A 27 year old _grand_mother!

Are you serious or was that a typo?

I have nothing against my neighbors wanting a "free," quality, public education for their children, but why should I have to fund it?

(Never mind that my children have already gone through the public school system and are off to college now.)

I thought we understood that governments build infrastructure on the premise that we all benefit in one way or another. Roads, airports, shipping ports, military, etc. Otherwise I could extend your argument to include all those other things and more. I may never drive on the Trans-Alaska highway, fly out of Portland, Maine international airport, but I do believe that by making things better for the people who do use them, we've all receive a benefit. Likewise for me, for the things I use.

And that free public education my children received? If I'd had to pay "the going rate" every year they were in school, I could never have afforded it, so now I'm paying for it in installments through my town or county property tax (or your council tax), and my neighbors will be doing the same, and if not here, where ever I live, or they live. If you look at the big picture it all evens out, more or less.

I'd go out on a limb and say it's not clear we need malaria-proof anything.

Spraying -- since the end of the civil war in Mozambique -- and distributing treated mosquito nets has greatly reduced Malaria in Mozambique and the lowveld regions of South Africa. Malaria was eliminated in Europe and the US without malaria-proof mosquitoes. (Remember that nasty DDT? It was intended solely for spraying the inside walls of houses in the south. Farmers saw how well it worked and started spraying it on their crops, and the rest is history.)

Mostly it's humans.

http://www.hmc.psu.edu/healthinfo/m/malaria.htm

http://www.itg.be/evde/02_Malariap2.htm

But there is some anecdotal evidence that "long pig" does taste pretty good.

Let me fix this for you:

      That's 7.5 square meters.

WTF? No, they'd say the same thing we'd say.

I think you need to go look at a can of stewed tomatoes or a box of cake mix or a bottle of Coca Cola.

100% of all commercial goods sold in the US have both metric and "US customary system" measurements. No, it's not "Imperial". US fluid measurements are not the same as English/Imperial fluid measurements that use the same names, e.g. gallon, quart, pint.

Including this

And those were creative activities?

I had a garden, I grew corn too. If I had stayed in South Africa I would have had to slaughter a chicken and cook it to get the scout Master Cooking badge. Instead I came back to the US where I only had to shop at the grocery store to get the Cooking merit badge. (And before some twit weighs in, there's actually quite a bit more to get the badge.)

My children helped in our garden, my children were in scouts too; I don't see slaughtering chickens (to eat) as the same kind of creative activity as building and making things.

My son and his friends were more inclined to destroy things. When he reached a certain age I sat him down and told him "If you have so much energy, go build something; but the next time you break something, the cost of the repair or replacement will come out of your pocket, not mine."

This sort of stupidity occurs all over the place.

Case in point---

One day not too long ago I arrived at work at 7:15 or so and parked my car. During the day a sign was installed in front of my car indicating that the spot was "Reserved for $product MVP of the month."

At the end of the day when I left to go home I found a note on my windshield from some asshat telling me not to park in the MVP reserved spot.

The coward didn't have the nerve to sign their note, so I didn't get the satisfaction of moving the sign in front of their car and leaving a similar note for them.

I grew up with toy bricks (not Lego), Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, Erector (Meccano) Sets, chemistry sets, electronic kits, etc.

My own children were given much of the same things; but chemistry sets and electronic kits don't exist any more.

As a child I took toys apart and put them back together, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. I built forts in the neighboring empty lots and fields. I went on all day exploratory bike rides. In junior high and high school I had wood/metal/electronics/print shop classes. As a teenager I learned how to repair my car myself rather than take it to a mechanic.

I don't think my own children have ever taken anything apart. They never built forts, they never went exploring in the nearby conservation land. Their middle school and high school don't offer any shop classes. Even though I've shown them how, things like checking the oil and changing brake pads is an alien concept.

The world is a different place. I don't think it bodes well.

Et voila, no more gas build up, no more explosions.

Even if they're primarily covers for electrical boxes there are obviously drains or some other means by which the sewer gas infiltrates.

Seems like the little bit of rain or snow that would get in through vents would be able to drain away.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/BUSINESS/06/29/china.rent.white.people/index.html

What's next -- tall, smart, white people?

blond, slender, blue eyes, and so on.

Creepy? No

I was going post a comment with that quote as the context.

I'm wondering what exactly they mean though. My children went through high school and went through or are going through college using Microsoft products -- but it's Word mainly and some Excel.

I wonder how they could have failed to 'access [the] "kids,"' except perhaps by deliberately ignoring them.

I develop for Unix/Linux and most of the recent college grads I encounter certainly don't know Unix/Linux! So what do they use in college then? One can only wonder.