AnodyneComplex

The cost is dominated by the price of the underlying land, which is privately owned. The actual construction cost is much lower than $900 million a mile.

It seems like we are talking about different things. No one is arguing that there shouldn't be multiple map interfaces, but rather that if the data was shared, you could have more investment in the interesting parts.

I'm glad that Nvidia and AMD compete to build better graphics chips, I'm also very glad they both work with a shared, cooperative standard (PCI-E) so I can plug them into my computer. They've chosen to compete on some areas and cooperate in others.

The parents are suggesting, hey, wouldn't it be nice if _everyone_ contributed data to OSM, and then competed on providing the best interface on top of that, rather than constructing data moats. Is it realistic that Google would do this? Of course not. But if 10 companies are all constructing their own data completely independently, that's an awful lot of duplicated work that could be avoided.

This seems to be attacking a strawman. The original comment was bemoaning the duplicated effort instead of cooperation amongst parties.

If you had a single company, you wouldn't have 10 teams doing the exact same job. The competition here isn't fruitful because so much of the work is shared. Competition is more effective when there is a diversity of approaches.

It's hard to do this just based on raw tax numbers. For instance, Alaska, Wyoming and South Dakota all have large scale extraction operations as a fraction of population. These supply a large fraction of income and are obviously tied to a particular geographical.

My guess is that states with more social services aren't necessarily going to have fewer people below the poverty line, but that being poor is not as bad there (via access to health care, food/rent subsidies, etc). That's obviously harder to pin a number on though.

The whole point is that it doesn't benefit you, _if you're a potential suspect_ to talk to the police. This shouldn't be a surprise no matter how perfect the justice system is -- it's better to not be involved with it if you can.

I'm not sure why healthcare makes for big government? We already have wildly successful healthcare programs in the US that are government managed and are cheaper than private alternatives. So we should trust the government can provide them because... it does. I wouldn't want the federal government running every pastry shop on the other hand.

I have no idea where concealed carry fits into this.

I think the idea is that Boeing gets a big head start on some commercial applications. E.g. they build a military cargo aircraft and can bill all of the R&D to the govt, then quickly convert the plans to something UPS wants.

Probably similarly for flight control software, electronics etc.

Though I'm not sure how much transfer you would see now that the designs for commercial planes are so mature.

Unless it's gone radically downhill since I was there 4 years ago, it's really just fine...

I mean if you're paranoid about ever having anything happen to you, sure, don't go there. But honestly you should be more worried about heart disease than murder.

It's of course fine to suggest the current system could be improved.

But it doesn't rise to the level of the title "how to fix flying". The current system, for all of its warts, has proven to be amazingly safe.

But none of the suggestions would increase the density of aircraft around major airports. They're already operating at runway capacity during peak times.

This seems oddly filled with misinformation: flight paths aren't locked into flying over radar stations.

And what exactly are we trying to fix? The sky is big, it's not like we have a lack of flight space over the centre of the country... None of the suggestions seems to imply any big efficiency or safety gain.

I thought the author actually had a pretty skeptical take on things. The ending quote is pretty hilarious:

"It's a press release, Mary. The iodine algorithm saved your husband from the brink of ruin. His newfound sense of consumer empowerment was so invigorating to his spirit that he no longer needed any Mucinex at all."