Best Of Web: Airport Lounges, Great Recession, Farmer Suicides, SEC on Cryptocurrencies, Cappadocia Balloon

We bring you the Best Of Web links: Airport Lounges, Great Recession, Farmer Suicides, SEC on Cryptocurrencies, Cappadocia Balloon.

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The Airport Lounge Business — An Insider’s View of How It All Works

If you always wondered about the economics behind the airport lounge business like me, this article will help you learn a lot about the business.

And increasingly, especially in the United States, they’re becoming more popular, as more travelers apply for credit cards that include membership in Priority Pass, a network of more than 1,000 lounges worldwide.

Priority Pass, owned by the UK’s Collinson Group, doesn’t operate any lounges. Instead, it has contracts with clubs, paying the operator a fee each time a Priority Pass member enters

All of our agreements are per guest. For every guest that comes in, there’s a payment that comes directly to us as the lounge operator and then whether it’s split with the airport or not depends on the agreement with the airport.

…the demand for shared-use lounges has gone up significantly in the last few years. That demand is driven by several things, [including] growth from the credit card companies with their embedded lounge access programs. There are thousands of customers in the concourse who have these credit cards and they want to find a lounge.

…airports are trying to attract new airlines, whether it’s an international carrier or even other domestic carriers who don’t have their own lounges. In order for an airport to grow in some cases, they have to have a lounge. San Jose, California is a great example.

But the Chase Sapphire Reserve came out about a year ago with lots of benefits, one of which, of course, was lounge access. Our guest volumes have grown significantly

You have to have people that are there, making sure the buffet is kept up and they’re helping out to keep things clean and they’re assisting guests with questions. People are less likely to [take items] if someone is standing there helping clean and helping get things organized.

The Great Recession Is Still With Us

Another one of those great articles that help explain the Trump phenomenon. How the recovery left so many behind.

Some workers do not rebound from a recession for years, if ever, their skills degraded and their earnings diminished.

More broadly, the downturn seems to have wiped away demand for certain types of work, skewing the jobs market in a way that has hurt the middle class—a middle class for whom wages only recently started increasing again, and a middle class that has been shrinking since before the Great Recession hit. Job losses from the downturn  were concentrated in so-called “middle skill” jobs—ones that require more education than a high-school diploma, but less than a college degree, things like parts manufacturing, assembly, telemarketing, mail delivery, cooking, and administrative-support work. “Unemployed middle-skill workers … appear to have few attractive or feasible employment alternatives outside of their skill class, and the drop in male participation rates during the past several decades can be explained in part by an erosion of middle-skill job opportunities,” one study found—arguing, in effect, that middle-class jobs were washed away and workers decided to give up rather than taking a fast-food or big-box retail gig. [Trump’s base. I am sure the new tax bill will help them, smh]

These changes in the demand for work and the jobs available have caused income inequality to be worse now than it would have been otherwise. Indeed, the rich have rebounded completely from the recession in terms of unemployment, earnings, and total job count—they did so quickly, in fact, and have flourished through much of the recovery. It is the middle class and lower-income workers who have not…Rural areas and so-called “distressed communities” also got hit hard and left behind, with the Great Recession amplifying longstanding trends that have seen rural areas, parts of the Rust Belt, and the South suffer. [We can do better!]

After the Great Recession, many rich families saw their home prices climb, and had access to the cheapest credit available in years. Meanwhile, after the Great Recession, many poor families lost their homes, had their credit scores dinged, and could not buy property if they wanted to—with many forced into rental markets overheated by investors. [ This is why Hillary lost…deep down]

A sicker, more unequal, more racially divided country: This is the legacy of the Great Recession. And it has profound lessons for policymakers going forward. [ Oh, it sure does!!!]

The question is whether policymakers will take such evidence of the pain and scars left by the Great Recession into account. Congress is today on the verge of pushing forward a tax cut aimed at rich families and profitable corporations that will add more than a trillion dollars to the debt, with no real need for new economic stimulus at the moment. Meanwhile, it has declined to do much for the poorer families that are still feeling the worst effects of the last recession and have not yet recovered. The risk is that next time, they will get left even further behind. [I have bolded the final paragraph of the article for emphasis!]

Why are America’s farmers killing themselves in record numbers?

I knew farming can be a tough business. But I had no idea about the suicide rates being so high! I found this article shocking. If you know any farmers please be kind to them. And get them some help too, look for resources within the article. Thanks.

The suicide rate for farmers is more than double that of veterans.

The US farmer suicide crisis echoes a much larger farmer suicide crisis happening globally: an Australian farmer dies by suicide every four days; in the UK, one farmer a week takes his or her own life; in France, one farmer dies by suicide every two days; in India, more than 270,000 farmers have died by suicide since 1995. [Holy shit!]

In 1999, Rosmann joined an effort called Sowing Seeds of Hope (SSOH), which began in Wisconsin, and connected uninsured and underinsured farmers in seven midwestern states to affordable behavioral health services. In 2001, Rosmann became the executive director. For 14 years, the organization fielded approximately a half-million telephone calls from farmers, trained over 10,000 rural behavioral health professionals, and provided subsidized behavioral health resources to over 100,000 farm families.

The CDC report suggested possible causes for the high suicide rate among US farmers, including “social isolation, potential for financial losses, barriers to and unwillingness to seek mental health services (which might be limited in rural areas), and access to lethal means”.

Since 2013, net farm income for US farmers has declined 50%. Median farm income for 2017 is projected to be negative $1,325. And without parity in place (essentially a minimum price floor for farm products), most commodity prices remain below the cost of production.

The image of Blaske on the farm, illuminating the darkness, is a powerful one. “Sometimes the batteries were low and the light was not so bright,” he wrote, “But when you found the cow that was missing, you also found a newborn calf, which made the dark of night much brighter.” [Very touching!]

SEC Warning on Cryptocurrencies and Initial Coin Offerings

Fantastic job by the SEC to put this out. Maybe a little late but you should take note as they spell out all the dangers with these bitcoin related things. You have been warned!

Inflating a Hot Air Balloon in Cappadocia, Turkey

I know the previous links are pretty heavy so lets brighten up your day with this amazing picture!

A local peanut farmer in Wicksburg talks about his gay daughter who committed suicide

Well, your day was brightened with the beautiful picture above but this gut wrenching video in the link in the headline will definitely make you cry as it sure did for me. You can really feel the pain and despair of this father talking about his daughter.

This is my inspiring link of the day. We are all people, be kind to each other.

I could be blogging about 45 reasons I love the Chase Sapphire Preferred card or pretend I am excited about some dumb reason and then unleashing dozens of affiliate credit card links on you every freaking day to help my pathetic conversion ratio and get beat up by blog trolls again and again. But nope, I whine pumping these types of links for five plus years because I am a…hypocrite. Whatever.

And oh, this blog mostly writes about travel bloggers “specializing” in the disappearing miles and points travel hacking hobby. Which is being taken over by expert marketers pretending all they want to do is help family and friends travel for free while marketing to their readers non stop. Got it?

Oh, hi Mark…I meant Ingy.

And I leave you with this…

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