What distinguishes bad small talk from good small talk? How does one move the small talk from being bad and painful to slightly less bad and painful?

Is it always bad, and it's just that some people genuinely enjoy it, no matter the quality?

Is there appetite for a Kissinger thread?

Apparently ghost flights are a thing:

IN DECEMBER 2021, 27,591 aircraft took off or landed at Frankfurt airport--890 every day. But this winter, many of them weren't carrying any passengers at all. Lufthansa, Germany's national airline, which is based in Frankfurt, has admitted to running 21,000 empty flights this winter, using its own planes and those of its Belgian subsidiary, Brussels Airlines, in an attempt to keep hold of airport slots.

Although anti-air travel campaigners believe ghost flights are a widespread issue that airlines don't publicly disclose, Lufthansa is so far the only airline to go public about its own figures. In January, climate activist Greta Thunberg tweeted her disbelief over the scale of the issue. Unusually, she was joined by voices within the industry. One of them was Lufthansa's own chief executive, Carsten Spohr, who said the journeys were "empty, unnecessary flights just to secure our landing and takeoff rights." But the company argues that it can't change its approach: Those ghost flights are happening because airlines are required to conduct a certain proportion of their planned flights in order to keep slots at high-trafficked airports.

Here's an article from a site called Airlines that says that it's not actually a problem outside of Covid-sized disruptions.

Here's an article from August 2023 about Qatar Airlines doing it.

SpooOOOoooky! I don't know anything.

When we talk about sprawl vs density, I think the class segregation bit often gets lost in the shuffle. It's really wild how separated the haves are from the have-nots, and how both are separated from the have-lots-and-lots.

I don't think it's necessarily getting worse, but I do think that it makes people more open to progressive arguments when they aren't as sheltered from the needs of others. To that end:

We use location data to study activity and encounters across class lines. Low-income and especially high-income individuals are socially isolated: more likely than other income groups to encounter people from their own social class. Using simple counterfactual exercises, we study the causes. While some industries cater mainly to low or high-income groups (for example, golf courses and wineries), industry alone explains only a small share of isolation. People are most isolated when they are close to home, and the tendency to go to nearby locations explains about one-third of isolation. Using our uniquely detailed data, we show that brands, combined with distance, explain about half the isolation of the rich. Casual restaurant chains, like Olive Garden and Applebee's, have the largest positive impact on cross-class encounters through both scale and their diversity of visitors. Dollar stores and local pharmacies like CVS deepen isolation. Among publicly-funded spaces, libraries and parks are more redistributive than museums and historical sites. And, despite prominent restrictions on chain stores in some large US cities, chains are more class diverse than independent stores. The mix of establishments in a neighborhood is strongly associated with cross-class Facebook friendships (Chetty et al., 2022). The results uncover how policies that support certain public and private spaces might impact the connections that form across class divides.

That's the abstract of the actual paper, but this silly write-up is where I originally saw it.

Indeed, the sweet spot for cross-class mixing is what the researchers call "full-service, low-price restaurants." That includes places like IHOP, Applebee's, Chili's, and, yes, Olive Garden.

Other businesses, like pharmacies, grocery stores, and gyms, or public institutions, like parks, schools, and libraries, are not as diverse, as they tend to serve the people in their immediate vicinity, the researchers found. A higher-income person is more likely to meet a lower-income person at a fast food restaurant like McDonald's or Wendy's. However, it's not a reciprocal effect since those restaurants tend to see much more of the latter. At somewhere like Panera, poorer Americans are more likely to meet non-poor Americans, but not the other way around.

This next paragraph just veers into self-parody:

As the researchers note, all of that could mean rethinking policy situations for getting Americans from different income brackets to socialize, especially as some areas prioritized cutting back on the number of chain restaurants they allow. After all, research from Harvard economist Raj Chetty has found that being friends with higher-earners is key to your economic mobility -- but many lower-earning Americans make friends based on proximity. That's why cross-income areas for socializing are important. You might just meet that rich new friend at Chili's.

I feel like there are a bunch of articles (in the ether, no links) chiding voters for being idiots and not realizing that inflation is back to normal.

When in fact, the journalists were the idiots all along! People don't actually care about the rate of change of prices. They care about the prices. If you absolutely must measure it as a rate of change, and you want it to be relevant to people's feelings, then the time unit ought to be roughly how long it takes for the old prices to fade in salience, as a reference point. Until you update your reference point (or if prices happen to fall), it's going to feel like inflation is rampant.

As an aside, a cute factoid I've always enjoyed:

In the fall of 1972, President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time a sitting president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection.