AppleZulu

cincytee said:

AppleZulu said:

“Lying” suggests the airlines knew where the luggage was and intentionally said it was in a different location. It’s much more likely here that the airlines’ tracking system, which depends on a bar code being correctly scanned, was reporting incorrect information to staff, and they were reflecting that information to the customer. Yes, the customer was telling them he had different information, but all they have to go on is their own system, which to be fair, moves a huge amount of luggage around correctly every day. 

So this isn’t about anyone lying, it’s about a customer convincing airline staff that he has different, more accurate info, and that, based on his info, they need to pull a person off of whatever task they’re normally doing, send them to the general area where the customer sees his luggage pinging, find it, and return it correctly to their system for final delivery. It’s not that they shouldn’t be expected to do that, but it’s at least realistic to understand what that means in the context of a system that’s still moving millions of other bags to their destination. 

Airlines do correctly deliver an enormous volume of luggage every day, and people forget what a logistical triumph that is. The problem is that, when presented proof that the system has failed in a specific instance, the typical airline response is that the customer is wrong. The airline here did lie that it knew where the bag was and when and how it would be returned. You're right that it wasn't lying in the usual criminal sense, but it was a known falsehood: A quick check by airline staff in the airports involved would have confirmed that.

Part of the point I was trying to make was that "a quick check by airline staff" is much easier said than done. One of the fundamental flaws of the current airline system is that they cut costs by eliminating most redundancies and surplus capacity from their operations. This is why small backups due to weather or mechanical problems can quickly cascade into system-wide interruptions. So chances are not great that there would be people available to stop whatever they're doing to go have a look around whenever a customer calls and says their Air Tag has located a bag at some location that's different from where the baggage tracking system reports the bag to be. A logistics system can be simultaneously very good at moving a million bags (or whatever) every day, and also very bad at seeking out the comparatively small number that get misdirected. It's likely that a significant percentage of misdirected bags get that way because of damage to or elimination of the airlines' barcoded baggage tags, which means there's a significant chance that an employee sent to look around may be reduced to trying to identify a bag by a customer's handwritten tag, or worse, the customer's phoned-in description of the bag, because the AirTag was inside the bag and all other identifying info was torn off with the handle in some mishap. All that potentially equals more time than "a quick check." It's likely that the normal method of finding lost bags involves periodic sweeps of baggage claim areas for loose bags, and then sending them to a location based on the best available information in the system and/or printed on the bag's tags. Then at that point, someone at any given airport location can start sorting out the mess all at once, instead of ad-hoc every time a customer calls.

None of this is to say that this sort of problem isn't immensely frustrating. Just that it may not be fair to say that the airline staff is lying when they use the internal information available to them for reporting where a customer's bag is.

Here we have another example of people suffering from no long-term memory, forgetting about how things were, way back in the ancient days before the iPhone, and thus imagining that their new ideas are not just re-branded bad old ideas.

Back in the day, most cell phones had user-accessible batteries, via a door or a case that was easily opened with your fingers. This meant several things. First, internal components were easily exposed. Devices were not even remotely waterproof. They would pop open when you dropped them. There was a whole industry of after-market replacement batteries. While they were user-serviceable, very few were standardized, so each phone model had its own size and shape to match. There was no quality control for after-market batteries, and users were incentivized to buy several cheap batteries to have on hand to swap out, rather than plugging in the device regularly to keep it charged.  Very few of these batteries were ever recycled or disposed of in any sort of environmentally responsible way. They're all now either in landfills or long forgotten in the myriad places where people keep random junk.

Apple shocked everyone by sealing the battery in the iPhone, shifting consumers to recharging the phone, rather than hot-swapping a collection of spare batteries. This enabled greater quality control of manufacturer-installed lithium-ion batteries in the devices, as well as making water-resistant and then waterproof phones possible. Apple incentivizes direct return and recycling of old iPhones, which includes the batteries, thus assuring that far fewer of them end up in junk drawers and landfills. 

A forced return to user serviceable batteries will be hailed by right-to-repair folks who will ignore the resulting increased environmental damage, more unreliable and unsafe aftermarket batteries produced, and more phones subject to breakage because they have battery doors and cases that come apart when you drop them. 

Wolflow said:

Better zoom functionality and no cameras sticking out would be nice

The one thing iPhone cameras can’t do is ‘zoom.’ The two things you’re asking for here are, in effect, mutually exclusive. 

Here's a revelation: this affordable housing mess is in large part a wage problem. Follow the money. Were any other part of a business plan built around the expectation of perpetually buying materials and raw goods at below cost, it would never get financial backing. Plan on buying labor at below cost, however, and banks, venture capital and everyone else will line up to give you money on favorable terms.

People need to realize that the business practice of externalizing labor costs is the least efficient, most government-intensive way to operate. If, instead, government enacted and enforced minimum wages based on actual costs of living, the housing crisis would be significantly abated.

Think about it. The most efficient economic structure would have the cost of labor fully included in the price of goods made with that labor. Employers would pay their employees enough to go home and pay their own rent or mortgage. Homebuilders would would build based on clearly evident market demand for units and types of housing, because renters and homebuyers would be showing up with their own money (or mortgages based on their actual income). The only government intervention in this scenario is the prevention of corporate wage theft.

Instead, we currently allow and even encourage businesses of all types to pay workers less than it costs them to pay for their own housing plus other basic needs. For that low-wage worker to show up to work, they must depend on charity or, mostly, government programs to cover the difference. (Stay with me. Those government subsidies look like they're directed at the low-income folks to pay their rent, but in reality those subsidies are directed at the businesses to pay for part of their labor costs. Don't be fooled.)

These programs naturally have administrative overhead, adding a premium to the cost of subsidizing all these business' labor costs. Those costs in turn are covered by the collection of taxes, inordinately from all the people in the middle who make enough to pay taxes but lack the resources and political power to avoid them. (Many of whom are fooled into directing their dissatisfaction at the low-income workers who need the rent subsidy, instead of at the high-income execs and shareholders who are the actual beneficiaries of those subsidies. Follow the money. That misdirected anger then tricks those folks in the middle into aligning with the people who are actually taking their money and to vote for the politicians who enact the legal structure to perpetuate the process.)

Of course, the most common response to calls for implementation of a meaningful minimum wage is that it will raise prices of goods and therefore cause inflation. The first part is true, but the second is not. Requiring businesses to pay for their own actual labor costs will undoubtedly result in an increase in the price of their products, but that would not cause inflation because those costs are already being paid, through taxes, inefficiently and at a premium. 

So if conservatives and liberals alike would just follow the money, they'd agree to support the implementation of a cost-of-living-based minimum wage. It would decrease poverty and taxpayer-funded government programs at the same time, while reducing the distortion of the housing market that's causing the current affordable housing crisis.

One day we'll look back and laugh about that time when tech nerds accidentally started playing around with money laundering schemes used by the Russian mafia and various international drug cartels, while coke-addled Wall Street wannabes dumped all their money into it because the were sure it was the next big thing. Yeah, good times.