What are the shuttles if not engineering successes? PR stunts? How would you categorize them? There are certainly problems (like providing a good and functional

What are the shuttles if not engineering successes? PR stunts? How would you categorize them? There are certainly problems (like providing a good and functional high-speed rail system) that are not really questions of "genius" and more practical questions of how to apply already developed technology, which, given the politics of our day, might require a different type of "genius" to approach. It is interesting that you describe language as a tool to think about a problem. Is it really so? Is it only because you have the language that you think about the problem in terms of the language? Humans cannot organize that well? Well, I guess Cape Canaveral in 1969 was smoke and mirrors -- or what do you mean? I think you probably mean that the cost of organizing at a large scale like that is not a cost you are personally (or, collectively in terms of the culture of elites in the West) willing to bear. I would even suggest that it very well could be in actuality an unwillingness to bear any sacrifice for the sake of a collective goal. "Less ambitious steps" for "really big problems." Sounds great. What steps do you mean and what problems are you possibly hoping to solve? How the private sector might be able to get someone in space -- an "engineering success" that was already accomplished approximately 50 years ago, now potentially finally accomplished by the private sector, so long as individual Russian tycoons are able to pay for $100M tickets with money stolen from starving peasants. A brave new world indeed. As for mail merge, I have very little interest in the common man. I live in Silicon valley and watch the world burn from a carefully-cultivated distance.