They've been expanding their airports over those 20 years; Barcelona's passenger air arrivals has doubled in that time and there is another expansion being planned. Barcelona is not a large city and they should really be coupling every airport capacity increase with an equal increase in tourist accommodations or they end up in an even worse situation.
Spain's airports are quite interesting. They're all owned by a monopoly which sets the same landing fee to land at any airport. So high volume airports are effectively cross subsiding building very good airports in the smaller regional areas.
Not great for prices (Ryanair is complaining about high landing fees) but it does mean tourists have a good job being dispersed into the countryside and having a good experience.
By what measure? Granted, I now live outside of Barcelona after moving here from an island with ~700 people on it, so for me pretty much any city is big, but I'm fairly sure Barcelona is within top 100 worldwide in terms of population living in it, so I'm guessing you're saying "not a large city" by some other metric?
And he went in on integrating trendy things like Ads that pay crypto and AI integrated into the browser, so it's not like there wouldn't be AI if he were in charge.
Kroger placed one of the sites in Orlando to also service Tampa and Jacksonville when they have 0 regular stores in the entire state. They were trying to use it to expand into the area, but I never saw very much in terms of advertising or promotions to drive demand but it could have also been that the robots were so bad that they couldn't attempt to market and push volume.
I lived in Jacksonville for most of my life, and near the end of my tenure I started noticing the Kroger trucks. They were coming all the way from Orlando? That's like a two hour drive for cold groceries, feels expensive.
(i do recall the chatter that this was their way to compete with publix, although I don't know anyone who actually used it.)
With rates that high, it's a disadvantage if you don't have specialists assess your kid for all the things that could qualify them for extra testing time if you have the money to do it.
> overpriced lock they conveniently have for sale and in stock in their vehicle
I object to the word overpriced in this context. It costs a lot of money to keep locks, tools, and other spare parts in a vehicle (including the cost of the vehicle). If you need a lock now and they have one it should cost a lot more than if you need a lock in 6 months and can wait for the factory to get around to making it. When you call their locks overpriced you are failing to understand the costs and value of having a part on hand.
I object to locksmiths that drill out consumer-grade locks you buy from Home Depot, instead of picking them.
Maybe some of them are selling normal-price locks, but people don't call a locksmith to drill out their lock when they can borrow their neighbor's drill.
They either can't pick an easy lock or they're scamming people.
There is always a way out and Europe is starting from an advanced spot. Japan went from a isolated medieval country with very little resources except for people and became an industrial power in 40 years.
It's going to be a rough time for a lot of colleges that have been using foreign students paying full price to fund their operations. Especially now that the incoming college aged population is beginning to shrink and the percentage attending college has peaked, so the domestic population probably won't be able to fill the seats at less competitive colleges.
Perhaps they should tighten their belts and reduce administrative bloat. It’s not as if American society hadn’t collectively called for this for decades while tuition has risen astronomically.
It's not administrative bloat that makes colleges so expensive. "Administrative bloat" happens when a school becomes a city. Harvard/Stanford/MIT et al. cannot go back to some time when tuition was affordable while still being the research powerhouses they are.
Bigger organizations require more overhead and those costs don't grow linearly. I'm not saying that I think all those administrators are necessary or they all make things more efficient, but at the same time many of them are in place precisely because they are running an office that does make things more efficient. You get rid of one administrator and you may end up increasing the workload on everyone else by 20%, which seems like a win on paper because you lose their budget while not giving anyone else a raise. But getting rid of them made the whole organization less efficient.
e.g. My university's IT office has a huge budget and a bunch of administrators. It makes my life as a professor easier, and it gives students a better experience. It's very easy to say that the entire IT office should be eliminated to "tighten their belts and reduce administrative bloat". Which may be true, but at the same time it exists for a reason, and getting rid of it doesn't teleport us back to the 70s when campuses didn't need an IT office.
> It’s not as if American society hadn’t collectively called for this for decades while tuition has risen astronomically.
American society has called for better education, more teaching styles, more research, more technology, more subjects and classes, more majors, delivered to more students every year. There's no way we are going back, it's just not happening, the expectations are too high at this point. We can either decide maintaining these kinds of institutions are worth it, or trade off for worse outcomes and just give up on being serious about research. Seems like that's actually what this administration wants to do, but the public decidedly does not. However the public wants to have their cake (world class research institutions) and eat it too (low tuition affordable by the general public) and that's just not going to happen.
Education is weird as a product, because you're delivering the same experience to students but they each pay a different bespoke price. Sometimes schools even pay their own customers!
When a rich person sends their kid to school they get charged full sticker price. Then schools use some of that money to subsidize the educations of the other students. Given those dynamics, there's really no reason for the tuition sticker price to ever go down unless the uber-rich can't afford it anymore, because the actual price anyone pays is floating and can be whatever it needs to be for them.
Which is a completely unrelated effort from the free money you're getting from abroad.
Unless governments institute policies that require them to "tighten their belts" they won't tighten their belts by cutting their own pay. They'll tighten belts by cutting out the least paying students, and scholarships, instead.
If this does push governments to get universities to tighten their belts, then why not have governments make them do that anyways without losing a massive chunk of export earnings, and a form of export earnings which has demonstrated positive effects many times greater than the dollars they bring in.
Yep. This is, of course, what's really happening, same as before. The next step is that highly educated jobs in the industry disappear, which then gives you cheap colleges with great teachers, but not much reason to study, and then we're back where we started this whole debacle in the 1990s.
Next step is expensive grifty colleges with bad teachers, as all the good teachers will flee or just not go into teaching, and nothing will be cheap because then what’s the point of the grift?
Picture Bob Jones U at Harvard scale. Or the Musk school of engineering where they teach that sensor fusion is a bad idea actually.
It also implies that either the blood was taken within 30 minutes of inhalation or they are measuring something else entirely.
Post mortem diffusion can happen, in either direction. Unless the individual died while smoking, there would have been ample opportunity for the drug to distribute within the bloodstream that could allow post mortem diffusion.
Unless the numbers I have for the blood stream decay rate are completely wrong a number as high as 30.7 seems like an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.
I saw a rate of 46% of car crash fatalities are within 30 minutes of the moment of impact. Unless they are only considering the subset of immediate deaths, I would be very sceptical of their numbers.
There was a wave of less formal topic based community groups when Meetup launched, but COVID + Meetup buyout & price hikes has led to most of them shutting down.
reply