It won't work out that way in the U.S. Plus central control of the company is still in the hands of the Japanese.. You won't see Sony outsourcing its CEO to an American for instance.

That's because you guys managed to get Harper re-elected again.. You need to make sure he is gone next election.

Indeed. Obama is more of an old time republican (which is fine, the whole country moved right) and not any kind of socialist. People just use that label to mean "bad", it literally has no meaning anymore. It doesn't refer to socialism at all because people don't really know what socialism is or what it stands for. Hell, I doubt they even know what capitalism is.

Gosh, I must have ended up in the abuse department..

I await when CEO jobs can also be outsourced 'elsewhere' since I'm sure they can be paid a lot less for their leadership skills than they can in the U.S. Funny, outsourcing is only for the lower ranks but not in higher management. Are you saying that someone from these other countries can't do as good a job as a U.S. corporate management team?

When will start putting together planets in the solar federation?

Yet they exist. Almost like a religion.

Price of oil is coming down.. speculation finally breaking up. Plus, Saudi is getting pressure from fracking and is trying to get gas cheaper. I think it is too late. I think we are going to see an ideological split away from oil for transportation.

Hah, I know. It seems people seem to forrget that there are things exploding inside that ICE engine.

this is happening quite well. I have an electric car, and I'm able to go to the coast and get a nice charge. If I had a damn chademo adapter I can get my car up to what is needed in less than 30 minutes. 30 minutes is absolutely perfect for a family to checkout the local restaurant, shop or whatever. It is a great magic marketing number and that means that you are a captured audience.. that alone should be enough for business to do the same thing and put high speed chargers in their place of business.

Congestion. At least in teh urban areas, having a public transport system is really really fast, will get cars off the road. It will also generate density around each of the stations. Greater density is actually excellent for the free market, as people congregate around these areas. Great choice, greater everything. The problem is that most people believe in the car economy. The effects of the 'pioneer spirit' of individual ruggedness is what propagates the car economy or even guns. They are pillars of most rural and even urban thought. So, of course things like high speed transport is relatively foreign and hard for people to get their minds around. When people think of public transport in the U.S., it's usually a place where the mentally ill, the alcoholics, junkies congregate, especially during the nocturne hours. So, there is also the fact at least in urban area that it is not a respectable way to travel. In Portland, the Max is quite popular and is continually to gain ridership. But it really needs to be a lot faster in order to support the growth of people in this area. Portland and the surrounding areas are getting mroe crowded and the roads are not able to cope. Even if you expand the roads, it just puts more people on the roads and you just end up having even more people on the roads, leading to more congestion.

A good rail network will give you more bang for buck on the same set of land. It might be interesting to reclaim some of the roads as high speed rail and see if that gets us anywhere. Sadly, Europe and Japan are ahead because they had a devestating world war that destroyed most of the infrastructure and they were able to get the kind of infrastructure that is scalable. The U.S. did not have that, and it would be very difficult to do what I envision in the first paragraph.

We pay less taxes, so nyah! That trumps everything!

Thanks, jedidiah!