...with what we spent in Iraq we could build nuclear power plants and space solar power satellites and tell the Arabs to drink their oil.

You see, I used to do a certain amount of market research by going to the local drugstore and seeing what the truck drivers would put up. Now it's all just copies from the latest best-seller list and damn little of anything else.

And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature.

That which does not kill me, has made a grave tactical error.

Much of economics isn't difficult, or rather, the difficulty is in cooking up arguments to "prove" that commonsense conclusions are wrong. The fact is that many commonsense conclusions are quite correct, and it takes a lot of education to get you to believe different.

The definition of a Dark Age is that we no longer remember what we once could do.

A Dark Age is not just a period in which people no longer know how to do things. The real key is that people no longer remember that certain things can be done at all.