I challenge any one of those moaning fuckers to so much as hit a comet with a rock, never mind come close to doing science out there :p

AAAARGH vi

I think this should be a meme.

...I would strongly recommend just getting the best people you can. In my experience good, experienced people in a small team do not mind picking up the grunt work if the team is pulling together and being productive.

You're wrong. This seems to be a common pop-sci fact, but it's nonsense. If you drank only distilled water, you would die slightly quicker than someone who drank only water, but that's it. Drink distilled water and eat normally, you would observe no effects.

Yes, but also rather more worryingly there is the minor issue that after using it for a few weeks it will become contaminated with Legionnaire's.

Requirements vary quite a lot between country. The UK is one of the strictest - corrected vision must be a certain standard in both eyes. In the US, some states allow people the UK would class as legally blind to drive. Some of these folk use miniature telescopes strapped to their eyes to see with - needless to see, field of view with these things is pretty small.

Half right. You must be upfront about what you do and intend to do at the time of underwriting, but if you then take up chain-smoking while surfing on a shark, that's your business. The insurer absorbs that as normal mortality. To put it in perspective, the biggest life policies are on the order of GBP50-100m (Warren Buffet types), and the industry absorbs one or two claims of this size every year. The real risk here is aggregation risk, the fact that you'll have a dozen millionaires on these flights. That's not an issue for the insurers, really, but it is for the reinsurers and their retro pools. But even losing the top ten insured lives is smaller than a billion dollar cat which again, is barely a rounding error in reinsurance.

Actually, closing the lid traps an aerosol of toilet water which blows up in the face of the next user. It persists a surprisingly long time. Citation: some Reader's Digest magazine I read in a dentist's waiting room twenty years ago.

Get back to me about that guaranteed profit when the next Katrina hits in the middle of a major flu epidemic. Hint: "guaranteed profit" and "insurance company" are not phrases that sit well together, ever.

I'm not an expert on US insurance, but I do work for an insurer and I'm pretty sure US health insurers don't enjoy the position they're in. Insurers should be top-slicing excess of risk; instead, they're left with an expensive involvement every time you get your flu vaccination.

Gosh, I'm sure nobody thought of that. You should probably ring them up and tell them personally, I'm sure they'll be very grateful for your insight...

(1) I'm not a product of the US American education system (thank goodness) (2) the US American system is light years away from being a free market at any level (3) a universal basic literacy program is not what I suggest is required, at least initially.

They managed it when they had no idea. Coming up with the ideas is the smallest of the problems; it's getting people educated and getting ideas transmitted through time and space. Free trade solves the first and printing the second.

Is anyone else getting a nervous twitch about the words "read on"?

Also, can we just make Bennet an author so we can block him?