Only the lonely

Only the truly ignorant and the truly mad believe they truly understand.

"Data" is not knowledge: it is neither conoscere (noscere, connaître, kennen...) nor sapere (scire, savoir, wissen...). 

The English language lacks this distinction. 

Knowledge in whatever form requires a knower to be known, the full reality of which is a fact in turn; an event that may itself become known by the knowers, so that "they know that I know that I don't know" does in fact become a distinct possibility. 

(This is certainly a curious result).

If one wishes to make a country "great", one presumably must first possess an adequate idea of greatness. 

For a start, we could admit that no aspect of buying, selling, or owning a motorized vehicle is truly "great", and that sending living beings into space lacks any practical utility. 

A team of alien astrobiologists someday probing our derelict world might easily conclude, observing the empty husks of our computer-enhanced vehicles, that they were really a nascent form of semi-autonomous life that briefly flourished, dominated, then destroyed what remained of the Earth's delicate balance of life along with their diseased and thoroughly anesthetized, zombie-like inhabitants.

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And then what will they do with their billions, once the radioactive miasma has settled on a charred and mutilated planet where nothing grows, when all simply rots where it stands or crumbles away into dust?

What would being "rich" actually mean?