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Comment by switch007 | Hacker News Reader

There is more to it than your entitlement.

Is the person behind you not entitled to comfort?

Your car is sold with a horn. Are you entitled to sit on it for 10 minutes at 3am in a residential area for no reason? Possibly. Should you? That’s the more important question when we live in a society.

Also if your father in law absolutely needs to use his laptop perhaps he should fly business class (I can’t speak to domestic services but internationally you’re guaranteed to be unaffected by others’ seats)

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The car horn is a safety feature that is designed to be used as a warning mechanism. It's a poor analogy to compare it to "comfort", which literally translates into the passenger in the back also reclining and reclaiming the same amount of space.

At the end of the day, the person paid for a seat and that seat comes with comfort features that they can use.

To reiterate, it's a poor analogy as no one is honking at you or keeping you from sleeping or waking you up or whatever else a random car horn would do to you at 3 am (at which point you should be calling the authorities because if you live in a civilized place, that ought to be illegal)

Using your car horn in that manner is illegal in most places, as it should be. Shouldn't you be more upset with the airline for designing and selling a product that is almost unusable because of how uncomfortable it is?

Are you entitled to deny another person their comfort and use of a service they have paid for? I don't understand this argument because it goes both ways. The airline is the only entity to blame.

> Shouldn't you be more upset with the airline for designing and selling a product that is almost unusable because of how uncomfortable it is?

Precisely. As the article/book author is correct to point out too. And this applies to so many products and services these days. We're conditioned to accept what's made available, because there's usually little we can do about it directly. So companies are free to engage in "value engineering", successively making every product asymptotically approach the border between "fit for purpose" and "fraudulent marketing".

There’s a pretty big gap between “needs to work on flight” and “can afford business class”

Premium Economy bridges the gap.

When has there been any alluding to or promise of being able to work in economy? It always seemed best effort. Eg if your laptop was small enough, if you’re at a seat with power, if the person wasn’t reclining.

IMO you should not book economy with the expectation to work for any decent portion of it uninterrupted.

(Again this an EU/international view. I’ve not flown US domestic)

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