There is also histoplasmosis in the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys. You expect to see a couple of small calcifications in the lungs of people who have lived in one or both for any length of time.
My half-brother is a sound guy. Lived in Nashville for years, and one day he had to put a lavalier mic on Dolly. He was a little timid at first, until Dolly told him "Don't worry, son, they don't bite."
Subsidizing rural citizens primarily benefits the city dwellers who enjoy lower prices for rurally generated staples. That is why building roads into sparsely populated areas makes sense. Cities make more money when costs of living are lower. Subsidies to rural areas lower the cost of living in cities.
I guess I'm going to have to keep posting this every couple of months until you brilliant urbanists catch up with the early nineteenth century on the economics of cities.
There's a book - a dry book, I'll grant, but a damned fine one - called Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. Its author, William Cronon, talks in an early chapter about the work of Johann Heinrich von Thünen. von Thünen recognized that cities function as concentrators of wealth that is fundamentally generated in their hinterlands, allowing specialists to turn the productive capacity of the land - food, energy, and raw materials - into everything from laws to technology. The wealth of a city is directly dependent on the productivity of its economic watershed. Chicago became an economic powerhouse because it was able to tap its hinterland more productively than other places - the prairie made building railroads less difficult and hence less expensive, while the availability of cheap water transport that allowed inexpensive trade via the Erie Canal allowed Chicago to tap into the markets of New York (and New York to tap into the productivity of the American Midwest - no small contribution to its rise as the preeminent city of the East Coast). Rail allowed transport of good across the gentle hill separating the Great Lakes and the Mississippi near Chicago. And so forth
In short, your cities depend on cheap West Virginia coal and Pennsylvania gas to power and heat themselves, dams in the Sierras to have enough water to drink, and farmers everywhere to be able to feed and clothe yourselves. Those roads you build at taxpayer expense in rural areas are convenient for the locals, it's true, but it's the city that primarily enjoys the benefit of decreased transport costs for its raw materials. It's hardly unusual for poor people to object to high taxes, especially when they understand that even taxes that are nominally spent on them - for roads, e.g. - will really end up in the pockets of a city guy who's friends with the politicians spending the money.
The transistor is the most important invention of all time. It made IC's, and thus chips, and thus computing power, and thus everything we possess, better. It's awesome on the level of fire, the wheel, and the steam engine.
Solutions that work in ethnically homogeneous countries containing ten million people don't work in ethnically diverse countries with three hundred million people. If you can't understand scale, I can't help you. By your logic, we could all be Switzerland, producing private banks and watches, and all be incredibly wealthy. The real world needs oil, and steel, and all sorts of things that the Swiss don't bother themselves with.
AKA: you're always responsible for saving your own ass. If you are going to come near the far side, fall off. I've come within a few feet of the end of one of those things before and planned to jump if I got to the last third of the pool with much momentum.
They also don't have large numbers of blacks or Native Americans (a group that comprises nearly all Hispanics of Central and North America, as well as being a major component of the ethnic makeup of a lot of nominally white people), both of which ethnic groups have much higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and cardiac disease than Europeans.
Not only that, part of the problem is that the US started from a relatively high cost basis - it's actually below the OECD mean for health care inflation over 2000-2009 (source).
I'm sure you're aware of this distinction, but for those who aren't: The FLSA has exceptions, of course, but people who are not in a management role are nearly always considered non-exempt, and the minimum-wage and overtime provisions apply to the vast majority of businesses.
The USA is also an enormous, ethnically diverse country. Northern European countries have the benefit of massive ethnic homogeneity - lots of things become possible when nearly everyone has the same cultural beliefs, because you can use societal pressure instead of laws to shape behavior, and when populations are small you don't have to convince nearly as many people. The solutions found in Scandinavia work for those countries. But that doesn't mean that you could scale them up to the US.
inventions were more plentiful and beneficial to society than they are today
I truly cannot comprehend how you can believe this is true.
Last month, my wife and I were able to travel from a small city in the US to London. Spent a few days there. Took the train to the south of France, rented a car, drove to a little town in northeastern Spain, went to a friend's wedding, drove back to France, took the train to Paris, and spent a few days there before flying home. In 1800 you couldn't do that in two weeks - you would have taken two months for one of the Atlantic crossings. Travel to other continents would be only for those wealthy enough to take six months or more off work.
The Kindle offers 3G-capable models. That is Amazon's killer feature: you can buy their products almost anywhere on Earth, with instant delivery. And it's not like it's hard to strip the DRM.
same day delivery is almost irrelevant for this sort of thing
Not when you're not at home. Usually, I'm indifferent to when my purchases arrive, as long as it's within a week or so. The genius of the 3G Kindle is that you can get instant delivery while traveling - which is a huge chunk of why it's worthwhile to have one. If I go on vacation and read through everything I planned to read - I need a book now. Kindle 3G can deliver that.
Depends. Just went to London for a week and found that Google Maps Transit was pretty fantastic. Obviously, you're going to need to be in a big city for it to work, but it's not like tourists are going to be trying to suss out transportation in out-of-the-way hamlets. We ended up taking the bus a lot more than the tube, both because it involved fewer stairs and because you actually got to see the city as you traveled. Total times were pretty similar - tube is faster but involves more of a walk at the end, bus is slower but drops you much closer to your destination. And I got to see some genuine anticapitalist protesters mix it up with the Met in Oxford Street - you won't find that on the tube!
The number of taxis in NYC is fixed, and the price of a "medallion" to operate one hangs around $1M (source). That's not an open-but-regulated business. That's a closed, protected one.
TSA Pre only exists at certain airports. I'm Global Entry/TSA Pre and I've waited in the regular lines when in first class domestic. It's nice, but it's not a cure-all.
Germany has abused the Euro to get its export success. If the US had currency union with Mexico and Canada, then the same sort of arbitrage might be possible for us.
Project Butter hasn't effectively made its way into every handset yet. Not even a Galaxy S3 (that was last year's flagship device on VZW) running stock ROM. Still have plenty of lag. I distinctly prefer Android over iOS, but my wife's iPhone never staggers the same way that my GS3 does a few times a day.
There's also the bias that people get from what you listen to as a teen/young adult. Take something I listened to when I was 17-20 years old. I have a lot of life memories that are intertwined with music from that era - not so much the case today.
IOW: you are likely to fondly recall mediocre music from certain periods in your life because it was what was playing (e.g.) the first time you got laid. As you age, you either have to develop a tolerance for listening to crap in order to find the gems, or you have to find someone who has a musical taste similar to yours that is willing to sort through the junk for you.
The restroom is a bit of a problem - flight crews currently use the ones at the front of the plane. The aisles are blocked with drink carts by the flight attendants while this happens.
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There is also histoplasmosis in the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys. You expect to see a couple of small calcifications in the lungs of people who have lived in one or both for any length of time.
My guess is that weight and size don't really matter for a big fixed plant, but do for a relatively small one located way up in the air.
My half-brother is a sound guy. Lived in Nashville for years, and one day he had to put a lavalier mic on Dolly. He was a little timid at first, until Dolly told him "Don't worry, son, they don't bite."
Subsidizing rural citizens primarily benefits the city dwellers who enjoy lower prices for rurally generated staples. That is why building roads into sparsely populated areas makes sense. Cities make more money when costs of living are lower. Subsidies to rural areas lower the cost of living in cities.
I guess I'm going to have to keep posting this every couple of months until you brilliant urbanists catch up with the early nineteenth century on the economics of cities.
There's a book - a dry book, I'll grant, but a damned fine one - called Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. Its author, William Cronon, talks in an early chapter about the work of Johann Heinrich von Thünen. von Thünen recognized that cities function as concentrators of wealth that is fundamentally generated in their hinterlands, allowing specialists to turn the productive capacity of the land - food, energy, and raw materials - into everything from laws to technology. The wealth of a city is directly dependent on the productivity of its economic watershed. Chicago became an economic powerhouse because it was able to tap its hinterland more productively than other places - the prairie made building railroads less difficult and hence less expensive, while the availability of cheap water transport that allowed inexpensive trade via the Erie Canal allowed Chicago to tap into the markets of New York (and New York to tap into the productivity of the American Midwest - no small contribution to its rise as the preeminent city of the East Coast). Rail allowed transport of good across the gentle hill separating the Great Lakes and the Mississippi near Chicago. And so forth
In short, your cities depend on cheap West Virginia coal and Pennsylvania gas to power and heat themselves, dams in the Sierras to have enough water to drink, and farmers everywhere to be able to feed and clothe yourselves. Those roads you build at taxpayer expense in rural areas are convenient for the locals, it's true, but it's the city that primarily enjoys the benefit of decreased transport costs for its raw materials. It's hardly unusual for poor people to object to high taxes, especially when they understand that even taxes that are nominally spent on them - for roads, e.g. - will really end up in the pockets of a city guy who's friends with the politicians spending the money.
The transistor is the most important invention of all time. It made IC's, and thus chips, and thus computing power, and thus everything we possess, better. It's awesome on the level of fire, the wheel, and the steam engine.
Solutions that work in ethnically homogeneous countries containing ten million people don't work in ethnically diverse countries with three hundred million people. If you can't understand scale, I can't help you. By your logic, we could all be Switzerland, producing private banks and watches, and all be incredibly wealthy. The real world needs oil, and steel, and all sorts of things that the Swiss don't bother themselves with.
AKA: you're always responsible for saving your own ass. If you are going to come near the far side, fall off. I've come within a few feet of the end of one of those things before and planned to jump if I got to the last third of the pool with much momentum.
They also don't have large numbers of blacks or Native Americans (a group that comprises nearly all Hispanics of Central and North America, as well as being a major component of the ethnic makeup of a lot of nominally white people), both of which ethnic groups have much higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and cardiac disease than Europeans.
Not only that, part of the problem is that the US started from a relatively high cost basis - it's actually below the OECD mean for health care inflation over 2000-2009 (source).
your employer isn't required to pay you overtime
I'm sure you're aware of this distinction, but for those who aren't: The FLSA has exceptions, of course, but people who are not in a management role are nearly always considered non-exempt, and the minimum-wage and overtime provisions apply to the vast majority of businesses.
The USA is also an enormous, ethnically diverse country. Northern European countries have the benefit of massive ethnic homogeneity - lots of things become possible when nearly everyone has the same cultural beliefs, because you can use societal pressure instead of laws to shape behavior, and when populations are small you don't have to convince nearly as many people. The solutions found in Scandinavia work for those countries. But that doesn't mean that you could scale them up to the US.
inventions were more plentiful and beneficial to society than they are today
I truly cannot comprehend how you can believe this is true.
Last month, my wife and I were able to travel from a small city in the US to London. Spent a few days there. Took the train to the south of France, rented a car, drove to a little town in northeastern Spain, went to a friend's wedding, drove back to France, took the train to Paris, and spent a few days there before flying home. In 1800 you couldn't do that in two weeks - you would have taken two months for one of the Atlantic crossings. Travel to other continents would be only for those wealthy enough to take six months or more off work.
The Kindle offers 3G-capable models. That is Amazon's killer feature: you can buy their products almost anywhere on Earth, with instant delivery. And it's not like it's hard to strip the DRM.
same day delivery is almost irrelevant for this sort of thing
Not when you're not at home. Usually, I'm indifferent to when my purchases arrive, as long as it's within a week or so. The genius of the 3G Kindle is that you can get instant delivery while traveling - which is a huge chunk of why it's worthwhile to have one. If I go on vacation and read through everything I planned to read - I need a book now. Kindle 3G can deliver that.
Depends. Just went to London for a week and found that Google Maps Transit was pretty fantastic. Obviously, you're going to need to be in a big city for it to work, but it's not like tourists are going to be trying to suss out transportation in out-of-the-way hamlets. We ended up taking the bus a lot more than the tube, both because it involved fewer stairs and because you actually got to see the city as you traveled. Total times were pretty similar - tube is faster but involves more of a walk at the end, bus is slower but drops you much closer to your destination. And I got to see some genuine anticapitalist protesters mix it up with the Met in Oxford Street - you won't find that on the tube!
The number of taxis in NYC is fixed, and the price of a "medallion" to operate one hangs around $1M (source). That's not an open-but-regulated business. That's a closed, protected one.
TSA Pre only exists at certain airports. I'm Global Entry/TSA Pre and I've waited in the regular lines when in first class domestic. It's nice, but it's not a cure-all.
Germany has abused the Euro to get its export success. If the US had currency union with Mexico and Canada, then the same sort of arbitrage might be possible for us.
Just ask all those union workers in Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Bethlehem how it's worked out for them.
If it's powered, it has a connection to the train monitoring system that tells it there's a stopped train ahead. If it's not, it doesn't.
Project Butter hasn't effectively made its way into every handset yet. Not even a Galaxy S3 (that was last year's flagship device on VZW) running stock ROM. Still have plenty of lag. I distinctly prefer Android over iOS, but my wife's iPhone never staggers the same way that my GS3 does a few times a day.
If you turn it off, it doesn't know if there's a train in front of it or not.
There's also the bias that people get from what you listen to as a teen/young adult. Take something I listened to when I was 17-20 years old. I have a lot of life memories that are intertwined with music from that era - not so much the case today.
IOW: you are likely to fondly recall mediocre music from certain periods in your life because it was what was playing (e.g.) the first time you got laid. As you age, you either have to develop a tolerance for listening to crap in order to find the gems, or you have to find someone who has a musical taste similar to yours that is willing to sort through the junk for you.
Just turning it off isn't a catastrophic failure.
Until it slams into another train while coasting to a stop...
And no, having it automatically stop isn't a perfect solution, either, because then it becomes the target rather than the projectile.
The restroom is a bit of a problem - flight crews currently use the ones at the front of the plane. The aisles are blocked with drink carts by the flight attendants while this happens.