#some are less than a oage of thoughts

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Opening my drafts/fic ideas and hunting through them like you do the pantry/fridge when looking for food

[cryptodictation]

An analog uchronia: this would have been the coronavirus crisis without the Internet | Technology

The killer application, the definitive application that would turn our lives completely digital has been a virus. And not a computer virus, but a biological one. During this quarantine, the Spanish spent an average of 79 hours out of the 168 that the week has connected in one way or another to the Internet, according to a study by Nielsen and Dynadata. Almost half of our time. Network traffic has grown 80% since the start of the crisis. The use of WhatsApp has grown to six times. Platforms like Netflix, HBO or the newcomer Disney fill their income accounts and our movies and series with our time at home with euros. Becoming addicts, the possibility that we could go offline terrifies us. The operators reassure us: the collapse is impossible. But what if it never existed? Now that David Simon's television adaptation of Philip Roth's fabulous novel The conspiracy against America ucronía (fiction based on alternative versions of history) has become fashionable, let's consider an analog. What would this crisis be like if it had come before the Internet entered our lives? What would this pandemic have been like in 1995?

We traveled less. Viruses too

Globalization already existed in 1995, but it was different. Thomas Friedman says that we are now living globalization 3.0. The first wave was led by countries. The second, companies. This third, the people. Empires or multinationals are no longer the protagonists of this process. We are. The Internet largely succeeded in defeating space, killing distances. Anyone can have friends they've never hugged on another continent or meet their better half on the other side of the ocean without having kissed her.

According to the World Organization for Migration, in 2019 there were 271 million migrants in the world. The virtual country that would make up all the people who inhabit a different one from the one that saw them born would be the fourth most populous on the planet. More relevant are the tourism figures. According to the World Tourism Organization, in 2019 1.5 billion international visitor arrivals were registered in the world. In 1995, before Expedia was created, the first online travel agency, 527 million.

The Internet has democratized travel. Come fly with me Sinatra sang. Flying was a special experience until the arrival of airlines in the twilight of the century low cost. According to a study by the University of Oxford, flying abroad in the 21st century is 70% cheaper than in the 20th. You traveled less times and to fewer places. According to OAG data, in 1990 there were 7,000 direct air connections in the world. In 2010 they exceeded 15,000. Tourists want to be travelers and begin to leave the traditional routes in a diaspora that reaches everywhere. Thousands of people discover destinations on blogs, networks and Instagram accounts such as Paula Solís. For her “the networks have brought destinations closer. Traveling today is less expensive and complicated. People run away from packages looking for places with fewer tourists. ” A paradox, tourists fleeing from tourism.

Without wanting to, these travelers for professional reasons or in search of the “authentic” are transmission mechanisms as were the Spanish conquerors in the epidemics that decimated the indigenous population of America. In 1995 much less was traveled than today, to fewer places and in a much shorter season. So it is possible to think that if a pandemic had devastated the world then its global spread would have been slower. The expansion from one country to another would not have been hours or days, but weeks or months as in the 1918 Spanish flu, which was accelerated by the movement of troops in the First World War.

The COVID-19 crisis will have a major impact on the mobility of people and tourism. For Solís, “international travel will take time to recover. We will be afraid, nobody wants to quarantine outside their home. ” Furthermore, “some airlines will fail, supply will decrease, prices will rise and international tourism will no longer be so affordable for everyone.” Traveling after the coronavirus will be more like how we traveled in 1995. It will be more expensive, more complicated, and less destinations with numerous countries forcing quarantines of their visitors. In the summer of 1996 an advertising spot popularized the “Where's Curro?” Maybe for a while Curro will stay in Spain.

The phone kept communicating

This confinement has supposed the explosion of the videoconference. It is used to drink canes remotely with friends – the sales of beer, potatoes and olives do not stop rising -, to have meetings with the family and even to form some with virtual weddings. Pedro Sánchez and his ministers used it in their press conferences without journalists and they are on the way to becoming a television genre in itself used in each live set to connect with one of the hundreds of experts in pandemics that have suddenly appeared on the programming morning. Zoom, the fashion app to carry them out, is, according to Statista, the most downloaded in the quarantine, although that success has caused multiple problems. Friends no longer argue over the bar where they can drink vermouth, but rather over the platform where they can see their faces out of focus and poorly lit.

In 1995 we would have had to settle for the voice. If in this crisis the traditional calls have doubled growing even more than the data, then, when they were the only channel to care and be cared for in the middle of the isolation, they would have exploded. Not being able to see the receiver's face would have been the least of the problems. At the end of 1995 only 2% of Spaniards had a mobile phone. Telefónica, the only operator to provide service, closed the year with 928,955 users. Although in 1993 Moviline phones had begun to be marketed, with prices close to 100,000 pesetas (600 euros) and since 1976 in Madrid and Barcelona huge and heavy devices could be used for the car, it was not until 1995 when in Spain it began to offer, as a luxury item, GSM digital mobile telephony.

The fixed monthly fee was 4,000 pesetas, about 24 euros, and the price of the call ranged between 45 and 18 pesetas per minute, depending on the time slot. All mobile numbers started with 909 and SMS was free because no one thought they could interest someone. So the telephony was overwhelmingly fixed. And at home, although it was usual to have several receivers, there was only one line, so parents and children shared a single communication channel. The “cut now” was one of the most repeated phrases and it is difficult to explain to the one who has not lived through the experience of the adolescent who does not call his girlfriend, but the home phone of his parents. A confinement with a single telephone in each home, always communicating, would have been a matter of dispute. Perhaps cabins should have been decreed as an essential service to avoid family schisms.

Teleworking was impossible … and allegal

Although the first Spanish web server, that of the Jaume I University that took advantage of the CERN directory, appeared in 1993, in 1995 practically no home had an Internet connection. In September of that year, Telefónica would launch Infovía, a slow connection. The flat rate would not arrive until almost the year 2000. In 1995 teleworking would have been impossible, although his oldest ancestor could have been launched: work from home. In 1665, when Cambridge University was forced to temporarily close due to the spread of the bubonic plague, physicist Isaac Newton developed the key idea of ​​his law of universal gravitation from his home.

The concept of teleworking is also not new. In 1973, in the midst of the oil crisis in the United States, physicist and engineer Jack Nilles began to think of ways to optimize non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels. His idea was to “take the job to the worker” and not the other way around. He tried to implement it in the insurer where he worked by connecting the keyboards and screens of his colleagues to remote stations. But the idea was technically unfeasible then and it was still in Spain in 1995.

Pablo Teijeira, director for companies of VmWare, a multinational specialized in virtualizing the workplace, assures that “although technology already allows it and 71% of large companies include it in their human resources policies, in 2018 only 3, According to the INE, 2% of employed persons teleworked in Spain, far from 25% in Sweden or 43% in the USA ”. Despite this, many companies have managed to implement contingency plans in record time that have allowed their employees to continue working from home. “Those who were prepared immediately took the step. Many even recommended it days before the state of alarm, “explains Teijeira.” For those who were not, we have given access to critical applications from anywhere to more than 20,000 users in less than five business days. “

25 years ago, technology was not the only limitation to transfer productive activity to homes. The first proposal for a law to regulate teleworking in Spain was presented in 2010. It was rejected and until 2012 it was not included in article 13 of the Workers' Statute. “Without teleworking, the impact would have been devastating,” says Teijeira. Many companies would have been forced to close, the destruction of employment would have been enormous and workers in essential sectors would have had to continue going to their workplaces, making confinement measures less effective.

The online classes that these days are followed by millions of students at home would also be impossible. Perhaps the Government would have had to organize a large-scale training course for all of them through public radio or through some kind of paper bulletins sold at newsstands.

New technologies have not only helped launch telework and maintain teaching activity. In 1995, perhaps the Internet would not have saved the economy or the school year, but it would have saved the lives of many of the people who are now receiving home help and remote diagnosis.

Fewer leisure options and less fear of boredom

In 1995, as today, the main entertainment for a confinement was television. But the meaning of that word today is very different. Following the famous phrase of Paul L. Klein, in 1995 people did not watch programs, they watched television. According to Klein's own theory of the “least objectionable program,” this should not delight a few, but dislike almost no one. That generalist television was tremendously removed from the ultra-segmentation and personalization that digital platforms allow today: from group and simultaneous consumption we have passed to the individual and asynchronous.

In a hypothetical confinement in 1995, leisure would have been based on “let's see what they throw”, according to the professor at the Rey Juan Carlos University, José María Álvarez Monzoncillo, who wrote in 2004 The future of home entertainment. Monzoncillo believes that this future, which is now past, changed radically in three aspects: we went from scarcity to abundance, from family to personal consumption and from homogeneity to segmentation.

The private channels had been released in our country in 1990 with what the television offer was four free channels and Canal +, the only payment option, still broadcast in analogue and therefore in a linear way and without any ability to choose. To these were added the autonomic ones in some communities, the international channels that provided the satellite dishes that had survived the fashion of the 80s and the video tapes. Perhaps a crisis like this in '95 would have served to see those home recordings from camcorders, the last cry in the early '90s, documentary memory of those who were children at that time.

But no matter how large the family home video library was, and considering that the video club would hardly have made an essential service (perhaps the poster had changed to rewinding and disinfecting before delivering), the menu on the audiovisual menu was infinitely less extensive. Children's channels did not yet exist and children's programming was reduced to very specific time frames. The only possibility to see cinema away from mainstream was the video or wait for Monday at 22.30 in This movie theater is so big, released in 1995, the first contact that many had with the classic cinema that is consumed today in Filmin.

The shortage of supply led instead to the concentration of the audience. Family doctor, which premiered that year averaged 8.5 million viewers and its final chapter, two years later exceeded 10.5. The paper house, which is an indisputable success today in our country, has just over 2 million and not simultaneously. For Professor Monzoncillo, today we are more addicted to content: ”We want everything now. There is a new cycle of anxiety, frustration, and tedium. In a cyberfetish environment, boredom is considered a failure and having fun is an obligation. ”

Since not everything is television, in 95 music would have been a fundamental companion to isolation. Hi-fi equipment had come home since the late 1980s, and the CD had banished the cassette tapes to gas stations. In 1995 there was no Spotify but it was the year of Tricky and Pj Harvey's debut from Common People Pulp and Wonderworld from Oasis. Now we have a trap.

Glues for the paper newspaper

The information that we would have had about the pandemic would also have been radically different in 1995. So the only daily content accessible online was the BOE and the Valencian cultural magazine Els Temps with an electronic version on the Servicom network since 1994. EL PAÍS did not have an Internet presence until May 1996, coinciding with the 20th anniversary of its launch. A curious phenomenon and today almost forgotten is that of electronic publications on CD. The pioneering experience had been the Expo 92 newspaper, available on CD-ROM and electronic kiosks installed at the Seville fair connected by fiber optics. Some media had joined this trend, but in 1995 the press was almost exclusively on paper. EL PAÍS sold more than a million copies every Sunday and in a situation like the present one it would have triggered the circulation, probably with more than one daily edition.

Radio consumption, which has increased significantly during this pandemic and is also, according to a study by the Havas Group, the most trusted medium to inform us of the coronavirus, would have been equally significant in 1995. We would not listen to podcasts or radio streamming or apps but we would do it in the late middle wave, but Iñaki Gabilondo or Encarna Sánchez would join us in our running of the bulls as Angels Barceló and Carlos Alsina do today. Television was still, in the words of Román Gubern, “a pulpit disguised as a window.” Generalist and flow, with enormous power in public opinion and in the creation of social consensus, it would also have played a key role in information.

There would also be fake news although we would call them only fake news. In fact, the Spanish flu of 18 October owes its name to the information manipulation that prevented the information on the pandemic from being published in the countries that were fighting in the Great War. The Spanish media, with the neutrality of their country in the war, were the first in the world to write about the virus and thus gave the epidemic its name forever.

The fundamental difference with the current situation would be in the propagation of those hoaxes. Without the Internet or social networks it would be more difficult for them to go viral. The health authorities would have easier to control the disinformation and without the tension that has taken over Twitter, the public debate would surely be calmer. In Professor Álvarez Monzoncillo's opinion, “informatively, television, radio and the press would have been the controlled reference. Now the news is flowing in other ways. In fact, during this confinement the political conflict, and the public agenda itself, have been marked by users and digital networks, which is promoting polarization. ” It is one more example of what Moisés Naím calls “the end of power.”

Science would slow down

In 1995, as today, it would be science that would get us out of this crisis. But research back then was very different without the technologies that have become popular later. As explained by the Professor of Physical Chemistry at the Complutense University of Madrid and former Secretary of State for Innovation, Science and University, Ángeles Heras, “The Internet is an invention of scientists.”

In the 80s, first in some North American Universities and later at CERN in Europe, they were deploying networks to interconnect their research centers. The impact was enormous, both in science itself and in the way of thinking and reading bibliography to propose projects, design experiments, analyze results, publish articles and disseminate knowledge. The scientific method remains the same, but before the Internet we needed much more time to obtain the same results.

Heras tells his own story as an example. His doctoral thesis was the first to be written in a word processor at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Córdoba in 1983. The bibliography was requested from CINDOC (CSIC), the results were analyzed in ballpoint pen and the articles were written in a specific machine. He still remembers the first article that he sent from the University of Córdoba in 1989 by email and not by certified mail, as was customary until then.

“We have gained a lot in immediacy and facilities. The network has allowed collaboration and knowledge sharing. In the early 90s “, explains the professor,” we had a single computer with email for the entire Faculty of Sciences. In the Congresses of each area, it was a matter of meeting scientists who knew each other from the articles and mainly by letter. I started collaborating with the UCM and the CSIC from Córdoba in 1986. I visited the Instituto Rocasolano del CSIC, because it had and still has one of the best Physics and Chemistry libraries. I arrived in Madrid with many references to articles that I photocopied and took me on paper to my Faculty of Córdoba. From so many trips and many scientific conversations, in 1990 I ended up moving to UCM. “

Letters, conferences, photocopies, and trips of a hundred kilometers to consult a library made the research much slower. Today, Heras explains, “more ideas are shared and there is a very natural collaboration between scientists from any country in the world. The human genome program would have been impossible without the Internet, which will also be key to finding a coronavirus vaccine. “

In 1995, scientists would work tirelessly to find treatments and vaccines, but without being able to share this information globally, the process would have been much longer. However, we cannot demand miracles either. The Internet can speed up the research and discovery phases, but the preclinical and clinical phases have their times. Perhaps this crisis will help us to trust more in science and less in the siren songs of technology. This pandemic has killed the Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. We were told that technology would allow us to dominate nature. Covid-19 has shown that they lied.

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Airline punctuality is getting worse every year

Bott and Co, the UK’s main flight delay compensation regulation agency, has discovered that the variety of delays and cancellations for flights departing UK airports has elevated by 72% since 2015, affecting tons of of hundreds of passengers.

In what was a turbulent and unpredictable 12 months for flight passengers, 2018 noticed the most important enhance of 33% for flights cancelled or delayed over three hours in comparison with the earlier 12 months, when only one.31% of flights had been affected.

Causes for among the turbulence final 12 months included cabin crew strikes, reoccurring drone chaos, tightly packed flight schedules and uncertainty over the looming Brexit fiasco, which has continued into 2019.

The info revealed that passengers travelling with a few of Europe’s hottest airways had been the worst affected, with sure airways displaying a 12 months on 12 months enhance in journey disruption.

Norwegian Air stood out as having the most important upsurge; their passengers suffered 754% extra delays and cancellations in 2018 than in 2015. Spanish low-cost airline Vueling had the second greatest enhance of 608% adopted carefully by Air France with 536%.

Of the British airways that made the ‘poor punctuality’ checklist, British Midland Regional Restricted, TUI, Jet2 and easyJet all had over 100% will increase in delays and cancellations over the 4 12 months interval.

The info noticed Virgin Air as the one European airline to have much less delays and cancellations in 2018 than in 2015 with a 3% discount.

Under are the airways ranked worst to greatest for the rise or lower in delays and cancellations leaving UK airports from 2015 to 2018.

Airline % Improve/Lower of delays and cancellations (2015 to 2018) Norwegian Air + 754% Vueling Airways + 608% Air France + 536% British Midland Regional Restricted + 463% TUI + 394% Jet2.com + 320% KLM + 251% easyJet + 166% Thomas Prepare dinner Airways + 97% Wizz Air + 95% Flybe + 60% TAP Portugal + 53% British Airways + 35% Lufthansa + 25% Virgin Atlantic – 3%

The agency discovered that of the airways that turned much less punctual in 2018, in some circumstances these airways routinely defend eligible claims and proceed to disregard the regulation.

Coby Benson, Flight Delay Compensation Solicitor at Bott and Co stated: “A few of Europe’s main airways are merely not doing all that they’ll to minimise delays. The proof’s within the information.

Whereas some occasions are exterior of the airways’ management, there are various situations of flights being disrupted by components inside their management. Managing disgruntled workers, that lead cabin crew strikes and cramped schedule instances that lead to passengers being confronted with chaos at airports, are just some examples.”

Benson continued: “EU Regulation 261/2004 was launched in 2004 to guard passengers and act as a deterrent to forestall important delays and cancellations occurring within the first place.

The info does provide some excellent news for passengers. Some airways have managed to cut back the quantity of delays and cancellations. This demonstrates that having a regulation in place is working to some extent at dissuading airways from delays.”

Air journey intelligence firm, OAG (Official Aviation Information) has simply printed its annual airline and airport punctuality league for on-time efficiency in 2018. No medium or massive UK airports appeared within the high 20 lists for top punctuality rankings, primarily based on flights arriving and departing.

Holidaymakers with flight delays over three hours and cancellations could also be eligible for as much as 600 Euros in compensation per passenger if they’re attributable to circumstances that aren’t thought of extraordinary.

For cancelled flights with greater than 14 days’ discover, passengers are entitled by regulation to a full refund of the price they paid for the flight, a substitute flight or comparable transport preparations on the earliest obtainable alternative. For flights cancelled inside fourteen days of the departure, the identical applies however travellers might also be eligible for compensation if the explanation for the cancellation shouldn’t be extraordinary.

Many passengers are nonetheless not conscious that whatever the purpose for the maintain up, if a flight is delayed between two and 4 hours, airways have an obligation to supply passengers with ample care and help. This contains foods and drinks vouchers in addition to two phone calls and emails. Passengers delayed in a single day should be supplied with lodging, together with transport to and from the airport.

Passengers can use the agency’s flight checker to get a free, instantaneous determination on whether or not their flight delay or cancellation is claimable underneath EU Regulation 261/2004.

A Norwegian spokesperson stated to LondonLovesEnterprise, “We fly 37m passengers yearly, together with 6m UK passengers from London Gatwick, Edinburgh and Manchester Airports to 40 locations worldwide.

“These inaccurate figures don’t match our information and doesn’t take into consideration that Norwegian UK didn’t function in 2015, Norwegian Air Shuttle had a major discount in flights and that Norwegian Air Worldwide flights had considerably elevated between 2015 and 2018.

“Norwegian’s punctuality in 2019 has improved and it should be remembered that frequent air visitors management strikes throughout Europe, drone exercise, capability constrained airports and hostile climate circumstances are past the management of airways and invariably impression flights.

“Norwegian is dedicated to maintain enhancing punctuality and the place components are inside our direct management, we now have launched measures to proceed delivering a clean, environment friendly expertise for our clients.”

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