Wrong question. What should a socially responsible megacorp that has overwhelming dominance in the primary communication system of the 21st Century do when confronted by a corrupt political process? Just quietly do business-as-usual, supporting the corrupt process, further entrenching it?

Google cannot avoid engaging with the pay-to-play system, but should it actively support it, or use its wealth, power, influence and access to challenge and expose it?

Voters have negligible power to make any change in the iron triangle of bought politicians, mouth-piece "think tanks", and corporations eager to buy legislation and elite "opinion".

This blog extolling Dutch road design innovation is nonetheless quite dismissive of the "glowing paint" idea, and mentions the use of glass bead retroreflectors (as in the UK) as a much better idea. It makes a good case.

A snow covered road is unsafe to drive on for the general public (no 4-wheel drive and no snow tires/chains) - so removing the snow is generally a very high priority (plows and salt). The times when snow is covering the strip will be rare.

This is a Poe's Law post if every there was one.

Is this guy serious or being over-the-top satirical?

We knew the "Don't Be Evil" motto was an ideal that could not withstand the rigors of the modern international marketplace. But how large a portion of "evil" is Google now comfortable with?

We "nuts" will forgive you when you do decide to examine this intellectually.

Your current offering fails to even attempt this.

You start with "I may be a bit ignorant on the subject" and then go on to show that indeed, you truly are. To address this "intellectually" you need to actually be willing to do a little hard work - read real research summaries and become familiar with why the objections you pull off the top of your head make you look foolish (hint: they actually are foolish).

Ah, the awesome combination of towering hatred and towering ignorance!

No, the all-powerful hippies are not holding corporate cowering helplessly in their thrall.

Do you know how many actual, real nuclear power plant projects in the U.S. have been halted by environmentalist opposition? None. Zero. Nada. Zilch. It is impressive in fact how completely all attempts to halt nuclear power plants through protest failed.

But weren't all those nuclear power projects abandoned at the end of the 1970s halted by those d*mned "extreme environmentalists"? Nope. It was lack of electrical demand - those plants were planned under the idea that the rapid growth in electricity consumption of 1950s and 60s would continue forever.

The high capital costs of nuclear power plants make them unattractive investments compared to coal and natural gas plants. Only government subsidies (or a carbon tax) could make them cost competitive. It is good old profit-maximizing capitalism that has been holding nuclear power back.

There are in fact nuclear power plants starting construction right now - Units 3 and 4 at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georiga. The plants project might have started a couple of years sooner - but what was holding it back was were the federal subsidies demanded by the private companies. At the start of this years the final i's were dotted on those subsidies ($6.5 billion in loan guarantees) and the plants are going forward.

Are you just making this stuff up? This is a complete nonsense.

Points well made. Thanks.

Right you are. If you have fireclay (deposits are found all over the U.S. and the world) then you can make cupola and crucible furnaces that remelt steel. Any sort of fuel can be used in a crucible furnace. And these furnaces are readily constructed on a small scale, but can be scaled to very large units too. There are hundreds of billions of tons of steel lying around.

Umm... why would we need to bootstrap "iron working" again? There are hundreds of billions of tons of high quality refined steel (compared to the iron of ages past) laying around to be remelted and reworked. Do you believe it will all evaporate?

But where are the articles on Pleonasm?

Citation?

"Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" refers to brioche, a rich sweet bread, sort of like a cake. Not said by Marie Antoinette though, it was attributed to an unnamed "great princess" by Jacques Rousseau in his Confessions, but Marie Antoinette would have been too young to be this princess.

It is essential that we keep the timelines straight on how jobs are lost, and then eventually regained in a true Industrial Revolution. We are currently in what should be called the Cybernetic Revolution, the only true successor to the original IR in terms of its effects on employment.

In the original IR there were rapid losses of employment (starting in textiles) as factories went up starting around 1780. Optimists, who prate about how 'the IR really wasn't so bad' argue that by 1840 the average wage had risen to finally exceed pre-levels. As with today, talking about average wages hides the extent of poverty with a society, but more importantly it ignores the fact that the gap between 1780 and 1840 is sixty years, and other more systematic analyses pretty much keep this same gap for the employment picture turn-around, though shifting the dates of both start and end forward slightly. This means the typical worker rendered a pauper in mid-life by the start of the IR never benefited, their children never benefited, their grand-children rarely benefited, it was only their great-grand-children that found ready work at good wages!

The promise that eventually the economy will adapt and replace the lost jobs is one that won't be seen for a few generations. We need to have policies in place now, as the jobs vanish, to keep the workers and their families from ending up in poverty, and these policies will need to be maintained and updated for several decades to come.

It is notable that a quick perusal of conservative policy sites (National Review, etc.) for suggestions on how to deal with this problem of inevitable long-term unemployment find by far the most common is to suggest that job salaries be subsidized by the government to create employment. The really aren't any other alternatives that might conceivably work - only government spending to stimulate the economy can step in. (But how taxes should be raised to finance this is never discussed.).