If you think filing up your car costs a lot, imagine filling up an airplane.

With oil prices at record highs, airlines continue to raise prices. Thursday, they took an unprecedented step and asked passengers to help reverse the trend.

For the rest of the article:

wgrz.com | Buffalo, NY | Airlines Asking Consumers To Help Fight Rising Prices

This is an interesting development. Can it be that the airline industry realizes it can't just keep passing costs along to the consumer indefinitely? Can it be that the airline industry is begging consumers for help because it knows it can't survive much longer with the status quo? What manner of desperation would drive a big business to turn to its customers for help?

Or is this just a publicity stunt?

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

The airline industry grew bloated and inefficient, and the people/companies acted like a lot of other industries and budgeted as if the good times would last forever. Even when times were good, they shaved a few pennies off each flight by stopping meals and cutting all sorts of amenities (which we put up with), and cramming more and smaller seats onto ever-increasingly expensive flights. They lobbied for a de-regulation-fest, profits soared, and because they made themselves into a necessity, rather than a luxury, they could happily ignore customer dissatisfaction.

They put themselves in an unsustainable position of overextension, and were totally unprepared and inflexible when this gas crap hit them. Now, they, like other industries are looking for a bailout.

Their asses are in a crack, the mechanics can barely keep them flying because of all the layoffs, delays and cancellations are twice as common as on-time flights, the public resents them for incompetence, another airline seems to go bankrupt every other month .......and now they are asking US for help, eh?

How nice of them. Heckuva job! They'll get a massive bailout, and go right back to their ways within a year of it. Mark my words.

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There is no sig. There never was a sig. The sig is a lie.

One suggestion: How about slashing your CEOs' salaries down to about $35,000/year? That's about what they've actually earned in the mess they've made, and it'll free up a lot of operating capital.

Don't be asking US to help prop y'all up. Run an intelligent, quality, responsible business, and the money will come.

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There is no sig. There never was a sig. The sig is a lie.

Actually, on the company level, cutting one or even a few people's pay checks way down will not help all that much. They'd have to slash just about everyone's paycheck, including the little guys doing baggage, so then they would get negative reps and it wouldn't do them any good.

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Set your destination with your heart, get there with your mind.

"The wisest men follow their own direction." - Euripides

If your intention is to maintain proportionality, i.e. the proportion of senior executive pay to baggage handler and other low-skilled labor pay, then you would have to cut all the way down the line. Of course, cutting all the way down the line would be "fair" in a sense but then you'd see a lot of people jumping ship.

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

I think slashing the CEO's $50 million salary would certainly be preferable to always hammering the workers to "save money." At the very least it's a good PR move, even it they are so far in the hole it barely matters.

It never happens though. The ones who run the company into the ground always seem to get the big parachute/severance packages and rewards.

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There is no sig. There never was a sig. The sig is a lie.

To me, it's less about "fair" than accountability.

You watch. Thousands of actual workers are going to get laid off, while the ones who golfed who Rome burned will actually get reward packages.

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There is no sig. There never was a sig. The sig is a lie.

Accountable for what? For acting according to human nature?

Yes, there will be layoffs. It'll be the 1970s all over again. And, yes, the CEOs are going to continue getting their multi-million dollar packages.

I recently e-mailed a company about investing my government bribe er um economic stimulus check into precious metals. It's time to start pulling what we can out of the economy.

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

Only if you think it's human nature is to be shortsighted, and try to avoid responsibi ---- actually, yeah, you're right.

Sucks. We never learn, do we?

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There is no sig. There never was a sig. The sig is a lie.

I think they should charge by the pound, just like freight. Make the fat people pay up.