Agreed. I just hope no one counters with the suggestion that the rigged-as-a-three-masted-schooner electoral system qualifies.

He didn't say anything anti-capitalist. And I'm a capitalist, so I think I'd have noticed.

There's a madrassah joke in there somewhere. But I take your point.

One of the many ways that higher education is not a free market is that most students pay for books with easily borrowed money. The distorting effect that guaranteed federal grants and loans have on the prices of everything in academia can scarcely be overstated, and the ludicrous cost of textbooks is one of these ways.

Otherwise I thought your analysis was great. And I'm with you, existing commercial publishers can all go die in a fire. Open educational resources for the win!

Thank you! Especially since in this case I was saying that usually I agree with the 3-D naysayers, but that Gravity is a singular exception.

That's one option. Another is that those of us who've been here a long time can keep our home, and new people who don't like the site for which they've signed up can discuss the movies they like better on a site that better matches their interests.

Apparently Guinan still has some work to do to get you to understand humor.

Seeing it on DVD won't make you like Sandra Bullock better but it will greatly diminish the amazing immersive experience of this particular movie. Seriously, see it on the largest screen you can find and see it in 3-D (and I'm usually a 3-D hater). You won't be sorry.

You're asking that about a movie based on a comic book full of sci-fi and fantasy elements? Seriously?

I wasn't necessarily agreeing with you, but at least I was listening to you, until this.

Somalia is not a libertarian society, and equating it with the libertarian ideal is an intellectually dishonest rhetorical tactic meant to conceal rather than reveal. Now, you can say we libertarians are wrong that markets can provide infrastructure, and fair enough if you do, but our ideal is no better represented by the overlapping collection of theocrats, warlords, and the occasional functioning republic that makes up today's Somalia any more than the progressive ideal is represented by Cuba or North Korea.

By the way, the belief that healthcare can only be provided by government or by employers is a false dichotomy. Better than either if people simply pay out of pocket for routine expenses and maintain insurance only for catastrophic, unplanned expenses, just as they do for gas and oil changes vs. collisions.

I think it's more that (other than janitors) men have more or less disappeared from most elementary schools in the last generation. There's a strong emphasis on protecting, and not at all one on letting kids learn "the hard way" from mistakes. Everything is supposed to be cooperative, and nothing is supposed to be competitive. There's a place for that, sure, but when that's the only ethos then things are seriously out of balance.

"We humans enjoy not having knives inside of us." ...except Wolverine!

On the other hand, if we're not able to do something to survive these sorts of things by a million years from now, I doubt another 999 million will help.

In a surprise announcement, Google said they were relocating the entire company to Antigua....

Bears are scared of you, at least sort of. If you see one in the forest, conventional wisdom is to shout at it so it knows you're there, because it will usually avoid you. And yes, I have done this. (Well, I sang loudly at it, but same difference.)