What do you mean there is no cost? Aisle and window seats are more valuable and can be sold for more, and this would force airlines to sell them to families without any up charge they would've received from other customers

I have no issue with airlines offering reserved seats for money. Let people buy their aisle seats and window seats and exit rows.

Most people don't give a shit where they sit, so most seats are not reserved. Traditionally, airlines tried to just put people close together when they booked together. When we check in, we just get random seats that are close together. That's okay. I'm fine with taking whatever seats no-one else wants.

If I understand United marketing correctly, they will actively sit you apart from others in your group unless you buy an upgrade. That is, instead of assigning you some of the free spots close together, you get put as far apart as possible, and they hope that you will buy an upgrade to sit close together.

Other airlines don't do that.

Is this a per-market thing?I’m from Chicago and therefore fly United with my family all the time. The website/app lets me pick all our seats at booking time in Economy class without any up charges.

It's a benefit of "Economy" vs "Basic Economy". I saw it on an international flight. You pay 20% more and are allowed to sit with your family. At least that's how I understood their marketing. There also seem to be some exceptions for kids under 12, but I'm not sure how they work.

I don’t have any data to back this up, but I think window and aisle seats being more valuable doesn’t necessarily mean they can be sold for more.

I am very tall and I always pay for a seat with extra legroom in economy. Whenever I’m picking my seat early, almost every seat in economy is available. People could pay to reserve a window or aisle seat, but anecdotally it seems like almost no one does this. Everyone I know just tries to check in as early as possible so they can grab a good seat before they’re all taken.

I don’t think airlines are actually losing any money by seating families together. It’s not like all those window and aisle seats would have been paid for otherwise.

If you're sitting together, that means at least one person is in the less-desirable middle seat, right?

An aside or window seat next to an unaccompanied toddler is worth considerably less.

I don't think that's what anyone wants. I think they just want families with young children to pay to sit together, like everyone else has to

I think that part of the problem is a want versus a need. I don't particularly care if me and my wife don't sit together. We see each other all the time. But I don't want to have my four-year-old sitting in between two strangers, six rows in front of me where I can't see him. That's not fair to the two strangers, but also I don't trust strangers.

I get the idea of paying for the privilege, but at the same time, it's not like they roll out the red carpet for someone who flies with their kids. Pretty much every time that I can remember them ever rearranging seats to get us together, we always wind up sitting in the rows at the very back of the plane close to the bathroom, which is fine with me. If I wanted red carpet treatment, I'd pay for first class for everyone. But I'm not about to do that.

All I do know is that if they were to stop rearranging seats, it would make the frequency of our flying go down quite a bit. At a minimum, if they went that route, I would want there to be a guaranteed payment to be able to get everyone to sit together. That way I can at least plan for the extra cost. Knowing airlines they would probably use a sliding scale based on age or something.

This exactly. For parents it is not a choice, you absolutely must have a parent sitting by a young child. The effect of not automatically putting parent and children next to each other would just be making tickets more expensive for parents.

Playing devil's advocate here, as a parent this sounds great! Have your young children sit next to a couple strangers a few rows away: now you get some peace and quiet while other people have to deal with their seat-kicking, drink-spilling, whining, crying, bathroom trips, diaper changes, requests for entertainment, etc.

You know this is going to happen too: there are going to be some subset of parents that are not going to pay extra and will just choose to let the airline make their kids some complete stranger's problem. Hope the general public enjoys it.

Haha, it's very true. Everyone is an individualist when it comes to paying for kids but when it comes to social security, we should raise that to high heaven so that the current kids will be slaves to the geriatric majority.

"I don't mind paying more money in taxes" they always say, knowing full well that the majority of the incidence is on the next generation.

There is a huge difference between funding education, health care etc which I’m all for paying taxes for and subsidizing your flight.

And if you expect me to defend the police or Karyns about anything, let’s just say I grew up on NWA and “F%%% the police” and my mom constantly told me that don’t think because my White friends could get away with minor criminal mischief that I could.

Well actually she said “don’t let your little white friends get you in trouble”. But close enough.

If you want to deregulate airlines you have no complaint from me. I couldn't give a shit if there's anti-kid airline who's advertising message is "Fuck dem kids."

If you're talking about a private company choosing who to subsidize once government regulations are removed, then I don't see how you have room to complain. It's not like taxes. You can charter a flight or rent a cessna to pilot if you don't agree to the private terms of carriage of anyone offering tickets.

Taxes are way worse because a guy with a gun can show up and put anyone who disagrees with the majority's idea of charity or subsidy into a tiny cage; if you disagree you can't even escape it by leaving the country because the USA has worldwide taxation. I would classify private flight subsidization as a much more ethical, moral, and wildly less violent regime than taxing people for the healthcare of others.

I personally have no problem with the current state of affairs or with the state of affairs that the airlines are proposing. I fly Delta, I don’t buy the cheapest ticket so I can cancel a flight up to the time the flight is scheduled and get a credit.

From the little I do fly other airlines, only the cheapest fares don’t at least give you credits for cancelled flights.

Every airline has a credit card that gives you free luggage where the annual fee is cheaper than the baggage fee for a couple flying round trip.

My wife and I also have status with Delta (Platinum Medallion), lounge access, TSA PreCheck, Clear etc so we can do our best to not deal with families and once a year vacationers. We live in Orlando now.

But if I did have small kids. I would definitely pay for reserve seatings.

Don't want to play the devils advocate... but if you _must_ sit next to a person in need... you have to reserve the seats. Doesn't matter if it's a child, a dependent parent or a colleague that you need to run through an upcoming presentation with.

Currently, it's just the case that parents get a discount on the seat reservation fee.

> must reserve

With the current implementation exposed to the end customer, yes, that's required. Reserving specific seats isn't fundamental to the constraint that some people want to sit together.

Plus, the current reservation system is predatory in its own right. When booking you're dumped into a page strongly suggesting you must choose a seat, and all available options cost more than the base ticket.

Well, any half decent operator will put you next to each other and the other half at least lets you select seats during the check-in process. If that 90% certainty is not enough for you... just reserve the seats. Yes, it'll cost money, because otherwise there won't be any seats to reserve as anyone will do it.

Currently children <11yr get a 20-50% discount/subsidy for a seat. So just rectify it to a 100% and give the seat as a bonus instead. Everyone happy?

I have never seen this. For all flights I have flown recently, the price for a kid and an adult is the exact same.

Honestly I would be happy if the 5x the price, and I'm a parent. I hate flying with a kid and it would let me convince the wife to drive or take a boat the next time.

I basically only fly with a kid because everyone else is willing to subsidize the massive externality I impose on them.

> if it is a 2 seater, and I have 3 passengers, that's on me for not planning for my passengers.

Well, no, it’s on all of you in the sense that all of your passengers pay the price for your mistake. But as the guy behind you in line at the rental place, makes no difference to me.

If a parent isn’t sat with a child everyone sat anywhere near the kid pays a price.

I 100% agree that a parent should be required to sit next to a child under a certain age, but I don't agree that is the responsibility of the airline. They should enforce that the parent/guardian traveling with the child should have to pick seats (so yes, pay for seat selection if it costs money), and if there aren't seats available, too bad.

Again, I (who paid for a selected seat assignment) should not even be asked by anyone (staff or passengers) to get up because they didn't pay for a seat with their baby.

You're still not really engaging with my point. A parent sitting next to their kid (without choosing specifically where they are sat) is to the benefit of everyone on the plane. You sitting where you want is to the benefit of you and you only. So it makes sense one has to be paid for and the other does not.

Again, 100% agree, parents sitting next to child should be a requirement. I agree that a child should not be sat away from their parent, because that is a bad time for everyone involved.

I just disagree that a child's seat should be allowed to be picked at random by the airline, forcing people to move who DID pick their seat. If an adult is booking a flight with a child, they should be required to book the child+parent seat even if that costs extra.

I believe all seats SHOULD be picked by passengers at the time of purchase, full stop. That was the way it had been as long as I had been flying, until they realized they could make more money by charging "seat selection" fees, now you have people who are the last to board because they got the cheapest seats who complain they aren't sitting with their travel partner. Which shouldn't be the problem of the airline or the passengers that picked their seat.

So you agree that a parent and child being sat together is beneficial for everyone but you want parents to bear that cost alone? Simple economics would tell us that results in parents not paying and more miserable passengers. Which isn't in anyone's interest.

Sometimes we're so focused on the concept of "fair" that we lose sight of the bigger picture.

Flying with babies (and other young children) presents challenges which "everyone else" doesn't have to deal with. Babies and children need much more attention. Babies are much more likely to throw tantrums, to feel pain from pressure changes, to be sick, etc. They often need a LOT of soothing. Many also need to be breast fed (some babies don't take bottles), which depending on the baby's length and the side they're nursing on may involve their legs sticking into the aisle or their neighbor's space. They also like to fling solid foods, spit up or vomit with no warning, and are generally fantastic at making messes.

My spouse and I just finished our first two flights with our 11 month old this weekend which were about 3.5 and 4 hours apiece. Even with an extra seat reserved for them and an overall extremely well tempered baby, I cannot imagine how much harder the flight would have been if the gate agent hadn't been able to rearrange our seats so all three of us were sitting together. If that hadn't been guaranteed, we would have had to ask one of the neighbors to swap seats with us. They'd have been highly motivated to do so, but it wouldn't have been a sure thing. They may have their own needs. Impromptu swaps during boarding seems not great for making the process go smoothly.

Having to get an extra seat to fit a car seat for an infant isn't required, but flying with the infant in a car seat is strongly recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Having somewhere to put the baby or their various toys/bottles temporarily helps a whole lot over a four hour flight. This already added $500 onto the price of our trip.

The cost of raising children is already very high in the US, so it will really suck if flying becomes yet more expensive and stressful. In my opinion, this (and many others) are a cost which we should spread out if we actually want people to have kids.

The "growth every quarter" is a disease that is going to destroy our civilization, said without an ounce of hyperbole.

Air travel is a solved problem and there's no innovation really to be done; the planes are packed like cans of sardines most of the time, the food is awful, and the travel itself is expensive, cumbersome, and a miserable experience overall but they are STILL trying to find ways to juice revenue, up to and including separating children from parents and charging them to be put back together.

Let it be the airlines problem. My screaming five year old is going to generate a bunch of complaints and refunds for the airline.

The kid will get over it, and the misery of the rest of the people on the flight isn’t my problem. The stewardess can deal with it and nobody gets their peanuts.

I'd rather it be solely a problem of their profits rather than adding inconvenience to families as well. Also, my kid is going to be a lot happier and less likely to be upset and bother everyone else if both of us are there to entertain her and keep each other from being frazzled.

There's a lot of kids that aren't like that once they reach, say, toddler age. They know they can terrorize mom/dad as much as they like and they'll still be there, so they ruthlessly exploit that. They can be ruthlessly terrorizing next to their parents, but put them next to a stranger they'll be polite and relatively quiet because they intuitively know they are capable of anything.

i.e. when my child was young, a waiter could hand them a lemonade and they'd be ecstatic. If I handed them the same lemonade, they would start screaming at me the color of cup was wrong.

I can imagine! I'm just speaking of my kid in this current week. By next week she'll be offering us a completely different traveling experience

Agreed. The point of these things is that the company is betting on you doing the decent thing at your expense. I refuse to accommodate their failure.

I was in one of these situations once where we missed a scheduled flight because of an airline screwup, and they refused to accommodate us without a substantial payment - thousands of dollars. Frankly, I couldn’t afford it. This despite the fact I already paid for an assigned seat on the fubar flight.

The predictable outcome happened after they pulled away from the gate and the flight crew came to me and my response was “He’s 20 rows away, what do you expect me to do? Sounds like the options are to move us, or return to the gate.”

They figured it out and were great about it, but the whole situation was stressful to everyone and was completely unnecessary. Flight crews are busy and it’s just senseless toil.

they're flight attendants now

As I said elsewhere in the thread there are situations where it's not a luxury. A bigger point though is that it's an additional burden on parents for something childless people simply don't need to deal with. Childless people might want assigned seats, but they don't need to sit next to an infant. When a parent can't sit near their kid it negatively impacts everyone else on board the aircraft. It might result in the kid screaming more, but it'll also definitely require people to get up and shuffle around more frequently as parents come to change/feed/soothe their infants (car seats/bassinets are not supposed to be in aisle seats).

I assume this is a somewhat flippant/sarcastic response, but it completely ignores the gist of the message (well, multiple messages) you're replying to.

> I say this as a parent who pays for assigned seats because we choose to buy tickets that reflect our actual level of flexibility.

For what it's worth, I'm saying all this as a parent who flies on airlines where assigned seats are the only option afaik

I don’t think it does. People with flexibility to be assigned to sit next to whomever and willingness to sit in middle seats ought to be able to pay less in exchange for providing that flexibility.

Their flexibility is lubricating the entire system and making it work better. Why should we charge them the same amount as people who aren’t as flexible?

What I see is people who aren’t offering that flexibility arguing that they should still get the price as if they were willing to provide it, when they are consuming rather than providing it.

> I don’t think it does.

Let me know if this is an unfair summarization, but the way I see it: my comments discussed how charging parents additional fees to sit near their infants is bad. Your comment proposed charging people who wanted assigned seating for that feature and allowing people who don't need that flexibility a discount. How does that address my point rather than simply re-describe the thing I've already described as the problem?

> Why should we charge them the same amount as people who aren’t as flexible?

Because that flexibility is needed more by parents and we generally want to encourage parenting and reduce the burden on them by using the power of the state to spread such costs out. IMO we don't do nearly enough of this, like with family leave, daycare, or healthcare costs.

Because the framing of what is the standard or default matters in determining whether a problem needs solving at no cost or merely needs a solution to be available in the market.

If the standard is everyone can choose whom they sit next to (assuming seats are available), then parents are at no disadvantage. This is how air travel was for a very long time, when tickets were much more expensive and much more all-inclusive.

Now, people are seeking cheaper tickets, so the airlines propose to offer discounts for passengers to forgo some of that all-inclusive nature and if those forgone items are a good match for your needs, feel free to take advantage of them. If they're not, feel free to buy a ticket that meets your needs.

No one would think that when the USPS offers Next Day Express, Priority, and Parcel Post that a parent should get Next Day Express for the price of Priority or Parcel Post just because they're mailing something for their kid, right? When a rental car company charges a family of 6 more for a large car than a childless couple is charged for an economy car, are they violating some kind of social contract? "Use discount code BUTIHAVEFOURKIDS to rent a Suburban for the price of a Civic." A landlord charging more for a 2 BR than a 1 BR also hurts parents, but I assume most people think that's logical and proper.

> we generally want to encourage parenting and reduce the burden on them by using the power of the state to spread such costs out

Some people want that. Not all people want that and probably no one wants it in unlimited amounts. I have kids and I'm largely indifferent on the topic beyond supporting strong K-12 public education. I do observe that some people take the notion of "we should spread out the costs of kids" way, way too far for what I think is rational.

Selfishly, I'd be perfectly fine if Basic airline tickets were made illegal for everyone. It just makes my looking at airfares online more annoying because I'll never buy a Basic fare. But, people who do find Basic fares to meet their needs ought to be allowed to have access to them, so I don't actually want them banned.

Do adults have to fly? Certainly they could walk or swim to their destination.

What an odd question...families travel all the time for vacations or to see grandma and grandpa for thanksgiving. You can't leave a kid at home.

You would think that this is an odd question. It's such an odd question if grant a degree of anonymity. I've seen a similar type of question, as it relates to affordances for parents in the workplace, like no on-call for a time when a newborn is on the scene. I don't know if this is just happening because people are feeling unfairly impacted when folks on teams become parents, but I'm always bracing for these comments now.

imo people asking those questions have no empathy, or they are just dumb. :)

You don’t _want_ a sleep deprived new parent on-call. A sleep deprived person is not who you want responding to an emergency, so of course others should pick up the slack temporarily. That’s what being a TEAM is all about. Kind of like playing a sport?

Now if the team is tiny the on-call impact will be a much bigger deal, and i sympathize, but in that case i’d blame management for having poor redundancy / contingency plans, NOT my colleague.

And for some reason there’s always some snarky person who chimes in with a comment like “but they chose to become parents!” A tale as old as time… so did our own parents! They chose. But i’m a human being that has empathy and i’m grateful to those who helped pick up the slack during their stressful newborn phase.

Feel like grandma is more capable of traveling to see the kids with the newborn than the other way around

Newborns are often basically potatoes and relatively easy to travel with

He said had to, as in necessities. No one has to go on vacations, much less fly for them

Well then if the people without kids don't like it they can just not fly.

Or we can treat people equally and not discriminate based on whether or not they have kids

> Or we can treat people equally and not discriminate based on whether or not they have kids

Society has to treat parents differently because children are necessary for society to continue. If you make being a parent sufficiently burdensome, people will choose not to have them.

Then pay the extra money to choose your seat like most adults do. Delta said in an earnings call for instance that less than 5% choose basic economy where you can’t choose your seat.

> Then pay the extra money to choose your seat like most adults do.

It's an additional expense which isn't a luxury for parents. You can't sit far from an infant for 6+ hours because they need close attention. Also, sometimes there aren't adjacent seats for you to choose. Nevertheless, gate agents are usually able to somehow make things work. I'm not sure how they do this on a packed flight though. I didn't notice anyone being called over the PA after a gate agent moved all three of our seats to a different row on our last packed flight.

Flying is a luxury. It’s one thing to pay taxes to fund the school system, pre-K, health care, even state college. I’m all for that. But if you want to fly as a parent either suck it up and pay or don’t fly. There are parents who take long road trips because they can’t afford to fly.

But I paid for my seat and if I did pay to sit next to my wife (which isn’t really a big deal for either of us), I would be really pissed if my seat was changed because a parent was too cheap to pay to have an assigned seat.

My wife and I have chosen a different flight because the seats we wanted wasn’t available.

Of course all of these opinions of mine go out of the window if it truly is an emergency. But even then, at least with Delta, they only allocate a certain number of seats as “basic economy” and once those are sold out - like they might be on a last minute flight - you have to pay a fare where you choose your seat.

> Flying is a luxury.

You appear to have since edited your comment, but the version I replied to referred to being able to choose a seat as the luxury, not flying itself. As I've said elsewhere, flying is either a straight up necessity in some cases and a practical one in others. As I've also said in other places, people without kids can fly without need of choosing their seats.

> But I paid for my seat and if I did pay to sit next to my wife (which isn’t really a big deal for either of us), I would be really pissed if my seat was changed because a parent was too cheap to pay to have an assigned seat.

You can debate on whether or not flying is a necessity, but if we're flying then it's a luxury for you to sit next to your wife but it's a necessity for me to sit next to my infant.

It’s a distinction without a difference. Just like flying is a luxury. I paid to sit next to my wife. You can pay to sit next to your infant. Don’t inconvenience me because you want to save a couple of hundred dollars.

You have to pay for all sorts of “necessities” because you have kids - just add that to the list.

> It’s a distinction without a difference.

That difference matters quite a bit if you're specifically arguing about how people who are going to fly get to experience said flight.

[Edit] If you don't believe that parents have as much reason to fly as anyone else I don't think there's much point to further discussion. However if you do believe it then whether or not assigned seating specifically counts as a luxury matters quite a bit.

> You have to pay for all sorts of “necessities” because you have kids - just add that to the list.

Why should we accept increasing the relative cost of having kids? That's a very good way to make having kids prohibitively expensive and part of how we've gotten to the point we're at. I'm in my late 30s and most of my friends chose not to have kids. For quite a few of those friends, they decided not to have them specifically because of how expensive it's become. You might think that's acceptable or even good, but birthrates are declining and people don't seem interested in allowing immigrants to come in and fill the void so I'm not sure what the endgame here is.

I didn’t say parents shouldn’t fly. I said if you want to be able to select yoir seat, pay just like other people do.

> Why should we accept increasing the relative cost of having kids?

So i now live 10 miles away from DisneyWorld, should my ticket prices also be more so your kids can get in free when we only have to pay for two adults? We were also able to downsize to a 1200 foot condo from a 3100 square foot house, we can spend our money on vacations instead of travel hockey like my friend.

What next? Should airlines have “kids fly free”?

> You might think that's acceptable or even good, but birthrates are declining and people don't seem interested in allowing immigrants to come in and fill the void so I'm not sure what the endgame here is.

I’m all for both low skill and high skill immigrants coming in where there is actually a shortage.

But play me the smallest fiddle because you don’t think you should have to pay for a ticket to reserve your seat requiring other people to move. See also, if you are too big to fit in one seat without encroaching on my space, you should also have to buy two seats - a policy many of the airlines have.

Yes, just like other people need to. Families move. Families are spread out. Families go on vacation.

We traveled so my only remaining grandparent could meet her great granddaughter before she dies, which could be any day now. Do you think we should make doing that harder just for slightly higher profits?

Hmmm didn't realize families had to go on vacation, and even more so they had to do it by flying

I didn't do these things for economic reasons growing up, and I'm perfectly fine today

You're free to argue people shouldn't expect to be able to go on vacation once in a while or see family. However, not only do I think that's absurd but it doesn't address my other examples.

They don't have to go to Grandma's funeral I guess. However they will fly if they are going to make it on time. (This is a real situation for me a few years ago)

No one does, so what's your point?

A small correction, but there are plenty of reasons someone might require flying. The travel might be required and also be on a tight schedule or terrain might be impractical to traverse by other methods. As an example: a friend of mine had to fly across the continental US for spinal surgery because traveling is stressful on the body and they couldn't be e.g. on a train for multiple days. People move across oceans all the time and might not have the luxury of being able to make a long trip by boat.

They are meaningfully different scenarios, though.

If you and your partner board the plane, sit separately, and one of you sits next to me that's not a negative for me. You'll sit, you'll watch a movie, read a book, whatever. You're self-contained.

If you and your five year old child board the plane, sit separately, and your child sits next to me that's a clear negative for me. Your child needs attention and assistance. It's bad for you, it's bad for the child, it's bad for me. Probably also bad for whoever sits next to the parent because they’ll be standing up and sitting down constantly to go and attend to their child.

I get that it isn't "fair" in a very straightforward examination of the scenario but take a step back and it's just making every passenger's experience more miserable in an attempt to gain more airline profits. If it happens just watch, the airlines will introduce a "guarantee not sat next to a solo child" add-on fee for you to pay.

At which point a homo sapiens specimen becomes a homo economicus?

There's a basic requirement in commerce that products sold must be fit for purpose. That is, they need to actually do what they're supposed to do in some form. I can't sell you a flight to New York and then give you a pair of plastic wings and say that the rest is on you. I have to actually get you there like any reasonable person would assume I would given what I sold you.

Selling tickets to a small child and their caregiver and then seating them far apart is plainly not fit for purpose. They can't actually fly like that, so you've sold them something they can't use, and that you know they can't use.

If they want to charge extra to sit together, fine, but that needs to be bundled into the basic price when one of the tickets is for a small child, not presented as an optional add-on at an additional cost.

Okay, in that case the airlines shouldn’t allow people to book a fare where you can’t choose your seat if you are flying with a kid - problem solved.

Right, that's my third paragraph.

I think the point remains, though, that making it harder to ensure a young child is sitting next to their guardian benefits _no one_. Having learned over the last year what flying with a 2 year old is like, an increase in the amount of toddlers who fly without sitting next to their parents is just going to be a nightmare for the kids, the parents, the other passengers, and the crew. No one should want this, in my opinion. Besides, the parents have the leverage in this situation I think, in the form of feral toddlers hell bent on maximizing chaos (and I mean that lovingly and empathetically, but still vaguely as a threat lol)

What the airlines want is to have people pay more to sit together.

What they're gonna get is same thing that happened when luggage fees became standard: enshittification because people find ways to pay less. In the case of luggage fees, suddenly everyone's like "yeah, okay, I guess I can fit things into a carry on" and turns out there's not enough overhead space for the entire plane so the plebs in Group 4+ have mandatory gate checks. Is the labor of always gate checking bags really any cheaper than having it flow through the airport luggage infrastructure? Apparently it is slightly, but it's definitely a shittier experience.

What's gonna happen here is parent is gonna book two separate cheap middle seats and ask you when you sit down if you could trade your premium aisle/window seat for a middle seat so mom and child can be together. Because otherwise you're separating momma from baby and therefore a terrible human.

And then we all get upset at each other for trying to cost-hack instead of seeing the real enemy in the room: the pathological MBA's picking up pennies in front of the enshittification steamroller.

> What the airlines want is to have people pay more to sit together.

And charging parents paying extra so families can sit together is just an easy target.

They don’t charge “parents extra”. They charge everyone extra for choosing a seat.

> I think they just want families with young children to pay to sit together, like everyone else has to

Oh great so now I have to sit next to someone’s unattended child in the name of fairness? Am I gonna get the option to subsidise the family’s seat grouping instead of being saddled with that noise? Talk about creating problems for no good reason.

Lying about a laptop being stolen is black and white. I'm not sure how you are trying to say that is ambiguous.

I don't know what the hell you mean by the term unreasonable. Are you under the impression that investment banking analysts do not think they will have to work late before they take the role?

> Lying about a laptop being stolen is black and white. I'm not sure how you are trying to say that is ambiguous.

I've been at startups where there's sometimes late night food served.

I've never been at a startup where there was an epidemic about lying about stolen hardware.

Staying just late enough to order dinner on the company, and theft by the employee of computer hardware plus lying about it, are not in the same category and do not happen with equal frequency. I cannot believe the parent comment presented these as the same, and is being taken seriously.

Nah the laptop and the dinner are exactly the same, they only differ in timing.

You can steal $2000 by lying about a stolen laptop or lying about working late. The latter method just takes a few months.

We're not discussing lying about working late, we're discussing actually working late.

The person way upthread said:

> people started staying just late enough for the food delivery to arrive while scrolling on their phones and then walking out the door with their meal.

That doesn't sound like actually working late?

(I still agree with you, though, that this isn't the equivalent of stealing a laptop, even if you do it enough to take home $2,000 worth of dinner.)

That's true, but the point I made to that was more along the lines of "physically being present in the office, it's likely an employee will still provide enough benefit to make the money worth it". They don't have to be coding. Chatting with a coworker about something non-work-related can be enough of a bonding experience for that to.be worth the company the dinner money in intangible productivity benefits down the line.

> Lying about a laptop being stolen is black and white.

Well, it was stolen. The only lie is by whom.

I agree with the theme of your message, but it's actually very challenging legally to change an options expiration date after its issued, and likely has negative tax implications

I've heard this excuse a lot over my career, mainly from people trying to backtrack on a promise of issuing options to begin with.

Upgraded and quickly hit my limit. And find that they have limits, I just wish that they were more transparent. Even if it's just a vague statement about limited usage. I assumed it would be similar to regular Gemini 2.5 on the pro plan but it's not

Good thing 35% of the country still trusts the courts https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-joe-biden-courts-ame...

Not at all relevant. Address the merits of the argument, not whether or not most people like the person who heard it. Though you'll be happy to find out that this disagreement never actually made it to court and eventually Elon went through with his original deal voluntarily.

> Compared to every other developed democracy in the planet, the US is politically unstable with its two party democracy.

I don't think this holds up to any sort of scrutiny. Brexit, plenty of other examples across the world