Lufthansa profits fall short of expectations, claims efficiency boost while firing workers to boost short term profits.
If you've ever had to deal with Lufthansa's customer service, you would not be surprised if sacking them and replacing them with AI agents noticeably improves customer service entirely by accident.
And I don't think much of AI agents.
You know Lufthansa is not an American company right?
With Luftwaffes famous anti-competitiveness, monopolistic designs, lack of customer service or even giving a shit, it's easy to mistake them for one.
I think that they're just trying to kill off the XBox brand at this point. Their product strategy is suicidal. For example, the XBox Series S is now almost 5 years old. This is the point in the product lifecycle, they should be discounting the product and getting it's replacement ready. Instead, they increased the price from $300 to $379 without making any hardware upgrades to the unit.
Who on earth would be willing to pay that much for a 5 year old gaming console? Nobody. Which explains why Costco and Target aren't selling them anymore.
They want to keep the brand, just get rid of the expensive hardware that doesn't pay for itself.
It's been the dream for a console generation to last 10 years, now it's a requirement as the hardware is sold at so much of a loss that you're not going to break even for years even when you're nickel and diming everyone for everything you can.
The problem with the loss leader strategy is that you have to make up that loss somewhere else, the bigger the loss the more you need to squeeze in other areas. Games get more expensive, subscriptions get more expensive, you require subscriptions for more and more features that used to be free. This leads to a situation where people get sick of being wrung out for money and just give up on the whole thing, which means you're not making back the loss you made by selling them the console to begin with.
Sony blinked by upping the price of their already old console to $700. Unlike Microsoft they cant subsidise their gaming division from more profitable divisions.
Computer hardware gets significantly faster every few years, so a 5 yr old console is going to start showing it's age... when you need it to sell for 10 years to make money you're going to have serious problems. I've long said that the "PC wannabe" consoles Sony and Microsoft make wouldn't last, they just cant compete with PCs and don't have the cheap, casual fun USP of a normal console. Also PC's have entered the console domain with the Steam Deck and unlike MS and Sony, the hardware is not being subsidised, so now the PC Wannabe consoles have to compete with an actual PC console.
Wasn't brexit sold on the basis that it would mean less brown people?
I certainly hope not.
That's a countable noun so it should have been "fewer" brown people.
Brexit was also a populist movement: reduce trade, visas, and immigration. Spain is actually having a mini-boom thanks to increased immigration.
Those who don't learn from history vote Donald Trump.
The UK is having more immigration than ever (the overwhelming majority is regular immigration, along the lines of 99%), but we're not getting the boom because we made it more difficult to sell stuff to closest ally and largest trading partner. The magical trade deals that Brexiteers promised never came... I wonder who could ever have predicted that.
Sadly for the UK, those who aren't learning from Donald Trump are planning to vote for Nigel Farage... A man who spends most of his time in other countries bad mouthing the UK.
We hadn't actually left in 2016.
I'm not really sure how I'm meant to read, oh what was it, I can't be arsed to look it up. Something like "we give the EU 350 million a week, we could spend it on the NHS".
I do remember at the time it was weaselly, though the figure of 350 million was an outright lie. The entire bus was designed to be deliberately misleading, how am I supposed to interpret it?
Brexiteers will simultaneously argue that the bus never said "£350 million per week for the NHS" and that the NHS actually got hundreds of millions... With perfectly straight faces (well they have to be pretty straight to talk out of both sides of their mouths).
The big lie on the big red lying bus was that their £350m figure did not subtract the rebate we got from the EU, of the approx £17b we sent to the EU, we received back approx £5b in rebates and subsidies, including the £4b discount on the dues to begin with, so we never actually paid that and we got back another 1-2b in subsidies. Little wonder they're not missing us. All in all we did rather well in the EU and are doing terribly out of it.
The entire Brexit campaign was based on lies... It worked for them so they've kept on lying.
"Brought to you by the lottery. It's a sort of tax on people who weren't too good at math." -- Prairie Home Companion
The thing is, as you get older you realise that the lottery isn't a tax on people who can't do maths.
It's actually a tax on hope.
LOL yes, this certainly mean that UX is now "dead".
Was it ever even alive?
If anything is purely Jobswerthian, an expression of underwater basket weaving, it had to be UX. Something invented so someone can justify getting a pay cheque without actually having any skills or qualifications.
The reason they're doing this is that too many cities have made it effectively impossible to remove a tenant for non-payment of rent or require a lengthy court process.
Your too many is my not enough. Of course it should require a lengthy court process to remove a person from their housing.
And the reason it's done is because too many landlords (landleeches) were abusing the process and kicking people out when they thought they could get more money.
It's a stupid waste now and it should say where it is -- but why did NY get a shuttle and not Houston in the first place?
Well now that the hard work and cost of restoring and preserving the space shuttle has been done by someone else, they want the end product moved to Texas until more work has to be done on it.
A trip to the Udvar-Hazy museum out near Dulles airport is a must if you're in the DC area. Well worth the drive out there.
New-gen little twin is great news for them..
But, they've wasted two opportunities:
1. They got the DC9 Super 95 (or MD-95) when they bought Douglas. They sold it for a bit as the 717. This is a five-abreast plane, smaller than a 737. This would have been *ideal* for small fields like Charlotte and for short hops, like it was designed for. But nooooo, to "save" the 737 they canned this one. That let Bombardier eat that market alive.
2. When they were designing the 787 they shoud've done the same trick they did with the 757 / 767 - one central section, one flight deck, same engines on both. Fly one, you can fly the other. This would've avoided the pains of growing old the 737 is showing.
But, since morons run Boeing, they did everything wrong.
18 months from paper to flying prototype for the 747. Almost 20 years for the 787. Something's very wrong.
2 is pretty much what Airbus have done. Put as much commonality between models as they can, of course you can't simply "scale up" a A320 to an A350 because they're different aircraft with different characteristics but you can make the interfaces and procedures similar so that re-training is easier and faster. I'd be surprised if Boeing hasn't done something similar in the past.
A very, very long lead time for new aircraft designs is a normal thing. They aren't as simple as they were in the 60s and safety requirements are much more stringent.
Boeing is screwed in the short term but has a very good opportunity for the long term. There's been a bit of a shift with the way passenger aircraft are being used. The A320/737 families used to be for short haul routes, feeding people from regional airports into hubs, then larger jets (767/A320) would move people between hubs. Now the A320s and B737s are moving people between hubs. They've steadily gotten larger and increased range so that in many cases they're no longer suitable or economical to run shorter routes with less demand. Airbus saw this and bought the Bombardier C-Series program which became the A220 family. Both the A220 and A320 families are selling faster than Airbus can build them, which isn't the case for the B737 MAX, customers are only buying those because they literally cant get an Airbus.
Much like the Ford Focus, it got lardier and lardier with each iteration until the point where it wasn't a small car any more. The same happened with narrowbody jets, the B737-100 had a maximum capacity of 115, the MAX8 has a capacity of 210 and that's not even the largest model (the MAX10 isn't certified yet) which has a seating capacity of 230 which puts it into what the 757 or A330-200 carry. So much like Ford introducing the Fiesta as a new small hatch, Airbus introduced the A220 as the new regional airliner because the A320 was getting too big. As a result of this, there is no demand for the smaller widebodies like the A330-200 or 767.
So Boeing has a huge opportunity to create two new airliners. A 100-150 seat regional airliner to compete with the A220 and a 150-230 seat to replace the 737 and compete with the A320. Both jets can share a lot of components even though they'll have different engines. I'll bet that they'll still fuck it up though.
Person 1: "The earth is flat"
Person 2: "That's kind of a stupid take."
Person 1: "Whenever I see anyone responding with a personal attack (even an indirect one), I see a tacit acknowledgement that the point cannot be questioned on its merits."
Some assertions are so dumb, they require no refutations, because only dumb people believe them. Honestly, the reason the internet has gone to shit is because the cost to post a stupid thing is vastly lower than the post to thoroughly demonstrate why it's a stupid thing.
The problem with ignorant people is that they think their ignorance is worth the same as knowledge.
The point of my comment was that those old money elites are painfully aware that they need to maintain the illusion and they go out of their way, as much as they do anything, to make sure the illusion doesn't break.
The public is kind of clueless because they are inundated with propaganda and poorly educated. Mix in a little socioeconomic problems and maybe some lead in your drinking water or some booze when you're in the oven so to speak and yeah you're in for a rough times
Simply put, none of us are as dumb as all of us.
Recent events have show just how easily led (or misled may be more accurate) the great masses of the people are.
Because your side are huge fans of Hitler but not so much of Stalin.
Personally I'm not a fan of either man but you do you I guess.
Hitler and Stalin got along famously, for a while... Sucked to be Polish in that while though.
Both Hitler and Stalin are important lessons for the followers of extremists... They don't care about you and they will always betray you, it's just a question of when.
Rommel after years of dedicated service was executed to satisfy Hitler's paranoia... so you really think Trump cares about you, a nobody in Bumfuck, Nebroma. Hell, the farmers are already being betrayed. Just a question of when.
Have people forgotten how downloading works?
Find the song you like and, instead of streaming it multiple times, you download it and never see adverts or pauses asking if you're still watching.
Really, it is that simple.
People would rather do the right thing. Piracy became a thing because other methods were so abusive that doing the right thing felt wrong. Streaming came along and offered us a way to do the Right Thing (TM) without the egregious abuse. Of course this was never going to last but it took the media cartels this long to figure out how to be abusive via streaming. It really didn't fit into their business models and they were hoping it would just go away.
Now they've adapted their abuse to streaming, people are going to go back to piracy because it feels more right than doing the Right Thing (TM). Yarrr.
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened. -- Winston Churchill
