Welcome. The Evils of Timezones. Covid as an Allergy. Airline Mergers as a Positive for Fliers
A Brief Intro.
So where to begin? I’m not entirely sure anyone will have any interest in reading my random ideas. To begin, I proudly proclaim myself a dilettante and I like to know a decent amount about many things. I came to this realization when I was well on my way to becoming an expert and it came to me just how unappealing the idea of personal expertise is, thus I ran from that path like the dog seeing a piece of pizza in the street (yeah, that kind of walk tonight)
To be clear, the world needs experts and we (a very abstract and collective ‘we’) need to listen to them. We also need to understand the limitations and not be deferential. Those two opposing poles are incredibly difficult squares to circle and there’s been a lot of deep dives on the subject. Perhaps I will at some point soon as well.
So the point of why I’m writing this is quite simple, I thought it would be a decent exercise on a public diary and personal thoughts about the world, politics, economy, Spain, generally musing about the state of the world as well as personal things of interest. (I think next week I’m going to do a layman’s explanation of why BMI is an absolutely shit measurement)
I’ll probably go into engineering/tech, politics, my dog, economics, aviation, general personal thoughts, more of my dog, or whatever other idea gremlin happens to possess my brain at a given moment.
So let’s begin…
Being an NFL fan in Europe sucks.
So with the Super Bowl this Sunday it’s a yearly reminder to learn your roman numerals and just how annoying it can be to be far from home sometimes and what home means (there will definitely be more of this in the coming weeks).
Normally while I like the NFL, it’s just not worth the effort to stay up to the wee hours of the morning to watch games so I don’t follow the season so much. As there are more evening games through the week, the trend has made it even less desirable (Interesting counterpoint to the talk of a London franchise and why Mexico City is a better choice for first international franchise). Regardless I spent at least the first part of the fall in America this year so was actually following what was going on. Though I missed what seemed like a rather exciting playoff year — this Bears fan was very happy to watch Robbie Gould be the one to send Aaron Rodgers home one last time — I still think I might try to catch the Super Bowl.
Now, first you have to find a place that will be open for the whole time. There’s an NFL bar in Madrid, so at least there’s that but now you have to have a reservation and then the game is on until 4 in the morning. Not being 22 anymore, that means actually having to plan around that mess as well.
While I’m sorry my first post is starting off with a complaint, I promise things won’t stay this way. Regardless, I just hope people realize how inconvenient time zones can be when dealing with immigrants from around the world. One of those banal things that’s not horrible, but just makes everything a little more annoying — the hangnail of problems.
Covid Restrictions as a Societal Allergy
I know we’ve all thought way too long about covid restrictions and what works and what doesn’t, if costs outweigh the benefits, how we should approach risk tolerance, et cetera, et cetera…. But I think there there is a bit more.
In a recent post exploring what “return to normal” means, Matt Yglesias wrote:
But Covid-19 mitigation measures are causing burdens over and above the burden of disease per se. To the extent that disruptions are caused by sickness, we would expect to see more disruptions in conservative parts of the country with low vaccination rates. Instead, we see equal if not greater disruptions in liberal parts of the country, even though the higher vaccination rate reduces the burden of disease. That’s because those jurisdictions are implementing Covid-19 mitigation measures with costs that exceed their benefits.
A point that made me think of an analogy to allergies.
The hygiene hypothesis is a fairly well followed idea that allergies, asthma and other autoimmune issues are at least partly caused by lack of exposure to pathogens and parasites for the immune system to fight so it responds to other threats.
Now, don’t get me wrong, living in a cleaner world with fewer pathogens and parasites is absolutely a positive development and we should want it for more people. The benefits far outweigh the costs, but we shouldn’t delude ourselves that there are no costs either.
Similarly, there seems to be something going on with societal risk tolerances. We have made life so much safer. This is the concept of safetyism that Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt explore in The Coddling of the American Mind. Though I’d note that there seems to be a similar phenomenon in Europe as well, though maybe not quite as bad.
This leads to weird results like a recent Monmouth poll where 18–34 year olds were significantly more worried about personally catching Covid-19 than 35–54 year olds and only slightly less than the 55+ cohort. (The poll also asked about concern of risk to others so the point is purely about personal worry)
This just seems to be self-evidently bad that we have to have non-profits whose sole purpose is to get parents to let children go play. But basically disruptive restrictions may be a result of a gross over-reaction to small risks.
This isn’t to minimize and say risk is zero but human psychology seems to have a very hard time with small risks in the first place and it’s going very much the wrong way.
Spirit/Frontier merger is a good thing.
As I’m also an aviation nerd, the big news this week is that Frontier Airlines is merging with Spirit in the US. Technically a union of equals, it’s clear that Frontier will come out on top of the merger. I’ve seen a lot of gnashing of teeth about how this is horrible for consumers but I just don’t see it.
First, it’s still not going to be that big of an airline.
This shows that the new airline will still be way less than the other big 4 US carriers. But the real value is a bigger airline is by being able to compete even more against the bigger players and forcing even more service to keep fares lower. Hard to see where there’s not much competition in the market.
On the lower end of the spectrum, new entrants are already in the market to help keep them honest. If they start raising fares too much or stay out of markets, Avelo and Breeze are around to come in and catch that opportunity.
I’d also add that Spirit has 100 aircraft with 50 options on order while Frontier has 134 on order, so the idea that they would pull service doesn’t seem to be that much of a threat since they’re going to be looking where to fly all of them.
Personal updates
So the big news on the coming week is that I will be starting the final process for naturalizing in Spain. After 6 years since I’ve started this mess I should be Spanish by the end of the month
We’ve started taking a new route for walking the canine and he’s discovered a new friend. Now when they find each other they play like none other. She’s a six month old German shepherd/mastiff mix so manages to rival his size and have enough energy
Great writing!