You must be new here. Many companies keep ex-C-levels nominally employed as 'consultants' so their stock can vest (which is typically the bulk of their compensation) and avoid any expensive/public lawsuits. It's paying them off to quietly go away without spending any cash.
We tell them to build. There are planet scale transformations underway and we need another incarnation of the WPA to help mitigate the impacts.
For example, the pine bark beetle is ravaging the forests of the Sierra Nevadas. Millions of dead trees just waiting for the next PGE power line to drop or lightning bolt to strike so why not head out with a few thousand young bodies and start felling that timber and getting it to mills?
What about some sea walls? Forget waiting for giant cranes and pontoons, how about people start dropping cement rubble in the ocean around coastal communities, one dinghy at a time? The coral is on its way out, time to reinvent some of that Roman cement and mitigate the hurricanes' impact.
How many roads could use some form of a retaining wall in the event of a deluge? There's got to be thousands of spots in the US alone. Wire covered rubble? Gabions? Deadman walls? Whatever works!
My friend who was killed by a repeated drunk driver might have argued otherwise. If you can't drive responsibly, it's in society's interest to make sure you never do.
>It's harder to reverse-engineer an unconscious process
Aside from some basic life support systems, don't almost all movements start with conscious effort? Whether you are deliberate about the exercise or not, you practice and practice until you develop 'muscle memory' where it becomes unconscious: walking, dribbling a basketball, holding a G chord on a guitar, etc.
There are so many tipping points and cascading effects at work that I doubt we have any real understanding of everything that is happening at the macroscopic level, nor even if we did could we battle everything everywhere all at once. I suspect whole swaths of humanity are in for perilous times ahead as the speed of the variances will outpace our collective ability to adapt. As the wizened Tool once sang[0], "Learn to swim, see you down in Arizona Bay".
It's not just conversations around the dinner table. It's also how you get started vis a vis introductions to the right people, prized starter jobs and educational pathways that may not be widely known (eg, an internship at ___ will set you up for a job later at ___).
Like being completely compromised by the drug cartels and effectively a narco-state?[0]
[0]https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/mexico-s-former-defense-...