hipmunk.com is the best out there. It shows whether a flight has wifi or not, it has a price graph for flexible flights, and their interface is just the best I've found.
Happens to be the way to deal with procrastination and analysis paralysis as well. It's easier to just do something and then course correct, than to try to calculate the best possible path before even starting out.
I have never even given flatware or towels any thought. They both have minimal impact on my life and thus don't need optimization. My laptop has a great impact on my life, so I think it's reasonable to spend time researching what you need and paying for the best if that makes sense. My wife is a terrible premature optimizer. She pinches pennies on the most obscure things like toilet paper, just to turn around and spend hundreds on a bag. My view is that I would cut that bag out of my purchases, and then it doesn't matter if I optimize my toilet paper or not.
Consider, if you will, that your wife's purchase of an expensive handbag is more purposeful than you imagine. First, women's clothes tend not to have pockets, so a reliable and comfortable bag is rather more important for ladies than gentlemen. Second, your wife understands that her handbag is also a social signaling device, and understands how to communicate in a completely non-verbal medium.
Oh yes, I've come to understand that these things are very valuable to her, but it's difficult for me to imagine. She's very cheap, unless it's something she cares very much about. When she's researching those things she's a huge optimizer, and I'm the biggest satisficer you can find. I think optimizers tend to be less happy though. For her engagement ring she spent months researching (wouldn't let me do it) and finally we bought a $7k ring. When she got it she was devastated that the ring didn't make her happier than it did. The good thing is, she's learning; I think she's realizing that optimizing everything doesn't actually lead to happiness.
I guess what I'm saying is that while dodging the real cause of this issue, Americans are going to point to large geography rather than large population as the 'root cause'. In this case that isn't entirely without merit, since for a lot of Americans (those in Maryland for example) the '(tax rate * population) / area' equation works out alright.
It has less to do with population density and more to do with population clusters. The people in Sweden aren't even distributed across the entire country.
Neither is the US population. Let's compare apples to apples for a minute. WA + OR ~= Sweden:
WA+OR population: 10.6 m, size: 170,000 sq mi
Sweden population: 9.5 m, size: 173,860 sq mi
Now, I think that's a pretty fair comparison. The roads can be pretty terrible in Washington and Oregon from my experience. That may be because federal money for roads goes to other less dense states, but these proportions hold up fairly well nationwide too. I think it's just a matter of less public funding, it's that simple.
Ehh, maybe. Philadelphia's roads are legendarily bad though.
One summer when I was living in Philadelphia they removed the surface of the road in front of my apartment. Two months later they put it back. And if it's not that, it's crews filling in holes from road-work with about half as much asphalt as the hole needed, or the random patches of cobblestone street still left in the city, seemingly with little rhyme or reason.
A great example is Canada. 35 million people, but 80% of them live within 200 miles of the US border. The population density stat would be very misleading in that case.
For a few years? Hardly. Actually living in another country is extremely different from traveling for a few months. You don't know much about a country until you live your everyday life there, shop at the grocery stores, participate in cultural events, go to the doctor, pay bills, rent an apartment, go through the immigration process, have a JOB etc. You don't truly know a place by just traveling there.
It's true that the states chose to spend on the money increasing worker pay (http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ECIGVTWAG) rather than hiring more workers, but that's a separate issue. (Call it anti-Keynesian spending during a recession.)
Historically we did things like hiring a bunch of unemployed people and having them build stuff (trails in national parks, fancy downtown landscaping, transit projects, etc). In the most recent recession, all we did was give the unemployed 99 weeks of free money.
Yes, but they're acting as if this is a permanent disadvantage of this device. And again, I think it's a bit harsh to judge before it's even been released. If there were like 10 apps I'd be worried, but there are around 5000 apps already, and Win 8 will be running on plenty of desktops and laptops as well as tablets, so I think this is not really a fair critique quite just yet.
