AA first has been a joke for a long time. It was an ever so slightly better seat and they served one extra course - a soup - but was otherwise identical to business class service. You can’t charge thousands more for soup.
First class has been dying for years - and the only airlines that will do it, it’s really a prestige thing more than a profit center.
Only sorta. I’m not sure how much they are right about the crookedness of the market - it’s just that retail investors are at a severe disadvantage to institutional ones.
What they did do was create a short squeeze for a bunch of folks (rightly) betting that GameStop is overvalued because it’s a shit company with no real path to an increasingly digital market.
We didn’t then either. The real issue is scale. What worked when the entire population of the human race was 100,000 doesn’t work when it’s 8,500,000,000.
You’re right that there are no wilds no, no one is getting 40 acres and a mule, and you can just inhabit a new area.
But let’s not forget that a lot of the stake a claim and defend with lethal force was literally colonialism. So many of those wilds were owned by other people, but the stronger guy with the bigger rock can kill him, take his land, take his wife.
Hardly utopia.
Honestly, it seems the same. If a bar doesn’t want Jews in it and the bartender asks everyone if they’re Jewish or a bouncer at the door feels like a distinction without a difference.
There’s no additional liberty, the people who own the bar set the rules.
But if you can throw people out, and kill them when they come back why is it that different?
Ostracism only required a vote, no crime, and no defense was allowed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism
The penalty for returning was death.
Presumably even though there were no border controls, they would kill you if you returned.
Honestly, I’m not sure what the fixation with a guy in a booth is about. Whether you get denied entry and they throw you out, or if they exile or ostracize you, what’s the difference?
Go read some Greek history on the city states and ostracism, as well as the fact that it only worked because they had slaves and subjugated women?
But that’s the way borders were understood then too… it was just harder to determine who was who?
They’d kick you out and burn down your house or kill you for being an invader?
So is the argument against technology that allows us to know who is who and records of who is a citizen of places?
Like, they used to record that stuff too… it was just much harder?
They would collect taxes and keep records?
That feels like a distinction without a difference? The vast vast majority of physical land borders are effectively open everywhere worldwide still today.
The zone of control of a government just kicks you out if they don’t want you?
BA, agree, AF, not a chance. La Premiere is much much nicer than even qsuites. LH is somewhat plane dependent, but the FCT is fun.