Can You Guess Who's the Best Coach Airline in North America?

Best overall coach-class airline in North America: JetBlue

Even after the current downgrading, JetBlue's extra legroom still beats any other airline. The de facto charge for a checked bag, at $15 over the minimum fare, is less than on most other airlines. The satellite-based Wi-Fi is free, at slow speeds, and $9 an hour for enough bandwidth to stream movies. And seats in JetBlue's Airbus planes are an inch wider than on any competitors' 737s.

Hope to see you soon on one of my flights!  

Intel Slowing Down CPU Advancement

Transitioning to 10nm isn't expected to be any better, so Intel is extending the timelines. Cannonlake is being pushed back, from 2016 to the second half of 2017, and in the interim, a third "lake" generation processor will be released in 2016. Like Skylake, this processor will continue to use the 14nm process. News of this processor appeared to leak last month along with its full name: Kaby Lake. Little concrete is known about Kaby Lake, but it's likely to be available in a range of lines from a 4.5W laptop part up to 80W dual-socket server and workstation parts.

Since selling my 2008 MacBook Pro a few years back, I've been patiently waiting for a newer architecture and design replacement to Apple's current 15-inch Retina Display. With Broadwell's deployment stagnant and almost non-existent, I'm hoping they just skip it and go straight to Skylake for a Fall release. I was definitely disappointed with the latest spec bump still on Haswell but at least the change in dedicated graphics cards helped increase processing power by 70%. Maybe I'll "settle" for that!.

JetBlue's New Fare Classes are Better than Meets the Eye

The big news is that the price differential between Blue and Blue Plus tickets is generally only $15. JetBlue has made it a better value to purchase a ticket that includes a checked bag than it is to pay a bag fee, even in advance. In addition, buying a Blue Plus fare earns more TrueBlue points than the base fare, for marginally more money.

In comparison, Delta and United don’t have fares that include a checked bag, nor do they let passengers purchase checked baggage ahead of time for a reduced fee. American does offer fares with checked bag included, but the premium is more than the cost of a checked bag, although it does include group one boarding.

Essentially, if you are going to check a bag, don't book on Orbitz or Expedia and just select Blue Plus via JetBlue.com. Attention media, friends and family, it's still the best out there.

 
 

Launching the #OnReserve Team via Slack

Slack syncs seamlessly across devices, features a powerful internal search engine, and is highly compatible with dozens of other programs that keep businesses running. But Slack’s truly innovative offering goes unlisted: It is a cool office culture, available for instant download.

I spent the last few days setting up onreserve.info and onreserve.slack.com. With the help of an awesome guy named henry from another slack team, I was able to find out that you can register domain names for free, have it hosted via a github page, and use an entire library of awesome images via unsplash.com.

I've been blazing away at lightening speeds setting it up and getting it going. Now, with many various channels ready to go up and running, I want to invite all various Pilots and Flight Attendants to come and join up in an online Live Chat / Bulletin Board / Forum. The end goal really is to become a productive and cool culture where everyone can talk, meet up maybe and or even plan things. No negativity just plane talk... and whatever else.

If you have any more ideas to add, email me or like I already mentioned, join in by navigating to onreserve.info and following the sign-up process. I'll also have a write up shortly on how I did the nitty gritty with more details. Thanks again!

JetBlue's Fly-Fi vs. the Rest

The inflight Internet market in the U.S. doesn’t seem to follow any basic rule of competition. On an American or Delta plane you could wind up paying $10 to $20 to surf for the duration of your flight, and “surf” might be a generous word in this case. If there are a lot of other people using the same network on your plane, speeds might be so slow you’ll wind up paddling your way through the web.

At the other end of the spectrum, JetBlue offers complementary Internet access to all of its passengers. Instead of delivering a sluggish Internet experience, its Fly-Fi service is the fastest in the biz delivering speeds over 10 Mbps, and doesn’t restrict high-bandwidth applications like Netflix on its networks.

Installed on about 85% of our Airbus A320s and 100% of our A321s, commuting on JetBlue is a breeze with Fly-Fi. So fast and with access to Amazon Prime, Netflix and YouTube and every other social network, time does fly. I love working here.

No Positive in Building a Stadium

Note that those studies looked at stadiums for all major sports. NFL venues, which cost more and are used less, tend to fare worse economically.

Yet a new Chargers stadium really looks bad compared to other public uses for the Qualcomm site. Leading the pack, by far, is higher education.

Expanding on a classic 1956 paper by Nobel Laureate Robert Solow, economists since the 1990s have argued that boosting “human capital” is key to further economic growth once basic resources, like money and raw materials, are in place. Put simply, building knowledge builds a better economy.

I guess I'm probably not going to be popular either but paying over $1 billion in public funds just doesn't give me the feel goods. We owe it to our kids to build a better and brighter future with great economic benefits. Rooting for a sports team that won't proportionally give back it its fans, count me out for ANY tax increase.

2016: The Year of Higher Insurance Premiums

Health insurance companies around the country are seeking rate increases of 20 percent to 40 percent or more, saying their new customers under the Affordable Care Act turned out to be sicker than expected. Federal officials say they are determined to see that the requests are scaled back.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans — market leaders in many states — are seeking rate increases that average 23 percent in Illinois, 25 percent in North Carolina, 31 percent in Oklahoma, 36 percent in Tennessee and 54 percent in Minnesota, according to documents posted online by the federal government and state insurance commissioners and interviews with insurance executives.

This is just the first two paragraphs. To captialism and the biggest scam of the 20th/21st century... insurance... Happy Fourth of July.

The NEW Kindle Paperwhite is the One to Buy!

I spent much of the past week repeatedly forgetting that I was supposed to evaluate the Paperwhite as a gadget. Whether I was reading Paula Hawkins’ “The Girl on the Train” while sitting by the pool or lying in bed with the lights off, the hardware simply disappeared, leaving me alone with the words on the page.

Most of the technology that enables that is in the new 6-inch E Ink touchscreen, which now has the same high-resolution 300 pixels per inch as Amazon’s elite $200 Kindle Voyage.

This is what reading on a device should be. And at $119 with special offers count me in!