Yes, if a project gets to be large, then you need careful process. There are a few flaws though:
1. A large proportion of the time, you are doing something far less complex and/or dangerous than bridge building. There are people who insist that for something akin to 'hello world' test cases must be written, everyone must use a bloated IDE, all code must be in version control managed by some project hosting site with issue tracking, wiki, code review, and continuous integration. Sure, there can be value in that stuff, but there is cost. Frequently the cost outweighs the value for simple utilities (git and test cases are generally tolerable, but venture far into mandates about IDEs and project management and it can get nasty).. One example for me was for a quick 2 or 3 line C program people might fire up visual studio, and end up with a 'project' with a lot more metadata than the application itself, when using the microsoft SDK by itself with notepad would have been just as good (in linux the 'just run gcc' can be taken for granted, in MS you don't have a compiler and most laypersons don't even realize you can get SDK without visual studio, so I used that example since I see visual studio project files for the dumbest stuff).

2. A great deal of the tools are frankly half-assed. Particularly when it comes to deploying the tools. Once deployed they work about 80% of the time, but then fall over and block progress while someone figures out why the tooling fell over. A lot of these development tools got to the point where the authors of them could use it and that was about it. One who understands every nook and cranny and can quickly recover given a stack trace doesn't feel as strongly about doing the other '1%' of work to make it easy for others to deploy and administrate.

How about we have a reasonable education for all? It turns out honors in High School is not a predictor of college success.

" Shouldn't we always strive to help the best the most?
define 'the best'? Is the person who never took a risk really the best?

When you have an Empire, you must distinguish the "Homeland" from the "Colonies".

Yes. Like TV is "free" with ads that take lots of space. Thankfully, the TV content makers don't make TVs and stereos, so we still get "mute" buttons. With Android, the ad maker is essentially the device maker (via the O/S), so they did leave out the common "mute" button, as well as any easy way for it to be emulated.

Investing in Microsoft, Virgin, or Symantic is a diversified investment strategy. The companies operate in many market sectors, produce products across diversified markets, and supply services to everyone from miners to financials, home users to governments. Your risk is thusly spread across more than 500 companies.

They're investing money in the idea that the stock is undervalued.

Revenues up, profits down. Odd. Revenues up all the time because inflation.

Stocks don't reflect real business performance.

Where are you getting this from? I detect a very basic failure to either apply critical thinking or reading comprehension.

Scattering musing to the winds....

That's not what everything I've read about the disaster has said. The mountain has gone through cycles - whenever it collapses, the river gets moved away, and the slides stop for a time, but eventually it wears away the footings enough that it falls again. They'd even tried to prevent landslides there by manually shoring up the base back in the 1960s, but it just flowed over their reinforcements.

The waterlogging of the soil is also a necessary factor too, mind you - not saying otherwise. :)

I had paperbark birch seeds, which are also pretty water tolerant (though not as much as river birch), but none sprouted - ironically I think the seeds were too wet when I stratified them (same with my maples). Isn't river birch (B. nigra) a warm-weather birch species? I've got some cuttings of random local birches from a neighbor but I have no clue whether any of them are water tolerant enough to take swampy ground. Also birches don't usually get that tall so I don't know how expansive of a root system they'll put down. The abundant local species B. nana (dwarf birch) grows (nay, volunteers) readily here almost anywhere that sheep don't graze, but it's just a shrub, I doubt it'd do the trick (though it's probably better than just grass). It can take wet soil, although not totally swampy conditions.

For the wetter areas I also have about a dozen or so western redcedar seedlings - they're not as swamp-tolerant as dawn redwood and western recedar, but they're still reportedly quite tolerant of wet or even waterlogged soils, and they should be more cold/wind hardy than those two (wind is actually the big issue, it doesn't really get that cold here). I've also got a number of other pacific northwest trees with varying degrees of standing water tolerance. Oh, and a species or two of tasmanian mountain eucalyptus (don't remember which ones) that tolerate fairly swampy ground and should at least stand a fighting chance against our winds.

Basically, I'm just going to plant a ton of stuff and see what survives. ;)

One plus is that where the ground is persistently wet and at landslide risk, it is slowly flowing water, it's not standing. It's constantly replaced by fresh, cold ground-filtered water, so there's probably not as much risk of root rot as might be common otherwise. But there's still the oxygen issue. That and the damned sheep, but I'm working to fix that issue once and for all...

Because they hadn't thought of advertising when computers were invented.

By the time phones came around- ads were in the revenue model for web apps.

By parallel, you can't use many web sites without turning on the advertising.

At least for now, there are no ads when I'm using my phone simply as a phone.

I don't see this lawsuit having any last effects. Most users will install an app after being informed the app needs "Advertising" and "User data transmission" permissions.

Not if it has paradox-absorbing crumple zones.

Are trees supposed to eliminate the river at the bottom that's been eating away at the foundation of the slope?

It's good that we agree on that.