Take two, for realz.

I'll just leave this here.

Yeah, but sooner or later you start running into those 'diminishing returns' issues. The reserves that keep popping up in North America and elsewhere require technology (and relative economic feasibility) that weren't in play a generation or two ago; there may still be lots of the stuff, but we still need to figure…

...and if she'd stopped feeling herself up while getting dressed, maybe she could've actually, y'know, saved that village...

Helike, Santorini, the Black Sea...just how many Atlantises (Atlanti?) were there? It's almost like someone just took bits of several ill-remembered histories together to help make his point...

I must be in the next one over. People keep telling me there was more than one Highlander movie, but that's just silly talk, amiright?

Heh. The gynophobia card. Proof ya got nothin'. Thanks for playing, though.

What.

Considering the meaning I was working with, that's...disturbing.

Meh. Nothing against teachers, but in a pinch that can be doubled up with something else, as in "I can do, and I can teach others to do". The modern specialist educator would be an unaffordable luxury.

Besides, all that long pig has to come from somewhere...

So, the germpocalypse now has the inside track on Skynet, and is dusting random asteroids in the Human Extinction Sweepstakes? Good to know.

A lot of 'if' in play there.

Understood, but that's not what's going to reach Joe Sixpack's brain. You're welcome to try, of course, but I don't like your odds.

True—after all, it is one of the cornerstones of my argument that there's a tradeoff—but at the moment I question whether the technology is at hand to manage a satisfying compromise.

That first line—is it that the SUVs are on the road, or that the smaller cars are kleenex coffins? Modern cars aren't as touch as their heavier ancestors. This is a trade-off, and you can't blame consumers for making the choices that make the most sense for them. When you can give them a more efficient vehicle that…

Hold up there.

5. are safety oriented. There's a tradeoff to smaller, lighter vehicles, and that's that you either engineer it to be totaled by a relatively minor collision to protect the occupants, or the occupants are going to get hurt more often and more badly. This is one of the big reasons SUVs sell—they're tanks by…

Consumers would also send the party or parties responsible into electoral oblivion. The shock effects of such a thing would finish off an already wobbly economy. It's a pipe dream, or a nightmare scenario depending on your perspective.

I shouldn't worry about that last bit. I'm sure it's nothing.