"Smart" people get rich quick, and in 50 years they won't give a shit where the oil comes from because they're already rich and/or dead. Clearly your definition of 'smart' is defective, it seems to include some sort of moral component or altruism.

..to 'hack' charisma for almost a hundred years? Dale Carnegie. The only difference is 'journalists' today think she's something new or original, because they're too lazy to do even basic research.

.. I'd like to say that for $40,000 your 'lossy audio file' at least doesn't have a reputation for spontaneously bursting into flames.

High-speed trains no longer make sense in the United States or Canada because in the last 100 years we've wholesale abandoned the infrastructure that makes them accessible, driven (literally) by the Big 3 automakers and Big Oil, who've had everything to gain from the death of rail transport. -Go digging up the history of the PCC streetcar conspiracies in the 1920s and 30s to see how diesel-powered buses and OWNING YOUR OWN CAR replaced clean, quiet electric trolleys.

In the UK things slid downhill this way for years under the nationalized British Rail, but in most of Western Europe and especially the shining example of train culture, Japan this isn't the case. Unless you're in a very rural area, you're never more than a few miles from the nearest local train station with decent service. And in the case of France or Japan, that leads you (probably within a half-hour's ride) to a high-speed, cross-country link.

That kind of convenience can't be rebuilt in today's economy and society- it has to have been ingrained in the public's interest and concern, and the space for infrastructure grandfathered from 50 to 100 years ago.