dave: November 2005 Archives
I've poked fun at Ms. Daswani before, but she's come up with another zinger in the Unlinkable SCMP.
Model for transport
Well-managed discount airlines are making profits in spite of high oil prices and selling air tickets so cheaply that it puts our public transport to shame. They do not have any "roadshow" infotainment income, yet they are able to charge less than public transport, calculated on a pro-rata basis. Sometimes the ferry ride to Macau is more expensive than the plane ticket. The airlines' fare structure is a good basis to force cuts in public transport fares.
NALINI DASWANI, Tsim Sha Tsui
The ludicruously low fares some airline operaters claim to charge are called "Loss Leaders". i.e., the first ten people to book get a loss-making fare, while the rest get a sliding scale of profitable fares. In. Ms Daswani's case, there's a few seats less than $170 (the cost of the ferry), while most of the rest of the seats are more expensive. The airline will make most profit on a route by charging exorbitant fees to business class users. i.e. Cathay Pacific's business class costs three times as much as economy class.
How does this translate to domestic public transport fares? It doesn't. There's no booking of seats or preferential treatment for early customers. Everyone who wants to use the service pays the same fare (unless they're an OAP or a child, of course). There is no scope for differential charges, or charging business users more than others, so the airline pricing model has no connection to public transport fares.
- Blazing Sunshine;
- Baking Heat;
- Christmas Carols.
There's been quite an amount of fuss in the Australia media recently about Howard's proposed new terror laws. And now, there's a Vague Terror Alert to demonstrate the need for immediate removal of civil rights from everyone. What a coincidence. Maybe he's learning from the Bush administration's fake terror alerts on the New York Subway?
UPDATE: There appears to have been An Actual Terror Plot in planning, so fair play to the Aussies for stopping that in it's tracks, if indeed there was a plot. It's kind of difficult to tell from the local news how real the threat was as most of the Headlines on Sky/Fox are full of heavy-handed right-wing gibberish. Reports of 'Bomb Making Materials' are everywhere, but that could just as easily mean sacks of fertiliser as well as crates of C4.
Mythbusters like, totally rocks, man. It's a show dedicated to the scientific testing of Urban Myths such as:
- Can a person receive third-degree burns if he or she lights a cigarette while inside a port-a-potty?
- If an elevator suddenly falls, can you save yourself in the nick of time by jumping just before it hits bottom?
- Does a duck's quack echo?
It's very entertaining, and well produced.
Brainiac, on the other hand, is a Sky One effort which seeks to research such questions such as:
- How many women with large breasts are required to blow up a washing machine?
- How many times can a cameraman look straight down the top of a woman with large breasts pretending to be Tina Turner while she blows up a car?
While there are some interesting and entertaining spots, most of it is typical MAXIM-style 'Laddy' humour, i.e. sexist, lowest common denominator rubbish.
Mythbusters is essentially creative - they build and modify machines and design experiments to test their hypotheses. The other show merely destroys things. OK, crash test dummies get a hard time in both, but at least Mythbusters dummy is a real crash-test dummy, while the Brainiac crew just destroy mannikins. (And the mannikins frequently have large breasts, too. It's something of a signature element to the show. I think the creator was probably bottle-fed as a child.)
This is not to say that stuff doesn't get blown up or destroyed during a Mythbusters investigation - dropping an elevator ten stories to see if your crash test dummy will survive the fall is destructive, but in the course of that investigation they:
- restored the elevator to semi-working order by modifying a soda-throwing robot vending machine!;
- designed and built a mechanism to make a crash-test dummy jump in a rough semblance of a human jump;
- and designed and built quick-release mechanisms for both the elevator and the dummy jumping device.
Compare this to the regular "Tina Turner and her Bunsen Burner" spot on Brainiac, where a short woman (with the obligatory large breasts) cavorts around in a red dress blowing up cars with dynamite, petrol or some other schtick, while the cameraman does his best to look straight down her cleavage.
Some Blogs
- Go Fug Yourself
- WWdN: In Exile (Wil Wheaton)
- Uncertain Principles
- Crooked Timber
- Official Google Blog
- Wine Library TV
- Slashdot
- waider
- waidesworld
- Making Light
- The Language Hat
- Neil Gaiman
- Whatever: John Scalzi
- Charlie Stross's Diary
- Ken MacLeod
- Dave Langford's Ansible
- Contrary Brin
- Stephen Fry
- Veronica Belmont
- Mahalo
- Merlin Mann
- Kung Fu Grippe
- Jonathan Coulton
- David Gerrold
- Orcinus
- The Sideshow
- Josh Marshall
- Atrios (Eschaton)
- Hullabulloo
- 43 Folders
- Wis[s]e Words: Ceci n'est pas un blog
- Wil Harris
- Boing Boing
- Engadget
- Gizmodo
- LifeHacker
- The Poor Man
- Creative Commons
Environental Sites
Apple News and blogs
- Apple Hot News
- Apple Phone Show
- Mac Rumors
- Andy Ihnatko
- TUAW
- MacRumors
- Apple Insider
- Fake Steve Jobs
- Erica Sadun iPhone developer
- ZiPhone Zibri's iPhone unlocker
- Mac OS X Hints
- 9 to 5 Mac
- MacWorld
Linux News
Photography News and blogs
- DPReview
- Photo.net
- This Week in Photography
- Strobist (flash photography)
- Stuck In Customs (HDR)
- Pentax
- Pentax Support
- The Gimp
- Photomatix
News and Politics
- Google News
- BBC News
- South China Morning Post
- HK Standard
- UK Guardian
- Your Yahoo!
- WhiteHouse.org
- Christian Science Monitor
- The Onion (Even better than the real thing!)
Podcasts
- TWiT.tv
- MacBreak Weekly
- This Week in Tech
- FLOSS Weekly
- Pixel Corps
- Podango
- TekZilla
- Command-N
- Mahalo Daily
Web Comics
- User Friendly by Illiad
- Sheldon by Dave Kellett
- Dilbert by Scott Adams
- Doonesbury by Trudeau
- Everyone Loves Eric Raymond
- XKCD by Randall
- The Joy of Tech comic by nitrozac
- PVP Online by Scott Kurtz
- Real Life by Greg Dean
- Questionable Content
- Mega Tokyo
- WonderMark by David Maliki
- Girl Genious
- Penny Arcade by Gabe and Tycho
- NASA astronomy picture of the day
- The World of Lily Wong
- Hi Jinks Ensue
- Three Panel Soul
- Girls With Slingshots
- Ann Telnaes
- Joel Pett
- Tom Toles
- Pat Oliphant
- Ted Rall
About Me
- about me
- odaiwai's shared items
- odaiwai on twitter
- odaiwai on youtube
- odaiwai on flickr
- odaiwai on del.icio.us
- odaiwai on blogspot
- odaiwai on livejournal
- SARS Statistics
- Site Statistics
- hong kong weather
- phpsysinfo
- dave's wibblings (feedburner)
Contact
- Unsolicited Bulk Email (spam), commercial solicitations, SEO related items, and abuse are not welcome here.
- email the webmaster
- Any email to the above address may be made public at the sole discretion of the recipient.