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Love this description of work nirvana. The desktop publishing revolution allowed me to have a typesetting business with a low cost of entry, but…. I struggled all 15 years I was an independent business with health insurance and the associated cartels. A medical incident could have bankrupted me. I submit that the reason most people stay employed is the health insurance problem. What will we do as a country to breakup the health care monopolies…

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The link to the article on commercial aviation is broken -- and I would *really* like to read it, as teaching commercial pilot candidates about avoiding the feces-storm that the FAA will rain down on their heads if they violate common carriage/holding out regulations is part of what I do as a ground instructor. It's a topic that attracts misunderstandings and "facts everyone knows that ain't so" like a neodymium magnet attracts iron filings.

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Got it! This is some great stuff. Love this line: “Should I drive, or do I have

time to take a plane?” Pilots themselves often put it: "Time to spare? Go by air!" (Although we are usually talking about the 10-minute pre-flight inspection that turns into an hour of having to find the chuck for the air compressor, a quart of oil...or having to sit out a patch of weather that is affecting nothing but the five mile circle with your airport at the center.)

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Meh. Last place I flew to was over 600 miles away and would have taken 9+ hours to drive according to Google Maps. Even with the various air travel delays, flying is a clear time saver.

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That's true for long flights, but not for short regional hops--which is what we were writing about. The hub-and-spoke model works very well for longer flights, and especially for direct flights between hub cities. It is rarely optimal for flights from one non-hub city to another non-hub city (e.g., Nashville to Asheville or, even more so, Smyrna to Asheville). Your flight was a clear time-saver. But conceptually, there are vast numbers of flights that people would take from on non-hub to another non-hub, but they don't even consider doing so because of the enormous time it would take.

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Yeah, there's definitely a break-even point somewhere along the line. That's why I've been following Hyperloop technology eagerly for a good while now; if engineers can manage to actually build one — by no means a certainty! — it should be able to revolutionize medium-distance travel, bringing air-flight speeds without all the overhead involved in safely getting up six miles and back down again.

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Hyperloops might be useful for densely populated urban corridors (maybe). They'll do nothing for travel between a cattle ranch in Montana and a state park in Wyoming. Or a trip from Alexandria, VA (where I live) to Norton, Virginia (where I have a close friend whom I have never visited). Planepooling can revolutionize that sort of travel. And a large percentage of the latent demand for travel in America is that sort of trip.

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If I must say so, that's probably my favorite line in the article, as well. :)

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