begin quoting Bob La Quey as of Sun, Jan 06, 2008 at 07:45:10PM -0800: > On Jan 6, 2008 5:06 PM, Andrew Lentvorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > Everybody has some characteristic that is unprofitable for the > > corporatocracy. Be very careful about providing the power to > > discriminate based upon it. > > I consider this a serious puzzle. Why should people _not_ be charged > prices that is some sense correlate with the cost of delivering whatever > service it is they are buying?
Because sometimes the savings isn't worth the cost. All those too-big people in too-small seats now have to pay more to be less comfortable than the too-small people in the too-big seats? They might decide not to fly at all, which means less revenue for the airline. Plus, you now have to /check/ someone's dimensions and weight, which is a further indignity (again, fewer sales), which slows down the whole travel process, adds people (greater expense), and encourages fraud. Now, if we can put everyone's data into a big database, where every corporation could search, correlate, index, and verify everything there is to know about everyone, all that could be automated. Maybe that would be cool, maybe that wouldn't, but the bets are that it would be cool for the big corporations and the government (and academia!), and no so cool for the folks who live on the edges. > We obviously have two alternative measures here. One measure says > per person another per pound. The amortization of costs can be more > or less directly charged to those people who create the costs. > > There are some costs that scale per person and some per pound. > > Most of us can come up with arguments for each approach. Yup. > And as Andrew points out "per pound" is simply one of many possible > variables that could be brought into consideration. In his case, per > shoulder width inch, might be appropriate, especially if we designed > variable width seats and used some kind of optimizing program to > pack the plane. Variable width (for the broad people), variable height (for the short people), variable padding.... heh. Encode your preferences into a string (width, depth, height, softness, angle of inclination, etc.) to feed to the airline reservation system. Don't forget the "error bars". :) > One person, one vote ... or on healthcare issues a vote inversely > proportional to BMI. Not likely but an interesting possibility. Yup. You'd want a curve off of both ends, as there is such a thing as "too skinny". > Should those who do _not_ smoke pay for those who do? Depends what else comes along. Most things average out, so the pay-as-you-go-meme might be more "fair", but it adds the burden of tracking overhead to me. I don't much care for toll roads. I don't mind paying for the roads out in Alpine or National City, even though I don't use 'em -- for the alternative is to either have only toll roads, or no roads at all, and neither solution is very sensible to me. [snip] > Why shouldn't grocery stores simply charge a flat rate for everyone > for a week's food then let er rip? This clearly has become popular > for phone services. What else might a flat rate work for? Well, if they prepared the food, they'd be a cafeteria. And I've paid the flat-rate for minimally-metered access to a cafeteria. It worked pretty well. If the cafeteria at work offered a flat-rate plan, I might well take advantage of it. For groceries... well, for me, at least, "a week's worth of food" is not a constant, or near-constant, amount. I imagine in a more related environment, fresh bread, a bottle of milk, and some fruit showing up on your doorstep every morning for a flat rate might well be welcome. (And don't they have companies that _will_ send you a "month's worth of food" every month, for the low, low, low rate of just $200/month or somesuch?) > Why, for instance, should Puerto Ricans have no foreign policy or > currency being essentially a colony of the USA and at the same > time no right to vote for President and no representation in the > Congress of the USA? Everyone Puerto Rican I've ever talked to seems to *like* the arrangement. They might be lying (possible) or deluded (less so) or be a self-selected group (likely). Maybe _not_ suffering thru our presidental campaigning is a feature. . . :-P > These puzzles go on and on, Yes, they do. That's why ideology makes for crappy politics. -- If every problem was an easy one We would solve it and be done. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
