Freedom to sell yourself into slavery is not freedom. You seem to have some libertarian idea of freedom where a contract can trump freedom. If you are truly free, you can sign a non-compete if you want, but you are free to ignore the contract. That's basically what California says: you can sign the non-compete; it just has no power under most circumstances. There's nothing more free than that. Or are you a statist, who thinks that states should enforce contracts that violate rights, by enacting Jim Crow laws. If a contract has to be enforced, then it's not free.

The most outrageous thing is sometimes they want to charge you $35 to download a scan of an abstract. An abstract!

It harkens to the old days of the company store and the company town, where the company are "taking care of the employees" but are actually just indenturing them to the company. I'm not saying there is some national conspiracy between the insurance companies and corporate overlords to keep the peons in line, but why then is the outcome exactly as if such a conspiracy existed?

There is no big difference between this and market research. The reason why this got more attention is because people are panicky animals and behave unpredictably. They need to be told (or suggested) what to believe, and they will adhere to this idea and so you get memes spontaneously appearing, and some ideas, including outrage, will pop up seemingly out of nowhere. We see this effect in research in music popularity (http://www.npr.org/2014/02/27/282939233/good-art-is-popular-because-its-good-right)

Most people you know aren't assholes. It's the people you don't know who are assholes. Think about it.

Theoretical is too strong a word to describe tachyons. Better to call them science fiction. Tachyons violate causality, and create some kinds of vacuum instability. They don't exist.

Why is solar production so much weaker during winter? The sun isn't 10% as bright during winter. At a shallower angle of incidence, the sunlight has to pass through more atmosphere, but it's not like the air is absorbing 90% of the sunlight.

Improving energy efficiency improves quality of life.

It means the reporter was lazy.

I think you are confusing neutrinos, which have been known for a while, with tachyons, which are speculative and haven't been detected. Neutrinos don't move faster than light.

In other words, it's just a few steps from changing everything.

That's an explanation, not a justification.

Actually, your spermatozoa or ova are also alive, and so are some of the skin cells you are shedding, so it doesn't follow that life begins at conception.

You know, when you combine many statistically insignificant measurements together, you can get something that is statistically significant. That's how statistics work.

Yeah, yeah, we know Anwar al-Awlaki was an al Qaeda operative, but what about his son Abdulrahman? Why the fuck was he killed? What is the court justification for that?