For the past five years, I have a no eating on travel days policy. Not only do I feel like I am avoiding these high costs, my stomach is less active which is great on travel days.
Yeah, if you get used to not snacking between meals, you begin to learn that typical hunger generally passes, especially if you stay busy/distracted. I usually only eat once or twice a day, and have fasted as long as a week.
I liked the general idea but found the examples counterproductive. I personally prefer cooking whole foods at home. However, paying $14 for one meal would provide calories needed to live. I do not "need" to touch my phone 32,000 times at 2 cents a piece.
30 years from now I will hopefully retain some my experiential (expensive) travel memories but may not remember/care if I used a value or flagship phone for a given 24 month period.
I think the tilting tail and minimal thermal protection system concept will always remain suborbital. But there are reusable space glider concepts like X-37 and Dream Chaser.
>>The Covid-19 pandemic threatens to leave their manufacturers scrounging to find buyers for the last jumbos built.
This is imply not true. The last 747s built are freighters. Freight demand is at an all time high due to COVID and constraints on supply chians. Even passenger vehicles are being called into freight service (which is far less efficient yet still economical).
I'd love to see some numbers on this. As far as I understand they are used for freight because it's better than to let them sit empty (and pilots and ground staff have to be paid too), but it still is not profitable.
A _large_ proportion of worldwide freight is ordinarily carried in the belly of passenger aircraft. When most airlines stopped flying, the price of air freight _quickly_ rose (as the capacity pretty much fell overnight to just the dedicated freighter aircraft). This meant it became profitable (i.e., above the marginal costs of the flights) to fly passenger aircraft purely for the belly-hold freight.
They certainly aren't doing this and making a loss: they're hemorrhaging enough money already that they wouldn't want to add to that, but when the marginal cost is essentially the landing fees minus the parking fees they'd otherwise be paying, plus the additional cost of paying the crew above and beyond any furlough payment, plus the cost of fuel, plus any marginal maintenance cost from the extra cycles.
I just watched a video about this, that basically goes over all your points:
"Air Cargo's Coronavirus Problem" by Wendover Productions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2oPk20OHBE
A summary of the video:
- Passenger flight belly cargo used to be responsible for 25% of air cargo capacity, so capacity is severely reduced.
- PPE emergency logistics has caused a huge spike in demand, since PPE allocations are currently too volatile for anything except for air cargo. Air cargo prices are high.
- Government funding for airlines require pilots to remain on salary, so there's no additional marginal cost of labor.
- The biggest marginal cost of a flight, the cost of fuel, has understandably also become very cheap.
The end result is that even though it's still quite inefficient as compared to dedicated freight planes, the perfect storm of circumstances makes passenger-planes-as-cargo-planes momentarily profitable.
From what I understand, most airlines are rotating the few remaining shifts. This way each pilot gets a couple of flights per month, which is enough to keep their ratings.
That said, since many airlines have completely stopped flying some plane types (particulary the A380 superjumbo), those pilots are going to have a problem soon.
Not to mention that when we're talking about freighters, e.g. 747-8F-- they are not limited to belly hold freight. (And have much less cabin weight, fly slower / use less fuel, so the weight they can carry is better than repurposed passenger aircraft).
Have seen plenty of evidence of freight being shipped in passenger cabins the last few months too. Some in and on the seats and others with seats newly stripped out.
I don’t have evidence of this to show but friends in the airlines have told me stories of empty passenger planes flying just for freight, sometimes even with small items in the passenger cabin
> This meant it became profitable (i.e., above the marginal costs of the flights) to fly passenger aircraft purely for the belly-hold freight.
That's not the usual definition of "profitable". As you say, they're turning a gross profit (if we treat aircraft leasing costs etc. as fixed, which over a short timeframe they are), but it's not enough to cover their fixed costs, so grandparent is correct that they are not (net) profitable.
Is there a single word for "it's more profitable to do this thing, rather than the other thing, or nothing"? I think that's what this counts as.
I think this is in the same category of decision as retailers selling old stock at a loss, because that's better than not selling it.
A large portion of the modern economy is run by spreadsheets, and crunching the numbers on what the "most-profitable" thing to do often leads to companies doing what seems insane to the average person. P.S.: only the first 2/3rds of that was directed at your comment specifically.
In this air freight context, the relevant short concept would be the "shutdown rule" of economics: you keep operating in the short term as long as your revenue covers your variable costs. If it doesn't, it's cheaper to just not operate at all, but if you're beating the variable costs you're at least minimizing your losses even if you're not covering your fixed costs.
In the long run, you can't ignore the fixed costs forever and you eventually just leave the market altogether.
In addition to this being in the context of air freight of which passenger..Not a whole lot of global freight involves rail or road only.
Not nonsense..
Passenger planes carried close to half of all air freight. And additionally while air freight only accounts for a small percentage of freight by weight, it carries a tremendous proportion by value.
> This is absolute nonsense. I don't know how you can claim this with a straight face. Almost all freight goes by sea, rail, and road, not by passenger aircraft.
He almost certainly meant air freight, given the context.
There's no reason to believe short term constraints on supply chains are much of a factor in demand for new freighters which won't be delivered this year and whose capital costs are amortised over more than a decade.
Even if airlines predict the global transport market to remain similar for years, that makes it much more practical and affordable to convert existing passenger aircraft stock [which happens anyway, but we've got more and more modern parked or underutilised airframes right now]
Do you have evidence Amazon sold books at a loss for 20+ years?
Buying a book for $10, selling it for $12, then spending $5 on a new warehouse is cash flow negative but not selling at a loss. Amazon isn't even cash flow negative anymore.
>If you're a hiring manager and can't even be bothered to >know the most basic facts about me and that I might not like >that piece or pork or salmon for religious or ethical >reasons then that about says it all.
If you are a hiring manager and you are attempting to learn someone's religious or dietary beliefs prior to hiring then then you should be sued/fired.
The video posted shows Forstall wondering if the dead fish was a threat. He might be making this up but the situation is strange at best, confusing, offensive or threatening at worst.
The person doing the hiring screwed up, and clearly did need to do better.
If you're of that view then why could you possibly think sending a dead fish to a candidate without checking first is ok in the first place.
And yes when I've taken my candidates for lunch as part of recruiting I always ask for any dietary preferences so i can find a place that accommodates. It's just commonsense.
