I see no difference between the design of USA toilets and Australian toilets

The interior shape of the bowl is completely different.

If your toilet doesn't work when it's flushed you should fix your toilet rather than blaming the government

WTF is that coming from?
Oh the EU stuff above - sometimes a good idea can be pushed a bit too hard into areas where it isn't but I'll bet the above poster will find that there are exceptions to the "mandate" if they look hard enough.

There are plenty of places with water restrictions on their toilets which don't seem to be having a shitty problem.

It's just a situation where the defining leader of the market was something that needed a shitload of water to get rid of a load of shit. After that there's the normal resistance to change and a half-arsed solution. Australia is only really flushed with success because widespread adoption of flush toilets happened later so a more capable design could be developed and be introduced without having to compete with "what they should look like".

Which then just moves it to a different government department.
Taxes can be spent on stuff other than giving a couple of guys millions for consulting on waterboarding, Star Trek set designers for the NSA and paying for dead wood executives on the FEMA payroll you know.

Depends on the workplace. In a typical office it's bad news, in a government office of most types very bad news, in mining, who gives a fuck?

It doesn't matter how good a negotiator you are if the company you apply for has a criteria that people who ask for more than a certain figure are not going to get it. Some places even delight in going for the worst negotiator since it's the "lowest bid". After being laid off, having a needy girlfriend and prepared to take anything in my field I ended up in that situation - bad choice in the long term not the sort of people you want to stay with (eg. only way to get time off, let alone a salary rise, is to quit and work elsewhere).

The big clues are right there in the summary. It's probably doable without a vast amount of effort since a lot of it will come down to insulation, ducting and awnings or similar window shading. There is already a subway in place so improvements there come down to better equipment instead of expensive tunnelling or land aquistion.
What makes 40% or so possible is buildings constructed with no thought for energy consumption in some cases need only minor modifications to for a major reduction in use. We've seen that in other place with "no-brainers" such as painting a roof white making a major difference to AC use.
It's not hard to use less if a lot is being thrown away.

Approximately 96% of "spent" fuel rod is fissile material

The above poster was pretending it applied to total waste and not just the fuel, so you are discussing something different to the topic of the thread.

Taking a neutral position, in that case it just means some cheapskate didn't design the cooling system to match the government requirements and that it's not being properly enforced. Having a lake large enough to get the cooling water temperature down before it ends up back in the river is one of the many reasons why nuclear has such a large capital cost - the benefit of running really hot means you have to pass a lot of water through it.

I don't understand why they would want to reduce reliance on nuclear power

Because they had already decided a few years ago to stop building new plants mainly due to high capital cost and an unwillingness to put the money up at the time. Some other energy sources can be built a bit at a time so there is less money needed up front even if the total is more per megawatt. They are also not building any new hydro.

3%? Only if you redefine nuclear waste to mean something completely and utterly different to technical usage. It's not just the fuel rods that have to be handled with care. The majority of nuclear waste is low grade stuff that has come in contact with the fuel but is not fuel itself, those pesky neutrons tend to break things. The low grade waste is not so difficult to deal with as the high grade waste, but pretending it does not exist is counterproductive and just will make people oppose your viewpoint once they find out they have been tricked. Let's please consider things in terms of reality and not redefinition word games.

but they sure as hell aren't going to be tearing down the ones the have already.

Time, neutron bombardment, corrosion etc do that whether we like it or not. Eventually it gets to the point where it is cheaper to build a new one than keep the old one going.

You've got the wrong end of the stick. The above poster mentioned Australia because water scarcity is far more of an issue there than even in California. For the purposes of saving water Australian toilets are superior simply because it was a mandated design criteria while it isn't with your cobbled together situation of high flow bowls and low flow cisterns. The entire thing is designed to deal with the job (pun intended) instead of the extra of a low flow cistern added on as an afterthought.
There is NOTHING in that post above about "the superiority of white Australia" or "Right-wingers" - and the amusing thing about your reaction is that it was a "socialist" government body that set the standard and demanded a better design than you are used to.

In the USA they have a different standard design of toilet bowl, probably for historical reasons (ie. always done it that way), and combining it with a cistern used elsewhere apparently does not work very well at all. Getting a better toilet may be beyond what the normal suppliers can do.
The lesson, for the millionth time in engineering, is if you change one part of the design you may need to change another. Not doing that means a low flow cistern with a bowl that needs a high flow cistern sucks with a low fibre diet.

Note that Nuclear is not going to shrink

By not building new capacity as the old is retired it is going to shrink, and by not committing to new construction some years ago this policy was effectively already in place.
I expect people to note before replying that nothing in that statement is against or for nuclear power, just an observation of the situation. If you have a thin skin either way please scratch it elsewhere.

You're thinking of Google like a smaller company

No, I am thinking of it as a large company with decent communication instead of what it appears to be in this case as a bunch of smaller companies stuck together with glue and very poor communication.

or male employees who are slightly more likely to watch the same TV shows as the rest of the team.

The point should be to have competency derived from getting the best you can get from a wide range of sources instead of having no better ability to get stuff done than a college club. That way lies "heck of a job Brownie!" and similar fuckups.