The heavy bomber's day has come and gone like the battleship. It's main role is demonstration, not waging war.
First off, lets ignore the fact carpet bombing has minimal effectiveness.
Except B-52s were getting frequent and daily use in Afghanistan. They are still extremely useful.
Vietnam, the North Vietnamese had limited to no abilities to counter or intercept B52.
Iraq had the 4th largest Army in the world. They certainly had plenty of air defenses.
the current fleet wont last six months against Russia or China if it is used.
Many weapons are useful against certain enemies, and not viable against others. The later doesn't eliminate the former. Humvees and Strykers would be death-traps driving among enemy tanks... And yet soldiers in Afghanistan don't go down the street in M1 Abrams.
It's utterly idiotic to claim that we need ONE weapon that does everything for everyone, all the time.
Besides, there's very nearly zero chance we'd ever get into a land war against a major nuclear power. Either our air-power will decimate their capabilities in the first few hours, or theirs will do so to us, soon after.
it's much faster and cheaper to build a multitude of drones than it is to build a manned heavy bomber.
And the drones you listed are faster and cheaper to build because they don't have the tiniest fraction the capabilities of a heavy bomber... Bullets are cheaper and faster to build than cruise missiles, too.
That's irrelevant. We have two things they don't: opposable digits and the human brain.
You don't think CHIMPS have opposable digits? And they'll have a human brain, too, a few seconds after they attack you.
I can make a spear with a decent sized stick and a sharp rock.
And if you wield it with ALL your might, you could potentially slightly annoy a grizzly bear. You are utterly delusional if you think you'd be able to kill a very large predator with a spear.
Well, the B1 is NOT likely going to replace the B-52.
The two are largely equivalent, TODAY. The B-1 and B-52s are regularly in competition for each bombing run... In other words, the B-1 replaces the B-52 every time it takes off. They say it has lower operating costs, so it makes sense as a replacement.
it will be hyper-sonic drones flying at mach 10 or more around 2025.
The B-52 has long linger time over a target... A feature which is often used to support soldiers on the ground. A supersonic craft would have just about ZERO linger time, making it absolutely useless for this task, and meaning that they'd have to keep the B-52 in service if that's the only replacement on the table.
More than that, there's only vague plans for a prototype of a Mach 6 spy-aircraft from Lockheed in the 2020s, if they suddenly get full funding.. There's not a snowball's chance in hell of Mach 10 drone bombers by 2025.
Counter insurgency is probably going to continue to be the major job for the US Military, well into the future, so the B-52 will have job security for quite a long time.
"I think you could say that there are two fundamental ways to fight the US Military: asymmetrically and stupid." -Major General Herbert Raymond McMaster (2014/05/24)
Today's stealth fighters, early warning radar systems, satellite tracking, and advanced anti-air missile systems on land or water makes this plane nothing more than a slow moving target.
Which is why a few stealth fighters and bombers go in first, take out ALL the air defenses, THEN the B-52s go in there and carpet-bomb the hell out of the rest of the place. The B-52 is fairly slow, but that fills a role than the military badly NEEDS at times.
Even if they were able to release all it's ordinance it would still be a one shot weapon.
Circular logic. If they release all their weapons, then they won't have anymore. If they release one or a few at a time (which is what they do in Afghanistan), then they've got a long-long time in the air, able to fire a few more at any time, lingering over targets longer than just about any other aircraft.
They would be better served to take all the money spent on an outdated weapons platform and build a few more B-2's if they are really hard up for more strategic bombers.
Demonstrating that you know nothing about the subject. B-2s don't have the linger time, maneuverability, survivability, as much payload capacity, and operating costs are several times higher. If the B-52 is to be replaced with anything, it'll be the non-stealth B-1s.
Still being used purely for counterinsurgency operations.
Only true, today, because that's the only kind of wars the US is fighting at this time. But B-52s absolutely are used in other roles than counterinsurgency.
"B-52s also played a role in Operation Iraqi Freedom," long before the insurgency even began.
"B-52 strikes were an important part of Operation Desert Storm," in which the US did not face a notable insurgency.
"B-52 had the highest mission capable rate of the three types of heavy bombers operated by the USAF in 2001."
You COULD use ICBMs, but maintaining appreviously purchased aircraft is a lot less expensive than building a bunch of ICBMs.
ICBMs are a no-no. Too quick from launch to impact, and too difficult to quickly tell where they are going to land. The Russians would be having heart attacks at record-setting levels if the US switched to all-ICBMs all-the-time, since the middle-east isn't far from Russia (not far for an ICBM, that is).
Not quite so true in the reverse case, as since Russia doesn't ever get into skirmishes with any American countries, so we've got a big ocean buffer.
Besides, I think the GP was just assuming that a new model of aircraft would be more cost-effective than B-52s... Not realizing that the engines have been replaced/upgraded, aerospace materials haven't changed yet, and the aerodynamics of the old sky truck are still good.
"In ancient China, the prevailing belief was that the Earth was flat and square, while the heavens were round, an assumption virtually unquestioned until the introduction of European astronomy in the 17th century."
An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older â" about one in four adults â" suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.
At that rate, the word loses all meaning, and I don't believe for a second that this higher mortality rate is reflected in over a quarter of the population. Instead, you're using an extremely wide definition.
Your comment is completely misinformed
No. I even quoted a relevant expert at the end of my rant, which largely supports exactly what I said.
it's not clear how mental disorders could be causing early deaths.
This is a positively idiotic statement.
The mentally ill are over-represented in homeless, impoverished, drug-using (self-medicating), and other highly at-risk populations. Even with a support network, they are often unable to assist in their own care, and symptoms they describe may be attributed to excessively attributed to psychosomatic rather than physical causes. They often refuse medical care, either blanket refusal, or may specifically refuse to take one medication, or follow one bit of doctor's advice. They usually have difficulty retaining a doctor, and bounce between them, probably to progressively less-capable ones.
The reasons are "are little understood and likely to be complex," say Dr. Hoang and colleagues, but "are likely to be influenced by adverse lifestyle and social factors associated with the presence of mental illness such as alcohol and illicit drug use, and exposure to poor housing."
With proper incentives, humans are superb at hunting species to extinction... I know full well how many cane toads there are in your area, and a few thousand humans designing ways to capture or kill them around-the-clock, would drastically reduce their numbers in a few years. More aggressive methods after that, would threaten the species.
Cane toads are not as numerous as, nor as prolific reproducers, as several of the species of ocean fish humans have trolled to endangered status. It can be done, when heavily supported by greed. Give me $100 each, and I'll drop everything, and make a good start of it.
So without our defining characteristics, we're easy prey?
The industrial revolution is not a "defining characteristic" of homo sapiens.
Thousands of years ago, we were pretty easy prey. Obviously we did just well enough that we could reproduce faster than we were killed, in some areas.
Today, we've reformed enough of our world that we're not often vulnerable as we used to be... Many predators are gone, and we don't live in the wilderness. Economics of the industrial revolution has made it so that we can afford to be difficult prey... with lights, knives, guns, etc., but most of us still aren't very capable of defending ourselves.
That's completely wrong, and any expert will say so. Without our technology and herd mentality, humans are VERY EASY prey.
We have very low strength for our body mass. Compare us to chimps, cats, etc., and we're weaklings. We don't have any biological weapons to aide in our defense, either. We don't have long, hard and sharp claws, and our jaws aren't powerful enough, nor properly designed to make our teeth practical defensive weapons.
Humans make difficult prey because of technology. We're well-fed, far away from wilderness, spending the overwhelming majority of our time inside defensive structures, out-of reach of predators, and when we are vulnerable, we have high tech items like knives, keys, or sharpened sticks which make very good defensive weapons. Our herd instinct means an injured individual will get immediate help rather than being food. And furthermore, we've eradicated the overwhelming majority of large predators that could, possibly predate upon us.
You go out, naked, into the wilderness of Alaska, and see how you do up against the first grizzly bear or a pack of wolves you come across...
I love how people expect us to subsidize their internet access but nobody (sane) argues in favor of subsidies for wells and septic tanks, both of which are more costly than municipal water service.
You very carefully chose your two utilities. Water and septic are the exceptions to the rule.
Electricity, roads, mail, telephone, and now internet, are exactly the opposite, and nobody (sane) argues against subsidies for those.
Access to clean water is actually essential to life
A person only needs 1 gallon of water per day to survive. Anything more than that is a luxury. That amount is easy enough to buy at a supermarket and haul to your home in a small car at nominal expense.
And people can survive without a septic system, either, if they aren't using hundreds of gallons of water. And I don't mean by being unsanitary. Composting toilets are usually expensive, but the basic technology only requires a bucket with a vent, and an ongoing supply of some very, very cheap "starter culture" bacteria.
but nobody expects suburban/urban people to subsidize water for rural folks
Actually, I am sane, and DO believe that water utilities should subsidize, or at least finance, the initial connection of remote homes to the utility, instead of charging tens of thousands of dollars up-front. They'll make the money back, eventually, when they charge connection fees for other people who later develop the land along the area where the water lines were previously run, in addition to their monthly fees.
Hell, they could even be inventive, and do something extreme like suspending quarter-inch water pipes along (existing) telephone poles... below electrical and telephone wires of course. The low volume would require residents to install water storage tanks to run high-flow items like showers, but that's a very modest up-front cost.
When our telecommunications WERE "nationalized" (i.e., when Ma Bell was a regulated "natural monopoly"), we got very good service as a whole, with reasonable rates. When it was all land lines, that is.
Ma Bell charged ASTRONOMICAL rates, particularly for long-distance calls. They also rented out phones, the same way cable/satellite companies rent converter boxes, hard-wired them to your wall, and would sue you if you dared to connect a different phone to your phone line. That's why we had "acoustic couplers" rather than modern dial-up modems that just plug-in to the phone jacks... There were no phone jacks, and Ma Bell demanded it stay that way.
That was anything but a "fascist wet dream".
No, that's pretty much what it was. AT&T got obscene profits, government got lots of AT&T money, and consumers got horrendously screwed. Why else do you think Ma Bell got sued and split into pieces?
The only thing that saved us, is the march of technology. Bell Labs stupidly invented and developed microwave, which allowed nation-wide communications without land-lines, and immediately opened-up competition for less-ass-rapey long-distance service.
Beyond that, fiber optics, docsis, and 2G cellular technologies eventually opened-up the possibility of phone service for less-than monopoly land-line prices. Notice that government regulation didn't do it.
You can't dig a hole in the ground to provide an internet connection, the same way you can with water and septic. For electricity, you could always buy a generator, although that is a much inferior solution than a grid connection. But you can't buy an Internet.
High-speed satellite internet works most anywhere on the planet. Wouldn't subsidizing the monthly price of that service be more cost-efficient to both parties than running fiber through many miles of trenches? It's not as if the FCC is mandating UHF broadcast TV translators in the middle of nowhere, instead they've made it legal to put up a satellite dish, preempting other local regulations that might prohibit that.
Satellite internet is similar to the way that modern well-drilling technology has made previously uninhabitable land viable, thanks to deeper, cheaper wells, and cheaper, powerful well pumps. Before, wells were hand-dug, and any water more than 30ft down, or with water level variability more than a few feet, just wasn't accessible.
It's similar to the way PV solar technology has made previously uninhabitable land viable, as it can be occupied comfortably, for a tiny fraction the cost of operating a gasoline/diesel/propane generation.
And those generators are only viable because internal combustion technology has made it very efficient at converting fuel into work.
etc., etc.
Don't act like deep wells and decent generators aren't modern high-tech innovations, just like satellite internet.
1. Invasive species cost money to get rid-of. 2. People pay quite a bit of money for good-tasting food.
Making invasive species valuable can make-up the shortfall for governments being unwilling to spend the requisite amount of money needed to deal with them, but it doesn't NEED to be "food".
Figure out how to make cane toad carcasses into fashionable ash trays, or kudzu into motor vehicle components, or anything else people are willing to PAY FOR, and you'll solve the problem. A better solution would be for governments to stop doing a half-assed job, and just spend the amount of money needed, to deplete the invasive species.
The crows have figured out how to deal with cane toads.
Crows / Magpies / Ravens are lazy SOBs. They aren't going to solve the problem for you. As long as other meals are easier to get than toads, they will leave the toads alone. Their huge numbers and availability when other food is scare may make them a nice alternative food source, but don't think they're going to bring the numbers down to manageable levels, as long as they've got other food available.
Please explain why it is not a relevant example if somebody other than your local bus company can get their shit together?
But you didn't point to just some other bus company... You went straight to THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PLANET, where the economics are completely, totally, and utterly different.
Why isn't this simple and obvious fact, painfully obvious to you?
Globally the consequence of extreme price gouging you are seeing locally is an exception instead of the rule.
On the contrary, public transit is subsidized. The opposite of gouging. To implicate gouging, you need evidence, and you've provided NONE.
Using it to suggest that public transport is always a bad idea is either stupid or dishonest.
You're the idiot that chose to expand this topic out to the other parts of the world. This was clearly about the US, until you went nuts and started talking about China, as if it had any relevance.
In the US, it's stupid and inefficient to take the bus.
Why would I buy HP stuff in the enterprise space when there are dozen companies that do it better, offer better support, and generally give their customers less grief?
Name a company that sells cheap x86 servers, superior to HP.
You say their laser printers are good? Are they great though?
Consistently good and reliable, which is vastly better than any other company, who might have an occasionally great product, inter-mingled with crap. Or they are substantially more expensive, or doesn't have the scale to keep consumables and replacement parts popularly available for many years.
On the high-end HP has stiff competition from Xerox, Sharp, etc. etc. On the low-end their printers aren't very good, but are often better than their cheap competitors. But in the mid-range, they are pretty dominant.
I'd avoid HP on principle at this point.
That's not a fair assessment, then, and there's enough people with exactly the opposite opinion.
There are many brands that no longer represent their heritage: Philips, Zenith, Bell Labs, Kodak...
Philips is still a good, solid brand. The others are HORRIFIC examples.
Kodak is a failed company, who sold their brand in the liquidation sale, to cheap Chinese crap manufacturers.
Zenith failed miserably in the 90s, and was bought out by LG, who make a few products with the Zenith name on them. Hasn't turned to shoveling crap like Kodak and Polaroid, but basically non-existent.
Bell Labs is a sad story, too. "As of July 2008, however, only four scientists remained in physics research". "On August 28, 2008, Alcatel-Lucent announced it was pulling out of basic science, material physics, and semiconductor research". It's better than turning into a patent troll, but they're just a more-respected name brand for Alcatel, and just trying to cash-in on all their previous R&D for an easy buck.
That company has no market. The only time I see HP stuff as at big box stores where they're competing for the least informed computer purchases.
Does the smart money buy HP?
HP still has a market in the enterprise space. They're probably still at the top of the heap in mid-range laser printers, and their servers have certainly been far more reliable than Dell's. Their switches are decent, even though Cisco is eating everyone's lunch.
You're talking about the consumer space, which is low-margin crapola, they'll only turn a profit on if they keep making crappier so their margins don't disappear entirely with the stiff competition. That's why they previously decided to drop the entire market segment, and only changed their mind when they realized what horrible effects it would have on related markets, like when loyal HP enterprise customers find they can't get cheap HP desktop computers in the same order as their HP servers and printers.
HP screwed up extremely badly, but it's not because their home PCs aren't competitive.
I forgot a significant detail... That's $20 in fuel for the ROUND TRIP, while the $40 ticket price was one-way, and not just took longer, but required substantial travel by foot to reach the destination from the nearest station.
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Except B-52s were getting frequent and daily use in Afghanistan. They are still extremely useful.
Iraq had the 4th largest Army in the world. They certainly had plenty of air defenses.
Many weapons are useful against certain enemies, and not viable against others. The later doesn't eliminate the former. Humvees and Strykers would be death-traps driving among enemy tanks... And yet soldiers in Afghanistan don't go down the street in M1 Abrams.
It's utterly idiotic to claim that we need ONE weapon that does everything for everyone, all the time.
Besides, there's very nearly zero chance we'd ever get into a land war against a major nuclear power. Either our air-power will decimate their capabilities in the first few hours, or theirs will do so to us, soon after.
And the drones you listed are faster and cheaper to build because they don't have the tiniest fraction the capabilities of a heavy bomber... Bullets are cheaper and faster to build than cruise missiles, too.
You don't think CHIMPS have opposable digits? And they'll have a human brain, too, a few seconds after they attack you.
And if you wield it with ALL your might, you could potentially slightly annoy a grizzly bear. You are utterly delusional if you think you'd be able to kill a very large predator with a spear.
The two are largely equivalent, TODAY. The B-1 and B-52s are regularly in competition for each bombing run... In other words, the B-1 replaces the B-52 every time it takes off. They say it has lower operating costs, so it makes sense as a replacement.
The B-52 has long linger time over a target... A feature which is often used to support soldiers on the ground. A supersonic craft would have just about ZERO linger time, making it absolutely useless for this task, and meaning that they'd have to keep the B-52 in service if that's the only replacement on the table.
More than that, there's only vague plans for a prototype of a Mach 6 spy-aircraft from Lockheed in the 2020s, if they suddenly get full funding.. There's not a snowball's chance in hell of Mach 10 drone bombers by 2025.
Counter insurgency is probably going to continue to be the major job for the US Military, well into the future, so the B-52 will have job security for quite a long time.
"I think you could say that there are two fundamental ways to fight the US Military: asymmetrically and stupid." -Major General Herbert Raymond McMaster (2014/05/24)
Which is why a few stealth fighters and bombers go in first, take out ALL the air defenses, THEN the B-52s go in there and carpet-bomb the hell out of the rest of the place. The B-52 is fairly slow, but that fills a role than the military badly NEEDS at times.
Circular logic. If they release all their weapons, then they won't have anymore. If they release one or a few at a time (which is what they do in Afghanistan), then they've got a long-long time in the air, able to fire a few more at any time, lingering over targets longer than just about any other aircraft.
Demonstrating that you know nothing about the subject. B-2s don't have the linger time, maneuverability, survivability, as much payload capacity, and operating costs are several times higher. If the B-52 is to be replaced with anything, it'll be the non-stealth B-1s.
Only true, today, because that's the only kind of wars the US is fighting at this time. But B-52s absolutely are used in other roles than counterinsurgency.
"B-52s also played a role in Operation Iraqi Freedom," long before the insurgency even began.
"B-52 strikes were an important part of Operation Desert Storm," in which the US did not face a notable insurgency.
"B-52 had the highest mission capable rate of the three types of heavy bombers operated by the USAF in 2001."
ICBMs are a no-no. Too quick from launch to impact, and too difficult to quickly tell where they are going to land. The Russians would be having heart attacks at record-setting levels if the US switched to all-ICBMs all-the-time, since the middle-east isn't far from Russia (not far for an ICBM, that is).
Not quite so true in the reverse case, as since Russia doesn't ever get into skirmishes with any American countries, so we've got a big ocean buffer.
Besides, I think the GP was just assuming that a new model of aircraft would be more cost-effective than B-52s... Not realizing that the engines have been replaced/upgraded, aerospace materials haven't changed yet, and the aerodynamics of the old sky truck are still good.
"In ancient China, the prevailing belief was that the Earth was flat and square, while the heavens were round, an assumption virtually unquestioned until the introduction of European astronomy in the 17th century."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
At that rate, the word loses all meaning, and I don't believe for a second that this higher mortality rate is reflected in over a quarter of the population. Instead, you're using an extremely wide definition.
No. I even quoted a relevant expert at the end of my rant, which largely supports exactly what I said.
This is a positively idiotic statement.
The mentally ill are over-represented in homeless, impoverished, drug-using (self-medicating), and other highly at-risk populations. Even with a support network, they are often unable to assist in their own care, and symptoms they describe may be attributed to excessively attributed to psychosomatic rather than physical causes. They often refuse medical care, either blanket refusal, or may specifically refuse to take one medication, or follow one bit of doctor's advice. They usually have difficulty retaining a doctor, and bounce between them, probably to progressively less-capable ones.
With proper incentives, humans are superb at hunting species to extinction... I know full well how many cane toads there are in your area, and a few thousand humans designing ways to capture or kill them around-the-clock, would drastically reduce their numbers in a few years. More aggressive methods after that, would threaten the species.
Cane toads are not as numerous as, nor as prolific reproducers, as several of the species of ocean fish humans have trolled to endangered status. It can be done, when heavily supported by greed. Give me $100 each, and I'll drop everything, and make a good start of it.
The industrial revolution is not a "defining characteristic" of homo sapiens.
Thousands of years ago, we were pretty easy prey. Obviously we did just well enough that we could reproduce faster than we were killed, in some areas.
Today, we've reformed enough of our world that we're not often vulnerable as we used to be... Many predators are gone, and we don't live in the wilderness. Economics of the industrial revolution has made it so that we can afford to be difficult prey... with lights, knives, guns, etc., but most of us still aren't very capable of defending ourselves.
That's completely wrong, and any expert will say so. Without our technology and herd mentality, humans are VERY EASY prey.
We have very low strength for our body mass. Compare us to chimps, cats, etc., and we're weaklings. We don't have any biological weapons to aide in our defense, either. We don't have long, hard and sharp claws, and our jaws aren't powerful enough, nor properly designed to make our teeth practical defensive weapons.
Humans make difficult prey because of technology. We're well-fed, far away from wilderness, spending the overwhelming majority of our time inside defensive structures, out-of reach of predators, and when we are vulnerable, we have high tech items like knives, keys, or sharpened sticks which make very good defensive weapons. Our herd instinct means an injured individual will get immediate help rather than being food. And furthermore, we've eradicated the overwhelming majority of large predators that could, possibly predate upon us.
You go out, naked, into the wilderness of Alaska, and see how you do up against the first grizzly bear or a pack of wolves you come across...
You very carefully chose your two utilities. Water and septic are the exceptions to the rule.
Electricity, roads, mail, telephone, and now internet, are exactly the opposite, and nobody (sane) argues against subsidies for those.
A person only needs 1 gallon of water per day to survive. Anything more than that is a luxury. That amount is easy enough to buy at a supermarket and haul to your home in a small car at nominal expense.
And people can survive without a septic system, either, if they aren't using hundreds of gallons of water. And I don't mean by being unsanitary. Composting toilets are usually expensive, but the basic technology only requires a bucket with a vent, and an ongoing supply of some very, very cheap "starter culture" bacteria.
Actually, I am sane, and DO believe that water utilities should subsidize, or at least finance, the initial connection of remote homes to the utility, instead of charging tens of thousands of dollars up-front. They'll make the money back, eventually, when they charge connection fees for other people who later develop the land along the area where the water lines were previously run, in addition to their monthly fees.
Hell, they could even be inventive, and do something extreme like suspending quarter-inch water pipes along (existing) telephone poles... below electrical and telephone wires of course. The low volume would require residents to install water storage tanks to run high-flow items like showers, but that's a very modest up-front cost.
Ma Bell charged ASTRONOMICAL rates, particularly for long-distance calls. They also rented out phones, the same way cable/satellite companies rent converter boxes, hard-wired them to your wall, and would sue you if you dared to connect a different phone to your phone line. That's why we had "acoustic couplers" rather than modern dial-up modems that just plug-in to the phone jacks... There were no phone jacks, and Ma Bell demanded it stay that way.
No, that's pretty much what it was. AT&T got obscene profits, government got lots of AT&T money, and consumers got horrendously screwed. Why else do you think Ma Bell got sued and split into pieces?
The only thing that saved us, is the march of technology. Bell Labs stupidly invented and developed microwave, which allowed nation-wide communications without land-lines, and immediately opened-up competition for less-ass-rapey long-distance service.
Beyond that, fiber optics, docsis, and 2G cellular technologies eventually opened-up the possibility of phone service for less-than monopoly land-line prices. Notice that government regulation didn't do it.
High-speed satellite internet works most anywhere on the planet. Wouldn't subsidizing the monthly price of that service be more cost-efficient to both parties than running fiber through many miles of trenches? It's not as if the FCC is mandating UHF broadcast TV translators in the middle of nowhere, instead they've made it legal to put up a satellite dish, preempting other local regulations that might prohibit that.
Satellite internet is similar to the way that modern well-drilling technology has made previously uninhabitable land viable, thanks to deeper, cheaper wells, and cheaper, powerful well pumps. Before, wells were hand-dug, and any water more than 30ft down, or with water level variability more than a few feet, just wasn't accessible.
It's similar to the way PV solar technology has made previously uninhabitable land viable, as it can be occupied comfortably, for a tiny fraction the cost of operating a gasoline/diesel/propane generation.
And those generators are only viable because internal combustion technology has made it very efficient at converting fuel into work.
etc., etc.
Don't act like deep wells and decent generators aren't modern high-tech innovations, just like satellite internet.
1. Invasive species cost money to get rid-of.
2. People pay quite a bit of money for good-tasting food.
Making invasive species valuable can make-up the shortfall for governments being unwilling to spend the requisite amount of money needed to deal with them, but it doesn't NEED to be "food".
Figure out how to make cane toad carcasses into fashionable ash trays, or kudzu into motor vehicle components, or anything else people are willing to PAY FOR, and you'll solve the problem. A better solution would be for governments to stop doing a half-assed job, and just spend the amount of money needed, to deplete the invasive species.
Crows / Magpies / Ravens are lazy SOBs. They aren't going to solve the problem for you. As long as other meals are easier to get than toads, they will leave the toads alone. Their huge numbers and availability when other food is scare may make them a nice alternative food source, but don't think they're going to bring the numbers down to manageable levels, as long as they've got other food available.
But you didn't point to just some other bus company... You went straight to THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PLANET, where the economics are completely, totally, and utterly different.
Why isn't this simple and obvious fact, painfully obvious to you?
On the contrary, public transit is subsidized. The opposite of gouging. To implicate gouging, you need evidence, and you've provided NONE.
You're the idiot that chose to expand this topic out to the other parts of the world. This was clearly about the US, until you went nuts and started talking about China, as if it had any relevance.
In the US, it's stupid and inefficient to take the bus.
Name a company that sells cheap x86 servers, superior to HP.
Consistently good and reliable, which is vastly better than any other company, who might have an occasionally great product, inter-mingled with crap. Or they are substantially more expensive, or doesn't have the scale to keep consumables and replacement parts popularly available for many years.
On the high-end HP has stiff competition from Xerox, Sharp, etc. etc. On the low-end their printers aren't very good, but are often better than their cheap competitors. But in the mid-range, they are pretty dominant.
That's not a fair assessment, then, and there's enough people with exactly the opposite opinion.
Philips is still a good, solid brand. The others are HORRIFIC examples.
Kodak is a failed company, who sold their brand in the liquidation sale, to cheap Chinese crap manufacturers.
Zenith failed miserably in the 90s, and was bought out by LG, who make a few products with the Zenith name on them. Hasn't turned to shoveling crap like Kodak and Polaroid, but basically non-existent.
Bell Labs is a sad story, too. "As of July 2008, however, only four scientists remained in physics research". "On August 28, 2008, Alcatel-Lucent announced it was pulling out of basic science, material physics, and semiconductor research". It's better than turning into a patent troll, but they're just a more-respected name brand for Alcatel, and just trying to cash-in on all their previous R&D for an easy buck.
HP still has a market in the enterprise space. They're probably still at the top of the heap in mid-range laser printers, and their servers have certainly been far more reliable than Dell's. Their switches are decent, even though Cisco is eating everyone's lunch.
You're talking about the consumer space, which is low-margin crapola, they'll only turn a profit on if they keep making crappier so their margins don't disappear entirely with the stiff competition. That's why they previously decided to drop the entire market segment, and only changed their mind when they realized what horrible effects it would have on related markets, like when loyal HP enterprise customers find they can't get cheap HP desktop computers in the same order as their HP servers and printers.
HP screwed up extremely badly, but it's not because their home PCs aren't competitive.
My example isn't an outliers, it's typical pricing. And pricing in China has no relevance at all. In the US, bus travel is incredibly inefficient.
I forgot a significant detail... That's $20 in fuel for the ROUND TRIP, while the $40 ticket price was one-way, and not just took longer, but required substantial travel by foot to reach the destination from the nearest station.