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

I think there is only one case, and that was because if a hijacking. The plane broke apart on landing. It was caught on video by someone on the beach.

Of course, we don't know what happened to mh17, which might have also glided into the ocean.

MH17 was shot down over the Ukraine, you must mean MH370.

Engines turn or passengers swim.

You have an extra word in there.

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.

I'd add time to that, and raw materials. Knowledge is a nonconsumable input, but education, training, and skills maintenance are also factors.

Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations has an interesting breakdown of factors contributing to wages, though he also maintains that a wage must always be sufficient to sustain not only the labourer himself (hey, this was 1776), but his wife and children, and their education so as to provide for the next generation of workers.

There are some other points I'll address directly to your parent's question.

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.

>as long as it is accompanied with increases in transport links

That point so often seems ignored in these discussions (with respect to many growing/popular cities).

So an example of the reality in the Boston area is that the Green Line extension is on hold last I read because costs have doubled to $2 billion or so. (And the Green Line is basically the oldest and crappiest line in the overall not-bad Boston metro system. It's essentially a trolley with underground sections dating to the turn of the last century.)

So 20 years and $20 billion or so in transportation infrastructure would certainly set San Francisco up to do more building in areas where there are good opportunities to expand housing stock beyond what's already being built.

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.