fracking won’t last with $20 oil. They can weather a few months, but not 2 years.
Airlines are not resilient at all - they have thin margins at the best of times, now they have negative. There will be a massive shake-up
hotels — like airlines, people are not going to be traveling at least until this Christmas. Even business is shifting to MS Teams / Zoom / conference calls
restaurants - massive shake-up, and again during the best of times they skate on thin ice, now it will be deadly for most.
newspapers - this will move things online - the NYTimes, Telegraph and Guardian are managing well. Local newspapers may work if they go all online. But a massive shakeup
Manhattan, London city - they will be hit temporarily, but they will come back - just as they did after all plagues etc. in history - cities attract talent, which attracts jobs which attract talent.
Destroy fracking, and get whipsawed by oil price doubling, and fuel insecurity forcing us to depend on undependable suppliers. Trump ain’t buying that. I wonder if the public will, either.Airlines are not resilient at all - they have thin margins at the best of times, now they have negative. There will be a massive shake-up
OTOH with oil cheap and airliners available at distress prices, what’s gonna happen in the air freight industry??And, at the margin, the seaborne freight industry. Speaking of which, with the emphasis on supply security, what’ll that do to shipping generally? Maybe marginal improvement in RR freight?
The wire services - which are a nineteenth century solution to the 19th/20th Century problem of expensive telegraphy bandwidth - inherently produce a (singular, even tho wire services be plural) “objective journalist” cartel. The AP dates back a decade before the Civil War (tho a map of telegraph lines in the country in 1860 showed a “spider web” of interconnections, whereas the South allowed only one single line). The Sherman AntiTrust Act dates back only to 1890.Prior to 1890, at least, the AP was aggressively monopolistic in suppressing any other wire service. Any telegraph line startup would be offered enough money to cover its operating expenses by the AP - with the proviso that no other news traffic would be carried on that line. In 1945
The Supreme Court held that Associated Press had violated the Sherman Act. The bylaws of AP at that time, as written, constituted restraint of trade. The fact that AP had not achieved a complete monopoly was irrelevant. The First Amendment did not excuse newspapers from violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. News, traded between states, counts as interstate commerce, and thus makes the issue relevant for the Sherman Antitrust Act. Finally, Freedom of the press from governmental interference under the First Amendment does not sanction repression of that freedom by private interests (326 U.S. 20). - WikipediaThat didn’t address the fact that each wire service is a virtual meeting of its member journalists - and collectively the wire services constitute virtual meetings of all the major journalists. Meetings which have been ongoing since memory of living man runneth not to the contrary. Adam Smith’s dictum thatPeople of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Wealth of Nationsimplies that you have to be "naive as a babe to believe” that journalists do not “conspire against the public.”In fact, the conspiracy is in plain sight - it is the propaganda campaign to the effect that journalism - journalism within the good graces of the cartel - is crucially important and “objective.” In fact of course, objectivity is a laudable goal but not a state of being. Any serious attempt at objectivity must begin with the humility to accept that objectivity doesn’t come naturally to anyone, journalist or not. The effect of the assumption of the objectivity of everyone else in your profession can only result in groupthink. Anyone who does not go along with the journalistic consensus on any given topic does not get along with it. And promptly has his career “pecked to death” by unanimous proclamation that the miscreant is “not a journalist, not objective.”
The entertainment imperative means that journalism is about difficult-to-ignore bad news and, consequently, journalism is negative. Negative about society, and implicitly naive about what society’s opposite - government - can do/be. The conceit that journalism is objective - when instead it is knowingly negative - is the very definition of cynicism. Which explains why “objective" journalism naturally produces pro-socialist - that is to say, anti limited constitutional government - propaganda.
My bottom line is that the wire services are not “too big to fail” as they were in ’45, and they have no legitmate and significant raison d'être which any court is bound to respect. They must be sued into oblivion. Whether by an individual or by the DoJ.