Have you ever asked yourself? "is there a spirit of poverty? If you go to Japan the answer is: "yes." If you drive to the Bimbo Gami shrine in the mountains about a four hour drive from Tokyo, you will come face to face with the "god of poverty." The god of poverty is a wooden statue believed to be that of a a thin, filthy man who represents the "state of poverty."

So, you are here along with about 500 other people and you want to chase poverty out of your life. You walk up to the statue and beat it several times with a bat, then you kick it as hard as you can and throw beans at it to drive away negative spirits and bad luck.

JetBlue Airways (NASDAQ: JBLU) is having to deal with weather problems, leading to flight problems and canceled flight problems, leading to unhappy passengers causing a 'storm' of bad publicity. In an effort to be the good guys, it came up with it's own "Passenger Bill of Rights." At the same time it reported that these events would affect its financials for the next couple of quarters -- well da!

So what's going on here is something that has been going on in the airline business forever. If you are in the airline business, life hits you harder than other businesses. Weather is uncertain, passenger impatience is very certain, and having to pacify large numbers of people with timely and satisfactory responses is very difficult. The business is seasonal, capital intensive, technology dependent, security constrained, and a constant coordination nightmare. Oh yes, and then there's luggage which does not complain much but has to run through the same system at the same time, in higher numbers than the passengers -- Wow!

If you read my story Why no airline mergers? Finally the answer... you learned the answer was IT'S A LOUSY BUSINESS!!! In this story another subject I mentioned is that the airlines know all this and mergers happen only in dire straits. According to a news bite I read in Barron's on February 5, U.S Airways (NYSE: LLC) withdrew a hostile takeover offer for Delta Airlines (NYSE: DAL) when creditors rejected it. Of course U.S. Airways had no interest in paying retail for an airline company and if you are considering investing maybe you should not either.

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Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the vice president for design and research at an architecture & planning firm that does aviation and aerospace related projects.