#Buy airline tickets

[angerydome]

I told a friend to keep an eye on their banks/cards because people are getting caught up in that recent data breach, and their response was,

“This is all capitalism’s fault.”

And I … err … is it??

[antisocialxconstruct]

.

[vamptits]

my plane was delayed by 3 and a half hours and they only gave us AC on hour 3. on a really tight plane in Athens in the middle of the day. but I made it 🥰🥰🥰

[carnationinstantbutch]

Applied for passport in July. ETA was mid-late August. We are crawling ever closer to Mid-September and my passport is still in review and I Am Scared.

[eugeniedanglars]

*emerges from the amtrak ticket buying experience shaking and covered in blood* actually i think i’ll fly. fuck the environment

[against-faith]

Guess who’s poor again now and for what reason

[flatoatchi]

the sheer logistical nightmare that is figuring out how to fly with both of your cats

[emrrys]

i love my job. i really really really do. however next branch manager who emails me about flight information for their states employees. is getting a bomb mailed to their home address

[boyapologist]

I just found someone selling a student ticket for PREMIUM PIT. just put in my flight request. this might be happening guys

[aspeckof-stardust]

.

[lovejoshua]

been feeling very anxious all throughout today 😁

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The cod-Marxism of personalized pricing

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

The social function of the economics profession is to explain, over and over again, that your boss is actually right and that you don't really want the things you want, and you're secretly happy to be abused by the system. If that wasn't true, why would your "choose" commercial surveillance, abusive workplaces and other depredations?

In other words, economics is the "look what you made me do" stick that capitalism uses to beat us with. We wouldn't spy on you, rip you off or steal your wages if you didn't choose to use the internet, shop with monopolists, or work for a shitty giant company. The technical name for this ideology is "public choice theory":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Of all the terrible things that economists say we all secretly love, one of the worst is "price discrimination." This is the idea that different customers get charged different amounts based on the merchant's estimation of their ability to pay. Economists insist that this is "efficient" and makes us all better off. After all, the marginal cost of filling the last empty seat on the plane is negligible, so why not sell that seat for peanuts to a flier who doesn't mind the uncertainty of knowing whether they'll get a seat at all? That way, the airline gets extra profits, and they split those profits with their customers by lowering prices for everyone. What's not to like?

Plenty, as it turns out. With only four giant airlines who've carved up the country so they rarely compete on most routes, why would an airline use their extra profits to lower prices, rather than, say, increasing their dividends and executive bonuses?

For decades, the airline industry was the standard-bearer for price discrimination. It was basically impossible to know how much a plane ticket would cost before booking it. But even so, airlines were stuck with comparatively crude heuristics to adjust their prices, like raising the price of a ticket that didn't include a Saturday stay, on the assumption that this was a business flyer whose employer was footing the bill:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/07/drip-drip-drip/#drip-off

With digitization and mass commercial surveillance, we've gone from pricing based on context (e.g. are you buying your ticket well in advance, or at the last minute?) to pricing based on spying. Digital back-ends allow vendors to ingest massive troves of commercial surveillance data from the unregulated data-broker industry to calculate how desperate you are, and how much money you have. Then, digital front-ends – like websites and apps – allow vendors to adjust prices in realtime based on that data, repricing goods for every buyer.

As digital front-ends move into the real world (say, with digital e-ink shelf-tags in grocery stores), vendors can use surveillance data to reprice goods for ever-larger groups of customers and types of merchandise. Grocers with e-ink shelf tags reprice their goods thousands of times, every day:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

Here's where an economist will tell you that actually, your boss is right. Many groceries are perishable, after all, and e-ink shelf tags allow grocers to reprice their goods every minute or two, so yesterday's lettuce can be discounted every fifteen minutes through the day. Some customers will happily accept a lettuce that's a little gross and liztruss if it means a discount. Those customers get a discount, the lettuce isn't thrown out at the end of the day, and everyone wins, right?

Well, sure, if. If the grocer isn't part of a heavily consolidated industry where competition is a distant memory and where grocers routinely collude to fix prices. If the grocer doesn't have to worry about competitors, why would they use e-ink tags to lower prices, rather than to gouge on prices when demand surges, or based on time of day (e.g. making frozen pizzas 10% more expensive from 6-8PM)?

And unfortunately, groceries are one of the most consolidated sectors in the modern world. What's more, grocers keep getting busted for colluding to fix prices and rip off shoppers:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/loblaw-bread-price-settlement-1.7274820

Surveillance pricing is especially pernicious when it comes to apps, which allow vendors to reprice goods based not just on commercially available data, but also on data collected by your pocket distraction rectangle, which you carry everywhere, do everything with, and make privy to all your secrets. Worse, since apps are a closed platform, app makers can invoke IP law to criminalize anyone who reverse-engineers them to figure out how they're ripping you off. Removing the encryption from an app is a potential felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine (an app is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to install a privacy blocker on it):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/15/private-law/#thirty-percent-vig

Large vendors love to sell you shit via their apps. With an app, a merchant can undetectably change its prices every few seconds, based on its estimation of your desperation. Uber pioneered this when they tweaked the app to raise the price of a taxi journey for customers whose batteries were almost dead. Today, everyone's getting in on the act. McDonald's has invested in a company called Plexure that pitches merchants on the use case of raising the cost of your normal breakfast burrito by a dollar on the day you get paid:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Surveillance pricing isn't just a matter of ripping off customers, it's also a way to rip off workers. Gig work platforms use surveillance pricing to titrate their wage offers based on data they buy from data brokers and scoop up with their apps. Veena Dubal calls this "algorithmic wage discrimination":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Take nurses: increasingly, American hospitals are firing their waged nurses and replacing them with gig nurses who are booked in via an app. There's plenty of ways that these apps abuse nurses, but the most ghastly is in how they price nurses' wages. These apps buy nurses' financial data from data-brokers so they can offer lower wages to nurses with lots of credit card debt, on the grounds that crushing debt makes nurses desperate enough to accept a lower wage:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

This week, the excellent Lately podcast has an episode on price discrimination, in which cohost Vass Bednar valiantly tries to give economists their due by presenting the strongest possible case for charging different prices to different customers:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/lately/article-the-end-of-the-fixed-price/

Bednar really tries, but – as she later agrees – this just isn't a very good argument. In fact, the only way charging different prices to different customers – or offering different wages to different workers – makes sense is if you're living in a socialist utopia.

After all, a core tenet of Marxism is "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." In a just society, people who need more get more, and people who have less, pay less:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_needs

Price discrimination, then, is a Bizarro-world flavor of cod-Marxism. Rather than having a democratically accountable state that sets wages and prices based on need and ability, price discrimination gives this authority to large firms with pricing power, no regulatory constraints, and unlimited access to surveillance data. You couldn't ask for a neater example of the maxim that "What matters isn't what technology does. What matters is who it does it for; and who it does it to."

Neoclassical economists say that all of this can be taken care of by the self-correcting nature of markets. Just give consumers and workers "perfect information" about all the offers being made for their labor or their business, and things will sort themselves out. In the idealized models of perfectly spherical cows of uniform density moving about on a frictionless surface, this does work out very well:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/03/all-models-are-wrong/#some-are-useful

But while large companies can buy the most intimate information imaginable about your life and finances, IP law lets them capture the state and use it to shut down any attempts you make to discover how they operate. When an app called Para offered Doordash workers the ability to preview the total wage offered for a job before they accepted it, Doordash threatened them with eye-watering legal penalties, then threw dozens of full-time engineers at them, changing the app several times per day to shut out Para:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app

And when an Austrian hacker called Mario Zechner built a tool to scrape online grocery store prices – discovering clear evidence of price-fixing conspiracies in the process – he was attacked by the grocery cartel for violating their "IP rights":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

This is Wilhoit's Law in action:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Wilhoit#Wilhoit's_law

Of course, there wouldn't be any surveillance pricing without surveillance. When it comes to consumer privacy, America is a no-man's land. The last time Congress passed a new consumer privacy law was in 1988, when they enacted the Video Privacy Protection Act, which bans video-store clerks from revealing which VHS cassettes you take home. Congress has not addressed a single consumer privacy threat since Die Hard was still playing in theaters.

Corporate bullies adore a regulatory vacuum. The sleazy data-broker industry that has festered and thrived in the absence of a modern federal consumer privacy law is absolutely shameless. For example, every time an app shows you an ad, your location is revealed to dozens of data-brokers who pretend to be bidding for the right to show you an ad. They store these location data-points and combine them with other data about you, which they sell to anyone with a credit card, including stalkers, corporate spies, foreign governments, and anyone hoping to reprice their offerings on the basis of your desperation:

https://www.404media.co/candy-crush-tinder-myfitnesspal-see-the-thousands-of-apps-hijacked-to-spy-on-your-location/

Under Biden, the outgoing FTC did incredible work to fill this gap, using its authority under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act (which outlaws "unfair and deceptive" practices) to plug some of the worst gaps in consumer privacy law:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

And Biden's CFPB promulgated a rule that basically bans data brokers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism

But now the burden of enforcing these rules falls to Trump's FTC, whose new chairman has vowed to end the former FTC's "war on business." What America desperately needs is a new privacy law, one that has a private right of action (so that individuals and activist groups can sue without waiting for a public enforcer to take up their causes) and no "pre-emption" (so that states can pass even stronger privacy laws):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/federal-preemption-state-privacy-law-hurts-everyone

How will we get that law? Through a coalition. After all, surveillance pricing is just one of the many horrors that Americans have to put up with thanks to America's privacy law gap. The "privacy first" theory goes like this: if you're worried about social media's impact on teens, or women, or old people, you should start by demanding a privacy law. If you're worried about deepfake porn, you should start by demanding a privacy law. If you're worried about algorithmic discrimination in hiring, lending, or housing, you should start by demanding a privacy law. If you're worried about surveillance pricing, you should start by demanding a privacy law. Privacy law won't entirely solve all these problems, but none of them would be nearly as bad if Congress would just get off its ass and catch up with the privacy threats of the 21st century. What's more, the coalition of everyone who's worried about all the harms that arise from commercial surveillance is so large and powerful that we can get Congress to act:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

Economists, meanwhile, will line up to say that this is all unnecessary. After all, you "sold" your privacy when you clicked "I agree" or walked under a sign warning you that facial recognition was in use in this store. The market has figured out what you value privacy at, and it turns out, that value is nothing. Any kind of privacy law is just a paternalistic incursion on your "freedom to contract" and decide to sell your personal information. It is "market distorting."

In other words, your boss is right.

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

Ser Amantio di Nicolao (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Safeway_supermarket_interior,_Fairfax_County,_Virginia.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[steddieas-shegoes]

to everyone’s shock, Eddie Munson is incredibly organized when it comes to taking trips. he has an itinerary and a packing list, and he’s got his budget figured out weeks in advance. even the smallest road trip for the weekend is planned in great detail so there’s no surprises.

even more shocking is that Steve Harrington is the exact opposite. he closes his eyes and points to a place on a map one day and buys a plane ticket the next. he packs the night before and almost always forgets something because he didn’t make a list and didn’t research the weather patterns for the area.

they drive each other absolutely batty the first few times they travel together.

but then Steve is pointing at a small island near scotland and Eddie is calling airlines and one of only two bed and breakfasts on the island. Steve is setting aside their money for the trip while Eddie packs after calling Jeff’s mom, who vacationed in scotland when all her kids grew up and left the nest.

it all comes together somehow, the two of them making the perfect combination of chaos and control.

when they arrive in scotland, ready to take the ferry to the island, Steve reaches in his backpack for his map of the island and freezes. it’s not there. it’s not in Eddie’s bag either.

it’s one of their most prized possessions for this trip and he lost it.

Eddie comes back from talking to the ferry operator holding a piece of paper and smiling despite the heavy mist descending on them.

it’s the map.

Steve hides his sigh of relief, smiling back.

“you dropped this,” Eddie says casually.

“oh, did I?”

Eddie’s only response is shoving it in his own bag.

yeah, it’s probably best he hold onto that.

it’s not the only time during that trip that Steve messes up one of their plans on accident.

he buys breakfast one morning instead of eating the free one at their bed and breakfast.

“it’s in the name, Steve!”

“I wanted a croissant, Eddie!”

he forgets their rain jackets when they go on a walking tour of the coast and it inevitably rains.

“wet denim isn’t ideal for walking tours, Stevie.”

“I’m well aware, Eds.”

but no matter what, Eddie always gives him that smile. the one that lets him know it’s okay that he’s a little chaotic with this stuff. it’s okay that he’s a little forgetful and more focused on the fun than the making sure everything’s right.

because love is about balance and in every area, that’s exactly what they do.

[flighthotelgo]

Flight Hotel Go is a comprehensive travel service platform designed to streamline the booking process for flights and hotels. Whether you're planning a vacation, business trip, or a quick weekend getaway, Flight Hotel Go offers seamless options to book both your flight and accommodation in one go. The platform provides users with a vast selection of airlines and hotel chains worldwide, ensuring competitive pricing, real-time availability, and tailored recommendations based on personal preferences.

[macgyvermedical]

Moving vs Fleeing (and what you need to flee)

I was on a call last night with a very reputable LGBTQ+ organization in my state that discussed the difference between moving and fleeing.

Essentially, moving is planned. You get an apartment and a job in another city- hopefully you visit that city to scope it out. Then you move your life. It takes, at minimum, months.

Fleeing is unplanned. Something is happening that is so bad in your area that you have to cut and run. It may not be police at your door. But it might be legislation that prevents you from using restrooms without the risk of being killed or arrested. It might be lack of access to medications and something that makes it illegal to get those medications in a different state. It might be the classification of your life (as someone gay or tans) as a sex crime, and sex crimes being punishable by death (a goal of project 2025).

And, they recommended, get things together before it gets to that point, even if you aren't sure that it will happen, so fleeing is as easy as possible if you need to do it.

Here's what you can do:

Pick a location you can get to either by bus, train, or car that has a good track record for your needs and that you think you could live. Do your research- are there jobs there in your field? Housing?

Then get yourself a bag or large backpack.

Get a file folder and put your documents in it. I mean things like your passport, your birth certificate, your social security card, copies of any professional licenses you have, a checkbook, name change documentation, copies of financial documents like mortgages, copies of insurance cards and policies, copies of marriage licenses, and a copy of your driver's license. These are things you might need if you have to prove your identity or get a job or apartment. Then print out maps of several routes to your destination. Put the file folder in the bag.

Add to that: a couple of changes of clothes for each person including a hat and a cloth or disposable face covering (people don't question them as much since the pandemic, and they're convenient to hide your face). Lightweight, caloric foods for at least 3 days that don't require cooking (protein bars work great for this). A month of medications and an emergency script for each medication for each person (get a paper prescription from your doctor that is good for a year or the max allowed for each medication) if you can get it. Pay out of pocket with a coupon card if your insurance won't cover your refill early. 1-2 containers of baby wipes so you don't necessarily need to shower. An empty water bottle for each person. A phone charger.

Buy a gift card that can be used for anything. I won't say how much because I don't know your situation, but make it enough that you can pay for gas or bus/train/airline tickets to your destination and (if you can) temporary lodging/food once you get there. Gift cards are less traceable than debit/credit cards and aren't easy to cancel. An alternative is cash, but that can be an easier target for theft if people see you with it.

Finally, bring something of comfort, like a blanket or memento or stuffed animal.

[the-one-that-weeps]

Can we please talk about how awfully rich the project sekai cast is.

- More more jump is composed of three reformed idols. If that's not enough, they also do shows fairly often and I bet those tickets sell well.

- Shizuku is also a model.

- And if that's not enough, Papa Hinomori is a well known artist.

- the Tenmas are pretty rich (just take a look at their house).

- Also Ichika afforded to buy a Miku software so she's not poor either.

- Shinodad is also a well known artist, the Shinonomes live fairly comfortably if I remember correctly.

- Toya is like the second richest character in the game.

- Ken doesn't act rich but that doesn't mean he's not a well known artist and if you've read any of the vbs area convos you know the RADder copies still sell after all these years

- Emu is the richest character in the game. I don't think I even have to specify why. The Otoris literally own an airline.

- Wxs also do shows all the time. Ticket money part 2

- Kanadad probably struggled financially after his failure as an artist, but Kanade doesn't only make enough profit to survive but also pays Honami every week or so. Also, she has really neat equipment in her room, so Kanadad used to have a fair amount of cash.

- Everyone who goes at Miya girl is automatically rich. It's a PREP SCHOOL

- Also Mafumom pays Mafuyu for grad school and I don't think that's a cheap miracle.

- Not only that but Niigo are probably the most popular group out of the cast, their channel has a lot of followers and their videos get thousands of views. This actually makes me question if they like. Split the money somehow. Or do they just give it to Kanade because no way she's living off of her grandma's pension.

- imagine Niigo getting the youtube golden play button because I need this to actually happen now