That vaguely reminds me of the society in Clarke's The Songs of Distant Earth. The president was a boring administrative position, without opportunities to actually screw things up. The position was filled by means of a bi-annual lottery. The only way you could get exempted from the lottery was by means of having a mental handicap or by having committed a severe felony. (Trying to weasel out after having been drawn to be the next president was a serious felony in itself. :-))

I think that raw materials can be excluded simply on the basis that not all of them can be mined in Europe in the first place.

They found the "Cloning" feature in Photoshop, and said: "Hey, someone else has already done the research for us! How convenient."

What do you mean by that? If it doesn't show up in the fossil record, how can that be an extiction event?

You've just describe the upwards-narrowing shape of the food chain pyramid. How is that surprising?

The design started long before the contract was signed.

Which is why the Americans have returned to the Moon already and the F-35s have been dominating the sky for years. Oh, wait...

"Sunk costs", "dead in water"...I don't know who floated the idea to the editor but it should have been torpedoed in the interest of seriousness.

It's even worse; they're Europeans - they can't blame it on vagaries of mixed-unit engineering! ;-)

What do you mean, "not sure"? You think this whole project was started yesterday? As opposed to, you know, the end of 1990's, being the time when the whole thing got approved?

That's nothing, wait till you see the Tacoma Bridge chips they're planning for the next year. I've heard they've made a real break-through with them.

You've obviously never tried electric stimulation...

Concrete is scarcely significantly different from many types of aggregate sedimentary rocks composed of SiO2 and compounds of calcium and aluminum, and if you actually bothered to read the page you've linked, you'd find it right there.

Oh, but they are. Given their composition, you can find concrete and ceramics in nature, or at least very analogical stuff. PVC? Not so much.

Yet again, Europium beats Americium when it comes to energy efficiency!

Uhm...the Montgolfier brothers, perchance?

That's good, because most people fail horribly at throwing themselves at the ground and missing. Not even high bridges seem to help.