Taming mother nature, one flight at a time

Sun, 30 Jun 2013 16:00:00 +0000

When Rick Curtis, Chief Meteorologist for Southwest Airlines, walks down the hallway, he is often asked, “What does this week look like?” For Curtis, it’s the universal question that comes to him from every level of management—frankly, just about everyone at Southwest has a stake in the answer.

What concerns the executives is the one uncertain element that Southwest, the largest domestic carrier in the United States and one of the best run and most profitable airlines in the world, cannot control. And that, of course, is the weather.

Weather delays are not only infuriating for travelers stewing in airports eating bad pizza—they also cost the airlines more than $1 billion a year. Revenues evaporate with every plane grounded by snow or hurricanes, and are siphoned by jets flying around thunderstorms. Southwest won’t release an exact dollar amount, but they say weather delays make up a considerable part of annual revenue loss.

Are parents morally responsible for their children?

Sun, 23 Jun 2013 15:00:00 +0000

I didn’t choose to have a child. Not if “choosing” means something rational—weighing pros and cons, coming to a conclusion. I tried that process but ran away from it because, even though I wanted a child, it seemed to me that creating a whole new person was such an enormity that no one could rationally decide to do such a thing. There is so much at stake, and so little certainty about the outcome. A child that I conceived might be happy, but he might be miserable beyond endurance. The child might bring happiness to others, or he might ruin people’s lives. It seemed to me that creating life was an act of astonishing hubris because it made me responsible, maybe morally responsible, for huge consequences. For most of our species’ history, we were spared that decision because procreation was not (for the most part) a choice, but merely something that happened to us. It was a biological destiny. We escaped that destiny when science gave us control over our fertility. But I wasn’t equal to the freedom that science gave me. Fearful of such an immense decision amid such uncertainty, I allowed myself to drift into parenthood instead of choosing it. I let other people’s expectations, the sheer normality of having children, construct a new, sociological destiny for me to replace the biological one and protect me from what seemed an impossible choice.

Salon.com > Nautilus

Taming mother nature, one flight at a time

Are parents morally responsible for their children?