Draw Breath

Hat tip to P O'Neill on Irish Election, who points towards Ryanair's formal notice of requisition for an EGM at Aer Lingus. As P. says, Ryanair have to be very careful about saying that they are seeking the reinstatement of the Shannon-Heathrow link for the commercial good of Aer Lingus as a whole: otherwise (in my non-expert reading of corporate law) they would be seeking to commit a fraud on the company.

But you have to think that this is bullshit. Surely the Belfast-Heathrow decision by the management of Aer Lingus is (whatever we may think of it) a tactic to recover profitable ground lost. Belfast-Heathrow is presumably bound to be more profitable than Shannon-Heathrow.

I get the feeling, now that they're sending lawyers out to do their talking, that Ryanair's heart isn't in this particular stunt any more. So how are they going to back down? My guess is that they will be defeated and will then moan about how their the only ones looking after the customer etc. In other words, no change.

I've spoken before about the evidence on how SUV drivers, having exported the risks to people outside their cars, tend to drive more recklessly. Not that this makes SUV drivers a particularly unique demographic: for instance this graph suggests that, if anything, the introduction of mandatory seatbelt-wearing led to a worse situation than would otherwise have been the case in terms of overall deaths: the reduction in driver deaths was more than matched by a the growth in pedestrian and other deaths. As the study from which the graph was taken says, "to compel a person to use protection from the consequences of hazardous driving, as seatbelt laws do, is to encourage hazardous driving."¹

So. What has this got to do with the ongoing subprime crisis? Well, they're both stories about risk. read the rest of this post »