Kind of like a tunnel under a city, with no stations per se, and using cars instead of trains!

Maybe someone will build a vacuum train (vactrain) that will run people at high speed in a near vacuum consuming immensely more power than a regular high speed train.

I'm sure someone will have something like an elite bus soon... one that they'll have to make sure the streets are super smooth or they won't be able to run.

Market rate also varies wildly by region. A person working at a job in California is likely paid far more than someone in Mississippi simply because of the CoL difference.

I know people who make a lot more as contractors, but they don't get benefits, it's all cash. They also don't have any real job security.

Plus let's not forget about the most overpaid employees of all: C levels especially the (often) token personality of the CEO. Unless they founded the company, they probably have zero actual vision. A great example is the difference between Steve Jobs and John Sculley. John was fine in a limited sense, but he was pretty useless for "vision" or whatever CEO's like to brag about. Jobs may have been a jerk to his employees, but he had actual vision. The most iconic parts of Tesla's vehicle planning was from the original founders: Eberhard and Tarpenning. Elon's contribution (Cybertruck) is likely to be considered the absolute worst botched vehicle design / rollout since the Edsel.

Most CEO's today could be replaced by an AI with a few data scientists to maintain the systems. Heck the job of CEO is almost perfectly suited to AI: Feed it data provided by humans / systems below, receive result.

Who cares? Just let him use it as AF1 without ANY modifications. I doubt there will be any problems.

To be fair, it's all MAGAt Maggie and Tommy Trumper understand. Trump appeals to them because he's the bully they want to be in real life. Look at Margarine Greene: She'll chase a high school kid for clout, but pout like a baby when a lib starts doing the same to her. So they get a free pass to be mean to those "other people" and still can cry when they are mean back.

By the by, if you haven't noticed that, you just admitted you're filtering reality. That's not an isolated issue, it's why people think you can have legitimate arguments with MAGAt's. You can't. They don't want a debate. They don't want facts. They don't want ANYTHING except being mean and owning the libz.

The best part is watching them cry hard when you do it back. I mean, they'll be rude / insult / belittle people all day... or cheer when others they agree with do that to people/groups they hate... but man do they get all self-righteous and become crybabies when someone is mean back. "BWAAAAHHHH! WHY YOU SO UNCIVIL MEANIE LIB?!?!"

I'm done being nice to Maggie MAGAt and Tommy Trumper. They don't respect civility, in fact they view it as a weakness.

MAGAt Maggie and Tommy Trumper will hear from Faux Newz, Breitshart, One Amerika Newz Netwerk, and Reich Side Broadcast Netwerk that the tariffs were totes great and that the GLORIOUS LEADER is totes a stabl jeanius. You will ignore the increase in fuel prices, and loss of jobs in the West Texas oil fields, as GLORIOUS LEADER accepts a 747-8i from an oil petrostate, during a petrostate tour. Don't forget to hate that new WOPE because he's got TDS! HEY LOOKS AT THAT... ILLEGALZ!

That will result in Maggie and Tommy screeching about how GLORIOUS LEADER OWNED THE LIBZ.

While I agree it will happen more to minorities, they will abuse anyone they think they can away with abusing. They don't care about race per se, just power. They want to make other people feel small while puffing up their own ego.

Most of my clients are in a hiring / spending freeze, changing as little as possible.

Most companies are trying to thread the needle. They can't even guess how tariffs are going to work, it changes constantly, so they're all hunkering down. The ones in the best position are trying to stay somewhat static in regards with employees, meaning they're trying to hold onto talent while this plays out. At the same time they're dropping any unnecessary leases, slowing production as necessary, and more, to avoid any long-term commitments. Why? So they don't get caught flat-footed if tariffs are lifted, nor are they on the hook if tariffs are held.

I was thinking it looked more like AMEE from Red Planet.

We lived in a small town, with my grandparents across the street from the main cemetery. You could literally see how much good vaccination did by how many small children's graves there were right up to about 1960.

My mom, and her siblings, were part of the last group with smallpox vaccine scars. She, and her siblings, were also some of the first vaccinated against the scourge that was polio.

I brook no anti-vaxxers.

Simple: They don't want people, as George Carlin noted about his own education, turned into questioners.

Authoritarians, in general, attack education first shredding accessibility to education, and standards being taught by teaching to the minimums. Since a minimally educated populace is easier to control, the last things they want taught are things like philosophy. Any history that isn't "rah rah GO TEAM" is called unpatriotic blah blah.

Cue the right-wing echo chamber: "WHY YOU HATE CAPITALISM?!?! YOU A LIBRUL?"

Cue the right-wing politicians screaming, "WE REFUSE TO SUPPORT EBIL BIG GUBBERMINT OVERREACH OF GLORIOUS JOB CREATORS! CONSUMER CHOICE!"

Meanwhile normal people are treated like slime by large corporations with near zero oversight.

To be completely fair most jacked up trucks are absolutely flipping useless for farm / construction work. You want to ruin a pickup? Jack it up and put all that extra stress on the ball joints, axles, et al., and in general make the truck worse.

As my friend puts, there are trucks you use for work... and most of those are built like the ones from 1970's / 1980's with very little bling. Bling trucks are "sissy trucks" that are useless to get stuff done because you're too afraid to scratch something or it's just not convenient to use because it's jacked up to shoulder height.

Except even when that applies in a parallel manner, e.g. the tax on AvGas / JetA at airports, Republicans then want fees. Why? Because they want to eliminate the federal tax on fuel. The fun part is this is also regressive because the people who pay the most for the ATC system right now (via fuel taxes) use it the most. The little guy zooming around in a Piper Cherokee 6 from 1975 doesn't use much in the way of services, especially not compared to that corporate jet zooming around executive(s) or that private jet carrying a billionaire.

Still, they want to change to a fee to use system that will cut costs for the, .1% and airlines, overall. Ironically enough it will likely result in LESS money for ATC services. Big shock, I know. They proposed getting around that by charging a not insignificant fee to aircraft. Ironically speaking, that fee would be tax deductible for businesses and complex corporations that hold many private jets that lease the aircraft back blah blah blah. The end result being that the guy flying a plane that's 50 years old and costs about what an SUV costs pays a couple thousand in new taxes to fly around locally, while the person with a US$70M private jet flying around the country "pays" the bill only to write it off on the taxes resulting in a decrease to their costs.

As a friend noted:

Art Laffer, with his napkin sketch, has become the penultimate economic terrorist. Republicans, in general, for over 40 yeas now have engaged in economic terrorism against over 90% of Americans. At a time where pay became wildly disconnected with productivity, they have slashed and burned the social safety net, and stolen an untold amount of money to give away as tax cuts that benefitted a tiny number of people. As more people struggled they enabled even more direct wealth transfers directly upward to a tiny number of people by creating ever more loopholes that allowed wealth transfers between generations on a scale that would seem insane outside of a country with a nobility class.

Not that modern Democratic Party leaders are much better, they just apparently know to hide it a little bit. Republicans just went for broke with culture war hysteria and it worked because most people can't think critically when their lizard brain is triggered.

Let me guess: They also have a SWAT team using an MATV or similar military vehicle(s) where the maintenance costs in a year or two could buy a new cruiser, and they also have enough military weaponry to qualify as a military company?

One of my friends lives in a town where the police were all happy to ask for a military vehicle, until he brought up exactly how much the maintenance was for that vehicle and asked the village if they were going to cut police salaries. Considering they have almost nonexistent crime, other than stupid kid stuff like Toilet Paper in the trees. He was able to get enough taxpayers to raise a big enough stink that the department didn't get their big toy which made the police very sad. They still got their automatic weapons, which made them happy.