Q: Would Sinclair do anything differently, large or small, if it had a do-over?
Lately, Fed officials have suggested they are not planning to do anything more, in large part because the economy seemed to be doing so much better.
"In this country, you can't do anything on a large scale without Government support," said Rong Guangdao, deputy general manager of Shanghai Petrochemical, a giant oil company 50 miles outside Shanghai.
But reducing the length and frequency of drug-related incarceration going forward for new cases, however welcome, doesn't do anything about the large population of drug users already stuck in our prisons.
"I think people ought to start thinking about [a peace treaty] because the reason why 1994 and 2005 [deals] fell apart is we didn't do anything about the larger steps of ending enmity," Sigal said.
The more urgent question is whether the government can do anything to prevent ever-larger crowds from creating ever-greater calamities in the future.
In the past few days, liberal commentators have condemned the Carrier agreement as a public-relations exercise, a bribe (the state of Indiana, where Pence is still governor, agreed to give Carrier about seven million dollars in tax breaks), and a one-off gesture that won't do anything to arrest the larger trend of offshoring and outsourcing.
And yet that's not true, not exactly, for if Spero is remorseless, he is not without conscience, which leaves him to question his own violent tendencies, his willingness to do anything and, on a larger scale, the kind of person he has (or wants to have) become.
The pieces migrated into storage and finally back into Mr. Valentine's possession, where they sat for years — unseen, too large to do anything with, too expensive to restore — and there they would probably have remained.
At Gatwick, he says, "if you wanted to do anything, it involved negotiating with large numbers of different stakeholders: the relationship with the airlines was usually adversarial and local councils were hostile to any expansion of the airport".
