Tiny Cat Warriors

A rant about airline travel

What’s wrong about travel these days

I’ve been a fairly frequent flyer since I graduated from college in 1979.  While I’m making a conscious effort to travel less, I’m still consistently flying around 75K miles a year, down from a peak of around 100K per year from around 1994 until 2004 or so.  Mostly business on domestic flights, mostly vacation travel on non-US flights. 

It seemed to me that there have been really two “golden ages” of travel during my working life.  The first from around 1981 or so until sometime in the early 90s - deregulation had happened, but it was slow taking hold.  Most of my travel was employer reimbursed, so while prices hadn’t really fallen as low as they would later on, I didn’t notice it.  Airfares on major airlines for, say, a Seattle to Chicago flight would run about $600 or so roundtrip.  There wasn’t much a discount for booking early and likewise, there wasn’t much of a price penalty for booking last minute.  The flights I was on were rarely full - it was fairly common to see flights less than half full.  Admittedly not  money-making flight for the airline.  Airline security was next to nil, which meant that you could rush to the gate at the last minute, depending on your taste for risk.  While you couldn’t check in online (there was no “online” then), you usually got your tickets through a travel agent anyway, or direct from the airline (United had two offices in downtown Seattle, one at 4th and University and the other further south... maybe in the Dexter Horton building, I can’t recall exactly), so you already had in your hand what you needed to board the plane. 

Back then I checked luggage on virtually every flight I took.  The wait at the carousel wasn’t outlandish (at Oakland’s airport, it’s pretty common these days to wait an hour or more before your luggage pops out on the carousel), and, since “wheelies” hadn’t been invented, it was more of a hassle to haul a two-suiter (the preferred business luggage at the time) back to the gate.  I’m sure luggage monkeys stole from luggage back in those days, but you could actually lock your luggage back then and I never knew anyone who had their luggage riffled through.  Anyway, so I was traveling pretty light as I headed to the gate.

Pretty much you got a full meal on every flight, other than maybe a Seattle - Portland flight.  I definitely remember getting fed on Seattle - San Francisco flights on every airline. 

Airline mileage plans were just getting started & once you’d racked up a few miles, it was pretty easy to redeem them.  The major holidays were blacked out, but most other travel days weren’t.

And airlines hadn’t done any scientific work to determine exactly how close they could put the rows before inflicting permanent injury to passengers.  Some airlines had tighter seating than others, but I think the standard arrangement was what United now calls “economy plus”.  All in all, the flying experience in those days definitely didn’t suck. 

The second golden age (at least in my opinion) ran from a year or two before 9/11 to around 2004 or so.  Airfares had fallen (dramatically on milk run flights up and down the west coast).  And there were flights all the time - United and Alaska both ran flights between Seattle and San Francisco about every hour or hour and a half on weekdays, with the last flights leaving around 9 or 10 pm.  United and Southwest bragged about having flights between San Francisco and Los Angeles every 1/2 hour. 

Flights were more full than they’d been before, especially during the 1999 - 2000 period as the dot com bubble reached its peak.  There was so much interaction between tech companies in San Francisco and Seattle that sometimes the flights seemed like commuter flights.  But the flights were so frequent that the additional flexibility made up for flights that were 80% or more full.  And airfares were cheap cheap cheap.  It was pretty common to see flights between Seattle and San Francisco for $49 each way.  International flights were also wicked cheap if you planned at least a few weeks in advance.  I remember flying from San Francisco to Paris for a 5 day trip one time because I had a hole in my work schedule that week and I could get a $400 round trip fair that I could upgrade to business class with miles.  And by this time, I was self-employed, so I actually cared what the fares were.

That time was a heavenly period for mileage plans as well.  There were a lot more blackout days than before for tickets using just miles, but I rarely had trouble buying a cheap economy ticket and using miles to upgrade to first or business.  I was flying to Maui two or three times a year then and virtually always upgraded using miles.

By this time, the wait for checked baggage had started to get really bad, so I’d switched to exclusively doing carry on for domestic flights.  Wheelies were in use by then and I wore one out about every 18 months or so.  And by this time there were no more meals on short flights (SEA - SFO for example), but going 1 1/2 to 2 hours without eating isn’t going to kill anyone.

All in all, during this period, the convenience of having flights very frequently, the planes not being too full and tickets selling at rock bottom prices made this a pretty great period.

So, what’s wrong with airlines now?  Flight schedules have been greatly cut back - United seems to have traded in all their 737s on 757s and has cut the flights back hugely - there are only a few UAL flights to Seattle daily from San Francisco any more.  Fewer direct flights, even cross country any more, which means on United for example that you’ll pretty much have to go through Chicago or Denver to get anywhere.  Compounding the suckage is that United (and other airlines) have cut the scheduled layovers in those hubs down to nothing.  I’ve had the UAL web site try and schedule me for layovers as short as 30 minutes for cross country trips.  Combine that with a general < 50% on time performance and that pretty much means you’re going to have a longer layover, a really long layover since you’ll miss the scheduled connection.

Full fare airlines (United, American, Delta, etc) have dumbed down and cheaped out service to the point that they’re basically committing seppuku: if you try and give me the same service as Southwest (no meals, flights crammed full, tight seating, dirty planes, etc.) at 30% to 100% of the fare (or more), I’m going to choose Southwest.  I use to fly UAL pretty much exclusively, now I probably half the miles I fly in a year on Southwest.  The appeal of Southwest is that they promise little: the flight will be full, they won’t feed you, they’ll yell at you to hurry up and get on and off the plane and you stand a semi-reasonable chance of flying next to someone weighing 350 pounds who hasn’t showered in a week, BUT it’ll be cheap and it WILL be on time.  And Southwest delivers on that - which is why their customer satisfaction is consistently about the highest among any airline.  They give you exactly what they tell you you’re going to get. 

What does the future hold for the full fare airlines like United?  I really see them as being only international carriers within just a few years.  It’s the only area they can still compete in ..... because Southwest, Jet Blue, etc. haven’t tried that market yet.  UAL, British Airways, Lufthansa etc. may end up being business class & first class only carriers and then only on international routes if Southwest & Jet Blue try and step up to the international economy stage.  Which would be a big step up for Southwest since they’d be forced on those routes to abandon their beloved 737s and buy/lease bigger iron.

I’m looking forward to ratcheting my travel back to pretty much only international flights on vacation in the next few years - partly because business travel in general (aside from the airlines) is getting to be more of a PITA generally, but the dissatisfaction with cattlecar style domestic travel is no small part of why I want to make that change.  Oddly enough, that change will probably, just coincidentally, take place at just about the time I reach 1,000,000 lifetime miles on United.  C’est la vie. Or maybe: ça va.

Prius owner = sanctimonious prick

I've noticed this before, but it really got brought home yesterday when I had to drive roundtrip from Sonoma valley to SFO to catch a flight for a day trip to Denver.  The morning trip started at 3:30 am and the return trip I left the airport at around 8:30 pm. 

I'd read this article before about a study by Quality Planning Corp regarding how many tickets Prius owners get.  QPC found that Prius (and other hybrid) drivers, on average, drive about 25% more miles than non-hybrid drivers.  The interesting (to me) finding was the data on moving violations: "Looking at moving violations, Quality Planning found that Prius drivers get 0.38 violations per 100,000 miles driven, compared to an average of 0.23. Collision loss costs are also much higher for hybrids—with comprehensive coverage loss about 17 percent higher than average."  So, while accounting for 25% more driving, Prius owners accounted for 65% more moving violation citations.

All of which just supports what a lot of non-Prius drivers already know - the percentage of Prius drivers who are sanctimonious pricks is a lot higher than for drivers of other cars.  This all got brought home for me yesterday when I saw three different instances of a Prius driver driving not just like a jackass, but downright dangerously, the worst being the moron driving his Prius on the northbound connector from 19th Avenue to Doyle Drive & the Golden Gate Bridge who was weaving in and out of traffic at about 80 mph in heavy traffic where the speed limit is 45. 

Anyway, just so the Prius owners know: the rest of us think that, by and large, you're a bunch of self-righteous jackasses. 

Thomas Jefferson said:

"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them." - Thomas Jefferson

About those online medical records

Interesting article here about the uses government employees are making of a supposedly confidential police database of information. 

"Police from communities across the state have repeatedly tapped into the state's criminal records system to improperly access information on celebrities and "high-profile citizens," according to a scathing audit released yesterday that also branded the system as obsolete and flawed."

"The Criminal Offender Record Information system, with its massive databases of criminal records, driving histories, car ownership, and Social Security numbers, is intended to provide police and prosecutors with complete portraits of individuals who have been arrested or brought into the court system. Reports are available to other users such as landlords and some employers conducting background checks on prospective tenants and job seekers. Access is supposed to be restricted to authorized law enforcement users, who are specially trained.

"But the yearlong review by state Auditor A. Joseph DeNucci depicts a system repeatedly accessed by users "without any apparent work-related justification.""
 
"DeNucci's audit condemned the decades-old system as antiquated, highly vulnerable to mistakes, and easily accessed by unauthorized users. With terminals in many locations that allowed anyone to look up information, the system permitted law enforcement officials access without fear of being identified and detected."

In the rush to put everyone's medical records online in order to supposedly save money and make the US medical system hugely more efficient, the people pushing these changes are conveniently ignoring that government controlled databases as frequent subjects of abuse by government employees and their friends.

Great quote from Jim Cramer

Found this one while cleaning out my old e-mail archives - it's from 2006:

"Some businesses are so reprehensible, so impossibly exploitative that they simply must be bought. Okay, that may not sound like sage investment advice, but given the Bush administration's wanton embrace of corporate interests, investing in a portfolio of companies you couldn't stand to work for without having a camp-guard mentality, a collection of stocks so motley in morals on the face of it, might be a solid bet right now. In a country where the top 1% of households controls 57.5% of corporate wealth, if you aren't thinking about ways to profit from our squeezed middle class, if you are still stuck in the mindless chasm of politically correct investing, you could be leaving fortunes on the table."

Feds agree to back GM warranties

Jeez, I have a couple of problems with this:

1.    I own a GM car under the factory warranty.  Since the Feds basically equals me (and you and everyone else who pays taxes), doesn't this mean that I'm essentially self-insuring for warranty claims on the car?  That's totally not the deal I was expecting when I agreed to help GM out last year by buying a car made in the US.  Except it's even worse than that - I'm not just adding any old bureaucracy as a middle man, I'm adding the federal government as a middle man.  Great.  So I can expect my warranty claims to be handled as efficiently as, say, a problem with the Social Security Administration.  Perfect.  I probably should just set the car on fire before anything goes wrong that might mean having to deal with the Federal Warranty Administration, or whatever it's going to be called.

2.    Rather than have the taxpayers fund this, wouldn't it make more sense to have the UAW fund it?  That's where the money went when GM pissed it away.

3.    How long before some idiot in Congress (i.e., Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman, Barney Frank, etc.) gets the bright idea that the federal government doesn't have any business insuring warranty claims for either: a) expensive cars, or b) rich people?  Any group of 435 idiots that can pass (in 24 hours, with no debate) a 90% tax retroactively on a select group of citizens is completely capable of deciding to "means test" warranty coverage.  I can totally see Henry Waxman giving a mincing speech about why the government shouldn't provide coverage on Cadillacs.  Totally.

4.    Isn't it also easy to see that one or more idiots in Congress might decide that the money set aside to pay GM warranty claims would be better spent on studying diaper rash in the New Orleans 9th ward?  C'mon, you know something like that will happen.

5.    Are the shareholders of Ford looking like total dumbasses now - they ran their company such that it wouldn't need the anywhere near the bailout that GM needs.  So Ford will have to cover its own warranty cost on the cars it's selling.  How dumb is that on Ford's part? 

There's no way this ends well.

Hair of the dog

Tim Geithner's finally described his plan to deal with the bad assets held by banks.  My opinion is that it leaves a lot to be desired & is really a "hair of the dog that bit you" plan.  

What caused the problem: First and foremost, bad lending practices by banks, but then it was exacerbated by banks and other financial institutions not understanding risk, not pricing risk accordingly (because they were doing the investing largely with borrowed money that, even worse, was borrowed on a nonrecourse basis), and then carrying the assets on their balance sheets at values that were wholly unrealistic based on the relative risk.  It's worth remembering that the mark-to-market accounting that everyone is complaining about requires companies to mark to present value based on discounted cash flow in situations where there is not a fluid market - so a lot of the complaints by companies now are simply bitching that they don't want to mark the assets down.  No one is requiring them to mark to fire-sale pricing.

Geithner's plan injects substantial leverage into the purchases of the "toxic assets" of the banks, in some cases 20/1 leverage.  You can bet that hedge funds will be trying to leverage even the 5% in cash minimum they're required to put up, in all likelihood pushing the leverage up to 100/1 or more.  The loans from the FDIC to purchase the assets that will constitute the leverage will be, get this, nonrecourse.  If the point of the exercise is to try and get a real grasp of the value of the assets, will letting hedge fund investors buy the bad loans using taxpayers' money and less than 5% (probably much less) of their own money encourage bids on the toxic assets that are realistic?  Hell no.  The incentive for the hedgies will be to overpay for the assets since they'll keep the majority of the upside through profit participation and fees, while shifting virtually the entire downside to the US taxpayers.  

If one of the substantial causes of the problem to begin with was excessive leverage giving people an incentive to overpay for assets, how can creating a situation where there is excessive leverage giving people an incentive to overpay for assets be the solution?

Interesting question: why did Geithner (with many connections to various investment banks <cough>Goldman Sachs<cough>) create a system where investment banks (<cough>Goldman Sachs<cough>) are likely to be the primary beneficiaries at no risk to themselves?

Dow to Obama - you suck too

Well, the market's been open 30 minutes and is already down 165 points.  If one way to look at the Dow is that it's a daily voting process, Obama's losing today.  It could be that his speech last night consisted of an hour of no details, fuzzy concepts and about one straw man argument per minute.

Obama, Geithner, and that plague spot Axelrod have had 4 months to pull something together.  It's time to quit talking and DO something.  Obama - you wanted the job; now you've got it.  If you're not going to do anything, how about resigning?

Is it possible that Milberg could get more sleazy?

There's an editorial on the op/ed page of the Wall Street Journal today that's worth reading, if only because, if true, the implications about the US justice system are truly appalling.

Milberg's former managing partner is currently residing prison, convicted of felonies relating to an ongoing 30 year kickback scheme involving their class-action lawsuit mill.  The firm itself settled a federal indictment as to the same charges.  Now we find out that the firm agreed to pay the founding partner, Melvyn Weiss, a portion of future earnings and also that it would pay his legal fees related to the prosecution.  Even though he's in prison.  Weiss is no longer a lawyer, having forfeited his right to practice law.

This arrangement was approved, in July 2008, by a NY state supreme court judge named Herman Cahn.  The judge approved the payments, even though law firms are prohibited from sharing fees with nonlawyers.  In fact, the claim that Milberg was sharing fees with nonlawyers (via kickbacks) was the core of the government's case against Milberg to begin with.

Now it gets interesting:

"And now for the latest news: In December, Judge Cahn retired from the bench. Last week, the renamed Milberg LLP announced it had hired a "distinguished" new attorney: Herman Cahn. In its press release, the firm listed his most notable cases, though omitting any on which he'd ruled on its behalf.

To recap: A class-action firm's name partners are nailed in a 30-year fraud. Class-action firm rewards lead perpetrator with share of future earnings. State judge sanctions the earnings deal. Class-action firm hires state judge. We'll let our readers decide what they think of this "fact pattern," as a plaintiffs lawyer might put it."

The woman with the octuplets

More news has been coming out about the woman who had the octuplets last week.  Turns out she has six (6) other children, is unmarried, and lives with her parents in a three bedroom house.  Oh, and she took fertility treatments to get pregnant.  [Actually, at age 30, would she even have been a candidate normally for fertility treatments?  With six [6] other children, apparently getting pregnant has not been a problem for her in the past.]  And there'll be 14 children and 3 adults living in the three bedroom house.

There's just so much wrong with what she did that it's hard to know where to begin.  I'll just summarize it all by saying that if the children were cats, we'd be calling her a cat hoarder and the local animal control authorities would take the cats away from her.  Why should society be more careful about how a crazy cat lady hoarder takes care of her cats than about how many kids a crazy baby lady decides to have?

One additional scary thought - this woman is young enough to produce a few more litters have even more babies.