Cuba and Hispaniola are not "a small island" nor are they in the middle of the ocean. Cuba alone is larger than England and together they're nearly the size of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales). Furthermore they are both considered part of North America. Everyone else rightly assumed the Earth was much larger and he'd run out of food before he got around to India. In his "wrongness" he ran into a gigantic new landmass full of riches and resources to report home about leading to European Colonization. So yea, he gets credit for starting that time period.

There's a difference between "such a device exists" and "They use a device". I believe those devices are possibly in use in Michigan which the ACLU is suing to find out more about, not in Florida.

Oh, I definitely agree with you there. As more and more of the population stays in school I think there is undoubtedly a pressure on teachers to try to keep average grades up and failure rates down which results in cases of relaxing standards. This doesn't mean the population is getting less intelligent or less educated though, it simply means the average graduate may be less intelligent, but now a much larger percentage of the population is attempting to graduate and learn and the population on the whole is getting better educated.

Imagine if you will that you switched from how cross country teams are now to having everyone forced to be on the cross country team, run and exercise. You might look at average run times for the team and exclaim that the population is getting slower and worse at running and that the system must be broken, but this is not the case. Now you simply have more people being pushed to run instead of the people who were already inclined and in a good position to do so. Forcing all these people to do training runs would mean the population as a whole is getting better at running, even though your average scores for your "team" would seem to disagree.

Firstly, proposing a hypothesis for a given condition (a hypothesis I am backing) is not a straw man. You simply disagree with my hypothesis. A straw man is where I insert a flawed argument into your mouth and then knock it down claiming victory. Fighting a man made of straw if you will. While it may certainly be more convenient for you to simply dismiss "what you see quite often" as logical fallacy instead of people simply disagreeing with you I'm afraid you'll have to coin your own "Ironhandx Fallacy" for that rather then trying to co-opt the definition of straw man.

Now, onto the matter at hand

I believe this premise to be correct but your conclusion that test scores should stay the same is incorrect. The problem stems from the fact that basic math and science tests are not a measure of intelligence they are a measure of the quality of prior education. People with affluence, which you admit heavily weight the original 20%, are going to have much better access to much better education both through private schooling and through living in areas with nicer schools due to the affluence of the average citizens there. People with affluence are afforded many advantages such as private tutors, parents that are more likely to value education having used it themselves to gain affluence, the ability to purchase educational materials and most importantly the time and environment needed to learn and study versus working to put food on the table.

I'd appreciate it if you took a moment of self reflection to examine what you just did. A self identified conservative put forward for debate possible solutions to a problem your platform holds important and regularly has problems with conservatives denying even exists. Presented with this extraordinary opportunity to initiate constructive dialogue to solve this important problem what action did you choose to take?

Instead of addressing said solution or debating it you make ad hominem attacks on conservatives in general and then try to switch to another issue (evolution) which has nothing to do with the matter at hand. Presented with an "enemy" which doesn't fit your stereotype you ignore him and the opportunity for a solution he represents because a solution is not important to you. What you want is an enemy that is evil enough for you to hate, and anyone who tones down or breaks that stereotype must be dismissed and ignored because you're not interested in working towards a solution, you're interested in having someone sufficiently evil to point a finger at while you complain about the problem

It's almost as if a higher percentage of the population is attempting to get into college and get further educated then ever before instead of dropping out of high school to work at the local automotive/shoe/soap plant. How many minorities are first-generation college/HS students/grads in the current population? There's been a lot of social change in the last 100 years that is causing a much larger percent of the population attempt those tests then ever before.

This is true, you hardly ever hear of the first and a half amendment these days, but it's not really all that relevant anymore. I suppose it's great and all if you're into that like the Founding Fathers were, but those were different times and the Constitution needs to be able to adapt. I think most Americans these days have little to no interest in shaving their arms.

The assumption that people will eat more because they walked around this mall is false. They may simply walk around at home a little less and sit down or go to bed earlier. There's plenty of energy being wasted on frivolous actions when you're talking about action of the human body and we usually respond to small amounts of extra exercise by resting rather than minute changes in the amount of food we cook for our meals. The amount we cook is usually binned in set amounts rather then being a continuous variable we carefully adjust and extra is thrown away or consumed needlessly more often then not. OTOH your point about production costs sounds reasonable but do you have any numbers to back up the idea that the energy used for mass production will be more then is reclaimed over the entire life of the tile?

False Dichotomy. I don't go to India to hire an incompetent electrician just because I don't need an electrical engineer PE to wire my new house.

This is part of the current problem. Software Engineers are writing lots of things that can kill you and we don't have any licensing body or laws requiring a PE to make specific applications. It generally means we can't be held responsible, but that cuts both ways. If we're working on a serious application we have nothing to hold back from management if we know the design doesn't pass muster. A PE must attach his signature to his work to approve it so a PE has leverage in the ability to refuse to do so unless the work meets his professional standards. As software engineers they can just take our work any day of the week and throw it into a production system and if we don't like it we can GTFO. So to sum up, we have the same pressures, the same dangers and moral responsibilities, with none of the leverage over management or our peers to enforce professional standards.

No. As a Software Engineer myself I see this 'blame the management not the engineer' mindset as an unacceptable abdication of responsibility. Management isn't the technical expertise, the engineer is. If your a Civil Engineer PE and your MBA boss asks you to sign off on a design, that's great and all, but you don't sign off unless you're sure that the designs are sound and acceptable according to your trained, professional opinion. The company is paying you to make that call honestly, they did not and can not simply buy your signature unless you have no sense of honor or integrity to your profession, in which case you shouldn't call yourself an engineer in the first place and can rightly look forward to being 'thrown under the bus' for signing off on a design that causes harm to others.

In your bridge example you state the designs are cross-checked and reviewed by a slew of other engineers. Guess whose job that is to make sure that's all been done properly before they sign their name on it? The CE with the PE license that's in charge of the bridge. If management doesn't give him the resources to have the designs cross-checked and reviewed he doesn't sign and the bridge doesn't open. He most certainly does not piss and whine about management privately, pocket the money, sign the design and say it's the fault of the MBA's who don't know anything about bridges when 20 people die on it.

Are management dicks? sometimes. Is it easy to stand up to them? No. Might there be negative consequences for doing the right thing and acting like a professional? Yes. Welcome to real life and having responsibility of a profession rather than a job.

That doesn't make sense on any level. How does one extend science with vendor lock in and get everyone to switch to it before they kill it off? Are you telling me the Big Bang theory (first put forward by a catholic priest) is a clever extension of science to lead us down the wrong path before they somehow destroy all scientific knowledge completely? You can't throw that phrase around just because you hate the person/group embracing whatever idea you also like and are thus faced with having to live in a world where your enemy isn't quite as ubiquitously evil as you'd prefer them to be. Can't let that happen or next thing you'll be self reflecting on whether the stereotypes you hold true are correct and you should be hating them at all!

Because they have a less firm grasp of the slippery slope fallacy?

Wow, you're giddy about fellow human beings dying because they have different culture and beliefs than you. Is this really the "enlightened" and "evolved" alternative to religion you wish to present?

You can get most college football from ESPN on an Xbox. I only use cable for the NFL. no idea about motorcycle racing but if it's on ESPN 3 you can get that via the xbox app.