Ideally we would send artificially intelligent machines who don’t mind a journey that takes hundreds of years to explore and begin building infrastructure thousands of years before any humans will arrive. Then when the star is at its closest there is a mad dash of humans to populate the system.

Do this every time a star is going to approach to within 4-5 LY and then from those stars when they approach other stars, and so on. It starts to seem feasible for the human race to overcome the vast engineering challenges of spreading throughout the galaxy. It would be difficult to get humans to put effort into something that takes more than a lifetime to accomplish though.

They probably spent $1000 researching this

Even more strange, the US is one of the few who has actually made meaningful reductions in CO2 emissions, where many of these countries that are 100% believing in AGW have actually increased emissions.

Can drinking beer the same time as eating these foods have any effect? I already do that.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

This sort of incentive should be introduced through loan programs rather than direct subsidy. The government should not be tinkering with tuition prices directly as that should be decided by cost and demand. Rather, the government should look at its loan programs as an investment. The types of degree programs that the Florida government wants to push are a good investment so they should work to make it easier to get loans for those, at the expense of loans provided to students that are less likely to help the economy and may also have difficulty paying their loans back later.

I think it is bad risk assessment at it's core (very few people really understand risk assesment anyway), combined with misinformation, but what really drives intellegent people remain anti-vac, even after being presented with the facts, is emotion and subconsious fear of accountability when it comes to something bad happening to their children. Given two possible outcomes: A. They decide to vaccinate and their child becomes severely ill due to an allergic reaction, they will blame themselves. B. They do not vacinnate and their child becomes severely ill from a disease they could have been vaccinated for, they don't see that as being as much their fault. Even if A is significantly less likely than B and harm to their child is equal, it is still seen as a significantly worse outcome and risk because it will have happend as a direct result of something they chose to do. Probably most anti-vax beliefs go back to poor understanding and/or missinformation, but among intellegent educated people who are anti-vax (and i've talked to several such people) the main cause always comes down to a cowardly (though perhaps subconsious) avoidance of accountability.

HFT exists soley to exploit arbitrage. There is no benifit to this, these trades would happen a split second later anyway. HFT is just jumping in the middle of them to take its cut without contributing anything. So instead of trying to come up with ways to discourage this activity such as a trasaction tax, maybe it would be better to just have the exchange resolve these arbitrage situations automatically either to the benifit of the bid or ask or splitting the difference.

I've been toying with this exact idea for a while now. If cap gains and income taxes were increased for it to be revenue neutral, this would raise the same amount of money and actually reduce unproductive allocation of resources (corporations spend an awful lot of money just to reduce their federal tax burden). Corporations will move around to dodge taxes much more readily than their shareholders. It's the corporations that create jobs, not the shareholders. Let the shareholders shoulder the tax burden. If corporations react to this by reinvesting the money internally (hiring, research, expansion) instead of paying it out to the shareholders, oh darn. I'm a little worried about unintended consequences such as small business getting crushed.

I lean libertarian, but where hard core right wing libertarians get off course on the subject of environmentalism is that nobody can 'own' the atmosphere. Thus if it is not protected via laws and regulations, it is sure to fall victim to the tragedy of the commons. Further, it is shared between countries making it an even bigger problem that cannot be solved or even mitigated by the market.

My mother in law worked for a groupon competitor. Groupon is known for purposly missleading and screwing their customers. The bad thing is that the businesses that are most likely to fall for it are little mom and pop places that may not survive.

I have converted to mostly CFLs in my house over the years. I only buy the instant on ones. I usually stock up when they are on a good sale, so I get them at a decent price. About a year ago, i started collecting the burnt out ones in a drawer in my garage to be disposed of properly all at once, saving time. So far I have only collected 2 burnt out CFLs. I have found that putting a CFL in an inclosed light fixture with an incandecent will shorten it's life substantially.

It's really too bad we are relaxing regulations to keep Older nuke plants around instead of relaxing regulations to make it easier to build new much safer ones. Our national strategy for nuclear safety is completly ass-backwards.

how do you make a vaccine without a virus? Excuse my ignorance, please explain

Keeping the samples around in case they are needed to produce vacines seems like a reasonal policy to me. But 3 billion dollars seems like an awful lot of money to spend preparing for an unlikely scenario, one of perhaps thousands of unlikely scenarios.