Passengers can now collect up to $1,300 for being bumped from a domestic flight if they arrive at their destination more than two hours later than scheduled, under Department of Transportation rules revised earlier this year. (The previous maximum was $800.)
Passengers can also get as much as $650 (up from $400) if they get to their destination within one to two hours of the scheduled time, according to the new rule.
Critics like the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators decry the bonus system for its lack of fairness and its contribution to widening inequality. But the greater problem is that it provides an incentive to take risks. The asymmetric nature of the bonus (an incentive for success without a corresponding disincentive for failure) causes hidden risks to accumulate in the financial system and become a catalyst for disaster. This violates the fundamental rules of capitalism; Adam Smith himself was wary of the effect of limiting liability, a bedrock principle of the modern corporation.
Bonuses are particularly dangerous because they invite bankers to game the system by hiding the risks of rare and hard-to-predict but consequential blow-ups, which I have called “black swan” events. The meltdown in the United States subprime mortgage market, which set off the global financial crisis, is only the latest example of such disasters.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has "a solution for the problem of bankers who take risks that threaten the general public: Eliminate bonuses."
Prune's Classic Bloody Mary
54 E 1st St.,Lower East Side
Several things are necessary for humans to thrive in fall. These include but are not limited to: mittens, hip flasks, football and Bloody Mary’s. Prune’s take on the last item has become something of a
Lower East Side legend. The lines that stretch along the sidewalk outside during peak brunch hours are worthy of a velvet rope and a bouncer sporting a headset. And, while the food is certainly part of what keeps the masses huddled in freezing weather for hours, the Mary’s are pretty damn spot-on. There are 10 recipes to choose from, listing liquors far beyond vodka, decorated with a whole cornucopia of garnishes. Each recipe uses Prune’s winning mix—a blend of Sacramento tomato juice, tart lemon, grated horseradish, and several other items Eater was unable to pry out of the tight-lipped bar staff. Brave the line. It’s worth it.
“Finally, we do not have to speculate as to whether there are new entrants in vertical search services such as comparison shopping and local search and review sites,” Schmidt says. “In February of this year, the travel comparison shopping site, Hipmunk, received $4.6 million in venture funding even as Google continues to expand its own flight search and hotel search functionality.”
The funding number is a bit off, but I'll let it slide. Healthy competition means consumers win!
I hated the name Reddit [acquired by Conde Nast and still going strong, though seemingly taken over by teenage boys] at first, for example, and made them promise to change it. Steve Huffman agreed with me and said he would. But not Alexis. And now it looks like Alexis has won. Reddit is now Reddit permanently. I’ll admit the name has one advantage: when people ask me where I heard something, I find myself naturally saying “I read it on Reddit.”
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