How Richard Branson started Virgin Atlantic

How Richard Branson started Virgin Atlantic.

β€œIn ’79, when Joan, my fiancee and I were on a holiday in the British Virgin Islands, we were trying to catch a flight to Puerto Rico; but the local Puerto Rican scheduled flight was cancelled. The airport terminal was full of stranded passengers. I made a few calls to charter companies and agreed to charter a plane for $2000 to Puerto Rico. Cheekily leaving out Joan’s and my name, I divided the price by the remaining number of passengers, borrowed a blackboard and wrote: VIRGIN AIRWAYS: $39 for a single flight to Puerto Rico. I walked around the airport terminal and soon filled every seat on the charter plane.

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Memo to the Occupy protesters: Ten things we evil capitalists really think

Memo to the Occupy protesters: Ten things we evil capitalists really think.

I especially like #8:

8. Capitalism, with all its imperfections, is the fairest scheme yet tried. In a system based on property rights and free contract, people succeed by providing an honest service to others. Bill Gates became rich by enriching hundreds of millions of us: I am typing these words using one of his programmes. He gained from the exchange (adding fractionally to his net worth), and so did I (adding to my convenience). In a state-run system, by contrast, third parties get to hand out the goodies.

Another way to say this is to call it freedom.

Read the whole thing.

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“Perpetuating rubbish”: a detailed analysis of one part of the new climategate emails

“Perpetuating rubbish”: a detailed analysis of one part of the new climategate emails.

I think the first comment sums up the tragedy of this situation very clearly:

So privately they said the series had a β€œdubious relationship to temperature”, but publicly they said it was β€œwell calibrated”? I am just about to the point of never trusting any scientists at all.

The willingness of the climate field to whitewash the fraud and corruption revealed by the first set of climategate emails is now haunting this field badly. Why should anyone believe anything any global warming scientist ever says? It is very clear that too many of them put politics above science in their work.

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