This isn't true as you can build an infinite sequence that never repeats. An example sequence in binary is (the number of 0s between each 1 increases by 1 every time)
Exactly. A number with the property that every sequence occurs is called a rich or disjunctive number - a number can be rich in s specific bases or rich for all bases we don't know whether pi is any if that. A number where every sequence occurs equally often (scaled to the length of the sequence) is called a normal number, which is an even stronger property.
While Pi is not proven to be a disjunctive number, nor the stronger condition of being normal, it is generally believed to be normal. That being said we don't have a proof of Pi being normal, nor disjunctive.
I am not familiar with how a proof of that would be constructed, as clearly numerical or computational measurements could never be conclusive.
My personal position is to abolish the minimum wage and update the tax scale with negative tax rates that support a reasonable quality of life at all income levels. The market will find its own balance for what a true minimum wage is in that environment (and not have weird perverse incentives like you state).
Yes, this is UBI. But phrased as a tax cut makes it politically viable (at least in the US).
One of the classic unintended consequences of social welfare is making someone at the bottom unwilling to work. We saw this during the pandemic when people in formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local restaurants?)
I'm curious to see an example scale that would continue to incentivize social behavior the whole way up the chain - avoiding the "oh I don't want to make $100 more dollars because I'm in a sweet spot now and bad things happen at $99."
You can certainly argue that many of the current disincentives are bugs in the bureaucracy. I'd like to see a proposal for the UBI tax scale you describe that doesn't have any bugs (that is, bumps in the distribution where people are afraid to reach for state C from state A, because the intermediary state B is worse than A).
> One of the classic unintended consequences of social welfare is making someone at the bottom unwilling to work. We saw this during the pandemic when people in formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local restaurants?)
I remember this, the cash assistance gave people back their time to focus on starting their own businesses, pursuing self-education, taking care of their kids, etc. It was fully apparent to me that these low-wage jobs effectively trapped people by sucking up all the time they had for self-improvement.
Very much agreed that there should be no cliffs. Every dollar earned should at minimum increase your usable cash flow by at least X amount no matter where you are in the income distribution and other tax incentive phase space
> We saw this during the pandemic when people in formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local restaurants?)
Unwilling to work or temporarily not desperate to stay alive? How many receiving assistance were still working, just doing it less?
The only studies on outcomes I recall is that a lot of kids were no longer experiencing food insecurity.
That "classic unintended consequence" was specifically tested many times in UBI context, and study after study doesn't find it in any noticeable amount.
In any case, given how badly broken the current system is, surely it's at least worth a try?
We should not make it more than $1000 per month. Very few would choose to be poor. It would put a lot of pressure on companies to pay decent wages, though.
$1000/month is $12,000/year. Thats far far below poverty levels. It needs to be enough that people can choose to supplement in order to engage with luxury consumption. If people are forced to supplement to just survive, then we need to maintain the minimum wage and a whole host of other weird baggage.
The 2024 FPL figure is $15060 + 5380 per additional person family member past the first. $12k/head/year comes up a bit short for an individual, but it's not that far off—expenses involved in holding down a job probably actually account for the difference anyway.
It also becomes clearly tenable with households of more than 1. Supporting a family of 2-3 on $24k-36k is like, yep, I've met married international grad students. Of course they'll spring for supplemental income where available, but as a baseline it is tenuously "enough".
The goal can't be to solve every desperation case. But if the program wouldn't allow individuals living in dangerous and exploitative situations to confidently leave them (financially) Id argue the program was a failure
It is important that this is based on all income levels equally. Yes, some will pay back that money in taxes, but the important part is keeping the amount equal. It would be even more effective if you gave them a monthly check (even if you would eventually take it all back via a consumption tax on people earning more). A ~25% national sales tax should be sufficient to cover a UBI program. (We should still have an income tax, though.) Furthermore, a consumption tax would decrease unnecessary spending since you can target only new products and not used products to encourage people to reduce, reuse, and recycle.
If UBI is encoded as a negative tax rate at low income levels, it no longer really makes sense to talk about it as applying to all income levels equally. It naturally gets distributed as
1) A check (issued by Social Security service?) if income is less than X
2) Less of your paycheck being withheld if your income is greater than X (or more if you're significantly above X, depending on how this gets funded)
We have a tax rate with negative tax rates at the low end of the scale. For sketchy social policy/political tenability reasons it doubles as a child subsidy and phases in up to a nominal amount of preexisting so-called earned income, but functionally that's what the earned income tax credit is.
Expansion of the EITC program is fairly well-regarded among economists and has been historically quite popular! We should do more of it!
That advice has context. Do not roll your own if the feature is not your core product offering. So don't roll crypto if you're not selling crypto. If it is your core offering (and media decoding is absolutely a core offering of a web browser), you should choose carefully whether to get it off the shelf or roll your own.
Otherwise how would new/better stuff ever get built?!
If Apple and Google can’t even find all the vulnerabilities in their libs, how on earth would a scrappy team of a few devs, especially since media decode isn’t the sole thing they’re focused on?
> Otherwise how would new/better stuff ever get built?!
The problem here is that people are salivating to use this as their daily driver. When WireGuard was still in development, everyone got told in very strong terms to not use it in any setting that required actual security.
Browsing the web at large is sort-of hostile by default.
Ladybird is a great project, and I hope it keeps developing, but any user that thinks their media decode libraries will be bulletproof libs free of vulnerabilities are nuts.
If Apple and Google can’t even find all the vulnerabilities in their libs, how on earth would a scrappy team of a few devs
Perhaps a few devs have nowhere near the required escape velocity to create vulnerabilities before they can be fixed, nor the pressure of PMs to ship substandard code?
> but any user that thinks their media decode libraries will be bulletproof libs free of vulnerabilities are nuts.
Sure. And its a high bar to challenge the same or better vulnerability profile that the established players have. But a "small scrappy team" which is capable of doing everything this team has done certainly garners a lot of confidence that the bar is possible.
Apple and google are big corpos and those are legendary for their inability to make anything properly. It has been a while since they were small and could move fast... So no, I would not take them as a standard.
Every time this is posted I want to rebut the water boiling portion. It's finally time.
The author gets the details of boiling water wrong. He commits a fairly common error: using his experience of a practical and common phenomena to make/guess a technical definition. The technical definition of boiling water is simply the temperature beyond which liquid water will not go (let's ignore super heating- too much detail!). The rest of the exposition is unnecessary and wrong given the true definition (although could probably be reworked from a cooking perspective)
is just the start. He starts with "water boils at 100 °C, right?" which I expect you'd agree with.
He then _continues_ to work out that, despite the simple definition, the everyday-life _experience_ of boiling water is nowhere near as simple. Why is it not so simple? Because, details.
Which is the point of the whole essay.
> gets the details of boiling water wrong
Can you give an example of a detail he got wrong?
> The rest of the exposition is unnecessary and wrong given the true definition
His _goal_ is to explore the details of the everyday-life experience of "boiling water" in the everyday sense of "boiling" and show how it's more complicated than what the simple (technical) definition would lead you to believe.
Part of the trouble is that the word "boiling" means two distinct but related things:
1. Heating liquid so much that all of it transitions to gas (your technical definition, restated to be a verb form -- "boiling water", a gerund phrase, cannot be a temperature, as you proposed to define it)
2. Heating liquid so that _some_ of it is transitioning to gas, while the rest of the liquid can be used for cooking
The second sense is what people actually mean when they say "I'm going to boil some water" or "Is the water boiling yet?"
If the discussion was about boiling pasta water I'd be on board (e.g. a discussion of the every day). But it's wearing the clothing of science and so falls flat (for me). None of the details turn out to matter for the real technical definition. Amusingly the one detail that does matter- air pressure and by proxy elevation- is omitted.
That's fair to point out. However, I don't think it detracts from the point: the definition is in some sense a detail, because there is a connection between "bubbles forming" and "the temperature water will not rise beyond", but it's subtle and assuming that one equals the other leads to error. The very reason we have that definition is that it's more precise, because in the real world there's details that escape narrow definitions as seen in school or in the kitchen.
As an aside: I love the bubbling patterns of water as it heats, and it's actually a useful skill in the world of tea-making (especially in the gongfu tradition) to estimate the temperature of water based on the amount and size of bubbles. Nowadays I use a temperature-controlled kettle, but in the past I would get by with a clear borosilicate glass kettle and paying attention to the details, which is fun and rewarding in itself—if far less precise.
The way I read it, that’s why you’re supposed to imagine it’s the 1800s. All you have is the simple-sounding concept of “boiling”, and you’re trying to codify it by finding the temperature beyond which water will not go. At which point you start really paying attention and find the phenomenon is way more complex than your initial model of “water is either boiling or it isn’t”.
But it rather isn't. The temperature keeps going up as you add more fire. And then it stops going up even if you add more fire. That point is the temperature of interest and was from the very start. It isn't hard to find. It isn't hard to understand. It's just a bad example for this essay
This is unlikely. There are many many theories of how dark matter could be accounted for with ordinary matter that we simply can't detect because our telescopes/etc aren't good enough.
Not all of these theories are completely excluded yet but most have very very thin margins of phase space left to explore (even when combining multiple explanations together). Every time a new telescope comes online we see the phase space diminish rather than hints towards first observations.
We are left with:
A) new particles that don't (or very weakly) interact with electro magnetic fields.
B) New theories of gravity.
C) New theories of the early universe that open up phase space previously thought closed to existing matter contributions
D) better instrumentation that sees actual contribution in the tiny phase space left to ordinary matter and ordinary physics
D is by far the least interesting of these options and so gets very little press. But it gets plenty of academic attention and you can be assured it is not being ignored by scientists
Unconditional love is a trope I want to die so badly. It's so.... Selfish? I read it as "You don't matter at all. I'm so big hearted and perfect; isn't it glorious?" I love my kid and wife because of who they are and specific things they do. And I tell them that. And I also tell them they can always change and my love for them will continue and change with them
I don't think that's what "unconditional love" means or should be taken to mean. It usually means that your ability to love someone is not contingent on an expectation of reciprocity. For example, an infant can't really verbalize affection, but you can nevertheless love them.
Unconditional love also doesn't mean "no boundaries". You can love someone while insisting, for example, that they respect your autonomy or decisions.
Its hard to imagine, and would probably break me. Something like admitted, intentional, malicious, torture of our entire family for no benefit whatsoever might do it.
I don’t think you can both love someone while also thinking they “don’t matter at all”. But maybe your definition of love is different.
A parent simply telling their child, unconditionally, that they love them isn’t enough. You have to believe they do matter and are worth something.
If you can say that about your child despite their many flaws, and potentially how they might hurt you [1], to me is what unconditional love is more about.
[1] That is, humans aren’t perfect, and will on occasion hurt other humans, to some extent — especially children that are still developing and trying to figure out what is and isn’t appropriate.
I don't think you're reading me properly. I think the statement is bs, not the feeling. Of course the individual matters! That's my entire point about the statement being bs.
And to the other half, of course the conditions are incredibly nuanced and context dependent and probably unknowable to boot. It's not some sort of "three strikes and you're out" situation.
> But isn't that what "unconditional" demands of you?
I think we're stuck on this word.
Unconditional means, to many, "without any conditions attached" i.e. I will love you even if you don't love me back. I will love you regardless of the amount of money, status, good looks, $FOO, $BAR or $BAZ you have.
I will love you, no matter the consequences, or the pain I will feel for doing so.
IOW, it is love you feel without control; if you have control over it, it is conditional.
I have not, until now, come across a definition of unconditional love to mean "I'm such a great person, I will love you even though you are not", or similar.
I agree the word is the sticking point. Unconditional to me means there is literally nothing that can change it. No conditions.
If you found out the relationship was a giant ruse created by a bored billionaire and the person began behaving completely differently because the contract ended: doesnt matter.
All sorts of wacky scenarios you can dream up.
I can't help but feel like saying unconditional love is a giant cop out. I love people for reasons. Important reasons. Some of those reasons can't change (e.g. you are my mom/dad/kid) but those aren't the only reasons. And it's important to me to communicate those attributes of people I love. And obviously the whole is bigger than the parts in some ineffable way. And I (try to) communicate that too.
But the whole concept of unconditional love says nothing. It is a cop out. And ultimately, a lie
Love is a choice, not a circumstance, and unconditional love is the strongest form of it. I choose to love you even if you stop having characteristics I like. I choose to love you regardless of any good or bad qualities you have. I love you because you are, but I'll even love you after you stop being (what else is grief?).
I don't know if you can understand it until you've received it. Until two years ago, I thought "love" itself was a lie we tell children to manipulate them into doing what we want, like Santa Claus.
But then somebody loved me. Somebody saw me, heard me, knew me, understood me. He found joy in my existence, often because of his own determination to do so, not because I was making it apparent.
He just loves me because I'm me and not him. If only one of us matters in this situation, from his perspective, it's me, not him. He wills my good for my sake, not his own, and even at his own expense.
You seem to be using "love" to mean something like "like a whole lot," and maybe that's why unconditionality doesn't make sense.
Love is an act of the will, not a response to a circumstance.
I think we'll simply agree to disagree. But suffice to say that I don't need you to explain love to me or tell me that what I feel isn't "real" love. And simply because we disagree on an adjective some people like to attach to their love and which I do not? How myopic and unnecessarily condescending of you.
I hope you experience unconditional love someday. I spent my whole life thinking, like you, that it wasn't real. That opinion was largely formed from infancy, by someone who did use it as you describe, to inflate his own beneficence at my expense.
All I can say is that I was completely and totally wrong about the nature of love (and, as I found out from that later, actually of the world). I don't think I could have understood that from someone's internet post about it. I may even have read their description of it as a condescending condemnation.
But it might have helped me hold out hope for what I now know to be true, hearing someone else insist it was real, against the unequivocal evidence of my entire life. And that hope would have been worth having.
I've vacillated a couple times on whether to respond to you, but apparently you've poked me in a place I can't just ignore and move on from.
My goodness you are a sanctimonious asshole. We are disagreeing about how to express extraordinary love. I think the common expression of "unconditional love" is both a shallow platitude and a lie. You think it is this over-the-moon perfect version of love. Fair enough, we disagree.
And yet, you have somehow twisted that into me not having experienced "unconditional love" that you apparently just discovered for yourself in the recent past? Do you always resort to debasing someone else's life experience when you disagree with their perspective?
The height of arrogance and foolishness you admit to is absolutely staggering! You claim this sole understanding of love, a question which has plagued and delighted humanity as far back as our history goes. And yet you, a person who has very recently fallen in love. Someone who confuses a partner who today sacrifices themselves for your benefit with one who will forever love you. You have it all figured out. You know the love I experience and give to my parents, my sister, my wife, my children. You know that it is not true simply because I think calling it "unconditional" is a shallow cop out. That I would deign to tell the people I love their attributes, our memories, our shared experiences and challenges, our disagreements, everything about us that is the reason I have love for them. Somehow, this expression which contains so much. This is less than the simple word "unconditional". What a farce.
I challenge you to actually describe your love for your new found partner. Be specific. Anything that could be used to describe some garden variety love between the main characters in a romantic comedy cannot be used. After you figure it out, tell them too. See if that description does not in fact strengthen your relationship and help your love grow.
I guess the one condition is that they ate the individual that they are, and not some other individual. So it matters that they are that specific individual (e.g. your child).
I find the concept problematic as well. In practice there can certainly be limits.
Well, unconditional love does originate from the favorable treats you mentioned, but its also the stories you had with them, your experiences, your ups and downs. Everything that made your life a little more worthwhile by simply standing by your side. Past a point, i believe it is impossible to end that relationship voluntarily, for both sides.
If it was only because for who they are, I dont think your love for them would continue nor evolve, it would be a simple materialistic jealousy, never making it past conditions (hence, unconditional love).
I disagree so strongly even though I also found the font horrible. Design is used to communicate. Whether or not you want to communicate "in the clearest way possible" is a choice. There are many other choices to be made and some may conflict with that choice. Some choices will resonate with you and some will aggravate. But only the author/designer can speak to whether the design was successful in it's aims
> Whether or not you want to communicate "in the clearest way possible" is a choice.
This is far from "clearest way possible", it's not even in the middle. This choice impedes communication which makes is less useful, by your definition.
> But only the author/designer can speak to whether the design was successful in it's aims
I find it difficult to believe that the author's aim was to share a story in such way that's unnecessarily harder to consume, by a large portion of people otherwise interested in their thoughts.
Anti-design[1] is a movement which rejects the over-sanitation of design. Type a random query into Google and click through the first few links. What will you see? An endless sea of black-on-white, sans-serif, grids of text.
Anti-design is effective in making things memorable and engaging. When I attended Davis, I first thought the Social Sciences Building[2] was a bit of an eye sore. It was intentionally designed to be challenging. Now it is one of my most vivid memories of the campus.
You find it difficult to believe? The person clearly worked hard to achieve this aesthetic. The font even sort of matches the illustrations. This is clearly intentional from my pov. This aesthetic was more important to the author than ease of reading/consumption.
I don't think the designer is the authority on whether a design is good or not. Just like a novelist, director, or composer doesn't get to dictate whether their output was creatively successful.
Paul Graham's essay on taste sums it up pretty well:
Design is the process of bringing ideas into form. It is intentional creation. This process does not necessarily include intentional communication: it can be purely utilitarian. The form itself is what unavoidably communicates the values of the designer.
I do agree that clarity or efficiency are not necessarily the highest values to strive for.
Point is to make the signal to noise on response too low for the scammers to deal with. Today, they can feasibly have a person look at every response and choose the most promising targets.
If auto respond to even 0.01% of scam email, they suddenly need to have tools to weave through ridiculous amounts of data. Expensive. Scam becomes negative ROI
People seem confused, but this seems very reasonable to me. Consider flying to some far away location. Would you rather
A) A short flight from your local airport to a nearby hub and then transfer to a long haul flight to the far away location
B) A long flight from your local airport to a far away hub and then transfer to a short flight to get to your final destination.
If something goes wrong, its likely to happen at the transfer point. If something goes wrong, you want to be in a place where you have the most resources available to you. Usually being close to home affords you the most resources/options. Stakes are much lower for commuter train travel, but it still rings true for me.
I think you're on the right track, but I'd argue it's even more abstract than this. Assuming a transfer represents uncertainty in arrival time, do you want it early or later in your trip? If the transfer is near the end of your journey, it means the uncertainty is ahead of you for most of the trip. Even if the early part of your trip is going smoothly, you still don't know if you'll arrive on time. On the other hand, if you get your transfer over with early in your trip, you can experience the rest of your journey with more confidence you'll arrive as expected. It's not so much that you have more options closer to home, it's that less of your trip is in the uncertainty zone.
For me it's more about emotional fatigue broadly. Transfers are annoying for any number of reasons, risk of lateness being only one of many. I would much rather front-load the annoyance and then get to relax, than to have to deal with annoyance after already traveling a long time.
For me it's that I want the most inflexible leg of the trip first. I'll often get a local bus to a railway station then get a long distance train. The trains are infrequent and it's cheaper to book a specific train in advance, so if a journey is bus then train I have to get an early bus to ensure that bus delays won't make me miss my train. Whereas going the other way I can step off the train and get whichever bus happens to be next, so train then bus is a shorter journey time.
it is easier to sort out alternatives if i am already close to the destination. when i have transfers near the start i have to be very careful to ensure that i don't miss the main part of the trip. where as i often don't even bother to look up transfers at the destination until i arrive. i'll just take whatever is available.
on a recent long flight where i was in a different city than the airport i actually spent a night in the airport city to avoid troubles on the way to the city.
but the problem in the article seems to be just about this: very inflexible transfer options at the destination.
I can relate to what you describe from personal experience. I definitely want to mitigate earlier than later on my trip, even for a train ride from the suburbs where i live and downtown where I work, which is about 2 hours now (the train schedule is messed up with a new train line that is late on delivery and way over budget (public budget)). That's why I really enjoy remote work, I don't have to think about that stuff anymore.
I think its anxiety. A transfer near home is safe maybe even familiar. A transfer far away feels risky, even dangerous, where mishaps could be more likely.
On international flights, it’s not just familiarity, but the fact that I’ll be sleep-deprived and jet lagged at the end of a long flight. Making decisions about how to fix problems in unfamiliar circumstances with my brain half-functional is not fun. At least near home I’ve thought about alternative transit beforehand.
I live my life by front-loading the work. I work hard early in the day so that in the evening I can relax. I tackle the complicated part of projects first. Traveling isn’t any different. Is it anxiety? Maybe.
But I don’t think it’s about distance from home. I’ve got nearly as many options in Cincinnati as I do in Denver.
I think that there is something else at play - something like arrival anticipation paradox - the final descent and taxi to the terminal feel a lot more tense than the 8 hours in flight before.
100% of my flights from Europe to the SF are A) and 100% of my flights from the SF to Europe are B). Quite frankly the deciding factor here is that the factor that outweighs everything is that transferring at a European airport is speedy, luggage stays checked and I don't need to go through security. Transferring in most of the US from an international to a regional flight is a much more involved undertaking.
The same kind of thinking for me applies to a lot of public transport too. I pick based on how annoying transferring is.
But you are also in SF, so you are already at a Hub of sorts that is well connected and is going to get you at least to a close by airport in Europe. If you were living in Seattle which is less connected to Europe than SF, you would be doing B more often.
In scheduling a trip from Seattle to Tokyo, direct in the way there (as it should be!) but on the way back I have to transfer in Minneapolis. I don’t think I could have flown to Osaka or something to get direct at a reasonable price.
Do you have Global Entry? It’s open to citizens of many countries and you can feasible get off the plane and be going through security (past immigration) in under 10 minutes. I wish other countries offered a Global Entry experience.
I think programs like Global Entry are one of the main reasons American airports are usually so bad. When most frequent flyers can avoid the default experience, nobody really cares about fixing it. In a well-run airport, everyone gets an experience similar to Global Entry by default.
most other countries have a customs/security process that is as fast as global entry. So everyone gets a good treatment most of the times. It's not pay for convenience, its a fair treatment for all. I honestly think global entry is a backwards solution to the problem, and only makes it worse for non paying people
Other countries have a more straightforward entrance protocol, I've never been stuck too long (I mean, except in case of strikes) in a customs queue in Europe
I take your point for long-distance travel, but the same argument doesn't really make sense to me in the commuter context. if something goes wrong with the second leg of my commute, I probably want to figure out a different way to get to work, not turn around and go home. either way, I'd just end up taking a taxi, bus, or both. as long as it doesn't happen often, it's not a big deal.
personally, I am primarily optimizing my commute for low average travel time and variance. I'll always pick the fastest option that allows me to walk out of my door at the same time every day and get to work on time for >90% of trips. practically, that equates to planning transit where the second leg has very short headways, regardless of where the transfer happens.
Actually, with the week divided between in-office and wfh nowadays, my most common reaction to something going wrong with my commute is to turn around and go home to work from there.
What's your intuition for how many people do have this luxury, and what context do you think it holds in?
My company has fully embraced flexibility, so even though many do work in the office it is completely accepted that some days they just won't. Other people in my social circles seem to have similar setups, but I've got no idea how far that extends outside of my bubble - not even in the rest of my city let alone the country or wordlwide.
Something like 60% of jobs can't be performed remotely. And of the 40% remaining, I think it's safe to say not all of them are allowed to be remote (due to office politics / management bullshit).
Given that not all jobs that can be remote are remote, and that the majority of jobs can't be remote (retail, manufacturing, agriculture, etc), I see good reasons to believe the vast majority of people don't have the option of working remote at their current job, anywhere in the world.
For the commuter example (at least in the US), often the first leg is a drive (in a car) to the train station. When the commuter-rail train gets to its destination, you don't have the car anymore, so you want to be as close to your destination as possible. Even then, if I have to take a local train from there, and something goes wrong with it, at least I can probably get a taxi or something.
Regardless, in your airline example, I would probably want (B), not (A). If I were to choose (A), and there was a problem with my short-haul local flight, I'm probably missing my long-haul connection, which will be more difficult to re-arrange. If I take the long-haul flight first, and something gets messed up with the short-haul connection at the destination, I likely have more options, possibly even including a train or car. Sure, the worst case might be worse (I get stuck at the connecting airport and need to get a hotel overnight), but I think the average case is probably better.
Sure, if I want to bail on my trip if anything goes wrong, the short-haul-first approach works better, but I don't think there are many situations where I'd want to bail rather than finding another way to get there.
But overall I'm not sure the main issue is when things go wrong. For commuting, there are still benefits to the happy path when the connection is closer to the origin. If the train station is next door to my house, but the station on the other end is 15 miles from the office, that's still a pain to deal with. The opposite is much easier.
Transfer can also be exhausting. I would rather have it done early so when I get out of the long haul flight I can directly go to the hotel.
For all my EU->US (and back) flights, if I have to transfer I always do it in Frankfurt/Zurich/Heathrow, rather than US. The fact the airports and lounges are nicer helps.
If you're just talking about immigration lines, that seems not correct at all. I've definitely seen much longer wait times at quite a few non-US airports than the non-citizen lines at most US airports.
Aside from that, at least you don't have to clear immigration to leave the US. I always thought it was super weird that you need "permission" to leave many other countries, which adds a bunch more unpredictable time to the airport experience, beyond what's already there with the security lines.
And LAX is not exactly a great example; it's one of the worst airports in the US. SFO, EWR, IAD, and even JFK (to name a few) aren't anywhere near as bad, and are just-fine to good at some of them.
And Indonesia... having to pay cash in the airport in order to be allowed to leave the country? And if you're out of rupiah by that point, they charge you much more in USD? Hell, I'd probably take LAX over that garbage.
And Heathrow! Oh man, Heathrow. It's been years since I flew into, out of, or through Heathrow, so maybe things have gotten better, but what a terrible airport it was! Transferring between terminals was a pain in and of itself, not to mention the need to go through security again if you need to make a connection between certain terminals.
What makes European airports nicer to you? I'm usually annoyed by them due to the larger number of duty free shops and fewer seating at the gate. My experience with US airports is mostly with west coast airports plus main hubs like DFW and ATL.
Airports in the rest of the world tend to be more impressive and have better services (restaurants, lounges, bars, shopping). It largely comes down to different ownership models where the airport is trying to get you to spend money on entertainment. US airports may have more seating by the gate but I don't want to spend my time sat by the gate... Especially if I have a few hours between planes.
I think in practice there are reasonable and bloody awful airports in both Europe and the US.
One thing I do find to be better, in general, in European airports is that they have thought more about how people will actually get to and from the airport; generally, you get there, you follow a sign, and you get on a bus, train, or get to a taxi rank. US airports (my sample's relatively small, but at least SFO and SEA) seem to enjoy making this awkward. For instance, when you get off the train to SEA, you seem to have to walk about a kilometre _through a parking garage_; bizarre arrangement. If you want to get an Uber/Lyft from there, you go to a random poorly signposted place in said parking garage.
Actually, now I think of it, last time I was in SF I got a bus to the airport, and that _also ended up in a random parking garage_.
My guess is they’re referring to the business lounges as being better in Europe than the US, which agrees with my experience (to your point, yes, often the gate seating is lacking).
And chances are high something goes wrong during a transfer on public transit. I don’t know how anyone manages to use transit in Seattle effectively without some sort of backup plan (Uber, bike, walking, etc.) because I often found the buses would never show up, often due to undocumented/poorly documented route adjustments. Also, buses would very frequently not stop unless I basically jumped up and down to get their attention (just standing right next to the stop marker in broad daylight was not sufficient).
Make sure you report every such instance when they happen. If nothing else they need to get statistics about how many people are really annoyed by their failing. Likely they have options to fix things, but need complaints to back them up.
> Also, buses would very frequently not stop unless I basically jumped up and down to get their attention (just standing right next to the stop marker in broad daylight was not sufficient).
Does more than one route stop at that stop? If so, that's expected, surely?
I think it's because we want to transfer while feeling fresh, and then relax for the remainder of the trip.
Traveling is exhausting, and probably a factor is increased stress, and the stress of an upcoming transfer, and a transfer when exhausted just seems so much worse.
With airplanes in particulart , that's not a given.
Even when it is, returning home is less stressful than leaving for a foreign place, so the effect is not cancelled out. Almost anyone would prefer being stranded in a different city in their home country than being stranded on anther continent.
This doesn't make any sense to me in your scenario or in the commuting scenario.
I don't have any "more resources" in a city that's a 2 hr flight from where I live vs. 10 hours away. I use the same app to find a hotel and the same credit card to pay for it. The only relevant thing is which one interrupts my sleep schedule more.
And in daily commuting it makes no sense to me either. Whether you drive 10 min to the train station and take it straight to work, or live next to the train station and then take a subway 10 min (including wait time) to the office, I find it hard to believe anybody cares much at all, or that people's random preferences don't cancel each other out.
Plus for a commute aren't you always doing the reverse as well? If you have an "origin transfer" in the morning it becomes a "destination transfer" in the evening. So wouldn't any preference become entirely moot?
Or for an American, being stuck at JFK or Atlanta is boring and sucks.
While an unplanned day in Amsterdam or Paris is a lovely start to your trip, just from the food and architecture alone! I don't know a lot of people who would complain about being stuck in Paris for a day. ;)
> Obviously not a rail or commuter example, but same principal.
Not really, unless it's international rail, which is a bit of an edge case; it certainly exists, but the vast majority of rail journeys do not cross a national border.
Long flights are usually more expensive and require more advance booking. If you miss the transfer after the long flight, there are usually plenty of alternatives to get to your final destination.
Commuter trains are different because they usually don't require booking in advance. And in this case, I think I prefer origin transfers, because if there is a big problem, I would just go back home and take a day off, work remote, take the car, ...
I'd personally take B. If something goes wrong on the trip, I'd much rather be almost there, as there will be more ways to complete the journey.
But I think it flips for me when commuting, in that a short local ride is easier for me to mentally discount as it's part of my routine. E.g. I used to live one MUNI stop from BART, and I came to see that first leg as negligible in the same way that walking to the MUNI station did.
I initially felt the same as you, but then I thought about some of the times this has actually happened. After 18hrs on a plane I just want to be home or in my hotel. I’m not in a headspace where dealing with any level of inconvenience is welcomed even if the the rational response is “well at least you’re close to where you want to be and have a range of options to choose from, some of them possibly quite familiar if you’re coming home”. I don’t want options. I don’t want to think. I just want to collapse into a bed.
Sure, I too want to just get there. I'd rather it just worked.
But if I compare the disappointment of having a problem when I'm almost there versus one where I've just started, I'd definitely take the former. In either case I've already gone to the trouble of starting a long trip. A failure at the 90% point means I'm almost there and just have the work of finishing it, and short trips have many more options than long ones (e.g., short-hop flight vs transit vs renting a car vs taking a Lyft). But a failure at the 10% point means that I've gone to a lot of trouble, gotten very little out of it, and will have fewer options for finishing.
I get people's preferences are different here, and maybe this is just me making use of whatever drives the sunk cost fallacy to keep momentum up and not get discouraged. But I'd definitely prefer B.
Quite the opposite for me. I would start with the long haul segment, because missing the long haul flight because of a late local flight would mean more trouble than being already near my final destination which gives me more options for the final segment in case problems arising.
I feel like from experience I'd much rather (B). The things usually go wrong in a fixable way, and it's much better to be close to your destination where you have more options, like more local flights with more space vs daily long haul flights; ability to give up on a leg of a trip and drive there; etc.
Especially across countries, where there may also be visa/document shenanigans.
E.g. going to Venice from Seattle, in terms of getting there it's much better to be stranded in Amsterdam or Paris than in I dunno, Atlanta.
When transferring I can do things like visit the restroom or get dinner or even update people I am meeting in my final destination. Those have far more value to me after I've been traveling for a while.
Meanwhile, I don't feel like I have "more resources" in a close location to a far destination.
I don't truly get it. If I really want to get to my destination, I'd rather be as close to it as possible when things go wrong, rather than being farther away. If I'm nearly there it feels there would be more resources available to make the last stretch.
This analogy doesn’t resonate with me at all. Based out of the US I’d rather have a misconnection in Europe than in the US (EU261 is amazing). Also I like the connection after the long flight as it gives me a chance to shower and freshen up before continuing on to my final destination.
Also flights arriving into EU if operated by an airline licensed in an EU member state.
This was very helpful this winter while Lufthansa’s ground handling was in full meltdown mode. On three separate occasions Lufthansa failed to get my luggage to its final destination on time so I was able to get reimbursed for replacement clothes and toiletries while Lufthansa tracked down my bags.
There is no such guaranteed compensation in the US.
In my ideal commute I'd be sleeping, so I would prefer the long first, short second option. That way I can get in a longer period of shut-eye before transferring and waking up for the destination.
If I have significantly more resource available in one side of the trip than other, it almost always a round trip. So the effect according to your logic will cancel out.
I’d add another factor, safety (perceived or real). Most people are going to prefer a transfer to their car in a quiet suburban parking lot, than transferring to another form of transit in an urban city where there might be a high level of homelessness/vagrancy/drug use/ crime/harassment
Not sure if your experience is common inside the US, but in most of the world, most people, by far, don't live in the suburbs. And most cities in the world don't have an appreciable amount of homelessness/vagrancy/drug use/crime/harassment in the areas most businesses exist.
"you can't simply draw a boundary... Https if people don't have responsibility... Only individuals do"
I think this is specious reasoning. We accept this just fine in other tort circumstances e.g
1) lawsuits against a city after miscarriage of justice
2) lawsuits against corporations when X happens.
Often individual responsibility will be a portion of the trial but to my understanding it is
1) a secondary or even tertiary concern
2) used to deflect blame from the group
I think in general not allowing blame to be allocated to individuals will lead to poor results. We need methods to call systems bad and curtail them in addition to individuals
I think the relevant grouping to take to task for these issues is federal, state, and local governments (and probably quite a few corporations). Not "white people".
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