That can be taught and tested. I have a meter long shelf with books full of puzzles that require "out of the box thinking" rather than conventional approaches, written by Martin Gardner, and other puzzle masters. I use problems from these books when I volunteer for after school enrichment programs. The kids love them, and they definitely get better at them with practice. The creative thinking exercises help them quickly come up with solutions in robotics and programming competitions.

Poor analogy. Doctors can choose their patients. Teachers can rarely choose their students.

If what is on the test is not what you want the students to be learning, then the problem is with the design of that test, not with standardized testing in principle. Most people that object to our current system of testing, have no interest in improving it, but rather prefer no accountability at all.

It is unlikely that kids are going to be inspired by someone doing something that people older than their great-grandparents already did 50 years ago.

The people asking for manned missions to the moon are not young people looking for inspiration, but geezers trying to relive their childhood.

That was one of the (few) justifications for the ISS. It didn't work. The kids were way more inspired by the robotic missions to Mars, which cost 1% as much, and actually engaged in real science.

A gravity wave detector is disrupted by vibrations, and would benefit from NOT putting humans on the moon. A robotic mission would cost about 1% as much as a manned mission, and would actually be superior for this purpose.

False dilemma. No regulations, and stupid regulations are not the only two alternatives. A third alternative would be to have sensible regulations, that require a licensed driver be ready to take over in an emergency, but don't require that driver to pretend to be driving.

Indeed. My personal favorite form was the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 compliance form. It was a form that you filled out and stapled to every other form to indicate that the attached form conformed to the requirements of the paperwork reduction act. I was in the military at the time, and we used PWRA compliance forms by the truckload.

Can you please post your employer's stock symbol, so I can short their stock?

Companies patent stuff all the time, often as a defensive measure. Outrage should be reserved for what companies actually do. There is no indication that Apple is implementing this idea.

Also, the actual patent, does not mention your "bank account", only your available credit.

This article is comparing graduation rates today with a labor pool hired over the last 30 years. The fair comparison would be to look at only new hires directly from universities. But the author is likely more interested in pushing an agenda than in presenting the facts.

Only dysfunctional organizations allow HR people to make hiring decisions. HR's job is to do the paperwork, not decide who to hire. Hiring smart people with a track record of accomplishments is a core competency of any successful company. If you have some HR admin drone reading engineer resumes, you are going to fail.

When I hire someone, I go to HR to get the position and salary range approved. Then I write the ad, I read the resumes, I do the interviews, I make the offer, I negotiate the salary, and at the end of that process, I go to HR and tell them "I just hired this engineer, so put her info into payroll." If your company does it significantly different, you have a problem.

The wider campaign for "social justice" is not a fad and is not going away, mainly because there really is a lack of social justice in the world. But the particular fad of "gender discrimination in tech" is dying. When the issue first came up, there was intelligent debate, and reasonable people argued on both sides of the issue. No more. It has become clear that the tech companies have little control over the composition of the tech labor pool, or the tech education pipeline. Many of the SJWs' pet projects, like steering more young girls into tech, have failed. There is now a strong backlash, and articles like this one are mostly subjected to contemptuous ridicule, with only a few trolls pretending to agree with the SJWs.

Yes it is a "bad thing". It is also an "illegal thing". Institutionalized racism and sexism are outlawed for good reasons.

It depends what you are mining. If you are mining a lithophile mineral like uranium or thorium, that readily oxidizes, you are better off digging into the earth's crust. But if you are looking for a siderphile mineral like gold, platinum, or iridium, you are better off looking in the asteroid belt. Gold readily dissolves in molten iron, and nearly all terrestrial gold sunk into the core eons ago.

To decide where to mine, look at the Goldschmidt classification for the element you need.

In space, all metals are precious. It costs $5k to put a kg of steel into LEO. Even more for GSO or deep space. The trick is to keep the mined materials in space. They are worth far, far less on earth's surface.