Most people on this thread understand that a cheap Boeing 737 costs about 60 million USD. For $100,000, knowing that an jetliner could not be lost, that is a sum the public may demand that the airlines pay. That is to say, for about 1/10 of 1% of the cost of a very cheap jetliner, this sort of massive charlie foxtrot would likely not take place again.

Further, there is a long tradition of government interference being required in the transportation industry to force changes that benefit overall public safety. Railroad history is rife with them, including entire political parties (The Grange) put together in an effort to boost regulation of a necessary industry. If the government is going to give away airports and airspace, allow jetliners to dump pollutants into the air, and provide gaterape security, then it is not unreasonable to ask airline companies to pony up 1/10th of 1% of the cost of an airplane to improve security.

...I'm being trolled, right?

What if I told you that the mechanism you've described is physically impossible at the ranges you've described? Would you invoke some kind of captured alien technology to double-down on your claim?

You should watch "Mirage Men". The sorts of crazy that you're propagating has been proven, time and again, to come from the very government offices you're claiming are reading our thoughts.

Also, let's say you're somehow right, there's physical laws we don't know about, and this sort of Fortean weirdness is possible.

If anything you're saying were true, starting from scratch would be IMPOSSIBLE. The moment anyone even THOUGHT of a solution, the very thought would be thrown into that DOD database and people would move to stop it, BEFORE THE THOUGHT COULD EVEN BE COMMUNICATED.

If you're right, then those evil government mind-readers must WANT you to say what you just said, because if you didn't, they would have read your intent to post this message and moved to stop you.

Please follow through the implications of your own claims more thoroughly, and ask yourself "if this was true, would the world look like this?".

You advocate a

( ) lunisolar ( ) atomic ( ) metric ( ) Luddite (x) overly simplistic
approach to calendar reform. Your idea will not work. Here is why:

( ) solar years are real and the calendar year needs to sync with them
(x) solar days are real and the calendar day needs to sync with them
( ) the solar year cannot be evenly divided into solar days
( ) the solar day cannot be evenly divided into SI seconds
( ) the length of the solar day is not constant

( ) the lunar month cannot be evenly divided into solar days
( ) the solar year cannot be evenly divided into lunar months
( ) having months of different lengths is irritating
( ) having months which vary in length from year to year is maddening
( ) having one or two days per year which are part of no month is stupid
( ) your name for the thirteenth month is questionable

( ) the lunar month cannot be evenly divided into seven-day weeks
( ) the solar year cannot be evenly divided into seven-day weeks
( ) every civilisation in the world is settled on a seven-day week
( ) having one or two days per year with no day of the week is asinine

( ) requiring people to manually adjust their clocks is idiotic
( ) local time should not be discontinuous
( ) local time should not go backwards
( ) people like to go to work/school at the same time every day all year round
( ) "daylight saving" doesn't

( ) UTC already solves that problem
( ) zoneinfo already solves that problem
( ) rearranging time zones yet again would make the zoneinfo database larger,
        not smaller
(x) the date shouldn't change in the middle of the solar day
(x) local "midnight" should be the middle of the local night
( ) I shouldn't need to adjust my wristwatch every few miles

( ) there needs to be a year 0 and negative year numbers
( ) no, we don't know what year the Big Bang happened
( ) years which count down instead of up are not very funny
( ) planetary-scale engineering is impractical
( ) not every part of the world has four recognisable seasons
( ) "sunrise" and "sunset" are meaningless terms at the poles
( ) the Earth is not, in fact, a cube
( ) high-tech applications need far more accuracy than your scheme allows
( ) leap seconds have been a fact of life for more than forty years
( ) leap seconds are more frequent than leap years
( ) TAI already solves that problem
( ) most of history can't be renumbered with atomic accuracy
( ) everybody in the world is already used to sexagesimal time divisions
( ) date formats need to be unambiguous
( ) abbreviated date formats should be possible and still unambiguous
( ) date arithmetic needs to be as easy as possible
( ) 13-digit numbers are difficult for humans to compare, even qualitatively
Specifically, your plan fails to account for:

(x) humans
( ) clocks
( ) computers
( ) the Moon
( ) the inconsistent rotational and orbital characteristics of Earth
( ) rational hatred for arbitrary change
( ) unpopularity of weird new month and day names
( ) total incompatibility with the SI second
( ) general relativity
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) technically, our calendar is already atomic
( ) they tried that in France once and it didn't take
( ) nobody is about to renumber every event in history
( ) good luck trying to move the Fourth of July
( ) nobody cares what year you were born
( ) the history of calendar reform is horrifically complicated and no amount of
        further calendar reform can make it simpler
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) sorry, but I don't think it would work
( ) this is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it
(x) please just shut up and fix your broken date/time code

Stop that.

URANIUM FISSION accidents are expensive. There are plenty of fail-safe, non-weaponizable options for nuclear power that we could adopt at scale within a decade, if people would stop being afraid of the word "nuclear".

But first, read this article: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/12/rejection-via-advice.html

Which times? How do you tell?

Sometimes when bad things happen, the problem is that the world isn't fair.

How do you tell which is which? Or is the just-world fallacy just a nice, comforting way for lucky people to feel better about themselves?

They are there because the employers can get away with it because there's not a shortage of unskilled employees.

And when you require their employer to increase the wage for their position, the employer will now hire a more qualified individual instead, since they have to pay for that anyway, leaving the less skilled employee (who is supposedly being helped) eventually out in the cold.

If your employer was suddenly required to pay 50% more in salary for your current position, do you think you'd keep your job long-term against other, more qualified people who would suddenly want that position as opposed to their old one? It all shakes out similarly in the end for those who used to make under the new minimum wage, typically the most needy among us who already have some of the fewest options.

I suppose I'd have mentally picked St. Laurence Island as a more representative example, as it's part of Alaska and only 36 miles from Russia. You'd have to have a mountain in the distance to see Russia from there, but it's feasible.

But more accurately, Little Diomede Island, is only 2.4 miles from Big Diomede Island, so you can easily see Russia from there and even walk between the two countries during the parts of the year it's frozen over.

I'll admit that I'm more familiar with the minimum wage history and practice in the U.S. than in the UK. Just happened to read that article the same day and it seems very topical.

However, the theory isn't that minimum wage causes unemployment for everyone. The vast majority already make more than the minimum wage, so other than increasing their costs for minimum-wage supplied products and services (which is a real wage decrease, come to think of it). Economic theory states that the impact on people who currently make the new minimum wage or lower is that they find it more difficult to get and/or keep employment, because at the margin, some of them become no longer worth employing for what they cost.

No, but I reached "beam of pure anti-matter" and started reading it in Richard O'Brien's voice.

Or, because she was smarter than her critics on foreign policy....

But hey, you can always check snopes for the actual context of her remarks on Russia...

Perhaps try some simple wikipedia reading? I mean, I know that's almost like actually researching something, but really, you could just read the first paragraph and learn more than you appear to know.

The Jim Crow laws literally required businesses to segregate facilities. It was no longer a choice by the business. It was a legal requirement by Southern Democratic lawmakers to keep their different colored customers separate.

Your facts seem to be less than accurate. For example, in the UK, the minimum wage for 16-17 year olds was set in 2004 and started increasing in 2006. Mysteriously, the unemployment rate for 16-17 year olds in the UK started heading up right at the same time until it almost doubled. Probably just a coincidence, right?

Increases in the minimum wage cause unemployment among those who are less valuable to an employer than the minimum wage. They work the same way as every other law setting a price floor. Price floors doesn't exactly have controversial effects.