• MushuChupacabra@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    For those of you contemplating ways of covering up the ads:

    This is the same airline that beat the shit out of that doctor because the airline overbooked the flight. For your own safety, do not cross this airline.

    • Eheran@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      The Chicago Department of Aviation did that. The same way if the police ends up killing someone, it was not the person calling the police.

      • CaptDust@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        United was booting passengers to make room for employee transfers though, the situation was shit before dept of aviation even got the call.

        • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Those employees could have stood. Frontier and Spirit give vouchers out when they intentionally overbook…which before the pandemic was everyday. If nobody takes the bait, they up the voucher value. For them it’s essentially monopoly money.

          If United couldn’t get anybody to bite at the vouchers, then the employees should have stood the whole flight. Instead, they beat a man who was not fighting back physically. He only insisted that he get to his patient. They LITERALLY dragged him off the plane. By his ankle, as he tried to grab onto anything he could.

        • Eheran@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Sure, but telling someone to leave their plane for some oddball reason is “only bad” not outright crazy like what happened then.

        • CaptDust@sh.itjust.works
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          7 months ago

          “The incident is widely characterized by critics as an example of mishandled customer service.”

          Made me laugh, that’s putting it lightly…

        • restingboredface@sh.itjust.works
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          7 months ago

          Holy shit what a ride that was.

          It’s clear from a lot of stories like this (severe customer mistreatment) that United employees are miserable people who hate their jobs but this is nuts. I hope Dr. Dao got a huge settlement from United.

          • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
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            7 months ago

            Is United Express actually United? I thought those tended to be a regional carrier using the name under license.

            I’d expect the labour friction to be still worse; I was peripherally involved with such a firm 20 years ago and know they had terrible problems with staff retention, mostly because they wouldn’t pay enough to retain people after they got fed up with the free-standby-flight privileges.

        • Seleni@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Wow. Even Trump thought they went too far. Damn.

          And the CEO who brushed that assault off ‘suffered’ a ‘delayed promotion’. Poor thing. For saying that stuff about anyone, let alone a customer, he should have been fired, no golden parachute.

          I think the doctor’s patients should have sued the airline too, since no doubt having their doctor pounded to a pulp caused them to miss their appointments.

    • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      Overbooking should be a mandatory minimum compensation of the greater of 1000x the ticket price or $20k. It’s a truly fucked up practice to disrespect people’s time like that.

  • SomeGuy69@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    This should count as violation of human rights. You’re chained to the seat for hours and have no other option than look at this screen or force your eyes closed. Holy shit, people should get really mad. Flashing ads on a screen you don’t look at directly are still very annoying, even if you look on your phone.

        • redisdead@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Shouldn’t be that far away from them in the first place if you actually cared.

          • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            This is fucking hilarious. Do you know that sometimes, people go elsewhere for economic opportunities? Then they bring their children after they get settled in?

            Sometimes they go back, and leave the children there.

            Do you think those kids should be stranded?

              • cole@lemdro.id
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                7 months ago

                sometimes people don’t want to live in the middle of nowhere forever. not many engineering jobs there. we all want economic mobility too

                • redisdead@lemmy.world
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                  7 months ago

                  The ultimate quest for wealth is worth destroying the planet.

                  Also vast majority of people take planes for leisure, I’m sure we can deal without them. People used to travel the world in sail boats and they still managed to get where they wanted to go.

  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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    7 months ago

    Targeted, individualized, advertising should be illegal. This will gut a lot of the motivations for the privacy invasions and data harvesting. This is how advertising worked for thousands of years. I think it could continue to be just fine.

    The amount of resources humanity is spending on targeted advertising is extremely depressing when you consider the opportunity cost. There are thousands of engineers and product managers that spend all day on this stuff instead of anything useful.

  • 14th_cylon@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    So I am going to sit down and the screen will be full of penis enlargement pills? What will all the hot singles in the area think?

  • sporks_a_plenty@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    …that will now reflect the information United has compiled on individual travelers, like where they live and destinations they’ve traveled to.

    I, for one, can’t wait to have my personal info proudly displayed to whatever randos they seat next to me! /s

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      About a decade ago Fox News got brought to court, and had to defend themselves against the idea that their content wasn’t actually factually accurate most of the time. Therefore not “news”.

      Fox responded by saying that their program wasn’t meant to be news. I forget the exact quote, I’m sure duckduckgo is your friend, but it was along the lines of “No reasonable person would ever consume Fox News content and believe it to be trustworthy accurate news. It is an opinionated entertainment show about the news.”

      I don’t remember their tagline at the time, but it was something along the lines of “Fox News is your only outlet for unbiased news!” Something to that effect. I just remember Jon Stewart calling out the hypocrasy of their tagline being the exact opposite of what they said in court.

      If Fox News is entertainment meant to push the agenda that the right is right, and if CNN is entertainment meant to push the agenda that the left is right, then I don’t see why The Onion can’t join them as entertainment meant to push the agenda that the whole world is fucking stupid.

      Still operating as a “real news source”, except it’s all bullshit like Fox News and CNN. Just entertainment.

      • MoonMelon@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        Same thing happened with “VitaminWater”, a product in the category of “enhanced water” (a term reminiscent of “enhanced interrogation technique”). Coca-Cola argued that, despite the name, no reasonable person would believe it’s actually healthy. They settled.

  • ME5SENGER_24@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    More to consider when selecting an airline. Greedy fuckers, I hope their stock takes a nosedive thanks to this

  • Yosawya san@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 months ago

    What’s the ROI on ads anyway? I feel like ads are just a way to funnel money between corps. People who are forced to see ads are really not even the point anymore. This is like corporations subsidizing other corporations. Don’t even matter that you buy that item being shown to you.

    • b_n@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      I always wondered this too.

      Found a website saying Youtube adviews are $100-300 per 10k (ad views, not video views). That’s 1-3¢ per view. If we assume an ad is 10seconds, then your time is worth 0.1-0.3¢ per second, or $3.60-10.80 per hour.

      An A380 looks to be 380-615 seats. I’d imagine they’re more often optimising for space, so let’s say 550.

      Long haul flight, 10% of people at any time using inflight stuff, 8 hours, 4 ads per hour = 5500.18*4 ads watched. 1760 ads. There will be a massive premium for planes, but surely only one order of magnitude more (e.g. 10x). That’s equivalent to give or take 20k YouTube adviews which would be $200-600 per flight.

      There are a lot of planes in the sky every single day though…

      • Yosawya san@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        7 months ago

        The thing is, it’s only a ROI if any of those passengers converts to a buyer. The act of seeing an ad creates no value for the manufacturer unless they are converted to a buyer. What you are describing is a market that has the consumer (ad watcher) almost completely removed from the conversion of capital. Being forced to watch an ad, in this case, only benefits the airline by their receiving ad revenue. The passengers are nearly supflourous.

        • b_n@sh.itjust.works
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          7 months ago

          ROI from adverts is always a shitshow though. If you come off a plane and see <brand name product> and buy it, is it because you just saw an advert for it, or were you always going to buy it. There is of course stats that may show number of impressions vs. total purchases trend, but its still just massive correlation that I imagine there is a bunch of people pulling spreadsheets together to justify their marketing spend. Anecdotally, I’ve heard of data teams working with marketing teams and just going “whelp, whatever you need to justify your job”, etc.

          Real ROI via direct sales though, that’s somewhat measurable since you have a direct cost of acquisition (sales person salary, overheads, etc) vs revenue.

  • Please_Do_Not@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    Including the opt out link in the announcement article is a good guy move on the writer’s part. Thanks, Kate. You’re a pal.

    • locuester@lemmy.zip
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      7 months ago

      I requested opt out and they requested my ID. lol! So they’re demanding more info to opt out of info collection.

      • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        How are they going to identify who is opting out without being able to match it to the person in the seat…?

        • untorquer@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Your united data is going to be tied to an email. They could just use that. It’s reasonable to see this as further invasiveness, similar to Meta™ account recovery.

      • Please_Do_Not@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        Say you’re from California on the form and it’ll change what you have to enter. You don’t have to put in an address or verify CA residency.

  • meseek #2982@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    “I’m sorry ma’am but could you please remove your jacket from the seat? It’s obstructing the ads and we have a very clear policy about that”

    🙃

    • spyd3r@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      They could come up with some bullshit like, obstructing your screen is interfering with the display of critical airplane safety information or something.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      To begin the flight, please drink Mountain Dew Verification Can.

      Verification Can Invalid. Please drink Mountain Dew Verification Can.

      ERROR! Passenger attempting to steal Premium Ad-less Flying Option! Adding your name to the No Fly List and automatically deducting penalty fee from your credit card.

      ERROR! Credit Card Declined! Alerting TSA! Alerting FBI! Alerting Sky Marshals!

  • mysticpickle@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    Remember when the assholes at United overbooked a flight and sent someone to knock a doctor’s teeth out and carry him off a plane? The doctor refused since he was on his way to oversee the opening of a clinic he founded for veterans.

    He and his wife started the clinic as a way to thank American servicemen and women, because he was plucked out of ocean waters by the U.S. Navy as he fled communism in his home country of Vietnam about 44 years ago, he said.

    Fuck United Airlines.

    https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/news/story/doctor-dragged-off-united-airlines-flight-watching-viral-62250271

    • DAMunzy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 months ago

      United will kill your dog, bust up your guitar, and knock down and drag out your doctor. They’ve made the headlines for all three of those. And the guitar guy made a song about United.

      Unfortunately, the other airlines aren’t much better.

  • Linkerbaan@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    “oh no everyone has phones, nobody needs these shitty displays anymore should we remove them and replace them with a phone holder?”

    “I have a better idea…”

    • uis@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      Don’t forget your trusty a4 and duct tape to plane.

  • hopesdead@startrek.website
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    7 months ago

    I already dislike the experience of being with other passengers on United. Nothing negative occurred on my part, just noticed how badly behaved other passengers were compared to every other airline I’ve flown.

    My point is, I wouldn’t pick United to fly as my first choice.