Do you want high-risk open-heart surgery, with a fifteen-per-cent risk of dying during the operation, or would you rather continue as you are, with a fifty-per-cent chance you will be dead in two years?

Open-heart surgery, please. You can actually feel your heartbeat, and thinking there's a problem means every irregularity, real or imagined, is going to give you a start. This gets especially fun when you're trying to sleep because that, after all, involves heartbeat slowing down.

When it hurts to get out of bed and you can't go and do what you want when you want?

Isn't this true for most people most of the time?

Any article citing statistics is invalid when they don't understand the difference between percent and per cent.

FYI: "The one-word percent is standard in American English. Percent is not absent from other varieties of English, but most publications still prefer the two-word per cent. The older forms per-cent, per cent. (per cent followed by a period), and the original per centum have mostly disappeared from the language (although the latter sometimes appears in legal writing).

"There is no difference between percent and per cent. Choosing between them is simply a matter of preference." -- http://grammarist.com/spelling/percent-per-cent/

I guess you don't have any grandparents who live alone, but can no longer reliably identify their own children....You are so deep into denial about the reality of aging

The "reality of aging" does include old people completely destroyed by aging. And we need to get serious about dealing with that, letting people check out when their life ain't no more fun.

But that reality also includes 90-something karate masters who are still practicing.

The "functional limitations" of which the author speaks can, to some degree, be mitigated by lifestyle. So can the supposed "lack of creativity" -- the problem isn't aging, it's stale ideas. Learn something new. Change fields.

My maternal grandfather was still quite aware, oriented, and active in his church at 90. And the heart disease that ultimately did him in could quite likely have been partially prevented or reversed with better lifestyle habits. My paternal grandfather was a bit short of his 79th birthday when complications from coronary bypass surgery (again, largely preventable) did him in. He never really recovered, emotionally, from the loss of his wife (could have used better social support, more community connections), but he was in no way crippled or suffering from dementia in his final years.

So given the example of my grandparents, with good dietary and exercise habits, good social connections, and a little medical help I can hope to get into my 80s with my brains mostly intact. (If we don't completely fsck up the planet, and if we make a few medical breakthroughs, with a little luck I hope to see the dawn of the 22nd century -- I'll only have to reach 131 to do that.)

Of course, I could also get run over by a bus this afternoon, or diagnosed with some particularly nasty cancer next month. One never knows.

What I find ironic is that supposedly one big reason for Obama's electoral success was due to his team's deep understanding of technology, the internet, and social media compared to Republicans

No, it's due to him not being a Republican. Personal qualifications might matter in party elections, but after that people are voting for a party, not a person.

Let's get off oil, then they will have no power, no funding, and thus, no threat.

I'd love to, especially since that would also force Russia to ditch dictatorship and start developing or become irrelevant. However, it's easier said than done, as oil happens to be near-ideal power source. The only technologically realistic alternative is nuclear, but that has political problems.

ItÃ(TM)s hard to imagine even the most ardent Democrats supporting the literal deification of Barack Obama or erecting small shrines in his honor throughout Washington DC. By contrast, after Julius Caesar was posthumously declared a god, Augustus, as his adopted son, became known as the son of god. Along with the other gods, he received dedications at small crossroads shrines throughout Rome.

What are flagpoles but shrines?

It's important to remember that our concept of divine is very different from a Roman's concept. Any fool could all but feel the omnipresent might of Rome, a pattern behind all the roads and aqueducts and legions and whatever. The Emperor was an easily identifiable focus point, giving name and face to something indescribable. But make no mistake, while we don't call them as such we too treat our nations the same way, waving flags, swearing allegiance and if called for, killing or dying for our gods.

So no, people don't deify Barack Obama personally. They deify his position. Power rests in the system itself, and Obama is simply the human currently most closely associated with it, hence any problems in said system get blamed on him. It's actually quite fascinating, the way our institutions take on lives of their own, escape from their founder's control, and all too often display a very human tendency towards megalomania and petty cruelty. And unless we learn to keep them focused on human good, rather than their own self-aggrandizement, and fast, I fear we'll meet the Great Filter.

There are good reasons to criticize the ACA, but the number of people who have gotten coverage for the first time because of the law is not one of them.

Unless, of course, your very ideology is to make the gap between rich and poor as wide as possible. Then it makes perfect sense that you'd be upset that everyone can afford medical care. And you can always explain away any attacks of conscience by claiming you simply want everyone to be personally responsible for themselves, even as your policies take away the means to do so from the majority of people.

My point is that democracy doesn't put competent people in charge most of the time. That's just the nature of the beast.

No known organizational model puts competent people in charge most of the time. Even the strickests of meroticracies are subject to the Peter Principle, even if they somehow fail to promote people who are best at promoting themselves. Democracy is superior because it lets outright lunatics to be constrained and removed as well as succession handled without bloodshed.

The cloud is not trustworthy, it was shown to not be many times over and no sane enterprise will allow the cloud to take over local desktops/servers.

Unless it's cheaper. Then as long as nothing happens, managers get bonuses for the savings their decisions have earned the company, and if something does, it's an unforeseeable event that was the fault of some evil haxor.

TLDs have certain requirements associated with them, unless Amazon magically also has some super special secret deal that Google hasn't told the world about after losing ... then Amazon won't be able to monopolize or otherwise use the TLD to an unfair advantage.

And yet that's exactly what Amazon will do. Even if they run their registry business as a separate department, the conflict of interests is always there. It's exactly like an ISP who also provides content has an incentive to make connections to Netflix suck.

Perhaps it would be best to simply forbid companies from expanding to arbitrary new segments?

You mean like how I can't get warranty repair on my Dell because I'm nowhere near Texas? Oh wait, I can. Hell, I can get the tech to come right out to my office and do it on-site, I don't have to take it anywhere. Funny what happens when there's a competitive marketplace, and the ease or difficulty of getting service and support is something consumers consider. Or were you imagining a scenario where car buyers worry less about server than computer buyers? Cars are so cheap, after all. Oh wait...

Why would you think that they could not twist being treated like "normal" criminals as something special?

They can try and probably will. Think of it as attacking a heavily fortified bunker rather than open field; sure, it can be done, but it's a lot harder.

In the US, Muslim recruiting is prisons is very effective.

But this is only a problem if you buy Islamic State's claim of being a Caliphate and thus representing all Muslims. Otherwise we're just looking at criminals finding religion and straightening up, which is hardly a bad thing. And that again gets us into this being primarily a war between competing stories, rather than physical militaries.

Liars are gonna lie, nothing you do is going stop that.

Which is precisely why their story needs to be contradicted rather than confirmed at every turn.