"Way below the margin of error."

False. Sample size and margin of error aren't even commensurable quantities (not even same units). The only requirements for estimating a population proportion are (a) a random sample, and (b) at least 5 "yes" and 5 "no" responses in the sample. As someone else pointed out, the margin of error here would be about 14%, at the 95% confidence level, assuming a randomized sample. (Weiss, Introductory Statistics, 9E, Section 12.1.)

Ladies and gentlemen: The parent post is what it looks like when someone tries to BS you with fancy words that they don't understand.

"A lot of this hysterical screaming about how we're destroying the planet seems a lot like hubris. On certain level, the idea that we have that much power pleases the egos of some people."

Holy god, these "argument by hubris and ego" debates are so fucking stupid. Look, they can always be flipped around the other way: "People believing they can exponentially expand in population without suffering the same limits as any other species sounds like hubris. The idea that we can do whatever we want without consequences pleases the ego of people."

See? It always cuts both ways, Such a stupid thing to hang an argument on. Scientific data or GTFO.

Guys like him fantasize about living in a sci-fi film so bad (Blade Runner, Foundation series, Martian Chronicles, whatever) that they will the poetically tragic destruction of life on Earth, so long as it better motivates us to become spacemen. The first might happen, the second won't, but they do like to imagine.

It's totally the Great Filter.

See: Machiavelli's The Prince.

Don't worry: someday they'll have another decades-long African occupation, or nuke somebody, and then Droolin' Joe Sixpack will be making the opposite joke for the next half-century.

Translation: "I am butthurt that I've been whipped in the productivity game. By a municipality. In France."

Oh, to live in a libertarian paradise where everything on earth is explainable within the first week of Econ 101.

"Vacation time is not something that government can force an employer to add on top of your salary"

Demonstrably false.

Citation? Will presume this is BS propaganda until then.

"Where do you work, I wonder, that you believe people who have flaws, like we all do, should be treated like used tissues?"

Probably a place where police/SWAT don't show up with machine guns if he whines "Timmy's being mean to me".

Probably not that predictable. The atrocity at that point might be: must be implanted in your butt to work, or automatically sniffs out and takes control of your car or flying drone, etc.

"effecience was improved"

I'm sure it was.

'At least, I think those bars are showing percentages."

Can you not read the label on the y-axis? It says, "APPEARANCES ON THE WATCH LIST".

And anyway, the 3rd bar (the next one higher than Tea Party groups) is for "Acorn Successors", ACORN being the group that many Republicans blame for electing Obama in the first place. So your arguments seem to be in a shambles.

"The research could be used for health-tracking apps, baby monitors, and for the military and law enforcement."

Yeah, lead with the health-tracking and baby monitors, which actually benefits the subject, such that the subject would happily allow a monitor right next to them, and thus "through the walls" monitoring will never, ever get used.

Bury the bit about using it shoot people who break a drug law, or a resister of some foreign tyranny, in a way that they never have a chance to see it coming, which is how this will actually get used.

Ugh.