What other company or government could do this?

The Chinese national government has a surplus, but the local and provincial governments are running massive deficits and have been for a while. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of these actions are to free up cash for the necessary wealth transfer to keep the popping of the property bubble from becoming too catastrophic to the retiring population.

The point was that New York City saw a large plane hit one of its largest buildings. The failure mode was known. It just happened to be that no one cared to design for that failure mode later.

Organization trumps money. The problem is that a lot of progressive organizations aren’t able to mobilize voters for elections like this.

Mossad was behind the Benghazi attack in order to get Mitt Romney elected in 2012. When that didn’t work, Mossad informed Republicans of certain Intel to use in order to make Obama look weak.

Not really. It is more that no one really thought that this would be something you had to design for.

Now, a bomber hit the Empire State Building at it survived. So, you could design a building to withstand a plane hitting it. The problem is that the Empire State Building is heavy; it is probably the last skyscraper whose design was controlled by dead load.

There had been studies into failure of buildings after the Oklahoma City Bombing; some of the fruits of that research led to designs which were installed in the Pentagon by 2001. However, for most buildings, it wasn’t considered to be worth it. This includes skyscrapers both in the USA and around the world.

A * B * C is generally considered below the cost of making most buildings plane impact resistant, so they don’t do it.

The problem is usually that the tourism economy isn’t a great economy to be a part of.

Most tourist economies rely on a large staff of low wage workers to provide services. This may be a worse economic deal than other economies, even if the other industries in the area are in decline. Most locals who make money when tourism takes off are usually land owners.

You also run into a problem where local amenities end up getting used more by tourists instead of locals. So, while costs of living rise, locals experience a degredation of service.

I’ve planned international travel a week before and other trips far longer. A lot of what determines planning time is logistics of all going, if there are events during that time, holiday planning, and travel demand.

It sounds like the family friend is planning a big trip, so knowing before the one year hotel window is probably necessary.

The answer is slightly more complicated than that.

Part of the problem is that a lot of mass transit was built in the USA by private companies to make a profit. This went from trolley lines in small cities to large parts of the NYC Subway and almost all commuter and interciry rail.

Most mass transit systems ended up being built as loss leaders to develop suburban property. After the property was developed, the incentive to maintain mass transit dropped. Along with that, rail companies generally hated passenger service and preferred freight instead.

It eventually got to the point where the private company would collapse and there was little political will to maintain service. There was some lobbying done by auto companies, but a lot of it came from cities and states too cheap to make transit a public good with public funding.

Has Brazil offered to intervene?

Benjamin Franklin got the flow of electricity wrong.

“You provide the pictures and I’ll provide the war”

And the city just humored him.

Harvard University is older than calculus.

It sucks that they ended up writing a more well rounded version of this character with Ro Laren and, even then, TNG couldn’t keep them on the cast.

So did Tasha.

I loved that Technology Connections video.

It is far worse than that.

Universities have a lot of metrics that they are judged against that don’t lead to a quality education. Research doesn’t lead to good undergraduate students. A good pass rate just means the curriculum is soft enough to keep don’t students from failing.

So you have university presidents who are incentivized to increase prestige and they aren’t going to focus on the quality of education because that doesn’t lead to better metrics. If presidents try to defend their universities’ way of teaching, they get replaced by those who follow the system.

This feels like spray painting “Trump 2024” on an evangelical church.

Liability insurance just becomes part of the cost.