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Comment by gwern | Hacker News Reader

I think the issue here is more one of externalities. We all know that fuel prices are not at the true cost which prices in all the pollution, geopolitical turmoil, military interventions, global warming, government subsidies etc, and that fuel is one of the largest costs airlines have. So when this guy and his followers hop on planes and fly millions of miles, often for no reason other than to game some tiny loophole in airlines' marketing for their own amusement, it's no different than if they had taken a bunch of oil tankers and lit them on fire and danced by the flickering light - in the end, they've killed some time, and a lot of valuable resources have been consumed to do so. Couldn't they have found productive jobs and just played Xbox on their time off or something? Did this really have to be their hobby/profession?

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Seriously, you could apply this to any hobby if you want to use an endless list of externalities.

I mean, come on. It's not like the plane would be sitting on the Tarmac if he didn't board it. It's flying anyway.

> Seriously, you could apply this to any hobby if you want to use an endless list of externalities.

I don't think you could. Fuel is one of the most mispriced things in the world; airlines may not be paying pennies a gallon like certain countries wastefully subsidize fuel in their countries, but it's pretty blatant that fuel subsidies of every kind are enormous, and they've been particularly singled out by economists like the IMF as wasteful.

> It's not like the plane would be sitting on the Tarmac if he didn't board it. It's flying anyway.

On the margin of plane flights, there would be fewer plane flights if he didn't have this 'hobby', and much more directly, every flight he boards wastes a lot more fuel simply carrying his weight.

Part of the reason this hobby continues to exist (and remain so lucrative for some participants) is because they are such a small segment of the total passenger miles traveled. If we had some numbers I think it would dramatically weaken this particular argument. Also in general the airlines' primary justification for giving away seats as awards is that they predict those seats will go unsold.

I'd be surprised if there are more than a thousand or so people who game the FF programs to this degree. And the number who do so to the degree of Lucky (subject of the article) is probably in the single digits.

That said, I don't think Lucky even comes close to the amount of flying Tom Struker does, United's only 10 million mile member.

How much is actually being burned though? How much fuel does it take to transport 200lbs on a transpacific flight?

Wikipedia suggests ~100 mpg/passenger [1]. As Schlappig has flown more than 400,000 miles, he's burned up about 4,000 gallons of fuel. That's a lot of fuel. It's enough to heat a northeastern United States home for about eight winters [2].

But it's not that much fuel. A 30-mpg automobile will consume a similar quantity of fuel (gasoline, not jet fuel) in 120,000 miles of driving.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport... [2] http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/tables/pdf/wf-table.pdf

Perhaps more importantly, how much fuel does it take to transport 200lbs in relation to transporting the rest of the plane?

Not like he's specifically chartering the flights, the planes is going to fly with or without him.

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