Being interested in intellectual history, I’m always trying to figure out: was DOGE the culmination of James Burnham’s critique of managerial technocracy? Sam Francis’s populist-nationalist antiglobalism? Is there some Paul Gottfried in there? Spengler? Schmitt? Anybody? What is the lineage here?
And then you realize - nothing. It was like four 22 year olds right-clicking and selecting “delete” a bunch of times. “lol who needs weather forecasters” is about as far as they got.
At least if there were an ideological project it’d be an ethos, Dude.
The ethos, if anything, was that the federal government's financial situation could be improved by cutting payroll (amongst other things). Unlike in most companies, however, payroll is not close to the largest of the government's expenses.
This is where the DOGE people just have no idea what they're doing. They could fire 100% of the staff at HHS and it would reduce the budget of HHS by 1%.
Why does the government need meteorologists, you can just go to the weather channel. This is the level of thought that went into this, right from the top with musk and trump.
Isn't it just that (a) they see the types of people who are likeliest to be employed by the federal government as enemies and want to hurt them, (b) they see the duties carried out by these federal workers as worthless and want to destroy their offices? Is that not an ideology?
Legends speak of a distant past when people had sex and were chill and stuff. I think it was five or ten years ago. I’d ask ChatGPT, but I don’t want the country to run out of groundwater, and I’m too busy watching TikTok.
I assume you're joking about the groundwater thing, but it actually probably takes a similar amount of water to watch a few minutes of video as to run an AI system - it's just that it was decades before people thought to attack online video on the energy and water grounds, while the anti-AI people came up with it in a paper whose title contains an emoji.
My most boomer thing is being super annoyed when checking out at the grocery and the kids checking me out act wildly unprofessionally. (I did my time in the aughts)
I wouldn't really say he's either. He comes off as a classic salesman.
I was referring more to my own experience. I'm....fine at my job, but I'm friendly and can talk to most people, so I've excelled in the actual workplace.
Interestingly if you sort by race almost all their personality measures consistently put Asians at the bottom (lower conscientiousness, openness, agreeableness, and extroversion, and higher neuroticism) and blacks at the top (vice versa). What are they, Harvard? lol…
Looks like conscientiousness has declined by 1.25 points from 36.48 to 35.13 on a scale of 9-45, which is still bad but a much smaller effect than the original graphs suggest, and notably people are still a lot closer to the top end of the scale.
Also interestingly if you look at the graphs in the raw data it looks like most of the decline in good stuff happened in the late 2010s before COVID and actually leveled out and started declining slower after COVID.
I would just again like to make the case that as a Blue City Dem, the organized labor cartel is a significant force making my life worse, and we’re going to have to confront this tricky electoral opponent to abundance sooner or later: https://www.understandingai.org/p/unions-want-to-ban-driverless-taxiswill
——
“When a Waymo representative mentioned the Waymo Driver—the company’s name for its self-driving software, Mejia objected. “Waymo is not a driver. Waymo is a robot,” she said. Mejia considered it “very triggering” for Waymo to use the term “driver” to describe a technology rather than a person.
…
The next day, Murphy announced legislation requiring that a “human safety operator is physically present” in all autonomous vehicles—effectively a ban on driverless vehicles. Given the near-unanimous hostility Waymo faced at the hearing, I wouldn’t be surprised if Murphy’s proposal became law in Boston.
And while Boston seems likely to be the first Democratic-leaning jurisdiction to pass legislation like this, it may not be the last. A number of other Democratic-leaning states are considering proposals to restrict or ban the deployment of driverless vehicles.
If these ideas become law, we could wind up in a future where driverless cars are widely deployed in red states and illegal or heavily restricted in many blue states. Not only would this be inconvenient for blue state passengers and bad for blue state economies, it would be a powerful symbol of how dysfunctional—even reactionary—blue state governance has become.
If this isn’t the future Democrats want, they’re going to have to say no to the Teamsters.”
———
Luckily, there is also a bill in the statehouse, H.3634 / S.2379, that would pre-empt this nonsense statewide. Hopefully sanity prevails any it passes!
I was never a big union guy but tolerate them in the coalition. I wish Democrats could throw them under the bus, but teachers are a very reliable voting block.
Fair enough, and the Teamsters should be absolutely the last people Democrats should listen to. But presumably their concerns have more to do with trucking than taxis.
No, that's part of the article's point -- the Teamsters aren't just specifically attacking driverless trucking, but also driverless vehicles in general:
"The Teamsters-backed bill [in Massachusetts], S.2393, is less than a page long and simply requires that all self-driving vehicles have a safety driver—effectively banning driverless technology."
But I think they're only doing it because they think that's the seemingly-intellectually-consistent way to ensure that there are no driverless trucks. Taxis are just collateral damage for them.
I would hope, but the Teamsters have long been active in the fights over ride share. The ride share drivers in Boston are also unionizing (under the SEIU and Machinists, however).
Any time I think about the Texas floods I feel ill at the thought in particular of all those teenagers at camp getting washed away. For whatever reason, that's a natural disaster that just depresses me viscerally. The idea that it could have been prevented makes me sick, and part of me hopes that we can prove it was preventable to push back against ideologies like DOGE, and part of me hopes it was just random freak luck with no villains.
I read up as best I could a few weeks ago, and I believe that the warning systems and procedures were actually activated and deployed as they should, that NOAA did in fact issue the correct warnings will in advance, and that most of the blame lies with people ignoring warnings on their phones or not being in range of warning systems.
I'll be curious to see how much every day people get annoyed with less accurate forecasts. On the one hand, weather is something that people care about more than some of the high level takesters think; on the other hand, people have long grumbled about weather not being completely accurate, and may just build in this grumpiness to whatever comes next.
I agree with you about the substantially increased accuracy of weather forecasts over the decades, but most people whom I've ever have occasion to speak with about weather forecasting overwhelmingly act as though there's been zero improvement in accuracy.
As a landscape contractor doing lots of construction, weather forecasts have been quite important (pouring concrete, deliveries, whether to have your workers bother to drive to the job site, etc.). Over the last 40 years they've definitely been on a more accurate upward trend, especially the 7-10 day outlook which I find amazing. Trump wanted to gut NOAA and all climatological departments because of the politics of climate change, just continuing the divisive ping pong insanity of sequential administrations undoing the policies of the last one. Goddamn where's a JFK or a Truman or Eisenhower with some fucking guts to have some sober leadership?
Worth noting that it isn't just Trump. I don't know if I'd say there's a consensus in the GOP around gutting NOAA, but the majority of the most influential Republican thought leaders support it. Like the Heritage folks, which is why it was discussed in Project 2025.
I don't think most people will notice. People just grumble about the weather constantly, the same way they grumble about traffic constantly. When I moved from Los Angeles to College Station, TX a decade ago, I noticed that there was no less complaining about the traffic and no more complaining about the weather, despite the extremely noticeable differences between the two places on both fronts.
Farmers and frequent fliers might be the most upset about less accurate weather forecasting. But that won't be enough move the political needle. There are aren't that many farmers and the median American hasn't flown in the past year.
I don't think it will either but it could have minor localized impacts in places that survive on the outdoor economy. Those places are quite blue already though
People will notice the degradation. It might not affect their votes directly. But it will contribute to a sense of things getting worse. The build up of many similar small degradations might be enough to affect their votes.
In general, people aren't going to notice (at least not in any specific way) *most* of the bad outcomes that will be generated by the GOP's gutting of so many government offices. On the other hand, people will sort of subconsciously notice if life is getting worse and society doesn't seem to be functioning as well as it used to, even if they can't consciously attribute it to bad weather forecasts or what not.
Hardly unique but I was struck by the subtle NIMBY propagandizing in this news story here in Australia in the ABC (the public news, comparable to NPR or BBC).
"Unley's historic cottages could be lost to make way for Adelaide's newest high rise"
Notice the framing about "historic cottages" vs "high rise". It could have led with "9 millionaires's homes[1] to be cleared to build 254 homes for non-millionaires, including 15% reserved for 'affordable housing'".
All while bleating about the housing crisis being driven by lip service and hypocrisy (in others, not their own editorial choices).
[1] I can't immediately find estimated values for the properties being cleared but one across the street sold for $2.6 million in 2021, just to give an idea of real estate prices in the area
I know that off topic discussion will still be part of these threads, but I'll feel a little guilty quickly rattling off whatever crossed my mind through the day with Halina delivering some high quality writing in the article body.
Touché. In my defense: 1) Ben always had the "byline" on the daily thread, so I didn't necessarily expect it to have the usual meaning, 2) A short piece per day is a lot for one person, so I wasn't sure if that was really the case. SB has prolific writers!
Five bonus mini-posts a week? Off to a good start with the new hires (at SB)!
I think there's a bit of a generational turnover thing where lots of us grew up treating meteorology as a bit of a joke-butt, that the forecast wasn't much better than oracular pronouncements. It's an important plot device in many movies, for example. But over time, like most things, weather forecasting actually got quite good! So I guess this, too, is part of the nostalgic RETVRN to the 1950s. (Admittedly, the weather *was* better back then...)
So...airlines finally became profitable by making us all pay a little more in retail prices via increased credit card use, and churn that back into tokenized mile programs. About what I expected once it's laid out to me in that manner...
Yes, your retweet* of this is how I saw this, and I agree that they are very much related. It just seems absurd to me that we have to gain airline profitability in this roundabout matter.
"This is fascinating but I don't really understand the logic of splitting the accounting out this way, it's not like the value of the loyalty program is unrelated to the existence of the airline — people want Delta miles because Delta has planes that will take you places."
No. But the future CC cashflows are (or should be) discounted at a lower risk premium. They're all just now helping the investors model off actuals vs. estimates.
Even more so because historically airlines trade at book value and the stable CC cash lows are miss priced. This change in disclosures and the associated change in investor narrative has been the major driver of the UA multiple expansion (for example).
The mileage programs of the major airlines were worth $20-25 billion at a time when the airlines themselves had market cap of $6 or $10 billion, suggesting something very similar to what that chart shows. The ordinary cash business of the airline is a loss leader for the ability to sell seats to credit card companies. Just like Facebook loses money on serving news feeds to readers, but makes it up by selling ads to advertisers on top of that.
Obviously you can't separate the real revenue stream from the loss leaders in these cases, but there's something meaningful in this division.
EDIT: Re-watching the video, I see that he's pointing out one big part of it is that airline points are non-taxed benefits that corporations are able to give to their employees by sending them on work travel.
It's more than that (and I have pretty good access to this story). They also raised their CC fees and annual fee for lounge access which drops directly to net margin. They've unlocked a ton of net margin by charging for class upgrades vs. giving them away based on status (i.e., nearly all 1st class seat is now sold through kindof auction process). They've also all gotten way leaner (i.e., it's really hard to net new headcount approved at any of these places).
I got an email from Peacock telling me they were increasing their prices, which is how I found out I still had a Peacock subscription, which I promptly cancelled. Great job, guys.
Should yimbys continue to use the word affordability when federal deficits/tax policies are fueling inequality? I think affordable for W2 employees, especially renters, has passed in big cities and is set to get worse. The potential for backlash/missed expectations is large.
I don't think "affordable" is usually a YIMBY word - it's instead a keyword for a certain kind of legally mandated subsidized housing.
I think it's better to take the Obamacare tack of talking about "bending the cost curve" and maybe even starting to get costs down. Though you have to be careful about how you say it, because newspapers always seem to treat decreasing housing prices as a per se bad thing, because so many people have so much of their wealth tied up in the cost of the house they (partially) own.
When I graduated college in 1985 I was employed by Martin Marietta on the Space Shuttle External Tank Project. We had over 4,000 employees. In my eight years there I became disgusted with the inefficiency and waste in that government program, and I used to tell people that you could get a random person to walk the halls firing half the people and there would be no change in the production.
Anyone who tells you those small DOGE cuts are affecting anything but the budget is lying to you.
Being interested in intellectual history, I’m always trying to figure out: was DOGE the culmination of James Burnham’s critique of managerial technocracy? Sam Francis’s populist-nationalist antiglobalism? Is there some Paul Gottfried in there? Spengler? Schmitt? Anybody? What is the lineage here?
And then you realize - nothing. It was like four 22 year olds right-clicking and selecting “delete” a bunch of times. “lol who needs weather forecasters” is about as far as they got.
At least if there were an ideological project it’d be an ethos, Dude.
The ethos, if anything, was that the federal government's financial situation could be improved by cutting payroll (amongst other things). Unlike in most companies, however, payroll is not close to the largest of the government's expenses.
This is where the DOGE people just have no idea what they're doing. They could fire 100% of the staff at HHS and it would reduce the budget of HHS by 1%.
Exactly.
Why does the government need meteorologists, you can just go to the weather channel. This is the level of thought that went into this, right from the top with musk and trump.
Isn't it just that (a) they see the types of people who are likeliest to be employed by the federal government as enemies and want to hurt them, (b) they see the duties carried out by these federal workers as worthless and want to destroy their offices? Is that not an ideology?
Again, USAID deletion was not a thing, even in Project 2025, other than typical waste and abuse.
It happened because Elon Musk and people like him saw some racist memes.
https://x.com/DKThomp/status/1953797071275765802
Young Americans are becoming less agreeable, less conscientious, and more neurotic. Yay........
Legends speak of a distant past when people had sex and were chill and stuff. I think it was five or ten years ago. I’d ask ChatGPT, but I don’t want the country to run out of groundwater, and I’m too busy watching TikTok.
I assume you're joking about the groundwater thing, but it actually probably takes a similar amount of water to watch a few minutes of video as to run an AI system - it's just that it was decades before people thought to attack online video on the energy and water grounds, while the anti-AI people came up with it in a paper whose title contains an emoji.
https://s10251.pcdn.co/pdf/2021-bender-parrots.pdf
There's something to this criticism though when facebook/meta is talking about building a data center that's literally the size of Manhattan
My most boomer thing is being super annoyed when checking out at the grocery and the kids checking me out act wildly unprofessionally. (I did my time in the aughts)
My millennial thing is that now that I have a small dog, I get mad at people for driving too fast in my neighborhood.
Being gregarious and conscientious in the tech industry in 2025 is a superpower.
Is that why people still trust Sam Altman?
I wouldn't really say he's either. He comes off as a classic salesman.
I was referring more to my own experience. I'm....fine at my job, but I'm friendly and can talk to most people, so I've excelled in the actual workplace.
Raw data is interesting: https://uasvis.usc.edu/corevisualization.php.
Interestingly if you sort by race almost all their personality measures consistently put Asians at the bottom (lower conscientiousness, openness, agreeableness, and extroversion, and higher neuroticism) and blacks at the top (vice versa). What are they, Harvard? lol…
"Values are expressed as percentiles of the full population distribution as it stood in in 2014" is a weird y-axis
Yeah here’s the raw data: https://uasvis.usc.edu/corevisualization.php
Looks like conscientiousness has declined by 1.25 points from 36.48 to 35.13 on a scale of 9-45, which is still bad but a much smaller effect than the original graphs suggest, and notably people are still a lot closer to the top end of the scale.
Also interestingly if you look at the graphs in the raw data it looks like most of the decline in good stuff happened in the late 2010s before COVID and actually leveled out and started declining slower after COVID.
I would just again like to make the case that as a Blue City Dem, the organized labor cartel is a significant force making my life worse, and we’re going to have to confront this tricky electoral opponent to abundance sooner or later: https://www.understandingai.org/p/unions-want-to-ban-driverless-taxiswill
——
“When a Waymo representative mentioned the Waymo Driver—the company’s name for its self-driving software, Mejia objected. “Waymo is not a driver. Waymo is a robot,” she said. Mejia considered it “very triggering” for Waymo to use the term “driver” to describe a technology rather than a person.
…
The next day, Murphy announced legislation requiring that a “human safety operator is physically present” in all autonomous vehicles—effectively a ban on driverless vehicles. Given the near-unanimous hostility Waymo faced at the hearing, I wouldn’t be surprised if Murphy’s proposal became law in Boston.
And while Boston seems likely to be the first Democratic-leaning jurisdiction to pass legislation like this, it may not be the last. A number of other Democratic-leaning states are considering proposals to restrict or ban the deployment of driverless vehicles.
If these ideas become law, we could wind up in a future where driverless cars are widely deployed in red states and illegal or heavily restricted in many blue states. Not only would this be inconvenient for blue state passengers and bad for blue state economies, it would be a powerful symbol of how dysfunctional—even reactionary—blue state governance has become.
If this isn’t the future Democrats want, they’re going to have to say no to the Teamsters.”
———
Luckily, there is also a bill in the statehouse, H.3634 / S.2379, that would pre-empt this nonsense statewide. Hopefully sanity prevails any it passes!
I was never a big union guy but tolerate them in the coalition. I wish Democrats could throw them under the bus, but teachers are a very reliable voting block.
Some unions are better/worse than others.
Not obvious to me what any of this has to do with organized labor.
In the underlying Substack article, there are several instances referenced of the Teamsters supporting anti-driverless vehicle legislation.
Fair enough, and the Teamsters should be absolutely the last people Democrats should listen to. But presumably their concerns have more to do with trucking than taxis.
No, that's part of the article's point -- the Teamsters aren't just specifically attacking driverless trucking, but also driverless vehicles in general:
"The Teamsters-backed bill [in Massachusetts], S.2393, is less than a page long and simply requires that all self-driving vehicles have a safety driver—effectively banning driverless technology."
But I think they're only doing it because they think that's the seemingly-intellectually-consistent way to ensure that there are no driverless trucks. Taxis are just collateral damage for them.
reducing investment in all driverless vehicles is probably in their interests
I would hope, but the Teamsters have long been active in the fights over ride share. The ride share drivers in Boston are also unionizing (under the SEIU and Machinists, however).
I suspect they’ll try and get a cut somehow.
It's not just taxis though right?
It would also ban personal use i assume.
Any time I think about the Texas floods I feel ill at the thought in particular of all those teenagers at camp getting washed away. For whatever reason, that's a natural disaster that just depresses me viscerally. The idea that it could have been prevented makes me sick, and part of me hopes that we can prove it was preventable to push back against ideologies like DOGE, and part of me hopes it was just random freak luck with no villains.
I read up as best I could a few weeks ago, and I believe that the warning systems and procedures were actually activated and deployed as they should, that NOAA did in fact issue the correct warnings will in advance, and that most of the blame lies with people ignoring warnings on their phones or not being in range of warning systems.
I welcome correction if this is not the case.
This is my understanding as well
Air gets colder
Days get shorter
Tune on in to that NOAA radio
-Clutch
“… will be sharing a short piece with readers on weekday evenings.….”
Whoa, a double-dip, two-scoop serving of content on weekdays?
More helado from Halina!
(Reminds me of the old days of hand-cranking ice-cream that was chilled by a Saline solution.)
Fond memories of doing that as a kid.
It made the best ice cream
I'll be curious to see how much every day people get annoyed with less accurate forecasts. On the one hand, weather is something that people care about more than some of the high level takesters think; on the other hand, people have long grumbled about weather not being completely accurate, and may just build in this grumpiness to whatever comes next.
Yes but that classic complaint long ago stopped being true. I’ve certainly noticed how accurate forecasts have become compared to when I was a kid.
True, but plenty of people remember things that are no longer true.
I agree with you about the substantially increased accuracy of weather forecasts over the decades, but most people whom I've ever have occasion to speak with about weather forecasting overwhelmingly act as though there's been zero improvement in accuracy.
Yeah. It’s still a popular joke, those weather forecasts, amirite?? Like, update your priors, people.
*this comment fully SB jargon compliant*
As a landscape contractor doing lots of construction, weather forecasts have been quite important (pouring concrete, deliveries, whether to have your workers bother to drive to the job site, etc.). Over the last 40 years they've definitely been on a more accurate upward trend, especially the 7-10 day outlook which I find amazing. Trump wanted to gut NOAA and all climatological departments because of the politics of climate change, just continuing the divisive ping pong insanity of sequential administrations undoing the policies of the last one. Goddamn where's a JFK or a Truman or Eisenhower with some fucking guts to have some sober leadership?
Worth noting that it isn't just Trump. I don't know if I'd say there's a consensus in the GOP around gutting NOAA, but the majority of the most influential Republican thought leaders support it. Like the Heritage folks, which is why it was discussed in Project 2025.
I don't think most people will notice. People just grumble about the weather constantly, the same way they grumble about traffic constantly. When I moved from Los Angeles to College Station, TX a decade ago, I noticed that there was no less complaining about the traffic and no more complaining about the weather, despite the extremely noticeable differences between the two places on both fronts.
Farmers and frequent fliers might be the most upset about less accurate weather forecasting. But that won't be enough move the political needle. There are aren't that many farmers and the median American hasn't flown in the past year.
Skiiers/snowboarders, hikers, and many others care a lot about how much precipation, and what kind, is coming
Again, not enough affected people to make a political impact.
I don't think it will either but it could have minor localized impacts in places that survive on the outdoor economy. Those places are quite blue already though
Yup, skier here, and I’m a complete nut job with weather models in the winter
People will notice the degradation. It might not affect their votes directly. But it will contribute to a sense of things getting worse. The build up of many similar small degradations might be enough to affect their votes.
I'm not sure that the swing voters necessary to win elections will connect all those dots.
Weather forecasts can be life or death for boaters
In general, people aren't going to notice (at least not in any specific way) *most* of the bad outcomes that will be generated by the GOP's gutting of so many government offices. On the other hand, people will sort of subconsciously notice if life is getting worse and society doesn't seem to be functioning as well as it used to, even if they can't consciously attribute it to bad weather forecasts or what not.
Got nerd sniped for a solid five minutes figuring out what I would name my weather-themed substack. So many good puns…
NOAAPinion
Chance of Glowers, for a really grumpy weather substack
State incapacity illibertarianism?
Hardly unique but I was struck by the subtle NIMBY propagandizing in this news story here in Australia in the ABC (the public news, comparable to NPR or BBC).
"Unley's historic cottages could be lost to make way for Adelaide's newest high rise"
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/adelaide-breakfast/cottage-development/105615092
Notice the framing about "historic cottages" vs "high rise". It could have led with "9 millionaires's homes[1] to be cleared to build 254 homes for non-millionaires, including 15% reserved for 'affordable housing'".
All while bleating about the housing crisis being driven by lip service and hypocrisy (in others, not their own editorial choices).
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-10/housing-crisis-hypocrisy-lip-service/104915610
[1] I can't immediately find estimated values for the properties being cleared but one across the street sold for $2.6 million in 2021, just to give an idea of real estate prices in the area
So, what does Trump want to do that's too corrupt even for Billy Long?
Wow. I'm first? I'm not sure what to say!
I'll start with the question I had when I clicked: Are these original pieces by Halina (also, welcome!)? If not, some attribution would be useful.
Hi! Yes, these are original pieces unless otherwise noted.
Welcome! If this is the new evening format, it's really great!
I know that off topic discussion will still be part of these threads, but I'll feel a little guilty quickly rattling off whatever crossed my mind through the day with Halina delivering some high quality writing in the article body.
Rattle away! I promise I won't take offense.
Ambitious but very cool! Look forward to seeing more!
That's what the byline is for!
Touché. In my defense: 1) Ben always had the "byline" on the daily thread, so I didn't necessarily expect it to have the usual meaning, 2) A short piece per day is a lot for one person, so I wasn't sure if that was really the case. SB has prolific writers!
Five bonus mini-posts a week? Off to a good start with the new hires (at SB)!
I think there's a bit of a generational turnover thing where lots of us grew up treating meteorology as a bit of a joke-butt, that the forecast wasn't much better than oracular pronouncements. It's an important plot device in many movies, for example. But over time, like most things, weather forecasting actually got quite good! So I guess this, too, is part of the nostalgic RETVRN to the 1950s. (Admittedly, the weather *was* better back then...)
https://x.com/benmarrow/status/1953485931970765022
So...airlines finally became profitable by making us all pay a little more in retail prices via increased credit card use, and churn that back into tokenized mile programs. About what I expected once it's laid out to me in that manner...
I don't totally understand this accounting
Yes, your retweet* of this is how I saw this, and I agree that they are very much related. It just seems absurd to me that we have to gain airline profitability in this roundabout matter.
*For those who didn't see what Matt's response was: https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1953805296595259823
"This is fascinating but I don't really understand the logic of splitting the accounting out this way, it's not like the value of the loyalty program is unrelated to the existence of the airline — people want Delta miles because Delta has planes that will take you places."
Does revenue from credit cards fees/transactions have a different tax treatment than revenue from sales?
No. But the future CC cashflows are (or should be) discounted at a lower risk premium. They're all just now helping the investors model off actuals vs. estimates.
Even though the CC cashflows are directly linked to the fact that airlines fly planes?
Even more so because historically airlines trade at book value and the stable CC cash lows are miss priced. This change in disclosures and the associated change in investor narrative has been the major driver of the UA multiple expansion (for example).
Wendover had a good video about this a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggUduBmvQ_4
The mileage programs of the major airlines were worth $20-25 billion at a time when the airlines themselves had market cap of $6 or $10 billion, suggesting something very similar to what that chart shows. The ordinary cash business of the airline is a loss leader for the ability to sell seats to credit card companies. Just like Facebook loses money on serving news feeds to readers, but makes it up by selling ads to advertisers on top of that.
Obviously you can't separate the real revenue stream from the loss leaders in these cases, but there's something meaningful in this division.
EDIT: Re-watching the video, I see that he's pointing out one big part of it is that airline points are non-taxed benefits that corporations are able to give to their employees by sending them on work travel.
This is extremely new to me and rather worrisome. Low fares are convenient but running at an operating loss with respect to unit costs seems nuts.
They want investors to value their revenue streams based on the predictability of a financial services firm. United's P/E ratio is 9 vs. Visa's at 30.
It's more than that (and I have pretty good access to this story). They also raised their CC fees and annual fee for lounge access which drops directly to net margin. They've unlocked a ton of net margin by charging for class upgrades vs. giving them away based on status (i.e., nearly all 1st class seat is now sold through kindof auction process). They've also all gotten way leaner (i.e., it's really hard to net new headcount approved at any of these places).
Yes, I agree--I was making an observation on the foundation to how they're getting more than that.
I got an email from Peacock telling me they were increasing their prices, which is how I found out I still had a Peacock subscription, which I promptly cancelled. Great job, guys.
Should yimbys continue to use the word affordability when federal deficits/tax policies are fueling inequality? I think affordable for W2 employees, especially renters, has passed in big cities and is set to get worse. The potential for backlash/missed expectations is large.
I don't think "affordable" is usually a YIMBY word - it's instead a keyword for a certain kind of legally mandated subsidized housing.
I think it's better to take the Obamacare tack of talking about "bending the cost curve" and maybe even starting to get costs down. Though you have to be careful about how you say it, because newspapers always seem to treat decreasing housing prices as a per se bad thing, because so many people have so much of their wealth tied up in the cost of the house they (partially) own.
Even if it’s not used, it is the perception especially when cities tie house building to affordability.
When I graduated college in 1985 I was employed by Martin Marietta on the Space Shuttle External Tank Project. We had over 4,000 employees. In my eight years there I became disgusted with the inefficiency and waste in that government program, and I used to tell people that you could get a random person to walk the halls firing half the people and there would be no change in the production.
Anyone who tells you those small DOGE cuts are affecting anything but the budget is lying to you.