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Grounded for good?

Think about that concept for a bit. What if we banned commercial flights globally? It’s not as ludicrous a thought as it might first sound, especially when one considers the 737 MAX may never be allowed to fly again.

What brings about this thought journey is a recent Twitter tirade by the two year old in the White House and a bit of common sense. We aren’t talking about Angel flights of mercy or cargo flights. Some cargo really cannot be preserved for ocean voyage. Think live crabs and lobster if you have trouble grasping that concept. No, there will always be cargo which must be transported as quickly as possible. It’s we humans that never really need it until we need an Angel of Mercy flight to a hospital, so let’s walk this journey together and explore the possibilities.

 

Melania trumpIt appears that Melania Trump’s “Be Best” anti-bullying campaign doesn’t apply to her husband. If it did she would take away his phone, parental block his Twitter account, and send him to bed without supper or that two scoops of ice cream giving him a beer gut Budwiser could be proud of. Greta Thunberg, a 16 year old girl with Asperger’s, gets on the cover of Time as the person of the year and Melania’s husband tries to cyber-bully the girl. Seriously? I’ve accidentally stepped on dog shit which had more dignity and humanity than President Trump. Melania, if today, December 14, 2019, you file for divorce, the world stands behind you. “For better or for worse” did not include this. Both houses should be in office today, unanimously censuring the President for this behavior, at a minimum. Honestly, if you didn’t think he should be impeached before, this one action should justify it all. When a north of 70 year old man knowingly cyber-bullies a teenage girl, most states have a task force show up at their house to escort them to jail. This behavior is beyond reprehensible.

The above actions had me reading up a bit on Greta. I’ve only seen the clips on the news and heard a few soundbites. I started reading an article about her needing to take a break over the holidays and honestly wondered if she also needed to get back to school. I don’t know about you, but I was still in school at 16. The opening line is what got me thinking.

Tireless teenage activist Greta Thunberg has been crisscrossing the globe by car, train and boat – but not plane – to demand action on climate change.

 

That lead me to find this article whith this quote.

Thunberg chooses to travel by boat, train, and electric car, refusing to fly on airplanes because of “carbon emissions.”

Fair disclosure, during my twenties I was on United Airlines e-fares email list. Every Wednesday an email would show up and it had really cheap flights for the weekend if you flew back on Monday. This was because the airline needed to stage planes for Monday through Friday traffic. I ended up going to New Orleans more than I should have one summer, simply because a $25 flight on United, back when United was worth flying on, was too good a deal to pass up. Those days are long since gone, but should they have ever existed?

We the people get sold a bill of goods on a regular basis. We put a man on the moon because our government wanted to build an ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) in plane sight. We polluted the countryside with ecological time bombs called nuclear reactors because we wanted to get better at refining Uranium and Plutonium for nuclear bombs. (To this date absolutely nobody has solved the nuclear waste problem reactors create.) The military wanted fighter jets and heavy cargo planes so the government funded a passenger airline industry. (If you don’t believe this last statement do some research on who paid for the airports.)

Now, to get the kind of flight duration testing which was really needed, they needed to sell you on the idea of travel. Come up with great stories about

  • flying away for a weekend of skiing
  • spending three days in Paris
  • a week in the Bahamas
  • flying home for Christmas

That last one got expanded into “flying home for the holidays” and then “flying home for mom’s birthday,” etc. etc.

In reality we shouldn’t be doing that. We don’t need to spend a week in the Bahamas, three days in Paris, or a weekend trip to New Orleans. Humans have no biological need for such and we shouldn’t be trying to cram it into five or fewer vacation days. We need a global culture shift to working seven days per week for six to eight months then being able to afford to take the rest of the year off. Not just take the rest of the year off, take the slow route to get there. Before you utter the phrase “That will never work” let me tell you I already do it and so do many others, I also no longer fly. By some definitions it is “the Gig Economy.” If you search you can find many sites doing the math on working as little as four months per year. Let me also point out some Fact Sheet information.

In 2013, global CO2 from commercial aviation was 710 million tons. In 2017, that number reached 860 million tons, a 21 percent increase in four years, and it climbed another 5 percent to 905 million tons in 2018. The United States, with the world’s largest commercial air traffic system, accounted for 202.5 million tons (23.5 percent) of the 2017 global CO2 total. EPA reports that aircraft contribute 12 percent of U.S. transportation emissions, and account for three percent of the nation’s total greenhouse gas production.

Globally, aviation produced 2.4 percent of total CO2 emissions in 2018. While this may seem like a relatively small amount, consider that if global commercial aviation were a country in the national CO2 emissions standings, the industry would rank number six in the world between Japan and Germany. Non-CO2 effects, such as warming induced by aircraft contrails and other pollutants, bring the combined total contribution of commercial aviation to approximately 5 percent of the world’s climate-warming problem.

 

Not as many as one would think will be laid off from the plane factories. Many baggage handlers would transition over to the cargo side because it is still just containers being locked down in a hold. Yes, 100% of the flight attendants would be out of work overnight, but some would transition over to cruise ships making ocean crossings. There would also be an up-tick in the number of passenger vessels devoted to crossings instead of vacation cruises making daily stops at ports along a coast. While there would be some down-tick in the manufacture of jets there would be a massive up-tick in the building of new cruise ships and they would need workers seasoned at making really big things.

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iDiot Phone

You see, we’ve all been sold too many “bills of goods” over our lifetime. We don’t actually need a new car, just a different, more reliable one which gets better mileage. (Millenials don’t even bother owning cars.) Absolutely nobody needs an idiot phone. We don’t need to own a show-stopping house that looks like it appeared in “Better Homes and Gardens.” We sure as Hell don’t need personal credit cards with a $100,000 limit.

When you choose to believe one or more of these “bills of goods” you get trapped. You rack up debt taking that dream vacation and take out a seven year car loan on a car you trade-in after only three or four years “while it is still worth something.” You have to work all year and you still declare bankruptcy. I used to buy shiny new cars. I even financed two. Never again. While I might be tempted to get the 2021 AWD Toyota Avalon I will only do it if I can pay cash for it. Over the past number of years I’ve been buying higher end vehicles with around 100K miles on them. They tend to be pampered and I usually don’t have to put more than $1000 into repairs right after buying them for under $11K. I’ve done a few things to it in the years since (yes, years) but I will get 350K out of it easy. Most of the higher end rides have drive trains which last this long with some basic maintenance. When you only pay $10.5K for a ride, full coverage commercial limits insurance is really cheap. I’ve got three vehicles on the policy and pay just over $1700/year through a good company, not one of those fly-by-night things you see advertising on television. Some of you are paying more than that per month for your $80+K just had to have it ride.

Here’s the last thing you really need to know about vehicles and insurance. When you spent $10.5K for something with around 100K miles on it, the insurance company isn’t going to fix it. Oh sure, if someone backs into it in a parking lot or a busted windshield, but the blue book trade-in value will be $3K or less. If you get into an at-speed wreck, they aren’t fixing it. You will get a check and be told to go find another one. If you think that $7K spread is a scam, you ought to learn the real dealer spread, not from the invoices they show you, the real dealer spread on your $80K ride and the real factory spread.

There are many different types of “gigging.” Some, you only get paid for a task. That’s actually the worst form, therefore it is the most common. Paid for task work always wants the worker to work for free. If you bid thinking it would take you 40 hours to do something but, due to changes the client wanted, it takes you 60-80 you just basically worked for nothing. I’m an hourly IT consultant. Every time I take gig work I lose my ass. Seems that once every 12-15 years I forget that and repeat the lesson. The rest of the time I work hourly, usually on-site, but sometimes remote.

Hourly is great for an IT contractor, assuming you don’t take the shit rates being offered by firms specializing in visa workers or the bottom feeders competing with them. The ultimate is a client you like in a state/city you’ve never been before, who is so far behind they authorize all overtime you are capable of working. You work seven days per week making huge bank. At the end of the project you take 3-6 months off. You might even spend a month bumming around that city/state you just worked in before heading home.

The secret to working seven days per week is knowing your limits. Too many people either don’t learn this or are just plain lazy. Monday through Friday you put in 12-14 hours. Over the course of Saturday and Sunday you put in only 10. If you are in a strange place, it is easy. If it is the winter or Portland Oregon, you don’t really want to do anything outside anyway. Just write down all of the “things to do” tips people give you and when you are done decide which you want to do.

People who go down this route don’t have to try and squeeze a life into ten vacation days per year. They don’t have to stare wistfully at the company paid holiday schedule counting days until the next paid day off. When they finally go to England or Europe, they can take a transatlantic cruise, spend a month, and take a different cruise back. If you spend some time searching you can even find the USA Today article serious about flying vs. cruising.

If you don’t buy the lie that you need the latest and greatest and newest and finest, you really can lead a low stress if not stress free life. Yes, I occasionally have stress during my contract work but it really is short lived. I’m not thinking about how I’m going to make the jumbo mortgage payment or worried about my credit card getting shut off. I’m also not worried about a factory closing or a downturn in the housing market.

One guy I’ve met who lives this way has a great big camping trailer. Needs a huge pickup truck to pull it. He does contract work in physical therapy. He takes contracts in whatever part of the country he finds interesting, goes there and finds a place to park the trailer. That’s what he lives in. I’ve stayed in one bedroom apartments which were way smaller than this thing. This is waaaay bigger than one of those “tiny homes.” He’s working down in Texas now. Turns out he doesn’t even have to pay to keep it where it’s at. I just can’t do the trailer thing though.

At any rate, living well within your means allows you to take months off each year. The concept of retirement really doesn’t come up. Oh, you still save for it because it helps you with taxes, but if you can still do whatever it is you do at 80 a couple of months out of the year, why not? There might be a part of the country or world you would still like to see so why not have someone pay you to see it?

The only reason we still have passenger airlines and the industry is growing is because you’ve all bought into the lie. You’ve bought into the lie that you absolutely have to go somewhere and it absolutely has to fit into a weekend or a week. Hell, I was in an airport with a Kevorkian Blond who had flown from Chicago to New York for a weekend shopping trip to pick up things for a bridal party.

If we all quit flying needlessly the airlines will simply go out of business. The government doesn’t have to actually do anything. You just have to stop buying the lie and 5 percent of the global warming problem goes away.

Keep in mind you can cross the Atlantic by ship in 6-14 days depending one which one you take. Enjoy some conversation and skeet shooting off the fantail or whatever deck they choose to do it from.

Just think, if you book the right ship you won’t even have Internet. Just how much more writing could you get done without Twitter, Facebook or Instagram access? You might even look up from your idiot phone long enough to realize you’re married.