Seems pretty obvious that a Killing Curse can't hit anyone but the intended target. You don't want dead that bystander you're not thinking about. Also "I meant to kill someone else" would be a defense if arrested for it.

Given that, it can fade quickly once it's moved past the target.

Gave 200 $ this time.

I can't remember how often Eliezer mentioned how important getting reviews was for him, but I wonder if that correlates with more reviews.

Kudos to the one who formulated the questions. I found them unusually easy to answer, at large.

I'm only puzzled at the lack of an umbrella option for the humanities in the question on profession. Were they meant to fall into the category of social sciences?

Not being that well-versed in the MLP-verse I didn't read the fic, but here's my two cents anyway:

If "I'm afraid of dying" didn't manage the intended emotional appeal, it may be because of those allegations of selfishness you already noted. One solution is to steer attention away from what death implies for her, and towards what it means for someone else. Altruism, if not overdone, should work better than self-interest (however enlightened). Here's an excerpt from one Damien's fanfic Ascension, which I felt worked quite well:

This Saria was just too young to understand. Paige didn't believe she had to explain herself to a child and her biases toward the Kokiri began to surface. "Well, Link is Hylian and he needs a Hylian to raise him and meet his needs. You're just a child, yourself, cursed to be young forever! What could you possibly know about children?"

Almost as soon as the words left her mouth, with a great suddenness the sky opened up and the rain began to pour down on the strange couple. Though her face remained angered, the fear that she was in a very magical place and that she may have over stepped her bounds, was creeping into Paige's bones. Looking at the face of Saria and the tears she was sure that were racing down the child's face lost in the rainwater, Paige knew the skies were mimicking the mood of the Kokiri.

"Is that so wrong?" Saria asked in a quiet voice that despite the roar of the rain seemed to echo through out the woods. "Blacky" the white wolfos, sensing the mood of her friend, nuzzled closer to Saria. "Is it wrong to be a child forever? What is so great about being an adult?" a bite of anger was starting to enter into Saria's normally angelic voice and a peal of lightening boomed from the sky. "Working all day… Worrying about this or that… growing gray, weak, old… Watching yourself and everything and everyone you know slowly decaying. What is so great about dying? I don't want those things to happen to him."

Can anyone with a better historical perspective on these things tell me if there's a single recorded occurrence of the year 2045 being mentioned as the magic deadline for some cool futuristic thing before Permutation City was published? It just seems like I'm seeing that date a whole lot in these contexts.

Thanks for posting this here. I hadn't been keeping tabs on the SIAI site itself and hadn't noticed the whole matching drive until this post.

The 60,000 Florida citizens who voted Green in 2000 didn't result in Nader for President (they did result in a nadir for the presidency, but that's different)

The parenthetical statement, while mildly funny, is unnecessarily political and detracts from the substance of your post.

I don't think it would be right or proper to control for killing other people due to alcohol use even if you could. The social externalities of alcohol use are a separate question from the private benefits.

Alcohol -> drink and drive -> don't die yourself, but WHOOPS, you just killed a pedestrian -> the statistics give the cause of death as "car accident" rather than "alcohol" -> longevity

The only way that would contribute to the total mortality rate for drinkers being lower than for non-drinkers would be if I'm more likely to kill a pedestrian given that the pedestrian is sober than given that the pedestrian is drunk.

(OTOH, an effect such as “I'm (going to get) drunk, so I'm not driving tonight -> I'm walking back home rather than driving to there -> I'm less likely to die walking a mile than driving a mile” would be in the right direction, though --I guess-- much smaller than other effects. My money's on the biggest effect being the one about income.)