To avoid going postal, have your captains monitor the radio then. Problem solved for ya.

Just pull out a cup of soup, run the seat full aft, and in between slurps mumble hey can you get the radios for a bit. You can stretch that out for an hour or more if you're creative packing your lunch. Crackers with some sort of spread and a teeny tiny little TSA approved wooden spatula to spread it with can turn a light snack into a half-hour project, cold mic the whole time.

LAHSO isn’t just for intersecting runways. ATL has LAHSO hold lines near the end of some of their runways so they can legally cross aircraft at the end of the runway with landing traffic still on the runway. Not sure how often they use them, but they’re there.

Have you flown with me?

Yeah, this. The controller isn't asking you your speed because he's already decided what speed he wants you to maintain and he's reluctant to just come straight out and ask you to maintain it. Controllers are actually pretty good at not asking pointless questions merely as a conversational gambit. He's asking for your speed because it's information he needs, and by not giving him that information he just asked for, you're wasting his time and demonstrating that you don't quite grasp the concept.

Was just about to say this. To add, often it's the very last taxiway before the end of the pavement so if you miss that intersection, you're in the dirt. Never understood the point of refusing that sort of LAHSO. Controller might as well ask "hey Spirit, can you be assured you won't go off the end of the runway?" I guess when you refuse you're saying "Nope. Not a guarantee."

Oh well. Not in your ops specs, it's not in your ops specs.

Meh, I get what you're saying from a practical standpoint, but right or wrong, the legalities of Airline flying aren't about "practical" they're about black and white. Either you're trained and approved for LAHSO operations, or your not. If you're not, then ATC has to give you clear runway full length for landing. There really aren't any grey areas there. Would you accept a LAHSO clearance if you weren't approved for it? I wouldn't.

Exactly right, A Squared. The controller is asking the question because he needs to adjust either your speed or somebody else's. All he sees are groundspeeds. He has no idea what those translate to in IAS or Mach in your cockpit, and therefore doesn't know yet "what he wants." Maybe someday it will be permissible for a controller to assign groundspeeds. Until then, he needs an answer to the explicit question he asked. Several toolish responses in this thread.

These are valid criticisms of "what do you need" by itself, but I've never heard it by itself, only in conjunction with stating the speed as asked. Does this really exist in the wild?

At the risk of nominating myself yet again, I have answered “.75, what do you want?”, mostly to say I am flexible on the whole speed issue, as opposed to:”we are doing .76 due to turbulence” or something like that.