What kind of barriers to entry on the ballot do you place that (a) prevent people from running just to exploit the lavish campaign fund and (b) don't require a large, well-financed campaign to achieve?

Because there's no story. Manna is an interesting thought experiment, but there's no characters, conflict or plot.

If you live in an apartment or condo, where are you going to put that drill press?

The big blockbuster movies are just advertisements for toys anyway. Sy-Fy quality movies don't sell merch the way that Disney/Pixar/Marvel/Star Wars movies do.

According to the second chart, the number global warming papers is growing exponentially each year! By the year 2100, our cities will be flooded with papers on global warming. Crops will fail because global warming papers will blot out the sun. We need to end global warming research now, before it's too late.

There is incentive to for small countries to cooperate in peaceful endeavors. The LHC is built by a cooperation between countries. The space program is increasingly moving the same direction.

You make that sound like its a bad thing. On Star Trek, the Borg are villains, but the only thing that might be considered evil is that their assimilation is involuntary. If joining the collective were a voluntary decision, then it might actually be a good deal.

The distances only seem insurmountable because of the limit of human life spans. If we could develop a way to extend our life span indefinitely, then taking a trip to another star might be an interesting 50,000 year vacation.

Yes, it is difficult. Corporations are owned and operated by flesh-and-blood human beings. Anyone who owns stock is an owner of a corporation and practically all of us are employees of corporations. If I make a political statement, am I expressing my own opinion or the opinion that my corporation pays me to express? If I get paid $100k/year and just happen to give $50k/year to political candidates, am I making political contributions based on my personal beliefs or am I a bagman for the corporation I work for?

Creating a campaign and funding it themselves is practically the definition of a PAC. That's what the Citizens United controversy is all about. It does nothing to mitigate the problem of a candidate being indebted to a collective that helps get them elected.

Even if you fund campaigns from public money, what's to stop an unaffiliated party from expressing political views that may influence voter decisions? Are you going to ban Micheal Moore or Jon Steward from making political statements in the media? That's what the Citizens United decision was really about.

Those are fine slogans for a bumper sticker, but difficult boundaries to make into enforceable law. You have to walk a fine line between closing every possible loophole and still protecting legitimate free speech. I have yet to hear any proposal that would actually achieve that balance.

When elections are won or lost based a few percentage points, then giving a 8.7% boost to a campaign can certainly sway the outcome.

A single paper with a novel result is just the beginning of the scientific process. If someone published a paper that claims X kills cancer cells in vitro, then the next step is to check if X kills cancer cells in mice. If the original paper is bogus, then follow up research is unlikely to yield any results. So the original paper doesn't get any citations and the next time that researcher makes a similar claim, they will be met with more skepticism.

It's true that the system can be gamed in the short run. And sometimes someone can be game it enough to get tenure. But without follow up and citations, they'll just end up in academic limbo of being an associate professor with no funding.

The follow-up papers aren't just repeating the previous experiment, but building on it. If I publish a paper that claims a method that accelerates stem cell development, that might get a splashy publication. But if other people try the method and their stem cells die, they're not going to cite my paper. Next time I submit a paper on stem cell development, someone who got burned using my previous method might be on the panel of reviewers and they won't take a favorable view.

There's never a point where someone officially stamps the work as "wrong", but unreproducible results gradually end up in the dust bin.