Don't the uranium cores get recycled into nuclear fuel and thus become profitable/useful? Would assume it would get sold to some nuclear facility and thus no longer need upkeep by the government itself. Even if they theoretically boxed it storage of a uranium core should be a far less costly matter than maintaining a functional nuclear warhead.

By recycling it into something useful (weapons into plowshares and all that) instead of it sitting around costing money through expensive guarding, monitoring and maintenance not to mention Russia under the treaty dismantling nuclear warheads that were meant for killing us. Oh, and 0% chance of it accidentally going off once it's dismantled versus the extremely small percentage chance beforehand.

All else being equal, a nation that spends 10% of it's resourced building machines of war will have a lower standard of living then a nation that's able to spend that 10% on things like education, infrastructure, or even private commercial ventures / R&D. Hence war being destructive to the economy in the sense that you're sinking resources into production that doesn't return value to you in the form of making your life better. Sort of like there's money to be made in boarding up houses after a fire but setting a bunch of fires doesn't help stimulate the economy.

Realistically, however; Things are a lot more complex as always and there are other factors involved like the nation that did spend 10% using their machines of war to take what the nation that didn't made or value returned in the ability to exert your will on other nations ect ect. But it's always a net loss for humanity as a whole....until the aliens come

I read that as "I'd hope there would still be plenty of edible vegetarians"

The amount of work and planning that would go into closing those 5 departments, their assets, and signed federal contracts under those departments, would most assuredly increase costs for that first year.

If only there were some sort of organized union of nations that each paid towards operating costs in order to work on world issues of security, health and economic development.

Out of curiosity did you consider that too incredibly outlandish or something? Keep in mind it was written pre 9/11.

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?