Seriously, most of the 'waste' that is sent out are great sources of resources. Gold, Iron, Plastic, Copper, etc. Yes, there is Mercury and Lead in those, but that can be dealt with easily. We have various deep mines, well below water tables, in which the pure mercury and lead can be easily contained.

Australia has the right attitude of using Robotics to part out items.

No. That was deregulation combined with businesses illegally colluding together.

Increase gas/diesel tax by .25 / year for the next 4 years and apply that to our roads and infrastructure.

Unless it's too useful for some, like say an investment robot that has figured out the ROI on dirty business beats clean business, ethics be damned. Or that they don't want to look a human in the eye and say no money, no food for you but a sales droid won't be bothered by it. Or that it provides too much control, like a despot using AI to weed out dissenters and eliminate political opposition. And if the killer bots have a bit of civilian collateral, they're just too powerful not to have. There's plenty of reasons why "bad AI" might be allowed to grow, they're the perfect opportunity to let out the worst of humanity without getting your own hands dirty.

New technology like DNA, deathbed confessions, evidence found or witness statements withdrawn years or decades later can show a ruling, no matter how correct it seemed at the time to be wrong and without there being any active investigation. Sure if I've been ensnared by unfortunate circumstances or framed I'd rather you find the truth straight away, but I'd rather be wrongfully imprisoned than wrongfully executed. As long as there's life there's hope that I'll be a free man again and you can't conclusively say it won't happen until I'm dead.

Sure, it almost certainly won't happen but proponents of the death sentence is using the likely outcome to justify the means. It's like basing a warrant on the assumption that you'll find something to justify the search. Yes you've lost the presumption of innocence, but when humans make decisions on worldly evidence and testimony there'll always be a smidgen of doubt left. Posthumously clearing a name might not matter much to the dead, but it matters to friends and family and helps prove the system isn't perfect. And though it can't get better it won't be perfect and we can't turn back time, but we can give the innocent every chance they can get. And that ought to be enough.

google boys are not. They chase what they consider to be the good dollars. The others, chase the easy dollars, no matter how corrupt it based on.

and yet, he got a loan that was paid off.

OTOH, the real problem is not loans to businesses, but when we make huge tax breaks to monster businesses such oil companies, GM, Ford, etc to take work offshore, rather than keep it here.

Actually, you do not know that for sure.
Google has been focused on an Autonomous system. That is true. But, so far, no car maker has expressed an interest in it.
As such, there is no reason to believe that they will not consider building their own cars. And if they were to do so, I am guessing that they will Work with Tesla to make their own.

Seriously, the google boys are some of the most important business guys going. However, unlike most of the business ppl, such as Romney, Fiorina, McNerney, Welsh, Koch bros, etc, they focus on nothing but making money and have no interest in the future of America or Mankind.

The point is that you work the surge by making the service worse everywhere else. You're not able to deliver more passenger miles, you just charge more for the same fixed-ish supply. It's good business but it's questionable if the users in aggregate are better off. Then again, it does create a flash mob which may eliminate the outliers which depends on how you value waiting time. If you wait 3x5, 1x60 minutes it's less than 4x20 minutes but the latter is often preferable, since you often have to make room for a "worst case" travel time in order to be there on time.

I don't think we'd have any clue how much water there "should be" since that depends on the stellar material that created the planet, asteroid impacts and so many other factors we wouldn't know. So practically no, I don't expect this to affect how we search for planets with life and we don't have nearly enough information to consider probabilities. For all we know ocean worlds might be the norm, no life as we know it survives without water so the most obvious place to find life might be in water. Land seems a lot less essential, really.

The idea of pushing for OLD homes to have solar added is a mistake. In addition, paying subsidies for it, is just plain wrong since it is causing solar companies to focus on just those locations.

Instead, at a US national level, we should put in place several regs and 1 new subsidy, while removing all of the other subsidies for Solar:
1) require that ALL utilities to buy up to 10% of a buildings excess electricity that is generated via on-site AE. IOW, if a building is expected to USE 1MW / month, then .1MW / month can be sold to the utility. In addition, it needs to be bought at the top that the utilitity pays for that time, to any other provider, including buying it from other providers.
2) require that ALL new buildings of 5 stories and less to have enough on-site AE to equal the HVAC energy needs (and require heating and cooling). Note that such a building with only enough on-site to equal the HVAC will likely not be selling much if any to the utility. However, if they decide to increase it, to the point that they equal 110% of their energy needs, then the utility must buy the extra 10%. Note that the smart developers will focus on lower energy costs buildings with better insulation and hopefully geo-thermal HVAC, since all forms of AE is actually expensive.
3) provide a TIME-LIMITED subsidy for energy storage. It should be in terms of max amount and must be able to hook up to the utility, company, or resident and provide the power. In particular, Utilities should be encouraged to move from 1 big grid, into small grids in which a storage is sitting there between the local grid and the big power grid.

With this approach, it will help utilities convert to storage, and lower their costs of energy production. In addition, it will stop new buildings from adding draw to the grid. Basically, it will help lower the real energy costs for all.

Seriously, these are removing competition, not improving it.
What is needed is to encourage companies to compete against each other, not just turn themselves into companies for takeovers so that the executives walk away with large golden parachutes.

WRT data comm, with comcast-TW merger, it will remove real competition. As such, if this is to be allowed to happen, we need to require that all laws that reward monopolies in data comm, to be removed. Cities should be allowed to put in their own network as long private can come in. Likewise, just because comcast-tw is in a place, does not mean that google should be prevented from coming in.

YMMV, but that's one of the reasons I really like google. For example converting units, what's 53F in C again? I could get a thousand hits that could give me the formula or a conversion table or whatnot but just "searching" for it saves me a step or two. I often use it instead of the built-in calculator just because it's already up. I suppose it could go overboard with Clippy-isms but I haven't felt that has been the case.

Outside. I know particularly the firefighters have complained about poorer coverage inside buildings, which is usually where their life-saving work is done. Details...