I do multiple 12/13 hour flights per year. It's not a big deal once you get used to it. The hardest part is just preparing yourself to be able to shut down properly. We spend too much time constantly stimulated that sitting still for a while freaks people out.
I find there is a benefit to being alone with your thoughts for half a day or so, in a physically inactive state. How many people honestly ever spend that time 'switched off'.
It's all in how you approach it really, glass half full/empty
The true answer involves looking at the basic inputs of an economy and seeing which are being regulated heavily, and how that flows through as price increases.
Land, labour and energy are the basic inputs. You could argue capital as well. Technology is a productivity multiplier. Some things are getting cheaper - much cheaper. But other things are getting heavily regulated, which drives flow-on price increases.
The problem is those flow on increases have swamped the price reductions from automation. Technology price reductions are gradual and incremental, whereas regulation can be applied on thickly at the stroke of a pen.
Where I live, heavy regulation on land use causes shortages, which drives up the price of everything. To sell tech in a shop requires silly rent, and paying someone to mind the cash register has been regulated to be high. So while the price of a 8Gb isn stick has crashed, the shop and the employee have rocketed up.
Seriously? Ferrari impromptu infernos is an Internet meme. Those things self immolate all the time. New ones too, not old ones with leaky hoses. Google it, it's a thing.
Generally construction of luxury-only housing indicates high regulatory barriers. Because it is hard to make a building, then demand is high, and the costs of meeting the regulations is also high. The rational response to that is to make he unit-cost high.
If you placed sever restrictions on car production you'd find the surviving brands would be the luxury brands.
You could actually do that. If you sold options in an approved development with a five years delay in start time, you'd probably get in plenty of cash and not actually have any new residents. You could get a healthy market going in just the right to own an apartment in the future.
I actually think it would be very hard to soak up demand at this point.
I think adding high rise is the right choice, as long as it is accompanied with increases in transport links. It's all very well to add in a couple of thousand people, but they all have to get in and out and buy groceries etc. you don't want each of those people owning a car and making the traffic worse.
I think there should be mor emphasis on making other parts of the Bay Area more like the things people want from the city / peninsular proper. Whether that is transport, cultural or liveability, it should all be possible.
It actually describes Australia, which for the most part is uninhabited and undeveloped, and has massive amounts of mostly untouched wilderness.
Take a land mass the size of the lower 48 states, and take out all the people except for Oregon on the west coast and Florida on the east coast. Remove nearly all the interstates and all but three of the railroads. That is Australia.
You can negotiate plenty of labor movement just with some simple qualifications, like not having a criminal history, being an eu citizen for 5+ years, no access to welfare for 3 years, things like that. I think most brexit supporters would go for that. The opposition is not to immigration in general from what I understand, but to uncontrolled immigration with which the UK parliament has no control.
Modern visa granting can be done electronically like the U.S. ESTA and could easily be achieved with little disruption. It could also prove a handy earner for a small fee.
I think it is misrepresenting the majority of brexit supporters to say they don't want any immigration. All the ones I talked to just wanted to have a say, and the EU did not give them that.
Your second point is incorrect. There are plenty of trade agreements without free movement included. Indeed the EC (forerunner to the EU) was precisely free trade without free movement.
The first point is debatable. There is a lot of political power to be gained by the person who pulls the trigger if they do it succesfully. I think it is 50:50, but there is a lot of upside to be had if it is done well and with plenty of stability and adjustment time. Anyone in the Conservative party who refuses to pull the trigger will be subject to endless criticism and undermining from the significant base of people that wants it done.
That might be your specific interests but I'd wager you didn't come from a family with anyone in jail, your parents sent you to school and stressed its importance, and were well read for their education level.
Of course outliers exist and some very successful people come from very dysfunctional families. But if you look at enough people, they come out in temperament and attitude very similar to their family. The really surprising thing is how often one family will produce two top level musicians or sports players.
Leaving aside heritability, the environment in which the child will grow up is more or less set in concrete by the time they are born. This includes the parents socio-economic level, but more importantly to that, their attitudes towards relationships, learning, critical thought, reading, victim vs control personality and plenty more. A house without books doesn't fill with books when the child arrives.
Pretty much by the time the first cry is made, a huge chunk of their future is already written. The margin is small, but, having said that, small changes at the margin can make a big difference in individuals.
Don't forget the extra taxes paid to provide the schooling and hospitals!
It's a good thing for these to be spread out - otherwise those who don't have kids are free riders on those that do. A healthy educated child not only supplies a lifetime of taxes paid, they also provide the labor to care for the ageing who didn't have children.
The article seems to be wandering down the tangled nest of errors called the labor theory of value, or one of its offshoots. This bedevilled people for a long time who could not explain why a diamond was worth so much when it cost little effort to make and is objectively useless.
Modern children are diamonds. They are not that difficult to make, mostly useless but give great utility to the parent. Modern children are also rare, thanks to birth control. Most affluent societies are below replacement rate, while 1800s societies had kids everywhere. The most spoiled and indulged children are the ones who don't have any siblings.
So...
- kids give their parents pride and joy (like a diamond)
- kids are relatively rare compared to the prior period
- the upbringing of a child is 20 year project for parents now, so the loss of effort as they get older increases the pain of loss
Most of these points are in reverse to the prior period, when you'd have 5 or 6 children in the hope of getting 2 or 3 to adulthood, which was onset much earlier. You had more, invested in them less, and everyone else had more as well.
I agree that people should be more connected to their food supply, even if for no other reason than to be able to select better produce for themselves.
I was witness to a cattle being slaughtered while staying on a beef property. It is confronting, I'll give you that. However I still enjoy eating meat but I strive to always eat locally produced and I try and eat what is in season. Again this is more of a quality preference than a moral stand. I worked in a butcher for a while and that taught me a lot.
I am lucky to live in an area abundant in food, so I do feel for those trapped in a big city at the end of industrial supply chains. For dinner tonight I had freshly caught fish that were swimming around yesterday. The difference is amazing.
We often modify our speech for the audience - put someone in a party situation where they are the odd one out and it will be harder for them to follow along.
Sorry, but no. Creative destruction is the end state of capitalism as has been proven time and time again. There are no examples of monopolies lasting more than a few years unless they have overt support from the state.
Large governments cause monopolies to happen. You said the same thing. Business co-opting a government to creat a monopoly is only possible when the large government exists. You could argue that water and dirt don't cause trees to grow, but without either there is no tree. The language definition is immaterial.
Increases in government size can only occur by taking over parts of the economy into state monopolies. The ultimate large government is a totalitarian communist government, which has a monopoly on everything.
The ultimate cure for monopoly behaviour is a smaller government and more competition by avoiding regulations that favour larger operations over smaller ones.
You can't use terms like 'useful' when measuring jobs or output. It's in the eye of the observer.
Apparently nail painting businesses are a viable industry, in my eyes they are totally useless.
Most of the businesses we recognise today would have been hilarious to our ancestors. Paying good money for a personal trainer? Paying someone to wash your car?
This is an age-old problem which keeps solving itself.
I find there is a benefit to being alone with your thoughts for half a day or so, in a physically inactive state. How many people honestly ever spend that time 'switched off'.
It's all in how you approach it really, glass half full/empty