to die via regulation. Another usurpation of the power of the people to make their own economic choices and nobody even wonders if this is a bad idea.
Bullshit. Make a hybrid Fit... 80 mpg and under 20 grand.
If there was enough demand for such a vehicle and automakers could produce it without losing money, why do you suppose they're not voluntarily producing such a vehicle? OH! That's right, there isn't sufficient demand for such a vehicle! There is, however, demand for trucks, SUV's, and muscle cars because people exercise their economic free will and choose to purchase such vehicles.
We obviously can't have people deciding for themselves what they want, right? Far better for the government to tell them what they want and force them to accept it, right? Forget that whole "freedom" thing! You're obviously too stupid to know what's best for you, therefore you must be dictated to by an elite group of government busybodies, people who won't be discommoded in the slightest by such decisions because they exempt themselves from them.
Trump's now fixing it so the smart people can't buy them either.
Why can't they buy them? Is someone banning the sale of such vehicles? Is there a law being proposed that would prevent them from buying one? Is there a regulation on businesses from producing such a vehicle?
The answer to all of these questions is, of course, no. Therefore your entire premise is wrong. Car companies are free to produce vehicles that exceed the economy figures, just like Warren Buffet is free to pay more taxes instead of griping that he thinks he's undertaxed. This is muchado about absolutely nothing and a legitimate rollback of powers the government should never have been given in the first place.
Nope, the implication here is that citizens might make choices that other citizens - who Peskin represents - do not want them to make.
The proper solution is to make it attractive enough for people to choose to eat outside the corporate cafeteria of their own free will. Peskin doesn't want to bother with that. Too much work. Much easier to dictate what they can and can't do via government fiat.
This isn't about healthy eating or some other situation that would fit within the criteria you propose, it's about the fact that a minority that has control over the SF government absolutely hates, hates with a passion, newcomers, and wants to punish them for not being part of the existing community.
All the more reason this fool should be voted out of office. A law -- or even a proposed law -- that punishes people for exercising their nonviolent free will is an affront to everything this country is founded on. It's the kind of thing you'd expect out of North Korea.
There are numerous reasons people pass laws. Clamping down on anti-social behavior is one
This is not a legitimate function of government, or at least it's not supposed to be in this country. Like I said, it's the kind of government-knows-best philosophy you'd expect out of a dictatorship where control extends down to the minutiae of how you live your life on a daily basis. It also shows the impotence of government. It can't convince people to behave the way it wants therefore it will compel them to using the only tool it has that citizens don't have: force.
And San Franciscoans actually want this, which is even more terrifying since they obviously have no clue what government can do with force once it decides it doesn't like something they like doing.
Most of the so-called libertarian here are deeply dishonest.
And you paint everyone with the same brush and make totally unfounded assumptions about them because reasons. How egalitarian of you!
the boundary appears to be "I've got mine and the government should be big enough to keep it mine, but other than that fuck you".
No, in this case the boundary is "the government has no business telling me where I can and cannot eat." Whether you're conservative, progressive, libertarian, or whatever, the idea that the people should give the government power to enforce such a thing ought to be frightening.
What's funny is Apple still pretends to be a computer company. They are not and haven't been for a while. They're a consumer electronics company that also makes a few computers now and then. The near-total innattention paid to the Apple Mac line of computers is proof positive of this. Without the iPhone, iPad, and iTunes, Apple would have died long ago.
You miss the point. Peskin wants this to become law. That is obvious because it was proposed. That such a person can continue to serve after making such an asinine proposal and not be run out of office by the voters shows the absurdity of San Francisco politics. They clearly would love a government that tells everyone what to do, all the time, regardless of the situation.
The implication here is citizens are too stupid to make their own decisions and must be forced into specific behaviors by the Almighty Hand Of Government, because only government has the wisdom and altruism necessary to ensure the well-being of the people. Don't the voters understand how they're being condescended to by stuff like this? "You can't be trusted to do what's best for you, therefore we will make laws that force you to do what we think is best for you."
Let's ban citizens from preparing meals in their households as well. What better to ensure the success of local eateries?
Just wait. That's next, right after they mandate what you have to buy at the local eateries, what kind of transportation you must use to get to the eatery, what you must wear, what you must say when ordering your food, how you have to say it, and...well let's just dispense with any pretense of this whole "freedom" and "liberty" thing since government elites obviously knows what we need far better than we do.
It wasn't enough the government wanted to tell you what to eat. It wasn't enough they took away your plastic straws. Now they want to tell you where you must eat.
At what point do people sit up and say "wait a minute, you don't need to be meddling in my life to this extent"? Are people oblivious to the slippery slope this kind of stuff always leads to?
This statement pretty clearly shows your philosophy.
It shows no such thing. Your response, however, displays volumes about yours and your willingness to judge people quickly with little or no relevant information to substantiate your claims.
An even more crucial question is how unpleasant must UBI be to motivate people to seek other work? If UBI is too good it will turn into a lifetime subsidy for do-nothings. However, if it's unpleasant people will bitch and moan and vote for politicians who will make it less unpleasant, thus decreasing the incentive to get off UBI.
If you don't think this is how it will go, just look at other similar social programs. Social security, Medicaid, unemployment, minimum wage...when was the last time you saw benefits decreased? Almost never. Increased? Almost always. The end result will inevitably bankrupt whatever social system is in place. This isn't cruelty or greed talking; it's basic reality. People love to get "free money." Who wouldn't? But that money must come from somewhere, and that somewhere is productive citizens. If they're marginalized as a voting bloc they will be increasingly taxed to support UBI and at some point there won't be enough of them to support UBI. What then?
I don't really understand paying to get rid of surplus electricity. Isn't the point to sell electricity?
You assume demand is constant. It is not. During peak load times there isn't a surplus; during low load times there is. What is to be done with the "excess" generated during low load? It's not economical to ship the power too far from where it's generated due to transmission losses. They can't store it in anything they currently have. They can't stop releasing water due to environmental regulations requiring a certain amount of flow downstream of the dam. They've got themselves in quite a pickle. Storing excess energy by pumping water back into the reservoir is one of the only economical, practical options.
If the water comes from the dam in the first place, wouldn't it be more efficient simply to leave it there until needed?
They can't without damaging downstream ecosystems. A certain amount of water must be released continuously.
This wasn't an issue back when the dam was constructed. However in the intervening decades more and more water is being used by upstream customers along with greater environmental regulation requiring the dam to release water for downstream ecosystems. The end result is not enough water coming into the reservoir to keep water levels as high as they'd like.
All the legal wrangling is meaningless. What this will actually come down to is who can get to the resource and defend their claim from anyone who challenges it. This is no different from the land rushes of past centuries. If you stake a claim and no one cares to or is able to dislodge you from it, it's yours, pure and simple.
Let us suppose some enterprising soul manages to fly a vehicle to and establish a permanent habitation on an asteroid. That asteroid is effectively theirs at that point regardless of what any piece of paper may say. If someone or group of someones (say, a nation) disagrees with that person's habitation, they can wage war to evict them. That's how such matters have always been settled when competing claims can't be negotiated.
Which brings up the interesting question of whether it's worthwhile for any nation, state, or even a private company would find it worthwhile to even try dislodging such a thing. It would be impractical for anyone to lay claim to even a small asteroid much less a large swath of the moon since it would be impossible to defend. At the same time, there's so much out there it's somewhat ridiculous to fight over it at this point.
Is it just me or does the article summary seem like it's only qualifying a "success" as "something the employee likes"? News flash: if you allow people to work less but pay them as if they worked more, they're going to like it. This comes as a surprise to no one. I'm an employee and I'd call it an "unmitigated success" if I could get paid to work four eight-hour days but get paid for five days.
But this is only half the equation. The true measure of "unmitigated success" would be if the company also saw some tangible benefit or, at the very worst, saw no productivity losses due to the truncated hours. The article says employees worked with the company to "plan" so that no productivity would be lost but, unlike the meticulous metrics on "work life balance", it doesn't state whether this was actually achieved.
all they need to do is pay enough in some form or another to make the expensive training worthwhile or pay for the training while the new employee is on a training salary.
And where would the money for this pay increase or training budget come from? Find me an airline that has a fat enough profit margin to absorb these costs without raising ticket prices. You won't be able to.
Sure, it may eventually come to this where the airline absorbs these costs and passes them onto the customer with higher ticket prices. However, the first airline to do so is going to be absolutely murdered into oblivion as customers flee it in droves for tickets a few dollars cheaper. Don't laugh. With online shipping people sort the fares "low to high" and pick the one at the top more often than not. Mark my words, the first airline to try this will be the first to die trying. A few more will follow until all are forced to adopt it en masse and fares go up uniformly. But no airline wants to be the first, and can you blame them?
Put all the regional pilots on mainline contracts. Pilot shortage would go away pretty quickly.
And the regionals would also go out of business. I'm no cheerleader for them but I know from working at one they aren't rolling in dough. Most are barely making it. They don't pay peanuts so the top exec can live in a solid gold mansion. They pay low because their profit margin is razor thin, their costs for things like fuel can spiral out of control in a heartbeat based on the whims of international relations, and a single crash can put them out of business for good even if they were not at fault. It's not a business for the faint of heart.
Given that the technology exists today to build passenger planes which require no flight crew at all
Technically possible? Yes. Socially acceptable? No fucking way. Look at how people are reacting to the (extremely few) crashes of autonomous cars or even semi-autonomous vehicles. They're freaking out to the point of asking they be banned in some places. Never mind that per mile they are far safer than human-driven vehicles. That doesn't register on the average person's cranium. They want to hold on to that cherished illusion of control despite all data to the contrary. This is exacerbated in no small part by the media which sensationalizes every autonomous fender bender there is serving the "if it bleeds, it leads" philosophy.
There is much in this world that is technically possible, economically feasible, and "better" overall but isn't accepted because of ignorance or prejudice. You can engineer a better system but we have yet to come up with a way to engineer a smarter human.
Almost always the problem is that the organization complaining is trying to be cheap.
Yet in this case it's a multitude of factors, not all of which are under the control of airlines. Training costs are very high but unavoidable for a profession charged with the care of 100+ human lives several times a day. This presents a formidable barrier to entry that heretofore was mostly taken care of by ex-military pilots. Now that supply isn't meeting demand and the extreme costs of private training are being felt more keenly.
Training is affected by regulation, mainly by having very high minimum requirements. I won't debate whether this is good or bad. I merely state it's something outside the control of the airline. Sure, airlines can foot the bill if they're desperate enough but then you have the issue of employee retention. To recoup those costs that employee needs to stay with the airline for quite a while and few employees will want to sign something binding them to a particular job -- or with the penalties of having to repay the education -- for the decade it will likely take to repay it.
Then there are fuel costs. There's an old saying in the airline industry: how do you turn a billionaire into a millionaire? Have him buy an airline. You may think airlines are awash in cash but they're not. Most are barely making it. A slight upturn in fuel costs can turn a barely-profitable airline into a sinking ship overnight.
Then we have regulations again, this time on the maximum amount of flying time mandated by the FAA and mandatory retirement ages. Again, I won't debate the merits of said regulation, only draw attention to it as a limiting factor in the current shortage.
Basic economics would tell anyone who can fog a mirror that high barriers to entry, low starting pay, high regulation, and demanding job conditions would create exactly the situation we're currently facing. It's been artificially sustained by military retirees for decades. Without that stimulus the current setup cannot last.
If there really is a pilot shortage then ticket prices are going to rise anyway because there will be a limited number of flights that can be operated by all airlines combined.
True but what will really happen is airlines will shut down flying unprofitable or marginally profitable routes in order to concentrate on the profitable ones. There will be fewer planes (but they'll always be full instead of partially filled) needing fewer pilots. I'm not saying this is good for the average customer. I'm saying this is what will happen. I used to work at at airline so I know how they operate. They know exactly how profitable each flight is. Triage will mandate they cull money-losing routes first since they only exist to feed people to more profitable routes. Next will be the marginal routes for exactly the same reason.
The OP was likely being sarcastic but let's address this common misconception: a mirror is not a magical shield against laser weaponry. Go investigate some of the issues with powerful ground-based lasers developed for anti-ballistic warfare use. Laser aiming/focusing mirrors routinely blew up because no mirror is a perfect reflector of all energy. It may only absorb a small percentage of what's aimed at it but when you're putting out that much power it doesn't matter; that small percentage is enough. Same goes for us watery meatbags.
Nah, that makes far too much sense to try. Much better to have judges "make" law even though they have no Constitutional prerogative to do so. That pesky Constitution is GREAT except for all the places WE don't like, so it should be selectively enforced or ignored on a whim. That'll work out GREAT! What could possibly go wrong? It's not like giving government arbitrarily vast powers has EVER been bad people, right?
We tend to think of the Internet as a thing in and of itself, where this judge appears to think of it as a pool of possible things that an ISP can cherry-pick content from to serve up for you.
Please find the exact clause and wording in the Constitution where it grants the government the right to tell a private company what it can and cannot distribute to customers voluntarily consuming its services. You can't, because it doesn't exist.
You see, this is one of the problems of wanting an "activist judiciary." Just because you want your ISP to work a certain way doesn't give you the right to force them to do so. The proper course of action is to vote with your wallet and take your business elsewhere. Don't act like you can't; it's a rare case these days where you have no choice of ISP's. You'd be outraged if the government ordered an ISP to not carry some specific content. The reciprocal of that is the government has no right to stop them from not carrying it. You cannot have one without the other. The alternative is government control of content, something any liberal or conservative should rightly oppose.
This is what freedom looks like. It is not perfect, never will be, and any attempt to make it so will eventually backfire when you hand the government too much control. The best control will always be in the hands of the people making economic choices of their own free will. No company can long withstand a situation where customers are dissatisfied with their product or service. Either their competition will drive them to bend or new competitors will spring up to serve market demand.
In the sense that the Internet and cable TV are both mechanisms for content delivery, they are just alike. Try thinking outside your narrow interpretation of things.
Slashdot Mirror
There isn't much left to do. Electric cars are great for short haul, but sometimes people need to drive farther. Small cars are fine for a lot of people, but try jamming a rear-facing car seat in one and you'll find the front seat is nearly unusable.
Which lays bare the real reason these MPG standards were imposed in the first place: to make it impossible to produce or sell anything except electric vehicles. And since the government lacks the power to ban internal-combustion vehicles, government decided to get around that pesky "we don't have the power to do this" issue by making MPG standards that become nearly impossible to meet with a conventional vehicle. It's the same tactic they've used to attack the 2nd Amendment, trying to ban ammunition since they can't ban guns.
Government apparently can't depend on the market to decide what technology wins and loses so they are picking one and forcing the other to die via regulation. Another usurpation of the power of the people to make their own economic choices and nobody even wonders if this is a bad idea.
Bullshit. Make a hybrid Fit... 80 mpg and under 20 grand.
If there was enough demand for such a vehicle and automakers could produce it without losing money, why do you suppose they're not voluntarily producing such a vehicle? OH! That's right, there isn't sufficient demand for such a vehicle! There is, however, demand for trucks, SUV's, and muscle cars because people exercise their economic free will and choose to purchase such vehicles.
We obviously can't have people deciding for themselves what they want, right? Far better for the government to tell them what they want and force them to accept it, right? Forget that whole "freedom" thing! You're obviously too stupid to know what's best for you, therefore you must be dictated to by an elite group of government busybodies, people who won't be discommoded in the slightest by such decisions because they exempt themselves from them.
Trump's now fixing it so the smart people can't buy them either.
Why can't they buy them? Is someone banning the sale of such vehicles? Is there a law being proposed that would prevent them from buying one? Is there a regulation on businesses from producing such a vehicle?
The answer to all of these questions is, of course, no. Therefore your entire premise is wrong. Car companies are free to produce vehicles that exceed the economy figures, just like Warren Buffet is free to pay more taxes instead of griping that he thinks he's undertaxed. This is muchado about absolutely nothing and a legitimate rollback of powers the government should never have been given in the first place.
Nope, the implication here is that citizens might make choices that other citizens - who Peskin represents - do not want them to make.
The proper solution is to make it attractive enough for people to choose to eat outside the corporate cafeteria of their own free will. Peskin doesn't want to bother with that. Too much work. Much easier to dictate what they can and can't do via government fiat.
This isn't about healthy eating or some other situation that would fit within the criteria you propose, it's about the fact that a minority that has control over the SF government absolutely hates, hates with a passion, newcomers, and wants to punish them for not being part of the existing community.
All the more reason this fool should be voted out of office. A law -- or even a proposed law -- that punishes people for exercising their nonviolent free will is an affront to everything this country is founded on. It's the kind of thing you'd expect out of North Korea.
There are numerous reasons people pass laws. Clamping down on anti-social behavior is one
This is not a legitimate function of government, or at least it's not supposed to be in this country. Like I said, it's the kind of government-knows-best philosophy you'd expect out of a dictatorship where control extends down to the minutiae of how you live your life on a daily basis. It also shows the impotence of government. It can't convince people to behave the way it wants therefore it will compel them to using the only tool it has that citizens don't have: force.
And San Franciscoans actually want this, which is even more terrifying since they obviously have no clue what government can do with force once it decides it doesn't like something they like doing.
Most of the so-called libertarian here are deeply dishonest.
And you paint everyone with the same brush and make totally unfounded assumptions about them because reasons. How egalitarian of you!
the boundary appears to be "I've got mine and the government should be big enough to keep it mine, but other than that fuck you".
No, in this case the boundary is "the government has no business telling me where I can and cannot eat." Whether you're conservative, progressive, libertarian, or whatever, the idea that the people should give the government power to enforce such a thing ought to be frightening.
What's funny is Apple still pretends to be a computer company. They are not and haven't been for a while. They're a consumer electronics company that also makes a few computers now and then. The near-total innattention paid to the Apple Mac line of computers is proof positive of this. Without the iPhone, iPad, and iTunes, Apple would have died long ago.
You miss the point. Peskin wants this to become law. That is obvious because it was proposed. That such a person can continue to serve after making such an asinine proposal and not be run out of office by the voters shows the absurdity of San Francisco politics. They clearly would love a government that tells everyone what to do, all the time, regardless of the situation.
The implication here is citizens are too stupid to make their own decisions and must be forced into specific behaviors by the Almighty Hand Of Government, because only government has the wisdom and altruism necessary to ensure the well-being of the people. Don't the voters understand how they're being condescended to by stuff like this? "You can't be trusted to do what's best for you, therefore we will make laws that force you to do what we think is best for you."
Let's ban citizens from preparing meals in their households as well. What better to ensure the success of local eateries?
Just wait. That's next, right after they mandate what you have to buy at the local eateries, what kind of transportation you must use to get to the eatery, what you must wear, what you must say when ordering your food, how you have to say it, and...well let's just dispense with any pretense of this whole "freedom" and "liberty" thing since government elites obviously knows what we need far better than we do.
It wasn't enough the government wanted to tell you what to eat. It wasn't enough they took away your plastic straws. Now they want to tell you where you must eat.
At what point do people sit up and say "wait a minute, you don't need to be meddling in my life to this extent"? Are people oblivious to the slippery slope this kind of stuff always leads to?
This statement pretty clearly shows your philosophy.
It shows no such thing. Your response, however, displays volumes about yours and your willingness to judge people quickly with little or no relevant information to substantiate your claims.
An even more crucial question is how unpleasant must UBI be to motivate people to seek other work? If UBI is too good it will turn into a lifetime subsidy for do-nothings. However, if it's unpleasant people will bitch and moan and vote for politicians who will make it less unpleasant, thus decreasing the incentive to get off UBI.
If you don't think this is how it will go, just look at other similar social programs. Social security, Medicaid, unemployment, minimum wage...when was the last time you saw benefits decreased? Almost never. Increased? Almost always. The end result will inevitably bankrupt whatever social system is in place. This isn't cruelty or greed talking; it's basic reality. People love to get "free money." Who wouldn't? But that money must come from somewhere, and that somewhere is productive citizens. If they're marginalized as a voting bloc they will be increasingly taxed to support UBI and at some point there won't be enough of them to support UBI. What then?
I don't really understand paying to get rid of surplus electricity. Isn't the point to sell electricity?
You assume demand is constant. It is not. During peak load times there isn't a surplus; during low load times there is. What is to be done with the "excess" generated during low load? It's not economical to ship the power too far from where it's generated due to transmission losses. They can't store it in anything they currently have. They can't stop releasing water due to environmental regulations requiring a certain amount of flow downstream of the dam. They've got themselves in quite a pickle. Storing excess energy by pumping water back into the reservoir is one of the only economical, practical options.
If the water comes from the dam in the first place, wouldn't it be more efficient simply to leave it there until needed?
They can't without damaging downstream ecosystems. A certain amount of water must be released continuously.
This wasn't an issue back when the dam was constructed. However in the intervening decades more and more water is being used by upstream customers along with greater environmental regulation requiring the dam to release water for downstream ecosystems. The end result is not enough water coming into the reservoir to keep water levels as high as they'd like.
Moving any sizable asteroid would be far more difficult than changing the intercept course of an inbound ship. Mass is hard.
All the legal wrangling is meaningless. What this will actually come down to is who can get to the resource and defend their claim from anyone who challenges it. This is no different from the land rushes of past centuries. If you stake a claim and no one cares to or is able to dislodge you from it, it's yours, pure and simple.
Let us suppose some enterprising soul manages to fly a vehicle to and establish a permanent habitation on an asteroid. That asteroid is effectively theirs at that point regardless of what any piece of paper may say. If someone or group of someones (say, a nation) disagrees with that person's habitation, they can wage war to evict them. That's how such matters have always been settled when competing claims can't be negotiated.
Which brings up the interesting question of whether it's worthwhile for any nation, state, or even a private company would find it worthwhile to even try dislodging such a thing. It would be impractical for anyone to lay claim to even a small asteroid much less a large swath of the moon since it would be impossible to defend. At the same time, there's so much out there it's somewhat ridiculous to fight over it at this point.
Is it just me or does the article summary seem like it's only qualifying a "success" as "something the employee likes"? News flash: if you allow people to work less but pay them as if they worked more, they're going to like it. This comes as a surprise to no one. I'm an employee and I'd call it an "unmitigated success" if I could get paid to work four eight-hour days but get paid for five days.
But this is only half the equation. The true measure of "unmitigated success" would be if the company also saw some tangible benefit or, at the very worst, saw no productivity losses due to the truncated hours. The article says employees worked with the company to "plan" so that no productivity would be lost but, unlike the meticulous metrics on "work life balance", it doesn't state whether this was actually achieved.
all they need to do is pay enough in some form or another to make the expensive training worthwhile or pay for the training while the new employee is on a training salary.
And where would the money for this pay increase or training budget come from? Find me an airline that has a fat enough profit margin to absorb these costs without raising ticket prices. You won't be able to.
Sure, it may eventually come to this where the airline absorbs these costs and passes them onto the customer with higher ticket prices. However, the first airline to do so is going to be absolutely murdered into oblivion as customers flee it in droves for tickets a few dollars cheaper. Don't laugh. With online shipping people sort the fares "low to high" and pick the one at the top more often than not. Mark my words, the first airline to try this will be the first to die trying. A few more will follow until all are forced to adopt it en masse and fares go up uniformly. But no airline wants to be the first, and can you blame them?
Put all the regional pilots on mainline contracts. Pilot shortage would go away pretty quickly.
And the regionals would also go out of business. I'm no cheerleader for them but I know from working at one they aren't rolling in dough. Most are barely making it. They don't pay peanuts so the top exec can live in a solid gold mansion. They pay low because their profit margin is razor thin, their costs for things like fuel can spiral out of control in a heartbeat based on the whims of international relations, and a single crash can put them out of business for good even if they were not at fault. It's not a business for the faint of heart.
Given that the technology exists today to build passenger planes which require no flight crew at all
Technically possible? Yes. Socially acceptable? No fucking way. Look at how people are reacting to the (extremely few) crashes of autonomous cars or even semi-autonomous vehicles. They're freaking out to the point of asking they be banned in some places. Never mind that per mile they are far safer than human-driven vehicles. That doesn't register on the average person's cranium. They want to hold on to that cherished illusion of control despite all data to the contrary. This is exacerbated in no small part by the media which sensationalizes every autonomous fender bender there is serving the "if it bleeds, it leads" philosophy.
There is much in this world that is technically possible, economically feasible, and "better" overall but isn't accepted because of ignorance or prejudice. You can engineer a better system but we have yet to come up with a way to engineer a smarter human.
Almost always the problem is that the organization complaining is trying to be cheap.
Yet in this case it's a multitude of factors, not all of which are under the control of airlines. Training costs are very high but unavoidable for a profession charged with the care of 100+ human lives several times a day. This presents a formidable barrier to entry that heretofore was mostly taken care of by ex-military pilots. Now that supply isn't meeting demand and the extreme costs of private training are being felt more keenly.
Training is affected by regulation, mainly by having very high minimum requirements. I won't debate whether this is good or bad. I merely state it's something outside the control of the airline. Sure, airlines can foot the bill if they're desperate enough but then you have the issue of employee retention. To recoup those costs that employee needs to stay with the airline for quite a while and few employees will want to sign something binding them to a particular job -- or with the penalties of having to repay the education -- for the decade it will likely take to repay it.
Then there are fuel costs. There's an old saying in the airline industry: how do you turn a billionaire into a millionaire? Have him buy an airline. You may think airlines are awash in cash but they're not. Most are barely making it. A slight upturn in fuel costs can turn a barely-profitable airline into a sinking ship overnight.
Then we have regulations again, this time on the maximum amount of flying time mandated by the FAA and mandatory retirement ages. Again, I won't debate the merits of said regulation, only draw attention to it as a limiting factor in the current shortage.
Basic economics would tell anyone who can fog a mirror that high barriers to entry, low starting pay, high regulation, and demanding job conditions would create exactly the situation we're currently facing. It's been artificially sustained by military retirees for decades. Without that stimulus the current setup cannot last.
If there really is a pilot shortage then ticket prices are going to rise anyway because there will be a limited number of flights that can be operated by all airlines combined.
True but what will really happen is airlines will shut down flying unprofitable or marginally profitable routes in order to concentrate on the profitable ones. There will be fewer planes (but they'll always be full instead of partially filled) needing fewer pilots. I'm not saying this is good for the average customer. I'm saying this is what will happen. I used to work at at airline so I know how they operate. They know exactly how profitable each flight is. Triage will mandate they cull money-losing routes first since they only exist to feed people to more profitable routes. Next will be the marginal routes for exactly the same reason.
The OP was likely being sarcastic but let's address this common misconception: a mirror is not a magical shield against laser weaponry. Go investigate some of the issues with powerful ground-based lasers developed for anti-ballistic warfare use. Laser aiming/focusing mirrors routinely blew up because no mirror is a perfect reflector of all energy. It may only absorb a small percentage of what's aimed at it but when you're putting out that much power it doesn't matter; that small percentage is enough. Same goes for us watery meatbags.
Want different laws? Elect different legislators.
Nah, that makes far too much sense to try. Much better to have judges "make" law even though they have no Constitutional prerogative to do so. That pesky Constitution is GREAT except for all the places WE don't like, so it should be selectively enforced or ignored on a whim. That'll work out GREAT! What could possibly go wrong? It's not like giving government arbitrarily vast powers has EVER been bad people, right?
We tend to think of the Internet as a thing in and of itself, where this judge appears to think of it as a pool of possible things that an ISP can cherry-pick content from to serve up for you.
Please find the exact clause and wording in the Constitution where it grants the government the right to tell a private company what it can and cannot distribute to customers voluntarily consuming its services. You can't, because it doesn't exist.
You see, this is one of the problems of wanting an "activist judiciary." Just because you want your ISP to work a certain way doesn't give you the right to force them to do so. The proper course of action is to vote with your wallet and take your business elsewhere. Don't act like you can't; it's a rare case these days where you have no choice of ISP's. You'd be outraged if the government ordered an ISP to not carry some specific content. The reciprocal of that is the government has no right to stop them from not carrying it. You cannot have one without the other. The alternative is government control of content, something any liberal or conservative should rightly oppose.
This is what freedom looks like. It is not perfect, never will be, and any attempt to make it so will eventually backfire when you hand the government too much control. The best control will always be in the hands of the people making economic choices of their own free will. No company can long withstand a situation where customers are dissatisfied with their product or service. Either their competition will drive them to bend or new competitors will spring up to serve market demand.
In the sense that the Internet and cable TV are both mechanisms for content delivery, they are just alike. Try thinking outside your narrow interpretation of things.