No, I am in the position of saying that whether or not there is an illiteracy issue in the US or not, you, Karmashock, are full of shit.

Personally, I think the evidence, as far as I have seen *is* ambiguous and scant. I'm not sufficiently interested in this argument to go digging for sources to back up the opposing point of view, since I'm not sure I even hold it - at least to any great extent.

My bone in this debate (as a professional statistician) is simply to point out that the specific data source you quoted is not what you presented it as. Thus it's deeply offensive to me that you misrepresent a statistical estimate and then have the temerity to go:

Assert as you wish. But without actual evidence, your claim is a mere assertion. I don't have to prove the opposite of your assertion to show that.

Careful there.

Those values you quoted are *not* education statistics. They are estimates from a model built on national data, only a very small number of which actually came from Montana. In short, these are *specifically* driven by demographic data, and for especially low population, unusual demographic states like Montana, can potentially give very inaccurate results.

http://nces.ed.gov/naal/estima...

Specifically, the estimate for 2003 uses the following set of predictors:

- Percentage of the county population who were foreign-born and who had stayed in the United States for 20 years or less years;
- Percentage of county population age 25 and older with only a high school education or less;
- Percentage of the county population who were Black or Hispanic;
- Percentage of the county population in households with incomes below 150 percent of poverty level;
- Indicator variable identifying the New England and North Central census divisions; and
- Indicator variable identifying the SAAL states.

Seriously yes. Most of the above skills are nice and all, but the likelihood is that not any one person will have all of the above. Which means you need to work with other people. In fact if one guy has a particular skill, you need to be able to educate the rest of the group in it. It's no use building a group where if one guy dies everyone is fucked.

Yeah, if you had cattle, the last thing you would want to do is shoot them, anyway. You have there an animal that converts useless grass into all sorta of diary products. Turning that into a steak will probably fuck you in the long term, and you'd better be thinking in the long term.

In most parts of the civilised world, there's very little to hunt. Whole herds of wild animals are not going to magically appear, and in terms of land area hunting would require far greater an area of decent unpolluted soil than agriculture to feed any given population.

Wow, you sure know a lot about this random kid, to assert all this with so much confidence. Modded insightful too! I'm convinced.

Do tell, how do you determine if something is done by a "**real**" kid, and not a FAKE KID like this one?

"US federal government debt as a percentage of GDP was a touch over 120%."

I note that a large proportion of that debt is debt the US government owes to itself.

The opposite is true. The Middle Class is in dollar *debt* - in particular, mortgages. Their assets - houses, cars are assets whose value rises automatically with inflation. Their wages also rise with inflation, because higher prices implies higher wages to sustain those prices, unless your shops want to scare off all their customers, as well as higher pay to employees, because businesses don't want to lose all their employees. Thus all things being equal, people who earn wages, as opposed to live off savings, are in a better position under inflation.

Warren Buffet's shares do not automatically rise with inflation. Rich people with large bank accounts suffer. Historically the rich have always fought for deflation, for this exact reason.

What's actually going on here is that Chinese researchers have carried out this research using the most easily available data they have - Chinese data. There's no reason to believe that US wastewater treatment plants don't also release this material, because AFAIK, no one has checked.

It is 40 year old tech in the same sense that the Soyuz the US uses now is 50 year old tech. The basic point is that space technology has advanced only incrementally since Apollo, especially with the Shuttle ending up costing more than non-reusable spacecraft and turning out to be a technological cul-de-sac. If the Chinese want to build, according to modern technology, the most cost-effective and efficient launch system, it's going to look a lot like this '40 year old tech', albeit with better computers, more sensitive sensors and other, less obvious, improvements. I'd say that the Chinese are essentially on a par with the US in terms of space technology. (For example, the automated hazard avoidance/hover land system is quite reminiscent of what the Curiosity rover landing system had, and that was much lauded. It's a lot more advanced than the manual remote control, or 'sit and pray you don't land on a rock' landings using for the Cold War landings, and for most of the Mars probes.)

What they lack is practical experience with actually *using* this technology, which is what these missions are about.

So, not exactly '40 year old tech', eh?

Look at what the US uses for its space program, these days: With the retirement of the space shuttle, the only thing left for boosting crew to the ISS is the Soyuz.

If the Chinese are using 40 year old tech, the US space program is using 50 year old tech -- built by a foreign country.

Yeah, what BoA is saying is that *even if* Bitcoins were successful and popular in commerce, and as trusted as silver (which it's not), the prices it is commanding now is approaching the maximum of what it should be. Basically BoA is saying there is a huge bubble.

But hey, the Bitcoin pump-and-dumpers will push any lie that will nudge the prices up.

This is a bunch of non-sequitirs. "As it was mostly option contracts, they were largely not executed, so it didn't end up being a major issue." Really? The damage caused by tulipmania and so on has nothing to do with whether or not the options are executed. Even if they aren't, people spent money on those options contracts, and so lost massive amounts of money when the prices collapse. The characterisation of the prices collapsing due to 'the height of the bubonic plague' is also incorrect. The height of the bubonic plague was 200 years earlier in the 15th century, and plague outbreaks occurred before, during and after tulipmania.