if people stop flying they will go out of business

They won’t. That’s the rub. We have played this game over the decades. Whenever the industry is on the verge of bankruptcy, the feds bail them out. When the profits are flowing, the executives/shareholders are free to cash out without concern for the future of the company, and the people who need to travel are never given any kind of alternative even as the process of flying becomes more expensive and emisserating.

It’s not that complicated.

The central arterial system for civilian and commercial rapid mass transit is enormously complicated. Just shouting “Don’t use planes!” doesn’t address logistical alternatives.

There is no “floor” to air travel

There is. I just linked to it. We had empty planes flying because airlines were not contractually permitted to run fewer flights without having their routes monopolized by their competitors.

Some of the most powerful and influential men in America fought tooth and nail to protect the railroad industry

They didn’t. They fought to consolidate the industry decades ago. But more recently they’ve turned it over to vulture capitalists to scrap for the real estate value. One of the biggest jokes of the modern era is how Union Pacific and BNSF Railway have fumbled the bag or straight up handed it off, so a handful of senior executives could reap a few enormous windfalls.

market forces (and, yes, to a lesser extent government policy, but mainly just people buying cars) eventually led to the near-collapse of the industry

Freight rail has never been more profitable, in large part because the number of routes and the regulations on transport have hit rock bottom. Firms are charging record prices, paying minimal labor costs, deferring maintenance, flagrantly ignoring the law, and absolutely cleaning up in the free market.

They’re eating their own seed corn. And in the end, the system will fail. But when you’re an executive making tens of millions in compensation, with an eye towards retirement in years rather than decades, it’s Not Your Problem.

A knock-on consequence of this management style has been to hold up passenger rail (specifically, Amtrak, a federally owned company also plagued with underinvestment and technical debt), as points at which freight and passenger cars share lines are choked with traffic such that passengers can’t arrive in anything resembling a timely manner. THIS IS NOT AN ACCIDENT.

Corporations can resist change but that doesn’t mean they are always successful.

Civilians boxed into a failed mass transit system who are told “Just stop using the system” are not being provided with functional alternatives or support to leverage those alternatives.

That’s a bit of a gimmick related to airlines betting (correctly) that flight demand would rebound after covid ended and wanting to keep their spot in line.

It’s an illustration of a market incentive that doesn’t reflect consumer demand. It was also a prelude to a bunch of federal and state bailouts for the industry (much like after the crashes in '08 and '01), intended to keep businesses that can’t stay profitable in the black.

If there was a true societal shift and people flew less

The societal shift would need to be a reduced demand for travel not a reduced desire to fly on a plane. That’s what COVID created (temporarily) but it still didn’t drop plane flights to the point of consumer demand, because of these private contractual arrangements intended to keep airports profitable.

I fucking hate flying. I know lots of other people who hate flying. It’s stressful, it’s expensive, it’s obnoxiously bureaucratic (especially as we switch to Real ID / tighten security at borders / etc). But it is also the only practical way to get between big states in less than a day.

If you want a True Societal Shift, you need to present alternatives to air transport. HSR was supposed to be that alternative, but it never got delivered. For some mysterious reason, passenger railroad companies that had crisscrossed the country a century ago just evaporated. Cities grew increasingly hostile towards municipal bus depots and rail terminals. Highway expansion and airline construction dominated the priority of municipal and state governments.

Also, there WERE a lot fewer flights during covid, ghost planes notwithstanding.

There was a floor below which the number of flights could not drop due to - what are functionally - political reasons. Similarly, there were restrictions on travel that were lifted far too soon, and reignited the rapid spread of the virus, for political reasons. And there was further M&A of smaller airlines intended to monopolize the supply of travel, because finance capital demanded air travel receive priority over other civilian alternatives.

These are not personal consumer choices. These are corporate and state policies.

Corporations aren’t evil

At least from the perspective of “evil” as an all-consuming selfishness that comes at the detriment of your neighbors, Corporations are explicitly designed to be evil.

The airline industry as it exists today - a poisonous, clumsy, alarmingly fragile, wasteful, gluttonous dinosaur of a mass transit system - is the consequence of a few cartelized industrial leaders bribing and strong arming key public sector bureaucrats into subsidizing itself, as the senior executives and investors plunder the cash flow on the back end.

Announcing that you will be bicycling from LA to NY in protest does not change any of their economic calculus.

I bought it and really tried to use it, but the reality was just too clunky for primary use. It has no dpad, a single crappy convex analog stick, terribly placed ABXY buttons, horrible shoulder buttons, and just a bit too much input lag on the trackpads.

Hard truths.

Why did they feel the need to replace analog controls with these weird, inconsistently responsive, difficult to map touch controls when every other console platform had already demonstrated why that’s a bad idea?

Was the SC innovative, bold and ahead of its time in many ways?

NO. It was kitsch and poorly engineered and obviously not play tested sufficiently before release. It was a hobbyist’s attempt at reinventing the mousetrap that got shoved into a major distribution pipeline when Playstation and Nintendo and XBox had already demonstrated why you don’t build controllers this way ten years earlier.

No politician is ever gonna run on a “no meat” platform lol.

Plenty do, in countries where the agricultural industry isn’t dominated by animal farming.

When meat over-production threatens the general quality of life, the issue flips from an anti-consumer issue to a luxury waste issue.

Just like with private jets and super yachts, the issue only becomes untouchable when your slate fills up with anti-populist corporate flaks.

when covid hit a and fewer people where buying plane tickets there where a lot fewer planes in the air

Thousands of Planes Are Flying Empty and No One Can Stop Them

In January, climate activist Greta Thunberg tweeted her disbelief over the scale of the issue. Unusually, she was joined by voices within the industry. One of them was Lufthansa’s own chief executive, Carsten Spohr, who said the journeys were “empty, unnecessary flights just to secure our landing and takeoff rights.” But the company argues that it can’t change its approach: Those ghost flights are happening because airlines are required to conduct a certain proportion of their planned flights in order to keep slots at high-trafficked airports.

They aren’t producing that meat for the fun of it

They’re overproducing because they’re heavily subsidized and operating under a functional price floor thanks to the wholesale market and industrial application of their products.

Grocery store ground beef is practically a waste product. Agg Business produces far more of it than they can ever hope to sell retail.

Its still true that less meat would be produced if less people purchased it

Less people in a single dense region, sure. If half of New York went meatless, you’d see a sharp drop in beef sales to the Five Boroughs.

But if you distribute those 4M people across the entire Continental US, there’s no market mechanism to reduce distribution that granularly. All you’re impacting is relative expected future profit margins per venue. No single business has an incentive to reduce wholesale purchases.

When populations are starving to death in 2044

You don’t have to wait. Sudan, Yemen, Gaza, Haiti, Chad, Afghanistan, Syria… All undergoing starvation level famines right now.

when I buy from them, they’re polluting on my behalf.

But that’s just it. The plane doesn’t burn less fuel because you didn’t buy a ticket. Hell, I’ve been on planes that were half full (in the wake of COVID).

They’re polluting whether you are on them or not. The only remedy is regulation / downsizing / nationalization. There’s no future in which people individualistically shrink the industry. No more than you could have saved someone’s life in Iraq by not paying your taxes.

Sure. Vote with your wallet.

But 52.4 million tonnes of edible meat are wasted globally each year. Roughly 18 billion animals (including chickens, turkeys, pigs, sheep, goats, and cows) are slaughtered annually without even making it to a consumer market.

This is a systematic problem that can only practically be addressed at the state level. Meatless Monday isn’t actually reducing your carbon footprint because you’re not actually the one emitting the carbon.

This isn’t like saying “I’m going to burn less fuel by driving less” it’s like saying “I’m going to burn less fuel by not taking the bus”.

Eliminating 9,000 jobs only guarantees they’ll flounder even longer.

Maybe. Microsoft’s biggest revenue stream has historically been government contracts. I don’t see that failing them anytime in the next decade.

But retail consumer spending? That’s something that could seriously take a few hits in the next big downturn. I can see a company putting its finger to the wind and betting a '08 style recession will kill the market for console gaming in another two or three years.

That’s a billion dollar scratch that could have made a huge difference in thousands of lives.

Okay, sure. But consider that they didn’t earn those billions of dollars by sucking up to the right assortment of Wall Street financiers, rich family members, and ego-driven Presidential nominees.

they didn’t inherit their immense wealth

Except even that doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny. A big component of the market cap of any Fortune 100 company stems from equity and debt held by the generationally wealthy, typically through family funds managed by private equity groups. Amazon and Tesla aren’t worth $1T without the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies and the Adelsons and the Waltons bidding up asset prices. Microsoft doesn’t exist today without Bill Gates’s mom sitting on the IBM board of directors and handing her son the contracts for their 1980s OS. Hell, Berkshire Hathaway is owned by the sons of a Congressman and a federal judge, respectively.

What’s more, the biggest source of market capital is inevitably government contracts. You can’t tell me that Michael Dell is “independently wealthy” when the bulk of his fortune came via the Texas public school system buying all his company’s computers. Particularly when the governors, legislators, and board members making these decisions are (a) big shareholders of the Dell corporation and (b) legacy scions of wealthy Texas families.

I’m sorry, I didn’t see Undertale anywhere on the box art.

There’s always the five finger discount

But then again, the mass general population is fucking dumb

That’s a lazy explanation. It neglects that Netflix did have a lot of accumulated goodwill from ease of access and quality content.

But now its in the enshittification era. All the streaming services are behaving like this. There’s no alternative that doesn’t suck with a comparable library.

*Also the writing generally sucks ass and assumes I’m not paying attention.

I’ve seen the articles dealing with the phenomenon of “Standard Netflix Show” and how it has become so painfully formulaic that it can only be described as background noise.

Really not a great sign when your premium service is treated like elevator music. But hey, they’ve got a near-trillion dollar valuation, so clearly I’m dumb and their C-levels have earned every penny.

Netflix getting in on the streamed video games wasn’t all that crazy. I flirted with it initially, as they had a few good Steam titles on there that I was effectively getting handed for free.

But the marketing approach of jamming “Play this clickbait garbage game, you stupid idiot!” install button into my face every time I visited the site ultimately lead me to cancel my subscription. Like so much else in modern streaming, the website’s admins do not want you to have any control over your front page. The end result is utterly alienating.

I genuinely enjoyed the Kingdom Hearts action-adventure with a couple of celebrity minions supporting your Dark Souls-style main character and the occasional Big Summons to drop a global special effect. I don’t think its bad on its face.

But they’ve invested so much time and energy into making Live Action work as a system that everything from the story to the game mechanics have suffered. Like, if you want to make a FromSoft game, then go over to FromSoft and do a business partnership to make Eldin Fantasy: The Soulslike Crystal Saga. You don’t need to keep tinkering with this engine that clearly doesn’t work.

Also, the FF7Remakes seem to have found a sweet spot. Why can’t the mainline games deliver this level of quality?

Also, also, also why have you abandoned ChronoTrigger? Twelve different DragonQuest titles but you gave up on Chrono in the mid-90s? You monsters.

if they successfully fully take over, those same supporters now become the new threat

Quite a few of the current crop of deputized ICE agents are MAGA goons from four years ago. So long as you’re actively doing the gruesome work of ethnic cleansing, you’ll be given a pass.

No, we were actually liberating it from oppression.