Having done a great deal of the work myself, I'd also throw in soul-crushing. I've spent years developing apps for companies that ultimately went bankrupt. The product of my years of work? Gone. Thrown away. Has my work actually helped anyone? Hard to say. Probably not. Definitely not directly. Not in any meaningful sense.
I'd like to second this sentiment. Very little of the work I've done has actually been at all meaningful. There was one job where I did some work on a product which is used in many retail stores, so it's pretty cool when I go to one of those stores and see that product in use there, running my software (presumably, I don't work there any more so I don't know if they changed it). But that job didn't last that long. There's a couple other jobs where the thing I worked on was used for a while. But there was a lot of stuff that just ended up getting shit-canned.
A story like what? "I worked for a while for this small business, was paid as a contractor instead of a regular employee, even though I was definitely treated as an employee, so I sent the IRS a SS-8 form and never heard back from them. Then I worked for another company in the same capacity, filed another SS-8 form, and nothing happened there either." How is that "a story to kill for"? Who knows, maybe the IRS called up the employer, he disagreed, and they closed the case. Even assuming the employer is definitely in the wrong, but what kind of story is the journalist going to get? He can call the IRS and they'll give him some BS answer like "we contacted the employer and determined that there was no wrongdoing and that the contractor status was correct". Or maybe "we're swamped with investigations and this wasn't high enough priority for us to get to yet".
Whatever the excuse is, there isn't much of a story here, not unless the journalist gets hundreds of such people all with the same story and shows a big pattern of lack of enforcement. But that would require a lot of work as an investigative journalist, and we don't have any more of those these days.
Terminator and Matrix had AI with entirely different goals. In the Matrix, the AI didn't want to eradicate humans; it somehow used them as an energy supply (which of course didn't really make any sense, but it's the premise you have to accept for the story to work). It just wanted to control humans and use them, so it had to deal with the ones that didn't go with the program. Eradicating them all would have been throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
In the Terminator movies, you're right: the AI is ridiculously inefficient and ineffective in dealing with humans, which it considers pests and wants to eradicate. Of course, there again that's the premise you have to accept for the story to work. Every sci-fi movie I believe has one of these: some completely implausible premise that you just need to accept. And it's not just sci-fi, it's every other movie too. There's always something completely unrealistic about them; off the top of my head, think about the old show "Friends": how does this group of not-so-gainfully-employed people afford to live in such a luxurious location in an extremely high-rent district?
I'm pretty sure Blade Runner did not depict interstellar travel at all; it only depicted travel within the solar system, and colonization of other worlds here. It was obviously overly-optimistic about this, as it was supposed to occur in 2017 (IIRC), and the idea of humans moving offworld to colonies on Venus and Mars or wherever in that timeframe (a few decades from 1983) is not realistic. But it's still a far cry from interstellar travel, short of some revolutionary discovery in fundamental physics. Realistically, even if we suddenly devoted all our resources to building Moon and Mars habitats and Lagrange-point space stations big enough to hold tens of millions of humans or more (in the movie, most of the population had already moved off-world), it would probably take well over a century to develop the technology and infrastructure needed to do that.
The problem is that it isn't going to fix anything, and will just cause problems for him. This problem of treating employees as "contractors" isn't just with this state, it's everywhere. I've seen it with a bunch of small businesses with friends/relatives. Supposedly, the IRS takes a dim view of this practice, and allows employees to file SS-8 forms to report such employers, and force them to pay their proper share of FICA taxes and such. However, in practice, the IRS simply ignores these submissions and lets employers do whatever they want.
But where would we be as a society if people were afraid to take such risks in order to fix wrongs?
When society is so screwed-up that taking risks never actually improves things, and only results in trouble for the whistleblower, why bother? Face it, our current society hates whistleblowers. They're even called "rats". They're not well-perceived by anyone except a minority of people who are already malcontents.
This guy is a software developer; the market for that profession is actually really good currently (though much more so in certain areas than others). He just needs to go find a new job. He'll probably get paid a lot more too. State governments aren't exactly known for being high-paying employers.
Of course it's arbitrary, it's a definition, all definitions are arbitrary. No one really wants to memorize dozens of names of mostly tiny objects when they're in science class learning about the solar system, especially when a bunch of them don't even have decent names, but some alphanumeric designation. So we limit the list to the ones that are large enough to be of real interest. Before, we thought it was sufficient to make the cutoff line be whether they had enough gravity to become mostly spherical. Now we find out that there's a bunch of bodies that meet that definition. So we change the definition to exclude those, and call those merely "dwarf planets". But Pluto isn't big enough to make the cut, so it gets grouped in with the other dwarfs.
So take your pick, do you want 8 "planets" and a bunch of "dwarf planets", or do you want dozens of "planets" to memorize the names of, most of them being little more than big asteroids?
And stop complaining about it being arbitrary. If you defined "planet" to be anything that orbits the Sun, there's countless objects that do that, including who knows how many in the asteroid belt, plus far more in the Kuiper Belt. So the previous definition was arbitrary too, because no one wanted to group Saturn, Jupiter, or even Earth in with a bunch of asteroids just because of their orbits.
It isn't a planet, you moron, it's a dwarf planet. If you define "planet" (the non-dwarf kind) to include Pluto, then you need to also call Vesta and a bunch of other objects "planets", so instead of 9 planets, it'll be somewhere in the teens, and growing as we discover more Kuiper Belt objects.
Mine doesn't, mostly because I think they came to the conclusion that making sure there is a pen at the desks for filling out paperwork before going up to the tellers was important--and people couldn't be relied upon to be polite enough to mention to the staff that they took the last pen.
That doesn't seem to be a problem with my bank: they have probably 100 pens at the counter at all times, and they keep it stocked up. I'm sure it's part of the staff's duties to check on the pen bins and make sure no one's going to be hunting for a pen.
Comparing to the US makes no sense; everyone knows US cops are the worst in the world. That's like comparing the UK to Somalia in economic power or something. Being better than the country that's the worst in the world isn't anything to be proud of.
Other businesses--particularly banks--chain the pen to their desk (if you haven't seen this, I'm being absolutely serious).
My bank doesn't do this: it has a huge supply of free pens with their name and logo on them at the desk where you stop to fill out your deposit ticket, and they encourage people to take them. Free advertising is worth a lot more (to a local place like a bank) than worrying about the cost of some $0.10 pens.
8kWh? Where'd you get that? Even if you left the 5W phone charger plugged in all day long (24h), that's only 120 Watt-hours. Here in the US, that's about 2 cents' worth of electricity. And that's not even normal usage: a phone only draws 5W when charging (it's probably more like 6W at the outlet, because of inefficiency in the charger itself); a normal phone can be fully charged in an hour or two, and after that goes into trickle-charge mode where it draws very little power from the charger. So you're really look at less than a half-cent worth of electricity.
People who want to use the best browser, that's who.
IE is trash of course, and Chrome, while it was a good option a while ago because FF was so buggy and Chrome was leaner and faster, today Chrome is a slow memory hog and FF has fixed most of its problems and runs much faster and with far less memory.
It's time for you to find a new place to do your banking. Using Flash on a bank/CU site is unacceptable, and shows that place has no clue how to do IT properly.
I don't need to build one to know that building things in factories is cheaper than building everything as a one-off on-site. This is basic engineering, and the basis of the industrial revolution.
As far as paying for the subway goes, I doubt it, I'd have the PRT lines pay for themselves, property and sales taxes pay for the subways.
At least until we're out of the PRT expansion phase.
I'm not an exec at SkyTran or anything, but it seems to me that once it's built out in a city, and if you price it artificially high (because you're in Manhattan and you don't want to overload the system with subway users; outside of Manhattan you'd keep the prices normal, so there's be a special fare schedule just for Manhattan or other dense cities with subways), the system is going to generate surplus money. Inside the city, some of that money can go to funding the subway, assuming the city has full or partial ownership of the system and helped fund it. It'd be a great investment for the city.
One trick is that I want 'the best' to win - because once a couple cities have it, you can run a line between the two, putting rest stations in every so often. Run it up to 100 mph+ and it'll easily be competitive with rail and planes below ~300 miles.
It can do better than that: from what I remember, the SkyTran people claim it can go up to 150mph. Inside a city, it wouldn't go that fast, but between cities it can. It's definitely usable as a superior alternative to planes, trains, and cars for inter-city hops. At 150mph, it's easily better than our current train system since Amtrak doesn't exceed 125mph (and only in the northeast there; Acela goes a bit faster but I think only 150 and only at certain points because their track system is such a mess). That'd make it the default option for regional travel; coast-to-coast you'll still want a plane.
Very good analysis. I do still wonder though how Denmark managed to get a permanent opt-out. Denmark isn't a cheap place to live by a long shot, it's probably one of the most expensive places in Europe to live.
It seems like the EU project would have done better by setting up two currencies, a strong-Euro and a weak-Euro, and keeping them independent of each other, with the strong economies using the more valuable one and places like Greece and Portugal and the eastern nations using the weak one.
10 years ago, the number of smartphones was exactly zero, outside of crappy junk like some WinCE phones. Now everyone and his brother has one. Luckily, it just took a couple of companies willing to invest and build the things, instead of a bunch of naysayers whining that there aren't any, so we can never have them.
Sorry if I was unclear. Being part of the EU and using the Euro, as I understand it, does not require any member countries to implement a particular minimum wage or anything like that (unlike being a State in the USA). Greece is only being forced to do such things now because they needed bail-outs.
My point is that being part of a currency union, or just unilaterally adopting another country's currency, does not require adopting all the other economic policies that country has. Zimbabwe and Ecuador don't have US minimum wages, even though they use the USD as their official currency.
Go look at the SkyTran website and Wikipedia pages.
The reason it's so cheap is because the rail system can be built in factories, whereas light rail is just like road-building: it has to be done from scratch on-site, which is always more expensive. Plus light rail requires buying up land, doing eminent domain seizures, fighting with landowners in court, ripping up existing streets and redoing them to fit the light rail track, etc. SkyTran just requires digging some holes for utility poles, installing them, then coming along with a small crane and hanging the rails. It's not much more invasive than doing some power line work, though in some places it might require trimming or removing trees.
And I hope I don't have to explain why it's obviously far cheaper than building a subway.
As you mention, while Skytran wouldn't have the capacity to deal with Manhattan, it could handle pretty much anything less. It'd kill the taxis there, which would be why it'd never go in there.
SkyTran doesn't need the capacity to handle all traffic in Manhattan, it would just need to serve as a supplement to the subway (a significantly higher-priced alternative, for rich and/or impatient people), and a replacement for the taxis, which would be great for pedestrians, cyclists, and other ground traffic by getting all those cars off the surface streets. Of course, it would need to overcome the corruption between the taxi companies and the city government, which could be a real problem, but maybe if enough cities in other countries, especially "3rd world" countries, adopt this and make NYC look like a backwards 3rd-world kleptocracy with its antiquated taxicabs, lack of SkyTran, and significant traffic accidents and deaths, then maybe the voters will vote in some politicians who make it happen.
As for overcrowding - remember that you can parallelize the tracks to increase density even more. If the building is big enough, it gets it's own station.
Yes, exactly: this is another big potential benefit of SkyTran. It's elevated, so it can go directly into large buildings so you don't even need to go outside to board. A large skyscraper would have a station, or probably even multiple stations (at different levels), built right into the building to handle all the workers there.
At which point, charge for the PRT, make the subway free.
Exactly: subways are good enough (in such a dense environment as NYC) for moving masses of people, and having enough SkyTran rails might be infeasible to replace it, but keep it as a higher-priced option and it'll pay for the subway.
I don't think handicap access would be that hard to do in practice. You'd probably need certain stations which have a wheelchair ramp, or perhaps just a small elevator, and then either the seats can be moved out of the way enough to fit a wheelchair, or perhaps you can just have special wheelchair pods: when a handicapped person needs to travel, they'll use their SkyTran smartphone app to request a wheelchair pod, and then they'll just have to wait a bit longer for one of them to automatically route itself to them. There's no requirement that every pod be exactly the same.
The thing you're missing is that we already have roads which are sized for peak times, and SkyTran has far higher capacity per rail than roads do, for a bunch of reasons:
1) SkyTran has no intersections. On roads (surface streets, not limited-access highways), you have to constantly stop-and-go because of traffic lights. SkyTran doesn't have this problem: any place rails have to cross, you just change the elevation a bit so that the different directions don't interfere, and then have a few extra rails joining them for cars which need to move from one rail to the other to change direction. How much time do you waste sitting at traffic lights?
2) SkyTran goes much faster than cars. In the city, it can go 50-100mph. Try that in a suburban area in a car. And it can do that nonstop, from the point you get in to the point you get out, though perhaps with a bit of slowing when it changes rails.
3) On regular roads, cars have to keep huge amounts of space between them for safety, because humans suck at piloting vehicles in formation. SkyTran doesn't have this problem, and can pack pods together densely even at very high speeds.
SkyTran's designers claim that a single SkyTran rail has the capacity of two freeways lanes. Obviously, even a single freeway lane can carry a lot more traffic than any surface street which has stop lights. So we wouldn't need that much SkyTran infrastructure to match our current roads.
Also don't forget that our roads are full of all kinds of vehicles, not just commuters: semi-trucks, cargo vans, contractor pickups, soccer moms with minivans full of kids, people going on road trip vacations, etc. SkyTran doesn't replace any of these, it's only for 1-2 people per pod, and mainly meant for commuters (which of course is probably the majority of traffic during peak hours). It doesn't replace the road system, it supplements it. It probably would allow cities to eliminate extra road lanes in many places though, to save on maintenance costs.
That's a different issue. As I understand it, the EU is not dictating things like minimum wage to Greece. PR isn't the only territory or nation using the USD: lots of other territories use it too, such as Palau, Micronesia, US Virgin Islands, etc. And a bunch of nations too: Belize's currency is pegged to it 2:1, and Zimbabwe now uses the USD as its official currency because theirs was worthless. Obviously, foreign nations like Zimbabwe are not going to implement things like US Federal minimum wage standards, and they seem to think they're much better off with a strong currency than with their own worthless one.
If you think Greece is a messed-up country economically, they're an economic paradise compared to Zimbabwe.
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Having done a great deal of the work myself, I'd also throw in soul-crushing. I've spent years developing apps for companies that ultimately went bankrupt. The product of my years of work? Gone. Thrown away. Has my work actually helped anyone? Hard to say. Probably not. Definitely not directly. Not in any meaningful sense.
I'd like to second this sentiment. Very little of the work I've done has actually been at all meaningful. There was one job where I did some work on a product which is used in many retail stores, so it's pretty cool when I go to one of those stores and see that product in use there, running my software (presumably, I don't work there any more so I don't know if they changed it). But that job didn't last that long. There's a couple other jobs where the thing I worked on was used for a while. But there was a lot of stuff that just ended up getting shit-canned.
This is why Groklaw shut down, actually.
Really? Do you have any more links about this, or can you expand on it?
A story like what? "I worked for a while for this small business, was paid as a contractor instead of a regular employee, even though I was definitely treated as an employee, so I sent the IRS a SS-8 form and never heard back from them. Then I worked for another company in the same capacity, filed another SS-8 form, and nothing happened there either." How is that "a story to kill for"? Who knows, maybe the IRS called up the employer, he disagreed, and they closed the case. Even assuming the employer is definitely in the wrong, but what kind of story is the journalist going to get? He can call the IRS and they'll give him some BS answer like "we contacted the employer and determined that there was no wrongdoing and that the contractor status was correct". Or maybe "we're swamped with investigations and this wasn't high enough priority for us to get to yet".
Whatever the excuse is, there isn't much of a story here, not unless the journalist gets hundreds of such people all with the same story and shows a big pattern of lack of enforcement. But that would require a lot of work as an investigative journalist, and we don't have any more of those these days.
Terminator and Matrix had AI with entirely different goals. In the Matrix, the AI didn't want to eradicate humans; it somehow used them as an energy supply (which of course didn't really make any sense, but it's the premise you have to accept for the story to work). It just wanted to control humans and use them, so it had to deal with the ones that didn't go with the program. Eradicating them all would have been throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
In the Terminator movies, you're right: the AI is ridiculously inefficient and ineffective in dealing with humans, which it considers pests and wants to eradicate. Of course, there again that's the premise you have to accept for the story to work. Every sci-fi movie I believe has one of these: some completely implausible premise that you just need to accept. And it's not just sci-fi, it's every other movie too. There's always something completely unrealistic about them; off the top of my head, think about the old show "Friends": how does this group of not-so-gainfully-employed people afford to live in such a luxurious location in an extremely high-rent district?
Blade Runner: Organic humanoid robots, flying cars, interstellar travel.
I'm pretty sure Blade Runner did not depict interstellar travel at all; it only depicted travel within the solar system, and colonization of other worlds here. It was obviously overly-optimistic about this, as it was supposed to occur in 2017 (IIRC), and the idea of humans moving offworld to colonies on Venus and Mars or wherever in that timeframe (a few decades from 1983) is not realistic. But it's still a far cry from interstellar travel, short of some revolutionary discovery in fundamental physics. Realistically, even if we suddenly devoted all our resources to building Moon and Mars habitats and Lagrange-point space stations big enough to hold tens of millions of humans or more (in the movie, most of the population had already moved off-world), it would probably take well over a century to develop the technology and infrastructure needed to do that.
The problem is that it isn't going to fix anything, and will just cause problems for him. This problem of treating employees as "contractors" isn't just with this state, it's everywhere. I've seen it with a bunch of small businesses with friends/relatives. Supposedly, the IRS takes a dim view of this practice, and allows employees to file SS-8 forms to report such employers, and force them to pay their proper share of FICA taxes and such. However, in practice, the IRS simply ignores these submissions and lets employers do whatever they want.
But where would we be as a society if people were afraid to take such risks in order to fix wrongs?
When society is so screwed-up that taking risks never actually improves things, and only results in trouble for the whistleblower, why bother? Face it, our current society hates whistleblowers. They're even called "rats". They're not well-perceived by anyone except a minority of people who are already malcontents.
This guy is a software developer; the market for that profession is actually really good currently (though much more so in certain areas than others). He just needs to go find a new job. He'll probably get paid a lot more too. State governments aren't exactly known for being high-paying employers.
Of course it's arbitrary, it's a definition, all definitions are arbitrary. No one really wants to memorize dozens of names of mostly tiny objects when they're in science class learning about the solar system, especially when a bunch of them don't even have decent names, but some alphanumeric designation. So we limit the list to the ones that are large enough to be of real interest. Before, we thought it was sufficient to make the cutoff line be whether they had enough gravity to become mostly spherical. Now we find out that there's a bunch of bodies that meet that definition. So we change the definition to exclude those, and call those merely "dwarf planets". But Pluto isn't big enough to make the cut, so it gets grouped in with the other dwarfs.
So take your pick, do you want 8 "planets" and a bunch of "dwarf planets", or do you want dozens of "planets" to memorize the names of, most of them being little more than big asteroids?
And stop complaining about it being arbitrary. If you defined "planet" to be anything that orbits the Sun, there's countless objects that do that, including who knows how many in the asteroid belt, plus far more in the Kuiper Belt. So the previous definition was arbitrary too, because no one wanted to group Saturn, Jupiter, or even Earth in with a bunch of asteroids just because of their orbits.
It isn't a planet, you moron, it's a dwarf planet. If you define "planet" (the non-dwarf kind) to include Pluto, then you need to also call Vesta and a bunch of other objects "planets", so instead of 9 planets, it'll be somewhere in the teens, and growing as we discover more Kuiper Belt objects.
Can you read? omnichad's post is the one that brought up the US.
Mine doesn't, mostly because I think they came to the conclusion that making sure there is a pen at the desks for filling out paperwork before going up to the tellers was important--and people couldn't be relied upon to be polite enough to mention to the staff that they took the last pen.
That doesn't seem to be a problem with my bank: they have probably 100 pens at the counter at all times, and they keep it stocked up. I'm sure it's part of the staff's duties to check on the pen bins and make sure no one's going to be hunting for a pen.
Comparing to the US makes no sense; everyone knows US cops are the worst in the world. That's like comparing the UK to Somalia in economic power or something. Being better than the country that's the worst in the world isn't anything to be proud of.
Other businesses--particularly banks--chain the pen to their desk (if you haven't seen this, I'm being absolutely serious).
My bank doesn't do this: it has a huge supply of free pens with their name and logo on them at the desk where you stop to fill out your deposit ticket, and they encourage people to take them. Free advertising is worth a lot more (to a local place like a bank) than worrying about the cost of some $0.10 pens.
8kWh? Where'd you get that? Even if you left the 5W phone charger plugged in all day long (24h), that's only 120 Watt-hours. Here in the US, that's about 2 cents' worth of electricity. And that's not even normal usage: a phone only draws 5W when charging (it's probably more like 6W at the outlet, because of inefficiency in the charger itself); a normal phone can be fully charged in an hour or two, and after that goes into trickle-charge mode where it draws very little power from the charger. So you're really look at less than a half-cent worth of electricity.
People who want to use the best browser, that's who.
IE is trash of course, and Chrome, while it was a good option a while ago because FF was so buggy and Chrome was leaner and faster, today Chrome is a slow memory hog and FF has fixed most of its problems and runs much faster and with far less memory.
It's time for you to find a new place to do your banking. Using Flash on a bank/CU site is unacceptable, and shows that place has no clue how to do IT properly.
I don't need to build one to know that building things in factories is cheaper than building everything as a one-off on-site. This is basic engineering, and the basis of the industrial revolution.
As far as paying for the subway goes, I doubt it, I'd have the PRT lines pay for themselves, property and sales taxes pay for the subways.
At least until we're out of the PRT expansion phase.
I'm not an exec at SkyTran or anything, but it seems to me that once it's built out in a city, and if you price it artificially high (because you're in Manhattan and you don't want to overload the system with subway users; outside of Manhattan you'd keep the prices normal, so there's be a special fare schedule just for Manhattan or other dense cities with subways), the system is going to generate surplus money. Inside the city, some of that money can go to funding the subway, assuming the city has full or partial ownership of the system and helped fund it. It'd be a great investment for the city.
One trick is that I want 'the best' to win - because once a couple cities have it, you can run a line between the two, putting rest stations in every so often. Run it up to 100 mph+ and it'll easily be competitive with rail and planes below ~300 miles.
It can do better than that: from what I remember, the SkyTran people claim it can go up to 150mph. Inside a city, it wouldn't go that fast, but between cities it can. It's definitely usable as a superior alternative to planes, trains, and cars for inter-city hops. At 150mph, it's easily better than our current train system since Amtrak doesn't exceed 125mph (and only in the northeast there; Acela goes a bit faster but I think only 150 and only at certain points because their track system is such a mess). That'd make it the default option for regional travel; coast-to-coast you'll still want a plane.
Very good analysis. I do still wonder though how Denmark managed to get a permanent opt-out. Denmark isn't a cheap place to live by a long shot, it's probably one of the most expensive places in Europe to live.
It seems like the EU project would have done better by setting up two currencies, a strong-Euro and a weak-Euro, and keeping them independent of each other, with the strong economies using the more valuable one and places like Greece and Portugal and the eastern nations using the weak one.
10 years ago, the number of smartphones was exactly zero, outside of crappy junk like some WinCE phones. Now everyone and his brother has one. Luckily, it just took a couple of companies willing to invest and build the things, instead of a bunch of naysayers whining that there aren't any, so we can never have them.
Sorry if I was unclear. Being part of the EU and using the Euro, as I understand it, does not require any member countries to implement a particular minimum wage or anything like that (unlike being a State in the USA). Greece is only being forced to do such things now because they needed bail-outs.
My point is that being part of a currency union, or just unilaterally adopting another country's currency, does not require adopting all the other economic policies that country has. Zimbabwe and Ecuador don't have US minimum wages, even though they use the USD as their official currency.
Go look at the SkyTran website and Wikipedia pages.
The reason it's so cheap is because the rail system can be built in factories, whereas light rail is just like road-building: it has to be done from scratch on-site, which is always more expensive. Plus light rail requires buying up land, doing eminent domain seizures, fighting with landowners in court, ripping up existing streets and redoing them to fit the light rail track, etc. SkyTran just requires digging some holes for utility poles, installing them, then coming along with a small crane and hanging the rails. It's not much more invasive than doing some power line work, though in some places it might require trimming or removing trees.
And I hope I don't have to explain why it's obviously far cheaper than building a subway.
As you mention, while Skytran wouldn't have the capacity to deal with Manhattan, it could handle pretty much anything less. It'd kill the taxis there, which would be why it'd never go in there.
SkyTran doesn't need the capacity to handle all traffic in Manhattan, it would just need to serve as a supplement to the subway (a significantly higher-priced alternative, for rich and/or impatient people), and a replacement for the taxis, which would be great for pedestrians, cyclists, and other ground traffic by getting all those cars off the surface streets. Of course, it would need to overcome the corruption between the taxi companies and the city government, which could be a real problem, but maybe if enough cities in other countries, especially "3rd world" countries, adopt this and make NYC look like a backwards 3rd-world kleptocracy with its antiquated taxicabs, lack of SkyTran, and significant traffic accidents and deaths, then maybe the voters will vote in some politicians who make it happen.
As for overcrowding - remember that you can parallelize the tracks to increase density even more. If the building is big enough, it gets it's own station.
Yes, exactly: this is another big potential benefit of SkyTran. It's elevated, so it can go directly into large buildings so you don't even need to go outside to board. A large skyscraper would have a station, or probably even multiple stations (at different levels), built right into the building to handle all the workers there.
At which point, charge for the PRT, make the subway free.
Exactly: subways are good enough (in such a dense environment as NYC) for moving masses of people, and having enough SkyTran rails might be infeasible to replace it, but keep it as a higher-priced option and it'll pay for the subway.
I don't think handicap access would be that hard to do in practice. You'd probably need certain stations which have a wheelchair ramp, or perhaps just a small elevator, and then either the seats can be moved out of the way enough to fit a wheelchair, or perhaps you can just have special wheelchair pods: when a handicapped person needs to travel, they'll use their SkyTran smartphone app to request a wheelchair pod, and then they'll just have to wait a bit longer for one of them to automatically route itself to them. There's no requirement that every pod be exactly the same.
The thing you're missing is that we already have roads which are sized for peak times, and SkyTran has far higher capacity per rail than roads do, for a bunch of reasons:
1) SkyTran has no intersections. On roads (surface streets, not limited-access highways), you have to constantly stop-and-go because of traffic lights. SkyTran doesn't have this problem: any place rails have to cross, you just change the elevation a bit so that the different directions don't interfere, and then have a few extra rails joining them for cars which need to move from one rail to the other to change direction. How much time do you waste sitting at traffic lights?
2) SkyTran goes much faster than cars. In the city, it can go 50-100mph. Try that in a suburban area in a car. And it can do that nonstop, from the point you get in to the point you get out, though perhaps with a bit of slowing when it changes rails.
3) On regular roads, cars have to keep huge amounts of space between them for safety, because humans suck at piloting vehicles in formation. SkyTran doesn't have this problem, and can pack pods together densely even at very high speeds.
SkyTran's designers claim that a single SkyTran rail has the capacity of two freeways lanes. Obviously, even a single freeway lane can carry a lot more traffic than any surface street which has stop lights. So we wouldn't need that much SkyTran infrastructure to match our current roads.
Also don't forget that our roads are full of all kinds of vehicles, not just commuters: semi-trucks, cargo vans, contractor pickups, soccer moms with minivans full of kids, people going on road trip vacations, etc. SkyTran doesn't replace any of these, it's only for 1-2 people per pod, and mainly meant for commuters (which of course is probably the majority of traffic during peak hours). It doesn't replace the road system, it supplements it. It probably would allow cities to eliminate extra road lanes in many places though, to save on maintenance costs.
That's a different issue. As I understand it, the EU is not dictating things like minimum wage to Greece. PR isn't the only territory or nation using the USD: lots of other territories use it too, such as Palau, Micronesia, US Virgin Islands, etc. And a bunch of nations too: Belize's currency is pegged to it 2:1, and Zimbabwe now uses the USD as its official currency because theirs was worthless. Obviously, foreign nations like Zimbabwe are not going to implement things like US Federal minimum wage standards, and they seem to think they're much better off with a strong currency than with their own worthless one.
If you think Greece is a messed-up country economically, they're an economic paradise compared to Zimbabwe.