You can live in Minneapolis and be either North, South, East or West of the Mississippi.

A man after my own heart!

Woooo Pig Sooie!

Razorback one

When are you going to stop this shilling shiznit? Too many guys here have spoken to the reps of C2012 and we all know the truth of what happened. You have no clue whether this is part of the discussion now ...just like we didn't know what the MEC admin leadership was planning in C2012. The one trolling here is you.

Carl

And you are a user Starcheck102.

Carl

Well since the river runs on the east side of the airport I will say yes. ;). What ever direction it is I just hope we start to see some movement.

Well, I got my tablet a few days ago and it is pretty awesome. The company did not include the ram mount training video, so here is one from American Airlines. I am not sure how to imbed the video but here is the link, it's a must watch! m.youtube.com/watch?v=ByyFYFu6q2I

Agreed.

You may recall I caught a lot of grief here for stating that the commodity price spike of 2007 to 2008 was driven by speculators, namely sovereign wealth funds abroad and investment banks like Goldman Sach's.

While oil played a large part, other commodities like copper gained 300% in price.

We know nearly all economic models assume people will pay their bills. What we fail to adequately plan for is people not paying their bills. This includes governments.

The point being, at a $30 a barrel extraction cost there is plenty of room to tax energy, spend on infrastructure and supplement payouts to non producers. At $80 to $90 the margins for society are slim and at $180, the system begins to break down; immediate need for commodity goods outweighs fears of foreclosure on the family home.

This is a pattern history has watched as many societies have grown until they reached a decline in commodity supplies, often that being a decline in the quality of farm land and water. The pattern becomes a large income disparity and a growing reliance on government until that becomes insufficient and the masses take to the streets.

Consider this chart:


What you see is that that rising costs in some goods were offset in cost by declining prices until rising commodity prices spiked. That spike popped the bubble because people stopped paying their bills.

IMHO there is a role for a very active Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission.* As global populations push the limits of resource sustainability we face tighter margins. Undisciplined trading of commodities has led to global crisis and will again.

We in the United States were well insulated. At the medical university adjacent to the orphanage my family runs in the philippines the staff and teachers saw a fire on campus and went to investigate. They found Medical Students trying to boil and eat sticks and foliage due to the extreme rise in rice prices. We used our supplies to feed the students (and we've long enjoyed a symbiotic relationship by which their students provide medical care to our kids). Point being, when orphans are feeding Doctors there is a clear market disruption.

Unions are a stabilizing force at the bottom of the market and should be highly valued by workers, governments and even the market. I am thankful for ALPA's work with Delta Air Lines to keep me employed when it would have been much easier to furlough in 2008. Instead of selling our house to pay bills, we were able to take advantage of the market's "half price" sale. Thus, we were keeping several bankers, real estate agents, crews of workers and people in the taxing agencies earning as well. Yes, the stock market took it in the shorts and the Company took a $500,000,000.00+ loss. But thousands of people reliant on Delta kept paying their bills.

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* Legal carve outs for Health Care Maintenance Organizations and even permitted monopolization of data (Comcast, in a nutshell) should not exist.

I'm going to need more coffee. And my glasses. And I don't wear glasses. But now I need some.

Your concessions since Ch11 has risen by 5 billion in six months......


Fact is the model of today is not the model of yesteryear. We as pilots should not look at "restoration" as a benchmark to hit, its more complicated and requires intellectuals that are willing to tell you your wrong and there is a different way to do it. Rates, PBS, no pensions (good and bad to it) etc make an apples to apples comparison impossible and shortsighted.

We should be looking a nuggets form the past and ideas for the future and create a new PWA that works well for us moving forward, not one that will be riddled with issues because some of the basic realities are changed forever.

The notion of getting C2K plus inflation on day one is a pipe dream, and will never happen. Now if you are willing to accept outside of the box approaches to many items, and accept pay in alternate forms besides section 3, you give this pilot group and the profession more options. Absent that, you will be a mad no voter that sits in the corner and complains while the game is still played. Adjust you mindset to one that goes beyond talking points that lose all but 15% of this pilot group by the second sentence. Add substance not rhetoric.

Explain why it is ok for the company to ask for 30 or 40 or 50% of your pay overnight in concessions, but it is a "pipe dream" to ask for it back?