News and notes from around the interweb:
- Lufthansa’s Europe business class award sale for 55,000 miles roundtrip
- 30% bonus converting hotel points to United miles in September generally not something worth doing, since you lose too much value in the conversion process, but Marriott -> airlines is decent. However United miles are easy to transfer from Chase (or Bilt) so I’d be reticent to even make that move.
- New Orleans tried to ban Airbnb and other homesharing sites by banning out-of-towners from renting (restricting them to local residents only).
Airbnb rentals for local residents will result in nothing more than very troublesome parties. That’s like Airbnb host 101
The Jones Act started with Seattle ship lines wanting a monopoly on shipments to Alaska, and to prevent Canadian ship lines from getting into this business. It’s led to American shipyards and ships becoming so uncompetitive that the Jones Act is the only way to keep some native US shipping around. While I think having US owned shipping and sailors is important national defense capability, it may be worthwhile to see if there are other ways to achieve this goal. We are subsiding chip manufacturers to locate in the US, so there must be some similar process to encourage more US shipbuilders and sailors if we find that in the national interest.
Subsiding? Subsidizing more likely.