Things like subsidies to special interest groups would become even more common since the payoff in terms of votes would be higher. Increase the corn subsidy and you don't just buy Iowa but corn farmers everywhere.
That would be around 1 million potential voters out of 235 million total. My suspicion is that attention would shift towards numerically larger special interest groups.
"It was officially adopted as a United States military bolt-action rifle on June 21, 1905, and saw service in World War I. It was officially replaced as the standard infantry rifle by the faster-firing, semi-automatic 8 round M1 Garand, starting in 1937. However, the M1903 Springfield remained in service as a standard issue infantry rifle during World War II, since the U.S. entered the war without sufficient M1 rifles to arm all troops"
jep, see Eiffel. Convention is indexing from 1. (but it allows you to do it in whatever way you want, start from 3 if you want, because hey why not -.-)
It's nice how you've written him off entirely because he likes one thing and not another! You completely disregard the possibility that some people are only ever fully engaged and in the moment when their mind is on and they are performing analysis. There's so little to what you're saying, you can mad libs your whole rant to paint you as the asshole.
The Dyson ones I've seen have only ever shot cold air on my hands and pushed my hands against both sides of the dryer. Maybe they've been horribly misconfigured at all 3+ places I've seen them at, but in my experience they've just been less effective and less sanitary than both traditional air dryers and paper towels.
I don't think they allow, expect, or calculate an unbounded positive as t->infinity. I don't expect we'll get caught in a local minimum - we've done a decent job breaking out of them when the individuals involved haven't had nearly as much at stake...
Let's review the bidding here. Somebody said "death is a medical failure." I said that it isn't; when you fail to achieve an impossible goal, the failure is in the goal, not the work done. I went on to say that all composite things decay, and that to expect that one is going to be the first exception is folly.
I agree that few people imagining they can have eternal life think that they will suffer. But that's exactly the problem. They haven't thought it through. They don't yet understand what life is. Which is why they are so woefully unprepared to handle the parts that don't match their fictions.
The bit about Shakespeare's sonnets I take to be a counterargument to "all composite things decay". That we have managed to keep 100k of text around for less than half a millennium seems like poor evidence that immortality will soon be ours. People die. Species die. Planets and suns die.
Okay. You do not value death, but you do not believe we can defeat it either. Note that in a strict sense, the second law of thermodynamic says you're most probably right. All there's left is a hope of a very long life. (Which you probably don't think we can achieve either, right?)
It's a long way to go, or at least a very long shot, but a long life is possible in principle. Things decay, but they can be fixed or replaced (even the brain: current physics says that copy-paste transportation actually works —in principle). We just don't know how to do that yet. Now, about my personal immortality, I see little hope short of Friendly AI or cryonics, and even those are a long shot.
I agree that a long life is theoretically possible. I personally suspect that even if we overcome the body problems, neither human brains nor human minds will be able to cope with that, so that anything truly long-lived will be a post-human organism.
I also agree with you that the various theoretically possible techno-miracles likely won't mean much for us than a modestly longer old age. So I think everybody should really come to grips with what dying means. E.g., by filling out a living will and discussing end-of-life issues with family. If it turns out that preparation is wasted, I don't think anybody will complain too much.
