Lufthansa confirmed that 18k flights had been flown empty to keep slots

Under the current system, legacy carriers got their slots for free or very cheap so they do wasteful things to keep their slots. They've been using smaller than optimal planes for years, and since the pandemic started the empty planes thing has gotten more common.

Airports also benefit from stability, though; airlines taking up a large percentage of traffic at a hub drive more traffic than if all those slots were split due to network effects. And to some degree people who transit airports tend to transit the same ones, so there are downsides to hectic, constant auctions of slots.

The main issue is that COVID has made demand totally dry up across the board, and so the inherent assumption, that giving away a slot will bring in passenger traffic where there is none, has fallen apart.

AFAIK airports charge airlines start and landing fees. By threatening airlines to loose their slots they ensure their steady revenue stream.

Keeping pilots current and keeping planes in service? At least down to 10% slot use, I'd be surprised if that's a real issue.

But yes, fundamentally it's a case of the cost of operation being lower than the risk posed by new airlines.

Having planes fly empty to maintain a monopoly is just bad all around

Lufthansa's interest is piqued. They already price out competitors, they've bought many smaller airlines (even the "national" airlines Swiss and Austria) and operate them at slim to negative margins to keep the workers quiet (the threat of bankruptcy prevents them from rebelling too much)..

When people say "they're just responding to incentives", what they often imply is that we should be changing the incentives, or going after the people who made those incentives. I think that's true on both a practical and moral level.

On a practical level, we are not going to get a corporation to make less money, for the most part, by appeals to morality. It just doesn't work. Changing the incentives absolutely does work. Both of these have been proven time and again.

On a moral level, I really don't think it's the fault of companies when they respond to incentives. We have a society in which people elect representatives to pass laws and regulations. If they pass bad laws and regulations and people follow them, then it's the regulators' fault, not the people they regulate. You can't have every person in the system enacting their own idea of morality - partially because they don't have the complete picture, partially because they don't have the same morality, partially because any company that decides to change how it behaves without the regulations themselves changing will just be outcompeted in most cases.

The one big caveat to that is that companies have a pretty massive amount of influence on the regulators themselves, and they can definitely use that influence in moral or immoral ways.

I often see this on HN in form of "working on X thing is immoral and everyone should just quit and not accept that work" and it makes the commenter feel superior to all the immoral people who work on immoral projects all the while forgetting that people just want to put food on the table.

In case it is not painfully obvious to you by now: YOU would have also been following orders had you been there.

Is it really immoral to follow orders that were issued by an entity that has a monopoly on violence?

You should not receive order that are inhumane. And you should not have regulation set up in a way that bad behavior makes you money.

The switch to paper straws was theoretically about eliminating single use plastics.

As someone who has done scientific surveys of beach flotsam: my personal feeling is that the switch to paper straws will change precisely nothing as far as global plastic pollution goes.

Nature quickly healed.

I pretended that using the recycling bin would change something, but I know that nobody takes our garbage anymore.

"apparently insufficient" doesn't count as bad?

relaxing these requirements during a period of heavily restricted air travel is an objectively correct policy

the organisation's institutional inflexibility/political inability to solve this very simple problem is yet another demonstration of the EU's current structure being unfit for purpose (or able to respond in a timely manner to current events)

> At least they can claim one good thing came out of Brexit. They need any win, however small.

there are plenty

note that any perceived negative changes are immediately reported as a direct consequence of leaving

however the converse is not true: positive changes don't tend to be reported as a direct consequence of leaving

make of this what you will

(and unsurprisingly: it takes a while to see the effects of more responsive and accountable governance)

I'm absolutely certain they would. Monopolies are incredibly profitable, after all, and a repeatable strategy for killing off all newcomers is step zero.

I.e., that government rule was created to address a rational but pathological behavior in a market.

Lufthansa could always not fly those routes. But then the business would lose money to fines, possibly lose gates, and maybe go bankrupt.

So, yes, in the name of the business. And of course that business's behavior is completely predictable.

Anyways.

Pointing fingers at isms is a waste of time. Businesses operate in markets. Markets are human inventions. Especially in the case of something like an airline, a Market is a Market in the Stock Market sense not in the Bazaar sense.

The question is: how do we modify market rules without re-introducing the aforementioned pathology?

Which is a REALLY hard question! The simplest solution, from a market perspective, might be charging a fair price for carbon, such that this sort of behavior is no longer rational. Of course, that's a non-started politically, so... here we are.

E.g. the local Dutch airline can keep its dutch spots a lot more easily than a Canadian airline.

Summer fights were almost normal. And even flights up to December weren't too affected.

This form of entitlement is more disgusting to me than any snarky comments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel?oldformat=true#...

So it's already possible to not have to change a normal light bulb for 10 years — in fact there's currently a bulb that's been burning for 118 years.

The parent comment actually makes a good point, and shifting the blame for global warming to non-corporate entities is disingenuous. Sure, go ahead and recycle, buy LEDs instead of incandescent bulbs, buy local produce, these are all good things to do and I would never discourage them, but let's not buy into the nonsense that it's going to make a dent compared to say, shipping containers (https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/cargo-container-shipping...). To do so would move focus away from where things really need to change.

If I was someone partial to conspiracy theories, I might point out that this shift in focus is convenient for the corporate entities I alluded to.