With literally only a few minutes of work, I recently booked (a) high-speed phone data for a month outside the US, (b) travel insurance, (c) a car to LAX, (d) a flight to Prague via Helsinki, (e) an Uber to the hotel, (f) a cruise down the Danube, (g) a hotel in Vienna, (h) transit passes for the city, (i) an Uber to the airport, (j) a flight back to LAX via London, and (k) a car back home.
Every one of these things was precisely on time, went off without a hitch, and took only a few clicks to buy. It is worth stopping occasionally to boggle at the fact that this is now so completely routine.
Well that's great, but HAVE YOU SEEN THE PRICE OF EGGS UNDER SLEEPY JOE??? The middle class has never been worse off, not even in Roosevelt's Great Depression.
First world solutions to problems of inconvenience.
“marvel” at…
These are the days of miracle and wonder.
-Paul Simon
Yes, and all of it without harming the environment. /s
"Over 90% of transportation is fueled by oil, and transportation accounts for almost two thirds of the oil used worldwide. Transportation is responsible for 15% of global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and is a major contributor to other air pollutants that affect human health." --Stanford U.
We could be using all of this digital technology to lower our fossil fuel consumption by replacing travel with online communication. Instead, we use digital technology to make unnecessary trips even easier.
I know I sound like a scold, but jet travel is ALL fossil fuels. So is travel by ship. If you think that personal choices matter at all, then the consequences of your vacation travel ought to be considered.
So basically nobody can go on any vacations ever, because every possible travel mode except walking produces GHG. (Even biking requires GHG to get the bike to the store where you bought it.)
Yeah. That’s gonna be popular approximately never. “Scold”? More like unrealistic buzz kill. Literally nobody - not even the most extreme environmentalists - forego all vacations for their entire lives. (Do you take zero vacations? Because even going to the closest national park or beach or hiking trail produces unnecessary GHG if you can’t get there on foot.)
Next, you’re going to recommend what? That nobody eat anything that wasn’t literally produced within walking distance of their home? Because your food choices can also produce unnecessary GHG? And I guess all the people born in Phoenix are just SOL.
A straw man AND a false dichotomy! You're quite the rhetorician, Austin.
Smarter trolls, please.
Please explain why that is a strawman argument.
FWIW, it so happens that KD himself opined on this topic a few years back:
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/08/should-we-all-be-ashamed-for-using-airplanes/
Exactly what “sacrifice” or change has Kevin made though? He keeps saying someone must do something, but it never seems to be him.
Honestly not my wheelhouse so I don't have a good answer, but if you're a longtime reader then you know he used to drive a really nice Porsche and a few years back switched to something more practical and much cheaper (and presumably more efficient as it's hard not to be more efficient than a Porsche). I would guess, though, that Porsche or not, KD's annual driving mileage is pretty low.
Is that mileage indeed low? His astrophotography jaunts are not to just around the corner.
"A few minutes"? You didn't comparison shop, check prices, jigger with schedules? Well, I guess you wouldn't need to.
Looking forward to cat blogging later today.
Even for the poorer members of the middle class (because of course real poor people don’t take many vacations), the internet saves them time or money in searching for bargains or fitting their vacation into a tight schedule. It used to be that you would have to do all that stuff Kevin mentioned by visiting a travel agency or buying it all as part of a fixed package. So the poorer members of the middle class would have to make multiple visits/calls to a travel agent to dick around on price or schedule and possibly visit more than one travel agent to get better deals and/or have no way of second guessing any of the travel agents on whether better prices or schedules were available and the agent is just hiding them from the customer because the agent gets more kickbacks for selling certain products over others.
It seems the internet benefits those people who “comparison shop, check prices, jigger with schedules” as well, by eliminating the need to deal with middlemen (travel agents or fixed package salesmen).
Oh, I definitely agree! But it takes ME a lot longer than "a few minutes."
“A few minutes” seems an exaggeration. I recently booked a similar trip for my family.
Once we had committed to the trip and the basic itinerary, it took more like three hours to select and reserve specific flights, hotels, cruise, etc.
I booked a round trip flight for July.
Since then, the departing flight time shifted from 10 am to 10 pm, then the return flight time shifted from 5pm to noon. I had to re-book those flights, shifting days, to accommodate ground transportation. I haven't booked the latter yet.
Kinda crazy that when I was a kid this stuff was such a pain there used to be a whole profession of Travel Agents whose job was to figure it out for you.
And we used to have "secretaries" who would do our travel orders.
Reminds me of a childhood memory of my mother calling my older brother in New York. We were in California and my bro returned from the war in Europe. I could hear the operators connecting one by one to cities across America. Now you can't hide from a phone call.
That brings back memories. Long distance used to be a serious big deal with a three minute call costing what would be $30-$50 now.
There are still some utility markers for AT&T long lines out where I live. They even have the old Bell System logo. I wonder if the lines are still active. The markers seem to be maintained. We're in the extreme northwest, so a lot of cable laying ships used to head out from our harbor.
It all works great until, you know, some hacker decides to target it.
“For more than two weeks, thousands of medical personnel have turned to manual methods after a cyberattack on Ascension, one of the nation’s largest health systems with about 140 hospitals in 19 states and the District of Columbia. The large-scale attack on May 8 was eerily reminiscent of the hack of Change Healthcare, a unit of UnitedHealth Group that manages the nation’s largest health care payment system.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/23/health/cyberattack-ascension-hospitals-patient-data.html
Will no one shed a tear for Travel Agents?
I have family members who still use them, mainly because most people don't know which local hotel/guide/etc. to trust. Same goes for nuances in booking cruise ships, getting the timing right, etc.
Then why the travel insurance?
Because sometimes they're not. My wife broke her foot on our last trip; my stepfather had kidney stones and a bladder infection on his last trip. Sometimes bad things happen, and having insurance makes recovering from the bad things a lot easier.
I drove to the supermarket yesterday without a single accident. Weirdly, I still have automobile insurance. Clearly, requiring it is yet another example of government overreach.
In other words, it is “completely” routine until it isn’t…
Your ai companions will listen and watch as you and Marian go about your days. They’ll sense you guys are zeroing in on a trip to Europe. But whose exact destination, dining, entertainment preferences will win out? Your personal ai friends will fight that all out for you behind the scenes, circuits nearly melting as they maneuver and joust. No more, ‘oh, I’ll go wherever you say, Marian.’ Nope. Kevin’s ai will stick up for him, and the battle will consume many a megawatt hour of power.
Booking and rebooking travel seems like an obvious use for an AI system. I'm surprised we haven't seen someone marketing one.
Yeah right. But for those on a restricted fixed income, all that neato access is beyond out means. Enjoy it...but it's not available to the masses
Except it's not?
If you can comment on the blog, you can use your device to access local transportation. Or any of the above information!
Kevin, by some chance, would you care to list the services you used to make all these arrangements ? Just curious.
Don't know what Kevin is using, but I have been using Booking.com a lot recently. Flights, hotels, temporary apartments, cars, various attractions - I always seem to get a good rate on Booking - often cheaper than what you will get if you go directly to the provider, and almost never more expensive. And when I have had disputes, they have usually resolved them satisfactorily. Plus it's convenient to have a lot of your reservations in one place where you can access them easily
Also worth noting is how much easier it is to deal with money issues when travelling abroad than it was even 20-30 years ago.
I now pay for practically everything in Europe not with cash but by swiping my contactless credit card. Most places you can get along with little or no cash. No more waiting in bank lines to cash travelers' checks (remember those?) and hoping you won't get ripped off on the exchange rate. I've done the math and my credit card (Capital One visa) always gives me an excellent exchange rate with no foreign transaction fees.
Just make sure that, if given a choice, you charge everything in local currency. You don't want somebody else doing the exchange - you want your own bank to do it.
I use my debit card to get cash from ATM machines, also at an excellent exchange rate, but I really don't need much cash.
And then there's the Euro. I still remember carrying several different currencies (and coins) when travelling around Europe, wondering when I would be able to get a good exchange rate and worrying about getting caught on a Sunday or holiday with no cash. It's a pleasure to be able to travel from the Netherlands to Germany to France to Spain to Italy to Portugal to Greece all with the same currency in my pocket.
Kevin, I wondered how you get from Prague to Vienna. You certainly dont think this is possible by a "Danube Cruise", do you? Reminder: Prague is not on the Danube and the Vitava there does not flow in the direction of the Danube either. Just sayin´.