While it's true that low-interest voters tend to be low-information voters, there is also the problem that highly-interested voters are often highly misinformed voters. You have fundamentalist preachers frightening their congregations to vote in favor of bans on same-sex marriage by telling them horror stories about gay couples adopting babies to molest; or dogmatic political organizations telling their members to vote against a candidate because she's going to take their handguns and hunting rifles away, when all she said was that she'd look into restricting sales of assault weapons. Voters who haven't been mainlining bullshit propaganda crafted to "mobilize the base" can actually have a better grasp of the truth.

I'm perfectly capable of managing my own defense, thank you very much. You crypto-statists with your "police" and "national defense" are nothing more than collectivists pretending to be rugged individualists. You're just as effete as the bleeding heart redistributing liberals.

There are still rats biting children in poor neighborhoods. That money should be spent on them!

Another human that you create is not a "semi-autonomous bot". It is a self-aware person, and is held responsible for its own actions. Maybe if you can demonstrate that your bot is sentient and fully autonomous, that'll get you off the hook.

I assure you that the Louis Vuitton handbag was a knock-off.

One thing in Apple's favor is that their primary competitor (still Microsoft) keeps doing so many things wrong with their software. I recently bought a Surface Pro (for the hardware, which is on par with Apple's in terms of quality design and manufature) and Windows 8.1 has managed to break so many of the things they'd finally gotten right in Vista 2.0 (Win7).

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says man, "[that article in the Wall Street Urinal says that science] proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

– excerpted from Douglas Adams (for the cretins in the audience)

For me it's hard to pick between her and Snowden.

I think you meant Julian Assange.

They believe Google exists to make money. No, Google exists to make cool things. The money is a means to an end.

Is it time to revive the Civilian Conservation Corps, which put jobless youth to work planting trees (among other things) during the Great Depression? It famously "brought together two wasted resources, the young men and the land, in an attempt to save both."

more tolerant, more enlightened, and certainly more technically competent?

would he just shrug and accept his fate?

No, because those mercenaries would be acting like a government that is taxing him, and that would make them evil. He'd have to make a second Galt's Gulch island to protest his first island's statistism.

It's a simple matter of terciles and life expectancies. Average life expectancy in the post-industrial world is about 80 years. Dividing that into three equal categories, you get (roughly) 0-26 = young age, 27-53 = middle age, 54-80 = old age. Of course with increases in life expectancy (and to make the math easier), you could use 30-59 as the middle group, and save a bunch of late-20s people the anxiety of already being "middle-aged", but it's still a bit silly how that term has become (in some people's minds) a euphemism for "old".

(And for the record, I'm 49: very accustomed to being "middle-aged".)

"A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once." – W. Shakespeare