I know you were joking, but for the record, I would like to point out that the twins wouldn't help. 138 yes and 70 no is still not 2/3. You need 140 yes if no nays are changing their minds. So quadruplets FTW!

Indeed. It could be that you need more than twice as many yes as no votes depending on how abstains and absent voters are handled, but it should be *completely* obvious to *anyone* that no matter what method you use, if you do not even have twice the number of yes votes as the number of no votes, it doesn't pass. The fact that someone whipped out a calculator in this situation saddens me. The fact that the moran who thought he needed a calculator failed to use it properly doesn't surprise me all that much. If you know no maths at all, why would using machinery help?

Yeah, it's not like an NFL game in London would sell out or anything. And I hear that baseball is pretty big in Japan and Korea. And while basketball can't compete with football in Europe, it is still wildly popular in most countries. Suggesting that only people from the US care about these sports is silly and wrong.

So that link gave me ~16K hits. Searching for LeBron james gave me ~1.6M hits. I'd still say the guy who suggested this guy is a bigger celebrity to Koreans than LeBron is to Americans exaggerated just a tad.

You would spend less time playing games. That would increase your productivity.

Completely false, unfortunately. Loads of countries do not allow any citizens to leave. Or do you think the idea of the Berlin wall was to stop westerners from entering? It is thankfully far fewer countries now than just 25 years ago, but it's still far from uncommon.

Meanwhile, if we look at how many people voluntarily move from the Scandinavian countries to the US, and how many people move in the other direction, a slightly different pattern emerges. Why do you think that is?

I'll actually spell it out for you. The standard of living in the US is ridiculously much higher, on average, than it is in Scandinavia, assuming we meassure what people actually buy for themselves, with their own money. Note that Scandinavian countries rank highly in HDI beacue that meassures stuff that the government buys.

If some random academic study tells you that people are happier in place A than in place B, yet more people want to move from A to B than the other way around, don't you think that should tell you something about the study?

Not true. See, for instance Bryan Caplan's "The Myth of the Rational Voter". Most people in fact vote altruistically.

No, it is gradually changing to "take slightly less from the rich, give slightly less the the poor". It's not like low income earners are net payers of tax in the Nordic countries. Not by a long shot.

Surely "pendantic" is a proper word. It must mean "having the attributes of a pendant". Exactly what that does have to do with being picky about someone else's use of language is quite unclear, though, I'll give you that.

As MAD Magazine said years ago: "The best things in life are free. The expensive part is paying for the dinner and movie that comes first".

Huh? I didn't know that the only two options were "spend billions on space research" and "spend billions on particle acceleration". Somehow, I figured there were more possible options. Silly me, I guess.

You think he's typing on Velcro? Myself, I am typing on a keyboard. They were around before the space race.

The idea that space exploration is giving us (humanity as a whole) good value for money is, frankly, ridiculous. The billions and billions of dollars spent has of course brought some benefits and some cool inventions. But spending that same money on other kinds of research would with a very high probability have yielded more benefits. But I do agree that it would have yielded less fame to the old whiners from TFA.

NASA's budget is about $20B/year. I'd say that is just a tad more than a tiny drop.

Considering that Malthus and his disciples have always been wrong so far, what you are saying counts as an extraordinary claim. And as you know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. What is your extraordinary proof that those who have said what you just said have been *completely* wrong for 200 years, yet now, at this very moment, things are different?

Higher living standards and better health outcomes for regular people living in other economic systems. Next question, please.