{"id":2447,"date":"2017-04-10T09:20:27","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T17:20:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2447"},"modified":"2017-04-10T09:20:27","modified_gmt":"2017-04-10T17:20:27","slug":"paying-to-be-human","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2447","title":{"rendered":"Paying to be human"},"content":{"rendered":"

So a few years back<\/a> I revisited a topic that comes up every so often: the hollowing out of the middle class, and the fact that the hollowing keeps reaching ever further up. Helaine Olen has hit on this<\/a> elsewhere<\/a>\u00a0but it\u2019s worth reconsidering in light of the United incident over the weekend, where a paying passenger was physically beaten and thrown off the flight by law enforcement after United told him he\u2019d been selected to miss the flight in favor of staff who were flying.<\/p>\n

Now, I have a little experience of this – I owe my marriage to the pre-Sept 11 use of United\u2019s Friends and Family travel vouchers. One of my future wife\u2019s family friends was a retired mechanic at United who gave us the vouchers to fly standby for five cents a mile. And $120.95 for a direct flight from Dulles to SFO? That was too good to pass up, even if you did have to dress up and accept that you\u2019d need an empty seat on the bird before you\u2019d get to travel. That was good enough for me, though – I even got bumped to first class once – and without \u201cUncle\u201d Dwayne, we would have had a much tougher road to where we ended up. Rest in peace, and thanks.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the thing: it was made abundantly clear that you would flap your arms and fly to San Francisco under your own power before they\u2019d bump a paying passenger. Overbooking is a way of life with aircraft because if the bird doesn\u2019t take off with every seat full, the airline is probably losing money. (When is the last time you didn\u2019t hear \u201cwe have a completely full flight today\u201d as you board?) So it\u2019s not surprising that they\u2019d overbook a flight. The bit that I find singular is that they offered a couple rounds of incentives\u2026but they let everyone on board first. You might ask \u201cwhy the actual fuck would you let too many people on the plane?\u201d That\u2019s easy: because if they can bait you into making a scene on the plane<\/em>, they can have law enforcement bodily drag you out as a danger to the flight, and they are 100% legally off the hook in doing so. It\u2019s absolutely reprehensible, and yet United may be able to completely skate under the terms of the law as currently written.<\/p>\n

And apparently, the bulletproof way to make sure this doesn\u2019t happen to you is\u2026be in first class. Or business. Or anywhere but coach. And maybe you\u2019re less likely to get \u201cre-assigned\u201d if you checked in bang-on 24 hours before boarding. But the point is: the more you paid, the more likely you are to be treated like a human being. In the meantime, all the special measures that had to be taken to financially save the airlines after September 11 are apparently permanent now, whether it\u2019s bag fees or charging for refreshments or making you pay for the in-flight movie.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not the point of all this.<\/p>\n

The point of all this is to go all the way down to the bottom: free. Which is to say: if you don\u2019t actually pay<\/em> for a service, what is your recourse when things go awry? Is it conceivable that this is the way Twitter or Facebook or Google want it – because they\u2019re a private company, and they aren\u2019t charging you, so when they rearrange the timeline or sell your personal info along\u2026so what? Or to offer another example: there is a university in Palo Alto that we\u2019ll call Hellmouth A&M. They run a shuttle service that\u2019s free of charge and goes around campus and to certain outlying areas for the benefit of employees and students. And for about a year, one of those shuttles was re-routed down El Camino Real past California Avenue, and as such was suddenly very useful to people wanting to take Caltrain to the CalAve station and then come onto campus.<\/p>\n

Well, in the course of the Great Schedule Rejiggering of April 10, 2017, when basically every form of transit in Santa Clara County blew up its schedule and tried something else, Hellmouth decided to move that shuttle back to its original route, which takes half as long and doesn\u2019t go through the middle of campus or past CalAve anymore. And apparently some of the riders are PISSSSSSSED. But\u2026the problem is, they don\u2019t pay anything to ride, and the shuttle is operated by Hellmouth. If they work for Hellmouth they could complain, but I can assure you that Hellmouth\u2019s shuttle service is impervious to complaint, because a lot of people were very<\/em> unhappy over a year ago when they started running that ECR\/CA route and making the trip twice as long and the response from Hellmouth was\u2026silence. So the people posting \u201cLETS FIGHT THIS\u201d on Post-it notes on the advisory notices are advised to wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which fills up first.<\/p>\n

Because when you\u2019re accepting a freebie, you have no leverage at all. None. At least with cash on the fucking barrelhead, you are a customer and in some sort of implied relationship. If you\u2019re passing all your mail through Gmail, though, or letting Facebook be your social outlet, you\u2019re\u2026kinda screwed, in the long run. And yet, we\u2019ve already established that The Potential For GROWTH is all Wall Street cares about, or else Tesla wouldn\u2019t have a higher market cap today than Ford or GM despite the fact that Ford\u2019s F-150 sales alone dwarf Tesla\u2019s revenue and just one of those pickups probably represents more profit than all of Tesla made last year.<\/p>\n

One part shell game and one part \u201cplease sir can I have some more\u201d – that\u2019s the world we\u2019ve made for ourselves. If you\u2019ve made it a little bit, you better seriously consider that your common cause should be made with those who have less, not those who have more – because the latter want your bit too, and they care for you no more than they care for the former.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So a few years back I revisited a topic that comes up every so often: the hollowing out of the middle class, and the fact that the hollowing keeps reaching ever further up. Helaine Olen has hit on this elsewhere\u00a0but it\u2019s worth reconsidering in light of the United incident over the weekend, where a paying … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Paying to be human”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2447"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}