The RDA can't do physics

[Human No More]

Nobody is delibrately, clear-cut evil.

Now you're putting words in my mouth. Crap ones at that, since I think the entire concept is flawed. I said that it reflects EVERY side of humanity - that means good, and it means that equally, perhaps exploitative, greedy and cruel.

Why would they use it? I mean, I'd be really surprised if their electrical losses added up to more than $20m * however much is needed to fix them. ...And the overhead of changing out all the infrastructure. And this is after you apply all the other cost-cutting methods, like turning voltages up and so forth.

There are no details on the electrical grid.

...and built out of an equivalent to cellolose, not steel. What possible evolutionary advantage is there for a tree to grow that excessivly tall?

Competition.

You'd be surprised as to the strength of some cell structures anyway, again, particularly with the much large structural cross-section than anything humans build. Certainly, an Earth species of tree may be unable to, but this isn't Earth. It even grows arches above ground level, which are an excellent load-bearing structure.

A larger cross-section starts working against you when the structure is leaning sideways.

Not when you have enough rigidity.

Also, even if falling over laterally isn't too much of an issue, the structure collapsing under its own weight straight down still is. Hometree is hollow, so there's plenty of space for things to fall into.

So are skyscrapers. Derp.

Your list appears rather biased.

...and?

Yet there's the conversation between Jake and Quartich where IIRC, Quaritch sounds like he's beginning to suspect that Jake is not playing for the RDA anymore. At that point, Quartich should've started investigating and pulled Jake out ASAP. (of course, doing so while giving Jake as little hint as possible of his doing anything wrong.)

This is another of thee times where I suspect you've done nothing more than read the wikipedia page. If you watch it, you can see that Quaritch is wondering, but decides to give him a chance in the hope that it does end up benefiting him, form when he talked to Jake before. If you honestly believe that a character misinterpreting the personality of another makes a film bad, I suggest you stop watching or reading all fiction (and non-fiction).

And my point is that even with perfect numbers in the relavent places, it still won't work, because magnetism is simply not that far-reaching.

Earth's magnetosphere reaches to ~39,000 miles. Clearly, strength falls off, but less than 1km is still extremely strong in relation. Again, even if known superconductors of high or low temperature would not experience the Meissner effect, one with a penetration depth that can be what is needed can and will.