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.
2.3% to support so little economic activity is just insane.
This is the type of tragedy of the commons issue where regulation is needed. For any one actor they can justify spending infinity energy as long as their ROI is positive.
There are enough justifications out there that it's easy to convince oneself that you're doing the world a favor ("I'm just librating finance and fighting the good fight against the central bankers").
The amount of economic activity it supports is somewhat of a poor measure without further information. Yes, it is a complete waste in its current form. But that doesn't strictly mean that the electricity usage will scale with the percentage of economic activity that takes place using it. I would be interested in knowing how this number would change if it supported most economic activity. Surely it would go up, but I doubt it would do so linearly.
I wonder what kind of shape it could take with the current mindset of putting weak signals to steer the market (ie. carbon tax, etc.). Mining bitcoin is far from being the only example of resources waste for pure profit... I can only imagine a vague but serious threat of being accused of ecocide to have an effect.
> 2.3% to support so little economic activity is just insane.
It kind of is!
But honestly that's the price we pay for not having sound monetary systems. At this point BTC is, functionally, just an alternative asset that hedges against inflation. As governments print increasingly more money, and the amount of BTC stays the same, each BTC becomes worth more. It's very simple. The demand for such an asset is apparently quite high; high enough to spend up to 2.3% of total US energy.
If the world operated on non-inflationary systems there would perhaps still be a small need for BTC, such as providing liberty in committing financial transactions, but I doubt it'd be nearly as big as it is today on that basis alone.
> BTC is, functionally, just an alternative asset that hedges against inflation
Bitcoin is a terrible inflation hedge. This is quantitaitvely demonstrable over its entire existence. It's a good gambling asset, and in my opinion, should be taxed as such.
It already exists it’s called gold. There are some hassles associated with physical storage and transport of gold but not 2.3% of total US power consumption worth of hassles.
To people who love gold, I always want to ask what you think should happen if Elon Musk claims a meteor one of his robot ships landed on, that's got 1000 times more gold inside it than there is gold on Earth.
Why should anyone respond and speculate based on a hastily written hypothetical? You need to put in some genuine writing effort for folks to take it seriously.
Offer some substantial, falsifiable, claims/arguments/etc.
If someone wants the world economy to be based on a commodity such as the metallic ore gold, then I wonder what they think would happen to the world economy, and more importantly all of the people in it, if all of a sudden, the world supply of the metallic ore gold went up by three orders of magnitude, all owned by literally one person.
Do they think people would continue to use the metallic ore gold as their currency, and they would just accept the insane inflation? And the fact that 99.9% of the world's wealth is now concentrated in the hands of one person?
Or do they think we would rapidly switch to a different commodity as our currency?
Also, why should anyone respond? Because they think the topic is interesting. I thought that would be clear. If you cannot imagine the nightmare scenario and you need "genuine writing effort" for you to imagine it, then it sounds like you don't think the topic is interesting. Maybe just let other people hash it out.
No, the international monetary system is perfectly functional, as evidenced by the fact that it supports the global economy just fine.
Bitcoin is neither an alternative to the international monetary system, nor a hedge. It's a joke. A gambling instrument for financially illiterate people.
The adoption of fiat currency by many countries, from the 18th century onwards, made much larger variations in the supply of money possible. Since then, huge increases in the supply of paper money have occurred in a number of countries, producing hyperinflations – episodes of extreme inflation rates much greater than those observed during earlier periods of commodity money.
Hyperinflation is extremely uncommon, especially in developed countries, and when it occurs it's always caused by incompetent or corrupt governments, not by the currency itself.
Wishful thinking. Cryptocurrencies have failed to gain traction even in countries experiencing hyperinflation. People don't trust a fiat "currency" that is issued by anonymous entities and is backed by nothing. Especially when it's been known to depreciate dramatically in the blink of an eye. People trust fiat currencies that are issued by reputable institutions that give credible assurances about the purchasing power of said currencies. This is why such currencies as the US dollar and the euro are used all over the world for international trade, and cryptocurrencies are not.
Trust in traditional currency shaken quite significantly in last 3 years. Especially when inflation ruins many businesses and government justify inflation by war and green energy.
When you cannot make living from money that you get from your hard work, naturally, you are forced to look at alternatives. As more people adopt cryptocurrencies, the less value traditional currencies had and eventually ignores inflation. Which, for now, bitcoins does. It just isn't that much popular yet.
No one would expect ten years ago that some cryptocurrency would survive or be adopted by more and more people. But somehow, it's still there and grows every year.
If crypto wouldn't be a thing, there wouldn't be plans for digital Euro by ECB for example. Basically same thing as BTC, except with regulations with centralized bank.
To be clear, I'm not a fan of digital currencies. Cash is still most private and free way of exchange method. For digital, you need electricity, device and data which many cannot afford to have.
> No, the international monetary system is perfectly functional, as evidenced by the fact that it supports the global economy just fine.
Obviously it is functional, I never said it wasn't!
Inflationary systems have a lot of benefits -- they encourage consumption, erode the value of debt over time, etc. But there are downsides, too. Savings and purchasing power are destroyed over time. They encourage investment in hard assets like real estate and BTC to protect wealth. And so you get some waste, too. There is no free lunch.
The international monetary system isn't a deflationary system per se. It can accommodate a variety of monetary policies, including deflationary policies.
As far as bitcoin being a hard asset, this isn't entirely correct either. Not only does bitcoin not generate income, but it consumes income. You see, the bitcoin network is extremely expensive to maintain, and the owners of bitcoins are the ones who bear the cost. Either they pay with fees -unlikely-, or they'll pay by losing value in their investment -most likely. There's no way around it.
> At this point BTC is, functionally, just an alternative asset that hedges against inflation
You are completely ignorant. I'm not saying that in a mean way, I mean it in the purest sense possible: You have no idea what you are talking about.
According to the graph below, BTC goes up when inflation goes down. That is the opposite of a hedge! It proves that Bitcoin is not valuable due to "not having sound monetary systems."
Bitcoin is obviously a speculative asset whose value goes up when inflation is low and people have money to spend on speculative assets. The fact that we use 2.3% of our nation's electricity on it is unjustifiable.
> According to the graph below, BTC goes up when inflation goes down. That is the opposite of a hedge! It proves that Bitcoin is not valuable due to "not having sound monetary systems."
Could you please refer me to a graph showing the relationship between BTC and inflation? Because inflation over the last 12 months is relatively low, at 3.4%, while BTC is very high, at $47,621. Then again, BTC hit a high of $65,000 back in November of 2021, when inflation rates were indeed high at 6.8%.
This seems to suggest a weak relationship at best between BTC and inflation rates.
It's like saying that employees only want one thing: to get their paycheck.