The Bush Administration today released a 35-page document entitled “The National Strategy for Victory in Iraq“. You can tune into any one of the news channels and hear endless analysis of the document and the accompanying speech, but two things jumped out at me. First, much of the document sounds like arguments for why we should never have gone into Iraq in the first place. To quote a few (all italics in original):
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Nov 302005
Nov 292005
President Bush ran on an illegal immigration policy five years ago, and now that his ratings are in the mid-30s, he’s decided to bring it up again. So, here are the major proposals that will be debated over the next few weeks as Congress tries, once again, to do something about our immigration policy.
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Nov 292005
The airline industry is in trouble. That link is to Delta specifically, which is in the news at the moment, but most of the airlines aren’t doing so well (although there are some exceptions). Part of it is due to a spike in fuel prices. Part of it is due to increased competition. Part of it is due to security costs.
I’m sure there are a number of things the airlines can do to turn a profit (or at least reduce losses). But try this one on for size. I came up with this idea on the plane the other day, and wondered what people might think of it.
It came to me as I watched the flight attendent do the safety instruction routine (not to be confused with the safety dance). “If there should be a rapid loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will drop from the ceiling. Immediately place the elastic strap over your nose and mouth and pull tightly. The bag may not inflate, but oxygen will be flowing to the mask”. It got me thinking…
Each oxygen tank weighs between .5 and 5 pounds. My best guess from having looked around is that the typical tank weighs about 4 pounds. Say each row on one side of the aisle shares a tank (they may be individual by seat but they may share, so I’m being conservative here). An airplane with 35 rows (like the one I took last week) would have 70 tanks * 4 lbs = 280 lbs. That’s the equivalent weight of 1.5 passengers. Delta airlines alone has over 6000 daily flights. Those flights range from puddle-jumpers to multi-continent sojourns which vary greatly in length. But for argument’s sake, lets say it costs the airline $20 in fuel for each passenger on an average flight (an estimate I think is extremely conservative).
Thats 1.5 passenger’s worth of weight x $20 per flight x 6000 flights per day x 365 days per year = 65 million a year in costs for having oxygen on each plane. Given the conservative estimates above, the number could be much larger. So I’m going to say a range of $65-$100 million a year.
So, what happens if we remove those oxygen tanks? Well, in the case of cabin depressurization, this surgeon general’s report suggests that temperature may be nearly as dangerous as respiration problems. People can function under oxygen deprived conditions for several minutes without any permanent damage. So long as the pilots have oxygen, they can drop the plane to an altitude that would prevent serious problems.
More importantly, doing a cost/benefit analysis, the incidence rate of cabin depressurization is… hard to find on google. So I looked around — not a single story in the past year on yahoo news on cabin depressurization. You’d think if it had happened it would have been reported, especially if there were deaths… but maybe not. So I asked around. The people I work with travel a lot. None of them have ever been on a plane that depressurized. And none of them knew anybody who had been on a plane that depressurized.
The point is, cabin depressurization almost never happens on commercial airlines. $65-$100 million a year for Delta alone, and as far as I can tell, nobody in the past year has benefited from that expenditure (not to mention the indirect cost of driving up fuel prices via supply and demand). And even if depressurization occurred, the cold would kill people if they stayed at high altitudes, and once at lower altitudes they wouldn’t need the additional oxygen.
So how about eliminating the O2 requirement on commercial airplanes? $65-$100 million a year may not completely save the airline industry, but it’s a nice start.
(As a side note, that $65-$100 million could probably save thousands if not tens of thousands of lives if it were spent on preventing starvation rather than flying useless oxygen tanks back and forth across the country. Of course, it wouldn’t go to preventing hunger if the airlines saved that much, but its’ still an interesting thought when considering life for money tradeoffs.)
Although my father is one of the world’s great technology buffs, there was one innovation my family never adopted. It was the “Christmas list.” All my friends had one, and I was frequently bitter about it. A Christmas list guaranteed you the top item on your list, and you were likely to get the top five! But my parents held firm; in my house you never knew what you were getting for Christmas, and oddly enough, it made Christmas more fun. Since we were never given instructions, we spent months in furtive observation of our family members, filing away pieces of conversations for gift ideas. Sometimes the results were great, and sometimes they weren’t, but opening presents was always exciting. Even better than receiving the perfect gift was being acclaimed as the giver of the best gift of the year (defined as the funniest, most appropriate, or most ridiculous). My father, incidentally, received many of the “best” gifts as well as most of the worst, the result of having hobbies which were well out of his children’s price range, forcing them to become extra-creative.
This entertaining tradition unfortunately began to die a slow death when my sister went off to college and was embalmed soon after my graduation. Without the close contact with our family, we could no longer pick up subtle clues about what they might want but wouldn’t think of buying, and as a family were reduced to giving gift cards (which are very useful, but on the fun-of-giving scale rate as pathetic). My sister rescued us all one year when she discovered the WorldVision Gift Catalog, which allows you to buy a gift for a person who truly needs one, in honor of your loved one. The next year my parents bought “me” a camel. We gave my public-school principal mother-in-law a new school. It was a wonderful new world of finding the perfect gift.
Almost all charities will accept donations in someone’s honor. We’ve now given gifts which give life-altering surgery to children, counseling to women rescued from the sex trade, harvest-enhancing seedlings to struggling farmers, and better lives to children in orphanages. And we’ve discovered fair trade gifts as well.
Fair trade means that the company is certified as treating its workers “fairly”, by paying them a living wage and not exploiting children, among other requirements. Many fair trade organizations also use environmentally sustainable methods. By providing a market for their goods, we improve their lives and often our own. For example, buying fair trade coffee will pay the coffee farmer a living wage. If by farming coffee he earns enough to feed his family and send his children to school, he may not feel compelled to farm cocaine. The Hunger Site, SERRV International, and Ten Thousand Villages are examples of groups which offer a large variety of fairly traded products.
This year I began my Christmas shopping with the philosophy of fair-trade first. Our current gift-list is 90 percent charity contributions or fair-trade gifts. These gifts are often more inexpensive than a sweater, but they are much more meaningful (unless you count the fair-trade sweater I’m considering for my sister’s birthday)! Which person on your gift list deserves a gift truly worth giving?
Nov 192005
The latest fad for those who want to justify “staying the course” in Iraq is to get the opinion of individual soldiers and officers. Yesterday I saw several recently returned Iraqi war vets giving their full-throated support of the idea that we are winning the war in Iraq, and that with time the Iraqi security forces will be able to take over and control the whole country, and then we can leave with our heads held high. This fad reached its low point last night during the House debate about immediate withdrawal from Iraq. To quote from the New York Times:
The battle boiled over when Representative Jean Schmidt, an Ohio Republican who is the most junior member of the House, told of a phone call she had just received from a Marine colonel back home.
“He asked me to send Congress a message: stay the course,” Ms. Schmidt said. “He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message: that cowards cut and run, Marines never do.”
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