Economist business-travel blogger Gulliver reports on British airline Ryanair's customer-service standards:
Jason Roe is an Irish blogger who noticed what he thought was a bug on Ryanair's website. The price of the flights he was trying to book changed when he accidentally went into the voucher section. Thinking he had found a way to beat the budget airline's credit-card fee, he duly blogged about it—and in so doing unleashed hell. The tenth commenter on his blog was "Ryanair Staff #1"...
As Travolution, another blog, noted, "We have seen the IP addresses of the commenters and they all trace back to Ryanair HQ". It seems Ryanair's employees are referring to a blogger, on his blog and in their company's name, as an idiot, a liar and a man with a "pathetic life".
Travolution followed the matter up with Ryanair and got this confirmation from a spokesman:
"Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion.
"It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again.
"Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel."
Ryanair's CEO then went on to suggest adding pay-to-go coin boxes on his airplanes' lavatory doors.
I'll just keep flying oneworld carriers, thanks.
Update: Lots more over at Travolution.
Crain's Chicago Business reports today that the pension liabilities of several prominent employers have exploded just as their assets have imploded:
Boeing Co.'s shareholder equity is now $1.2 billion in the hole thanks to an $8.4-billion gap between its pension assets and the projected cost of its obligations for 2008. At the end of 2007, Boeing had a $4.7-billion pension surplus. If its investments don't turn around, the Chicago-based aerospace giant will have to quadruple annual contributions to its plan to about $2 billion by 2011.
... At Peoria-based Caterpillar, shareholder equity dropped more than 25% from the previous year after the company booked a $5.8-billion pension shortfall and its plan went from 93% funded to 61% funded.
That means Cat has to pay an additional 1.5 percentage points of interest to keep its untapped credit lines intact, according to SEC filings. Its pension assets sank 30% last year, and this year's contribution will more than double to about $1 billion. A Cat spokesman declines to comment.
In many cases these pension deficits will hurt exactly the people who need them most.
It's good to know who wears the pants in the Republican Party. This from Democratic Party chair Tim Kaine will clarify:
I was briefly encouraged by the courageous comments made my counterpart in the Republican Party over the weekend challenging Rush Limbaugh as the leader of the Republican Party and referring to his show as 'incendiary' and 'ugly.' However, Chairman Steele's reversal this evening and his apology to Limbaugh proves the unfortunate point that Limbaugh is the leading force behind the Republican Party....
Intellectual consistency is important.
By the way, I do think the Republican Party will return to being a force of moral and political authority someday, as they were in the 1850s and 1860s. And when that happens, I'll be happy to explain the historical irony to my great-grandchildren.
Two (probably related) items via Talking Points Memo: a reversal in a San Francisco death-penalty case, and a release of nine Bush Administration memoranda.
In the first case, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey had overruled the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco and pressed for the death penalty in a murder case. New AG Eric Holder has reversed the DOJ's position:
The Down Below prosecution has been a searing episode for the local U.S. attorney's office. The original prosecutor on the case, Richard Cutler, opposed seeking the death penalty against [defendant Emile] Fort and co-defendant Edgar Diaz. After the Justice Department took the opposite stance, the administration sent an investigator to San Francisco to question Cutler about the case. Cutler left the office soon thereafter.
... Fort's new deal will be much the same as the one Mukasey rejected....
The DOJ's document release sheds some light on the last eight years. Not much light, but it's an improvement over total darkness. Titles include:
- Memorandum Regarding Constitutionality of Amending Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to Change the "Purpose" Standard for Searches (09-25-2001)
- Memorandum Regarding Determination of Enemy Belligerency and Military Detention (06-08-2002)
- Memorandum Regarding Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities within the United States (10-23-2001)
That last one, by John Yoo, should scare anyone who's ever read Orwell or Huxley.
Who else is glad we have a new President?
From the New York Times the last few days, three articles worth reading. First, the story of AIG:
When you start asking around about how A.I.G. made money during the housing bubble, you hear the same two phrases again and again: “regulatory arbitrage” and “ratings arbitrage.” The word “arbitrage” usually means taking advantage of a price differential between two securities — a bond and stock of the same company, for instance — that are related in some way. When the word is used to describe A.I.G.’s actions, however, it means something entirely different. It means taking advantage of a loophole in the rules. A less polite but perhaps more accurate term would be “scam.”
Second, "In Letter, Warren Buffet Concedes a Tough Year:"
In language that was by turns blunt and witty, he decried what he called “a series of life-threatening problems within many of the world’s great financial institutions.” An inveterate optimist about the American economy, Mr. Buffett also forecast an eventual recovery, asserting that the country has faced even more severe economic travails in the past.
Finally, a Canadian journalist points out that her country's banking system is fine:
Canadian banks are known to be risk-averse, and this has served them well. While their American counterparts were loading up their books with risky mortgages, Canadian banks maintained their lending requirements, largely avoiding subprime mortgages. The buttoned-down banks in Canada also tended to keep these types of securities on their books, rather than packaging them and selling them to investors. This meant that the exposures they did have to weak mortgages were more visible to the marketplace.
Through multitasking and some minor process improvements, I'm already through 92 of the re-ripping project I started last week. At this rate...I should be done sometime next month.
If the weather were warmer, I should point out, I'd be walking Parker instead.
Via Calculated Risk, unemployment in California crests 10% for the first time in 26 years:
The 10.1% jobless rate is the highest since June 1983 and not far below the 11% record set in November 1982 at the worst point of a severe recession, according to the governor's office. Job losses escalated in January, with the state's unemployment rate jumping by 1.4 percentage points from a revised 8.7% for December.
The L.A. Times goes on to report a total of 380,743 layoffs in California so far this year. That's about 6,500 per day. Cheery thought.
That's how Douglas Adams described the effect of a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster. I feel like I've just drunk two, after a phone call I recevied an hour ago from North Carolina.
Long-time readers of this blog who know me personally have noticed I actually maintain a certain sense of reserve in my public writings. The actual word is "privacy," but so few people remember what that word means in the context of the Internet that I avoid using it. These long-suffering people (called "friends" and "family") have had to deal with me fretting about an application to the Fuqua School of Business Cross-Continent MBA for the last 15 months. I admire them; many of them even helped me with the application; and each of them who told me to "just $%@*&!! apply already" was completely justified in saying so.
To everyone's relief, I transmitted my application on January 31. Apparently I did something right, because Duke have admitted me into the December 2010 class.
This will have certain practical effects on my life, mainly having to do with paying for it, but also around this blog. First, for example, I'm going to slow down on the 30-Ballpark Geas as both time and money argue against going to another 16 baseball parks before September 2010. As I expect to live another 50 or 60 years, I have plenty of time to see them; I don't have to do it before turning 40. (And my cousin and I still have 13 Cubs games to go to this year.)
Also, the residencies required by the program will have me out of touch for 10 to 14 days at a time, which will be hardest on Parker. The longest he's ever been boarded is 8 days; the first residency, in London starting August 15th, will require 16 or 17 days of boarding, and I don't know how he's going to react. (Taking him overseas is not an option.) I suspect he'll be pretty resilient, but I also suspect he'll be pretty mad at me.
Anyway, those are surmountable problems. I have until the end of March to commit, but my gut says "go."
Three more photos from my trip. First, AA 657 arriving from JFK:
Second, the ruins of the Mullet Bay Resort, destroyed in September 1995 by Hurricane Luis:
Finally, another view of that sunset from the 15th:
The Rocky Mountain News, one of Denver's two newspapers, will shut its doors after tomorrow's edition:
Rich Boehne, chief executive officer of Scripps, broke the news to the Rocky staff at noon today, ending nearly three months of speculation over the paper's future. He called the paper a victim of a terrible economy and an upheaval in the newspaper industry.
"Denver can't support two newspapers anymore," Boehne told staffers, some of whom cried at the news.
On Dec. 4, Boehne announced that Scripps was looking for a buyer for the Rocky and its 50 percent interest in the Denver Newspaper Agency, the company that handles business matters for the papers, because it couldn't continue to sustain its financial losses in Denver. Scripps said the Rocky lost $16 million in 2008.
Yeah, not good. This leaves yet another major metro area with only one newspaper.