I had a friend who worked for the FDA in animal feeds. She said that all she wanted to recommend approval was three honest studies significant at the 5% level, and was really annoyed at companies who couldn't understand that. (Control group? What's that?)

Just because a result is statistically significant doesn't mean it's correct, although I can't search for the appropriate xkcd here at work,so google for "xkcd jelly beans" or "xkcd significant" to find it.

Statistical significance means that the results you got would be gotten by random chance by a certain probability, typically 5%. 5% is not some magic number, and there's no theoretical significance, but it seemed like a reasonable value.

Therefore, if you take a batch of statistically significant results, some of them are going to be statistical flukes, and retests will not confirm the original significance. This happens. If you run twenty studies correlating two factors, and they're all unrelated, you will get an average of one publishable result. If you run a study with more than one comparison, you're much more likely to get a publishable result, because psychologists generally don't do really good stats. I read a psych paper once that had eight or ten correlations, and suggested that the one that was only 10% likely to result from chance variance was promising.

I'm not enough of a videophile to care about the difference, myself. If the video is interesting, I won't notice. If it isn't, I won't watch it no matter what the resolution.

The courts are likely to consider encryption to be a free speech matter, and strike down laws limiting it.

The Palestinians put legitimate military targets in areas with daycare centers, which is a violation of international law. The US put legitimate government organizations in areas with daycare centers, which is perfectly normal and legal. Israel bombing Palestinian military sites is legal, while detonating a private bomb isn't. Want any more reasons why your comparison is stupid?

Other people have corrected your incredible lack of understanding of the economy, so let me try on the Middle East.

When Bush left office, the Iraqi government was far from stable, and was propped up by the US military presence. Obama withdrew on Bush's schedule, and we had the entirely predictable disaster. The only way to stop it would have been to leave an army of occupation in Iraq indefinitely, which would have been a wonderful advertisement for Muslim terrorist organizations. Iran isn't going to openly use nukes, since the actual decision makers aren't batshit insane and they know what would happen if they did. Pakistan has had the ability to send nukes more or less covertly to terrorist organizations for a long time.

Oh, and your beliefs on race relations and riots also bear little resemblance to the reality I'm more or less in.

When did Kirk ever get the Enterprise into a stable orbit? They kept putting it in some sort of standard orbit, which would decay, threatening to smash the starship into the surface, every time it was relevant to the plot.

No, but we do know the momentum of photons having a given energy, and we're talking about a lot more apparent momentum change than can be accounted for by the energy used.

No, it is a violation of physical law, just not the ones you're thinking of.

We're talking about the law of conservation of momentum here. It isn't the microwaves. We know the energy-to-momentum ratio of photons, and the reason using photons for thrust is impractical is that the momentum is far too small for given energy. TFA says this looks far more powerful than a light drive.

A pity that you made no effort to understand what laws of physics it's appearing to break.

Everybody's busy bagging on the science because reactionless space drives are known to be impossible, and if it turns out this is actually one, it's going to be a real interesting time to be a physicist because some really basic assumptions are going to have to be replaced.

The chance that this is due to some systemic experimental effect that nobody's noticed yet is still way higher than the chance that this actually works as advertised, so it's WAAY too early to cry fair either.

The practical result says that it works anyway.

There's nothing currently practical about it. It's in the experimental stage. If we had a spacecraft flying around on one of these, I'd be much more confident. The last time an observation violated the laws of physics like this, it turned out to be a loose cable connection.

By Noether's theorem, if we're violating the law of conservation of momentum, the laws of physics must vary from place to place in the Universe. (Unfortunately, I don't understand general relativity well enough to generalize this.) If this actually works, we're going to need a rewriting of physics comparable to Special Relativity. We definitely should push ahead with testing this thing, although I still think it's going to turn out not to be a reactionless space drive.

In the case of that that I'm familiar with, the employee got the pay of the higher position while she was in it. Seems fair.

Yes, it's that outstanding performers tend to be promoted, often to a position that requires significantly different skills, and once they reach their level of incompetence they are never promoted again, but remain where they are.

I once had a manager describe company policy to me, which was the mechanics behind the Peter Principle, being completely straight and not realizing the implications of what he said. I was glad to leave that company.

You left out the other thing that people do when they're feeling threatened: look for somewhere more stable-looking. Typically, your better people will be better at doing this, so you're getting rid of the top and bottom and lowering morale in the middle.

You can't simplify out the humans in microeconomics without making serious mistakes. They won't behave the way you want them to, or the way you think they should. Remember, some of your employees are at least as smart as you are, and they outnumber you. An attempt to outwit them is likely to end badly.

Maybe we should say you never have a non-tech directly manage people who do technical work. Then you can have non-techs immediately above the lowest-level management, and it can work. (Where I work, out of five people directly over me, including the CEO, only the CEO doesn't have good experience in software development, but this is unusual.)