I don’t know about you, but The Onion has the ability to make me laugh uncontrollably. If you’d possibly enjoy such an experience, follow along:
This week, I talked about Ford surprising everyone with a $1 billion profit last quarter. Well, they have some momentum now. Just check out the next car to hit the showrooms:
Ford Unveils New Car For Cash-Strapped Buyers: The 1993 Taurus
In case you didn’t hear, United Airlines has a new plan to stack passengers like cordwood, in order to generate more revenue:
According to a press release, the company estimates that the new policy of simply arranging them in a towering mound will allow it to sell approximately 20 times more tickets per flight. In addition, executives claimed they would be able to eliminate the unnecessary cost of in-flight magazines, chairs, seat belts, blankets, bathrooms, headphones, and oxygen masks.
United officials said they conducted a test run in September during which they sent a flight from San Francisco to Denver and really jammed them all in there as hard as they could. Analysts found that 98 percent of them arrived safely at the correct destination, and of those who were lost or damaged, nearly all were eventually located.
Finally, we just learned that Congress has approved $500 billion to build a new monument to Human Folly. Just in time. It’ll be built on a Washington freeway overpass:
The lead architect on the project, Robert Wheeler, told reporters that the monument would be a stirring testament to more than 200,000 years of arrogance, idiocy, and waste. He also confirmed that no fewer than eight different blueprint designs would be clumsily patched together in order to preserve the spirit of indecision and gross incompetence with which mankind has approached the vast majority of its endeavors.
“The face of the building will be covered with recently excavated sections of the Titanic, as well as several faulty pressure valves from the Chernobyl power plant and hundreds of uranium-tipped shell casings from the first Gulf War,” said Wheeler, whose design calls for the monument to be surrounded by dozens of oil derricks pumping night and day into bare dirt. “But the most exciting feature of the memorial, in my opinion, is the giant glowing orb at the top that will symbolize humanity’s needless overuse of energy and will itself use a staggering 12 gigawatts of power per second.”
Enjoy!
I’ll be off tomorrow, but Paddy Hirsch is filling in. I’ll still host my weekly podcast, After the Bell. It’ll roll out sometime tomorrow morning. There’s a good chat in there about the deficit. Talk to you again on Monday. Have a great weekend.
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
