Bailouts could doom the airline industry!
 

If you look at the history of the railroads, you'll understand why:


https://fee.org/articles/railroad-history-suggests-federal-bailouts-could-spell-doom-for-airlines/

On the flip side, has ANYONE alive today ever heard of the Great Northern Railroad?

Asteroid COULD destroy the Earth
 

The one that took out the dinosaurs was actually only medium sized...

Fortunately we're cataloging the dangerous ones. I'd feel better if we had a defense capability on the shelf, but at this point I think we have enough advance notice on any extinction size objects.

Interestingly, I recently learned that the Chicxulub Asteroid impact caused such mass extinction more so because of its angle of arrival, rather than its mass. I recall that it impacted at about a 30 deg angle, which caused it to "skip" several times, before coming to a stop, and that this caused much more heat to be released into the atmosphere than a 90 deg impact angle would have.

Of course none of this is first hand knowledge:D

Near earth supernovas and Gamma Ray Bursts are another one, but I don't think we'll be close enough in our galactic orbit for at least tens of millions of years to be near any stars that are massive enough to go supernova.

Of course. The much more efficient railroad built by James J. Hill, whose namesake train, the Empire Builder is named after. (I knew this without reading the article.)

That article used terrible selective history.
Maybe we shouldn’t publish every thought out there.

Speaking of railroads, Jay Gould discovered that he could pay half of his employees to kill the other half for his benefit. Crandall used a slightly more civilized method.

Here's a wakeup call...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Jupiter_impact_event

This asteroid impact disturbance is the size of the Pacific Ocean. It occurred 11 years ago.

The image you're looking corresponds to an impact energy measured in Billions of tons of TNT (the largest fusion bomb ever tested was about 50 million tons). An impact like that might well end human civilization.

Railroads declined because of airplanes and automobiles, not because of mismanagement.

Airlines will go the same way once teleportation becomes readily available to the masses, and is no longer the jealously guarded purview of starfleet elites.

Bailouts = Socialism.

Damn.....I didn’t think a few hundred meters was large enough. I would have thought at least a mile or more to cause a realistic chance of mass extinction!

We are lucky all the gas giants are in the outer solar system.

Not when it’s the federal (and state) governments telling people not to travel. That blows the whole socialism argument out of the water.

That argument would have made sense in the 2008 recession, if the government bailed out airlines, but not now.

That might have caused some extinctions, but not humans. Might have set civilization back a few hundred years though.

Objects big enough to sterilize the planet are fortunately rare, and hopefully all in known orbits.

Fixed it for you.

Fake news. The earth is a flat motionless firmament disc with a dome enclosure that seals in our atmosphere. Don’t buy into what the priests at NASA are trying to sell you, use your own senses and the truth is clear.






/sarcasm

Union Pacific’s route winding and inefficient? For the most part UP’s current route (the Overland route) follows the original Transcontinental route, with the exception of some parts (including where the original golden spike was located) were changed as technology and profit allowed. Both railroads and right-of-way’s are key components of the current Union Pacific system (Original Union Pacific, Missouri Pacific, Western Pacific and Southern Pacific) and BNSF (Burlington Northern Santa Fe).

If the author really wanted to make his point, he should’ve used the Northern Pacific railroad verses the Great Northern.The NorPac was built with federal subsidies while the Great Northern was built with private funds. The Northern Pacific was merged out of existence in 1970 during the Burlington Route, Great Northern and Northern Pacific merger of 1970 which produced the Burlington Northern Railroad (Which later was merged with Santa Fe, which produced the BNSF railroad). NorPac’s route was poorly engineered, and was abandoned soon after the 1970 BN merger.

Ok, nerd switch off now, ha.

No, that's not socialism.

if giving money and opportunity to the poor is socialism... then....

Socialism is the nationalization of industries. Like healthcare for example and it's bad.

So you're saying that if we give money to the corporations, then we should nationalize them?

Interesting idea

No, just correcting your ignorance.

With your superior ignorance.

ok buddy

Cold, hard reality: some industries are so critical to the economy (like us for example) that the cascading costs of not bailing them out are far worse than the bailouts. There's nothing fair or equitable about it, it just comes down to what can we not live without.

Politicians need to keep the economic golden goose alive.

Government bureaucrats need to keep the tax base goose alive.

Nope, the Constitution disagrees.

Not to mention that the basic law of economics explain why what you have described is a horrible idea.

what?
what part of the constitution was infringed?
what laws of economics?

Bailing out business (or people for that matter) isn't authorized in the Constitution.

As far as economics, it is a bad idea to do so because it is paid for by either borrowed or printed money, both of which are harmful to the economy. And it creates what is known as a moral hazard. -- https://fee.org/articles/the-moral-h...of-government/

Promote the general welfare...?

Constitution doesn't forbid it, and it reasonably falls under prudent governance per both precedent and the constitution... the constitution doesn't authorize you to fly airplanes either.

I'd give the airlines a pass on moral hazard on this one, because they were mostly positioned to weather a 9/11 type event or other typical downturn. Loss of essentially all revenue for 4-8 months was not what anyone would have considered a plausible scenario two months ago. There's no precedent for this.

And the airlines are a very key economic pillar... the economy will not come back without them, or at least not as anything recognizable and certainly not within a decade. Too many other sectors would have to completely collapse and then re-invent themselves, or be replaced by something new. That would take 10-30+ years and result in global human misery beyond reckoning. And war, don't forget that part... plague and famine don't tend to ride very far without their two brothers.

That's not what it means. At the time it was written that phrase meant that anything the government did had to be for the general welfare of all people (as opposed to the welfare of a few or upper class).

Of course it does. 10th Amendment.


Per the 9th Amendment, it doesn't have to. In fact the feds have no authority to regulate flight at all, other than across national borders. If the Constitution were amended to allow the FAA, then it would be Constitutional.




That's crazy talk. Where there is a demand someone will step in to fill the supply. Econ 101.

Jupiter is a little bigger than earth and a little easier to hit.

That is true, as the period from WW2 to 1981 illustrates perfectly. The reason why is because labor was given a much larger share of capital than it ever had before, or since. That has been undone and society is back to the gilded age. Under the current rules many billionaires are created before there's enough minimum wage jobs to go around.The USA may be relatively comfortable but has become very much a thirld world economy.

Do you mean the company that ran mostly along the US-Canada border and had a billy goat as their mascot? You mean the one that took my family to a new home in Minisota?

Nope, never heard of it.

Easy trivia questions for aviators:
What two railroads merged to form the BNSF?
What three railroads made up "The Chessie System?" Follow up: why was it called "The Chessie System?"

Even Chessie the cat can spell Minn.

Easy. Burlington Northern and Santa Fe. I almost went to work for them as a dispatcher in 2009, during my last furlough.

I don't know the exact answer to the second but I'm thinking Chessie was part of C&O? I fail as rail foamer.

C&O+ B&O+Western Maryland = Chessie System. Wasn’t it named after a cartoon, or something? It had something to do with the logo right?

Chessie System+ Atlantic Coast Line= CSX Transportation, correct? Still a foamer, I probably should’ve worked for a railroad vice aviation. I’d be close to retirement now!