You can learn a lot of life lessons simply from understanding the concept of supply and demand. People pay thousands of dollars taking economics classes to learn it! But there are so many real life examples that exemplify it. Recently looking at airline prices emphasizes the importance of booking tickets EARLY. More than a month before the flight, prices are cheap because there's a large supply of seats left............airlines need to fill those seats, so they charge lower prices to make it attractive for customers to buy. But gradually as seats fill up, the number of seats go down while demand goes up not just because of the now limited supply, but because now there are more people who suddenly need the tickets, something came up, business trips, sudden illness, etc. Suddenly you get a situation where there's constantly decreasing supply of a fixed supply but escalating demand, and that's where you see a ticket that started at $100 go to $300, maybe even $400. The airline is trying to get just the right amount of people to buy early to fill out enough spots but reserve enough so that in the last 2 weeks or week they can jack up prices like crazy for the last-minute flyers, and sell exactly the right amount to fill up the plane to capacity. (Sometimes it doesn't work out, they have empty seats, or the opposite, they have to put people on standby or offer packages to people who are in a seat already, hence the United Airlines dragging a passenger out debacle). AND THEN there's the situation where sometimes a flight isn't even close to selling out as they near the flight date, and that pushes the prices WAY down, like getting a $60 flight from Chicago to Los Angeles the day before the flight (have done that). Only happens on lower-demand travel days and destinations though.
Thank god there is no smoking on planes. Something about being in a smoking room of a hotel or an airbnb that allows smoking just rubs me the wrong way. Just the smell of smoke makes me kind of nautious, or at least not feel right. I can't really understand people who voluntarily put that smell and the smoke into their bodies. Luckily, MJ and I share this particular view in life and can bound over tsk-tsk-ing at people who are smoking in improper places. It's a negative externality; if you want to ruin your life, go ahead, but don't make my life worse while you're doing it. Smoking, unfortunately, has a high chance of doing that. And I'm not such a big fan of those electronic cigarettes neither; although not using tobacco and you don't see a fire, doesn't mean those fumes and whatever you're inhaling isn't bad for you.
Another lesson in supply and demand, just observe New York subway trains at rush hour. That's exactly a situation where demand outpaces supply and you get "hell train" (what it's called in Korean when people get stuffed into a train). Probably a wise move would be to increase the supply of trains during rush hour, but the subway system is already so congested and causing delays with so many trains pulling into stations from this way and that way that adding more trains would probably raise the risk of a catastrophic disaster to dangerous levels.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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