Originally Posted by magic111
Find your recommendation that my response to the OT (believe you meant OP or TO) whom suggested we the government fund his scheme was OMNI to be a distasteful opinion. YMMV
I said this:
Originally Posted by seoulmanjr
As for taxes going to programs you don't use, I'm sure other people feel the same way about programs you use and they don't, but that whole part of the discussion belongs on OMNI, in my opinion.
In response to this:
Originally Posted by magic111
Last time I looked at my 1040 a big chunk of my money went to the government paying for a big chunk of nothing that is a bit of importance to me or my family.
Simply because I thought that debating the merits of our tax system in the general terms you used would take this thread off-topic and make it pretty politically charged. What if I responded that your fiscally conservative stance was "distasteful in my opinion"? We'd be getting nowhere fast in this thread.
Back to the topic at hand:
Originally Posted by magic111
If airline A gives out 2 million awards and we the government tell you that 25% of them are standard awards is this going to be any more useful to you than the anecdotal evidence that some people get standard awards to Hawaii and some don't.
If airline B gives out 1 million awards and we the government tell you that 50% of them are standard awards is this going to be any more useful to you than the anecdotal evidence that some people get standard awards to Hawaii and some don't.
Oh wait lets also find out what percentage of those awards go to the elite flyers as opposed to those whom only earn mileage from non-flying. Must be a large segment of the population who want that information.
The airlines have this information already and the government could force them to publish award availability in terms of % or seats available per season per specific route -- the way that they require the same of on-time percentages by route / flight number. I think seeing that a particular flight is only 45% on time is useful. If the system for on-time percentages worked the same way as your example above, then airlines would publish a statistic that says out of a million flights, the airlines operations are 85% on-time, which would indeed be useless. It's not a good example or fair comparison.
I think that the cost to the government to tell airlines to publish information they already have would be low, and most likely negligable. How much do you think it costs taxpayers for airlines to publish their on-time stats for flights? It's not like a team from the FAA is going to sit on availability tools all day and collect award info.
peace,
~Ben~