Often when you are listening to the news they will use little fillers to take up the extra time in the segment. Earlier today I heard a couple I thought worth sharing.

As some of you may know the government has imposed new standards for the airlines to comply with. Specifically if the airline leaves passengers on the runway for longer than 3 hours they will be fined for each passenger. The fines could total several million dollars per plane.

I’m certainly not saying that preventing people being stuck out on the runway is bad. But at the same time in order to avoid the delays, and thus the fines, the airlines need to be much more conservative than they once were. You can’t predict for sure if a storm will clear or the runway will be plowed, so the airlines are cancelling far more flights than they used to.

I don’t know that this is neccessarily a bad thing. It’s better to be sitting at home than to be stuck in the airport (or worse yet on the plane). But at the same time there are going to be people who get upset over this, and it will be interesting to see the next steps.

Another tidbit is the fact that the bad economy may be contributing to a lower divorce rate. People who find themselves in tough economic circumstances are delaying plans to divorce. This doesn’t mean of course that they suddenly find a happy marriage, but it is an interesting impact. It is even possible that in some cases there might be time for the couple to work things out.

Just a couple tidbits to ponder as you wait for/watch the closing ceremonies in Vancouver.