The point is that whether and how much one wants to die tends to fluctuate a lot, and the willingness to commit suicide depends a lot on the availiability of means to easily and painlessly do so. A large percentage of suicide attempts are opportunistic rather than planned. The planned ones probably succeed more often, but that does not necessarily mean that those people really wanted to die more - just that their will to die was over a certain threshold for a certain time.

Or Terry Pratchett:

HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

Or a mathematician.

Would like to attend, but probably can't at that time

She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it)

-- Lewis Carrol, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

Hard to believe that it hasn't show up here before...

If the your number one priority in finding a house is being able to easily sell it, you probably should rent rather than buy.

Criminal justice only if you tune out the rehabilitation aspect. Civil justice only if you tune out everything except punitive damages (which don't exist in many jurisdictions).

Read the (long) linked-to article from which the quote stems. Basically the point is that using violence to achieve a goal teaches the people involved that violence is an effective, legitimate way to achieve goals - and at some later point they will invariably have conflicting goals.

The quote is from a fantasy book. There are dragons in it...

A few points come to mind:

• Presumably they also wanted a canal and there may well be an optimum point where you maximize some sort of combined utility
• Jobs programs, even those that create nothing particularly useful, are about giving people a sense of worth and accomplishment, otherwise you could just hand out money. Obviously futile make-work activities like the one suggested achieve the opposite of that and are, indeed, often deliberately used to punish and humiliate people.