Admittedly, Zimbabwe is probably more of a democracy than we are ...

I just went through sheer HELL with a set of Itanium HP severs

Those with half a clue were predicting that 15 years ago. That's why they call it "itanic."

Different forms of ethanol have different impacts.

Ethanol from crops that would have been burned creates a net zero GHG impact, especially that from cane sugar production.

Ethanol from actual corn, due to the high water and fertilizer content, and the fact it is diverted from feed crops for animals and humans, has a high GHG impact, and actually costs more to turn into ethanol, in terms of GHG impact, than if used for feed.

Ethanol from switchgrass and blue-green algae is fairly good, with a net positive GHG impact. Switchgrass is a rotation crop, so it has very low fertilizer and water needs, and converts fairly well. Algae does have high water requirements, but if produced in areas with high water content, or used as a filtration crop to clean polluted water, can be a net positive.

But corn ethanol ... that is a bad choice.

(caveat - I invested in various corn ethanol IPOs at various times)

Really, my college education was a waste.

Good luck affording a house for you and your children to live in without one. 30 years of dual incomes and financialisation have placed a home firmly outside the reach of most single income households, and at this stage quite a few double income households.

Make no mistake, no mistake whatsoever. These women are not pursuing abstract "careers". They are perusing the income and job-security needed to buy and live securely in a family home. And like the rest of us, they are losing.

This happened in Japan beginning in the 1980s. The birth rate there has plummeted. If you don't produce affordable, aspirational accommodation, people will not settle down.

Putting off having kids is not as easy as you think.

My sister did have a kid in her late 40s, but the viability of female eggs is actually not that high.

You're far better off having kids and doing what First World Nations do, which is have women with kids not suffer in their careers.

Your entire argument ignores the fact that the support of the Upper Middle class as a whole -- the entire top 10% -- is the most vital component of the general support for the top 0.1% and 0.01% of the population. Without the consent and indeed approval of the highest half quartile of the population, no regime will last very long. The present one retains this high support, and will do so until such time as the pension pots of the top 10% are raided wholesale, or wiped out by inflation.

The additional $41,950 is allocated towards sunk costs including

• - Cosmetic designs of a hand like-prosthetic to prevent adults staring uncomfortably and children exclaiming "cool"!
• - Insurance/class action insurance for when the prosthetic ends up injuring/irritating one or more users or people, or things, or otherwise perishable or damageable entities the hand interacts with.
• - Robustness to last through more than, say, 10,000 cycles before snapping into brittle plastic shards.
• - Salaries and children's college funds for the scientists, designers, and MBAs running the prosthesis companies
• - Salaries and children's college funds for the academic and medical researchers involved in prosthetic studies, both mechanical, psychological, and sociological

Meanwhile, the 3D prosthetic hand has only the following sunk costs to cover.

• - ~$10,000 investment in quality 3D printer
• - The time taken find and to add the most saccharinly kitch music to 3D printing application videos on Youtube.

It's important to remember to keep the background details out of perspective... or in perspective, depending on whichever context you'd prefer to hock.

Democracy is a form of government in which all eligible citizens participate equally - either directly or indirectly through elected representatives - in the proposal, development, and creation of laws.

Sgined: another Brit.

It's no more or less believable than any other religion. Do you think people really believe that a dead guy came back to life? How about an entire ocean was suddenly parted so the good guys could get away and then collapsed again on the bad guys? Or that the earth is 6000 years old? Or that the guy who created the entire universe 12 billion years ago and billions of light years large is really really concerned about if human penises wind up in human vaginas before the correct ritual is performed?

You can sort-of understand why ancient religions came about and stuck. People in general, without education, before the formulation of the Scientific Method, living in a very uncertain world where starvation and disease were all about (and life was short and harsh) would invent supernatural explanations for things and perhaps like to believe that there was someone looking over them in judgement all the time.

However, there is absolutely no excuse for Scientology to be as big as it is. It was conceived as a cynical exercise in demonstrating that gullibility, ignorance and superstition, which are fundamental parts of human nature, are every present and easily exploitable (for money) and that society has not advanced to the point that the human race has outgrown its primitive cultural roots.

You have to hand it to L Ron, it was a dastardly,cynical plan to make money out of the stupid, and it has been a soaring success.

As they say, a fool and his money are easily parted. There are a lot of Hollywood actors involved...

But the story DID come out.

I'm already seeing ads for managers offering to sell me this information.

I'm not sure you realize that it's already being marketed, not "will be" marketed.

I think you don't get how genetics works.

Various biochemical pathways are conserved, and are there to react to different environmental conditions.

Disease is a moving target. As we suppress one disease, another takes its niche.

In most cases we only know the primary biochemical pathway, have sparse information on the secondary biochemical pathway which kicks in when the primary pathway is disrupted, and have little to no information on the evolutionarily conserved tertiary biochemical pathway we inherited from fish or dinosaurs.

Making "designer" kids leads us to less genetic diversity, and less adaptive capacity as a species to stressors which will occur.

That plus in most cases we end up with too many males and not enough females when we let people "choose".

More free skeet targets.

If you want your robot back, don't send it over my airspace.

No, there is a growing move to outsource Lawyer jobs too.

There are a few nations that provide the bulk of H1-B "workers".

Look at job ads in those locations - those are the people that will replace the US workers.