Whether I can be considered credible or not is another question, but seeing as my wife is a teacher in the Chicago suburbs...

$75k outside of Chicago proper is insanely high - it's possible for a 20+ year veteran teacher with extra certifications and a couple of masters degrees, but aside from that, most teachers will never see that much. There are a few expensive districts where the prices vary, of course, but once you get out of Chicago itself, the pay rate traditionally plummets.

IN Chicago, 75k is much closer to reality. I don't know if that's that's the AVERAGE, but I do know starting salaries in CPS (chicago public schools) are over 50k, and in some cases pushing 60. There's a few of reasons for this.

  1) The Chicago teacher's union is absurdly powerful.
  2) To teach in Chicago, you have to live in Chicago (same is true for almost all government jobs in the city) Unless you want to live in the ghetto, the cost of living there is extremely high.
  3) Speaking of ghettos, a very high percentage of Chicago schools are, to put it mildly, hellholes. It's hard as hell to keep teachers because of just how bad conditions are in some of those schools. Nobody wants to work there, so the salaries have to be higher than the 'burbs.

Nah, it'd be kind of cool to be the ones strutting around in our encounter suits spouting enigmatic one-liners to the lesser civilizations.

The only drawback is we need to rapidly speed up our medical research so we live long enough to see it.

Multiple times. And, more importantly - about 6 months ago, my motherboard decided to go south. Not wanting to spend the money to upgrade everything, I found a cheap new board, moved everything over, and called it a day. Had the CPU been soldered on, I'da had to buy both a new board and a new processor, along with the possibility of my RAM no longer being compatible with the new board. Big difference between a $50 board and several hundred dollars worth of new hardware.

I was gonna say, he can share a cell with Hans and they can get to work on a cracking new product.

Tell that to the teacher who gets the 'gifted' class one year, the sack of potatoes the following year, followed by the class of kids whose primarily language is not English, followed by the class of batshit insane kids whose parents refuse to medicate. Teachers get WILDLY different groups of kids year in and year out. Furthermore, they get their tentative class lists well in advance for good reason - woe to the teacher who doesn't at least do SOME prep work beforehand. Waltz into the first day of school thinking you're going to be able to teach a brand new class with the same schedule and plan as last year, and you'll get a very rude awakening very fast. It's very true that a teacher will still have to do some alterations once they meet the kids, but if you think they can get away with doing nothing all summer, you're out of your mind.

And the picture of teachers only working 9 months out of the year, getting out of work at 3 and doing no work outside of class is also completely false. Teachers have to put in a TON of work outside the classroom, and many principals/other administrative folks can be as bad as any PHB when it comes to making up inane busy-work for their staff.

They are. Different districts, different principals, different rules that change by the year/mood of the administration.

Administrator gets a bug up their ass to try some New And Awesome Teaching Method, demands their staff use said method, and there you go. New lesson plans.

Add to that, kids are different every year. What worked for one group of kids may not work for next year's group, and teachers need to adapt just like everyone else.

Short answer: Yes, rail travel, with vast investments, could truly do wonders.

Long answer: Vast, VAST investments. It would require much, much faster trains, and new rail tracks...everywhere. The biggest problem with Amtrak is the fact they don't own the rails - they have to yield the right of way to freight, which causes an already Not Too Fast train to be even slower. So, yeah. You'd need more than a few billions, you'd need a complete redesign of the entire county's rail system. Not happening.

Mmm hmm.

Talk to me about walking distance to places when you live in the midwest or northeast, when it's 800 degrees below zero and there's a foot of snow on the ground.

Try working in Chicago proper, and try finding a place close to your office. You have two options. 1) Dodge the bullets, or 2) Sell your kidneys to afford it. Oh, you want to raise a family? Want your kid to have a good education? Hope you can afford private school, 'cause the Chicago public school system ain't exactly Harvard. Want your kid to actually have a safe neighborhood? Well, see above. Hope you can afford one of those nice neighborhoods (that costs several times more than a comparable suburb) But hey, at least you can walk to where you need to go.

Choose where you live, huh? Well, I'd be more than happy to move. Just find me a job in your little walking distance paradise, and find my wife a job as well. While you're at it, get my friends and family to move as well, 'cause I happen to like them.

There are VAST differences in lifestyles depending on the region of the US you are in. One size fits all is utterly impossible in this country.

From a brief scan of SkyTran on Wikipedia...neat idea, completely unworkable. (At least not in any significant US metro area).

How is that system going to handle several hundred (possibly several thousand) people waiting in line to hop on for their morning/evening commute home? How long are people going to be stuck waiting in line for their turn during these rushes? Add to this the fact that large metro areas that two of our largest metro areas (New York and Chicago) have some real nasty winters. So factor in the cost of very large enclosed & heated areas for people to stand around and wait their turn to hop into one of these things (and the cost of acquiring the real estate to build said areas).

The US has a larrrrge amount of real estate. A whole lot of people commute in from suburbs to the major metro areas. Thus, for this to even make a dent in traffic, you'd have to have just an absurd amount of connection points throughout every suburb and into the city, which would also create several very backed up 'exit points' when you have a small army of corporate types heading to the office.

Now, if we're talking about just doing it within a large city itself, okay. You still need to address the sheer mass of people trying to get on and off at a single point (can you imagine how long it would take to board this thing after, say, a sporting event?), and how one can cram this thing into densely built cities. Much easier said than done.

Unless I'm just not seeing it, this would NEVER be efficient in a densely populated area, especially during rush hour times. A combo of high speed mass transit and self driving cars is really the only feasible Solution To Transit In The Future (tm)....unless/until we get our Star Trek Transporters.

I'm curious to know the % of those guns, etc. that were found using baggage X-Rays and metal detectors. You know, the two things we already had and used before the TSA existed. Remember, back when air travel wasn't a total clusterfuck pain in the ass.

Anyone who's ever played X-Com has known for years that the alien HQ on Mars was underground.

Time to hunt some Sectoids...

No, the real question is...how the hell will the three sea shells work?

Good lord, your supers are only making 80-130? Average superintendent salary in Illinois is ~150k, with more than a few making over 300k/yr - there's a reason I'm hoping I can convince my wife to move from teaching into administration down the road, despite the political bullshit that comes with the job.

And of course, they're axing teachers left and right due to financial difficulties. Shock.

In my experience, the administrators are/were rarely all that great of teachers, they're the ones who play the political game the best.

http://www.shacknews.com/article/60020/blizzard-on-starcraft-2-expansions

""We effectively look at it internally as expansions," said Sigaty. "So we'll see what that means for the price--we're not just going to raise it and call it that for the purposes of that. We would need to offer the same content.""

Of course, more than a few people figured this was bullshit to begin with. As someone said above, they can price it at 60 bucks and still make boatloads - hence they will.

Probably ended about the time some parent figured out they could sue the school because little Johnny was allergic to something/didn't like the food.