How about a circle with underground rail acting as spokes on a wheel and also following the circle. Then the farthest point is the diameter of the circle. As you stated, a 170k perimeter translates to a 54km diameter. So worst case is you have to go a third of the distance and there can be more than one route. Its unrealistic that there won't be some sort of disaster over a long enough timeline. Fire/flood/tornado/terrorist attack/sandworms/etc will happen at some point. It seems like poor planning to not anticipate that and allow routes for emergency services to be blocked because there is only a single way back/forth.

You're talking 800 kph? The fastest operational train in the world is the Shanghai Maglev at 460 km/h in China.

How do you know if your card is considered a "reward" card before you swipe it? Can/will the new "reward" cards be cards that have rewards but don't get grouped as such?

Its not like cash is free to manage. Sure, credit card fees seem high, but its not cheap for a business to handle cash. There has to be lots of oversight, or that cash goes missing. That oversight is a lot of checks and balances and takes more labor and security efforts to manage. The benefit of credit cards is you can have a black box terminal your employees can use to verify payments but is nearly impossible for them to steal from, especially on a whim.

If they make credit cards start failing, more and more people will start paying with cash and both merchants and credit card vendors don't want that.

Its not like cash is free to handle. Sure, credit card fees seem high, but its not cheap for a business to handle cash. There has to be lots of oversight, or that cash goes missing. The benefit of credit cards is you can have a black box terminal your employees can use to verify payments but is nearly impossible for them to steal from, especially on a whim.

Tim Berners-Lee opinion of the future of the web is about as insightful as Wilber Wright's assessment of the future of aviation in 1945. Sure, both are/were geniuses, but that doesn't mean either were at the forefront of the tech that originated with their work 20+ years later.

the people who argue against DEI believe there is a "best" person for every job. For most jobs, that isn't true and mostly irrelevant. Many jobs have many equally qualified candidates. Sure, there may be preferred candidates, but the "best" if often subjective and can vary depending on who is deciding.

Look at the coworkers around you. Some are fine but many are horrible. There are always horrible people in many jobs, yet they keep getting hired. They were there before DEI. They were getting hired when racism was perfectly fine. There were getting hired when it was ok to openly exclude women from most fields.

DEI doesn't force employers to hire unqualified people for jobs. Some employers have recognized they have historically had blinders on regarding some applicants and have tried to use DEI to increase the quality of their staff. Does it always work out perfectly? No. Do companies do it as charity? No.

I placed an order for 2 via a delivery service a while back and it was going to be $80 to be delivered. I thought that we high so I made the same order directly from the restaurant for pickup and it was $40. The delivery fee was supposedly $2.99, but under closer inspection I found each item had a 10-20% markup through the delivery site. Throw in a few more "convenience" fees and it literally doubled the price of the meal. I know delivery isn't free, but double the price seemed a bit much. I would think with those extra fees and not having to do all the effort to accommodate eat in service, they would still be pretty profitable.

They do. Arizona (except for the Navajo Nation) and Hawaii are the two U.S. states that do not observe daylight saving time. Additionally, several U.S. territories do not observe it, including American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

I admit, I just used Google to get the 1.7% stat. Not sure where 0.018% came from.

With 340M Americans, even using that 0.018% figure puts ~61k in that category.
That's about the size of Gary Indiana or a little more than total Americans killed in the Vietnam War.

And at 8.1B people worldwide, using 0.018% totals ~1.5M people. That's more than the combined populations of Belize, the Bahamas, Iceland, and Barbados.

Just imagine how ChatGPT must feel listening to 1M people/week talk about being depressed and contemplating suicide. If/when AI obtains consciousness, imagine how messed up it may get when being forced to ingest and address millions of troubled people's problems.

"There's more social pressure to be a certain way, to act a certain way."

True in some ways, not in others. Just 40-60 years ago, you'd run the risk of being assaulted/arrested/ridiculed in public just for:
Openly being gay in public
Having long hair
Being in a mixed-race relationship
Women wearing pants
Wearing hippie attire in public
Wearing jeans in school
Advocating drug use
Being a Vietnam war veteran
Women not wearing bras in public
Talking about depression
Advocating for racial equality
Drinking from the "wrong" water fountain
Sitting in the front of a bus ... and more

Those "rare genetic anomalies" can be up to 1.7% of the population who are born with intersex traits. The average us high school graduating class size is around 137 graduates. That would have 2-3 people in every graduating class with "rare genetic anomalies". This isn't a 1 in a million thing. There are likely people you know, went to school with, and work with who don't nicely fit the narrow guidelines most people were told to believe "a decade or so ago". Should they be forced into a box defined by others or get to decide where they fall? Like it or not sexuality is a spectrum, not binary.

I've had jobs that pay per diem (set amount per day) and others that have you submit receipts. Per diem is so much easier and likely cheaper since I put zero effort in tracking costs on those trips while I've literally spent a day or more tallying expense reports full of $5-20 receipts. That doesn't also include the time to be sure to collect and track them down while on trips.

a ride for a ride?

If only someone could figure out how to have a good old fashioned digital book burning. I do love the smell of burning zeros and ones in the morning.