EasyJet 4, Ryanair nil

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I don’t do much long-distance travel (sheer laziness) but I do fly short-haul quite a lot, using budget airlines — mainly Ryanair. This afternoon, I flew with EasyJet to Copenhagen to speak at the Neils Bohr conference and was reminded of how comparatively civilised EasyJet is compared with its raucous competitor.

Reflecting on the difference, four factors stand out:

  • The EasyJet website is relatively straightforward to navigate. There are none of the annoying hidden traps for the unwary with which Ryanair tries to nudge naïve customers into buying travel insurance, priority boarding, car rental or ‘special’ Ryanair cabin bags. One has the feeling that the EasyJet site is actually trying to help one book a flight as quickly as possible.
  • There’s no scramble to board and no scrum to find a seat when you get into the aircraft. Why? Simple: Easyjet assigns everybody a numbered seat on booking.
  • During the flight, it’s relatively quiet. There’s nobody constantly on the public-address system trying to flog you scratch cards, ‘duty-free’ crap, rail or bus tickets, or electronic ‘cigarettes’.
  • EasyJet planes have pockets in the back of the seats into which one can stuff books, water bottles, Kindles and other paraphernalia while you’re settling in and trying to find the seat-belt.

    • In other words, there’s nothing sophisticated or complicated about the things that make EasyJet a more enjoyable travelling experience. Why then doesn’t Ryanair adopt them? After all, they give EasyJet a competitive advantage. I have friends who, when coming to visit us in Provence in the summer, will fly to Nice rather than to Marseilles or Toulon simply because EasyJet flies to Nice — even though the resulting road trip to the house is significantly longer.

    Why the NSA has landed us all in another nice mess

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    This morning’s Observer column.

    Fans of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy will fondly remember Oliver’s complaint to Stanley: “Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into!” In a future remake, Hardy will be played by Barack Obama, suitably enhanced with a toothbrush moustache, while Keith Alexander, currently head of the NSA, will star as Laurel. The scene in which this particular bit of dialogue occurs is the Oval Office, which for the purposes of the scene is littered with flip charts summarising the various unintended consequences of the NSA’s recent activities, as relayed by Edward Snowden.

    One chart, supplied by the Department of Commerce, lists the collateral damage inflicted by the revelations on major US internet companies…

    Read on…

    New Yorker cartoons

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    I love the New Yorker, even when I feel reproached by the accumulating pile of as-yet-unread issues. Leafing through some this morning I came on two cartoons that made me laugh out loud.

    One shows a pantomime horse with a speech-bubble coming from the rear asking “Are we there yet?”

    The other showed a group of beggars on a street corner. One says to the others, “Remember — we’re not begging. We’re crowdfunding.”

    The issue-a-day men

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    There was an interesting conversation this morning on the Today programme between Evan Davis and the chancellor, George Osborne. The peg for the conversation was the government’s announcement that it was going to intervene in the so-called “pay-day loans” market – by capping interest rates, among other things. Davis made the point that the government had already set up a new banking regulator – the Financial Conduct Authority – to oversee the financial services and asked the perfectly reasonable question: why was the government suddenly doing the job that the FCA had been set up to do?

    Osborne did not have a satisfactory answer, but I do: it’s a headline-grabbing piece of pseudo-activism aimed at persuading the public that the government is on the job. They’re concerned because Ed Miliband appears to have captured the initiative with his proposal to cap energy prices, and generally to take the cost-of-living crisis (that’s the crisis that ordinary people are experiencing) seriously.

    And then I was reminded of something perceptive that Alistair Campbell said last week during his sojourn in Cambridge. He pointed out the way in which, in recent months especially, David Cameron appears on TV on an almost daily basis, expostulating on an issue or problem about which he feels absolutely passionately and about which he is determined (clenched fist, emphatic gesture) to do something. But every day it’s a different issue. Campbell sees this as a symptom of a leader who is now devoid of strategy and so is driven to following the day-to-day vagaries of public opinion and tabloid obsession, like a kitten chasing a moving patch of light.

    What GDP doesn’t compute

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    This morning’s Observer column.

    Deciding that the health of a nation’s economy can be measured by a single number is as daft as thinking that a single measure of “intelligence” (the IQ) can sum up an individual’s capability and potential. As Howard Gardner pointed out many years ago, there are many different kinds of intelligence, and each person occupies a different point in that multi-dimensional space. Similarly, the health of an economy needs to be measured along several axes. But we seem to be stuck with GDP because that’s the only thing economists know how to calibrate.

    To the measure’s age-old contradictions, the internet has now added a really puzzling one. The world of traditional “production”, in which industries and businesses produced goods and services and in the process created value that could be measured and included in GDP, has been augmented by a parallel universe in which there is a great deal of activity, most of which is invisible to the bean-counters who compute GDP.

    Take Twitter…

    Read on…

    What was lost in Dallas

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    The CRASSH Blog, edited by Sally Lewis, launched today. My contribution is an Observer TV column about Jack Kennedy that I wrote 20 years ago. This was long before the paper had an online edition, so this copy had to be resurrected from my clippings file.

    I saw Jack Kennedy once, in the flesh, at close range. It was during his visit to Ireland in 1963 and my father – who had been responsible for some of the arrangements – had wangled a good viewing position for me. For a brief period, long enough for every detail of the scene to be etched onto the memory of an impressionable schoolboy, the President stood about 15 feet away from me…

    Read on…

    Aldous Huxley: the prophet of our brave new digital dystopia

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    Jack Kennedy wasn’t the only one to die 50 years ago today. C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley passed away too. Here’s my Guardian piece about Huxley.

    On 22 November 1963 the world was too preoccupied with the Kennedy assassination to pay much attention to the passing of two writers from the other side of the Atlantic: CS Lewis and Aldous Huxley. Fifty years on, Lewis is being honoured with a plaque in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, to be unveiled in a ceremony on Friday. The fanfare for Huxley has been more muted.

    There are various reasons for this: The Chronicles of Narnia propelled their author into the Tolkien league; Shadowlands, the film about his life starring Anthony Hopkins, moved millions; and his writings on religious topics made him a global figure in more spiritual circles. There is a CS Lewis Society of California, for example; plus a CS Lewis Review and a Centre for the Study of CS Lewis & Friends at a university in Indiana.

    Aldous Huxley never attracted that kind of attention. And yet there are good reasons for regarding him as the more visionary of the two…

    On this day…

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    … in 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address as he dedicated a national cemetery at the site of the Civil War battlefield in Pennsylvania.

    The text reads:

    Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

    Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

    But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

    Oh, and if you ever want to explain to someone why they should never, ever again use PowerPoint, point them at Peter Norvig’s wonderful translation of the Address into .ppt format.

    LATER: Via Kottke I find one of Lincoln’s handwritten copies of the text, which now hangs in the White House.

    gettysburg-address-1