Overbooking should be fraud

Admit one (well, if we feel like it) [courtesy torbakhopper@flickr]


Yesterday’s shitstorm caused by United Airlines’s beating up a passenger has brought the practice of overbooking into sharp focus. Why do we let airlines get away with overbooking? How is this even legal? A ticket is essentially a contract: In exchange for my money, you will take me from point A to point B. Seems pretty simple, right? So why are airlines allowed to renege on that contract?

Let’s say you planned to take your sweetie out for a big date at a concert. You bought your tickets months in advance and made arrangements for transportation, hotel, etc. You and your sweetie get all dressed up, show up at the arena, and get settled in your seats only to be tossed from the arena because they are “oversold.” You’d feel like burning something down, wouldn’t you? And yet airlines do this every day.

Now, let’s imagine that you made reservations for dinner on your date night but the restaurant canceled them. Sure, you’d probably be pissed but a reservation is free. You haven’t put up any money and so you are getting what you paid for. You expect the restaurant to honor the reservation but you know that since you don’t have any skin in the game you have to go along. See the difference?
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Video shows man forcibly removed from United flight from Chicago to Louisville

In case you were under a rock, yesterday United Airlines dragged a paying passenger off one of its planes to make room for another United crew to fly standby. The resulting outcry caused United’s stock to lose $800 million in value at one point Tuesday. CEO Oscar Munoz then released the biggest bullshit non-apology ever, apologizing for having to “re-accommodate” this passenger. I predict that “re-accommodate” has already earned its place on the “word of the year” lists.

A video posted on Facebook late Sunday evening shows a passenger on a United Airlines flight from Chicago to Louisville being forcibly removed from the plane before takeoff at O’Hare International Airport.

The video, posted by Audra D. Bridges at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, is taken from an aisle seat on a commercial airplane that appears to be preparing to take flight. The 31-second clip shows three men wearing radio equipment and security jackets speaking with a man identified as Elizabethtown doctor David Dao seated on the plane. After a few seconds, one of the men grabs the passenger, who screams, and drags him by his arms toward the front of the plane. The video ends before anything else is shown.

Source: Video shows man forcibly removed from United flight from Chicago to Louisville

Google’s “Someone has your password” emails still ripe for abuse

Fraud or not? Always be on guard!

I got another “Someone has your password” emails today from Google’s security team. These appear to be sent due to a flaw in the way Google geolocates the IP addresses used by our T-Mobile phones and are thus false alarms. That doesn’t keep me from freaking out every time I get one, however.

What’s more, it is exactly these emails that compromised John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee’s emails during the campaign. I consider myself fairly savvy at detecting phishing emails but I have to admit that the fake email the Russians sent was good enough to have had a chance of catching me.

I emailed a friend at Google to make sure the company knew their geolocation stuff was in need of serious work. My friend replied that Google is aware that their algorithm needs work and were working on a way to receive feedback from the message recipients. It appears Google’s “New sign in from … ” emails have a feedback link at the bottom but the “Someone has your password” emails still do not.

I appreciate getting alerts when unauthorized activity is detected but I could certainly do without the false alarms.

Men and women in leadership roles

Ladies, men making decisions about you (like VP Mike Pence and the “Freedom Caucus” here) should be incentive enough to start taking charge.

I’ve been fortunate to work with a number of strong, amazing women, many of whom have stories of times when they have been (or felt they’ve been) shut out of important discussions in their professional lives simply because of their gender. I’m always sad to hear that they face this treatment and strive myself to treat everyone with whom I work (and, frankly, everyone I meet) with respect.

I got a small taste of how this feels as PTA president when I’d be the only man in a meeting and the women would never address me. Education, it seems, is so overwhelmingly associated with women that as a man I felt like an interloper. Other PTA volunteers would so often applaud the efforts of “our PTA ladies” that rather that fight the point it was easier just to quietly consider myself an “honorary lady.” There are ongoing efforts to get more dads involved in PTA but I came to realize that the deck is stacked against them.

Another thing I have noticed after years of serving on various boards and groups is that some women love to call the shots but only if they’re not the actual leader. They have strong views of how things should be done but when given the opportunity to take charge of the changes they demur. This drives me nuts because I know what they’re capable of doing – these are women who are great leaders – but for whatever reason are reluctant to be in charge. I don’t know if this is a culture thing or what but many women seem to hold themselves back – a self-imposed glass ceiling. They have so much going for them! If they’d only step up and add the authority to their ideas they would have it all.

It might come down to men and women leading differently. Or it might come down to me being full of shit, too. As an off-again-on-again leader myself, though, I do enjoy studying the topic.

Home projects getting done

While I’ve been away from my blog, several honeydos have been getting done (or worked on, anyway). I’ve scrubbed our boat down and started replacing parts in order to get it ready to sell. Kelly and I have also made plans to replace our cracked, rotted deck with something nicer. We’ve also explored expanding our screened porch, though not quite ready to pull the trigger on that one.

One thing we did decide to do is fix the drainage in our back yard. We get deluged by stormwater every time it rains as a catch basin on Glascock street empties into the neighbors’ yard and settles in our yard. The new homes next door have “industrial strength” storm drains at the edge of our property, so we hired a contractor to put in an underground pipe to move the water from one end of our yard to the other. Right now our backyard resembles the trenches of the Western Front of World War One. It should be better than new in a few days, though. Good to be investing in the home again, and knocking out those things we’ve been meaning to do for so long.

Where’s Mark?

Been a while since I posted. As y’all should know by now, that means I’ve been busy! Got home from Spain with so much to say about the trip but couldn’t find the time to put it all down. Instead, I had consolidate my two Amazon instances into one, working to save money (and complexity). Since my old server was running CentOS 6.x and I wanted to be able to run Docker, I had to build an identical server, only based on CentOS 7.x. This took a while to transfer but hopefully no one out there noticed.

The reason I wanted Docker was to work on a new project, kicking the tires of new web forum software that I hope to use here in Raleigh for a new community site. It took some work but I got it going, though launch date is still several weeks away.
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KremlinGate Just Put the Trump White House in a Precarious Place | Observer

Last week I explained in this column how President Donald Trump, despite facing serious political challenges over his murky ties to the Kremlin, was fortunate to have opponents more motivated by partisanship than truth-telling. As long as that state of affairs continued, the commander-in-chief was likely to avoid the thorough scrutiny which his apparent links to Moscow actually merit.

A lot has changed in just a few days. Last week began promisingly for the president, with his joint address to Congress on Tuesday evening earning better reviews than many had anticipated. Then it all unraveled the next day, when it was reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a key member of the White House inner circle, had two discussions with Sergei Kislyak, the Russian ambassador in Washington, during the 2016 election campaign.

It’s hardly abnormal for sitting senators—as Sessions was last year—to meet with foreign diplomats, even Russian ones, but the precise capacity in which he chatted with Kislyak suddenly became important. Was Sessions parleying with the Kremlin’s emissary as a senator or as a top advisor to Donald Trump?

Source: KremlinGate Just Put the Trump White House in a Precarious Place | Observer