quokwok

Works In Progress have an odd antipathy to picture rails. Actually, picture rails are good. You don't have to fill any holes if you wish to move or remove a picture. To put up a picture rail, you can drill multiple holes laterally until you find a stud. The unused holes will be covered by the rail.

You're a few years out of date. You don't get charged extra for using any credit card.

And clicking "I don't need insurance" is easy.

It's easy to book a Ryanair ticket without being upsold. You select the ticket, probably add a bag for about £40, skip the car rental and hotels screens etc, then book. What's the problem?

Thanks, that makes sense.

Why isn't Ryanair allowed to prohibit use of their website by resellers?

This is an odd story. Ryanair doesn't pay commission, so these resellers make money by charging extra fees to unsuspecting customers. I don't know why Ryanair wants to stamp out this practice (which doesn't cost them anything and brings extra sales), but I don't see why they should be prevented from stamping it out.

If something has negative externalities, the solution is to tax the externality. E.g. a carbon tax will raise the price of fossil-fuel energy, which will make some green energy projects worth building. That's it -- job done.

Subsidising "good" projects is instead of taxing bad projects is the wrong way to do it, because the government has to evaluate every project proposal to figure out which projects should be subsidised. Whereas a carbon tax does it for you; all the government needs to figure out is the cost of carbon, and the market takes care of the rest.

I'm surprised you rate "The Spirit Level". I think it's a pack of lies, partly because of Chris Snowden's book but mainly Tino Sanandaji's many posts about it on his blog. The most devastating criticisms are

1. They use data from a UN report from a particular year. Except for one reference, they use a report from a different year. It turns out that this report contains data which supports their argument, but all the other years disprove it.

2. They use a mysterious sample of countries. When a larger sample is used, the effect goes away or reverses.

More generally, the whole argument is nutty. If you spot an apparent correlation, you have to come up with some causal mechanism. Inequality is supposed to somehow make people unhealthy, through envy or something... nuts.