A man goes to a doctor. The doctor says "You need to stop smoking." Man says "SNORE! Old news, you told me that last time, tell me something I don't know!" and lights up. The man dies shortly thereafter *.

It is news because it is still happening and most people don't know it, or like to pretend we're not in for rough times. If a story is a duplicate on slashdot, then that's one thing. If it's so obvious that everyone already knows it, then that's also fair to object.

Maybe start by asking why they are all spouting the same nonsense. Then conclude that it's because we have stupid voters who tolerate it. Then move.

I get the impression that you have about equal chances of getting a rude gate agent no matter what airlines you fly with. Which is to say they're almost all reasonable people, but sometimes have bad days, other times it depends more on how you ask. The guy here seems to have an entitlement. He's a frequent flyer, his kids aren't, he was asking if they could get on with him in the early boarding. He could have paid the early check-in fee for them and gotten on before most people anyway. I think it's $15 on southwest. Point is, he had other options. It's fine to ask for favors, but if you're fuming about someone NOT granting you a favor, you're probably the asshole in that situation.

Moreover, personally, I'm willing to pay for more polite staff. Specifically, I'm willing to pay maybe five dollars. Southwest is still cheaper usually. Who cares about rude gate agents?

On service (as in flights on time) I have gotten the impression that they're slipping. Their fleet isn't as young as it used to be. Mechanical issues seem to be causing more delays. That said, they're still newer planes than Delta. I suspect southwest's reputation is working against them here: If Delta is delayed 2 hours you think "Fucking Delta, always pulling this shit, good thing I brought a book to read just in case this happened." If Southwest is delayed you think "WHAT THE FUCK!!! SOUTHWEST ISN'T SUPPOSED TO DO THIS SHIT!!! AAAAA!!!!"

I may be biased though because Delta woke me up in very the middle of a trans-pacific flight to fucking sell me duty free shit, and I didn't get back to sleep the remaining 6 or so hours, then on the ground I learned they had smashed both of my checked articles, and then told me with a straight face that I took that risk when I checked it. Southwest doesn't do international flights, so doesn't have a chance to wake me up trying to sell me something, and I don't check bags anymore.

While terrorists have and will claim victory over causing economic damage, that's not their goal, and it never was. Their cult doesn't promise them forty grapes/virgins if they total a million dollars in lost GDP or anything like that.

Being ignorant of modern medicine is not a genetically-encoded trait. So, despite your best attempts to rationalize it, no, there's nothing good about people dying in this way.

Moreover, you sound like you consider yourself somehow superior to the people who are dying of the disease, though you are undoubtedly too cowardly to actually come out and say it even as AC. You're protected by geography and the fact that the virus doesn't appear to have gotten into a major international airport. At the moment. If it did, you would yourself likely be bread out of the gene pool. You are in no way superior to the people who are dying. In fact, I think a corpse has you beaten on personality.

Not really. The embryo here is a fruit fly. They're small enough to see the entire thing with a microscope. Vertebrates tend to get too big to image completely with current microscopes really early on in development. A human brain is way too big to image completely with a microscope without slicing it thinner than lunch meat.

As a cell biologist I have to say, we already can:

Option 1. Die
Option 2. Cancer

Another thing not considered: that the person who provided that comment was a complete idiot.

"Hi sir, you just checked into your flight, which is totally fun, would you like to continue the thrill by standing around for a few minutes longer and taking a survey about your experience? Yes? GREAT! If you could stop drooling for a minute, tell us how we can improve your experience? You like to look at human faces? Oh, you said 'feces'? I'll just write down faces, how about that?"

You might not, and I'd wager that most people would SAY they wouldn't care about a face, but I could also believe that it could actually improve customer relations.

Kind of like advertising that seems silly. I see an ad for coke and I think "That's stupid, I'm not going to order a coke simply because I saw a pretty woman on a billboard drinking a coke." Yet I'm told it does actually have an effect without you realizing it. People aren't completely rational.

Of course, I'm not confident this guy or the airlines have actually studied whether this will actually reduce people's stresses with check-in, I'm guessing they just made a hypothesis and liked it because it promised a quick, cheap fix to their problems rather than, I dunno, stop hiring idiots at the checkout counters and to hire more of them.

See... that was what we like to call "an example." As in just one of many things which prove the point. CNN is not the only website doing it. It's an arms race for eyeballs. When everyone starts doing it, then the internet as a whole is harmed.

Hey man, didn't you read "could generate thousands of jobs?" Let me say that again. COULD. MAKE. THOUSANDS. JOBS.

End of discussion. We all know the only things worse than aborting potential jobs are terrorism and taxes.

From a public health perspective: who cares? T2 Diabetes rates are still going up, yet we've known that for a long time. We need to keep telling obese people with T2 diabetes to lose it, obviously diabetes isn't the only problem associated with obesity, and that drives up costs for the public at large, but telling the public to diet isn't working.

You individually, great, pat yourself on the back, but you're not most people. We know empirically that most overweight people will stay overweight, and diabetes on top of that is going to cost the public a lot of money through health insurance. A preventative measure that is not "lose weight" is a very good thing.

You're just presenting a false dichotomy: solar with brownouts or coal being profitable. That's utter nonsense.

But research funds are still low. There's been a big push to spend money on what the summary is talking about for about a decade. I'm wondering if the government spending money on moving stuff from the lab to the doctors office has simply convinced private industry they don't need to spend their own money to do that. I mean, people frustrated with "death valley" aside, I don't think we were previously ignoring valuable, profitable science go to waste anyway.

Lets not fall into a trap of thinking it's a black and white issue. Inappropriate comments can definitely be a real issue. Take sex out of it a minute and look at non-sexual assault and battery.

If your boss cracks your skull with a crowbar, that's obviously serious battery that is going to create a hostile work environment, and he should be jailed. If he jokingly punches you on the arm, that's not battery, that's not creating a hostile work environment.

If your boss rolls his eyes when you give him bad news and says "I should just kill you" with a sigh, that's probably not a "real issue." If he looks you dead in the eyes and says he's going to stab you in the back one day, and you believe him, that's obviously a real issue, that would definitely create a hostile work environment.

Why would words become trivial if instead of saying "stab" he says "fuck"?