What If Wednesday

What if airlines charged passengers by their weight?

This horrible idea* was first suggested by my Latin teacher at school. She was four feet ten in shoes and I'm sure had to have her clothes specially made, since size 6 didn't really exist when I was at school. I could completely understand it from her point of view: she'd do better out of it.

So might the airlines. Lighter passengers require less fuel to transport, presumably. In those enormous A303s that carry nearly 1000 people, those few extra kilos a percentage of them are carrying are really going to make a difference. More cargo could be carried if the airline was clear on the weight of the passengers ahead of time, possibly leading to less flights and therefore a reduction in emissions.

How would it work, though? Would you be weighed when you booked your flight and have to pay extra then? Or would they charge everyone the same and then weigh you at check in and add a surcharge at that point? Since generally people try to lose weight for their holidays I think the second way would be fairer, though perhaps less useful if you want to know total passenger weight in time to add extra cargo.

How would it affect travel patterns? Fatter people would have to diet hard, save for longer or make do with staycations and cruises. Perhaps multinational countries would promote lighter people to positions that involve travel, whilst simultaneously looking at videoconferencing for their portlier employees.

I can see that weighing people and charging for extra pounds would cause enormous outcry. It's quite negative. The best way to introduce a new idea is to turn it on its head and look at the positive side: more incentive for people to lose weight. So perhaps lighter people could be allowed more baggage. Perhaps if you are a light couple, one of you gets to travel free (as long as you share your meal) since then that seat won't be taken up by a fatty who's weighing the plane down.

You know, I feel like I'm doing Stelios's job for him. How long before the bucket airlines adopt my policy? I want free flights for life, you know. And I won't be disclosing my weight, either.


* As an overweight lover of travel with family on three continents, I find it horrible.

What If Wednesday

What if skinny had never become the fashion industry standard?

(A brief disclaimer here: this is not a dig at the fashion industry. It makes sense that fashion designers would prefer skinny people to model their clothes, since it's easier to create the illusion of, say, breasts and hips than it is to disguise one: ergo skinny models are more versatile, and work out cheaper in terms of sample sizes.)

The in-vogue body shape has changed over time. Sometimes thin has been in - I'm thinking of the 20s and the flapper - and sometimes curvy has been in, like in the 50s and the days of Ursula Andress and Marilyn Monroe; and then thin came back in the 60s with Twiggy. But then it sort of became stuck at thin. Maybe the fashion industry got a bit lazy, or maybe this was when it cottoned on to the fact that thin women make better models.

So, here is my crackpot theory for the day. The 80s saw the start of the age of the supermodel. Thin and tall women became the icons. I can still name most of the famous supermodels of the early 90s, so often were they featured in the magazines I chose to read. Supermodels were paid megabucks, featured on front covers, in ad campaigns and music videos. They started popping up in films. I think if I'd been an aspiring actress back then, I would have felt a little bit sick about this.

So, instead of haughtily rising above the clothes horses, the actresses did what they thought was necessary: they conformed to the fashion industry standard. They got thin. If they didn't get thin, they put up with a lot of pressure and missed out on the best jobs. For those who got thin, the rewards were rich. Now ad campaigns and front covers are more likely to be not-a-model (I actually saw an editorial complaining about this) as the real talent returns to centre stage. Women prefer to read about women who do stuff, not women who wear stuff. The age of the supermodel is dead; the savvy ones are designing capsule collections for the high street, or have buggered off to be a muse, or got behind the camera instead.

Now for the impact. Where fashion and the famous lead, the rest of us follow, especially as the number of healthy, non-skinny role models dwindle. In spite of not needing to be superskinny in order to get parts/modelling jobs, superskinny became the thing to aspire to - and there's gold in them there hills. Diet pills, fitness DVDs, meal-replacement shakes, motiviational books - the works.

It is my theory that this has in part led to the obesity crisis we're facing. This unhealthy obsession with being thinner and thinner has pushed people in the opposite direction. An entire generation, or three, has lost its ability to relate healthily to food and diet. So, perhaps if there hadn't been the meteoric rise of the supermodel, the pendulum would have swung back, we'd all have a normal relationship with food, and the NHS would be a lot better off, and the weekly gossips would have features on how to copy Beyonce's moves instead of her diet.

I know, I know, there are millions of things that can be blamed for obesity: fast food, sedentary lifestyles, video games, blah blah. This is my what if, you know. I get to make up whatever crazy shizzle I like.



Are you telling me that Ursula Andress, the woman who, when questioned about why she posed nude for Playboy, replied, "Because I'm beautiful" (beautiful, mind you, not "worth it"), would be caught dead doing the cereal diet?

A "What if" for Wednesday

This week I read a blog post from Scott Adams, about good news, which contained as its first item the suggestion that America might be close to reaching fuel self-sufficiency.

This crossed over nicely with what I've been reading for work. Now in my fourth year of teaching 20th century US Foreign Policy to my oldest students, I am really getting into it, and have started reading a wider variety of books than Ian has provided. My favourite of these so far is the very readable Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938, by Stephen E Ambrose (helpfully available on my Kindle). In it, he posits that, in spite of winning the Cold War, America was more vulnerable by the 1990s because it was so dependent on the Middle East for its fuel needs. He suggested that, without this dependence, America might have returned to its isolationist ways of the early 20th century; and, indeed, was doing so until Iraq invaded Kuwait.

I have a few holes to pick there but let's ignore them for the purposes of this extended ramble. If America really did achieve fuel self-sufficiency, what impact would that have worldwide?
What impact would it have on the Middle East? And on petrol prices?
Would all US military overseas just pack up and go home, and what about the countries they are supposedly helping?
Would they maintain their alliances, and membership of things like NATO?
Would the miltary-industrial complex in the US allow America to reinstate isolationism? The defence budget pre-1939 was less than £500m, with 185,00 soldiers. Now it's £300b*, and countless personnel. That's an enormous number of jobs and businesses. Also, when you think of it like that, you can understand why people come up with conspiracy theories about 9/11.
Who would fill the power vacuum? China?
With America more reliant on natural energy, what would happen to global emissions? Would there be more effort made to develop alternative car/plane fuels? Unlikely, I think, as long as somebody's still making money from the oil.

Just thinking, you know. I like it when I've read enough on a subject to finally form an opinion. Teaching this last year, it was all about fear as a motivator, but now I've read more and concluded this is just a facade. I'll continue to read and eventually decide what's behind it, I suspect.


*My favourite way to think of big numbers like these is in seconds. 500m seconds is around 15 years. 300b is around 9,600 years.