This is the same kind of thing that was said in the US. The space program had more "spin-off" benefits than I can list. Computers, solar cells, etc. were all advanced by contributions from space research. If it hadn't been for computers in particular, I don't know what kind of work I would have had. It probably wouldn't have been such a good ride for me, and I was never directly employed by NASA. Yes. There are still poor people in the USA... carrying pocket computers.

Power to the sphincter!

Possibly the evidence of a lack of evidence.

The first rule of economics is "Businesses do not pay taxes. Businesses collect taxes."

Of course politicians make sure that the public doesn't understand such things with demagoguery.

Power to the blamers! There is far too much power to be garnered from inflaming (occasionally real, but often wholly manufactured) biases.
But things like the Rolling Stone UVA rape hoax, global warming, GamerGate, &c have blown the lid off what a bunch of cheap hucksters the Grievance Industrial Complex are.
Go back to hell and stay there, creeps.

"'Doesn't carry all the bad PR', fustakrakich? Apparently you weren't paying much attention during the last election," said Mitt Romney.

"Sustainable" is the biggest unintentionally funny concept going. The atomic mokita is that the world economy, itself, is unsustainable. Whatever Ehrlichian silliness you care to trot out is currently in the process of correcting itself using the traditional means: war.

â(TM)Tâ(TM)râ(TM)uâ(TM)e.

My mom is unfortunately on my phone plan because she can't manage her own finances well enough to pay for a phone herself.

Last November she lost her closest-thing-to-a-dumb-phone-I-could-get-her. It would still do web stuff, but... in a very dumb way, like "smart" phones before the modern (iPhone/Android/etc) smart phone era did. I simply could not get her a phone that only make phone calls, but that was close enough for those purposes.

And then she lost it, and I had to replace it. I wanted the cheapest goddamn dumbest simplest most basic phone possible. All she wants or needs to do is make phone calls. She doesn't give a flying fuck about texting or internet or anything! (Or she didn't at the time, and I wish it had stayed that way). All. She. Needs. Is. A Phone. But to get her a "dumb" (not even, like before) phone would have actually cost me more than their cheapest generation-or-two-old smart phone, a Galaxy Mini S3. Now she's fucking addicted to it and sucking up all the data (that I barely even use) on my plan.

What the fucking fuck has happened where it is simply impossible to get just basic phone service without paying more for it!?!?

It turns out that when you take materials that are usually not a problem, and change their surface chemistry, they can become problems. Take carbon, for example. Pencil "lead" is graphite. Not a problem. OTOH, take a look at a bottle of graphite lock lube. It's the same element, in a fine powder form. There are all kinds of warnings on it because it can get into your lungs.

IANAChemist but I think a real chemist would agree that surface chemistry is an exciting new field, and we don't know enough about it. Sometimes you can get exposed to things in weird ways because they're small.

To take an oddball analogy here... jumping up and down on a mile high peak is not a problem. People do it all the time. Now shrink the mountain down to six feet and try jumping up and down on the peak. Ouch.

I won't take you seriously until I see some unit tests.

I'm pretty sure I don't want to see anybody on Slashdot testing their unit.

â(TM)Hâ(TM)eâ(TM)lâ(TM)pâ(TM)!

I thought anthropogenic global warming was solving that?

However, the focus at improving a task repetitively helped me enormously, and I have video games to thank for that.

I'd love to hold society to the standard that no child should have to risk death due to parental stupidity. That's just not California. If you really want to uphold this ideal, you'll have to crusade for myriad causes, including gun control, obesity-fighting measures, tighter distribution of driver's licenses, promotion of breastfeeding, etc, etc. On the list of annual deaths in California caused by parental stupidity, lack of vaccination is near the bottom of the list.

All of this is true. However, lack of vaccination will rapidly climb the lists if America's current anti-science, anti-education and anti-logic trends are allowed to continue.