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When Asiana Flight 214 from South Korea crashed onto the runway at San Francisco International Airport on Saturday, hundreds of flights into that airport were canceled, stranding thousands of travelers at airports across the country.

The Asiana crash came right in the middle of a holiday weekend, disrupting airline networks. And it occurred during a weekend when many flights were intentionally overbooked.

What happened next to all those stranded travelers offers a revealing window into how airlines view their passengers.

The fate of each traveler trying to get back to San Francisco depended almost entirely on their "status": how the airline computer systems calculated their potential future value to the airline. When there's a disaster or bad weather closes an airport, available seats are doled out based on a customer's status on the airline, not how far they have come or how long they have been struggling to get home.

The scene inside Newark's United Airlines terminal Sunday afternoon bordered on chaotic. At Gate 113, a huge crowd of people pressed up against the desk trying to get to San Francisco. Half a dozen previous flights had been delayed or canceled in the past 24 hours.

Imran Qureshi was stuck at Newark after flying in from the United Kingdom on Saturday.

"There is no way to go home," he said. "I have been going to every flight — which leaves every hour — to see if I can get on a standby but apparently the airline has policies to overbook every flight. So if they have overbooked their flight, people on standby have no chance at all."

The flight Qureshi was hoping to get on had close to 100 passengers waiting on the standby list and no free seats. United was bumping between six and 12 confirmed passengers off most flights from Newark to San Francisco on Sunday, adding to crowds in the airport.

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Many people know how to buy things in cyberspace. But what about doing business in outer space? That's the question PayPal says it wants to answer. Citing the looming era of space tourism, the company is creating the PayPal Galactic project along with the SETI Institute, "to help make universal space payments a reality."

The two organizations are announcing their new joint effort Thursday, saying they hope to help solve the big questions that arise with commerce in space. The first hotel orbiting the Earth is slated to open in the next few years.

"Space tourism is opening up to all of us in the next decade or so, and we want to make sure that PayPal is the preferred way to pay from space and in space," PayPal President David Marcus says, in a video accompanying the announcement.

Here's a quick rundown of some of the questions the PayPal Galactic project will take on:

How will the banking systems have to adapt?

How will risk and fraud management systems evolve?

What regulations will we have to conform with?

"PayPal envisions exploring possibilities in space the way that we do, breaking boundaries to make real progress," says SETI astronomer Jill Tarter. "When the SETI Institute succeeds in its exploration of the universe, and as we find our place among the stars, PayPal will be there to facilitate commerce, so people can get what they need, and want, to live outside of our planet."

Among the possibilities are things as rudimentary as paying bills back on Earth while you're out in space, either working as an astronaut or traveling as a tourist. And because life can be quiet in the dark vacuum of space, PayPal expects people living there will need a way to buy things like music and e-books.

"Within five to 10 years the earliest types of 'space hotels' and orbital and lunar commerce will be operational and in need of a payment system," says John Spencer, founder and president of the Space Tourism Society, which is taking part in the research.

The PayPal Galactic project will also try to answer the question, "What will our standard currency look like in a truly cash-free interplanetary society?"

To explore that idea, the company sent out a release that lists currencies used in science fiction, from the Federation credits of Star Trek to the cubits of Battlestar Galactica ... and even the mice of V.

The exploration of how space travelers might pay for things in space is the latest look we've gotten at how people are preparing for space travel to become more common, and more prolonged.

Most notably, news emerged recently that NASA had awarded a contract to experiment with using a 3-D printer to create food for space travelers, possibly for an eventual trip to Mars.

The Galactic project coincides with the 15th anniversary of PayPal's founding; now a part of eBay, the company says it currently services more than 128 million active accounts in more than 190 markets worldwide.

"We wanted to bring the experience we've learned over the last 15 years to help the industry answer the difficult questions that an interplanetary commerce system brings," says PayPal's senior communications director, Anuj Nayar.

The project also includes a crowdfunding campaign to support SETI and its research — and, we assume, to help find new markets in space.

NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health recently polled 1,081 African-Americans about their lives. One of the areas respondents were asked about was their perceptions of their financial status.

As Code Switch's Gene Demby reported in an earlier post, the effects of the housing crisis and a recession — both of which disproportionately affected African-Americans — didn't seem to dampen a sense of optimism and overall life satisfaction among respondents. But the survey did reveal a dramatic — if not exactly surprising — split between two evenly divided groups of respondents: 49 percent who saw their financial situations as "excellent" or "good," and 50 percent who described their finances as "poor" or "not good."

This finding mirrors attitudes of African-American respondents to a 2001 survey by the Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University. Then, the stats were similar: 49 percent polled saw their financial situations as "excellent" or "good," and 51 percent considered them "poor" or "not so good."

Robert Blendon, a professor of public health at Harvard and one of the 2013 study's co-directors, told NPR's Kathy Lohr that many African-Americans who don't consider themselves well-situated financially still have a sense of optimism. A combined 81 percent of respondents said they would one day attain the American dream — owning their own home, gaining financial security — or already had. Only 16 percent said they felt the dream was out of reach.

Supplies of oil have been surging this year, and U.S. drivers, who have been switching to more fuel-efficient cars, are using less gasoline.

That would seem to be the right economic combination to push down prices at the pump, but gasoline prices have remained stubbornly high this summer.

Even some people in the industry are wondering whether the law of supply and demand somehow has been repealed.

"I'm actually quite dumbfounded," says Azam Zakaria, vice president of Lone Star Petroleum, a family owned company that owns and operates 15 gas stations in the Houston area.

Zakaria, who has been in the business for nearly three decades, used to believe that more oil would mean lower prices, but he hasn't been seeing that lately.

The disconnect between supply and demand seemed to get even wider Wednesday, when the U.S. Energy Information Administration released its latest data, showing that U.S. crude oil inventories rose by 0.3 million barrels last week. Most experts had been expecting the oil inventory to decline by 0.6 million barrels.

That sort of surprise keeps happening as more and more domestic oil gets pumped. In fact last year, the United States saw the largest-ever yearly rise in oil production, according to a statistical review released last week by BP, the global oil giant.

At the same time, global oil reserves continue to grow, the BP report says.

The price of crude oil, however, continues to hover around $100 a barrel, and an average gallon of regular gasoline is still running above $3.62 nationwide. At the start of this year, the price was about $3.20 a gallon.

Zakaria worries that speculators are pushing up prices beyond what the usual balance of supply and demand would dictate. "Just to be blunt with you, I think that it's a commodity now that is being exchanged at Wall Street," he says.

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