The people you're talking about go through a ton of screening before being allowed onto an aircraft.

If by "a ton of screening" you mean a fingerprint check and signing a statement saying you haven't been convicted of felonies like murder, arson, & hijacking in the last ten years, then yeah, a ton of screening.

You do realize that most of the taxes and fees on your airline ticket go to things like building, maintaining, and staffing airports, traffic control centers, etc? So these are legitimate expenses of running an airline that would be built into the cost of a ticket one way or another.

Sounds more like private industry, where such behavior wouldn't even raise a hint of scandal.

1 HP is more accurately 746 watts.

well, Netscape didn't get over it quickly.

Scientific laws are assumptions (based on observations). They are not confirmed theories.

Yeah, just drop them in from high enough, and they even dig themselves into the ground.

It's pretty quick even compared to demolishing a gas station.

. . . but who would program the embedded systems in the lift pump system that keeps Florida from being underwater?

You say that like it'd be a bad thing.

I think "I could care less" is wrong, but I always thought it was supposed to be "As if I could care less"

No, he said individual stake.

Talking to a Chicago cab driver of 28 years, what happened was a Russian bought 80% of all cabs in the city. He talked to the mayor and a year later there was a medallion law in Chicago costing $800k to operate a new cab.

I believe you have been misinformed. Chicago licenses cabs for a normal fee, not hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they have limited the number available (on some theory/excuse like that can drivers can't make a living if there are too many of them). Anyway, Many years ago, when Yellow Cab / Checker Cab had almost all the medallions, Chicago decided to expand the number of medallions, and held a lottery to give them out. Licensed cab drivers with so many years of experience had first shot in the lottery - not sure if the odds were weighted or not (for things like years of cab driving experience or military service). Anyway, my wife's step-father won one and sold it for $20,000. Medallions are bought and sold on the open market, and those prices have risen a lot lately. They are now around $300,000 each. The city of Chicago records the sales but does not make that money.

Accounting tip: infrastructure investment doesn't show up in a profit and loss statement.

Actually it does show up there, but it's amortized over several years/decades.

Aircraft are not blunt objects, so they don't need as much help in keeping the airflow attached. Wings often have little angled vanes, (which do a better, more precise job of mixing high speed air into the boundary layer than dimples do) in order to keep the flow from detaching, and to keep the air moving across the wing rather than along it.

Aircraft designers already pay attention to separation of the airflow from the vehicle body (which is what the dimples reduce, by mixing higher velocity flows into the boundary layer). The long, streamlined, tapers at the tail do a better job than blunt objects with dimples. And many wings have small, angled fins along their length to ensure that the flow stays attached to the top of the wing and flows across the wing camber rather than following along the length of the swept-back wing.