ericbarbour wrote:Strelnikov wrote:Sorry, that wasn't trivial; they beat the snot out of Dr. Dao to ferry a United employee in his place. The substandard, price-gouging service in air carriers seems to be reaching a breaking point, and this might be the start of it.
That would be expected and "reasonable", but you are forgetting the American corporate fondness for hiring special PR people to "make problems vanish". Plus, don't forget that Dao is Asian, meaning that White Asshole Middle America feels no sympathy for him (esp. in the Age of Donald); and United and the
Daily Mail already tried to
openly defame Dao.
Remember this? The story is already dropping off Google News anyway. Dao will probably win in court; and the story will fade away.
Turning the American public against the airline industry will take a lot more atrocities. And most of all, rising prices. The main reason Joe Blow lets the airlines stomp on his face: airfares have actually declined in the past 40 years. A round-trip coach ticket from NY to LA costs about $1200-1500, when it should cost more like $5000 given the rate of inflation. Feel free to ask the good people at Flyer's Rights. They've been trying to fix the mess for 10+ years with little effect. (When they're not editing their own Wikipedia articles, of course.)
Yes, I know they tried to defame him in the press, but I don't think that worked, and even if the story fades it joins the list of crappy actions by airlines that can be used in future news stories, as pamphlet material for Flyer's Rights, etc. The problem is not going away.
Don't blame Joe Blow,
the airlines are a near-oligopoly, with four companies running 82% of the business; unless Joe Blow lives in a major American hub he has no choice of whom he he can buy a ticket from, as if that would matter because all the airlines suck the same way.....they have gone out of their way to
not compete with each other. Re-regulation is a possible short-term solution because market forces create monopolies or semi-monopolies that allow crap service to be possible, though nationalizing air travel will probably be the only way out in the end.
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I looked at the
Venture Brothers list of characters article; you are right, it's a joke. A lot of it reads like they adapted comments from the A.V. Club's episode reviews of the show, stuff from a
VB Wikia, etc., but never named sources. Of course they would never throw it away, it's
too large for that.
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.