Two key decisions in the history of Disney parks have put them in an eternal war to balance capacity and pricing: deciding not to close the parks to new entrants on crowded days, and doing away with ticket books for rides.
Both were rational decisions. With Knott’s Berry Farm and other competing attractions offering all-you-can-ride entry passes, Disney’s antiquated A-E ticket books felt like a ripoff, and the fact that they were a not-so-subtle way of manipulating you into riding rides you’d otherwise pass up (“We gotta do something with these A tickets, oh look, there’s the Omnibus!”) became so obvious that no one could miss it anymore.
Then there was the business of shutting the doors once capacity was reached. The parks still do this, but the definition of “capacity” has slid a lot further along the scale. I remember driving up to Walt Disney World’s gates around Christmas 1977 and being sent back because there was no more room. It happened again in the 2000s, but “no more room” then meant much more crowding than I’d ever seen in a Disney park (we were able to bypass it because we were staying in an onsite hotel).
It’s impossible to say which is worse: flying halfway around the world to visit a Disney park, only to be sent away; or to be admitted, only to find yourself in a kind of rush-hour Tokyo subway train with characters and popcorn.
As the popularity of Disney parks has increased, the company has found itself in a Red Queen’s Race with its crowds. Its favorite tactic is building new showstopper rides – like the Cars Land area in California Adventure – to drain off some of the crowds, but all that does is bring in lots of new crowds who want to see the new ride. The year that Cars Land opened, the park turned into a kind of horror-show in which lines snaked all around it, filled with miserable children and fuming parents who were waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting.
Other innovations made crowding worse, too: before Fastpasses, a substantial fraction of the attendees at any given moment were likely to be standing in line in an air-conditioned show building. Now they’re wandering around in the heat, looking for amusements.
In Disneyland, the sheer volume of annual passholders has added more fuel to the fire. Even doubling the price of the annual passes hasn’t seemed to make much of a difference – and now they’re about to go from $750 or so to over $1000/year for the premium pass, as Disney does its damndest to cool down the ardor of its biggest fans.
It’s all about to get worse, too: the Star Wars lands being built in both Florida and California will send crowds into the stratosphere. So Disney is marking out some days as “premium” days and charging extra to attend, while other days will be “off-peak” and discounted. I predict that this will have little effect on the problem, alas. Partly that’s due to the American workplace’s stinginess with days off – regardless of the price, there are very few days when American workers can get out of their jobs. Combine that with the US school system’s increasingly strict policies on absences and you end up with certain days being the only ones when many visitors can attend.
Raising prices has a paradoxical effect: people who pay $150 or more for a day’s admission are going to want to get their money’s worth, meaning that they show up early and stay late. Those people have a terrible time, because it’s impossible to have a great day at Disneyland that starts at 7AM and ends at midnight. If they could be convinced to go home at dinner time, you could add 20-30% to the parks’ capacity.
Variable pricing is going to make this effect more pronounced. Worse, it’s going to start a lot of people’s Disney days with a huge, difficult to understand fight in which they’ll feel like they’re being ripped off. The start-of-day experience at Disneyland is already the worst it’s ever been: fight traffic to get to Disneyland; fight traffic in the parking lot, queue up for the escalator, queue up for the tram, get searched, queue up for tickets, queue up for admission (behind people who’ve printed out tickets and need to go through a lengthy, balky process to convert those to passes at the turnstyles) – it’s half a dozen queues before you even get inside the park proper.
It’s not clear to me what they could do to make this all better. It’s a paradox: the more popular the parks get, the worse the experience gets, but the crowds still grow. Eventually, perhaps, it will reach a breaking point. In the meantime, the problem itself looks like an opportunity for anyone who wants to build a park designed from the ground up to manage the whole crowd issue more gracefully.
If you know anything about Cystic Fibrosis, you probably are aware of the insane amount of pills and other therapies that we require in our everyday life. While there are a lot of medications, patients with CF, like me, still have to go on with our lives like a normal person. This includes having to do our medications in public. When I have to take my Cystic Fibrosis medication in public, I am usually pretty discreet about it. Although, sometimes it’s hard to keep them from being seen. When I was in elementary school at lunch, I was asked many times about my enzymes. Being that young, I only understood that I needed them to digest my food. So, that’s what I told my classmates. Nowadays, people are aware I have something going on due to my constant supplemental oxygen. When I go to eat and pull out my 6 horse-sized enzyme pills, I get a “Whoa, what are those for?” or a “What are those for? They are HUGE. I can hardly take one small pill!” I use this time to create awareness for Cystic Fibrosis and explain that while CF affects my lungs, it also affects my digestive system causing a problem absorbing nutrients and breaking down food.
Another medication that is hard to hide is my breathing nebulizer machine. Sometimes I have to do it in public. When I was younger I was embarrassed, due to all the stares I received. Now, I do it with confidence because there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Some people come up to me and ask me about it. Like the enzymes, I always tell people about Cystic Fibrosis because it’s impossible to get awareness out without talking about. Plus, if the public is not educated about it, then there likely won’t be enough funding for a cure or drug development. When I get asked about my breathing treatment, I explain that I have a genetic illness called CF that causes my lungs to fill with sticky mucus that will eventually grow bacteria and cause my lungs to scar, which is irreversible. This can lead to needing a double lung transplant when the lungs are too scarred up and the lung function drops too low. So, in order to get this junk out of my lungs and to breathe easy, I need nebulized breathing treatments.
I am never embarrassed when people ask me questions in public about my medication. I find it as a way to open up someone’s eyes and heart to the struggles of a person with Cystic Fibrosis. I always hope that after speaking to the public, I spark an interest in them to go research it and hopefully get involved with their Cystic Fibrosis community to find a cure. Hopefully one day we will have a cure. That’s a world I dream about 🙂
Jeong’s got a nuanced position about free speech, consequences for bad speech, and gender, and her accompanying Harvard Berkman Center talk does a good job of covering all that ground.
A federal judge called America’s move to forced arbitration and bans on class-action suits – bans favored and enabled by Scalia – “among the most profound shifts in our legal history.”
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is currently floating a rule that would limit forced arbitration, ensuring that people had access to the courts when they were wronged by finance companies. While most of the debate about forced arbitration focuses on unfairness, the outcome of that unfairness is wealth transfer: because forced arbitration takes away your legal rights and bargaining power, it constitutes a parallel system of justice whole laws are literally written by corporations to give them the upper hand when they wrong their workers and customers.
Companies don’t rip off the humans they deal with out of sadism: they do it for profit. Unsurprisingly, the effect of a system that enables firms to profit by taking away rights from workers and customers is to make rich people richer, at the expense of poorer people, who become poorer still.
What kinds of claims are run through the forced arbitration system? Claims for wage theft, where companies literally just refuse to pay workers for the hours they have worked (as much as $50B/year is stolen this way in America, affecting everyone from Walmart workers to Oakland Raiders cheerleaders); financial fraud, including deceptive loan practices, hidden fees, and payday loans; and antitrust, where companies conspire to fix prices and rig markets – health care and pharma companies are particularly aggressive in insisting on antitrust arbitration provisions in their dealings.
A brief from the The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy lays out the case for forced arbitration as a wealth-transfer mechanism in clear language. Several regulatory and legislative initiatives in the coming months have the power to roll back forced arbitration, but they’ll need public pressure from people who’ve taken a moment to learn about this issue which manages to be devastating and obscure at the same time, a bad combination for public policy outcomes!
Having successfully invented the paperclip-bending machine, engineer Elis F. Stenman set out to build a new summer home for himself in Rockport, Mass in 1922, entirely from paper.
He did. It is a marvel.
The Paper House is still standing, and can be toured in the company of Stenman’s grandniece Edna Beaudoin, who inherited the gig from her mother. The varnished paper walls, floor and ceilings are joined by paper furnishings and decorative elements. Stenman’s paper home is electrified and plumbed, and can be toured for the entirely reasonable sum of $1.50.
Holy wow you are totally right! I knew that Dementors represented Depression, but I didn’t get the connection between Patronuses and CBT.
I asked Pottermore what my Patronus was, and I can’t remember what it told me … I recall that it was kind of cool, but not, like, super cool. If I had to pick it myself, it would probably be an Owl, or an Otter.
You swerve to avoid a squirrel. Unknown to you, the squirrel pledges a life debt to you. In your darkest hour, the squirrel arrives.
I showed this to my 5 year old nephew and said ‘what do you think this brave squirrel’s name is?’ and he replied ‘Sir Nuts-a-lot’ and my mom has been laughing for about 5 solid minutes
In many ways, it makes no sense to distinguish between Trump and the Republican Party any longer. Trump is popular among Republicans, and Republican officials are satisfied with the White House’s policy output. “I think we know enough now to know that Donald Trump is doing the same kinds of things that Jeb Bush would have done or Marco Rubio would have done or Mitt Romney would have done,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Thursday.
But it is too pat to pretend Republicans don’t view Trump differently than they viewed past party standard bearers, and with much, much more alarm. That they may be too cowed or craven to do anything about their concerns is beside the point: All that matters for the purposes of identifying sources of optimism is that their moral barometers aren’t broken in quite the way Trump’s is.
If congressional Republicans were going to use their power to check Trump, the way they would a non-partisan political or national security threat, we have a pretty decent sense of what they’d do.
In the policy realm, they might restrain his Muslim ban and deportation force designs; in the oversight realm, they would force him to sell off his assets, or at least release some of his tax returns, as well as launch a full inquiry into whether his campaign colluded with Russian intelligence to disrupt the presidential election. As a matter of basic governing competence, they would try to sideline reckless advisers like Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and the now-deposed Michael Flynn. Republicans probably can’t stop Trump from holding destabilizing press conferences, but they could make life uncomfortable for him and his team unless and until they started to show some semblance of control.
Instead they choose to whine anonymously to the press.
Representative Jason Chaffetz, the GOP’s chief investigator, has asked the Department of Justice to pursue criminal charges against a former Hillary Clinton aide who helped set up her private email server. The same man who continued issuing subpoenas at an impressive clip after the FBI shelved its Clinton investigation believes the appropriate number of subpoenas the scandal-plagued Trump administration should face is zero. And Attorney General Jeff Sessions—who called on his predecessor, Loretta Lynch, to recuse herself from the Clinton investigation for extremely flimsy reasons—is resisting demands, based on clear-letter rules, that he recuse himself from federal investigations of Trump’s aides and their potential ties to the Russian hackers who disrupted the election.
