Many who deserve blindness receive sunlight, and many who deserve sunlight are blind.

Ah, but what if they were filled with gentle, intelligent, naked ladies?

How about a hot air balloon? what kind of scale factor would we be talking about, because of the thinner air?

Yeah, going to have to second that one. Pre-WWII education was all primer-based, you know, one-room schoolhouse, prep 'em for the factory and what-not. School as a thing just has to suck - it all seems so reasonable and solvable from where you are, but really: you have to recognize what the 50th percentile really is - just imagine the stupidest cashier you've ever met, and move down another standard deviation - not just for Americans, but for humans. It's a public system - cost-benefit analysis and so on. Everyone knows the poorest kids are screwed no matter what, and the richest can afford to buy their degrees. The industrious middle can do all their "think about it" stuff on their own time, and learn to excel.

People, on average, are just kind of stupid. Governments can throw money at that all day, for very few percentage points. Honestly, yeah, maybe we don't need that jet-fighter, but don't give any of that cash to the schools, it's just throwing it away. Make them hold their damn bake-sales.

I would love to see someone with their legs between their legs. Is that what the kids are linking to nowadays instead of goatse?

Are those like the "language professors" who hate the man who discovered the trick to learning any language in ten weeks? Those language professors?

Hahahahahahaah. I'll be leaving now with all my philology jokes, thanks.

I think you might be giving them a wee bit too much credit in the brains and planning ahead departments. I think the effect is exactly as you claim - but they have no idea at all that they're causing it. Just morons in suits.

what the hell...? I don't think you're following the thread very well. I was responding to someone's post. Good hussle, though.

I guess you're going for some kind of contrary position here, but there are a lot of people alive because of transplants. They're not sequestered away or anything. Perfectly healthy, normal, and long-lived, as well as easy to find. Many, many people. I don't think your information is accurate, and even if the rates are as low as you hint at, I think the q-o-l issue has been mischaracterized to you.

This is clearly biased, but it's not a false front; these are real humans: http://donatelife.net/stories-of-hope/

For all intensive purposes, yes

If you're a trained computational linguist then obviously yes, you can generate this information (collocations and concordances) from corpora. The COCA actually has some pretty neat features along those lines, but it's not user-intuitive.

Exactly. Any such new information would be integrated so fast... well, really fast. Blink of an eye. "Of course there is life in the stars, just as prophesied by our spiritual leader in verse blah-blah-blah." The only people who would be labelled heretics would be any earthling who would suggest that the aliens could possibly be atheists.

Not only is it retarded, but it goes from zero to retarded so fast. By the second exchange he's like already pulling the real estate mogul bigshot card. And the wacky tonal swings from asking for pity to near-death threats - man, the guy is unhinged.

And it will swing back around to hilarious again in 3... 2... 1...

Yes, that is correct. It was either one, or the other, - space exploration or socialism - and we have made our choice. Thanks a bunch, Obama! Now our children will be engulfed in plasma...