Please explain why you really need to. Let me guess : to attend a conference on organising conferences? A conference on designing aircraft for taking people to conferences on designing aircraft? A conference on marketing holiday flights?

In my work I see others who make careers out of travelling to meetings all over the place, then writing reports on the meetings they had. No-one ever reads the reports. It is all bullshit.

So it's strange that most wars have been between people and nations that have known each other only too well. The medieval wars between England and France, such as the Hundred Years War, were basically family disputes. Until about 1400 the English kings and their courts were culturally French, considered themselves French, and even spoke French - but they still fought the French. The foot soldiers of course didn't give a shit and were there for the plunder - nothing has changed there then.

Then there are civil wars, more common and vicious than international ones, between people who live together, just as most murders are committed within a family or social circle. Things like 9/11 are the result of the global export of what were once localised fueds.

OTOH, Europeans never fought American Indians until, well, early globalisation. It is a common fallacy to assume that people who know each other must get to love each other.

He mentioned "train car bus". You picked cars, which are the worst for efficiency, but only slightly worse than aircraft. Trains and buses are far better.

As for aircraft carrying freight, that is so inefficient that it is only used for premium freight, such as mail and high value stuff.

All the time "we" have been around (unless you or me are >70 yo) there have been phones. And back when there were not, hospitals were localised enough for one to have sent a runner or despatched a telegram for hand delivery to where you lived if things were life threatening. They did that sort of thing in those days.

Stop feeling guilty about the First World. Nothing to stop a runner being sent in the Third World (who largely have cell phones these days anyway).

Is his name Lenny?

It's Lenny

I run Linux but very often have Windows XP running in a VM for one reason or another. I would love one of these guys to phone me so I can fuck him around with my VM, but they never do. How does one get onto their list?

That's enough complaints for anybody.

No it is not ridiculous. I regard my country as my home, albeit shared with the other people legally in it. As for "tearing apart families", it is immigration that does that because it is not generally whole families that migrate; it tends to be the men who migrate. The immigrants I know spend a lot of time (and CO2 emissions) travelling back and forth to their country of origin to see their families (and no, those families do not necessarily want to leave where they are).

As for you taking in girls and "sponsoring" immigrants, you clearly have an agenda. I am not sure what you are trying to prove, or is it just to wind people up? Or is it to knock the Naxi culture out of them by westernising them? Are you not yourself involved in "tearing" them from their families? Ironic that you give the Naxi link, it shows an admirable culture; don't you feel guilty about having a part in destroying it?

You think that maintaining Mexico would be cheaper than maintaining a fence? I'd change tablets if I were you.

It depends who is doing the calculation. If you are the boss of a cheap clothes factory I expect your calc will come down very favourably for illegal immigrants - favourable to your own pocket anyway which is where most people's calcs stop. OTOH if you are an out of work "native" it will come out unfavourably.

But it is not just money. Also needing to be taken into account are social factors such as the fragmentation of society, sex ratio balance, divided loyalties, the import of other countries' fueds and the attitudes of people who feel they have nothing to lose whatever they do.

The "Nazi scientists" were actually looking for differences between Aryans on the one hand and Jews and Slavs on the other. Africans, which is where this discussion started, were not even on the horizon as far as they (and most white people at the time) were concerned

Forgot the fluid flywheel.

Try the Sun. It makes loads of it and it's nearer too. Bring some back for me.

You are not making sense (ie I don't understand what you are saying). Is this American language? Elevated, what's that?

In The UK, in most big cities, it is crazy to drive a commute by car and nearly as crazy to use a bus, even with dedicated lanes. The dedicated lane system breaks down at junctions, and there are stops every few yards where scores of people get on and off, all fumbling with money or payment cards. For a fit person it is quicker to get off and walk. Anything involving the public road is just slow, slow, slow. You talk about "slow" commuter trains, but they are going at the speed of light compared with road traffic.

Not quite knowing what you mean by elevated, perhaps you are thinking of trains as things sharing the road with cars. In the UK we call those trams, and trains are things with their own dedicated infrastructure, whether at ground level, on viaduct or in tunnel, with nothing else in the way, such that the only restriction on speed is the engineering.

And you can say that about road and motorway building too. Living in rural Wales I don't get any direct benefit from new motorways or road widenings in, say the Midlands; nor do most people living in Newcastle or Scotland for that matter. I could even do a reductio ad absurdum of your argument by extending it to say that even if I do use a 3-lane motorway, I get no benefit from the two lanes I am not using. Building HS2 is like having more lanes of motorway.

Whether there is really any benefit in building either motorways or high speed railways is another matter. I have always doubted it. When I see a motorway I am always left wondering how it is that so many people can be in the wrong place and needing to get somewhere else. Usually, when these things are built, people just start travelling longer distances, like my company centralised (closing its regional offices) in the 1980's when a lot of new motorways were completed (the M25 in particular) - explicitly because "travel times were reduced". In fact it took longer to reach most destinations from the central office than it had done from the nearest regional office before they were closed. Staff numbers were not reduced anyway.