It'll be Turtles All the Way Down. :-)

I wonder what Great A'Tuin thinks about that.

Back in the '90s I was chatting with a skript-kliddie who actually had an AOL logon like that. He figured that none of the CS drones could type it in right to nuke his account. You should have seen his face when I said the magic words: "copy and paste."

Last estimate I heard said that the contamination in Oak Ridge from the Manhattan Project and the Cold War would not be cleaned up until 2050 -- 100+ years after the end of WWII.

You think that's bad? That's nothing compared to Zone rouge in northern France and Belgium. It's been uninhabitable since about 1919, and is expected to stay that way for at least 300 years, possibly as much as 700 and not because of radioactivity. No, it's because of heavy metal contamination, unexploded ordinance and poison gas shells that didn't (yet) go off.

If the long press isn't working, pull the plug. HTH, HAND.

Also, people who aren't good at negotiating also deserve fair wages.

I'm not saying that they don't. And that's why sports figures have agents so that they don't have to be good negotiators themselves. My point is that being in a union doesn't stop you from negotiating if you think you can do better.

Why, then, does Major League Baseball have a union? These are very high skilled jobs, very well paid. The highest performers make FAR more money than the middling ones - having a union doesn't prevent that.

My father spent most of his working life in union supermarkets in Los Angles, most of the time in management. Except when he was just starting out, he never worked for union scale, but negotiated a higher rate because he was known to be good enough to deserve it. No matter what the unions say, you can always get more if you can make the boss believe that you deserve it.

That is the completely-unfounded religious axiom of every scientist: that the universe is as it (roughly) appears to be, so that the nature of reality can be inferred from observation.

There is one objective fact that supports that axiom: no matter who makes the observations, what direction they look and when, they get the same results. This strongly suggests that what we are observing is objective reality, not some subjective vision that can vary from one observer to another.

In other news, sky is still blue.

...you have functional illiterates like Trump.

Functional Illiteracy means that somebody is barely able to read, not that they can read fairly well but don't like to or don't bother. Do you have any citable evidence that Mr. Trump is functionally illiterate, or is it just your TDS getting the better of you again?

In that case, you'll be pleased to know that that site is now 404 compliant.

That's a chicken and egg thing.

Not completely, I can imagine potential customers telling the factory owner that they need to get their prices down and in the long run, building a rail line is the best way. Of course, I'm assuming that the auto part factories aren't the only ones using it so that the costs get spread around.

If they had to truck parts back and forth to/from the middle of Africa, that would be different.

If there were that much trade, there'd soon be a railroad to take the product from the factories to the nearest port.

Whoosh!
Get your mind back into the gutter where it belongs!

Doing it discretely is a a piecewise approximation of that curve.

And what do you get if you do it indiscreetly?

About 4 years? No. Try ~6 instead. It started when Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and ended when Japan surrendered in 1945.