Yes. I'm a very frequent flyer, and used to be far more frequent. No one, and I mean no one, flys southwest because it's their choice. "Southwest is the greyhound of the sky" is a well known phrase. You fly southwest because it's slightly better than being cramped on 3 legs of a 50-60 seat commuter jet. Your home airport dictates which airline you take. Unless another airline steps up and takes some of the routes & provides better planes, you're stuck with SWA.
> No one, and I mean no one, flys southwest because it's their choice.
I wholeheartedly disagree. I don't fly SW except to save money, but everyone else I've spoken to with an opinion on airlines loves to say how much they love the carrier.
Coworkers and I went to look at the sea of unclaimed bags yesterday, and I mentioned that SW has drastically underpaid ground crews and have flight crews sleeping in crew rooms in airports, and they said that they'd repeatedly heard how much flight crews enjoy working for the company.
I really don't understand the appeal, but it's definitely out there.
Alaska
Hawaiian
[Delta American United Southwest] (rough tie here)
Frontier
Spirit
It depends on what you value. If you always fly first class, of course SW is worse. SW does offer a lot of direct flights that no other airlines offer. For me saving several hours in not changing planes is worth a slightly worse flight experience.
Also SW doesn't gouge you when cancelling or changing flights, unlike all the others.
In the Midwest I know a ton of business travelers (>1 trip/month) who default to Southwest. The weekly travelers tend to prefer the legacy carriers if they're available (so I'm sure there's something to your point even here) but IME Southwest rules the monthly/short notice flyers around me.
Weekly travelers prefer legacy carriers because they get upgraded to fist class, have special phone numbers for customer service and rebooking, board first, etc.
> No one, and I mean no one, flys southwest because it's their choice.
Everyone in my family preferred to fly southwest (at least before this round of incidents). Among other things, this was based on a history of better customer service especially in extenuating circumstances. They've been at the top of e.g. JD power customer satisfaction rankings for years.
If you're trying to say no one flies economy because it's their choice... I could certainly afford not to, but I _choose_ otherwise.
In various parts of the US there are sketchy bus companies with unpredictable and unreliable service that are cheaper than Greyhound. One example is the busses between New York and nearby large cities. They tend to accumulate accident records, close, and re-open under a new name. Boarding involves standing in a scrum they vaguely measure.
I've got platinum on united, and companion pass on SWA. I can tell you YES status is worth it. it's not really about the early boarding, or free bagage, or that BS. It's about being able to call up the airline, outside of my company's travel service, and just tell them what I want and they do it.
Also, all those doubling of miles and other perks allow me to get upgrades for free so when I do have flights I really need to sleep on I can take first class.
I get it. I'm the same way. my 14" mbp with 64gb/ram is the perfect size/performance for me. I run intellij, docker, iterm2, chrome, obsidian and vscode. If there's OSX under there well...I guess so, but fuck it. I can't remember the last time I opened up system prefs, or any config file on my laptop.
earlier this year I tried fedora 32 on my xps9500(a supposedly great linux laptop). After a freakin week random shit still wouldn't work right. And sleep/resume was like rolling a dice. No thanks.
In this regard, electric cars are worse even than 'normal' cars. They're too quiet. If recently one of the car brands did not introduce a (very too quiet) beep on one of their EVs when reversing, I would have been ran over in a parking lot. And my hearing is more than fine (to the point that I have to disconnect electronics when sleeping because I hear them).
EVs are not completely silent, but often times the sounds of the environment are louder, thus making EVs harder to notice through hearing.
I recently got into goats. Already have cows, chickens, and pigs on my hobby farm. Goats are without a doubt the most picky. I use pigs and goats for pretty much the same things, land clearing then food. Pigs are pure freaking destroy everything and then still eat what feed you give them. They also tear the crap out of the dirt, but they taste really good.
I agree goats are picky the point that if you keep an on them you can catch them before they tear up anything you want to keep(apple/peach trees). Another thing is goats are just dang fun. Pigs and cows are friendly in a dull sort of way, goats have character & personality. One of my goats will come out of his pen nightly just to hang around with me and the kids. When it gets tired of us he puts him self back in the pen.
I've tried the outsourcing part before. Unless you have fields you can lease out or some other basic need of other farmers, it really doesn't work. Especially today with the shortage of "blue collar" workers. The costs to have someone clear land, dig ponds, run water lines, etc is either too much or you simply can't find someone that's reliable.
I've seen a few folks move from the city in the last 5-10 years and try the "we'll just hire a landscaper to manage the drive way and cut by the trees". It didn't work out well. 10s of 1000s of dollars a year to have someone reliably do it, or they simply couldn't find someone.
