Not to speak to the rest of the topic, but focusing on direct sales:

I'm almost certain Ford would love to sell direct, but the various franchise laws in different states make it next to impossible. On top of this, dealership owners are typically quite powerful in terms of local politics, which makes such laws very difficult to overturn.

For example:

Texas: https://www.txdmv.gov/dealers/licensing/franchise

Florida: https://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Disp...

California: https://www.nmvb.ca.gov/protest/protest_establish_new_fran.h...

Somehow Tesla has managed okay, Ford could if they weren’t worried about their existing dealer base.

To give my own anecdata to counter yours: every time I've flown with children on United they've gone out of their way to make it straightforward. The only better airline I've encountered for it is Virgin Atlantic, which is, to be fair, better at everything.

Interesting; I just flew Virgin Atlantic for the first time a week ago (SFO->LHR) and found the experience aggressively mediocre. Reservation management and check-in experience with their app was the hottest of hot garbage, boarding was slow, in-flight meal below average, general comfort just kinda okay. No complaints about the crew, at least.

I generally fly United (while they are also aggressively mediocre, they mostly fly direct to the places I need them to, and their pricing is generally good on the routes I take), and I'd honestly rate United higher than Virgin Atlantic, which surprised me. Maybe my single experience was a fluke, but it was a really bad first impression.

And I say this as someone who absolutely adored Virgin America back when it existed. Bizarre that the two could be so different.

As Branson used to say, the best way to become a millionaire is to be a billionaire and start an airline.

"Put it in the hold" is a decent argument for point-to-point flights, or when you do gate checking. Otherwise it's a crap-shoot whether your stuff makes it (which can end a two-day business trip before it begins), what shape it will be in, and how long you'll have to wait. As soon as you have a connection, all bets are off.

How long you'll have to wait is mostly a function not of the airline, but of the arrival airport and the competence of the handling company.

> On e.g. a Lufthansa longhaul flight, which are priced similarly and cover the same route I flew (fra-ord), it would be unthinkable.

I fly both airlines regularly, United is _vastly_ better from a hard product perspective, a soft product perspective, and _especially_ a service recovery standpoint.

The credit card thing is easily ignored, but you used to heard it often on European flights too before branded credit cards got wiped out there. I've never heard an announcement about adult content, and have taken over 90 United flights this year.

Because lugging around two child seats when you get out at the other end fucking sucks.

The difference, as usual with this kind of thing, is scale.

Strange, I have a lot of good things to say about both it and Terraform.

Probably some specifics might be more useful there...

I believe the original GitHub Actions was in Go - it used HCL which was at that point only really implemented in Go. Quite the move backwards to switch to YAML.