No offense to them, but in general, investment grade companies should have a stable future and not have easily-switchable, competing products that cost a fraction as much to use come out regularly. This is almost laughable that I have to say this.
Makes me want to own the stock now that they are more diversified. I will never understand why they didn't want to own all of Waymo but did for pretty much everything else.
Wow. This is insane news. To think you suddenly can get by with up to 25% fewer people is truly a sign of what is to come. They probably assume much fewer will accept, but still. They probably think 10-20% will actually accept. But they're confident that they can make due with suddenly quite a bit fewer people.
I recently took a contract with big tech after working with startups for about a year ( I was at this big corp a year ago)
Maybe it’s the small sample size, but from what I’ve seen, the thing hurting velocity more than anything is the fact that teams have too many “cooks”.
The way work is delegated is a bit broken when in reality the engineer who knows the code base or problem best should scope the work and just delegate it to their agents.
My opinion (which is about filming in general, not the glasses) which seems to contradict others' but:
So if someone acts up and starts screaming it's suddenly ok to film, or even when people are committing crimes on board it's not ok? Who's to say when this is happening or not?
If filming is banned there will be less evidence for when this does happen, and people could get away with more crimes (although admittedly the bar is higher on a plane and the flight staff's testimony will carry lots of weight).
I think planes are public places (because 200 people are crammed into a tiny tube of metal) and your expectation of privacy should be diminished there. There are too many potential things that could happen on a plane. People are too close and vulnerable while on a plane. We cannot run or protect ourselves as well.
And as far as flight attendants, unfortunately they are at least partially responsible for both the safety and wellbeing of those on board. That is literally their job.
Banning filming of them will reduce their sense of urgency and responsibility, just like it would of cops if we were not allowed to film them.
There are just too many things that need to go right and also that could go wrong on a flight.
Just recently someone took a photo of an ostensible pedophile while on board conversing on a website for pedophiles and now the world knows. If all photography or filming was banned then this wouldn't have happened.
We have had convenient, ultra-portable, widely available video taping for what, 20 years now? Closer to 15 years for any resemblance of quality or faces being recognizable. Commercial flying has existed for over a century now, and somehow it all worked out for decades upon decades before portable digital video cameras (like what we have now) became cheap. It's funny how once we gain some extra convenience, no matter how marginal in the given situation, it only takes a few years for it to be considered indispensable, the right to use it utterly essential.
No one's getting away with a crime on a commercial flight, there are hundreds of people around you and upwards of a dozen or more flight crew on board, with a button to call over one of them in short reach of every passenger.
This is unsupported, but I feel like the vast majority of people filming flight attendants are not doing it for any valid reasons, but to try to start a harassment or doxxing outrage campaign online because they've caused them some brief inconvenience. 90%+ of flight attendant interactions with passengers are about convenience and not safety, and people should not have a right to hold a stick over these largely underpaid and overworked employees because they've not topped up their drink in 5 minutes. For the remaining minority of reasons, recording their voice should cover most cases.
However, the strongest argument against this is that it is possible for things to be banned in general but allowed when doing the banned thing would prevent a greater harm. This idea already exists in legal system. Zero-tolerance and free-for-all are not the only options, you could be allowed to film in emergencies or to prevent worse things from happening.
While you're right that your expectation of privacy is obviously lower in a place like this, the blurry term here is 'privacy'. Is 'you expect yourself to be seen by others' the same kind of privacy as 'you expect anyone to be able to get a permanent record of you without your knowledge or agreement'? What about when these glasses start doing facial recognition? Wouldn't you also have to steelman the 'you should expect anyone to be able to know exactly who you are and to upload your identity, location and appearance to a megacorporation' kind of privacy?
Oh they are trying their very best to go the way of policing. For example just last week Delta's PR team has been working overtime to make sure one of their South American customer abuse cases don't get picked up by the English speaking media. You won't see this anywhere in major US media because the victim was a foreigner (Santiago Daza) from a poor country like Colombia. Delta's team did a wonderful job of suppressing it. If they tried this with a rich French or Chinese they would have been raked over the coals and on their knees apologizing. The foreign media and internet users would not let them go so easily.
They literally aren't, though. They are the airline's private property, and you've entered into a contract of carriage with them to temporarily have access to their property under the terms of the contract. To some extent these terms are circumscribed by law, but in the absence such law, you are bound by whatever terms you agreed to in the contract. If you don't agree not to film in the plane, you're free to not accept the contract.
They literally are. They are common carriers, which is a legal concept with a lot of precedent. The UK term for this, ironically, is "public carrier" and while yes it's a privately owned it has distinctly public characteristics encoded in law that sharply distinguishes these spaces from genuinely private areas.
The important question, though, is whether being a common carrier implies that the airlines cannot forbid customers from taking photos or videos inside their aircraft. That hasn't been established.
I think when you're asking normative questions, what you're saying is that it should be established. And that it should be established in the way that you're proposing.
That's a distinction without a difference. There are enough structural constraints in launching airline alternatives that they might as well be, especially the national carriers. They are not too far from being a utility (and in a lot of places they are subject to enormous amount of public funding to stay solvent because it's a national security issue when you don't have a pool of pilots and airplanes).
It's one of those "too big and too important to fail" businesses. There can be the occasional M&A or bankruptcy but no structural industry collapse is allowed. It's as important as the car industry in some places, though the reasons differ.
Do you expect the masses to fly private jets or Cessnas to cross the globe? It's like saying electrical companies shouldn't be regulated too much in certain jurisdictions because the generators are privately owned rather than being publicly owned. People will laugh you out of the court of public opinion.
I think their quasi-public status means that contracts of carriage should be tightly hemmed in by law and not have as many degrees of freedom as ordinary contracts, but they are still contracts regarding the use of private property, and in the absence of such hemming, the terms and conditions still apply.
If you want to launch a public campaign to change the law and add "you can always surreptitiously record people on airlines" to the set of unenforceable contract terms, go ahead and attempt it. You'll deserve the furious blowback you get, though.
There's a big difference between keeping all of your ownership and giving it to the son and paying a huge salary and making him non-executive chairman while giving away most of your wealth.
He was chairman and CEO for a long time. Since he has only been a chairman for not that long I don't think it's fair to say that he's been a very active chairman for a long time.
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