It was a frequently cited difference - whether for propaganda or not it's still supposed to be a mark of civilization.

The "people here who do not understand a topic" is aimed at the poster up above - "Richard_at_work" who got things so stupidly wrong that he suggested it would cost "billions".
For some reason I didn't catch that he was not the one that replied to my comment on his comment.

Sorry - another poster "Richard_at_work" wrote the utterly ridiculous "billions".

So does that Escomarine do it for "billions" as you suggest or a hell of a lot less as your link suggests?

PCB's ... and no doubt lead and mercury are also present.

So? People do work with dangerous materials you know.

in India and Bangladesh

That's right, the places that are now training engineers about as good as anywhere else. You've also given a link to an example of how dirt cheap it is.

my understanding is that the steel often gets rolled into rebar

The scrap gets melted first. Say goodbye to anything that's a gas at around 1500C - so no lead, no PCBs, no mercury - they go somewhere but not where the steel goes.

There's an informative show out there

I really do not get why people here who do not understand a topic take it upon themselves to "educate" people with real-world experience in a topic.

have works that have been in the public domain, sometimes for decades, and all of a sudden are protected under copyright again

There's a flute player in Australia who committed suicide due to the legal fallout from using a riff from a 1932 song with unenforced copyright owned by the Girl Guides (Girl Scouts). The copyright was bought by a record company who took legal action in 2009 against the song with that flute riff recorded in 1981.
IP laws are well named - it's about pissing all over everything.

"No man is above the law and no man is below it".
It's convenient to label some people we don't like as complete outlaws but it's a sign of barbarism that just leads to things like rounding up and killing minorities which is the sort of thing we fought a war against people such as Goebbels to stop.

On the other hand batteries really sucked in 1962.

So you are calling the above poster a liar? Nice.
Do you do children's parties?

You can't just "forget" something so critical and conveniently avoid a very time consuming and expensive step.

What does the Skilled Occupation List have to do with this?

In the past Silicon Valley thrived due to people coming from all over the world to get funding for their designs that ignorant over-conservative people people would not fund in other places.
Even going back a bit more "the dread spirit of innovation" was complained about in the Austria-Hungarian empire so Tesla came to the USA to build his alternating current motors.
Now? Doesn't look quote so good. We've turned into the Austria-Hungarian empire that Mark Twain reported on as being stagnant instead of the vibrant Roman empire we say we are the heirs to.

It's not about getting funding for way out ideas like Horvath's hydrogen car scam, it's about progression instead of just sitting on assets.
As for the bridge, a third year civil engineering or mechanical engineering student can show it can work using mathematics that was taught to such students early in the 20th century. Solid mechanics is difficult but the heavy lifting was done in the 19th century, since then we've mostly just added various tricks to take advantage of computers to get good, fast approximations and handle huge matrices. Something so big as that bridge was never going to be easy to get the workers and materials but there was never any doubt that a suspension bridge would scale that far. It's no space elevator where no material matches the requirement of the maths yet.

The only Gods harmed by Darwin are those puny enough to be ordered around by Oral Roberts and Jimmy Swaggart.

So - how many of those contracts in other places are not government related? The others just don't pay anywhere near as much do they?
It's an artificially distorted environment and you are IMHO very much out of touch with the commercial environment that is beneath you.

First of all, I would make it so you can press the Enter key and it conducts your search. Forcing people to either tab or navigate their mouse to the button makes it a little annoying.