Nintendo didn't make Other M, which is probably a big part of the rpason it was terrible.

Or, to go for something more classic, The Man With No Name.

A pedantic git at this point? Did you miss my original post that launched this thread? Because you know what? It was pretty pointlessly pedantic.

GDP measures the size of an economy, growth is a change in size.

India's economy is larger than Switzerland's. The size of an economy is its outputs, not its wealth. My way seems to accurately represent the size of the economy. The IMF seems to agree, since they use GDP to measure the growth of economies.

I was not criticizing the article. I was criticizing io9's presentation of the information in the article.

Also, much of the colonial period involved the creation of finished goods, even in the era of triangular trade. The conversion of sugar into rum was a value-creating process. The harvesting of lumber, the same. Much of the colonial activities, especially prior to the industrial revolution, were concerned with…

Since when? The go-to measure of economic growth is delta-GDP, which isn't adjusted by population. GDP per capita is a measure of standard-of-living, not economic growth.

Growth of per-capita income is not economic growth.

Oh, wait, I know this one!

We're not talking about individual lives, we're talking about economic growth, which has as much to do with individuals as the weather. I didn't check it in the paper, because honestly, I assumed io9 was the one that screwed up the claim.

The very premise is flawed- if we measure an economy by the output it creates (which is what we do, abstracted through GDP), to claim that the economy never grew before 1700 means that the total production of any given society has remained exactly the same since the dawn of time.

Oh, it certainly wasn't measured like it is now. And the data would be much spottier and unreliable, bringing into question how well it could have been measured at all. But that's a far cry from saying "there's no economic growth prior to 1700" unless you're using some really really narrow definition of growth.

Rockets have some physical limits as to how efficient they can get. Fuel efficiency is not the barrier to space- gravity is. As it stands now, you could park an asteroid made of platinum in LEO, and it'd still be more economical to mine platinum on Earth. So long as we're using rockets, that's not going to change.

Doubtful. Space, as a fueler of industry, is a long way from being practical. Efficient solar power is both a prerequisite for going to space and the next Industrial Revolution.

Even in a world of finite resources, economic growth should be expected, if only because we should get more efficient at using those resources. In fact, a society that isn't growing economically would be worrisome- it means they're stagnant and not improving their ability to do things. They're wasteful.

there was no economic growth before 1700, when the first Industrial Revolution started

It might be showing on BBCA, but it's being produced in Canada, like cheesy-but-fun sci-fi series should be. I look forward to this filling the space until "Continuum" picks back up!

All-powerful characters can be plenty compelling. Take a peek back at the Dancers at the End of Time, or Creatures of Light and Dark.

"Doctor Who" never scared me. But I vividly remember having nightmares about Stickybear, the poorly drawn cartoon mascot of a line of educational games. I once wet the bed as a child because I was too damn scared to leave the bed because I believed that Stickybear was in my room.