News and notes from around the interweb:
- Eleanor Roosevelt’s American Airlines Admiral’s Club card.
American Airlines CEO C.R. Smith was best man in Roosevelt son’s Elliott’s wedding. Smith would receive funding from the Roosevelt administration’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation for American’s first major aircraft purchase. The Admirals Club’s first location was at New York LaGuardia airport, using space intended as Fiorello LaGuardia’s office there after public outrage over the mayor’s ostentatious use of the public space.
- 40 years ago, the Hyatt Regency Kansas City collapse
114 people..were killed at the Hyatt Regency that night when two elevated walkways broke free from their support rods and collapsed onto the crowd below, injuring more than 200 and leaving a crumpled heap of rubble for rescuers to dig through.
It remains one of the deadliest accidental structural building failures in U.S. history and is drawing parallels to the recent condo collapse in Surfside, Fla., that killed nearly 100 people roughly 40 years later.
- Transportation Means Transplantation (HT: Tyler Cowen)
By merging the U.S. airline transportation and kidney transplantation data sets, we create a unique sample tracking (1) the evolution of airline routes connecting all the U.S. airports and (2) kidney transplants between donors and recipients connected by these airports. We estimate the introduction of a new airline route increases the number of shared kidneys by 7.3%. We also find a net increase in the total number of kidney transplants and a decrease in the organ discard rate with the introduction of new routes. Notably, the posttransplant survival rate remains largely unchanged, although average travel distance increases after the introduction of new airline routes.
- American Airlines Federal Credit Union will pay $1.8 million to settle class action lawsuit over overdraft fees
- Finally a business idea that could unseat Expedia and generate real value for hotel guests everywhere:
That every major hotel booking website doesn't rate each place's shower water pressure is a massive market failure.
— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) July 18, 2021
- Take a moment to be jealous of the way award charts used to be. The real gutting of Qantas frequent flyer though came in 2004 with the elimination of confirmed upgrades at booking, elimination of upgrade credits, and a the cost of premium cabin awards rising as much as 92%.
Shower water pressure does vary between hotels, but I’ve never found it so low that it’s not usable. I do always run the shower when I tour any property, such as an apartment, which I might be renting long term. But for a night (or few) in a hotel? Low water pressure means a few extra minutes of rinsing.
Expedia sucks though. Competitors please enter the arena!
I’d also like to see the sites rate how high up the shower head is. I’m not particularly tall (6’3″ – considered the runt in my family), but the last hotel I stayed in, I could see over the shower curtain and the shower head only came up to my chest. Given the low water pressure and the thickness of my hair, I had to spend a long time bent over pretty low to rinse my hair. The most annoying thing was that there was plenty of room up the walls to mount the shower at a more usable height.