Gongol.com Archives: April 2021
April 16, 2021
France considers plan to ban short-haul domestic airline travel
The parliament approved a rule to abolish short flights that could also be made by rail in less than 2.5 hours, as part of a broader bill about climate change. ■ Assuming that the "distance" tool on Google Maps is telling the truth, all points within mainland France are within 700 miles of one another...as the crow flies. But the road trip from Brest (in the northwest) to Nice (in the southeast) is almost 900 miles long, suggesting that there's some meaningful inefficiency in getting around the country via overland methods. ■ France does possess a high-speed rail option: the famed TGV. As a representative trip, the TGV will get you from Brest to Paris much faster than driving (perhaps 6 hours by road and 4.5 by rail), but it'll still take much longer than 2.5 hours. That's for a distance of a little over 300 miles as the crow flies -- but more like 370 by road. ■ Thus it's hard to see how the proposal banning shorter flights would be massively restrictive. Marginally, yes, it would prohibit flights that presumably might be plausible for commercial flights. But it's likely not the kind of restriction that has much practical effect: By the Brest-to-Paris metric, the climate-related rule would only do away with trips shorter than about 175 miles. Thus, a flight from Des Moines to Omaha would be prohibited by law, but not from Des Moines to Minneapolis. At that stage, the real constraint is whether it's worth one's time to bother driving to the airport, parking, checking in, passing through security, and being there sufficiently in advance of the flight to board...and then wait. ■ France's high-speed rail network is pretty enticing -- but it appears to serve most effectively as a way to get to and from Paris. It's a hub-and-spoke model on steroids. The rest of the country is well-connected, but by slower service. Extending rail networks (especially for high-speed service) is expensive and slow work. ■ What could be interesting, though, is if the French idea ends up fueling demand in the market for electric-based air travel. Oh, yes, that day is coming. And if it facilitates the arrival of flying taxis, then so much the better. It's not as far-fetched as you might think: If we can de-carbonize air travel with battery-powered electric flight, things could change quickly for the better. Long-haul electric flight may be far outside the capacity of current technology, but short-haul electric flights have already been conducted. ■ If generated from clean sources, electricity can be quite green (we already know how to get to zero-carbon using nuclear and renewables) -- and electric motors are much simpler than combustion engines, which means less complexity and less demand for complicated maintenance. This is why serious companies like Airbus are working on small electric aircraft already. And if air taxis can fly in and out of small, under-utilized airports that already exist (like the 98 general-aviation airports in Iowa alone) and bypass the massive deadweight of security theater associated with airline travel today, their time advantages over road and rail could add up in a hurry. ■ Keep an eye on France: It might be just the right market to prove whether air taxis will be the ride of the future.
Could you confidently name the world's ten largest megacities? The UN says they are (in descending order) Tokyo, Delhi, Shanhai, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Cairo, Bombay, Beijing, Dhaka, and Osaka. Sorry, New York.
First-grader lobbies for pockets in girls' pants
And she wins coverage in the Washington Post for doing it: As 7-year-old Kamryn Gardner argued in her letter to Old Navy, "I want front pockets because I want to put my hands in them. I also would like to put things in them." ■ As trivial as the status of kids' pants might seem, it's a question that demands an answer. What is the message to girls if their pants are decorated with fake pockets? There isn't a single defensible reason that doesn't ultimately lead back to imposing weird standards of beauty on girls, and doing so at an imprudently young age. (Come to think of it, is there even a good age at which those standards shouldn't be set by the wearers themselves?) ■ To make decorative pockets is strictly an aesthetic choice, and it's one that nobody is applying to boys' pants. So that means it's a gender-specific aesthetic choice. And more than that, it's a choice that signals one thing as "normal" (pockets are normal) and another thing as a matter of deprivation (boys get pockets they can use; girls don't). The wearer, of course, is ultimately free to put nothing in their pockets at all. ■ Pockets are useful, by definition. The more utilitarian the clothing, the more likely it contains an abundance of pockets: Scrubs come with bunches of them. The same goes for carpenter pants. And whether we like it or not, we start forming impressions from very early ages about usefulness. It's unwise to let one gender's clothing become equated -- even subliminally -- with lesser usefulness. ■ It was all the way back in 1859 that John Stuart Mill wrote, "That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time." Perhaps bland conformity is a recurring problem in human nature. But it's a delight to see that kids can recognize even the mild injustices around them, and that some of them feel good about insisting on their right to something better. ■ The kid who can call out faulty design judgments in pants today is well-equipped to recognize injustices later, and it's up to adults to cultivate and applaud that kind of spirit whenever we see it.
50% of Minnesota adults have gotten vaccinated
At least with a first dose. One county is at 74%.
Putting a puppy in a home listing is a stroke of genius
Dogs in Zillow listings are the new cookie-scented air freshener for real estate agents. But they still don't make paying $918/square foot make sense. That's just plain crazy.
