Louis Ingenthron @LouisIngenthron@social.cleverlibre.org

@jmacc My bet is that we're trained to think this way by Hollywood. They use tempo as a cue for emotion, and most of us have tuned into that by a very young age.

@MJ @TonyStark He won by double-digit percent and despite terrible weather, there were only about 10,000 fewer voters to show up than 8 years ago.

This story can easily be framed either way, but the fact that he won means one simple thing: we cannot become complacent.

@PamelaBarroway Just out of curiosity, how are you so sure the texts made a positive difference? Literally every person I know hates receiving unsolicited political texts.

@jann Right, but JetBlue won't offer the low prices. They'll spend billions, take on this heavy debt, all just to get a fleet that they'll have to heavily retrofit to match their standards (Spirit packs them on tighter than JetBlue). If those assets are valuable enough to spend billions and take on that debt, then they're valuable enough to make money for Spirit, should they have competent leadership.

But more importantly:
If Spirit is left to compete, it *might* fail at some point in the future, at which point customers will lose the lower price point option.
But if Spirit is bought, the industry *will immediately* lose the lower price point option, reducing competition and almost certainly leading to price increases across the board.

So, if you look at it from the shareholders' perspectives, the merger should go through.
But for the rest of the general public, it's much better that it not go through.

@jann If they're so awful and inefficient and unprofitable, why would a competitor want to buy them?

@jann Last I checked, the customers who enjoy the lower fares don't give a shit how much Spirit's stockholders profited.

@jann Making air travel affordable to those who otherwise couldn't afford it seems like a good.

What good is consolidating them, inevitably laying people off and raising prices and closing routes?

@ThinkingSapien Pretty sure that's their new fancy Nvidia ray-traced version, right? The standard game did not have such fidelity.

@voron @drrimmer "Fined" for what? He isn't breaking any law by moderating his own property.

And our opinions absolutely matter. We vote with our feet. Twitter only exists because people keep choosing to use it.

@freemo Same concept as rampant misspellings in spam emails: The multiple spam replies automatically scare away anyone smart enough to see through the scam, leaving only the dumb and vulnerable.