CSotD: Consumer follies
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At the risk of dwelling too much on my ever-present anxiety over whether I'm just old or actually stupid (scroll down to yesterday's post), I was really pleased to see the new Scenes from a Multiverse today, below which Jon Rosenberg comments, "If you’re interested in keeping your money in a form that can drop 50% in value in a single day, cryptocurrencies are where it’s at! I’ll stick to tulip bulbs, thanks."
I've been kind of waiting for bitcoins to make sense, but it's kind of like listening to astrophysicists talk about black holes and such. I accept that such things exist — both bitcoins and blackholes — but when people start getting into microdetails, I start to wonder if they're actually talking about real things or just extending some fantasy game they're into.
I have this mental image of scientists sitting around a big table talking about how the light bends in a black hole and its impact on sub-atomic nanoparticles, and somebody says, "and then the Klingons …" and everyone stiffens and says, "No! No Klingons!" not because Klingons are any less real than the other things they've been positing, but because they fear the reference would unmask the cosmic cosplay at work.
And ditto with recent news stories about people using bitcoins in the 3-D world.
Though I guess if you want to use them to buy Beanie Babies, that would work.
I bet if you went through a black hole, you could emerge in a parallel Switzerland where the vaults are filled with Beanie Babies, propping up that parallel Earth's economy.
I mean, they went somewhere, right?
That's where they went.
And while we're flaunting realism
Paul Noth on the weird fantasy world of airline travelers.
I like the new system where you get a barebones price for a ticket and then can pay a little extra for a bulkhead or exit-row seat to get some extra leg space. I'm headed for Denver next month and I added those nicer seats and, while it jacked up the ticket price a bit, I'd have paid that much in the first place if all the seats were that good.
If that were the base price and they offered a discount for more crowded seats, people would brag about it: "Yeah, I went for one of the cramped seats — Saved me forty bucks!"
But the thing of being pre-boarded puzzles me entirely. I'd pay extra to be the last person who gets on.
It's not that much of a privilege, in my eyes, to have people jostling past and banging you with their oversized carryons, and then making you stand up and get out into the crowded aisle so they can get to their seats in your row.
In my world, everyone with Frequent Nobility status would sit in the waiting area until all the knuckleheads were belted in, and then we could walk down an empty aisle, smacking them in the heads with our carry-ons. On purpose.
Did you know that, if you fly first class, they heat up your peanuts? Not kidding. I got upgraded once and we got these little bowls of warm nuts. Not just peanuts, either. Mixed nuts. Yeah, cashews and filberts and the whole thing, and they were warm!
Yeah, the seats were bigger, too, but we were just flying to Chicago, so what the hell. For that distance, it makes as much sense to pay double so you can have warm peanuts as it does so you can stretch your legs.
Granted, even for those shorter two hour flights, there's still plenty to complain about, even for those of us who don't actively search for reasons to complain.
I'm glad they invented ear buds, for instance, because, back in the Walkman days, you'd have some guy sitting next to you with tsch-tsch-tsch escaping from his headphones for the whole flight, and that got old in a hurry.
And while I think people get way too bent out of shape over claustrophobic infants whose ears are not pressure-equalized, I've also flown in close proximity to kids who were genuinely undisciplined and, even for those of us who really like kids, being packed in with ill-behaved ones is not fun.
But people who can never find enough to whine about are way, way, way too obsessed with seatbacks.
Seatbacks have become a whiner meme. Neither facts nor reason have anything to do with this: Whiners simply feel great solidarity and affirmation in being part of the chorus.
In fact, hang on while I go into the files here …
I was going to run yesterday's Loose Parts but ran out of space and it didn't fit the day's narrative. It fits today's perfectly.
Here's where my elderly status actually benefits me: I can remember when airline seats reclined noticeably, and, yes, it could be a pain to have the person in front of you drop their seatback into your face.
And maybe that's still the case up in the land of warm nuts.
But back where we po' folk fly, the seats don't go back any farther than about the point where they take some of the load off your spinal column.
The top of the seat may move three inches, but I don't think so, and that's not enough to be significant, even if it is actually three inches and even given the small amount of personal space anyone has these days.
When the flight attendants walk down the aisle before take off and landing, they have to look at the seat backs to see if they line up before they can tell that someone is not in the full-upright position.
And that's the top. I'm not defending the airline industry, I'm just pointing out basic geometry. If your knees are up in the part where the seat in front of you goes back three inches, you're not just "tall." You're a freaking grasshopper.
Okay, you may not see it that way.
But here's what we agree upon: It is really annoying to be stuck on a flight with a bunch of crying babies.
Some people hate the little crying babies.
Get a grip. It ain't what it used to be.
(I was in local TV advertising when this commercial ran. It was held up as a model, and not just in our little station.)
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