I'd be happy if airlines made seats non-reclinable since the few degrees you get is pretty much useless;
Yeah, most of the time I don't even recline my seat. And when I do, it's usually because the person in front has reclined theirs, putting the video screen too close to my face for comfort.
Anyhow, if you want a few extra inches of legroom and don't care about reclining seats, check in early and get the emergency exit row seats. Because they're an egress route they need a lot of space between the seats to allow passengers to file out quickly, and the seats can't recline. Airlines generally can't pre-book those because they have to see you in person to verify that you're able to open the emergency exit seat (about 40-50 lbs). A few of them have started policies where frequent fliers (who've been allowed to use those seats before) can pre-book them.
Judging by images like these, today's business class is pretty much what economy class used to be in the 70s.
Hoo boy. Do you have any idea how much more expensive flying was in the 1970s, before deregulation?
In 2011, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer (who worked with Senator Kennedy on airline deregulation in the 1970s) wrote:
"In 1974 the cheapest round-trip New York-Los Angeles flight (in inflation-adjusted dollars) that regulators would allow: $1,442. Today one can fly that same route for $268."
Of course that factoid cherry picked the 1974 fare to coincide with the Arab oil embargo. But current oil prices are actually higher in inflation-adjusted dollars, and a cheap ticket between LA and NY is still around $350.
Some argue that flying has become too cheap. I beg to disagree: flying in a humane manner has not become cheaper, it's just that you'd have to book business class nowadays.
Of course that's exactly what happened. Because back when the LGA-LAX ticket cost $1442, very few people flew. The fundamentals of weight on an airplane and fuel use means the more people you can squeeze on a plane, the cheaper it is (per seat) to operate. So when federal regulation fixed the lowest airline price at $1442 making it inaccessible to the vast majority of people, the planes were emptier and the airlines could get away with fewer seats.
Air travel is in the state it's currently in because passengers prioritized lower fares over seating space, and the airlines found a way to deliver upon passenger desires. If passengers had demanded lush, business-class seating as you suggest, then that's what airlines would have delivered. Most of the seats on airplanes would be business-class sized, and a LGA-LAX ticket would still be around $1442 (actually, probably higher since current real oil prices are higher than in 1974).
i.e. It's not that current seating is "inhumane", it's that your definition of "humane" differs from what the vast majority of people buying airline tickets consider to be acceptable. Many airlines have premium economy seats offering an extra 5-6 inches of legroom at a higher price. A few people are willing to pay for those, but not many. If more people were wiling to pay for those bigger seats, the airlines would put more of them in - unless you're a monopoly, you always make more money giving people what they want.
The fundamental problem with air travel is that it's too fast. People look at that tiny seat and figure they can deal with it for a few hours. If air travel were slower and you were stuck in that seat for a day or two, people would demand more room.
Me: Hi. I switched to Verizon, cancel my service
Comcast: Why do you want to cancel?
Yeah. Unfortunately that doesn't work if you're part of the huge chunk of the population whose only choices for Internet are a single cable company (hopefully not Comcast), 1.5 or 3.0 Mbps DSL, or wireless.
The idea of municipal governments granting cable monopolies was founded on good intentions. By holding out the carrot of a monopoly, they got the cable companies to agree to concessions like providing service to remote and poor areas which otherwise would've been tagged as uneconomical and ignored. But at this point I think we can all agree that the drawbacks of these monopolies far, far outweigh the benefits. They either need to be banned outright, or treated like the other government-granted monopolies - utilities whose rates and service are carefully monitored by a public utilities commission.
Merriam Webster
transitive verb
2: to put an end to scotched rumors of a military takeover>
Oxford
verb
1 [with object] Decisively put an end to: a spokesman has scotched the rumours
The problem is the way "Scotch" used in the headline, it can be either a verb or an adjective. This is compounded by "Court" also working as either a verb or an adjective. I was scratching my head for a minute trying to figure out why it was worth forging documents intended to court a review of an alcoholic drink.
because an enormous part of the problem is the percentage of our food today that is processed, and the percentage that contains vast amounts of sugar (and particularly high fructose corn syrup).
I realize this is a common tenet of anti-farm conglomerate arguments, and I am all against farm conglomerates. But this tidbit simply isn't true. HFCS is not mostly fructose as the name implies. The most common forms used in soft drinks and processed foods are 55% fructose, 42% glucose. Or 42% fructose, 53% glucose. Your body breaks down sucrose (e.g. natural cane sugar) into 50% fructose, 50% glucose. So for all intents and purposes they're the same thing once your body gets a hold of them.
It's just called "high fructose" because it has a larger percentage of fructose than normal corn syrup, which is mostly glucose.
And while we're on the topic, carbs are just lots of sugars linked together into a longer molecule. Heck, wood/cellulose is just lots of sugars linked together (in a form which is extremely difficult for animals to break down; ruminants do it by chewing it twice and digesting it 4 times, termites do it with the assistance of a special kind of bacteria in their gut). It is extremely difficult to avoid sugars in your diet even if you eat no simple or processed sugars. Bread is sugar. Rice is sugar. Noodles are sugar. Potatoes are sugar. So it's quite misleading to blame things on the "vast amounts of sugar" in processed foods. (Unless you're talking at the caloric level, and taking into account all forms of sugar like starches and carbohydrates.)
I suspect that's why the low-carb diet trumped the low-fat diet. Those on the low-carb diet were restricting their intake of sugar (in the form of carbs), while in the back of their minds they were conscious about avoiding too much fat. Those on the low-fat diet figured since they were avoiding fat, everything was ok so they piled on the carbs.
It will be decades before these vehicles can handle real life situations. You will need AI that can improvise as well as a human. Good luck with that.
I see that problem mostly being attacked from the opposite direction. With cars getting radar and proximity sensors, and being able to electronically communicate their intent with each other before actually moving, you reduce the need for the AI to improvise. If an autonomous car wants to pull in front of your car, the two car AIs will communicate it with each other and work out a plan to make it happen before changing lanes. No improvisation required. Sure you might get the stray deer hopping through traffic that requires a human to take control and improvise. But the vast majority of improvisation situations can be eliminated before they ever happen with better communication. That is after all the whole idea behind brake lights and turn signals - to allow you to communicate your intent to the drivers behind/beside you so they don't have to improvise in response to your sudden moves.
all taxes have to be included in prices
It's the government's fault that U.S. companies don't do that, not companies'. Most countries have a single unified tax structure. A store can set a price, and advertise that price inclusive of taxes nationwide.
The U.S. is an amalgam of tax-governing bodies. The States can set their own sales tax. The counties can set their own sales tax. The cities can set their own sales tax. Consequently, the sales tax rate differs, sometimes from city to city. A store sets a price and advertises that price + taxes, it's correct for one locale, incorrect everywhere else. The only way to advertise a "correct" price is without taxes. Not because the price varies or because they're trying to hide the final price from you, but because the tax rate varies.
There are currently close to 10,000 different sales tax rates in the U.S. With more states trying to impose sales tax on Internet purchases, it's actually becoming a barrier to entry for small businesses trying to start up Internet sales. The sales tax rates can change at any time if some local governing body decides to change it, so you have to either watch daily for new tax rate changes, or hire someone to do it for you (but you still have to pay if they make a mistake). Amazon tried to harmonize sales taxes in the U.S. because of this, but the States were more interested in casting it as "protecting brick and mortar stores from unfair Internet competition" than addressing the real problem.
The best solution (other than a harmonized sales tax) would be if the Federal government set up a website listing the ~10,000 different tax rates, and forced states and local governments to update their entry in the site before a sales tax rate was "official". Businesses could then just download all the different tax rates every night and be sure they're charging the correct sales tax.
and if you buy something you have all kinds of rights (two week period to send stuff back/cancel contracts
That's the case for nearly everything in the U.S. too. In fact most shops have 30-90 day return policies.
two year warranty on physical items and such) that cannot be taken away by ToSs.
Warranties are just insurance policies. Just because the law forces companies to provide them to everyone does not mean they're free. Their cost is rolled into the price of the item you're buying.
In general, insurance is not worth it (otherwise someone wouldn't be selling it to you). It makes sense to insure items whose prices are so high it'd be difficult for you to replace (e.g. cars, houses, maybe appliances depending on your income level). But for items costing a few hundreds of dollars or less, you actually save money by just replacing the things which break rather than taking out an insurance policy/requiring a warranty for them. This is why larger companies and organizations self-insure rather than buying insurance for things like mailed packages and fleet cars. You'll notice the more expensive items like large appliances and cars already come with multi-year warranties exceeding what's required by EU law. That's because being an insurance policy on something that's difficult for the buyer to afford to replace, it's additional profit for the manufacturer to provide the 5- or 10-year warranty and raise the price accordingly.
The one place warranties do help is setting a baseline for product durability. i.e. It weeds out products which are so shabbily made it'll break after a few months. The cost of providing warranty service is so high the manufacturer goes back and redesigns the product to be more durable. At least usually that's how it works. Sometimes it doesn't (e.g. hard drives, where manufacturers can refurbish enough drives returned under warranty to replace new drives which fail during their warranty period). But overall, very few products I've encountered are that shabbily made (in fact the only one I can think of was a portable DVD player made by a company which went bankrupt anyway a few months later, so I would've been out the warranty even if I'd bought it in the EU).
Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.