Part of the issue is that Minivans are really expensive, and parents with lots of kids tend to not have as much money as childless adults.
for Cars and SUVs:
- A Chevy Equinox starts at $28k MSRP.
- A Toyota RAV4 starts at $29k MSRP.
- A Toyota Prius (PHEV) starts at $33k MSRP.
but for minivans:
- A Honda Odyssey (gas only) starts at $42k MSRP.
- A Chrysler Pacifica (PHEV) starts at $51k MSRP.
Minivans are actually really popular for families in the midwest, for folks who can afford it. If you can't, the option becomes "Get a Minivan, or get an SUV and save $15,000 USD", which obviously skews a lot of families towards the SUV.
So shoving two or three kids in the back of a cheap SUV is pretty normal, event though it's less convenient in a lot of other ways.
If you have more than 2 kids the minivan is the clear winner. A two row SUV can't hold 3 car seats, and even a 3 row SUV will have trouble, plus strapping kids in is way harder.
Actually SUVs often have more width interior side-to-side in bench setups, making it possible to put in 3 child car seats side-by-side (child seats are often very wide, full width of seat and wider than topical adult hip width). Minivans have less, especially in back row where wheel wells are more more likely to be involved since the minivan doesn’t sit as high as an SUV.
Yes, when I looked at minivans it seemed like the concept had lost its way. When they were popular in the 1980-90s it seemed they were bare bones and fairly affordable, and certainly the best way to cheaply move a lot of people. They'd turned into heavily featured family vehicles by the time I was shopping in the 2010s and their prices were so high I never even test drove one.
The same sort of thing happened to trucks which turned into giant impractical luxury vehicles. I think with trucks it is worse though because minivans are actually sleeper cargo haulers where as a lot of trucks its pretend or for show.
The comparison to a "$150k sports car" is crazy -- a Sports Car can be a flashy way to display wealth. No one is displaying wealth by having once paid for a Sublime License.
No one is sliding up to folks at a bar, flashing their Coda license, to prove they've "made it". "Hey baby, why don't you come back to my place, I've got a developer license for the entire JetBrains Product Suite" is simply not a thing.
The closest analogy I can think of, is probably in construction hardware tooling. Folks being "Mikita" vs "DeWalt" vs "Milwaukee" people or some such.
> The author cherry picks the SV area which is not indicative of the country as a whole.
The whole country is SV now, plus or minus a few percentage points.
Even in nowheresville-Michigan, any house near any job costs about 4 to 5 times what it did 15 years ago. We even have cities that have lost total population and the prices still skyrocketed. Even if you scope it to just say, a specific small town -- a house that cost $80k in 2012, that exact same house now costs $360k in 2024, and wages did not rise 400% to compensate.
Tech folks sit in SV with a $200k/yr income and think, "ah, see, Michigan is so affordable". But the people here are holding Masters Degrees and student debt and make $45k/yr, $360k is every bit as out of reach to them, as a $1.5 million house is to you in SV.
Sure, not every place is SV from a literal perspective. But from a relative percent basis, nearly every city in every state in the US is now experiencing their own SV-like housing price explosion (regardless of whether their total population has grown or shrank, regardless of whether they have made it difficult to develop, or have been very open to new development, as most of Michigan has always been).
A much more salient cause is the 0% (base) interest rates. Obviously you can afford the a larger mortgage at 3% than at 7%. This should eventually reverse itself with higher interest rates, but right now no one with a 3% mortgage is selling, because then they'd be stuck with a higher mortgage, so there are even fewer houses available for purchase, but roughly the same demand.
I also think AirBnB has increased housing prices, although I don't know how one would find evidence for that. But with AirBnB, now your house can also produce income, so the price of a home should rise to account for that. Plus it reduces supply, because some people rent out homes on AirBnB without even living in them.
Student debt didn't cause the financial crisis of '08, opaque securitization of home mortgages did. That created a domino effect of brokers handing out variable-rate loans to people who didn't understand the terms. They didn't care about the deliquency rate because they could sell that mortgage to another party and make it their problem. The whole thing was a ticking time bomb.
None of that applies to student loans because those aren't collateralized with a real asset the way home loans are.
> Student debt didn't cause the financial crisis of '08, opaque securitization of home mortgages did.
That's what Canada said in 2008, claiming its much more regulated financial sector avoided the situation. Yet look now...
While you are right that subprime mortgages contributed a temporary exacerbation, they still needed a catalyst to drive the price of homes higher in the first place. Said mortgages only became available because homes were increasing in value already (which was historically unusual), making lenders see it as a safe bet. That is, of course, until the homes started falling in price in late 2006, which brought on panic as the mortgages started coming up for renewal.
Outside of the US, UK and Switzerland, OECD countries did not experience major bank failures in 2008 (maybe also France w/ BNP Paribas). Yet housing costs are rising in all OECD economies. The point I'm making is that housing is seen as an asset class, so it's a political priority to keep prices high. There is no such equivalent in the student loans market because outside of the US, higher education doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
> Yet housing costs are rising in all OECD economies.
Exactly. Especially in economies that are struggling to turn the education into something real. The US fares a little better here compared to many other OCED countries because of its strong tech industry creating things that are real, but it is certainly not immune.
After all, if you spend $100,000 on an education, and then use that education to create a widget that sees buyers send $100,000 back to you there is no impact on housing. You got an education, they got widgets, you can pay your loan back. This is a win-win situation and the economy is better for it. If students turn the debt into something real, you don't have a problem. This is why we offer student loans. They can be leveraged to benefit an economy.
The problem is when someone spends $100,000 on an education and then resorts to taking a regular job – a job just like they would have done anyway. Now you have an extra $100,000 floating around in the economy with no home. An extra $100,000 that needs to find a home, and it turns out a literal home has been a good place for it to end up.
At least with traditional debt, if you failed to create a compelling widget you'd be forced to give up your security, and the $100,000 you borrowed would go back into someone else buying that security. Worst case, if someone declares bankruptcy then someone else ends up giving up something real. But student loans create a 'fake' situation if the student fails to create something real afterwards. There is nothing real that already exists to fall back on if they fail to succeed, and if it is also not dischargeable in bankruptcy...
> higher education doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
Not true. Any unsecured, non-dischargeable debt always costs an arm and a leg. The only way to repay it is to put those arms and legs to use. The same arm and leg that one would have otherwise used to buy their own home, now helping to pay for someone else's. It turns out that when you help someone else pay for their home with your arms and legs, they can pay more than they would be able to without your help. Who'd a thunk it.
>strong tech industry creating things that are real
I don't think this is as clear of a claim as, say, the manufacturing economy of previous generations. Tech creates a lot of speculative value which sometimes turns into something real, but often does not.
There is real value there. American tech sells things people actually want.
And, indeed, we even saw home prices fall quite considerably when that real value creation was at its peak (iPhone, Facebook, etc.) as the money started wanting to buy what that real value had to offer.
I think it is fair to say since that peak we've seen more speculation than actual value creation, but that's why money is taking more interest in housing again. Still, the US is in a better place than many OCED countries with respect to housing thanks to still seeing some real value creation (and more of it, relatively speaking).
I'm not implying there is no value. I'm drawing a distinction with high-PE industries, like tech, where the market value is highly biased to future (unrealized) potential. Previous generations, where hardware manufacturing was the dominant industry, had "value" more tightly coupled to realized value.
That’s not my claim, but it would seemingly follow with your hypothesis (along with a range of other asset classes). The tough part is actually showing good data of the causal relationship.
I'm lost. How did people being poorer (having more student debt) push prices higher?
Most of the people I'm thinking of don't have student debt for fun. They did it because their jobs either hard-required it (to get licensed), or soft-required it (to get hired). Think folks who are teachers, social workers, LPN nurses, therapists, healthcare admins, etc.
Education and Mental Health seem to be the worst cases for this -- it's expected that you have 4 to 7 years of expensive college education, and 1 to 3 years of internships/practice, and after all of that, you get to maybe make $40k. If you are lucky you can eventually work your way up to $60k-$75k/yr.
> I'm lost. How did people being poorer (having more student debt) push prices higher?
Huh? Why would it make people poorer? If you take a $100,000 loan and then give the $100,000 to me, I'll be $100,000 richer. That is $100,000 more than I can spend on a house.
A college brings more indirection than you simply handing me $100,000, but the essence is the same. Were you under the impression that colleges burn the money?
Do you know of anyone who took out student loans to buy a home? Presumably, the OP was saying that debt was already spent on something non-fungible (like education). By most examples, that money is spent by the time a student graduates.
You still haven't made clear how I am poorer when I, the hypothetical provider of education, gained $100,000 from the student.
The student is giving up the future money they would have otherwise used to buy a home in order to give it to me, sure, but we already know that. That was established in the comment about Michigan. Did you forget to the read the entire thread, or something?
Is your point that student loan debt is flowing to the administrators of higher education and making it's way back to the economy to push up home prices?
If so, it's an interesting hypothesis, but there's a few questions like a) why did it only start to occur in the last decade or so when student loans have been increasing for decades, b) why does this specifically impact housing prices and not other CPI items, and c) has there been any empirical data to actually show this relationship?
> Is your point that student loan debt is flowing to the administrators of higher education and making its way back to the economy to push up home prices?
I'm saying taking on debt comes with the assumption that you can create new value, over and above the debt value, in the future. Normally, lenders require a promise of value you have already created (security) to fall back on if you fail to create that future value in order to keep things in check. Not so for student loans, though. They are assumable by those who haven't created any value in the past, and who may struggle to create new value in the future. This creates a distortion in the economy.
> why did it only start to occur in the last decade or so
Why do you say that? As far as I can see it started in and around the 1950s and really started accelerating in the 1970s. Before that housing prices were almost perfectly stagnant.
> why does this specifically impact housing prices and not other CPI items
Mostly a function of what else are you going to buy? I wouldn't say housing is the only place that has attracted money (remember Bitcoin?), but may be the most notable.
If everyone saw a share of the money then you might find competition in buying things like bread, but if it is only the top 10% (for the sake of illustration) taking the proceeds, there isn't much pressure for them to pay more for bread. Only for the things the other people in the "top 10%" want to compete for.
I don't think we disagree on this. Students, by the nature of generally have no/limited assets, are able to get loans because they are backed by the government.
>As far as I can see it started in and around the 1950s
It took on a completely different character in recent decades, though. Changes in regulation and private loans have changed the rate of debt.
>Mostly a function of what else are you going to buy?
Forgive me if I'm putting words in your mouth, but it seems like you're saying money flows to education administrators and they disproportionately invest in housing. I'd need to see some data backing that up before I draw a stronger conclusion on it, otherwise it's just a neat and untested hypothesis. And you would expect other administrator-preferred asset classes to follow suit. If your stance is that money goes into the economy as a whole, I would expect a range of products to track with student loan increases, but I'm not sure the data backs that up either.
Because people buying something means they no longer have the money, and are thus, poorer. If you have $20, and you buy lunch for $10, you now are $10 poorer.
> Were you under the impression that colleges burn the money?
(looking around at my alma mater, which has tripled the size of administration and built like four new sports stadiums, while the wages of professors have remained flat for ten years and cost-per-credit-hour has tripled) -- um, yes? Are there colleges that don't just burn the money, or dump it into stocks/bonds/trusts/etc?
> Because people buying something means they no longer have the money, and are thus, poorer.
How does you, hypothetically, paying me $100,000 to teach you how to weave baskets under water make me poorer? By my math I gained $100,000. $100,000 more I now have to spend on a house that I wouldn't have had otherwise.
> Are there colleges that don't just burn the money?
Presumably all of them. At very least they pass a large portion of that money off to administrators, who then often buy houses with the money.
And if the driver of higher housing prices was college administrators, you'd have a point. Would you care to demonstrate that college administrators are in fact the cause? Because without presenting such data, you're not going to convince many of us, who currently believe that college administrators are, at best, a very minor contributor to high overall housing prices.
> And if the driver of higher housing prices was college administrators, you'd have a point.
I don't follow. If college administrators were driving the price of housing, my point would fall apart immediately. That was in response to someone who thought colleges burn money, not the greater topic at hand.
> you're not going to convince many of us
Okay...? Why would I want to convince anyone of anything? That doesn't make any sense.
>a house that cost $80k in 2012, that exact same house now costs $360k in 2024
I think this is making a similar mistake in sampling. Your baseline is a price that still hadn't recovered from the housing market crash of 2008-2010. I lived in Michigan during that time and I distinctly remember the ability to find reasonable homes for less than my annual salary. To be clear: I am not saying housing prices aren't inflated now, I'm just saying it probably isn't as bad as the author insinuates because they are cherry-picking their comparisons and also not controlling for important factors like home size. Houses built in the last decade are 40%-50% bigger than those of previous generations (although this trend may be reduced in more recent years as a response to increased construction cost).
>But the people here are holding Masters Degrees and student debt
I think this is a real driver of unaffordability, but not necessarily home prices. If all student loans were forgiven, I would expect home prices to increase (because people now have more money to pay for a home without a commensurate increase in supply). My opinion is that there are too many bad incentives in the housing market. Local municipalities prefer high property values because it increases tax revenue. Existing home owners like high housing prices because it makes them feel rich and gives them a revolving line of credit in home equity loans. When people have 70% of their net worth tied up in a single asset class, they are going to go to great lengths to protect it even if it screws other people over.
It's less about the games being high-quality, and more the games being community-created and user-driven.
Roblox isn't a competitor to Astro's Playroom or Ratchet and Clank. Roblox is like, the next generation of ActiveWorlds, or like a user-generated version of Uru. It's a 3D Chatroom that solved the problem of "what do you do when people want something to do, while standing around chatting in the 3D chatroom?" by saying, "we'll give a bunch of tech tooling to the players, and maybe 0.1% of them will do something interesting with it". And that's enough.
The closest PS5 equivalent would be something like, the Dreams game from Media Molecule.
----
As a parent (with a kid, who loves Roblox), I totally get it. I lived on ActiveWorlds as a kid, I saved up paper-route money to pay for my own "P-10 World" back in the day. The next summer, I used paper-route money to buy a "catch-a-call" device, so I could be on ActiveWorlds via Dial-up without tying up the phone line from my parents. I had an entire alternative identity and active social life on there in middle-school & high-school. I would bicycle all the way downtown to local community college, to take VB6 classes with college students over the summer, to learn how to program against their ActiveX control API to write my own ActiveWorlds Bot, to interact with folks in my private ActiveWorld. I ran an ActiveWorlds "TV Station" (in AW, you could set a JPEG image to 'refresh' regularly like a webcam, and I would point the URL at a custom PHP script I ran on an old cPanel-based shared hosting plan, that would rotate JPEG images out in appropriate order every 1 or 2 seconds, in pre-programmed ways, so you could have 'shows' broadcasting, and you could switch to 'live' (screenshots) on 'air' and such)
I treat Roblox similarly for my child. (They can play on it, but never use real names, reveal no personal information, there's some time limits to ensure you don't go crazy, talk through appropriate content and what stuff warrants adult intervention, etc. And gently prod them that, if they're ready to deep-dive on Roblox, all the tools people use to make their favourite "obbys" are things they could actually learn and write themselves, with some time and patience and practice...)
> It's less about the games being high-quality, and more the games being community-created and user-driven.
There's also the socialization part. My kid's friends are all on Roblox. They don't get together IRL because a lot of them moved away when their parents had to move, and others just live way across town and "meeting at the park" is so 1980s. When new kids come to school, they share their Roblox and Fortnite usernames and that's where they hang out after school to socialize.
It sounds like the platform really matters for Roblox, if it's that much of a creative tool. BTW the first time I'd heard of "ActiveWorlds" (or Uru) was just now from your comment. And it also sounds like my kids don't have the problem Roblox solves! (And I don't really want them standing around in a chat room looking for things to do; absent a compelling reason to look at a screen, I encourage them to do real-world things.)
> Carriers see the ability to easily move a physical SIM outside of their control as a problem
Every carrier has already had the ability to block moving physical SIMS too, for many decades now. (AT&T in the US literally did used to block physical SIM swaps, for ages)
eSIMs don't actually give carriers any more-or-less control over SIM movement than they already had before.
Maybe this was common in the US, but absolutely unheard of in Europe.
eSIMs allow them to sneak in that control as part of the move to eSIMs and get consumers to accept it, even though technically they already had this control previously.
You open your web-browser on anything with service (your laptop / desktop / toaster / Nintendo Wii U / whatever), go to "insert-my-carrier-here.com", login, and click "move eSIM". You type in the IMEI/eSIM ICCID number on the back of your new phone (or in the 'settings' menu on the new phone), and wait a few minutes. Your plan moves over as-is, same with your telephone number, etc.
Yes, it's steps, and it takes time, and in a remote situation, those are real barriers with real trickiness. But it's no more tricky than saying, "I smashed my laptop, how do I check my gmail now?".
> My old phone is dead and my new phone doesn’t have a SIM. I have to go out of my way to find a Wifi network (for billions of people their phone is their only internet connection)
Ok, sure. Yes, eSIM requires you have a new device to connect with. But other than that, it's not terribly tricky. (You can do it via your carriers mobile app, or you can transfer via any web browser, you don't have to get to a store or get a new sim card, its usually free to transfer an eSIM, etc).
> Because of this I will end up paying to repair a phone that I have already replaced, just to extract the eSIM!
That's not really how eSIMs work. No one regular person would ever need to do that. (If you are already in a phone repair place, you already have everything you need to transfer your service to a new eSIM in ~5 minutes anyway).
> eSIM seems like it was designed by someone from the US who has no idea how the rest of the world uses phones, particularly the developing world.
Well, I suppose that's fair (in that, half of the carriers in the US already did service provisioning without SIM cards at all on legacy non-GSM networks for a decade, so for them eSIM is entirely upgrade with no downside).
But as someone who actually uses eSIMs, the only real annoyance I've seen on eSIMs, is that US Cellular Carriers often lock it down to postpaid only or prepaid carriers don't know how to support it properly, so changing eSIMs on prepaid/mvnos is still a huge pain. (For example, US Mobile's eSIM support didn't reliably work for me on Verizon, but Visible's eSIM support did work on Verizon, despite literally being the same eSIM, same device, same network). Or they put artificial delays on provisioning, so it takes an hour for the network to "update" the "profile" or whatnot. So, while the technology works fine, carriers artificially make it kind of a pain.
But that's not SIM vs eSIM's fault at all, carriers also made switching physical SIMs a huge pain for many years (AT&T used to device-lock SIM cards, for example, defeating the entire point of the card).
> Then what do I tell customer support?
Nothing? It's like saying, "if I want to check my gmail, what do I tell customer support when I telephone call in?". The question is kind of nonsensical. You wouldn't call customer support, the whole point of an eSIM is you no longer have to talk to customer support to transfer the SIM.
> But really mixing two powertrains is expensive and complex, and can only be fit in big cars.
So "big, expensive, and complex", that Toyota's only been doing it since 2003. (Or 1997, in Japan).
Yes, it's a luxury to have both drivetrains and a sizable battery. But it's not a huge one. (using USA MSRP pricing, a Nissan Leaf starts at $30k, a Toyota Prius Prime PHEV starts at $34k).
On the contrary, a small plugin hybrid makes perfect sense. You get all the benefits of the EV (somewhere between 40 to 60 miles of non-gasoline driving, every night, with no emissions) and you get all the benefits of an ICE (easy road trips, two-minute refills, etc). And yes, it incurs the costs and maintenance of both, but traditional hybrid cars have already proved for decades now that it's possible to handle that well.
I love my Gen 2 Chevy Volt (had the Gen1 Volt before that, and a 2009 Toyota Yaris before that). If my Gen2 Volt died, I legitimately don't know what I'd do, most cars are a huge downgrade, there's only a few decent PHEV's still on the market.
Toyota should have been pursuing this strategy from the beginning, and I'm told their current Prius PHEV is pretty good, but all that means is that it's finally competitive with 2013-era Chevrolet. Chevy killing Voltec is probably their biggest strategic failure in the past decade -- they stopped it just a few years before those vehicles became popular.
Something like ~6% feels "fair" (where "fair" means, is equal to the approximate value provided).
Apple isn't really incurring any costs for this. They don't make any of the content, they don't write any of the software, they do host the 'applications', but they only deliver the tiniest parts of the app (they host a small binary, but they aren't hosting the videos on Netflix or YouTube, for example, or the major assets in an MMO game or such) and a lot of the labor they do "provide" isn't necessarily valuable (their "review" of the apps, for example).
The 30% figure seems to be pulled from gaming console markets, but it was never really justified over there either, and the previous economics that made it work (like subsidized hardware) never applied to Apple's ecosystem. (iPads aren't like, $99 each, and priced at that point, with the expectation that Apple will 'make it up' via the 30% tax on app store sales, the way consoles once were)
For Epic this is almost entirely about Fortnite, where they're making ~$5 billion a year selling skins and emotes to children while not being in App Store or Google Play.
Epic wants the millions of users and IAP they would get by being on these platforms but they want to pay 0% to the platforms for it.
If I want to run a television ad during the Super Bowl it should cost $0 because the network doesn't own the audience, right?
Of course not. That's why the ask has always been a percentage reflecting the economic value to the developer created by the platform, which is surely non-zero.
Bad analogy. The ad company is purchasing slots from the network.
This is more like the TV manufacturer demanding a cut of the ad revenue because they've demanded all incoming feeds go through their middleman software layer.
The problem is not that selling access to users has no value. The problem is that it is anti competitive to sell access to these users in the first place by virtue of putting up barriers for other companies to distribute to customers
That's a specious example. If I'm showing your Super Bowl ad, I can't show anyone else's at the same time. Having one app available by a means doesn't make others unavailable.
And even then - the Super Bowl ad pricing is directly correlated to the number of users that ad will be delivered to.
All of that becomes even more emphasized if there's an alternate app store experience.
the Super Bowl ad pricing is directly correlated to the number of users that ad will be delivered to
Correct. The value is in the audience reach, not the opportunity cost of not being able to show another ad.
Epic stands to make billions from the audience reach of these platforms, but when it comes to paying for that reach it somehow computes the value to be zero. That's some Hollywood accounting.
"Hollywood Accounting" refers to exaggerating losses on items so as to avoid paying dues on profits and is completely irrelevant to this situation.
The "App Store" is a platform that offers reach in distribution channels. The Epic Games store is a platform that offers reach in distribution channels. The iphone is not. If you buy software through the epic games store, then apple gets nothing but a middle finger.
Do we not understand metaphor here? Revenue exists when paying ourselves but disappears when we owe a cut to others. Hollywood Accounting.
Epic would not be fighting so hard to get back on iOS and Android if they did not expect to make piles of cash from the massive market those platforms created, but when it comes to paying those platforms, they say the fair value is 0. That's the same logic at play.
As for buying from the Epic Games Store, I think you may be a little confused. These terms are for link-outs from apps you first installed via the App Store. You're still getting the app via Apple with this.
> Do we not understand metaphor here? Revenue exists when paying ourselves but disappears when we owe a cut to others. Hollywood Accounting.
No you just don't understand accounting. Hollywood Accounting has nothing to do with hiding revenue. It obfuscates profit.
Epic standing to make money is not a problem. Apple made its money when it sold the phones to customers. It has no right to continue to extract taxes. That is completely unrelated to hollywood accounting.
The fees on links are just part of a broader problem that apple is preventing fair competition on software distribution.
> Epic would not be fighting so hard to get back on iOS and Android if they did not expect to make piles of cash from the massive market those platforms created, but when it comes to paying those platforms, they say the fair value is 0. That's the same logic at play.
I would argue that it's also entirely possible that if Apple had taken or being willing to negotiate a less usurious cut, that Epic would have been quite happy and not played hardball.
Wouldn't the easy solution be to use two sets of letters for IATA coded flights for the same airline?
Something like "DL1234" and "DZ1234" for Delta?
I know a lot of the two-letter codes are claimed too, and I'm sure there must be some reason this wouldn't work OK, but it would seem like they they would each have at least one code left over from the various airlines they've acquired over the years?
If an American Airlines regional flight started with "TW1234" again, for example, I don't think it would break the world.
It almost certainly would completely break thousands of functions that have those magic letters hard coded into them in fortran, cobol, C or whatever. You might even find that clever people back in the 70s used other ways of representing those letters so you can't even search for them.
I've worked on codebases like this -- I've seen it take a team of engineers years to add a single digit to an ID number in a multi-million LOC mixed language codebase that was written in the 60s.
It's not that it can't be done, it's that it costs millions of dollars and takes years and you're never sure it's actually done because nobody has ever written a single test for the system and if you tried that would take years as well.
In prior roles, I've worked at 2 of the largest US airlines that have gone through mergers. There are lots of hard-coded letters in decades-old code that help identify what's mainline, regional, and OA (other airline). We're talking everything from reservations (booking) to revenue recognition (flight departure).
It would be no simple feat to upgrade the tech stack. Hell, some of the mergers are still lingering within the systems because airlines wanted to complete it quickly for the passengers. The backend, however, has band-aids all over the place.
And there is so much functional testing that needs to occur on systems boundaries. I'm just thinking of crazy things that happen often enough like luggage getting put on the wrong flight and shipped via another carrier via agreement.
I get the appeal (and the 60 years of accumulated technical skeletons, and the business and legal necessity) of keeping all of the airline’s segments coded as the same carrier and notionally able to connect to one another. I do wonder, though: in your scheme with a notional “DL” range and a notional “DZ” range, would it be feasible to partition the real-world flight networks in a way that keeps all the tickets as “same-carrier” according to the legacy logic?
That is, could you partition the flight network such that nobody has purchased or ever will purchase a single ticket that spans flights from both ranges? Assuming maybe that a significant number of “backbone” flights (e.g. between hubs) can themselves be “codeshared” between the new DL and DZ ranges. If so, how much new flight number space could you buy, considering the tradeoff between “codeshare all the new DL/DZ flights” and “free up the most new flight numbers”?
That's not such a great solution, it kicks the can down the road and it's super confusing to humans to have the same airline be represented different ways.
As a traveler, I already know the airline name because it's printed on my boarding pass, so I don't really care what two-letter prefix they use; to me it's just another part of the opaque handle they call a flight number.
It's common in Asia, with regional affiliates like the different AirAsia, LionAir, and VietJet companies having virtually identical branding but different flight prefixes.
I can confirm for AirAsia and Lion Group, and IIRC Ryanair also do this with their UK subsidiary with different flight prefixes and different aircraft registration numbers.
for Cars and SUVs:
- A Chevy Equinox starts at $28k MSRP.
- A Toyota RAV4 starts at $29k MSRP.
- A Toyota Prius (PHEV) starts at $33k MSRP.
but for minivans:
- A Honda Odyssey (gas only) starts at $42k MSRP.
- A Chrysler Pacifica (PHEV) starts at $51k MSRP.
Minivans are actually really popular for families in the midwest, for folks who can afford it. If you can't, the option becomes "Get a Minivan, or get an SUV and save $15,000 USD", which obviously skews a lot of families towards the SUV.
So shoving two or three kids in the back of a cheap SUV is pretty normal, event though it's less convenient in a lot of other ways.
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