Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 23, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
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ights that were delayed and 900 canceled on Sunday. Nine hundred flights. Nine hundred flights is a lot of flights, isn't it? It feels like everybody would feel that. It doesn't feel like that would just be something that a few people were inconvenienced by. Well anyway, I wonder about the United States and its ability to fix things. And this will be sort of a meta theme for today's live stream.…

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No terrorist would want to blow up a flying plane with six people in it. It would be terrorism-free because the target wouldn't be worthy. It would be like blowing up a bus on the ground. There'd be no point, right? It's only because planes have so many people in them and they're so big that they have any terrorism value whatsoever.

So with batteries, imagine if you will that you go someplace much more local than your airport because the copter things can take off straight up. And you just book it on your app. You just walk in, you get on it, and you go to LA from San Francisco. Now it can still be hard for the cross-country stuff for a while, but just imagine it.

So here's the thing. I think that the airline industry is so completely crippled that a competitor like Uber — the way Uber took over taxis because taxis were a broken industry too, in my opinion. Calling a taxi and not knowing if it would really come or when, that was really broken. And the whole taxi business couldn't figure it out, but then Uber did it. So I think there's going to be an Uber situation for the sky. It'll fix flying.

I saw one suggestion. It's the best one I've seen for fixing everything. Because everything's broken. And I just saw a suggestion on the Locals platform. Given that we are probably a simulated reality, if we live in the simulation, the question was asked, have you tried turning it off and then on again? And I thought, I wonder if that would work. What if we just rebooted the simulation? And I thought, well who would do it? Because you need somebody outside the simulation to reboot it. And then the other question is, how long do you wait?

Do you ever have this problem with your Wi-Fi or your modem at home? You know you have to reboot it. So you pull out the plug and then you say to yourself, do I really have to wait a minute? Engineers, engineers, talk to me. Have you ever unplugged a thing that you have to wait 30 seconds or something? Do you really think you have to wait 30 seconds? Is that real or is that like using your cell phone on an airplane? Of course it's not real.

Look at all the answers. People are all over the board on whether that matters. Yeah I get it, capacitors have to drain. But you don't think that they engineered them so that turning off the po

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wer makes a difference? Like actually it goes back to its ready state. Are you telling me the capacitors can't be drained upon turning it off? They're not quick-draining capacitors, if that's a thing. So it's funny that your answers are all over the place. And that's something we all do, don't we? Don't we all unplug things and replug them in and we're all wondering if we've waited long enough? I…

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