I quite like this idea of ranking people based on their prior predictions! Again, no idea about any of the specific subject matter or the people covering it, but certainly an interesting site.

Hot take, I know. That said, I do agree with your premise and think a disproportionately high government stake in a bailed out company makes a ton of sense.

Normal line workers everywhere have to travel for business and don't have any choice about it. These people aren't travelling for fun and aren't elite by any stretch of the imagination.

Seriously though, we’ve become extremely accustom to a mode of travel (air travel costs have deflated over the last several decades) that generates ~3% of the world’s CO2 emissions. Anything that scales that back so essential travel is the majority of air travel is a good thing.

High level, we’re forced by COVID to re-evaluate what we perceive as needs, and what actual needs are. Again, this is a good thing, and pushes back against cultural inertia (open office plans, face to face for biz travel, commuting to work when you could just as easily work from home, etc).

[0] In normal times, 80% of commuters get to Manhattan via transit. ~1,500 rail passengers enter Manhattan’s central business district every six seconds between 8–9AM.

Trying to cram all those Manhattan-bound train riders into cars (or AVs) would be impossible. You’d need 324,000 more vehicles to accommodate them, and 100 new bridges or tunnels. [1]

[1] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2009/08/10/what-if-everyone-drov...

Government is already reading license plates, might as well attach it to a billing system and charge people accordingly. Want to travel during high demand hours? Pay more. Watch businesses and people adjust their habits automatically to better use the shared resource.

And if the concern is that poorer people get shafted, then give them a certain amount of cash or credits for road usage.

Or you could just impose a gasoline tax as a proxy for travel (oh hey that's exactly what they did.)

The free market is only efficient when transaction costs are low. For many forms of travel, the cost of monitoring such travel makes tracking far too expensive. Even just understanding a toll scheme has its own cost; you don't want to be too worried about misestimating the cost of every drive down to the grocery store.

For long-distance interstate travel, however, toll roads make a lot of sense. This is particularly the case where trucks are involved. You charge proportionally to axle weight, so the companies doing the shipping pay for the damage they are doing to the roads.

In other congested areas, tolls can serve as an effective form of rationing, particularly over bridges or through tunnels. This encourages more efficient resource usage, e.g. by making carpooling more worthwhile. This also makes more sense for city centers with congestion-charge fees. The alternative rationing scheme here, "sitting in traffic", is a very bad way to pay for things and imposes its own very high transaction costs.

This already happens in many places, especially with tunnels and bridges.

It's literally regressive.

If life is too hard for people with less money, society should decide how much money to give everyone to make it better, and then let them make their decisions -- instead of declaring, "Passenger Vehicle Traffic And Parking Lots Are Virtuous And Worth Subsidizing."

Meanwhile, the government generally ends up building too many roads and not enough transit. All this easily overwhelms the other inefficiencies.

Other bad plans where we don't charge for resources: Let's give all the people free electricity, so poor people don't have to pay something regressive! Then a few jerks can use it to mine Bitcoin until there are brownouts everywhere.

norway has an interesting model which i don't agree with fully - new roads are toll roads until they pay for themselves. i guess support after that time is paid by fuel tax?

someone transporting it in a vehicle is also an option which I very seldom use for groceries but almost everything else does come to my house this way.

access to shelter, food and water should be a basic human right. access to a car and it's supporting infrastructure shouldn't. consider what would have to happen to not need a car to get groceries instead of fueling the positive feedback loop of communities designed for cars and cars only. i've been to a development surrounded by a highway on all sides, you literally couldn't get out of it legally in any way which didn't involve a car. of course people jaywalked to walmart on the other side of one of the two-lane roads.

How do you think it gets to the shop?

It's possible the amounts and/or split between grants and loans wasn't right...but some kind of bailout was needed to avoid chaos.

(Their pilots average ~$167,000 a year. The mechanics make ~$70,500. Reviews say the health insurance is pretty good, there is a modest 401(k) match, and of course you get to fly free on standby).

Please bring only meaningful in-depth critiques to HN, and leave the fact-free axe-grinding elsewhere.

I wouldn't make a direct comparison of that with other jobs. There are many work hours they aren't paid for, or are paid at a lower rate.

Oversimplified, but they are paid nothing or almost nothing for waiting around for late flights, security, etc. Full pay for "block hours" where the plane has pushed back, less for pre/post flight work. And lower seniority f/a folks can have a harder time getting hours at all, and they are well below average pay. Seniority is everything.

It's not a bad job considering the fairly low qualifications, but it's not really $30/hour. New flight attendants generally end the year around $20k gross. And that's at the majors.

Every time you step on to an "American" plane that is "operated by xyz", you are not flying American Airlines. You are flying an American Eagle branded subcarrier like Republic or SkyWest. These subcarriers fly a very large percentage of "American" flights.

The pay and benefits at the subcarriers are dismal.

The regional airlines, on the other hand — the ones running those little connector flights with CRJs and the like, branded "American Eagle" or "Delta Connection", with a four-digit codeshare and inferior snacks and entertainment — those are a lot less picky, and their pay is a lot more questionable.

On the other hand, they do have collective leverage, as airlines can't quickly replace them.

Here's two reasons why this particular one report is making the rounds:

1) It's unexpected. Sell-side analysts inherently have a conflict of interest as the parent company's bread and butter is investment banking/M&A advisory deals. They try not to issue "sell" reports since who wants to do business with a bank that is pessimistic about their future.

2) It's shocking. I don't think I have ever seen a bank issue a $1 price target on any (non-penny/non-fraud) stock. The last time I saw this was by a short seller (betting against Peleton). For a stock that's trading at $10+, saying this is akin to telling management, "we will probably never see you again so it's fine for us to say our goodbyes with working with you ever again."

So what's in it for Evercore (the investment bank here)? If Evercore is correct, they just got some good PR in the investing community as the first ones to "call it" once the dust settles (and maybe fame under the "Financial Troubles (2020-)" section of American Airlines wiki page).

Another related question though would be why the stock market jumps around in response to these "news" items if you trust that there is no new information that equity analysts get that isn't otherwise publicly accessible. Seems like people think that's bullshit though, or, they believe the analysts are smarter than them in terms of processing this public information. Regardless, whenever Goldman issues some report on a FAANG stock, expect some pretty big vol...

(real talk, who actually buys these stocks? they keep going so very bankrupt...)

If that happens again with most airlines I personally will put as much in as I can and wait for a merger after a bailout

Edit to be fair I profited heavily based on an original buy that was 70 dollars total

These are my picks because they may go bankrupt but they will get a bailout or cash infusion like always. They are not going to cease to exist.

Politicians have confused the shutdown. It was intended to reduce the likelihood of overwhelming the hospitals, but it seems it's been interpreted as protecting people from getting infected. That was never going to happen, but nobody wants to talk about it.

1. https://www.wired.com/story/the-promising-math-behind-flatte...

It wouldn't be a stretch to say that reducing infections RIGHT NOW directly leads to reducing hospitalizations, so I can't blame politicians for mixing up the language.