I think Scotland deserves an honourable mention here. Bachelor’s degrees are free, under a scheme called “SAAS” (Might be home and EU only). Interestingly, people from England have to pay the same in Scotland as they do in England.

Alternatively, put much higher taxes on flights, and fund train/coach travel to make it more afforable, so more people can take lower impact, near home trips.

I’ve lived in north western Europe my entire life, and enjoy travelling by train/ferry and explore neighbouring countries - there is more than enough to see for a life time. It is astonishing to me how many people find it neccessary to fly to the other side of the globe to feel like they are on vacation (or more likely.. for vanity.)

Before I have a chance to study abroad, I never saw snow at all. Flying to the other side of the globe is more than a vacation for me. It was like a trip to gain the experience, the perspective of many interesting cultures.I do agree though that train in Europe and some country is so good that you can avoid the flight.

Maybe, because I was born and lived here in SouthEast Asia. Almost no one in my circle or news outlet here talk about avoiding travelling by air. Every national holiday here, you can expect to see people crowded at the airport.

I do understand that traveling by air has higher cabon emission, but I think the experiece and perspective you gain from travelling make you understand the world better.

I do hope we can come up with sustainable alternative of air traveling soon.

Higher taxation is probably the most realistic we can get. I do wonder if it would succeed in actually limiting the amount of flying done. The cost of an all-inclusive trip to the Turkish coast by plane should become high enough for tourists to consider the alternatives.

The taxation level should be somewhat dynamic and simply rise or fall to discourage flying as much as is needed to remain below a predetermined yearly ceiling of Revenue Passenger Miles (RPM).

On the bright side: in recent years train travel in Europe has been getting better, with a renewed interest in sleeper trains. I just hope this whole Covid-mess doesn't stop these developments completely.

Much better solution.

These marketplace schemes never work in reality. except for creating a bunch of marketplace middleman saas that makes money.

The problem is that the tax would need to be super-linear. There are two effects going on.

First, with a fixed quota, the value of a credit is bid up by people wanting to fly, not dissimilar to the Norwegian butter crisis where a stick of butter cost upward of €40.

Second, with a credit transfer system, people selling their credits receive a "negative" tax, while people buying credits pay a positive tax.

This system ensures everyone still has access to a basic level of air travel at today's prices, but is also super-linearly incentivize to travel less.

A linear (fixed) tax on travel will just price out the lowest class, and a linear tax means nothing to those on top of a power-law wealth distribution.

Thanks for sharing this, it's an amazingly unfortunate consequence of this technology which I never thought about.

What is the goal? Will any of these make colours easier to use or understand?

I suspect the goal is to make fun of conspiracy theorists, since the issues they discuss are non-issues to anyone who paid attention in grade-school physics (or even art class). I imagine there are plenty of conspiracy theorists who will fall for it, since they are deeply biased to give in to their paranoia about figures of authority.

Came to the comments to say this. Slightly awkward use of cheap classical marketing tricks, for such a big company.

It may still work for emails, because people might be unsure of how many mails are actually sent out, but this is cringe in 2016.

Super cool idea - Though one of my first interactions was to search for an emoji, which failed completely as it deleted my query when I typed more than one letter. (MacOS Sierra, Safari.) Other than that, thumbs up on the delicious UX.