I am a retailer upon occasion. We had just gotten a new Credit Card processor and a new machine. Some company in New York called my manager out of the blue, and said "You have machine X, right". She replied that we did. They said "We are sending out an order for you." Since we had just gotten a new machine, she thought that this was the processing company sending something. So she said "OK". Never any discussion of what was in the order, and no indication of any price. Well, lo and behold, we get this big box of supplies for our machine, with probably $100 worth of credit card machine supplies in it. When we got this the manager called me and I called the company up telling them that we did not order this stuff and they had better take it back. They said "Your manager is authorized to order isn't she? She ordered it." I told them she is not authorized to buy from them because we don't have even have an account with them. They said all their orders are double checked. We only had gotten the one call, so I don't know how they figure it was double checked. Then, we got the bill for over $400 for that $100 worth of supplies. I told them again to come get their stuff. They said I can send it back to them. I took it to Fedex, and they happily shipped it...right back to me. I told them I wanted it shipped back to sender. They said they can't do that without authorization. By this time, I figured I had spent over $100 worth of my time on these crooks, so screw it. I'm using their supplies. Maybe they'll send me some more.
Your post makes me wonder how restaurant reviewers are able to review a restaurant. If the restaurant knows they are a reviewer, which they probably will if the reviewer is at all well known, then the restaurant will obviously try to get better dishes to the reviewer than to a normal patron. If I was a restaurateur, I would not know where to draw the line, as I would not know how far other restaurants go above their normal service level. I guess that is just the way life works. If anybody cheats at all, then everybody has to cheat in order to get a fair shake.
My pastor one Wednesday night just before the service wrote in his blog "the first person to read this during the Wednesday night sermon will receive $20." About halfway through the sermon, someone stood up and asked for the $20. Yes, he did get it.
When it comes right down to it, ghosts go against the beliefs of science. Science at its very core does not believe that there is any special spark, magic, soul, or nefarious effect that cause us to be alive. We are simply a collection of various of the more common elements found on earth that has managed to figure out to build itself, sustain itself, and replicate itself from quite humble beginnings billions of years ago to an increasingly complex system today. There is no magical difference between us and a clod of dirt, and to prove it, you could eat the clod of dirt, and much of it would end up as part of your body.
Scientifically speaking, the state of awareness is just chemical interactions. There is no me. I am just a lot of cells working together created by a central program and all the cells working together constitute an organism which is capable of storing and puzzling out information as thoughts, and which has such a powerful processing center that it is in fact able to ponder it's own self, and cannot help but think of itself as some kind of special living being, and will fight tooth and nail to keep from letting some other creature take away its 'specialness'. Yet in fact, there is no specialness. All of the atoms in the thing I call me are just there by happenstance. Scientifically life is the ability to consume outside resources in order to replenish internal resources. I have no magic or spark of life. I am just a sophisticated enough structure that the organism that is me can THINK, and this organisms THINKS that it has some sort of specialness that makes it 'alive'. But scientifically it does not. Therefore, when the organism that is me ceases in it's ability to sustain itself, there is no specialness, spark, soul, or energy that had been previously associated with the organism that was me, and that can now be expressed as some sort of ghost, soul or whathaveyou.
Personally, I cannot fathom that there is not some sort of specialness associated with any organism. What does it profit a bunch of molecules to be able to be able to process external resources and contribute to itself? To what purpose?
And one wonders about the very first life on Earth. Now, we have DNA and reproduce. Probably the first life, maybe the first billion attempts at life never had the capability of reproducing itself. But perhaps there was no need. Nowadays, we have to die to prevent choking off the resources of the next generation. But without reproduction, there is no point, a single organism could simply consume and consume, and either grow, shrink or stay the same, (what difference did it make to the organism), until it consumed all the resources in it's limited area, and then it died. Perhaps then, the idea of reproduction happened because these organisms were not able to change their own characteristics in order to make changes to their features, such as mobilization. But why should this be? DNA is so limiting. Only by failure for DNA to reproduce properly could the creatures descendants ever hope to move out of their little area of resources. Why shouldn't billions of attempts at life have created some organism capable of changing itself at will to be mobile? Then there would be no need for reproducing itself. That would be much simpler and much more likely to have happened. But perhaps there were too many of these non-reproducing organisms, and they began to compete with each other for resources, and one organism found a way to reproduce itself which was imperfect, but ironically, the imperfections happened to be good for it, and it was able to outcompete for the resources, and from that point forward reproduction became a necessity.
Still, I wonder, to what purpose, if there is nothing special of life?
As a result, you'll be apt to believe in what you're told or what others believe too - no matter if it's in the Bible or on TV. Or on the Net, for that matter.
Which, if true, means that all you have to do is spend a few minutes talking to someone to change their mind about their faith. Has this proven to be true?
So I can't have faith that my chair can hold my weight. Instead I can only have belief? And then what if it doesn't hold my weight? Was my belief wrong? Or has the belief now downgraded to faith?
Well 34% also believe in UFOs. I wonder if the people they surveyed took that to mean little green men, or the actual definition, which is something flying around that you don't know what it is. I believe in the second (and that they are manmade), but not the first.
It's interesting that I have found people out there who believe in ghosts but not God, or even stranger, Angels, but not God. Of course many on this very board believe in Little Green Men, but not God. I suppose an Atheist might as well believe in other life forms, though I personally don't think they exist, or if they do, that they are not necessarily within a thousand orders of magnitude of our size, nothing like our chemical makeup, aren't based on carbon, don't give a rip about water, or in some other way are completely unlike what we so vigorously search for.
Reading your website, I see that you're also stuck in Oklahoma City, that vibrantly thriving megopolis of the I.T. market.
Yes, but the ridiculous cost of living in the thriving IT areas is causing some companies to move to lower cost areas. So areas like Oklahoma City, which are big enough to have a decent infrastructure and talent base, but reasonable costs of living SHOULD benefit.
Well, when I look at the list of requirements posted by many companies, I become acutely aware that it would be an extreme statistical improbability that anyone could have had the exact duration and breadth of experience that they mandate. In fact, it almost seems that they are being deliberately over-qualifying the position in order to avoid hiring local talent. One almost expects one of the requirements to read "must hold engineering degree from little-known Indian university."
I'll not get into the postings I have seen for companies requiring expertise in a third party software system that perhaps 10 or 20 companies in the world use, or worse yet, ones that require proficiency in a software system that was developed IN-HOUSE and only ever used by a small subset of the people in that company!
As a Manager, if I were to find someone that had strong skills in even 2/3 of the job areas that the job would encompass, I would gladly hire them, because someone with the ability to master 3 or 4 technical areas would have no problem picking up the one or two more that would be needed for the job.
One gets a strong impression that this woman simply isn't very well educated and that because she doesn't understand what scientists are talking about, she defaults to a simplistic answer that she can comprehend.
You assume the woman is stupid. There are other possibilities: If something doesn't make sense to you, then yes, you could be stupid. On the other hand, the thing in question could be wrong.
I find it sad myself. I mean I guess their pseudo-science might convert people who don't really understand science, but it turns away people who REALLY understand science. I think the main problem is their attempt to justify a 6,000 year old Earth. It just doesn't make sense scientifically. This is not a problem for me personally because I don't believe that the Bible maintains that the Earth is 6,000 years old.
I love science, and I love learning about how things work. I believe that science as the study of creation should draw us closer to a knowledge of the Creator. If my faith is right, then I have nothing to fear from science. The only thing to fear is when science loses focus on the goal of studying creation and instead focuses on the goal of disproving the existence of God. Yes, yes, I know you can't prove non-existence, but many who call themselves scientists try.
If scientists are able to create life, isn't that just proof of intelligent design? When they create these lifeforms, are they going to make whole new genetic sequences or pick some known good ones that they'll put together?
Using DNA in their new life form would be cheating. If they're going to invent life, they need to do it with some non-existent form of passing code from one generation to the next.
Is the statement, "There is no objective truth" absolutely true?
No, there IS objective truth, but science only more and more closely approximates objective truth. I don't think science can ever know the objective truth, and I believe but cannot prove that only a higher power can enlighten us to the onjective truth.
science requires proof before belief.
That is not true. You are thinking of Math.
Science merely requires a sufficiently small amount of contradictory evidence before belief. Science is ALWAYS WRONG, and is ALWAYS in the pursuit of replacing theories which are OBVIOUSLY WRONG with theories that are more SUBTLY wrong.
If Science were ever RIGHT on a particular subject, there would be no more need to perform science on it. But we always find that no matter how closely a scientific theory matches reality, there is always room for improvement.
So a lot of H1-B's are going home this year. The local labor market WILL get tighter, and wages WILL rise.
But, but, but that's IMPOSSIBLE. Because H1-Bs are paid PREVAILAING WAGES and are only necessary because there is INSUFFICIENT LOCAL TALENT!
Maybe I should check back and see if I can get that contracting job back that I lost to the H1-B.
But, if you don't have 5 years recent experience already, you can forget about those area: SAP, Project Management, database administrators.
You're spang-on there. I used to be a hotshot datawarehouse architect billing $100/hour. Then 9/11 hit and I had to take $anyoldjob which did not even involve databases. Now, my database skills are 6 years old, and I haven't a prayer of getting hired for a datawarehouse position. Now, mind you, I had a natural aptitude for relation databases, and went from 0 to eclipsing my peers in less than a year, so obviously, I could learn it again in a matter of months, but that is not what employers want to hear.
So I am still doing $anyoldjob, which is a serious waste of my talent, and doesn't pay much to boot.
"For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible."
Sorry I can't cite the reference as too many people see, to want to take credit for it.
I never pay full fare. I arrived two hours early for my flight about 6 months back, and I didn't even have to request an earlier flight, they just plainly told me that I was booked on my flight, but I could feel free to go get on the standby list over at gate X and I would probably get on.
This helicopter, which HASN'T crashed, is made out of the bits of a plane that did. A Boeing 747, that is made with all that modern tech and those high safety standards.
If this is the same 747 that I am thinking of, it did not "crash" in the sense that you think. Most planes that "crash" don't fall apart and fall down to the ground. Most plane crashes are due to human error. This one was caused by a lock of proper notification of runway closure. One of the planes main wheel trucks struck construction equipment on the runway while on the takeoff roll, and the wheels and a wing were torn off. There were no injuries.
Naughty me, replying to myself. But I just remembered that while eating that first meal on a U.S. domestic flight in 20 years about the newsreels I used to see, back in the '70s about the complexities of running the airport food service kitchens. I wonder how the catering people are doing now that the only food served is pretty much only international.
My deodorant comes in 4 oz containers. I suppose I can live without that. But can the people around me?:)
I suppose I could buy it somewhere when I arrive, but then I would have to throw away the unused portion, which is fiscally and environmentally irresponsible.
I own a beauty salon, and we get a lot of calls for travel sizes of various shampoos, conditioners and sprays. For some reason, the manufacturers only make the travel sizes during the holidays. Other than that, most of the time, the smallest size you can get is 8.5 or perhaps 4.25 oz.
I don't see where airlines have reduced costs. When I started flying in the '70s, an airline tickets was less than a quarter the cost it was today. Adjusted for inflation, it was still cheaper to fly in the '70s. At that time, adjusted for inflation, high time captains earned six or seven times what they do now. Oil has tripled in price, but adjusted for inflation is less than double the cost.
Prices are about the same, oil is up, but fuel is not the top expense, salaries are, and those have dropped tremendously in the last 30 years. Where is all the money going?
Southwest, the only airline making money, is usually only a bit more expensive than the cheapest airline. The employees seem to be treated very well, because they are almost always happy, giddy even. They keep maintenance costs low by only flying one type of airplane (granted the 737 has a large number of subtypes). They don't punish emergency flyers by jacking up the prices in the last two weeks. If you arrive to the airport early or arrive for a connection early, they will try to get you on the earliest flight for free. Southwest understand that delays are cumulative, so getting you out of the airport and to the next stop is a priority over keeping everyone in their appointed seat on their appointed flight. Late night flights on Southwest are therefore sometimes nearly empty, so that flight undoubtedly loses money, but in the grand scheme of things, they make more money by not having to spring for hotels for lots of stuck travelers and making people happy by getting them where they wanted to be, perhaps even ahead of schedule.
I just had a meal on Continental Friday night. I was shocked. It was the first non-international flight I have had a meal on in 20 years, and I fly a lot. It was only about a 2 hour and 10 minute flight, and it started at 6:30 PM, which made it more shocking. I am used to flying from 10 Am and getting to the layover location at 1:40 or so for the next flight which is at 2:00, and no meal is given on either flight, and because they are running behind my 1 hour layover is reduced to 15 minutes.
Now, international is something else. You're theirs for 6 hours or more, and they don't want you getting pissy, so they constantly shove food in you.
I have traveled domestically in other countries besides the U.S. and it seems that everywhere else in the world, any flight longer than an hour and a half is going to have food. TACA airlines gave me a very nice chicken dish. Now, the plane itself was quite obviously falling apart, but hey, they give you a good last meal.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a retailer upon occasion. We had just gotten a new Credit Card processor and a new machine. Some company in New York called my manager out of the blue, and said "You have machine X, right". She replied that we did. They said "We are sending out an order for you." Since we had just gotten a new machine, she thought that this was the processing company sending something. So she said "OK". Never any discussion of what was in the order, and no indication of any price. Well, lo and behold, we get this big box of supplies for our machine, with probably $100 worth of credit card machine supplies in it. When we got this the manager called me and I called the company up telling them that we did not order this stuff and they had better take it back. They said "Your manager is authorized to order isn't she? She ordered it." I told them she is not authorized to buy from them because we don't have even have an account with them. They said all their orders are double checked. We only had gotten the one call, so I don't know how they figure it was double checked. Then, we got the bill for over $400 for that $100 worth of supplies. I told them again to come get their stuff. They said I can send it back to them. I took it to Fedex, and they happily shipped it...right back to me. I told them I wanted it shipped back to sender. They said they can't do that without authorization. By this time, I figured I had spent over $100 worth of my time on these crooks, so screw it. I'm using their supplies. Maybe they'll send me some more.
Your post makes me wonder how restaurant reviewers are able to review a restaurant. If the restaurant knows they are a reviewer, which they probably will if the reviewer is at all well known, then the restaurant will obviously try to get better dishes to the reviewer than to a normal patron. If I was a restaurateur, I would not know where to draw the line, as I would not know how far other restaurants go above their normal service level. I guess that is just the way life works. If anybody cheats at all, then everybody has to cheat in order to get a fair shake.
My pastor one Wednesday night just before the service wrote in his blog "the first person to read this during the Wednesday night sermon will receive $20." About halfway through the sermon, someone stood up and asked for the $20. Yes, he did get it.
When it comes right down to it, ghosts go against the beliefs of science. Science at its very core does not believe that there is any special spark, magic, soul, or nefarious effect that cause us to be alive. We are simply a collection of various of the more common elements found on earth that has managed to figure out to build itself, sustain itself, and replicate itself from quite humble beginnings billions of years ago to an increasingly complex system today. There is no magical difference between us and a clod of dirt, and to prove it, you could eat the clod of dirt, and much of it would end up as part of your body.
Scientifically speaking, the state of awareness is just chemical interactions. There is no me. I am just a lot of cells working together created by a central program and all the cells working together constitute an organism which is capable of storing and puzzling out information as thoughts, and which has such a powerful processing center that it is in fact able to ponder it's own self, and cannot help but think of itself as some kind of special living being, and will fight tooth and nail to keep from letting some other creature take away its 'specialness'. Yet in fact, there is no specialness. All of the atoms in the thing I call me are just there by happenstance. Scientifically life is the ability to consume outside resources in order to replenish internal resources. I have no magic or spark of life. I am just a sophisticated enough structure that the organism that is me can THINK, and this organisms THINKS that it has some sort of specialness that makes it 'alive'. But scientifically it does not. Therefore, when the organism that is me ceases in it's ability to sustain itself, there is no specialness, spark, soul, or energy that had been previously associated with the organism that was me, and that can now be expressed as some sort of ghost, soul or whathaveyou.
Personally, I cannot fathom that there is not some sort of specialness associated with any organism. What does it profit a bunch of molecules to be able to be able to process external resources and contribute to itself? To what purpose?
And one wonders about the very first life on Earth. Now, we have DNA and reproduce. Probably the first life, maybe the first billion attempts at life never had the capability of reproducing itself. But perhaps there was no need. Nowadays, we have to die to prevent choking off the resources of the next generation. But without reproduction, there is no point, a single organism could simply consume and consume, and either grow, shrink or stay the same, (what difference did it make to the organism), until it consumed all the resources in it's limited area, and then it died. Perhaps then, the idea of reproduction happened because these organisms were not able to change their own characteristics in order to make changes to their features, such as mobilization. But why should this be? DNA is so limiting. Only by failure for DNA to reproduce properly could the creatures descendants ever hope to move out of their little area of resources. Why shouldn't billions of attempts at life have created some organism capable of changing itself at will to be mobile? Then there would be no need for reproducing itself. That would be much simpler and much more likely to have happened. But perhaps there were too many of these non-reproducing organisms, and they began to compete with each other for resources, and one organism found a way to reproduce itself which was imperfect, but ironically, the imperfections happened to be good for it, and it was able to outcompete for the resources, and from that point forward reproduction became a necessity.
Still, I wonder, to what purpose, if there is nothing special of life?
As a result, you'll be apt to believe in what you're told or what others believe too - no matter if it's in the Bible or on TV. Or on the Net, for that matter.
Which, if true, means that all you have to do is spend a few minutes talking to someone to change their mind about their faith. Has this proven to be true?
So I can't have faith that my chair can hold my weight. Instead I can only have belief? And then what if it doesn't hold my weight? Was my belief wrong? Or has the belief now downgraded to faith?
Well 34% also believe in UFOs. I wonder if the people they surveyed took that to mean little green men, or the actual definition, which is something flying around that you don't know what it is. I believe in the second (and that they are manmade), but not the first.
It's interesting that I have found people out there who believe in ghosts but not God, or even stranger, Angels, but not God. Of course many on this very board believe in Little Green Men, but not God. I suppose an Atheist might as well believe in other life forms, though I personally don't think they exist, or if they do, that they are not necessarily within a thousand orders of magnitude of our size, nothing like our chemical makeup, aren't based on carbon, don't give a rip about water, or in some other way are completely unlike what we so vigorously search for.
Reading your website, I see that you're also stuck in Oklahoma City, that vibrantly thriving megopolis of the I.T. market.
Yes, but the ridiculous cost of living in the thriving IT areas is causing some companies to move to lower cost areas. So areas like Oklahoma City, which are big enough to have a decent infrastructure and talent base, but reasonable costs of living SHOULD benefit.
Well, when I look at the list of requirements posted by many companies, I become acutely aware that it would be an extreme statistical improbability that anyone could have had the exact duration and breadth of experience that they mandate. In fact, it almost seems that they are being deliberately over-qualifying the position in order to avoid hiring local talent. One almost expects one of the requirements to read "must hold engineering degree from little-known Indian university."
I'll not get into the postings I have seen for companies requiring expertise in a third party software system that perhaps 10 or 20 companies in the world use, or worse yet, ones that require proficiency in a software system that was developed IN-HOUSE and only ever used by a small subset of the people in that company!
As a Manager, if I were to find someone that had strong skills in even 2/3 of the job areas that the job would encompass, I would gladly hire them, because someone with the ability to master 3 or 4 technical areas would have no problem picking up the one or two more that would be needed for the job.
One gets a strong impression that this woman simply isn't very well educated and that because she doesn't understand what scientists are talking about, she defaults to a simplistic answer that she can comprehend.
You assume the woman is stupid. There are other possibilities:
If something doesn't make sense to you, then yes, you could be stupid. On the other hand, the thing in question could be wrong.
I find it sad myself. I mean I guess their pseudo-science might convert people who don't really understand science, but it turns away people who REALLY understand science. I think the main problem is their attempt to justify a 6,000 year old Earth. It just doesn't make sense scientifically. This is not a problem for me personally because I don't believe that the Bible maintains that the Earth is 6,000 years old.
I love science, and I love learning about how things work. I believe that science as the study of creation should draw us closer to a knowledge of the Creator. If my faith is right, then I have nothing to fear from science. The only thing to fear is when science loses focus on the goal of studying creation and instead focuses on the goal of disproving the existence of God. Yes, yes, I know you can't prove non-existence, but many who call themselves scientists try.
As far as 'theories' go, gravity is also "just a theory". I'd like to see you disbelieve THAT one.
The universe sucks.
If scientists are able to create life, isn't that just proof of intelligent design? When they create these lifeforms, are they going to make whole new genetic sequences or pick some known good ones that they'll put together?
Using DNA in their new life form would be cheating. If they're going to invent life, they need to do it with some non-existent form of passing code from one generation to the next.
Is the statement, "There is no objective truth" absolutely true?
No, there IS objective truth, but science only more and more closely approximates objective truth. I don't think science can ever know the objective truth, and I believe but cannot prove that only a higher power can enlighten us to the onjective truth.
science requires proof before belief.
That is not true. You are thinking of Math.
Science merely requires a sufficiently small amount of contradictory evidence before belief. Science is ALWAYS WRONG, and is ALWAYS in the pursuit of replacing theories which are OBVIOUSLY WRONG with theories that are more SUBTLY wrong.
If Science were ever RIGHT on a particular subject, there would be no more need to perform science on it. But we always find that no matter how closely a scientific theory matches reality, there is always room for improvement.
So a lot of H1-B's are going home this year. The local labor market WILL get tighter, and wages WILL rise.
But, but, but that's IMPOSSIBLE. Because H1-Bs are paid PREVAILAING WAGES and are only necessary because there is INSUFFICIENT LOCAL TALENT!
Maybe I should check back and see if I can get that contracting job back that I lost to the H1-B.
But, if you don't have 5 years recent experience already, you can forget about those area: SAP, Project Management, database administrators.
You're spang-on there. I used to be a hotshot datawarehouse architect billing $100/hour. Then 9/11 hit and I had to take $anyoldjob which did not even involve databases. Now, my database skills are 6 years old, and I haven't a prayer of getting hired for a datawarehouse position. Now, mind you, I had a natural aptitude for relation databases, and went from 0 to eclipsing my peers in less than a year, so obviously, I could learn it again in a matter of months, but that is not what employers want to hear.
So I am still doing $anyoldjob, which is a serious waste of my talent, and doesn't pay much to boot.
"For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible."
Sorry I can't cite the reference as too many people see, to want to take credit for it.
I never pay full fare. I arrived two hours early for my flight about 6 months back, and I didn't even have to request an earlier flight, they just plainly told me that I was booked on my flight, but I could feel free to go get on the standby list over at gate X and I would probably get on.
This helicopter, which HASN'T crashed, is made out of the bits of a plane that did. A Boeing 747, that is made with all that modern tech and those high safety standards.
If this is the same 747 that I am thinking of, it did not "crash" in the sense that you think. Most planes that "crash" don't fall apart and fall down to the ground. Most plane crashes are due to human error. This one was caused by a lock of proper notification of runway closure. One of the planes main wheel trucks struck construction equipment on the runway while on the takeoff roll, and the wheels and a wing were torn off. There were no injuries.
Naughty me, replying to myself. But I just remembered that while eating that first meal on a U.S. domestic flight in 20 years about the newsreels I used to see, back in the '70s about the complexities of running the airport food service kitchens. I wonder how the catering people are doing now that the only food served is pretty much only international.
My deodorant comes in 4 oz containers. I suppose I can live without that. But can the people around me? :)
I suppose I could buy it somewhere when I arrive, but then I would have to throw away the unused portion, which is fiscally and environmentally irresponsible.
I own a beauty salon, and we get a lot of calls for travel sizes of various shampoos, conditioners and sprays. For some reason, the manufacturers only make the travel sizes during the holidays. Other than that, most of the time, the smallest size you can get is 8.5 or perhaps 4.25 oz.
I don't see where airlines have reduced costs. When I started flying in the '70s, an airline tickets was less than a quarter the cost it was today. Adjusted for inflation, it was still cheaper to fly in the '70s. At that time, adjusted for inflation, high time captains earned six or seven times what they do now. Oil has tripled in price, but adjusted for inflation is less than double the cost.
Prices are about the same, oil is up, but fuel is not the top expense, salaries are, and those have dropped tremendously in the last 30 years. Where is all the money going?
Southwest, the only airline making money, is usually only a bit more expensive than the cheapest airline. The employees seem to be treated very well, because they are almost always happy, giddy even. They keep maintenance costs low by only flying one type of airplane (granted the 737 has a large number of subtypes). They don't punish emergency flyers by jacking up the prices in the last two weeks. If you arrive to the airport early or arrive for a connection early, they will try to get you on the earliest flight for free. Southwest understand that delays are cumulative, so getting you out of the airport and to the next stop is a priority over keeping everyone in their appointed seat on their appointed flight. Late night flights on Southwest are therefore sometimes nearly empty, so that flight undoubtedly loses money, but in the grand scheme of things, they make more money by not having to spring for hotels for lots of stuck travelers and making people happy by getting them where they wanted to be, perhaps even ahead of schedule.
I just had a meal on Continental Friday night. I was shocked. It was the first non-international flight I have had a meal on in 20 years, and I fly a lot. It was only about a 2 hour and 10 minute flight, and it started at 6:30 PM, which made it more shocking. I am used to flying from 10 Am and getting to the layover location at 1:40 or so for the next flight which is at 2:00, and no meal is given on either flight, and because they are running behind my 1 hour layover is reduced to 15 minutes.
Now, international is something else. You're theirs for 6 hours or more, and they don't want you getting pissy, so they constantly shove food in you.
I have traveled domestically in other countries besides the U.S. and it seems that everywhere else in the world, any flight longer than an hour and a half is going to have food. TACA airlines gave me a very nice chicken dish. Now, the plane itself was quite obviously falling apart, but hey, they give you a good last meal.