Is it comically cheap if you don't consider inflation?
Because while air travel has undoubtedly gotten less comfortable, in most (if not all?) cases it's also gotten cheaper. With every passing decade air travel because accessible to broader and broader swaths of the economic pyramid. Now it's at the point where the cost of the taxi to a London airport can cost more than the airfare of whatever budget airline flight I'd be on.
I am [not really] too young to have flown on the Concorde, but a Googling of "Concorde flight cost" suggested between $6000 and $12000 round trip for NYC-LON flights. That doesn't strike me as cheap.
Air travel definetely got cheaper. As as a software engineer (with a bit for search hacking) I can now afford flying across globe (26 hrs) in business (which used to be first) twice a year.
also, feedback is more granular by several orders of magnitude. In a political democracy we roll up every single issue (including mutually contradictory ones) into a bundle of policies, multiply that by an uncertainty factor of the personality of the person you are voting for, and then a fraction of us actually turn out to make the decision.
Meanwhile in the market I can decide down to the level of "no, these oranges aren't sufficiently orange-y for me".
I'm no market fundamentalist, mind you. I'd rather find ways to make the public sector more responsive to public feedback than through occasional elections.
Wouldn't that drastically increase the sun exposure on the internal elements and artifacts in the church? Sun damage is noticeable in just a few years, let alone on a time scale of centuries...
Indeed. The more interesting question would be how many Googlers internally talk of people leaving Google as though they've left a religion vs those who meet it with a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
although really from the perspective of battling NIMBYs, the benefit (first-order, anyway) of Shanghai is not that one man can say no, it's that only one man has to say "yes"
