sophistry

I believe the experience of "stress" that you feel in this sentence is because "had" is being used as a modal verb. That is, it's being used to qualify the verb "to Google" rather than specify it's tense like in "I'd Googled that last week". Modal verbs are a type of auxiliary verb.

I don't know the "real" rule for when you can contract and when you can't, but I'm sure that there's some linguist somewhere who has written a paper on it. The reason that I didn't try to explain the stress that native speakers feel by talking about modal verbs is because I don't think that you can say in general that you never contract a modal verb. For example you can say "I would talk to Jim" or "I'd talk to Jim" where is "would" a modal verb modifying "talk". Maybe it's the case that the only time you have a phrase in the form of [auxiliary verb] [unconjugated verb] is when the auxiliary verb is being used as a modal verb? I don't know. I don't have any expertise in linguistics, I just know the terms because I took a class on it in college.

Just a small pointer because I assume you're a non-native english speaker: you never (I think) contract an auxiliary verb before an unconjugated main verb. You have to write "I had to Google ..." The only reason I mention it is because it's an easy error to make but one that makes people have to read the sentence a few times to figure out what it means. If "to Google" was conjugated, you could write "I'd Googled that last week ..."

It sounds like the shift to 28 hours would be voluntary and only last up to two years for those who choose it.

> Unfortunately unless worldwide culture changes such that demand for produced goods drops dramatically in favor for intangibles (humanities, happiness, etc.) any small union that does this will basically become irrelevant in no short time. It's important to note that the union in the OP has huge leverage.

This is exactly the theory behind socialism. Capitalism is great at increasing our productivity, but past a certain point, you can't continue valuing productivity more than worker happiness. Socialism is less efficient than capitalism, even Marx admitted that, but at some point it begins to make sense to shift our values. When will that point be? Probably not yet, maybe not as soon as people think, but probably not never. If the metalworking industry is productive enough so that it makes sense to shift their values, then more power to them.

Microwave radiation is not itself a toxin though. It may or may not create toxins, but EM radiation is not a molecule, peptide, or protein.

Can you give an example of a case where you've expected to find a solution in humanities and social sciences and been disappointed?

I've done an absentee ballot several times. It's a bit of a pain. If it wasn't so easy for me to vote in person, I might not vote as often.

>a potent biological toxin

A toxin is a poisonous substance produced within living cells or organisms [...]

Toxins can be small molecules, peptides, or proteins that are capable of causing disease on contact with or absorption by body tissues interacting with biological macromolecules such as enzymes or cellular receptors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxin