Airing a Grievance

Feb 16, 2010 23:50

The latest highly important and significant news story to rock the globe is that a slightly famous* person is chucked off a plane for being too fat. Apparently the airline in question displayed all the professionalism and joined-up-thinking we've come to expect from this industry in dealing with the matter. As a result, feathers were ruffled, and ( Read more... )

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thechangingman February 17 2010, 04:46:12 UTC
I used to sit next to a real certified Miserable Old Git. He'd go garrity every time he read about proposals to put extra tax on big fuel heavy cars. "Its my right to drive any car I want."

Water, food, education, employment, basic human dignity....nah - My basic human right is to drive a car.

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camile_sinensis February 17 2010, 20:32:24 UTC
It's a sort of escalation of necessities. Once you've got the food and water and not being eaten by a Grue sorted out, you begin to feel deprived without a 50" tv, i-widget or vast amounts of cheap petrol to keep your enormous tank-like vehicle rumbling along. Also, some people are just not happy unless they've got something to be miserable and gittish about.

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sildil February 17 2010, 09:00:54 UTC
Totally agree with you. And this is from a former I hope since the diet is working very well - 34lbs and counting down fat person who fully appreciates that my weight is MY responsibility, not that of everyone else, that if I want to be able to afford to fly anywhere then I have to put up with the inconvenience of being squeezed into a limited amount of space ( ... )

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camile_sinensis February 17 2010, 21:04:21 UTC
If it was economically possible to have flights with wider (and therefore fewer) seats at the same price, then that's how planes would be, because that's what everyone wants. The fact that there isn't such an airborne utopia shows the reality of the situation. It's also not economically viable to have dedicated one-and-a-half width seats at one-and-a-half times the price of normal seats - dedicated seats also incur the cost of displacing ordinary seats. This is why first class seats cost so much - you're not paying just for that trip, you're paying for every other trip the seat makes when empty,at the expense of a greater number of ordinary seats which could have been in that space.

This is one of these situations where social mores and beliefs ("discrimination is wrong") runs hard into the immovable concrete pillar of facts, and demonstrates that the two are quite clearly not equal. In the wise and immortal words of Mr Scott "Ye cannae change the laws o' physics!" (or economics).

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gingerspark February 18 2010, 02:39:20 UTC
so you got something against all birthmarks? or just ones shaped like Luxembourg?

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camile_sinensis February 18 2010, 21:54:54 UTC
I also have an irrational hatred of people with birthmarks in the shape of Wales. I am an equal-opportunities disparager.

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