Perhaps, but there is far more reason to think that Putin is lying, because he's been telling bald-faced lies to the entire world as recently as the past couple of weeks (concerning Ukraine). At least in the US, our politicians tell their lies in a gray area such that fact-checkers give numeric ratings to indicate just how untruthful a statement is. Putin just tells outright lies as if he believed them to be completely true and reasonable himself.

Or, phrased another way: In Soviet Russia, Putin fact-checks you!

Clearly, the Executive chair is just for show, since he'll be out at the golf course all day anyway.

And I'd recommend a sit-stand desk to anyone at all. Even if you don't stand all the time (I don't), being able to spend part of your day standing will make you feel better without discomfort, in fact being able to switch back and forth is more comfortable than sitting.

Obviously not, but you may not realize how open the company is internally. Larry Page stands up in front of the entire company every week, for example, and takes -- and answers -- live questions. There are no negative consequences for asking hard questions, and hard questions do get asked. Sometimes the executives duck or dance around them, but not very often, and questions that aren't really answered continue getting asked until they do get answered.

In addition to that, other than things like acquisitions there are very few "top-level executive decisions" at Google. Most decisionmaking is driven from the bottom up.

You're probably still not impressed. Whatever. I'm just giving you my perspective and opinion. I would think that an intelligent insider's viewpoint would be of use to you; you're certainly free to dismiss it, whether or not that makes any sense. Time will tell, and I'm quite confident that the future will bear out my statements.

Not according to YouTube employees who made the transition.

This is why it's not a "standing desk" but a "sit-stand desk". The idea is that you alternate between sitting and standing, changing position every hour or two.

Then it's not the same as mine. I've also followed the company from the beginning... and I have the benefit of the insider view.

YouTube was a very obvious acquisition. What YouTube needed to survive and grow was low-cost scalability and a way to monetize the views it was getting. What Google had was massive data centers and network connectivity, plus a proven revenue model. YouTube also needed a better search engine, and Google was interested in finding ways to index and search non-textual content. It was an ideal match, technologically.

The basis for your claim is?

The basis for my claim is three years of seeing how the company operates and what decisions it makes, and how, from the inside.

At least, won't everyone who's paid a middle to upper middle class wage, buys a house and saves for retirement eventually be a millionaire?

If you want to retire at 65 and have enough money to live a decent life for 30 years after that, you need pretty close to a million dollars plus a paid-off house. And, frankly, it's not that hard to accumulate a million dollars of net worth over a ~40-year career, assuming reasonable returns on your retirement account and modest appreciation on your home. I'm actually targeting net assets of two million for retirement, given that it's still 20 years away and I expect that inflation will roughly halve the value of the dollar between now and then.

Regardless of the number of exclamation points you use, Mountain View and SF housing do affect one another. I know several people who have lived in both areas and who have opted for one over the other based on questions of price and convenience. Said (insane, IMO) prefer to live in SF, but some choose MTV because SF is too expensive. Lowering the cost of housing in MTV further -- and making it more convenient to the Google campus -- would induce some more to leave SF.

Utter nonsense.

There are problems -- lots of them -- but peaceful civilian control of our government has not yet failed. Things aren't bad enough to justify civil war, but that doesn't mean it will never get to that point.

Of course they intended it to be amended. Which means that if people would like to ban civilian firearm possession, they should amend the constitution. Not that any such amendment would have a prayer of getting ratified.

Well, if you want reasonable housing prices in the face of climbing demand, then it's your problem. Without new housing in quantity in Mountain View, existing housing in Mountain View will cost more, and the same effect will ripple out to surrounding communities, including SF. The increased number of commuters will also increase traffic on the roads (though not as much as it could, thanks to the Google buses).

If you don't care about housing costs and traffic in the region, then it's not your problem. I don't live in the area, so it's certainly not my problem.

Very good point. I stand corrected.

Putting something into LEO with an elevator would probably require lifting it well beyond LEO to get something close to the right orbital velocity, then applying thrust to fix up the resulting eccentric orbit. It'd still be cheaper than lifting it from the ground into LEO... though it occurs to me that the reason it would be cheaper is that it would get its orbital velocity by taking energy from the elevator. That could be restored by lowering a mass from geostationary orbit.

I hadn't consider it before but it seems like a space elevator would need station-keeping thrusters to maintain its orbital velocity since it would be sapped a bit by every kilogram lifted from the ground. Without thrusters you'd need so send a like amount of mass down, which means for every kilogram you lift up and want to keep in orbit you'd need to find a similar mass to send down. Maybe ore from asteroid mining operations? Of course, then the source of the orbital velocity you're using to restore the elevator's velocity is the thrusters that put the ore into the right orbit to go down the elevator.

I don't have any concerns as long as Page and Brin are running the show. You're right that a future CEO could make other decisions... though he'd have to change the company culture first, or face mass rebellion.